1
If you were to ask my friend Priya what the most depressing day of the year is, she wouldn’t hesitate to inform you that it’s the first working Monday in January. I don’t agree with her, but I can see the logic in her argument. Priya is a solicitor at Watson and Fletcher, one of the top family law firms in the UK, and the first Monday in January is known to them as ‘Divorce Day’ due to the spike in divorce enquiries on that day every year from people who have just spent the holiday season cooped up with a spouse they’ve suddenly realised they can’t stand.
My friend Rosie, who is the Executive Assistant to the CEO of a biotech firm, will tell you that the most depressing day of the year is actually the third Monday in January, colloquially known as ‘Blue Monday’. Apparently, this is when most working people feel at their lowest ebb, due to a combination of factors including the end of the holiday season, the fact that they’re up shit creek financially after massively overspending at Christmas, and their failure to keep any of their New Year resolutions. I don’t agree with her either.
In my opinion, the most depressing day of the year is actually the one that’s about to dawn: New Year’s Day. Think about it.The buildup to Christmas starts so early now that it might as well begin in July but, once you hit December itself, there is a defined set of steps designed to ramp up your festive spirit to the point that you consider it quite normal to go out in public dressed in a jumper with enormous reindeer on it. I’m talking about the well-loved milestones of the first Christmas ad, the first card to drop through the letter box, putting up the decorations and so on. It all adds to the sense of anticipation that climaxes (in my family anyway) with a massively passive-aggressive gathering on Christmas Day, at the end of which we all wonder why we bothered. Disappointing as that inevitably is, it doesn’t matter, because we’ve still got five more days of holiday and New Year’s Eve to look forward to.
New Year’s Eve is quite my favourite day of the year. Living in London, there’s never any shortage of party invitations, and I always calculate my schedule carefully to make sure I fit in at least three. Everyone is in a good mood, usually keen to kick the crappy old year into touch and focus on the possibilities and opportunities the new one has to offer. What’s not to love?
It’s all wonderful and exciting, until you wake up the next morning: New Year’s Day. Your head is inevitably pounding and your mouth feels like it’s grown fur on the inside. You’re full of self-loathing for thoroughly overdoing it and what do you have to look forward to now? Nothing. It’s January. The days will be short, grey and brutally cold for the foreseeable future. You’re going back to work and, if that weren’t depressing enough, you’ve put on enough weight that your office clothes are just waiting to punish you by pinching and squeezing you uncomfortably. There isn’t even a bank holiday until Easter, which feels so far away you might as well measure the time in light years. And then, just to twist the knife, someone came up with the concept of ‘Dry January’. I mean, isn’t January bad enough on its own? Why not have your dry month in June, whenthe weather’s nice and you might be wanting to go booze free as part of the preparation for your summer holiday? But no. Let’s encourage people to give up alcohol for a month that already has everything going against it. There’s a reason why people call January the longest month of the year, and New Year’s Day is the dismal marker that tells you you’ve arrived.
Yesterday was a typical New Year’s Eve for me. I was full of optimism as I spent ages getting my makeup just right and coaxing my light brown hair into some kind of updo, before fishing out my best underwear and pouring myself into a sparkly cocktail dress. If I’m brutally honest, I knew the dress was a size too small when I bought it in the post-Christmas sales but, combined with a push-up bra, it does amazing things for my normally modest cleavage. Even before Christmas had arrived, I’d decided which party invitations to accept and prebooked the relevant Ubers. Leave that to the last minute and you’re going nowhere. Party number one was at the home of one of the increasing number of my friends who have children. I knew they’d be frazzled after their little darlings had basically spent a whole week on a continuous sugar high and, although I was sure they’d do their best to make it as far as midnight, I could tell they were pleased when I made my excuses around nine o’clock.
Party number two was at Priya’s, as Rosie and I agreed we wanted to be at her house for the all-important midnight celebrations. This is the second year she’s hosted and she already has a reputation for pushing the boat out, with proper champagne to toast the New Year with, and a selection of delicious snacks to soak up the booze. Although we both struggle a bit when her lawyer mates talk shop, she really knows how to host and either drags us away or encourages them gently onto a topic that we can join in with. Predictably, we’d found ourselves on the balcony of Priya’s flat at some point during the evening, shivering with cold as we sucked on cigarettes. Neither of ussmoke normally, but it somehow seems obligatory to light up after several glasses of wine. When Priya held the first of these parties last year, we’d stubbed them out under our shoes and tossed the ends over the balcony, but I think someone must have complained because an ashtray had appeared last night.
Party number three was where things got messy. It was well after midnight by the time I arrived and everyone was already fairly well lubricated. Party number three is always high on my list of regrets in the morning; I’m sure if I did the sensible thing and got an Uber home just after midnight, New Year’s Day wouldn’t be half as bloody as it is. But I never learn. Every year, I convince myself that it will be different, and every year it’s exactly the same. To be honest, there are some years where I literally have no idea how I made it home at all.
But it seems I’ve managed to excel myself this year. It’s still dark when I wake with a splitting headache but, when I finally summon the courage to crack open one eye so I can check the time on my bedside clock, the damned thing doesn’t seem to be there. Not only that, but some bastard has replaced my beautifully tasteful pine bedside cabinet with a horrific white Formica thing that looks like it came from either a charity shop or the kind of catalogue where nothing costs more than £14.99. Who would do that to me, knowing that my head is already pounding fit to burst and my mouth tastes like someone lit a bonfire in it?
