I was thinking of getting a fringe anyway.
Not long after, with my wall of shame still glaring into the room, I’m sitting in the kitchen. Spencer had pulled out the chairs stacked up in the corner. The table is too large and is currently leaning against the wall.
‘Keep still.’ Josie huffs her glossy auburn hair away, as her scissors snip.
I still don’t know who I called last night; my phone is vehemently charging next to the kettle. Finally, the clump is removed and she’s crouching in front of me, levelling the edges of my new fringe.
Spence’s phone rings and he excuses himself.
‘That’ll be the mystery girlfriend,’ Josie says, glancing towards the door.
‘You think?’ I crane my neck, but all I can see is his head dipped towards the phone, scruffy light-brown hair falling over his glasses.
‘Yep.’ She steps back, examining her handiwork and passing me a mirror. ‘There you go. Not bad, if I do say so myself.’
I take in my new look. It’s a bit Dakota Johnson. It looks nice, or rather it would if I didn’t have a sheen of sweat across my skin, and my eyes didn’t look like piss holes in the snow.
‘Thanks. Everything OK?’ I ask, looking up at Spence who holds a small smile in the corner of his mouth as he looks down at the phone in his hand. Josie busies herself putting away her scissors, but I haven’t missed the way the lines around her eyes have tightened.
‘Georgia OK?’ I ask him.
‘Huh? Yeah. She’s staying for dinner at a friend’s. I’ll pick her up later.’
‘So, what do you think?’ I frame my face with my hands, but he’s distracted, his hand still holding the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Sorry. Yeah. Looks good.’ He slips his phone away. ‘Shall we get started on the furniture?’
What I want is to go to bed. Except my bed isn’t built and is propped up, along with my wardrobes and bedside cabinets, in an upstairs room that I’ve only walked into once. I need to rebuild my furniture – my life too.
It takes us a few hours, a few curses, copious cups of coffee, and discarded screws, but by the end of the day I have a room that resembles a bedroom, with an empty bookcase waiting to be filled.
Josie has already left.
Spence has returned from the chippy down the road, not forgetting to buy me a few sachets of salad cream – my condiment of choice since I was a kid – given that my cupboards are bare. I shift on the sofa so we’re facing each other, plates balanced on our laps, my radio playing in the background. I look around the stark room; I’ll have to get a TV at some point.
‘Titanium’ starts playing as I dip a chip into the salad cream. ‘God, this song reminds me of prom… Feels like a lifetime ago,’ I say through a mouthful. ‘Do you remember Jared?’
‘The lovesick poet?’
I nudge Spence with my foot.
‘He wasn’t a lovesick poet.’
‘No, he was a pretentious arse who had you swooning after him like he was Darcy, but without the decent prose.’
I think back to our last year at school. Jared was the new kid, and I had fallen head over heels for him, as did half the year eleven girls. He was mysterious. Aloof. Damaged. And I wanted nothing more than to fix him.
Spencer takes a swig of his lemonade. ‘Who, I might add, you ditched me for.’
‘Oh shush, we’d only agreed to go together so we didn’t look like complete losers. And I didn’t ditch you. I spent most of the night with you. And, if I recall, you didn’t do so bad yourself that night.’
‘Hmmm, well, that’s up for debate…’ he trails off and I know he’s thinking about Heather, about the way he stood by her when she got pregnant that night, and how she’d left Georgia with him,just a few months old, telling him she ‘couldn’t be a mother right now’.
‘But,’ he continues, ‘I suppose if you hadn’t got together with Mr Pretentious Arsehole, I would have spent the rest of the night with you, getting drunk on cheap cider and dancing to ‘Mr Brightside’, rather than hooking up with Heather, and then I wouldn’t have George.’ He examines a chip then drops it into his mouth. ‘Huh, maybe I should thank him?’
‘Thank him? I don’t bloody think so. I found out he wasn’t actually writing poetry for me, he was using lyrics from Bob Dylan songs and handing them out with his broken guy routine to at least five of us.’
