Without offering any explanation, I get up and walk out to the corridor. I’m suddenly hot with anger, and I have the worrying urge to boot the wall as hard as I can. The truth is, I was miserable here. Totally miserable. And my misery was compounded every day by the fact that I wasn’t brave enough to quit. I suppose I was too scared of being broke again, back doing pub shifts and spending my nights endlessly trawling the Guardian Jobs website. I also thought – deep down – that this job might eventually lead to something more interesting if I stuck with it. It never did.
I take a deep breath and reach instinctively for the phone in my pocket. I think about calling Daphne, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to speak to her yet. I scroll through my contacts until I get to Harv, and before I can think what I might say to him, I’m dialling. He answers after one ring.
‘Yo. What’s up?’
‘Nothing. Just … Sorry. Just calling to say hi, I guess.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Calling to say hi is not something Harv or I have ever done in fifteen years of friendship.
‘So … what are you up to?’ I ask.
‘Playing FIFA. Still reeling from last night.’
‘Is Liv still there?’
‘No, she’s gone into the office, but I’ve got the day off. What are you up to?’
‘I’m just …’ I breathe out heavily and rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. ‘I’m wondering what the hell I’m doing here, to be honest.’
‘I thought you said the job was going all right?’
Had I said that? Probably. It’s not like Harv and I were having any particularly deep or honest conversations at this point. I answer his question by outlining the basic premise of Frankenstein’s WAG.
He snorts down the phone. ‘Yeah. OK. Well, you’re unlikely to win a Pulitzer for that. How detailed is this feature, though? Are we talking internal organs as well? Like, Victoria Beckham’s small intestine?’
I laugh. ‘Coleen Rooney’s gall bladder.’
‘Good name for a punk band.’ I hear him shuffling about on the sofa. ‘Look, honestly, man, don’t worry about it. Obviously they’re not your kind of people, but you’re not gonna be there forever, are you? And we’re twenty-four years old, for fuck’s sake. We’re not supposed to be sorted yet. Who’s sorted at twenty-four?’
This strikes me as a pretty good point; one I wish I could’ve grasped properly at the time. But it stings a little when I remember that I will be even less sorted at thirty-four.
Still, though, this is the deepest conversation I’ve had with Harv in a long, long time. And it definitely didn’t happen on this day originally. I feel a sudden rush of affection for him – my best mate, my future best man – and I wonder if I can actually change what’s about to happen to him.
‘Hey, so, Harv,’ I say. ‘You know Liv?’
‘I’m aware of her work.’
‘Well, I just … I dunno. This sounds a bit weird, but I wanted to say that I think you two should, sort of … take things a bit slowly.’
There’s a long pause, and then the phone is flooded with laughter. ‘Mate, what are you on about?’
‘No, nothing, I just … She might not be as perfect as you think she is, that’s all.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Yes, obviously she’s very hot. But I’m just saying, maybe …’
I kick at the carpet in frustration. I can’t think of any way to do this without telling him the truth, which would obviously make me sound like an utter lunatic. I’m about to try another tack when he grunts and says, ‘Look, I’ve got to go anyway, man. My toast’s burning. But have fun tonight.’
The phone line rustles, and before he hangs up, he adds, ‘Say hi to the naked ladies for me.’
Chapter Twenty
If there is a more depressing sight than a Christmas tree in a strip club, then I’ve yet to see it.
It sits there forlornly in the corner of the dark mirrored room, beside a stage on which a pneumatically breasted woman is grinding listlessly against a greasy pole. I’m not sure what it is about the tree’s presence here that’s so jarringly awful. Possibly the fact that everything Christmas is supposed to represent – family, love, kindness, joy – seems totally alien in a place like this, where blokes are essentially paying large sums of money to forget those concepts exist.
I’ve whiled away most of the day sitting silently at my desk, either moving exclamation marks around at random on Frankenstein’s WAG or checking my phone to see if the agent’s email has arrived (it hasn’t). But now it’s 4 p.m., and I am walking into Archie’s Strip Club in Shoreditch with the ten other members of the all-male Thump team.
The overpowering blend of cocoa butter and sweat fills my nostrils as soon as we step past the bouncers. The Archie’s design team have really gone all out on the Christmas theme in here: as well as the sorry-looking tree, there are also silvery scraps of tinsel draped across the L-shaped black leather sofas, green and red baubles dangling limply above the bar, and a few of the dancers are even wearing Santa hats.
This was my first visit to a strip club – the second came during a stag weekend for an old school mate a few years later – and I have to be honest, I still cannot see the attraction. I mean, obviously, objectively, it’s nice to look at naked women. But doing it in a place like this requires a level of self-detachment – maybe even self-deception – that I just don’t seem capable of.
In a weird way, I find it more interesting to watch the customers than the dancers. These hunched, baggy-faced men in bad suits, who still manage to look desperately unhappy while smiling. The horrible, hungry glint in their eyes that makes you feel vaguely ashamed to be the
