Читать книгу Not That Easy - Radhika Sanghani - Страница 6

‘Ellie, you’re single. You should take the single room.’

I stared at Will in shock. He couldn’t be serious.

‘The rest of us are all seeing people, so we need the double bedrooms,’ he continued.

‘Please tell me you’re kidding,’ I said slowly.

Will stood up tall and went straight into accountant mode. ‘I’m not trying to be a dick,’ he said diplomatically. ‘I just think it makes sense for us three to take the big rooms because Emma is with Sergio, Ollie is with Yomi and I’m with Cheng. You’re single, so you should have this room. Logically, you don’t need the double bed.’

I looked around the tiny room at the others. Emma was shuffling awkwardly on her black-wedged heels and avoiding eye contact with me, while Ollie was inspecting the laminated floorboards. He ran his hand over his short bleached hair and blinked at me innocently with his bright blue eyes. I forgave him immediately.

‘It won’t be that bad. You can pay slightly less rent,’ said Will.

He was serious. He was actually serious. I stared at Emma and Ollie again, waiting for them to stick up for me.

Ten seconds later, I was still waiting.

This was a trap. A coup de whatever in my own bloody home. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I cried out.

Will’s tweezed eyebrows settled themselves into a familiar frown and he crossed his arms.

‘Emma?’ I demanded, as I turned to face her. ‘Do you agree with Will? Are you a part of this blatant singleism now?’

She shook her short blonde hair. ‘No, of course not, babe, but I do kind of really need a double bedroom. Serge will stay here loads and he’s six foot six, El. I don’t think he’ll fit in a single bed.’

I gave her a withering look before turning to Ollie. ‘Ollie? What about you?’ I asked, hoping my eyes looked more doe-eyed than rabid.

‘Ah, I’m really sorry, Ellie,’ he said. ‘It’s just that Yomi will stay with me whenever she’s down visiting me from uni in Bristol.’

I sighed. Of course the perfect almost-doctor girlfriend was going to visit him whenever she had time off from saving people’s lives.

‘Come on, Ellie, it’s the easiest option,’ said Will with a look of faux sympathy on his annoyingly symmetrical face. ‘If you had a boyfriend, it would be different, but you don’t really need all that extra space. If you’re worried about wardrobe space, we can all give you sections in ours, can’t we?’

Emma nodded fervently. ‘Of course! You can put whatever you want in my room and borrow my stuff whenever. Even my thigh-high leather boots.’

Oh God. Was this actually happening? Were my friends really consigning me to the single bed and a life of single-dom? Even my BFF, Emma, was siding with them and slowly losing the second F from her acronym.

I had to try to stop this or I would die alone in my child-sized bed.

‘I cannot believe this,’ I finally spluttered. ‘You can’t just relegate the smallest room in the house to me like I’m some kind of unwanted spinster aunt. I’m part of this household too, and we’re going to live together the whole year—I’m not staying in this shoebox the entire time.’

‘I guess we could switch halfway?’ Ollie offered. ‘I mean, I dunno if I could, but maybe you could, Will? You’re not in a serious relationship with Cheng, are you? If you split up, maybe you could swap with Ellie?’

‘Whoa,’ I said, holding up my left hand. ‘First, stop talking as though I have agreed to taking the smallest room, because I haven’t, and second, Will, what the fuck—Cheng isn’t even your boyfriend??’

Will looked uneasy. ‘We’re not exclusive,’ he admitted, ‘but we do spend most nights together. And if I’m not with him, let’s face it, I’m shagging someone else. I need the double for when I bring guys home.’

‘But what if I want to bring someone home?’ I asked.

He snorted and Emma suppressed a laugh. The cow.

‘Ellie, I love you,’ said Will, ‘but after hanging out with you a fair bit this summer, I think I can safely say you’re not the kind of girl to bring a guy home.’

‘That’s so unfair!’ I cried. ‘Just because I didn’t sleep with any strangers over the summer doesn’t mean I never will.’

