Portia MacIntosh - Drive Me Crazy

Our moment only lasts a few seconds.

‘Oh, before I forget, I’ve got Charlie’s leaving card here. I need you to sign it, and get the few remaining people who haven’t done so to do the same. It’s just Rick and the IT team, so if you could get that done ASAP.’

He walks over to his tidy desk and locates the card without much searching, then he hands it to me, before adjusting my outfit a little for me, making sure I’m tidy too. Will kisses me on the forehead before the ringing of his phone drags him back to his desk.

‘Hello, Caroline,’ he answers, so she must be back at her desk, which means hopefully the new guy will have cleared off. ‘OK, send her in.’

‘I’ve called for a meeting with Julie, you know the girl who cleans the offices?’

I nod, uninterested. I don’t know much about Julie, other than the fact that she’s my age, Sweet Caroline’s right-hand woman, and a total bitch. She once would have certainly lost me my job, were it not for my relationship with Will. She was tidying my desk as I was working, and I was panicking to get an email sent before the end of the day. I had two piles of invoices on my desk, one of which needed shredding. She was going on at me to clear them, so I told her which pile needed destroying. Anyway, she shredded the wrong one, and Will hit the roof. I was so certain I carefully told her which pile was for the shredder, but she wouldn’t have it. She started crying and Will fell soft, because he’s useless around emotional women, and the whole situation was just quietly forgotten about. But I know that somewhere there’s a HR record of the events, probably saying it’s all my fault.

‘Well, she’s doing an awful job. Look at this.’

Will runs a finger across a framed photo that sits on his desk. I glance at his finger, which looks absolutely fine to me, but he does have a reputation for being a perfectionist.

‘I’m going to have to have a word,’ he insists.

As I head for the door, Julie walks inside, squeezing past me.

‘Candice,’ she says, acknowledging my existence without a hint of pleasantness.

‘Julie,’ I reply as I go to pass her in the doorway.

‘Breathe in,’ she says with a sweet little giggle as I squeeze past her. Well if she’d just move, I wouldn’t need to.

I close Will’s office door behind me, pissed off at Julie but satisfied with another successful interaction with Will. It’s hard spending so much time around him at work, always so close, but never being able to touch – only when we can squeeze in these brief moments together. That’s all they are though: moments. Now it’s back to work.

Chapter 6

‘Honey, I’m home,’ I call out, as I do every night, and my dutiful little cat runs up to me and shows me affection, like she always does when I get home. It was Will’s idea that I get a pet, so that I had some company when Amy finally moved out. I would’ve preferred a puppy, but a kitten was less work. Cats are much more independent, and don’t take much looking after. They’re capable of showing affection, but they don’t need to. They’re happy on their own, doing their own thing – the perfect pet for me then.

As much as I love Honey, sometimes I look at her, and feel like she’s the first step to my never-ending spinsterhood, a reminder that I’m going to be forever alone. Deep down, at the back of my mind, I do worry that I’m going to live here at the top of my tower until someone comes to rescue me from a life where I have more cats then I do husbands. Even if I don’t get more cats like the crazy cat lady I imagine I’ll turn into, one cat still makes that a fact. Unless, of course, we’re counting other people’s husbands, but that’s merely a technicality, isn’t it?

The first thing I do is head for my wardrobe, where I hang up my clothes, before taking a seat at my dressing table. I let my hair down – immediately scraping it into a bun and removing my make-up. Despite it being June there’s a chilly breeze tonight, so I put on a pair of pink flannel pyjamas, which, despite being purchased from Victoria’s Secret, are sexy by no stretch of the imagination. Then I head for the kitchen, throw some diced chicken into a pan and cook it, before throwing in a packet of stir-fry sauce. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with having this for dinner, it’s just that it’s this kind of healthy, low-fat, low-calorie, low-fun stuff that I live on to make sure my new dresses keep fitting me. I am bored of it, but I toss it around in the pan with the wrist action of a professional chef, breaking only to pop out onto the balcony to water my plants.

I never really thought I had a problem with my weight, until that first time Will pointed out that I was making unhealthy lifestyle choices. I wouldn’t say he was keeping tabs on my weight, but he started making helpful suggestions about how I could drop those extra few pounds I’ve been carrying around. At first, I was good at it. It was simple maths, just eat less and move more and those few pounds melt right off. But then, when I wanted to go back to eating ‘normally’ Will explained to me that I would pile it all back on – and more. The diet was OK for a few months, but I miss food so much. Eating steak just reminded me how much I love it, and I miss chocolate more than anything, which is probably why I’m powerless to resist when someone literally offers it to me on a plate. I’m healthier though, right? I’ll live a longer life, even if it will be a joyless one without big bars of Cadbury’s chocolate to keep me happy.

After sitting at the dining table to eat, all alone, I make myself a cup of tea, grab a SkinnyKwik chocolate cereal bar (a poor excuse for the real thing) and get comfortable on the sofa, ready for another night in, all alone.

Netflix has become my best friend. I recently started binge-watching Breaking Bad of a night and, I have to say, I am hooked. It’s a huge shift in genre from the last thing I watched, which was Gossip Girl , but as much as I loved that, Breaking Bad is just something else. Watching the journey Walter embarks on is eye-opening to say the least, and as much as it is reminding me that life can be short, it is also showing me just how much you can change your life. In a way, I relate. No, I’m not embarking on a career cooking meth – even stir-fry is a stretch for my culinary skills. Walter is trying to be this Heisenberg persona to fit in with his new world, just like I am trying so hard to fit into Will’s world. I’ll be interested to see how it plays out for him – and me. It’s hard to imagine anyone can keep up the act of pretending to be something they’re not, not without someone figuring out that they’re a fraud, or them turning into the person they’re pretending to be and losing their identity for ever.

As I sit here on the sofa, alone, cuddled up in the dark, with my new favourite show on the TV, I realise something: my relationship with TV is a lot like my relationship with Will. It takes me on an emotional roller coaster. It can make me so happy and then leave me so crushed in so much as a scene. A happy ending can lift my mood, just like a plot twist can distract me from my thoughts all day, or a sad scene can leave me feeling devastated. A character death leaves me feeling like I’ve actually lost someone. I mourn them. I think about them, about what the show would be like if they were still in it, just like I wonder what my life would be like if I’d made different choices. TV never lets me down, though. It keeps me entertained on these lonely nights. It excites me… I’ve just realised I’m living vicariously through Walter White.

It’s a particularly tense moment of the show, and as I await the fate of a main character, I feel my fists clench and my nails dig into the palms of my hands. The TV is silent, I am silent and just as tension is building my phone comes to life on the table in front of me, lighting up and vibrating with a message, causing me to jump out of my skin. As my heart finally stops pounding, I narrow my eyes, giving my phone a suspicious glance. Who is texting me? People hardly ever text me. Not since I got involved with an unavailable man and alienated all my friends.