How to Get a (Love) Life

HOW TO GET A (LOVE) LIFE

ROSIE BLAKE

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Except for Chris, who is as big a knob in real life as he is in this book.

Prologue

Staring up at the departures desk, I scanned the list of destinations. In just two hours the flight to Greece would be leaving and I would be on it. My compact grey suitcase, hastily packed that morning, stood to attention by my side. I was ready to go.

All around me, loved up couples held hands and giggled sickeningly over one another. Giddy children gazed up at the illuminated flight boards, their faces full of wonder and excitement. A young mother cooed at her perfect and adorable baby. One daddy clutched his youngest boy to him as his eldest attempted to clamber on to his back.

Everyone is in a unit
.

A sad, single tear sloped down my cheek. I wiped it away fiercely. What was I doing? Why was I here? How had things gone
this
wrong?

As I rolled my suitcase over to the check-in queue, I felt a firm tap on my shoulder.

‘You going too, eh?’

The voice belonged to a woman dressed as if she was about to strut out on stage at
The X Factor
. Her neon orange vest top failed to restrain a roll of pasty flesh and her enormous round earrings looked like weird green moons orbiting her head. Her clothes shouted ‘teenager!’ but the fine lines around her eyes suggested that she was in her early thirties.

‘Um, yes.’

‘Sick! Me too!’ She laughed – revealing a lipstick mark on her front tooth – and pointed a coral-painted false nail at her luggage. ‘Packing light as ever. Ha ha.’

The unfeasibly high pitch of her laugh sliced right through me.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I nodded, trying my best to be polite, while every sinew of my body screamed:
Leave me alone, Overly Bright Airport Girl! Can’t you see I want to curl up into a ball and crrrryyyy?

Remaining firmly at my side, she manoeuvred her suitcase next to mine and held out a stick of gum.

I shook my head. ‘No, thanks.’

She popped it into her mouth and talked through it. ‘You know, I’ve been on three of these holidays and I’ve
always
pulled.’ She paused to stretch a bit of the gum out before rolling it back in her mouth. ‘Shagged one guy for the whole week last time and then he got picked up at the airport by his
wife
. Awks.’

She smiled at me. It was my line.

‘That’s
terrible
,’ I said.

‘Yeah, whatevs. I ’spose it just wasn’t meant to be. Better than the 2011 guy who was super clingy. I had to be all, like, “Hellooo, back off, I am totes not into back hair.”’

Me again: ‘Er …’

‘Soooo, you hoping to meet a fella?’

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words stuck in my throat. I wondered again what I was doing in this queue of people: how had my life come to this?

‘Your first time?’ Her head cocked to one side.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed, as the gorgeously tanned woman behind the check-in desk beckoned me over. I approached and slid my passport over the counter. Overly Bright Airport Girl stayed fixed at my shoulder. I waited for Check-In Woman to shoo her back into the queue, but it was clearly assumed we were travelling together because Check-In Woman took her passport too. I turned to Overly Bright Airport Girl and said with a gulp: ‘It’s … my first singles holiday.’

She squeaked at my announcement, her glossy pink mouth a big ‘Ooh’ of pleasure. A tall man in the queue next door sniggered.

I coughed and continued. ‘Yes. I am a single woman who is deliberately going on this holiday with the hope of meeting someone who will love me.’

Check-In Woman looped a sticker through the handle of my suitcase and raised one neatly pencilled eyebrow. Arms wide, I turned to the rest of the airport. ‘It is my first ever,
ever
time on a singles holiday,’ I cried. ‘I booked it last night because it seemed like the right thing to do. I just needed to … I wanted to, you know … um …’ I trailed off idiotically, watching as my suitcase juddered along the luggage belt and out of sight.

In the distance I thought I heard someone calling my name and in that moment my heart soared. I whipped around – hair flicking across my face in my haste – and scanned the crowds hopefully …

Nope.

Nothing.

I’d imagined it. My stomach lurched.

Overly Bright Airport Girl slung her meaty arm around my shoulders.

‘We should totes sit together on the flight. I’ll show you my holiday pictures from last year. I’ve got them all on my phone. All of them.’

I sniffed, nodded once, resigned. ‘Great.’

Nicola Brown, how the hell did you end up here?

Chapter One

Single, white, female, 29, GSOH, N/S. Definitely not interested in meeting nice man for friendship or more.

Contact: Box No. 235

It always made me feel itchy when things were out of place. I couldn’t seem to settle unless everything around me was completely ordered. For instance: I’d just aimed a screwed-up piece of paper at the bin and missed. It had sailed beautifully over the room, hit the rim and fallen to the floor, where it now lay. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew I should leave it there – others would leave it – it really was no big deal …

Caroline sat across the way, head of wild auburn curls bent over her desk, engrossed in her current task. She was surrounded by a fort of sweet wrappers, invoices, brochures and photographs. She hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. Of course she hadn’t. To anyone else there
was
nothing wrong.

I stared resolutely at the actor’s headshot I was holding until the image swam before my eyes and it became a blur of a face, like a child’s watercolour. My eyes flicked back to the paper on the floor.

I drummed my biro against the desk.

Just leave it there, Nicola.

It was no use. With a heavy sigh, I stood up, walked across the office, picked up the piece of paper and dropped it in the bin, exactly where it belonged. I tried to convince myself I was just stretching my legs. Who was I kidding?

