‘Just going. What are you doing?’
‘Oh, I’m still in bed. Jude just brought me an orange juice and a warm bagel. With marmalade.’
‘I’ve never liked you.’
‘Oh, sword through my heart. Now get to work. And remember to keep all my records up to date–it took me months to devise that system and get it up and running.’
‘Ginny, you really need to get a life. And I don’t mean mine. Anyway, how’d Mr Motivator take the news of your thirty-day desertion?’
‘Fine.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yeah, fine.’
‘You haven’t told him yet, have you?’
‘Not exactly. Okay, not at all. He got cut off last night and I’ve not been able to reach him since. So I was thinking, since we’re doing this role-reversal thing and I’ve spent my entire life delivering messages of doom for you, maybe you could break the news. Gently. He’s doing a Bums & Tums class in the back room of the library for the Young Catholic Mothers this morning at nine thirty. But please, please, Roxy, promise that you’ll say you begged me to help you. I don’t want him to be pissed off before I’ve had a chance to explain it properly to him.’
Roxy groaned. ‘Ginny, it might have escaped your notice, but your boyfriend isn’t exactly my biggest fan. He’s never liked me since I tried to set you up with Jason Morrison in fourth-year PE. You’d have been much better off with him–he’s made it to the first team at Millwall.’
‘Yep, and the Sunday Mirror had two pages of photographs of him snorting coke off some female’s nipples at a dogging site last weekend.’
‘Well, no one’s perfect. Okay, I’ll break the news gently. Anyway, better go before my mother grounds me for late time-keeping. Oh, and if I die today, tell the doctors it was polyester poisoning–it’ll save them doing a post mortem.’
She hung up as her mother hurried back into the room. ‘Come on, dear, if I don’t open up the community centre then the Perky Pensioners committee will be loitering on the pavement and those mobile oxygen tanks are such an obstruction to passers-by.’
Roxy somehow resisted the urge to stab herself to death with her Shreddies spoon.
‘Okay, you go warm up the car and I’ll just get my bag.’
‘Car? Oh, no, dear, Violet’s got me on a diet and exercise plan and I think it’s starting to work–I’ve lost two pounds this month! Although that might be something to do with starting the change. Anyway, we walk to work. Look, I’ve got my pedometer–10,000 steps a day–got to keep the bones strong and the muscles flexible.’
Roxy’s life flashed before her. Or, rather, the life of her £650 Louboutin shoes. She felt like she’d just been told a family member was on life support and unlikely to make it.
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