The List Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  JANUARY

  FEBRUARY

  MARCH

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  AUGUST

  SEPTEMBER

  OCTOBER

  NOVEMBER

  DECEMBER

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2013 Joanna Bolouri

  The moral right of Joanna Bolouri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN 978 1 84866 308 4

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84866 309 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Joanna Bolouri worked in sales before she began writing professionally. Winning a BBC comedy script competition allowed her to work and write with stand-up comedians, comedy scriptwriters and actors from across the UK. She’s had articles and reviews published in The Skinny, the Scottish Sun, the Huffington Post and HecklerSpray. She lives in Glasgow with her daughter.

  For Nicola, who

  has been making me

  laugh for 25 years

  JANUARY

  Saturday January 1st

  I emerged from my bed like Nosferatu about an hour ago with a mouth like a stable floor. Since the minibar has been cleaned out and I cannot find one cup in this entire hotel room, I’ve been forced to drink water directly from the bathroom tap. Fuck, I’m so hungover my face feels like it belongs to someone else. Lucy is still asleep on the other bed and I refuse to get dressed and venture out where there are people with eyes who will judge me.

  For once the hangover was worth it, as last night’s party was amazing! Every year we all stay at the Sapphire Hotel (overpriced, trendy and slap bang in the middle of the city centre) to bring in the bells and every year I’m surprised they haven’t banned us yet. The others had already checked in by the time Lucy and I arrived at half past three. We took the lift to our floor, dragging our needlessly large suitcases behind us as we searched for room 413. I’ve worked with Lucy for two years and she’s never on time for anything. ‘I bet the others are pissed already,’ said Lucy, ‘and shagging. I bet they’re all covered in Moët and wearing each other’s underwear.’

  Finally, we found our room and I fumbled with the key card in the door, ‘Jesus, is that all you ever think about? Anyway, we’re only half an hour late. Hazel’s most likely pricing the minibar, Kevin will be ready for a pint and Oliver’s probably …’

  ‘Getting head off that Spanish girl,’ Lucy interrupted. ‘What’s her name again?’

  ‘Pedra. I’ve only met her once and called her Pedro by accident.’

  She threw her coat on the bed near the window and turned on the television as I started to unpack, wondering why the hell I’d brought four pairs of shoes.

  ‘Are you wearing your green dress?’ I asked, looking at the plain black one I’d brought.

  ‘Yup. Although with my red hair, I look like a Riverdance reject.’

  I left her, mid-Irish jig, and went for a shower, excited about the evening ahead and thinking about last year’s party: when Lucy got so drunk she fell asleep in the lift and Oliver hid behind my bedroom door and scared me so badly I wet myself.

  My train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door and a familiar Dublin accent.

  ‘Phoebe, I’m coming in. Put your cock away.’

  I grabbed the towel and wrapped it around me just as Oliver appeared from behind the door.

  ‘Fuckssake, Oliver!’ I shrieked, turning away from him. ‘Give a girl some privacy! Go and peek at Pedro’s tits.’

  ‘It’s Pedra, and I’m not here to see your tits, impressive as they are. I’m here to tell you that dinner is at 7 p.m., and there was something else but Lucy’s Irish dancing has distracted me and made me homesick for mental redheads.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll see you when I’m dressed. Go and annoy someone else.’

  An hour and two glasses of wine later, Lucy and I were still getting ready. The plan, every year, was to try to stay relatively sober until midnight, but generally we’d all be hammered by the time the bells chimed for New Year and do shots until we all fell over. I knew this year would be no different. ‘At least you don’t have Alex with you,’ said Lucy, pulling on her tights. ‘That man bored the shit out of everyone last year, going on about his bloody job. He’s a physiotherapist, not a fucking wizard.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, sleeping with his boss all that time, and he had the cheek to bring her into the conversation—’

  ‘Enough!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t kill my buzz talking about that dickhead. It’s over now. I just need to concentrate on finding someone who isn’t a total prick.’

  ‘Don’t set the bar too high,’ Lucy laughed. ‘And besides, it’s not a new boyfriend you need, Phoebe, it’s a shag! Sex makes everything better.’

  ‘My sex life is fine, thank you very much. What I need is another drink.’

  We met Hazel and Kevin at the bar before dinner. They had already thrown half a bottle of champagne down their necks. Hazel saw me eyeing up the bottle.

  ‘We have no child for the night. I intend to get shit-faced.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not judging. I celebrate the fact I have no child every night,’ I replied.

  Hazel looked amazing in her pastel-pink evening dress. She’d swept her blonde hair up into a high ponytail decorated with tiny diamantés. Her husband Kevin was in his kilt and looked very handsome. They always looked so effortlessly groomed that I felt a tad thrown together in my black wrap-over dress, red heels and the same hairstyle I’d had since 1995.

