Bridesmaids. Zara Stoneley
doing my head in, and had nowhere to live. Even though I love my mum, living with your happily married parents when you’ve just hit thirty, and it looks like you’re going to be a spinster for ever, and you’ve just woken up to the fact that there’s more chance of your eggs getting hard-boiled then producing babies, is not a recipe for happiness. One more day and one of us would have cracked. Nastily.
So, I’d strolled confidently into an estate agents’ office. All naïve and excited about my new life as a single independent woman earning a wage.
Okay, I wasn’t excited, I was exhausted from crying, full of self-doubt and needing to find a cave to hole up in. But I was naïve. That bit is true.
‘I’m looking for a flat to rent. Something like that.’ I’d said to the guy by the desk, pointing at what I thought was an unassuming but nice apartment.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’ He wasn’t being very helpful. ‘Very. How, er, much are they charging?’
‘Haven’t got a clue.’ He grinned. Quite a nice grin. ‘A lot I’d imagine.’
I smiled back, feeling slightly awkward, not quite sure what to say next.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t find much in your price range.’ A tall, slim, blonde, immaculate vision in killer heels and a tight skirt rudely interrupted our smile-a-thon. ‘Apart from this.’ She passed him the details with a dismissive sniff.
Ahh, so that figured, he didn’t actually work here. I felt myself colour up but couldn’t resist a glance over his shoulder.
It was the smallest hovel, next to a railway line, overlooking bin-alley and on the drug dealing route. Okay, I might be exaggerating the very tiniest bit. About the drug-dealing. But it was daylight hours, so who knows? The really terrifying part of it all though, was that the monthly rent was roughly the amount I’d had in mind as affordable.
Turned out my type of salary didn’t stretch to a roof over my head and food. The two would appear to be mutually exclusive.
Bummer.
Anyhow, gloomy was not the word. I mean I’d thought I’d be able to at least afford something that was halfway decent. And I really, as in really, liked the flat that I’d spotted when I walked in. It said ‘home’ to me.
Turns out I was delusional.
‘Were you interested in that one?’ She’d dismissed him and moved on to me. ‘It’s in an up-and-coming area. Very on-trend.’ She’d looked me up and down and made me not feel on-trend. ‘Well-maintained.’ She was doing it again. Cow. Bits of me might not be particularly well-maintained, but other bits are fine. I nodded mutely. ‘Very reasonable.’ She named a figure and I reckon I blanched. Reasonable it was not. Well, not for a normal person.
I think I may have squeaked.
Anyway, the smiley guy realised I’d been stuck dumbstruck. ‘I think she needs to think about it, we’ll come back later?’ His hands were on my shoulders and he’d spun me round and whisked me out of the office and before I knew it we were walking down the street together.
‘That’s shocking.’ I’d finally found my voice again.
‘Totally. Shit isn’t it trying to find a place round here?’
‘It is indeed shit.’
‘You don’t fancy a restorative coffee, do you? Just to get over the shock of that place?’ He pointed up, and I realised we’d slowed to a halt outside a café.
‘Yes, er, well, I don’t normally have coffee with strange men, I don’t want you to think …’
‘I’m not strange. Trust me!’ He winked, and I wanted to. Trust him. I felt a kind of glimmer of recognition, like I’d known him for years. Comfortable is the word I suppose. Safe.
‘Well, I suppose you do look harmless.’
‘Now,’ he held a finger up, ‘I didn’t say that!’
Anyway, just as I was wondering whether this was how you met ‘the One’, and if this was the moment to state clearly that I was never, ever going to get my knickers off for a man again in my whole life. That I was all about getting my career established and some money saved up for a house deposit. Though, ha, fat chance of me being able to ever do that solo. Unless I slept in a bin. Or trawled the streets for somebody who wanted to share a flat with me. Just as all that was whizzing through my brain, he interrupted me.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you Janey?’
Turns out I was right. He was familiar.
He wasn’t a random stranger, and my feelings weren’t those of kindred spirits destined to be together, but meeting at the wrong moment in their lives. It was much more down to earth than that.
‘It’s me, Freddie! I hung around with Matt at school?’
‘Oh, shit, you’re kidding? Freddie! Wow, sorry, I just didn’t recognise you, it’s the hair, the top, the …’ Body, I wanted to say, but stopped myself.
Now he’d told me, I definitely did remember him. But he’d changed. Back then he’d been a bit of a geek; lanky, quiet. Sweet. Whereas his mate Matt was all front. A cocky bugger who was a bit of a dish and knew it.
Freddie was the cheeky one, who played the fool some of the time (like when he nicked my yoghurt) but most of the time blended into the background. Into Matt’s shadow.
I grin. ‘You said you weren’t strange!’
‘I’m not. Now.’ He grins back. ‘I was a teenager back then, we’re all strange.’
‘You can say that again!’
‘All we think about is getting off, footie, having it off, computer games, what a normal sex drive is, food and, well, sex.’
‘Most of those seem to be the same thing.’ I arch an eyebrow in what I hope is a sophisticated not a pervy way.
‘Exactly, being a ‘yoof’ is bloody hard work.’
I laugh at the way he says yoof, it’s so completely not-Freddie.
So, anyway, I did know him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done what I did.
Well, who knows, I might have done. I was bloody desperate. And he was laid back and friendly, not pervy at all.
We got chatting over coffee, then ended up being practically swept out at closing time, and we moved onto the pub on the corner and realised we were in the same boat. Roughly.
Well, he hadn’t been dumped, and he wasn’t currently living with his mum. But he was being chucked out of the flat he was currently sharing, because the other two flatmates had become a far too cosy couple. And he wasn’t really ready to settle for living in a dump but couldn’t afford somewhere up-and-coming on his own.
After two drinks, Freddie waggled the card that the estate agent had given him. ‘Shall we call her? We could just about afford that flat you’d fancied, between us. Or is that a bit weird? You can ignore me if it’s too weird. I’m not usually this forward but it’s just I’m solvent, got an okay job, pretty well house-trained, you’re, er,’ I wait for him to say desperate, but he doesn’t, ‘keen on the same place as me, and we do kind of know each other, and, er, I think it could work.’
When I’d spotted that flat I’d just felt deep down it was the One. Even though the rent had made me feel queasy, I’d been tempted with youthful optimism, to arrange a viewing anyway. Even if it was far, far more expensive than I could afford.
I’m not quite sure what I thought would happen, even I knew that estate agents didn’t tend to come with soft hearts and big discounts.
In my head while the agent had been talking to Freddie, I’d been fantasising, but all the while knowing that I couldn’t really