I shut my eyes again. Maybe I’m still asleep and this is a dream, although I don’t remember sleep ever hurting this much. It’s at this point that my bladder decides to join in with the punishment. When you’re already suffering, you’d think it could start with a gentle nudge to inform you that you might want to think about going to the loo at some point in the not-too-distant future, but no. It’s gone from nothing to ‘you’re going to wet yourself if you don’t take action now’ in the space of a coupleof seconds. That’s all very well, I tell it silently, but I have an unhappy choice. If I give in to my bladder’s increasingly urgent signals, I’ll have to sit up, at which point my poor head will inevitably explode. If I don’t, well…
Reluctantly, I open both my eyes. The room is still dark so, apart from the ghostly presence of the aforementioned bedside cabinet, it’s not too bad an experience. I take a moment to check whether there’s any sign of motion. If the ceiling starts to spin, then my bladder will have to wait until I’ve finished throwing up. Thankfully, it stays still. One point to me. I roll onto my side and start to curl myself into a foetal position. My plan, such as it is, is simple. I’ll let my legs kind of fall out of the bed and roll the top of my body after them, hopefully landing on all fours and thus avoiding the need to sit up. Once I’m on the floor, I can crawl on autopilot to the bathroom and start to deal with the problems one by one.
God, my bedroom carpet feels coarse. Either my palms and knees are super-sensitive this morning, or I need to take a serious look at it when I’m feeling more human. As I edge carefully round the bed and head for where the door should be, I’m utterly confounded to find only a blank wall, painted in a colour that doesn’t look at all familiar. What the hell is going on?
Oh, no. Please God. Please let this not be true. Ignoring my howling bladder and whatever is trying to sledgehammer its way out of my skull from the inside, I lift my head and force my eyes to try to focus in the gloom. When they do, my worst fears are confirmed.
I’m not in my flat.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to process any more than that, as my bladder is now throwing a full-on tantrum and bad things are going to happen if I don’t find the bathroom urgently. Thankfully, it doesn’t take me long to locate the bedroom door and I shuffle towards it as fast as I can. On the other side,I find myself in a small hallway with four other doors off it. One is obviously the front door by the looks of it, and a hasty investigation reveals that the bathroom is the one on the right. It takes me a few moments of feeling blank wall before I locate the light switch, and then I haul myself gratefully onto the toilet. There is no relief, of course. As the pain in my bladder lessens, my head simply ups the ante to take its place. New Year’s Day regret is already in full swing and I haven’t even managed to work out what time it is or where I am yet. What the hell have I done?
There’s something not quite right about this bathroom, I notice as I peer around. I can’t put my finger on it exactly; it’s perfectly clean and the carefully folded towels look like they’d be soft against my skin. It’s just a bit bare, I realise eventually. There’s a toothbrush on the basin along with toothpaste and a wash bag on the windowsill next to an assortment of little bottles that look like they’ve escaped from a budget hotel, but very little else. It’s nothing like the bathroom in my shared flat, which is so full of different hair and body products that I sometimes wonder if one of the precarious stacks will collapse at some point, burying one of us underneath.Where the hell am I?
I shut my eyes and try to force my addled brain into life. I remember leaving Priya’s, wishing her and her partner Martin a happy new year as I sought out the Uber that would take me to my final destination of the evening, the strangely named XYX nightclub where I was due to meet up with Sonya and Lily, my friends from work. I’d originally decided against going, as I’ve always believed you become too old for nightclubs the moment you’re legally allowed to go into one, and I wasn’t sure I’d know anyone apart from the two of them, but Sonya had been so persistent that I’d given in and accepted against my better judgement.
The memories are starting to come back. Loud music with the kind of bass you don’t so much hear as feel in your stomach and that weird ultraviolet lighting that makes everything white stand out, not that the women whose white underwear was shining like beacons through their clothes seemed to mind. A patterned carpet, typically sticky underfoot and the hot, slightly rancid smell of too many people in a confined space. The recollection of that makes my stomach heave uncomfortably and I swallow hard in an attempt to soothe it.
It had taken a while to find Sonya and her group, I remember that. There was some sort of complimentary cocktail, sickly sweet with lots of fruit in it, one of those idiotic umbrellas and a harsh aftertaste that left you in no doubt that it packed a punch and the booze used was certainly not from any of the premium labels.
Lily wasn’t there, having gone home with her husband shortly before I’d arrived, but I’d danced a bit with Sonya and her other friends. Well, it’s a nightclub, so that isn’t surprising, but something else is coming back now. A boy, familiar yet also strange. The details of his face are slowly starting to assemble and, when they finally do, I feel as if I’ve been given an electric shock. Please, God, no. Anyone but him.
As I creep back towards the bedroom, I’m already promising any deity who will listen that I’ll not only do dry January but a whole dry year if they’ll only make my suspicions turn out to be false. However, one glance at the bed is enough to tell me that nobody is listening. The bedside light is now on, and the person I’ve just spent at least part of the night with is sitting up, revealing a torso that has filled out a little, but is still recognisable.
‘Morning, Tori,’ Stuart says with a smile.
Fuck.
2
‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’ Rosie’s voice is horrified as she stares at me from the other end of our slightly threadbare but very comfortable sofa. When the three of us first moved to London, it was a no-brainer that we’d share a flat and, when Priya moved out a couple of years ago to be with Martin, we were inundated with people wanting to move into her room, eventually deciding on Sophie, who works in recipe development for a major supermarket chain.
‘I wish I was,’ I moan. Although I’m feeling considerably more human after a long shower and some heavy-duty headache pills washed down with coffee and a carb-laden breakfast, the downside is that the events of last night have come back to me in vivid detail. If I wasn’t still feeling a little delicate, the temptation to try to blot them out with vodka would be almost overwhelming.
‘You had sex withflipperStuart?’ she asks, evidently struggling as much as I am with the concept.
‘Don’t keep repeating it,’ I tell her. ‘It’s bad enough that it happened at all; I don’t want reminders.’
‘But you hate him!’ she persists. ‘How long were you two together before he dumped you?’
