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  1 January 2016, 9.02 a.m.

  NY RESOLUTIONS

  Delete Tim’s number

  Get job IN LONDON

  Make money

  Exercise 5 times a week

  Have sex at least once a month

  Find my G spot

  Make more fun friends

  Take a course in design

  Give up carbs and sugar mon-fri

  Rebrand personal style – less high st

  Move out of home TO LONDON

  CHAPTER 1

  Whenever the first of January came round, I had a habit of imagining myself a year on, as someone who had enigmatically outgrown the person I was in that moment. But year after year, it was like déjà vu – and it was starting to get old.

  I had always thought of my life in Topsham as a sort of drawn-out prelude to the life I planned on eventually living. I’d expected that once I’d done all the things you’re supposed to do – like finish school and university – I’d float naturally into a job for some London-based fashion designer, who would be blown away by a talent that even I’d been uncertain I possessed. I’d live in a flat with palm-printed wallpaper and a free-standing bath, wear embroidered kimonos and get a blue tick by my name on Instagram. I hadn’t accounted for being sucked back into the arse-end-of-nowhere to pull pints and wait for a call from the recruiters who had sounded so eager when I was fresh out of the graduate oven back in June. And I certainly hadn’t accounted for spending New Year’s Day on yet another bathroom floor I didn’t recognise, in England’s tiniest town.

  ‘You’re not still looking for it, are you?’ Billie called out from the other side of the door.

  I cradled the toilet basin. ‘Looking for what?’ I said, moving my mouth as little as possible in case it put pressure on my stomach, which was at that very moment threatening to expel the contents of the night before.

  The door opened a crack and Billie looked down at me, her blood-red, boy-short hair standing up in all directions. ‘Your G spot? Last night you were worried you didn’t have one.’

  It was then that I winced – not because of what she’d said, but because it reminded me that I’d sent an unsolicited selfie, at three in the morning, to Tim, the on-off fling who hadn’t been ready for anything serious throughout the three years we were at university, whom I hadn’t seen since graduating and whom I had been known – after a few drinks – to refer to as ‘my first love’.

  Please.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered.

  ‘Still missing then?’ she said.

  I wriggled my hand around the floor for my iPhone and braved a peek at the damage: an aerial shot of myself on the loo, captioned, ‘Miss me?’, as if murky urine framed by average thighs was a truly irresistible thing. Seeing it in the cold light of day, I had a vision of myself shrinking in size and morphing into the screaming face emoji.

  I held the phone up to show Billie and moaned. ‘This is a disaster!’

  I never sent messages like that to Tim, or anyone I was seeing, in the daytime. I was very much Cool Girl in the daytime. That was my safe spot, even if it got me nowhere closer to the discovery of my G spot. That was what he’d always liked about me. No pressure, no strings. Nothing in it for me, basically.

  Billie looked at the photo, shrugged, and said, ‘At least your piss looks good,’ because she knew it would make me laugh. She always knew how to make me laugh.

  Billie and I met at school. She was in the year above me, where she had earned herself the uncreative nickname ‘Dyke’, owing to the fact that she was the only girl in her year who wasn’t a walking blow job charity, and, to be fair, looked a lot like Ant or Dec. We came across each other on a tree-lined hill near school that was called ‘the smoker’s slope’, and its function was self-explanatory. One day, when it was just the two of us, she said to me, ‘Can I tell you something, as a friend? I don’t think you know how to inhale a fag properly.’ I looked at her, amazed that she’d taken notice of some girl in the year below. And it was true. I just took little bird-like sucks on the end of my Lucky Strikes, which was why my cigarettes took longer than everyone else’s to burn down, though sometimes I’d blow into them to speed up the process. So Billie kindly taught me how it was done and we’d been best friends ever since. I’d been addicted to cigarettes ever since, too.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, unsticking my tongue from the roof of my mouth several times in a row.

  She shook her head and gave me a look that said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ Billie was my only fun friend and I was hers, so the people we ended up mingling with on nights out were usually unpalatable before the sixth tequila or when you were on their bathroom floor the next day, dying of alcohol poisoning.

  ‘Can we Irish?’ I asked hopefully, not in the mood to be polite to anyone.

  Billie held her finger to her lips, reaching out with her other hand to haul me up off the ground. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, looking like the grim reaper in a blonde wig – or, rather, an orange-tinged wig, thanks to the home-dye job. As I followed her out, I realized – or remembered – that we were on a boat. I had a fleeting vision of looking out the small window to find that we were halfway to France, but thankfully, or maybe disappointingly, we had not drifted from the sleepy quayside of the town that I’d spent my whole life waiting to leave.

  Billie handed me my raincoat as she threw on the bomber jacket that I’d customized with patches and sequins for her when we were sixteen (I’d hardly seen her wear anything else since) and we made a beeline for the exit.

  ‘Can I come back to yours?’ I asked as we tumbled out onto the path and started walking.

  ‘I love you, but I need a few more hours’ kip before my shift,’ she said. ‘And you’ll want to talk my ear off.’

  I got it. She needed her space. Something that I found I had way too much of. Too much space was bad. Too much space led to boredom, and if you let boredom happen, it often mutated into something much gloomier.

