Queenie(5)

“They do, I just don’t talk about it,” I said, handing him a hot mug. “These are fancy, where did she get these from?”

“No idea,” Tom said, taking a sip.

“Oh, hold on, you’ve got the Q mug.” I reached out for it.

“This one’s going to be mine.” He lifted it out of my reach. “Like you’re mine,” Tom said, putting an arm around me.

“Do you know,” I said, “whatever tone you’d said that in, it would have sounded creepy and possessive.”

“Creepy and possessive.” Tom took a sip of tea. “Were they the qualities that initially drew you to me?” He laughed.

? ? ?

I packed until I was exhausted, falling asleep on the sofa boxed in by years of accumulatively unimportant stuff that I probably didn’t need to continue carting through life. When I woke up the next morning, my alarm chirping obnoxiously from the bedroom, Tom still wasn’t back. I sat on the Tube to work, doubling over when pain ripped through my stomach. A woman handed me a plastic bag, saying, “If you’re going to be sick, can you at least do it in here? Nobody wants to see a splattering so early in the morning.” I snuck in late, turned my computer on, and fake-smiled my way through the morning. The television listings got confused with the club listings, and I asked Leigh to fix it before our boss, Gina, noticed. One day he’s going to tell me to do my work myself, but as long as I listen to him talking about his own work and his boyfriend Don’s faltering DJ career in great detail, he lets me get away with a lot.

At midday, I walked over to Darcy’s desk, a gray metallic dock in the quiet corner of the office that she shared with Silent Jean, the world’s oldest and the Daily Read’s longest-employed subeditor. She was a ghostly pale waif of a woman who didn’t fit with the aesthetic of a flashy news institution, one who seemed to hate me without having ever spoken to me. Or to anyone, actually.

“Good afternoon, Jean,” I said, bowing. She tutted, nodding swiftly before putting her surprisingly snazzy earphones in. I placed both hands on Darcy’s head and began to plait her thick, heavy brown hair, an activity that, thankfully, she found as satisfying as I did, so no HR summons for me.

“Please keep doing that. It is literally the most soothing thing,” she said. I looked at her screen and began to read the e-mail she was composing aloud:

Simon, you just can’t expect me to reconfigure my wants and my needs to suit you. Knowing that I’m at a different point of my life to you, instead of understanding it you almost use it as a weapon—

Silent Jean looked at us and sighed surprisingly loudly for someone who rarely exercised her vocal cords. “Queenie! Privacy, please!” Darcy snapped, turning to look at me. Her bright blue eyes looked through my dark brown ones.

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Lots,” I groaned, banging my head down on her partition so loudly that Silent Jean jumped in her seat.

“Right, let’s go, come on!” she chirped, looking apologetically at Jean and sweeping me up and away. She’s the most intuitive of my best friends, though Darcy has known me the shortest amount of time; that we’ve worked together and spent every weekday talking to each other for the last three and a bit years has meant that we know each other better than we know ourselves.

She’s very beautiful, with a complexion as rosy as her outlook, and looks like one of those wartime girls whose pictures their army husbands would kiss at night. You might think that that aesthetic doesn’t really have a place in the present day, but she makes it work.

Darcy bundled me into the lift, forcing me to step on the foot of a man I hadn’t seen before—he was dressed in a tweed jacket with glasses too big for a face that I would have thought was handsome if my entire brain weren’t concentrated on heartbreak. He looked at me and opened his mouth to complain, but instead stared until he looked down at his phone. “It’ll be all right, Queenie,” Darcy whispered, putting her arm around my shoulders.

“You don’t even know what’s wrong,” I whispered back at her. “So you can’t say that.” The lift zoomed to the ground floor and we bundled out, words of sadness and betrayal and abandonment firing out of my mouth at a hundred miles per hour.

“I just don’t know what to do! Things have been so bad for such a long time, Darcy. It’s relentless,” I told her, my pace quickening the more irritated I got with my stupid situation. “We argue every single day, about absolutely everything, so much that he’s started going back home to stay with his parents at the weekends, and when it’s really bad, he stays there in the week and commutes! From Peterborough! Then this weekend, when we really got into it, he told me that he needed a break, and that he thought I should move out.”

“Yeesh.” Darcy winced. “Did he mean it? Or was he just angry?”

“Darcy, I have no fucking idea. We stayed up all night talking and bickering about it, and I agreed to move out for three months, after which point we could revisit things.”

“Why are you the one moving out when he can go and stay with his parents? It’s not like you have that option.” Darcy linked her arm through mine.

“He said he can afford to stay on in the flat because my entry-level wage is nothing in comparison to his big-boy fucking Web developer salary.”