Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (18 page)

They descended like jackals on a half-eaten zebra carcass, delightedly snatching up the delicious tidbits which I had hoped to save from their grasp. Who cared that a couple of hours ago I was happy to be rid of all this stuff? That was before I knew that all I’d be getting to replace it would be a bunch of tasteless student tat not fit to clean the house in.

Jude and friends had decamped to the pub, crowing over newly acquired designer items. I remained behind.

‘I’m feeling a bit tired,’ I said, clutching the one decent item I had managed to scavenge from Jude’s
mates, a slightly gothic but quite sexy black dress from All Saints. Not much good for wearing to job interviews, but I had to come away with something.

‘I’m not surprised after all the work you’ve put into this, Cass,’ Jude said. ‘It’s just such a shame Ali and the others couldn’t make it.’

As she left I cursed her and her bright ideas. Dog walking, clothes swaps … it was all her fault. I could have sold all my old stuff on eBay. But oh no, I had to listen to Jude and now, here I was, a hundred and sixty quid out of pocket, half a wardrobe down, left with enough uneaten sushi to feed the five thousand.

Annoyed as I was, that wasn’t what was really bothering me. What hurt me – if I’m honest, what broke my heart – is that Ali hadn’t shown up. Not only had she not shown up, she hadn’t even called to say she wasn’t coming, to explain why, to apologise. She hadn’t even returned the calls I made earlier in the evening asking her where she was. I was starting to realise what was going on: she had dumped me. Ali had dumped me.

How had I not recognised the signs earlier? I’ve seen her dump men enough times before. First, there’s the slight cooling of the relationship as she puts some distance between them. Then she starts to look elsewhere, in an obvious way. Her targets are often completely unsuitable people (in this instance Kate and Sophie). She gets irritable in the man’s presence, snaps at him for no reason. Then, if the poor sod hasn’t already got the message, she just snubs him. Doesn’t
turn up when she’s supposed to and doesn’t take his calls. It was official. I had been dumped three times in the space of two months: first by my employer, then by my boyfriend and now by my best friend. And this hurt most of all.

Cassie Cavanagh
is injured

Hours to go until the date with Jake: 28
Number of pounds in my bank account: -£1,789
Available bank balance: £11
Credit left on my card: £18.88
Weeks until the rent is due: One

Dog walking continued, out of sheer necessity. After I’d taken Susie and Stanley out (she’s the only one he’ll walk with without biting), I went to see Mrs Bromell to pick up payment. As she handed over the cash, she said, ‘Would you mind popping over to see Mrs Mellor at some point this week, dear?’ Mrs Mellor is the owner of Thierry and Theo, the skittish greyhounds.

‘Of course,’ I said, a little nervously. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think she may just have a favour to ask of you.’

Well, as long as it was a paid favour, I didn’t care.
Dog walking over the past week had earned me the princely sum of £70 – not enough to cover half the damned Tsunami sushi bill. Jude had very sweetly offered to give me a bit of cash for the party.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘you did all the work and you didn’t seem to take many clothes.’ She handed me a tenner.

Money wasn’t the only thing playing on my mind. The date with Jake was coming up and I was unaccountably nervous. So nervous I had spent the past three days reading Jude’s
Guardian
from cover to cover. I was sure he was the sort of person who would have opinions on world events and I didn’t want to come across as a complete idiot. After all, we had only met twice: the first time I had been lying on the bathroom floor, the second I was recovering from a mild concussion following a flood in the kitchen. Come to think of it, why did this man want to go out with me?

No use obsessing over it, the point was that he did. He did want to go out with me – and he wanted to go out with me tomorrow. I was starting to panic: I had nothing to wear and I was looking, shall we say, a little unkempt. Yes, I know it was only a first date, but there is an unwritten law somewhere that if you go out with a man without sufficient depilating you are guaranteed to be removing your clothes in his company at some point in the evening.

