Lindsey Kelk - About a Girl

Resplendent in skintight black jeans, an obscenely low-cut white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket, Vanessa looked me up and down, a small silver suitcase resting by her high-heeled feet.

‘Why are you at home using my towels in the middle of the day?’ she asked with an expression that suggested she’d just caught me doing lines of coke off the PM while my mum watched. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I thought you were away all week?’ I stalled, really wanting not to be standing in the middle of the living room in a towel. In Vanessa’s towel. ‘Didn’t you book a shoot or something?’

‘I cancelled,’ she replied with a single flip of her shiny blonde hair. ‘I got to the airport and they had me booked on easyJet. Fuck that. Why are you in my flat?’

To someone who was so conscientious and sickeningly loyal that they were still fighting the urge to call the office that had just fired her and make sure someone had changed the colour of the squirrel in the paper towel concept, this news caused me near physical pain. Vanessa was a photographer. And by that I mean that once every couple of months one of Vanessa’s friends booked her for a job that she occasionally accepted, and she vanished from the flat for a couple of days with the camera I’d had to trade her one month four years ago when I couldn’t afford my rent, which she had subsequently refused to sell back to me. I ignored the part where she referred to my home of five years as ‘her flat’. I knew for a fact that my rent paid more than two thirds of the actual mortgage, but never having paid a penny herself towards the roof over our heads made absolutely no difference to Vanessa whose house this was. Admittedly, her dad did legally pay the mortgage and had done ever since she had been accepted onto a fine arts programme at Central Saint Martins an undisclosed number of years ago. The deal was that he’d pay until she graduated. She never graduated. He was still paying. As far as Van was concerned, a deal’s a deal.

I took a deep breath and started my favourite conversation again. ‘I sort of got made redundant this morning.’

‘You what?’ She blinked and smiled.

‘I got made redundant.’

It did not get easier the more often I said it.

‘Oh my God.’ Vanessa laughed. Actually laughed. ‘You lost your job?’

I nodded and rested one wet foot on top of the other, dripping quietly.

‘But what are you going to do?’ she said as she slowly sat down on the sofa, eyes fixed on me. ‘I mean, like, all you do is work.’

‘It’s OK, it was just restructuring,’ I said, reminding myself as much as telling her. ‘I’ll be in a new job by next week.’

‘Are you high?’ she asked. ‘Where exactly? If a company that has had you working twelve hours a day for five years doesn’t want to keep you around, what makes you think anyone else is going to want to touch you? How are you going to explain getting the sack?’

‘I didn’t get the sack,’ I reiterated, trying not to panic. ‘I was made redundant. No one’s going to care. I’ve got loads of experience.’

‘Loads of experience in getting fired,’ Vanessa replied. ‘You know what they say – it’s easier to find a job when you’re in a job. Who is going to believe you were kicked out for nothing?’

These were not the things I needed to hear.

‘If I were interviewing for whatever it is you do, who would I hire? The person who’d applied but still had a job because they were good enough for their company to want to keep them, or the person who’d got the sack for being surplus to requirements?’

Damn her evil logic.

‘Honestly, I’m amazed you haven’t already killed yourself,’ she said, stretching out on the cream settee without taking off her boots. She was truly evil. ‘Now you haven’t got a job, it must bring all the other tragic parts of your life into focus.’

‘All the other tragic parts?’

‘No job, no boyfriend, no friends …’ She ticked off my faults on her fingers. ‘That hair.’

I shook the towel turban from my head and grabbed a damp strand. ‘What’s wrong with my hair?’

‘Maybe you could go off on one of those Eat, Pray, Love self-exploratory adventures,’ she carried on, clearly enjoying herself. ‘Although that would actually require some imagination. Can you put the kettle on? I have had the worst morning.’

I pressed my lips together in a grim line. Vanessa had had the worst morning. Of course.

Vanessa and I had come across each other five years ago. I’d been looking for a new flat closer to the office and she was looking for a new flatmate who wouldn’t walk out after three months because she was a living nightmare. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. We were introduced by a ‘mutual friend’, aka a friend of Charlie’s who was trying to get into Vanessa’s knickers, and even though it was hardly love at first sight, her flat was beautiful, right in the middle of Clerkenwell and only a twenty-minute walk from work. She told me she was a photographer, and I’d been a keen amateur photographer until work had completely taken over my life, so I thought that was nice. We made small talk about our mutual love of Bradley Cooper, Kinder eggs and wearing shorts over tights, and within fifteen minutes I’d signed the lease. The day I moved in, Charlie, Amy and I were treated to the sight of Vanessa and Charlie’s friend shagging over the back of the settee. I never saw him again. Vanessa I was stuck with.

Within weeks, Vanessa had broken every rule in the flatmate book. She drank my booze, my tea and my milk; she never bought toilet paper; she played music so loudly that I had to sleep with earplugs in. Inside a year, she overtook Angelina Jolie on my list of most evil women alive. She fought with my female friends, she slept with my male friends, she took my clothes without asking, and I was fairly certain that on at least one occasion she had stolen money out of my purse. On my twenty-fifth birthday, she performed an impromptu striptease on the bar of the restaurant we were eating at because she was ‘considering a career as a burlesque dancer’ and called me a boring twat when I asked her to get down. Suffice to say my visiting grandparents were not impressed. The day my second granddad died (not related to the burlesque performance as far as I was aware), she punched me in the arm so hard that I had a bruise for a week and told me to cheer up, it wasn’t like I had died. Her favourite term of endearment for Amy was ‘Tweedle Twat’, and she’d been openly trying to shag Charlie since the day he’d moved my stuff into the flat, despite the fact that she knew how I felt about him. And despite the fact that she was actually being penetrated by one of his best friends the moment they met.

Of course there were reasons why I’d stayed. I hated moving and I hated living with strangers even more. Amy refused to leave her shared house in Shepherd’s Bush and I refused to share one bathroom with five nursing students, so that was off the table. And given that Vanessa’s dad was paying the mortgage, the rent was so ridiculously cheap that I’d been able to pay off all my student loans without bankrupting myself. And once in a blue moon she would do something human and I’d think she wasn’t so bad. We’d spend an evening on the sofa watching bad romcoms and slagging off every man who’d ever walked the earth, or she’d suggest ordering a Chinese takeaway and manage not to insult me more than twice the whole time we ate. And every year, without fail, she bought me a new vibrator for my birthday. Which, for Vanessa, was a Nice Thing To Do. Plus I was very busy and she she was away a lot. Somehow, until now, it had worked.

But when the doorbell went again, I was still standing in the living room wrapped in a towel that was not my own, and I really, really wished I lived in a six-to-a-toilet bedsit in West London.