Charlotte Street Read Free

flatmate and virtually no rent in return for a few afternoon shifts and a weekly supply of
Krokiety
.
    Talking of which …
    ‘Right, we’ve got
Żubr
or
Żywiec –
take your pick!’ said Dev, holding up the bottles. I wasn’t sure I could pronounce either of them so pointed at the one with the least letters.
    ‘Or I think I’ve got some
Lech
somewhere,’ he said, pronouncing it ‘Letch’ and then giggling. Dev knows it’s pronounced ‘Leck’, because he asked Pawel, but he prefers saying ‘Letch’ because it means he can giggle afterwards.
    ‘
Żubr
is fine,’ I said – something I’d never said before – and he flipped the lid and passed it over.
    I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind him.
    I looked tired.
    Sometimes I look at myself and think, Is this it?, and then I think, Yes, it is. This is literally the best you will ever look. Tomorrow, you will look just a little bit worse, and this is how it will go, for ever. You should definitely buy some Berocca.
    I have the haircut of the mid-thirties man. Until recently, I wore cool, ironic T-shirts, until I realised the real irony was they made me look less cool.
    I’m too old to experiment with my hair, see, but too young to have found the style I’ll take to the grave. You know the one I mean – the one we’re all headed for, if we’re lucky enough to have any left by then. Flat and dulled and sitting on every man in an oversized shirt at an all-inclusive holiday resortbreakfast buffet, surrounded by unpleasant children and a passive aggressive wife who have worked together in single-minded unity to quash his ambitions the way they have quashed his hairstyle.
    I say that like I’m any better, or that my ambitions are heroic and worthy. I am a man between styles, is all, and there are millions of me. I’m at that awkward stage between the man of his twenties and the man of his forties. A stage I have come to call ‘the man in his thirties’.
    I sometimes wonder what the caption at the bottom of my
Vanity Fair
shoot would say, the day I wrote the cover story and they decided to make a big deal of me:
    Hair by Angela at Toni & Guy, near Angel tube, even though her fingers smell of nicotine and she says ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask’
.
    Smell: Lynx Africa (for men). £2.76, Tesco Metro, Charing Cross
.
    Watch: Swatch (‘It was an impulse buy at Geneva airport,’ he confides, laughing lightly, and picking at his salade niçoise. ‘Our plane was three hours delayed and I’d already bought a Toblerone!’)
    Clothes: Model’s own (with thanks to Topman VIP 10% discount card, available free to literally everyone in the world)
.
    But I’m not that bad. A Spanish model I met at a Spanish bar on Hanway Street and once even had a passable date with said I looked ‘very English’, which I took to mean like Errol Flynn, even though later I found out he was Australian.
    ‘What. A. Day,’ said Dev, sighing a little too heavily for a man who can’t really have had that much of a day. ‘You? Yours?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You know, not bad,’ by which I meant the opposite.
    It had been bad from the moment I’d got up this morning. The milk had been off, but how’s that different from normal, and the postman had slammed and clattered our letterbox, but the real kicker was when, with a grim tightening of my stomach, I’d flicked my laptop on, and headed for Facebook, and even though I
knew
something like this would eventually happen, I saw those words, the words I
knew
would come.
    … is having the time of her life
.
    Seven words.
    A status update.
    And next to it, Sarah’s name, so easily clickable.
    And so I’d clicked it. And there she was. Having the time of her life.
    Stop, I’d thought. Enough now. Get up, have a shower.
    So I’d clicked on her photos.
    She was in Andorra. With Gary. Having the time of her fucking life.
    I’d snapped the laptop shut.
    Didn’t she care that I’d see this? Didn’t she realise that this would go