The long and short of it was that I was in need of a wax. I rang Body & Soul. The full leg and Brazilian cost
£120. I literally could not afford it. I consulted
Less is More!
. There was an entire section on beauty therapies, including home sugar-waxing. I rang Jude to make sure that she was not planning on coming home until that evening. She wasn’t. I double-locked the door, putting the chain on as well (just in case) and got down to business.

‘
Waxing at home need not be a painful or messy experience
,’ the book said cheerily. ‘
In fact, you can recreate the atmosphere in some of the world’s best spas in the comfort of your own bathroom
.’ What a load of unmitigated bullshit, I thought, skipping through the rest of the blurb until I reached the actual recipe.

All I needed, the book said, was a cup of sugar, two tablespoons of water and two tablespoons of lemon juice, as well a saucepan, butter knife and some cotton or linen scraps cut into strips. The book recommended old sheets. I rummaged around in the airing cupboard and found some pillow cases that looked as though they had seen better days. Those would do.

In the kitchen I boiled up the sugar, water and lemon juice in one of Jude’s copper-bottomed saucepans. According to the book, I had to simmer the mixture over a medium heat for five to eight minutes while stirring CONSTANTLY until it became slightly frothy. After ten minutes or so my arm was starting to ache and there was not a lot of froth going on. I turned the heat up and stirred vigorously. My phone buzzed on the counter opposite. It was Ali calling. Not like her to be calling in the middle of the morning on a
weekday; not like her to be calling at all these days. I picked up.

‘Hello, stranger,’ I said.

‘Hi, Cass.’ She sounded forlorn and distant. There was an odd echo, as though she were calling me from a church.

‘Where are you?’ I asked.

‘In the loo at work,’ she replied. There was a sharp inhale on the other end of the line. She was smoking. Smoking in the loos at Hamilton in the middle of the morning with the markets open? All was not well.

‘Look, I’m really sorry about Saturday,’ she said. ‘I’ve been having a total bitch of a time at work and the thought of having to spend an evening with Jude and the hippies as well as Kate and Sophie was just too fucking much for me.’

‘So you thought you’d just ignore me, did you? You could have called me, Ali. You could at least have replied to my texts.’

‘I know, I’m really sorry. To be honest with you I went to bed at about six thirty and I turned off my phone.’ A likely story.

‘You were with that guy, weren’t you? You blew me off to see your married man.’

‘I didn’t, Cassie. I swear, I’ve just been feeling . . . Oh, whatever. How’d the clothes go anyway?’

‘Total disaster,’ I said. ‘Because you and the Hamilton girls didn’t turn up, I ended up with a load of tasteless crap from Jude’s mates while they took all my good stuff. So cheers for that.’

She sighed. ‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry . . .’

‘And I had to shell out loads of cash for food because the stuff I’d made didn’t work out . . .’ I realised that I was doing it again – moaning about myself when there was clearly something going on with her. Suppressing my disappointment with her, I asked, ‘Ali, why aren’t you on the floor? You’re in the loos, smoking – don’t deny it, I can hear you – this isn’t like you.’

‘Shit, there’s someone coming. Hang on . . .’ There were some scuffling noises, the pffft of a lit cigarette hitting water, then she was back on the line, whispering, ‘I can’t talk now. Gotta go.’

Feeling more than a little irritated by her halfhearted apologies (I was sure that she’d been with that French guy; there was no way Ali would gone to bed at six thirty on a Saturday unless there was someone else going to bed with her), I realised that there was an unpleasant stench emanating from the kitchen. Oh, fuck, the sugar wax.

The mixture had boiled down to a nasty brownish-black treacle which was now smoking ominously. I grabbed it off the heat, and chucked it in the sink, yanking open windows as I did in an attempt to stop the smoke alarm going off. Too late. Still, at least I knew the alarm worked. After fighting with it for a minute or two, answering the door to my irate upstairs neighbour, Mr Poole, apologising profusely to Mr Poole and finally, when Mr Poole refused to accept my apologies telling Mr Poole to sod off, I got back to the home waxing.

I grabbed another saucepan from the cupboard and started boiling up my mixture again. I managed to get to the frothy stage, checked whether there were any granules left (there weren’t) and decanted it into a ceramic bowl. The book instructed me to put the mixture into the fridge for AT LEAST fifteen minutes before I used it.