  ‘Can I come for a drink later, while you’re working?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t.’

  With that we parted ways, and my mind began spinning with a faux-methodical reverie detailing exactly what I’d do from that moment on: walk briskly home, prepare a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich, boil the kettle, eat the sandwich while listening to some podcast that would likely instruct me how to be a better human, make coffee, run a bath, soak in said bath while drinking coffee, get into pyjamas, get into bed and take out my long-suffering sketchbook to draw for the rest of the day. I hoped that the familiarity of drawing would be comforting. More than that, I hoped that I’d feel resourceful by feeding the burgeoning fantasy of becoming a fashion designer, which was still loitering in the back of my mind, like something on a hypothetical to-do list.

  When I reached the end of my road, I put the whole plan on pause and sat down on someone’s doorstep to light a cigarette. My mother would probably be up and she didn’t know that I was a smoker. You’d think as a fully-fledged adult, I’d be able to admit to it, take the disapproving headshake on the chin and move on with life. But, not so.

  I took out my phone and opened the Notes application to do what you were meant to do at the start of the year, but what I probably should have done six months earlier.

  1 January 2016, 9.02 a.m.

  NY
RESOLUTIONS

  Delete Tim’s number

  Get job IN LONDON

  Make money

  Exercise 5 times a week

  Have sex at least once a month

  Find my G spot

  Make more fun friends

  Take a course in design

  Give up carbs and sugar mon-fri

  Rebrand personal style – less high st

  Move out of home TO LONDON

  ‘That’s not how you chop onions,’ said my mother. She took the knife away from me and started slicing them horizontally.

  I sank down into one of the mint-green kitchen chairs and opened Instagram on my iPhone, resigned to the fact that I couldn’t even chop an onion, let alone get a job, move to London or tick off anything else on the list of New Year’s resolutions I’d only just made. I scrolled through the anecdotal squares as the smell of those onions filled the small kitchen, prickling my eyes. There was something so mindlessly captivating about the holidays of people I’d never met, the poached eggs drizzled with green sauce I’d never tasted, the £5 vouchers for a clothing brand I’d never heard of, the fitness videos and makeup tutorials that I always meant to emulate. I stopped on some supermodel I followed who had taken a mirror selfie in a fancy-looking room. She was wearing sunglasses and dangling a pair of high heels from her fingers. The shot was simply captioned, ‘@KurtGeiger’, tempting all of her impressionable followers onto the shoe brand’s Instagram page. I clicked right through. Kurt Geiger’s profile bio was a one-liner, promising anyone who clicked on the link to their shopping page a chance to feature on their Instagram. Again, through I went.

  ‘What can you possibly still be looking at on that virulent device?’ my mother’s voice came cascading over my shoulder.

  ‘I like these shoes,’ I said, showing her a pair of metallic silver heels.

  She glanced briefly then let out a small laugh that I would describe as a chortle. ‘When would you wear those? You never go anywhere but the pub!’

  ‘Where else am I supposed to go around here?’ I muttered.

  The doorbell rang before she could answer, though I’m not sure she had an answer to that question. Her friend Philip had arrived for dinner, like Friday-night clockwork. He was virtually her only friend and she was in love with him, although he was almost certainly gay. They were both lecturers at the University of Exeter, the reason I had been uprooted from an exciting South London life, at the age of four, and dumped into seaside monotony. My mother had taken the job when my father – ‘a Dutch immigrant’ as the locals now referred to him – left her for a buxom blonde. I’d always imagined she looked like Ursula Andress, but now I think about it, that is highly unlikely. It wasn’t something my mother and I spoke about.

  My mother and Philip were both reading some book about Russia’s cultural elite, which sounded so depressing that I could have slit my wrists just listening to them unpack it over spaghetti bolognaise. The conversation then mutated into Brexit chat, as it always did, which seemed pointless given that we were all set on voting Remain, so what was there to really talk about?

  And then Philip asked me the question that I so dreaded to hear, especially around my mother: ‘So, Scarl, what are you doing with your life?’

  I would’ve taken the Russian elite or Brexit over that conversation topic.

  ‘I’m trying to find a job, but the recruiter says there’s nothing at the moment,’ I said, opening my mouth to allow a greedily large forkful of spaghetti to enter.

  ‘The recruiter’s been saying that for six months now,’ said my mother, without looking at me, which was her way of saying, ‘She’s a lazy cow.’

  ‘Can’t be easy the way things are at the moment,’ said Philip, no doubt hoping to open another riveting conversation about the state of our country.

  ‘Yes, but we can’t always rely on other people, like recruiters, to do everything for us, can we?’ said my mother.

  She liked to make comments like that when other people were around, so that I was forced to curb my natural reaction. Instead of welling up with tears of frustration and storming out of the room, as I might have done in her company alone, I just muttered, ‘When you live in Topsham you can.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I’d sent off nearly a hundred job applications – to fashion houses, retailers, textile studios; to be a PA, to be a copywriter, to be a goddamn personal shopper; whatever came up on Indeed.co.uk when you typed in ‘jobs in fashion London’ – and had either been rejected or plain ghosted by every single one of them.

