The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (26 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘A problem is never as permanent as a solution.’

‘What?’

‘Dunno what it means really. My mother always says it. Usually when she wants me to see a shrink and go straight.’

‘It’s not
yours
, is it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The kid.’

‘It?’

I pull a face. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I said that,’ I say. Actually, I
do
sort of know why I said that. I was thinking about my own, potential, and so far, sexless child, and whether whoever fathered Jenna’s child might want to do the same for me.

Is it an option I would consider?
A problem is never as permanent as a solution.
‘Anyway,
is
he? Yours?’

Darren laughs. ‘No,’ he says. ‘But – and don’t say I said anything – but I suspect that the dad might be Mark.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, he and Jenna
are
really close.’

‘But he never said so.’

‘No. But I mentioned it once – who the father was – and he seemed funny.’

‘Funny.’

‘Yeah. He just sort of changed the subject.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, don’t say I said anything.’

‘No,’ I say.

A movement outside catches my eye, and I turn to see a van parking opposite. ‘Talk of the devil,’ I say. ‘White Van Man is here.’

All It Takes is a Plan

I throw myself at work, and with the European Grunge! campaign going live, the stateside one hitting production (some mornings I arrive to find fifty emails from Harper & Baker in my inbox) and Victoria Barclay still off, there is easily enough work for me to lose myself in it completely.

I think that the reason that Mark’s law – or rather Mona’s law – appears so true is that the human brain is by nature dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction is one of the defining features of being human – if it were not the case we would still be happily living in trees and eating bananas.

The way we modern apes channel our dissatisfaction is to look at our three-piece puzzle and focus all of our capacity for dissatisfaction on the least successful third of our lives until the situation becomes, or at least
appears
to become, untenable. Equally, the human brain, unable to think about more than one problem at a time, creates a rosy pretence that the other two thirds are, for now at least, just dandy. So when we’re in a bad relationship we throw ourselves with relief at our jobs. It’s not that the job is perfect, it’s simply that we are too busy funnelling our angst at the unsatisfactory home-life to care. We need to pretend that the job and the flat are fine just to survive. Equally, the day we fall in love, the job doesn’t get any worse . . . it’s simply that because we no longer need it to escape the awful ex (and because we would rather stay in bed shagging) we direct our angst at the job.

Right now, I’m loving my job. It’s exhausting and exciting and satisfying and massages my ego on an hourly basis. I have a half- a-million pound international ad campaign swirling around me, and so, professionally at least, I’m right there at the hub of my life.

My job digests my days, and often my evenings and half the weekend as well. By Sunday I’m too tired to do anything or think about anything else anyway. I sit and drink (too much) wine and watch (too much) TV and wait for the Monday morning juggling to recommence.

It’s not that I’m missing much outside of work anyway. Sarah- Jane is cocooning with George (read: shagging for a baby) and Mark is cocooning with Ian (read: simply shagging). As for Darren, he is on a coke-fuelled man-hunt, which
also
seems to involve vast amounts of shagging, though mainly, from what Mark tells me, with absurdly inappropriate partners.

Indeed, I seem to be the only person I know who
isn’t
shagging.

But it’s all fine, because, as I say, my job is brilliant. My job is my saviour. My personal life can wait.

At the end of September, the European Grunge! campaign hits full steam, and suddenly there isn’t much to do except watch and wait to see if it works. Indeed, we have a bet on at the office that the first person to take a street-snap of a stranger wearing carpenter pants gets a bottle of Champagne from each of the rest of us. Liking a drop of Champagne but rarely having my hefty camera with me, I even consider lending George a pair of the trousers and getting SJ to send me a photo.

On the last day of the month, the US campaign enters what we call the eye of the storm. This is the moment when the whirlwind of preparation is over and there are a few fallow weeks before the campaign launches and causes a flurry of fresh media enquiries. Being a bit of a last-minute outfit, we rarely experience this moment of spooky calm here at Spot On, but Harper & Baker’s campaigns are organised with military precision, mainly by Tom, and on the first Wednesday of October, I open my email to find no messages at all. Not one.

I stare at my screen, click on ‘fetch mail’ a few times, and then sigh deeply. I have been dreading this moment.

Even our other accounts seem dormant right now, and when by Thursday lunchtime I have made precisely one phone call (to a printer about an unpaid bill) and received two emails (both spam messages which have slipped through the net), I can take it no longer. I head up to Peter Stanton’s office.

‘You might as well take a long weekend,’ he tells me when I explain my problem. ‘Lord knows you’ve done enough hours recently.’

I send a final, hopeful, email to Tom asking if there’s anything I can do to help, but when even this produces only an automated reply that he is out of the office until Monday, I steel myself against the terror of an empty October weekend – an empty
long weekend
, and shut down my computer, sling my monastically silent BlackBerry in my bag, and head for the door.

It’s raining gently as I step out onto Soho Square.

I retreat and linger for a moment with the smokers as I wonder where to go. I have the whole of London surrounding me. People travel the world to come to our museums and our galleries – surely I’m not going to just go home and sit at the kitchen table. Am I?

Surely I’m going to go and visit the Tate Modern, or the National Portrait Gallery, or the V&A . . . Aren’t I? On my own, all of these options just strike me as depressing.

What
is
this inability to take joy in doing things on my own, I wonder. Isn’t that what they call co-dependency? I nod, suddenly decided, and head off towards Foyles. A book on co-dependency is clearly what’s required.

It turns out that whatever I am suffering from isn’t codependency. Co-dependency is another pleasure reserved for people in relationships.