He raised the perfectly arched eyebrows at me. ‘Ellie, have you ever even had a one-night stand?’

I flushed and felt my face heating up. This was a very sore topic. I couldn’t lie because I’d sworn to stop covering up the truth about my—limited, very limited—sexual history, and besides, Emma knew everything anyway. If I lied, she’d just think I was pathetic.

‘Fine,’ I growled. ‘I have never had a one-night stand, but if you give me this shitty little room, I never will.’

‘You could go back to theirs?’ suggested Ollie.

‘What?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘How is this even a conversation? I am twenty-two years old. I am clearly capable of casual sex, and if I want to do it, I will. I’m not taking this room on the basis of being single because that is …’

Shit, what was it?

‘That is outright discrimination,’ I declared. ‘We live in a democracy and we’re … we’re going to pick names out of a hat.’

‘Ellie, stop acting so childish. We can reach an agreement like adults,’ said Will.

‘I dunno, it seems fair to me,’ said Ollie. I flashed him a look of utter gratitude. ‘Shall we just do rock, paper, scissors?’

‘Meh, fuck it,’ said Emma, shrugging her shoulders and sticking her right hand out into the air above the bed.

On the other corner of the bed, Will rolled his eyes and stuck his fist out. Ollie did the same and, from the one remaining corner, I placed my trembling arm out so our hands met in a charged square.

I had to win this. If I wanted to live the life of a young professional graduate in London, I needed the right setting. I couldn’t go on dates if I didn’t have anywhere to bring them back to.

‘OK, on the count of three,’ said Ollie. ‘One …’

Please, Julius Caesar, help me out here, I prayed to my own personal hero. God had never really done it for me—which broke my Greek Orthodox mother’s heart—but the Roman conqueror had helped me out once before, and he could do it again.

‘Two …’

Oh shit, I had to pick one. Um … rock. The strongest one. Caesar would pick the strongest.

‘Three.’

There were two rocks and two pieces of paper in front of us.

Will scowled at me. ‘OK, Ellie, it’s between you and me now,’ he said, as Emma whooped with joy and Ollie high-fived her. It was fine. I hadn’t actually lost. Caesar had helped me out. The rock was clearly a keeper. I would play it again.

‘I’ll count,’ offered Ollie.

Will and I faced each other across the bed and I stood with my legs wide open. This was it. Roman luck was on my side; I could squash this Gallic peasant.

‘One … two … three.’

My pale rock lay in the shadow of a triumphant palm paper. Will grinned smugly at me. Bollocks. Just like my hero I’d forgotten the cunning of Brutus’s betrayal. Et tu, Brutus.

‘I knew you would go for a rock again, Ellie,’ said Will. ‘You’re so predictable.’

My face dropped and Emma reached out across the bed to squeeze my limp fist. My Ides of March had begun.

I looked around my room. I’d covered the bed in a floral bedspread and hung scarves from the ceiling to give it an Aladdin’s cave vibe. There were fairy lights around the window, and photos of me, Emma and Lara taped onto the walls. If I stood on the bed, I could touch all four walls and reach pretty much any item in the room.

The bed, for lack of other options, was pushed up against the non-double-glazed window. It meant condensation was slowly dripping onto my Primark cushions. I sighed. Throughout my three years of university I’d lived in halls of residence and constantly dreamt about living in a proper flatshare with friends. This was not what I’d expected. A room of my own it may be, but I bet even Virginia Woolf would be seriously unimpressed with it.

‘Nooo, get off me!’ squealed a high-pitched voice.

I thumped the wall behind me with my fist.

‘Nope, not me,’ called Ollie from behind the wall.

I rolled my eyes and stood on my bed to hit the ceiling.

I could hear suppressed giggles before Cheng yelled, ‘Sorry. We’ll keep it down.’