  ‘She wants to work in fashion, you see,’ said my mother, with a subtly mocking half-smile at Philip.

  ‘Sounds ever so glamorous,’ he said, brightly.

  ‘Glamorous, maybe. Stable or lucrative, absolutely not,’ she said, and that was settled.

  After dinner, the two of them sat in the living room drinking Pinot Noir and jizzing over a Radio 4 podcast. When I popped my head in, Philip was sitting slim and dainty by the arm of the sofa and my mother was sitting unnecessarily close to him, twirling the ends of her long, silver-streaked hair around her fingers.

  ‘I’m going to the pub,’ I said, a sentence I knew she was bored of hearing.

  ‘Are you working?’ she asked.

  ‘Nope.’ (Couldn’t even claim that excuse.) ‘Just going to see Billie.’

  She gave me something between a nod and an eye roll before holding up her hand dramatically, evidently anxious that she was missing some particularly arousing soundbite of condescending intellectual bullshit.

  When I arrived at the pub, Billie was busy serving a couple of battered kids who had come down to crawl the Topsham Ten, like the university students loved to do during term time. It had always baffled me – the idea of escaping the shackles of home and entering the freedom of uni life, and thinking the best you could do was a pub crawl in a town with a population of five thousand. But hey, each to their own.

  While I waited, propped up at the bar, I re-read my New Year’s resolutions, hoping they would seep into me by osmosis, and that a light bulb would miraculously appear above my head, or a rocket would force its way up my arse. Finally the kids staggered off, pints of dark lager in hand. It was the fifth pub on the trail and it was standard that they’d all be sick by the seventh, but who was I to judge, given my own track record with vomit?

  Billie slid a vodka tonic over to me and tapped her long, acrylic nails against the bar top.

  ‘No money,’ I said, guiltily.

  ‘What a surprise,’ she said, and started rubbing a pint glass with a dirty tea towel.

  ‘What am I gonna do?’ I whined. She was better at coming up with solutions than I was.

  ‘Just work more shifts here. It adds up,’ she said.

  ‘I need a proper job.’

  ‘You mean a Landan job?’ she said. She’d been teasing me about being London-beguiled ever since I’d gone to see the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the V&A museum the year before and had come back banging on about how the city had given me life.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make it happen,’ I said, and rested my head on the bar to show just how hard I was finding life.

  ‘Why don’t you shut up talking about it, pack your stuff up and just bloody go?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s realistic,’ I said, looking up.

  ‘Why not? Just walk into one of these wank-arse fashion places you want to work for and tell them they’d be mad not to hire you. You’ve got nothing to lose.’

  Nope, just my dignity, I thought, and returned my head to the sticky wooden bar top, where it belonged.

  ‘You’re so fucking hard to pity when you do nothing to fix your problems, Scizzle,’ she said, which pissed me off, because I knew it was true. And also, ‘Scizzle’ was a nickname from school, and I was growing to hate what a stupid word it was.

  Over the next few weeks, I continued sketching, scrolling, creating Pinterest boards and making lists of all my favourite designer
s and fashion icons in preparation for the job interview that I was becoming less and less confident was coming. I even started going on runs, adhering to at least one of my resolutions, in an attempt to prepare myself for the lifestyle that I still believed was ahead of me, though the route into it was nowhere in sight. I’d never been the sportiest of types, having opted for the smoker’s slope or the art room rather than the lacrosse field at school, and was rather regretting those years as I rasped along the quay with a splitting pain from throat to abdomen.

  It was towards the end of January, when I returned from one of my runs looking like a sweaty beetroot, that my mother announced, ‘I’ve got you a job at the university.’

  I reached over to pluck a digestive biscuit from the packet she was holding (runs meant that I could eat whatever I wanted, obviously) and asked, ‘What kind of job?’

  ‘Assisting one of the history professors with faculty research.’

  ‘That sounds bleak,’ I said, flatly, and bit into the biscuit, letting crumbs fall down my chin.

  ‘It’s not bleak, actually. It’s very interesting,’ she said defensively.

  ‘I doubt I will find it interesting!’ I retorted, amazed that she was still imposing her interests – which, clearly, were not mine – onto me. ‘There’s no way I’m doing that job.’

  ‘Well what, may I ask, are you going to do instead?’ she said.

  ‘Not your problem!’ I replied, though it probably was, given that I was living with her. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  Then she used her go-to weapon: ‘God, you are so like your father.’

  At one time, tears would have been my response to that remark, but I’d grown so used to hearing it that I simply snapped a sardonic ‘Thanks!’ back.

  She carried on: ‘You’re never going to get a job sitting in the pub waiting for a recruiter to call. You have to be proactive, you have to—’

  ‘I’ve applied for about a million jobs. No one fucking wants me!’ It bubbled out of me unexpectedly, like a carbonated liquid that had been shaken too hard. Immediately, I felt embarrassed that I’d admitted to what I suspected she already thought: no one wanted me. Her cryptic silence prompted a creeping pain in the base of my throat, so I muttered, ‘Just leave me alone,’ and flounced away from her.