Caroline looked up as I passed her, nudged out of concentration.

‘Lunchtime?’ she asked, hopefully.

I gave her a wry smile. ‘It’s only eleven-twenty, Caroline.’

She pulled a face and returned to typing, though how she did it, I had no clue; her keyboard always seemed to be half-submerged under a sea of paper and neon Post-It notes. How she
ever
managed to get anything done was beyond me. Important documents were nestled under other piles of documents (also important), yet she always managed to produce exactly what we needed, and laughed at my disbelief when she did. ‘Organised Chaos’ she called it. I called it Black Magic. The notion that anyone could live like that was bewildering to me, but Caroline Harper’s desk was a perfect reflection of how she lived her life. At least her mess no longer annoyed me, which was testament to how much I’d grown to like her. I envied her easy manner; people’s eyes lit up when they came in to see Caroline, knowing they would be greeted with a hot cup of coffee and some kind words. Desperate actresses, bored and out of work, always left smiling, hope re-born inside them. On the phone, she laughed with potential clients, giggling at their stories. I was more suited to bookings, searching out new talent and ensuring the office ran smoothly. Caroline often said I was the cogs to her clock, which made more sense than most of her phrases (yesterday’s front-runner:
He’s all talk and no pyjamas
– more information than I really needed about her husband).

We made a great team, Caroline and I, which was extraordinary, considering the rocky first impression I’d made at my interview four years ago …

The Sullivan Agency, Bristol’s largest actors’ agency, was on the second floor of a Georgian building at the top of Park Street. Below, the street thrummed with the hustle and bustle of city life; busy bookshops, cafes with colourful canopies and beautiful vintage clothing stores lined both sides of the street and curved around the corner at the bottom of the hill. Initially impressed with the entrance to the office – a heavy oak door leading to a staircase lined with black and white photographs of the actors on their books – I’d felt nervous as I walked up. I paused on the landing, momentarily distracted by muddy footprints on a carpet the colour of clotted cream, fingerprints on the large sash windows and a dying yucca plant (could you even kill a yucca plant?) wilting in the corner. I’d breathed in, and then out even more slowly, attempting to steady myself. The glass lettering on the door to the office announced,
The Sullivan Agency
. I knocked tentatively, palms damp. Clutching my black leather satchel in one hand, I waited. My outline was reflected in the cloudy glass. I patted at my bobbed hair, trimmed that week.

‘Come in, come in,’ called a bright female voice.

Fixing what I hoped was a relaxed and confident smile on my face, I pushed open the door.

‘Arrrrrrrrrr,’ screamed a small boy dressed as a pirate. He brandished a cutlass sword at my stomach. His eyepatch meant I could only make out one menacing eye.

I jumped backwards, one hand to my chest, and let out a yelp.

‘Who be you, arrrrrrrrrr?’ he asked, waving his sword from side to side.

A woman, about ten years older than me, with a mass of red curls, kind eyes, and a small girl on her lap, looked up. ‘Ben – don’t scare the lady. Be nice.’

Ben pivoted back round,
Arrr’ed
at who I assumed was his mother, ran over to a swivel chair, threw himself into it, and started bashing the keyboard with both hands.

‘Welcome, hi, I’m Caroline,’ said the woman, with a grin. ‘I would get up and shake your hand, but …’ she nodded her head towards the young girl in her arms and re-adjusted the green ribbon in her hair. ‘Alice, Ben, say hello to, um …’ she paused and looked down at her sheet.

‘Nicola.’

‘Of course, Nicola! I’m sorry, I’ve got baby brain, or children brain … actually, to be honest, I’m useless with names most of the time.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, looking surreptitiously around the room for somewhere to sit and wait. Pirate Ben had moved onto picking up the telephone and screaming ‘Arrrrrrr’ into it before slamming it back in its cradle. I smiled at him but he was far too involved in his world of pirate destruction to notice.

‘… I’ve had to bring these two to work because my child-minder just let me down, she normally does Thursdays, but –
oh no, Alic
e!’

Alice flung her apple juice carton down onto Caroline’s desk, where its contents seeped into the computer keyboard.

‘Oh Christ,’ Caroline swung her daughter across her body, seized a filthy-looking wet wipe and dabbed at the juice. She was wearing some sort of colourful poncho and as she cleared up the mess it jingled with the sound of little bells sewn into the hem.

Ben, sensing new commotion, jumped down off his swivel chair, swished his sword around again and told me to, ‘Walk the plank, walk the plank.’

I was seriously considering whether to about-turn and run far, far away from this nightmare of mess and madness when a man burst out from a side office, filling the cramped space with his tall frame and wide shoulders.

Raking a hand through his dark hair, he said, ‘Caroline, I’ve got bloody Chris on the phone asking for the details of his voiceover on Monday. What did Suzy do with the info from the compu …’ He trailed off as he caught me hovering by the doorway. He looked momentarily puzzled before realisation lit up his eyes. Walking across the room in three big strides, he held out his hand. ‘I’m so sorry, you must be Nicola, here for the interview. I’m James, James Sullivan. We spoke on the phone last week.’ I leaned towards him and took his hand in my best firm grasp. I’d recently read a book about successful interviewing and it said that the handshake could potentially decide
everythi
ng. I was so busy thinking about whether I was doing a good handshake, I’d forgotten to actually let go of his hand. I swiftly removed it.