Will’s low voice murmured something and then the squealing came back. I sighed and collapsed back onto my bed. We’d been living here for only forty-eight hours but I—quite literally—knew the ins and outs of Will and Cheng’s relationship. Thanks to the shitty plaster walls I also knew every loving word Ollie said to Yomi whenever she was visiting. The only person whose relationship I couldn’t overhear was Emma’s because her room was down the hall, but she told me every detail about her sex life with Sergio every time we hung out anyway.

As fun as it was living in the youngest—and cheapest—part of London, I had never felt more single. I opened my laptop and logged onto Facebook to see how great everyone else’s lives were now we had graduated.

Kara was back in a relationship with Tom and working for a publishing company. Belgian Marie seemed to have five boyfriends who all looked like varying versions of Burberry models, and my arch-nemesis, Hannah Fielding, was working as a writer for Tatler. Ugh, she was even tagged in a picture with Kate Moss. That was just so bloody typical.

I looked around my tiny room, where the mould was growing over the landlord’s cheap paint, and I felt an urge to start crying. Instead, I decided to tech-harm.

I reached out slowly for my iPhone, knowing I would regret what I was about to do. I tapped open the screen and, feeling pre-emptively sick, opened up Instagram. The sepia-filtered world burst into life and I scrolled down the feed to see photos of my uni friends dating beautiful people, working for high-powered companies and sunbathing on the rooftop of Shoreditch House in white bikinis with retro sunglasses. I could feel self-pitying tears pricking my eyelids when the door burst open.

‘Ellie, we’re having a major crisis,’ gasped Will. He was standing in my doorway wearing red boxers patterned with tiny yellow cars. Were those mini Noddys sitting in the yellow cars? I craned my head forward. ‘Stop staring at my penis and help me,’ he snapped.

‘Oh, right, sorry. What’s up?’

‘No one in the house has any lube,’ he declared.

I snorted. ‘Oh, right, and you think me, the single flatmate with the single bedroom, is going to be the one to help you out with that?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Please, I’m not that deluded. But I just wondered if you have any more of that Aussie miracle conditioner you use.’

I stared at him. ‘Um, no? I need to go to the supermarket. Why do you want to wash your hair now anyway?’

‘It’s not going on my hair, babe. At least, not for the hair you can see.’ He smirked.

‘I literally have no clue what you’re talking—OH MY GOD. You want to use my £4.49 conditioner for lube?!’

‘Well, that’s what I’ve been using for the past week until you ran out. You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I bloody mind,’ I cried. ‘I can’t believe that’s why I’ve had to buy double the amount I normally buy. I thought I just had really … knotty hair lately,’ I finished lamely.

He rolled his eyes at me. ‘I’ll go and ask Emma.’ His Noddy boxers retreated down the hallway until he paused to face me.

‘Hey, were you crying?’ he asked.

‘No, ‘course not,’ I cried. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘You have Facebook open on your computer and Instagram on your phone. You only do that when you’re miserable, Ellie.’

‘Will, you’ve lived with me for less than a week and only known me for a few months. That doesn’t mean anything,’ I replied tartly.

‘How about the fact you have mascara running down your face, then?’

Bugger.

‘Oh, fuck off, Will,’ I yelled, as he laughed and walked off.

I pulled the duvet over me. I felt as single as my bed. It wasn’t that I wanted a boyfriend per se, it was more that everyone else was so ahead of me in the romantic—well, sexual—stages of life. Hell, they were shagging with conditioner while I was watching them on Instagram.

The problem was that everyone I’d grown up with had lost their virginities aged fifteen to seventeen. At school, all my girlfriends had gone out with the boys at the school next door, and after a year of climbing up the bases, they’d eventually ‘done it’.

But because I was the frizzy-haired Greek girl with thick eyebrows and ill-fitting jeans, no one had been particularly interested. My only sexual encounter during my school years happened when I was seventeen and it was so bad that my friends nicknamed it a ‘bite job’. So, while I was still recovering from the humiliation of biting James Martell’s penis, they were sharing sex stories in the sixth-form common room. Even my best and oldest friend, Lara, had got involved.

