Shari Low - My Best Friend’s Life

This couldn’t get any worse.

‘Oh, and Roxy, love, you need to do up your shirt–your button’s come loose and you’re flashing your underwear.’

Half an hour, three blisters and two toes with frostbite later, Roxy hobbled into the community centre through a throng of senior citizens in felt headwear and plastic footwear. But at least they looked comfortable. She contemplated offering one of them fifty quid for a pair of shoes that came from the same kind of catalogue that sold bath chairs and those long rods with the grippers that allowed you to pick things up without bending down.

Her mother kissed her goodbye and toddled twenty yards to the entrance of the doctor’s surgery where she’d been the receptionist since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Roxy moped across the corridor and followed Auntie Violet into the library. Located in an annex off the back of the community centre, it was the book depository that time forgot.

She dumped her bag in the staffroom and readjusted her hair, before snorting at the ridiculousness of it. Who was she trying to impress? Johnny Depp was hardly going to wander into the Farnham Hills library, find himself overcome with wild abandon and an insatiable desire for her before bending her over the gardening section and shagging her senseless. And anyway, wasn’t she absolutely, definitely, resolutely off men?

She wandered into the main section of the library and marvelled at how nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed in the twenty years she’d been coming here. The walls were still that impossibly depressing shade of inconsequential grey. The plastic flooring, probably manufactured by some seismic shift in the earth’s crust before time began, still stuck to your feet as you walked. The overhead fluorescent lighting could still bring on a migraine in under thirty seconds. And the rows and rows of books were still propped on thick hardwood shelves that buckled precariously in the middle.

The reception desk, or rather the four-foot-by-twelve-foot plank of Formica that masqueraded as Mission Control, still had bits peeling off the edges and smelled of Flash. Roxy sank to her knees and peered under the counter. Yep, still there–a carved love heart with ‘Roxy loves Stevie’ engraved in the middle. She’d done it in the summer of ’94 when her mother had made her work every day for two weeks as punishment for getting caught smoking a roll-up in the park pavilion. She’d have made her work for six weeks if she’d realised that the roll-up contained a couple of grams of the finest Moroccan weed.

‘So what do you think of our new look then? We’re all high-tech now and no mistake,’ boomed Auntie Violet as she joined her behind the desk.

‘Oww.’ Roxy banged her head on the underside of the desk, then prised herself upright.

She glanced along the counter, looking for some signs that the new millennium had actually arrived: a laptop, an MP3 player, a cordless phone–Christ, an electric kettle would be progress–but nothing, just yards of box files, record cards, a blue plastic penholder and a phone that still had a circular dial.

‘No, over there!’ gestured Violet, pointing down the feverishly popular Historical Romance aisle to two archaic-looking computers sitting side by side, each one complete with its very own grey plastic chair. Yep, thought Roxy, the producers of Gadget magazine would get a hard-on if they saw this lot.

‘They’re in such demand that we sometimes have to have a waiting list and limit the use to twenty minutes per person. Imagine! Oh, and remember old Reverend Stewart? Well, he’s banned from them–caught him looking at a site called “Babes with Biggies” and it wasn’t referring about their feet. Of course, he said it was an accident but we’re not convinced. His eyes are too far apart.’

With that, she turned on her heel. ‘Anyway, I’ll get the kettle on. Tea, love? Course you will. Milk and two sugars, I remember,’ she added with a wink. ‘It’s lovely to have you here, Roxy–we do miss you, you know. I’ll just get the tea and then you can tell me everything you’ve been up to. Dying to hear about all those city boys you’ve been courting. Back in a min–and since it’s a special occasion I’ll break out the Penguins!’

Roxy couldn’t decide what hurt more–the toes that were curled in excruciating mortification, the teeth that were clenched in horror, the jaw that was fixed into a manic, tortured grin, or the forehead that was thudding repeatedly off the desk.

This. Was. Never. Going. To. Work.

This wasn’t a city detox, it was a Saga tour to insanity. She’d never do it. She couldn’t. She wanted her old life back. Fuck it, she’d even take Felix back and just threaten to amputate his organ somewhere around the testicles if it was caught in enemy territory again. She wanted her job, she wanted her flat and she wanted Petrov, her bisexual, bilateral thigh trainer.

She let the cool stickiness of the Formica soothe her wrinkled brow. See! Bloody wrinkles! That settled it; she was on the next train out of here.

‘S’cuse me.’

There was nothing, nothing on God’s earth that could make her suffer this for a nanosecond longer.

‘S’cuse me.’

She rolled her head so that her left cheek was now on the Formica, and she squinted to focus.

It couldn’t be! She jolted up. Nope, it wasn’t. But it was pretty damn close. If she was squinting. In a dark alley. Wearing sunglasses.

So a bloke who, on reflection, had nothing in common with Johnny Depp, except long, brown un-brushed hair and gorgeous hazel eyes, was standing in front of her with an expectant grin on his face.

‘Hi,’ he said.

Okay, not exactly knocking her out with super-smooth chat, but hey, he was male, he was relatively good-looking and he didn’t appear, on first impression, to have any psychotic personality disorders–he therefore qualified in the category of ‘reality distraction’. She briefly wondered if he’d just stand at the desk all day and allow her to look at him and perhaps fondle his man parts on an hourly basis to ease the inevitable boredom. If she wasn’t off men, that was. And she was. Definitely. Until hell froze over or the real Johnny Depp appeared in front of her wearing nothing but a ‘Roxy Be Mine’ badge.

Farnham Hills Porn Prevention Officer chose that moment to reappear.

‘Oh, hello Mitch, love, how are you this morning? Fancy a Penguin?’

‘I’m grand, thanks, Mrs Wallis,’ he burred in a soft Irish accent. ‘Where’s Ginny then? Having a day off today?’

‘A few days off, actually. She’s gone up to London for a wee bit of excitement. You know how you young things are these days. Anyway, this is our Roxy, Vera from the doctor’s surgery’s daughter. Her and our Ginny have been best friends since they were still peeing in nappies.’

Toes re-curled. Jaw reset into manic grin.

Violet turned to Roxy. ‘And this is Mitch. Father Murphy’s nephew. He’s over from Ireland and staying at the chapel house with his uncle while he finishes writing his new novel. Imagine, a real writer in Farnham Hills!’

Roxy was indeed imagining. Mitch. Laptop. Naked.

Mitch held his hand out. With only a slightly embarrassing delay while she attempted to surreptitiously reopen those top two shirt buttons, Roxy reciprocated the gesture.

‘Pleasure to meet you,’ he said. ‘I usually call in every morning to have a coffee and a read of the papers. Hope that’s okay with you?’

Yep, Roxy thought, perhaps this life detox was going to work out fine–just as long as she went with the flow, took the ups with the downs, and managed to nip to the chemist in her lunch hour for a new diaphragm. She re-evaluated her strategy–perhaps the generic term ‘penis embargo’ had been too all-encompassing. Perhaps what she’d really meant was that she was avoiding Felix’ s penis. Yep, why should the rest of the world suffer for one man’s sins?