Adorkable (37 page)

I held my phone away from my ear and all it helpfully said was ‘Unknown Caller’ because I’d deleted her number from my address book but even though she was crying and not saying anything, I knew it was Jeane. I just knew.

And
then it was Christmas Eve and the world went silent and still.

Well, no, that was a total lie. Not silent. Not still – especially at eight in the morning when I was making my way back from an all-nighter in Shoreditch and decided to pop into the supermarket and get my Chrimbo comestibles ahead of the rush.

It turned out that the rush had got there first. Seriously, what was wrong with these people? It was Christmas Eve and they had nothing better to do with their time than get up, get dressed and go shopping.

At least I hadn’t been to bed yet and was still in the gold Lurex and taffeta ballgown I’d worn to dance to breakbeats and dubstep in a derelict mini-mart. Doing your Christmas food shop on the way home had a completely different vibe to getting up at dawn o’clock to do your Christmas food shop in tracksuit bottoms and hoodies.

Anyway
, it was a bad scene. Everyone was shoving and a woman with two small children in tow actually called me a bitch when I snagged the last tub of brandy butter and someone else grabbed hold of the back of my fun-fur coat to yank me away from the tins of Roses. I’d been in more civilised mosh pits. And of course I couldn’t find a cab or my Oyster card so I had to walk home in the bitter cold with four bags of heavy shopping (who knew sweets, cakes and tortilla chips could weigh so much?) in shoes that hadn’t been worn in very well by their previous owner.

The light on my landing was broken and I knew the caretaker was away until New Year so I had to wrestle with my bags and my keys in near-darkness, but eventually I was home.

Home.

It felt like I hadn’t been home for days, weeks even. The flat was just somewhere that I passed through to get clean clothes, charge up iPhone, iPad and MacBook and maybe sleep for a few hours, because honestly the last month had just been a blur.

My days usually started with a breakfast-meeting, then more meetings, then a lunch-meeting. Editors, agents, TV executives, publicists, sales and marketing, they all needed to sit down for ‘face time’. In the afternoon, once America had woken up, there would be conference calls and then maybe I’d head to the web company in Clerkenwell who were helping me build adorkable.com, or the production company in Soho who were making my documentary series.

I should have hated it but I didn’t. It was a kick to spend every day talking to people who listened to what I had to say.
Usually, I had to work really hard to find people outside of Twitter who got where I was coming from, but now I’d found those people.

OK, they were all at least ten years older than me, but I’ve always known that I was way more mature than my immediate peer group. I also relished the complete lack of eye-rolling when I was sounding off about something. In fact, I was positively encouraged to sound off, but it was quite exhausting having to sound off for hours at a time and people always looked a little disappointed when I wasn’t sounding off, like I was a performing seal or something.

So, after a long day of sounding off, I needed to kick back in the evenings. Luckily, there was always something to do. It was the run-up to Christmas so there were parties and drinks and bands playing their last gigs of the year and special club nights and lots of alternative Christmas dinners with friends who wouldn’t be in London for the holidays. Even Ben was being dragged off to the wilds of, well, Manchester for a big family Christmas at his nanna’s.

But now it was Christmas Eve and the mad merry-go-round I’d been on had stopped, but that was all right. Because I totes needed time to regroup. And it was really just as well that Bethan hadn’t been able to come home because, apart from heading out to Tabitha and Tom’s open-house Christmas tomorrow (note to self: order a minicab), I was going to stay in and work on the first draft of my book.

It was going to be fun. Just like the old days. I’d camp out on the sofa in my PJs eating things with lots of sugar in them, watching every single musical that the TV schedules had to
offer and banging out one hundred thousand words on the Life and Times of Jeane Smith and how the world would be a totes better place if everyone was a bit more like me, yo.

There wouldn’t be any more meetings or parties but I was still going to be very busy. Being busy was what was important ’cause if I wasn’t busy and I wasn’t focused then my mind started to wander and it always wandered in the same direction and it wasn’t a direction where I wanted my mind to go.

