Looking for Andrew McCarthy. Jenny Colgan

going.’

      ‘But aren’t you supposed to be really stylish and stuff?’

      ‘Clearly,’ said Arthur who was wearing satin smoking trousers and had his cigarette in a holder.

      ‘Well then, why do you hang around with Annabel and George?’

      He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I like to keep a constant reminder around me of what I’ll never ever have to be. That and the sponge cake.’

      ‘Really! Me too! That’s me exactly! Would you like to be my partner in crime?’

      Arthur had considered it for a second.

      ‘Yeah, alright then.’

      ‘My life,’ said Ellie now, sitting up on the bed, ‘is like one of those adverts for soup. You know, when someone has a really horrid, cold, rainy, bad day but it’s all right because at the end they sink into an armchair with a big cup of soup. WITHOUT THE SOUP.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ said Arthur. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your life that a little scooter wouldn’t sort out. Let’s go shopping on Sunday.’

      ‘No, it’s not that,’ said Ellie. ‘I mean, just, why do I just feel so bleargh? I mean, is all I have to look forward to squeezing massive foreign objects through my own tissues?’

      ‘You know, you really don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to,’ said Julia.

      ‘We’re going to have to go,’ said Arthur, looking at Colin who was snoring sweetly in an armchair. ‘Come on; why don’t we forget tonight and go out tomorrow and drink the cocktail alphabet?’

      ‘Uh huh. Maybe. Okay,’ said Ellie. ‘You might as well go now. I’m wearing fifteen layers; it’s going to take me half an hour to get undressed.’

      Julia kissed her on the head. ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be worried about. Not really.’

      ‘Oh, I know,’ said Ellie wistfully. ‘That’s why I’m so worried about why I’m worried.’

      ‘You looked lovely tonight,’ said Loxy to Julia as they left.

      ‘Uh huh,’ said Julia. They picked their way through the party detritus and the old Classix Nouveaux LPs.

      Ellie didn’t sleep. Or she thought she wasn’t sleeping, but found out she was when she fell out of bed. Having been dreaming of doing something rather disconcerting with Anthony Michael Hall, she bounced and shuddered awake with a yelp and scuttled about on the carpet, noting as she did so how filthy it was. It was grey outside, inside, on the floor, and especially under the bed.

      ‘Aargh!’ she yelped. ‘The first yelp of my thirties,’ she thought. She paused experimentally, in case the landlord she shared the flat with might get up to make sure she was alright. Her landlord was a bastard and it was a horrible flat, but she’d picked it because it was within walking distance of all her friends.

      ‘Shut up, Hedgehog!’ came a sleepy voice from next door. He’d come in late the previous night and eaten the remaining sausage rolls very, very loudly.

      ‘Shut up yourself,’ she yelled, snivelling. Unfortunately she wasn’t bleeding hard enough to go into his bedroom and do a Carrie imitation. She wiped herself with a dirty tissue and crawled back onto the bed, not noticing that the reason she had blood on her head was because she’d knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table. Lying back down, she dropped straight into a coma until the flat farting rev of her flatmate’s supposedly trendy scooter underneath her window woke her up at ten to nine.

      ‘Aargh,’ she yelped again, and leapt out of bed to look out of the window to try and work out what was going on.

      ‘Late for work again, Hedgehog? Not like you,’ shouted her big bastard landlord, a huge rugby player who was so muscular he couldn’t cross his own legs. Ellie was looking forward to his thirty-fifth birthday, when he would go to bed a brick shithouse and wake up morbidly obese. His hair was brown and stuck out persistently in different directions, despite his efforts to clamp it down with what Ellie fervently hoped was hair gel and not spit, and his face was permanently red.

      She leaned out of the window. ‘Give me a lift on your scooter, Big Bastard.’

      He snorted. ‘No chance. You are at least two hours off being ready and it’s morning traffic.’

      ‘Pleeease. I’ll do your ironing.’

      He barked with laughter.

      ‘If I want fewer clothes I’ll give them to Oxfam, thanks.’

      ‘I hate you.’

      ‘I know, I’ve tasted your shepherd’s pie.’

      ‘I am thirty years old,’ Ellie rifled through her drawers, thinking. ‘And yet I do not appear to have a pair of unladdered tights. How can this be?’

      ‘Big Bastard!’ she hollered out of the window again. He was slipping his helmet on.

      ‘Ugh?’

      ‘Have you been stealing my tights for hilarious drunken pranks again?’

      ‘Guh … Yeah, I think so. We put one on Vince’s head for … ehm, some reason. Bloody funny though. Oh, and we took a pair of hold ups for Gaz’s stag. Oh, and that bet Willis had to put a pair on those monkeys at the safari park. And, ehm, Carmel borrowed a pair one morning. Oh, yeah, and I needed a pair to fix the car.’

      Carmel was his dull girlfriend. Her only point of interest was that, as she was four foot eleven and Big Bastard was six foot four, people were always asking them how on earth they managed to have sex, as casually as if they were asking them if they wanted a cup of tea.

      ‘You are one big bastard,’ said Ellie.

      ‘Tough,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I need your rent and your share of the satellite TV.’

      ‘But I never watch the shagging satellite TV! You only use it for sport and women’s bosoms!’

      ‘Just write us a cheque, eh darling?’

      ‘Yeah, minus tight tax. Now I’m going to have to wear my white tights again.’

      ‘Nothing wrong with white tights.’

      ‘Yes, Big Bastard, but you think Jordan’s gorgeous. And please give me a lift.’

      ‘Phforr … Jordan. Sorry, what was that darling? No, I couldn’t possibly be seen out with someone in white tights.’

      ‘I hope you get run over by a lorry carrying really stinky chemicals that hurt you really badly and make you stink for the rest of your life. Even more than you do now. And maybe turn you purple.’ Ellie petered out, slamming down the window as Big Bastard completely ignored her.

      ‘Aha,’ she thought. ‘I’m thirty and even the quality of my insults is deteriorating year on year.’

      Still, Big Bastard had been right about the ironing. Prodding desperately at a silk shirt that appeared to have taken on several different shades, Ellie cursed the entire institution. ‘In the future,’ she growled to herself, ‘ironing will be like dunking witches and bloodletting. They won’t have a bloody clue why anybody bothered.’

      She turned the shirt over and groaned at the large water stain that appeared.

      ‘Along with commuting,’ she sighed, throwing on a jacket with only one button missing and diving for the door, stopping to scoop up a spoonful of the horrid brown supposedly athletic mush Big Bastard had left behind to cement itself to a bowl. ‘And breakfast cereal, probably. They’ll discover it on an archaeological dig and say “Well, we’ve analysed it, and it’s not food.”’

      Ellie stormed out of the door, not even stopping to pick up her newly delivered copy of Smash Hits.

      ‘Miss Eversholt!