It was worse at uni. By then, everyone had already had a couple of relationships, peppering the gaps with drunken one-night stands and the odd inappropriate fling. They carried on shagging throughout uni, boasting about it in drinking games. Only, as always, I either had to listen with a fake smile on my face or—the less awkward option—make up a sexual past of my own. Because I’d been a virgin until the ripe old age of twenty-one.

It wasn’t out of choice. All I’d wanted to do was break my hymen, but no one vaguely attractive had offered. In my final year of uni, I’d been so desperate to lose my V-plates that when freckly, twenty-six-year-old graphic designer Jack Brown asked me out, I practically threw myself at him. He didn’t protest, and after a few dates, he deflowered me. I thought my happiness would never end.

Until a week later, when he abandoned me on the streets of Shoreditch with chlamydia.

It had been a shit end to a shit year, but I’d spent the summer getting pissed and taking my anti-chlamydia pills, so I was now well and truly over my STD and Jack Brown. The only problem was that he was still the only person I’d had sex with, and I hadn’t even orgasmed the one time we’d shagged. The only orgasms I’d ever had happened solo in my bedroom with my £14.99 bullet vibrator.

No one really played sex drinking games any more, but I still couldn’t join in when Emma and Lara discussed anal and sixty-nines. It just meant I felt left out. I’d spent all summer batting my eyelids at every average-looking male—aged under thirty, naturally—in sight, but none of them had done anything but snog me. I had become officially unfuckable. Now being shoved into this single room and labelled the sexually inactive housemate was just like being a virgin again. No matter what I did to try to keep up, everyone was always ten steps ahead of me. It wasn’t even for want of trying.

I lowered my head into my hands and let out a pathetic moan. I was twenty per cent of my way through my twenties. I had only eighty per cent left before I’d be at a child-bearing age and seriously in want of a husband. I should be out having wild, passionate no-strings-attached sex with dreadlocked men on motorbikes before meeting The One, but instead I was lying alone in my mouldy bedroom.

It wasn’t fair. Emma had slept with about thirty people. Lara had shagged about nine. Why hadn’t I managed to get anywhere near that? I was average-looking and just as fun as them. I’d always thought that my virginity was the obstacle and, as soon as I lost it, it would be easy and I could start having casual sex.

But that hadn’t happened. Maybe it was because I hadn’t tried hard enough. Or because I was just doomed to be different—the podgy girl with dark body hair destined to have below-average sex and bite jobs. I’d always felt like the awkward teenage Greek girl who didn’t really fit in anywhere.

I wasn’t anything like my cousins or family friends—the thought of getting married to someone ‘from the community’ made my skin crawl. I’d die of claustrophobia and boredom, and that’s if any guy ever agreed. I wasn’t exactly the pretty, tanned girl they dreamt of. All my cousins loved dressing up and wearing lip gloss, while I’d rather kick about in Chucks and old leggings. Dream daughter I was not.

And I wasn’t like anyone at school either. I didn’t have the natural confidence that the girls had—that came from knowing they were beautiful, privileged and loved. I hadn’t exactly had a tough background, but I never saw my dad and my mum was pretty overbearing. She was always different to the other mums as well—she still spoke with a thick Greek accent and it would never occur to her to watch The OC with us as Lara’s mum did.

Maybe it’s why I was always so much more insecure than the others, and maybe my mum’s strictness about boys was why I didn’t get involved with them for so long.

Or maybe there was just something wrong with me.

Even now that I’d figured out eyebrow threading and finally made some amazing friends, I still felt like little Ellie Kolstakis, aged fourteen, the girl no one wanted to dance with at the school disco. I knew it was stupid. I was twenty-two now, with a cool internship, living in an East London flatshare. But when all my flatmates were going on dates, bringing people home and sharing a lifestyle that eluded me no matter how hard I tried? Yeah, sometimes I still felt pretty fucking shit.