Instead I pick up a copy of the best-selling
Single Blues: Beat them from the get-go
, and another:
Living Life Lightly: a guide to creating joy in your life.
I hesitate over
Living Life Lightly
because, ironically, the book (a hardcover) is so heavy I’m not sure I can be bothered lugging it around. But in the end, the bullet points all seem suitably uplifting to make the effort worthwhile.

Then, still not wanting to face my kitchen, I stop off at Nero’s for a cappuccino. Sitting in Nero’s with a copy of
Single Blues
on the table is a bit like walking around with a sandwich board marked ‘
I’m available. Please chat me up.
’ At any rate, I hope it is.

I’m Available, Please Chat Me Up
suddenly strikes me as a brilliant idea for a book. I reckon millions of single women would buy copies. It would be the ultimate dating aid
.
Maybe
I
should write it.

I decide, on further reflection, that advertising that I have the blues probably isn’t the nub of a good campaign, so I hide
Single Blues
beneath
Living Life Lightly: a guide to creating joy in your life.
Figuring that advertising my need for joy isn’t going to do much better, and noting that the only single guy in the place has a crazy Bin-Laden beard anyway, I give up and put both books back in my bag and resign myself to the non-judgemental sanctuary of home.

It’s five when I get in. I dump my bag on the table and look around the kitchen. Winter is closing in and it’s already pitch- black outside.

This was a bad decision. I don’t think I can bear to spend the next hour in my flat, let alone the next three days. I need a plan.

Perhaps I should accept the invitation to help Mark and Ian paint their kitchen. I wrinkle my nose and look around. I haven’t painted anywhere since Brian and I painted this room, and that was five years ago, and I didn’t enjoy it much then.

And then I smile. Bugger Mark’s walls! I’m going to paint
my
kitchen.

I remove the books from my bag and swipe my keys from the table.

Amazing how quickly emotions can swing from one extreme to the other. I suddenly feel energetic and elated.

All it takes is a plan.

It takes most of Friday for me to wash the walls, move the furniture out, and to tape plastic sheeting around the kitchen cabinets. I have a fleeting moment of despair when I realise that I can’t manoeuvre the table out of the kitchen on my own, but then the postman unsuspectingly asks me to take in a parcel for Mark so I co-opt him into helping me with the table.

On Saturday the first coat takes considerably less time than I had hoped, but even this works out fine. The smell of paint drives me from the house and, at a loss for anything better to do, I simply go to the cinema.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
, the latest Woody Allen film, does just the trick: it demonstrates that people in relationships are as miserable as I am.

By the time Sunday evening comes, my kitchen is looking positively perky.

To reward myself and to find a fresh victim for table-moving duties, I order a pizza from Domino’s. The delivery guy is the usual spotty adolescent, but he eventually agrees (on hearing my offer of a five quid tip) to help me move the table back where it came from.

It’s only once I have eaten my pizza and downed a third of a bottle of Chardonnay (my first drink for three days) that my carefully constructed optimism finally starts to disintegrate. For how much nicer it would be to have a boyfriend to help move tables! How much nicer to have a man to share the wine! How much nicer to have my boyfriend drop in unexpectedly and congratulate me on my stunning handiwork!

Just as I am wavering over whether to drink the rest of the bottle and collapse into a satisfying state of misery or put the bottle away and heroically resist, my period starts. I have to run, knock-kneed to the bathroom. I’m now nearly a week late so the relief is stunning.

I don’t get that irritable with PMT, thank God, but when the dam finally breaks, there is always a weird moment of clarity – a fleeting instant of comprehension – in which I realise that at least fifty per cent of whatever emotional state I was in
was
caused by PMT after all.

A wave of calm rolls over me. Within minutes, I feel centred, composed and thoroughly relaxed: at one with everything and everyone – even with the rain outside. Even with Mrs Pilchard. Even, dare I say it, with her Leylandii.

By ten I’m tucked up in bed with
Living Life Lightly
, trying to concentrate on exercise one.

Thoughts
, the book says,
become reality.
Exercise A is simply to force oneself to imagine the outcomes one desires in life.

It takes me quite a few attempts to create a mental picture of a brown-eyed man who is neither alcoholic, nor balloon fetishist, nor bastard, but in the end I manage it.

By the time I drift off to sleep, I am daydreaming, and then suddenly
dreaming
, of a man and a baby and a big farm kitchen. A big farm kitchen with freshly painted walls.

What a Waste

On Monday morning, the post-apocalyptic silence of the office continues and I wonder for the first time if there is something more to this than the usual lull of the project cycle. There doesn’t, after all, seem to be much new work coming in either . . . Perhaps the doomsayers have it right. Perhaps it is going to be the eighties all over again.

The open-plan floor I work on is so quiet that people are whispering to each other. A couple of times, I pick up the phone just to check that it is still working.

At ten, out of sheer boredom, I phone Sarah-Jane.

‘Hello, dear, how are you?’ she says.

‘Bored. It’s like a morgue here. No emails, no calls . . . it’s bizarre.’

‘You’re the only person I know who says
bizarre
,’ she comments. ‘It’s the same here, by the way.’

‘What, bizarre?’

‘Yeah, scary. They reckon recessions hit charities really badly too.’

‘Do you really think it’s going to be that bad?’

‘Do you
have
a telly?’

‘Well, yeah, but I only really watch
Desperate Housewives
. And
The Apprentice
. And
Dragon’s Den
. Everything else is too depressing.’

‘Well the stock market crashed again this morning, and another bank almost folded too.’

‘Another American one?’

‘Yeah, Bear Sterns or something.’