My phone buzzed again. It was Mrs Bromell, asking if I’d be able to take Paddington out this afternoon. He had a vet’s appointment at three and they really wanted him to go out first. It meant I’d be a bit pushed for time, but I really couldn’t afford to turn the work down. I stuck the sugar wax in the freezer for a couple of minutes. That ought to do it. Then, standing in the kitchen dressed in a bra and nothing else, I got to work. Get the worst over first, I thought, slathering some wax at the top of my inner thigh.

I screamed. I howled, I hopped around in agony. Too hot, it was too bloody hot! Hoping the people in the apartment block backing onto ours couldn’t see me, I clambered up onto the counter and splashed the scalded area with cold water. There was a banging on the door.

‘Could you
please
keep the noise down in there?’ It was Mr Poole from upstairs. ‘I am
trying
to work here.’ Jude and I have never been able to figure out exactly what it is Mr Poole does and I was not in the mood to find out.

‘Oh, will you just piss off!’ I yelled at the top of my voice. There was a stunned silence from the other side of the door.

‘Well, I must say . . .’ I heard him mutter before he stomped off upstairs.

Oh God oh God. What the hell should I do? It was agony. I couldn’t bring myself to pull the strip of linen off, convinced that if I did it would take three layers of skin with it. What to do? Araminta, the stupid bloody
Less is More!
woman did not give advice on how to deal with third-degree burns as a result of home sugar waxing, so I called NHS Direct.

In between bouts of barely stifled laughter, the woman on the other end of the line told me that I needed to get to Accident & Emergency as soon as possible. Would I be justified in calling an ambulance? I asked her. No, she didn’t think so.

‘If you can’t face public transport, get a minicab, love.’

Economy drive or no economy drive, there was no way I was going to get on the tube in that state. I rang our local car service, pulled on some tracksuit bottoms using extreme care, donned a long coat and trainers and made my way gingerly down the stairs to the cab. I lowered myself onto the back seat and we set off towards St Thomas’s. The taxi cost £9. I handed over a tenner and waited for my change. Sighing dramatically, the driver handed back my pound. Now marked as a non-tipper, I was going to have to change minicab firms.

In A&E, I explained my situation in hushed tones to the woman on the reception desk. She kept a straight face throughout and even managed to sound sympathetic.

‘That must be very painful,’ she said. ‘I’ll do my best to get someone to see you as soon as possible.’

Unable to sit down with any comfort, I stood by the window of the waiting room and, ignoring the prominent ‘
No Mobile Phones
’ signs, rang Mrs Bromell to cancel Paddington. She sounded pained. Not as pained as I was. Then, in dire need of some hand-holding, I rang Jude. There was no answer from her phone. I looked at my watch. It was after four thirty. The market had closed. I rang Ali. She was still in the office, but she took the call.

‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Sounds like you’re in a train station. Are you going somewhere?’

I told her the whole sorry tale. When she had stopped crying with laughter, she said,

‘God bless you, Cassandra Cavanagh, that is the funniest thing – the only funny thing, in fact – that I have heard in about a month.’

‘Very pleased I could be of service,’ I grumbled, but it was lovely to hear her laugh like that again.

‘Stay put,’ she said. Not that I had much choice. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

A minute later, a nurse came to call me through to the treatment area.

The nurse, a jovial South African lady called Josephine with a dazzling smile and enormous bosom, instructed me to slip off my clothes, put on a robe, and lie down on the bed in the cubicle. The doctor would be with me in a second. When he arrived, I knew for sure. Events of the past few weeks had given me the
strong suspicion that God hated me, but I couldn’t be certain. Now I knew. There in front of me stood Dr Dragovic, a six-foot-four Serb, all dark hair and smouldering eyes, St Thomas’s answer to Luka Kova
off
ER
. (Dr Dragovic probably wouldn’t welcome the comparison – I had a feeling the Serbs and the Croats didn’t like each other that much – but it was true.)