Being busy was the key. So, although I’d had, like, no sleep, I decided that I wasn’t going to go to bed but get to work. If I went to bed, I’d wake up in a few hours’ time and then I’d stay awake all night and although I was fine about being home alone and I had stuff to do and lots and lots of things to eat, being wide awake in the wee small hours of Christmas morning would make anyone feel a little mopey, unless they were waiting up for Father Christmas. Whatever.

The weird thing was that the flat didn’t really feel like home any more. It was so tidy. Lydia, my cleaner, had pitched an absolute fit after her first session and had forced me to buy all these shelving units with ridiculous names and pretended not to understand when I protested about the IKEA-isation of the domestic sphere. She also pretended not to understand when I said it wasn’t working out and that maybe I didn’t really need a cleaner. She tidied everything. Cleaning was her crack. She even went into my sock drawer (not that I’d ever had a sock drawer before, but she’d decided that each specific type of clothing should have its own drawer) and paired them all up.

As I unpacked the shopping, I noticed that she’d even touched my Haribo and arranged them in neat rows in the
fridge. Unfortunately, she hadn’t noticed that I was out of milk and bought me some, but I didn’t have the energy to go out again and get shouted at by people who had full-on trolley rage.

I just pulled off my clothes and took great delight in throwing them on the bedroom floor because Lydia had gone home to Bulgaria until the third of January, put on some pyjamas and sat down to write.

It took a while to get going but soon I was engrossed and only getting up to make another cup of black coffee or go to the loo – though I’d also forgotten to buy loo roll but I improvised with a packet of Hello Kitty hand tissues that I found in a handbag. Anyway I wrote three chapters about my formative early years, glossing over anything to do with Pat and Roy because being raised by them had been boring enough: no one wanted to read about it too.

I’d just finished summing up the amazing adventures of Awesome Girl and Bad Dog when I realised I was squinting at my laptop screen because the daylight had disappeared and the room was in darkness. I had a cramp in my right hand and an ache in my neck from hunching over my laptop. I also felt thoroughly ooky, the way you did when you’d stayed up all night and it was now four in the afternoon and you still hadn’t had a shower.

I would feel tons better once I had a shower and possibly had a home-cooked meal inside me. Or a meal cooked by my local Thai takeaway place – they always seemed very friendly, homely even, when they answered the phone. But my need to be clean was even greater than my need to stuff prawn Pad Thai into my mouth.

When
I staggered into the bathroom to turn on the shower, I realised that I’d also forgotten to get shampoo, but I was sure I had some little bottles that I’d nicked from various hotel bathrooms. I’d hunt for them while I waited for the shower to heat up. Except when I tried to slide back the shower door it was alarmingly wobbly and then it stuck, leaving a gap so small that I couldn’t even squeeze myself into the cubicle.

Lydia had obviously done something, because as well as getting up in my grill about my standards of cleanliness she was always breaking stuff as she charged around the flat with a damp cloth in one hand, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her.

For one moment the enormity of not being able to get in the shower seemed almost too enormous, but that was just ridic. It was a fricking shower door and I wasn’t going to let it get the better of me. I would simply use some common sense and, if that failed, brute strength.

First I squirted some body lotion along the bottom of the door to get things going but it didn’t make one bit of difference. Then I tried to close the door, but it was stuck fast, and then I took a deep breath, tensed all my muscles and shoved the door as hard as I could. I didn’t just shove, I kind of hefted it too – actually I don’t know exactly what I did but the door lifted off its bottom track and it was really, really fucking heavy, and I was trying to get it back in place and not have it land on top of me or take half the bathroom tiles off with it but I couldn’t and I was gripping it so tightly that I bent back one of my fingernails and I had to use my whole body just to prevent it crashing to the floor when it slid out of my grasp.

‘Could
be worse,’ I muttered out loud. It really could. Nothing was broken, though my hands were stinging like I don’t know what.

So then I couldn’t take a shower because the shower door was currently propped against the cubicle but I could ask the caretaker to come up, except he was in Scotland and Gustav and Harry were in Australia and Ben was in Manchester and Barney was with Scarlett and what was the point of having all these people to help me build a lifestyle brand and half a million followers on Twitter when it was Christmas Eve and I couldn’t have a shower and there was no one to remind me to buy milk and shampoo and toilet roll because I was all on my own?

The buck stopped with me.

And being alone and being lonely were two different things but they felt exactly the same: they felt
horrible
. Christmas Eve was like Sunday evening but to the power of a gazillion, then tomorrow it would be Christmas Day and being alone and being lonely would feel even worse and I’d probably left it far too late to book a cab to take me to Tabitha’s anyway.

I realised I was crying, though generally, as a rule, I didn’t do crying. I couldn’t see the point. It didn’t achieve anything. It wasn’t useful and it just made me feel worse.

Made me feel so helpless that I was reaching for my phone to call the one person who I tried not to think about because if I did they’d be the only thing I could think about. We hated each other now and we hadn’t talked in weeks but I knew, I just
knew
that if I asked him to come round, to make the loneliness stop, to fix my bloody shower door, he’d be there.

For me.

‘What’s
up?’ I asked, not unkindly but not like we were cool and she could just call me whenever she was feeling a bit down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she spluttered. ‘You were the last person I wanted to call, but I’ve called everyone else and you’re the only one left. The only one!’

OK, you’d have to be made out of concrete not to feel something when someone you’d had some of your best and worst times with was crying their eyes out and you didn’t know why.

‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’

‘No. Nothing’s right and I don’t know what to do.’ She ended the sentence on a wail then she was crying too hard to talk.

‘Do you want me to come round?’ I asked, but I was talking to dead air because she’d rung off, and, without thinking about it, because if I stopped to think about it then I’d be staying where I was and ordering a coffee, I stood up.

‘Got
to go. Tinfoil emergency,’ I said, digging out my wallet. ‘Shall we call it twenty quid for my share plus tip?’

‘Don’t go,’ was the general theme. Along with ‘Get the sodding tinfoil from the yellow shop that never closes,’ but it wasn’t as simple as that. It never was with her.

It felt strange to be walking along Jeane’s road again, standing in her doorway, ringing on her bell and shouting, ‘Jeane? It’s me,’ into her intercom. She didn’t reply but buzzed me in, and she was waiting in the darkened hallway, the only light coming from the open door of her flat, when I got out of the lift.

I’d forgotten how small she was. She was wearing purple pyjama bottoms with slinky black cartoon cats on them and a huge fuzzy jumper. Her hair was white, which didn’t suit her face, which was red and swollen like she’d been crying for ages. I hate it when girls cry. It’s so unfair.

‘I didn’t expect you to come round,’ she said in a choked voice, like air wasn’t coming out of her windpipe. ‘You didn’t have to.’

‘Well, you sounded like something awful had happened and you shouldn’t just buzz people in. I could have been a homicidal rapist murderer.’

Jeane sniffed. ‘Aren’t homicidal and murderer kind of the same thing? Like, you can’t have an unhomicidal murderer.’

‘You could if they didn’t mean to commit murder. Like, if it was a crime of passion or something,’ I decided, and Jeane nodded tiredly like she couldn’t be bothered to argue out the details and that’s when I realised that something was really wrong: arguing out the details was as natural to Jeane as breathing oxygen. And also, she looked awful. Not the kind of
awful that had anything to do with her lack in the pretty department or because she dyed her hair unflattering colours or because she dressed like a lady clown; it was another kind of awful.

Her face, the bits of it that weren’t red or blotchy, was the colour of putty and she was slumping rather than standing up straight, her arms wrapped tightly round herself. She oozed defeat and I didn’t know why because it sounded as if everything in her life was just fine. She was taking over the world, one dork at a time.