  ‘Oliver and Pedra not down yet?’

  ‘From the way those two were slobbering over each other in the lobby, I’d be surprised if they’ve left the bedroom.’ Kevin laughed and then paused, obviously trying to picture this in his head.

  A flustered-looking waiter ushered us into the main hall, where we all sat around beautifully decorated tables covered in white linen with green and red centrepieces. There must have been around a hundred tartan-clad guests and the atmosphere was electric. There were tables of hipsters wearing jaunty hats, ready to Instagram photos of their meal as soon as it arrived, the obligatory table of young lads who were pissed before the meal even arrived and the occasional middle-aged couple who weren’t quite sure what to make of the whole thing. The meal itself was traditional Scottish: steak pie, haggis and some sort of tofu extravaganza for the vegetarians.

  ‘That cutlery is immense,’ said Lucy, lifting a silver spoon up to her face. ‘I’d like these in my house.’

  ‘Steal it then,’ I joked, but then I saw the look on her face.

  ‘Hey, klepto! Do not steal it. They made you pay for that dressing gown last year, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but they don’t allocate cutl
ery to room numbers. That was a schoolboy error on my part.’

  Ten minutes later Oliver swaggered in with a cheeky grin on his face, followed by Pedra, a woman so beautiful I wanted to punch her in the face and then myself. ‘Finally! Did you two get lost?’ I asked, knowing full well that wasn’t the case.

  ‘No,’ Pedra answered quite seriously.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Oliver announced, stealing the bread roll Lucy was buttering. ‘When’s the food?’

  ‘You better replace that with something carby in five seconds, Webb, or I won’t be responsible for my actions,’ she growled.

  ‘You never are,’ Oliver smirked, dropping another roll on to her plate. ‘A toast, please!’ He raised his glass and we all followed. ‘To my good friends: Hazel and Kevin, who completely ruin my theory that all marriages are a sham; Lucy, the kind of woman my mother warned me about; Phoebe, my oldest and funniest friend; and finally to my lovely girlfriend, Pedra; I apologize in advance – this will get messy … oh, and not forgetting the new friends we will make and quickly lose this evening by being terrible human beings. Let’s fucking do this.’

  We ate, we laughed, we danced, by midnight my shoes were lying under a table, I’d been outside for 17,000 cigarettes and I was starting to get the ‘I’m going to be alone forever’ New Year’s blues when the slower songs came on. Thankfully Hazel spotted this and was able to pull me back off the ledge.

  ‘You thinking about Alex?’

  ‘Yeah. I think I still miss him.’

  ‘Nah, you miss the idea of him. The man you thought he was.’

  ‘The man I hoped he’d be.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘He was charming in the beginning.’

  ‘So was Ted Bundy,’ she quipped.

  ‘I always thought Bundy would be a good name for a dog.’

  ‘Focus, Phoebe.’

  ‘Ugh, look, maybe I didn’t try hard enough either. He did have moments when he was quite loving and tender. Maybe I—’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t, Phoebe, who knows, but you didn’t screw around and he did! Alex was cheating on you for four months. That’s four months’ worth of lies for you and his mistress! That’s not an endearing quality in any man.’

  I knocked back my tequila. ‘Why do I always gravitate towards arseholes? I’ll never find anyone good.’

  ‘You’ll find someone new. Perhaps you need to go for someone who isn’t your normal type.’

  ‘Like a woman?’

  ‘No. I mean someone you’d never usually consider, but, most importantly, someone who deserves you.’

  ‘YES!’ I shouted, startling a nearby man in an ill-fitting kilt. ‘This year I’m going to find someone. Someone different. Someone brilliant!’

  ‘You can do whatever you want. This is going to be your year, girl. Start living it. Now come and dance before we all turn into pumpkins.’

  And so here I am, the first day of my brand-new year, and all I have to show for it so far is a hangover, a new spot on my chin and a handbag full of Lucy’s stolen cutlery. I’m going back to bed.

  Sunday January 2nd

  Today I have decided to make my New Year’s resolutions and become a better, more useful person instantly. But instead of the usual – lose weight, make money, unfollow everyone on Twitter who uses bastarding chat acronyms – I’ve decided to ask myself one question: if I could do last year again, what would I do differently? Every year I make the same lame resolutions, yet nothing really changes, and I end up wondering why I bothered. So, this year, the plan is to choose just one thing and actually get off my arse and do something about it. The question is, what? I’ve been brooding over where it went wrong with Alex, but the more I think about it the more I realize it was never right in the first place, even before he pissed off with Miss Tits. (I should really grow up and call her Susan, but that doesn’t quite convey the level of my disdain). The first night we met, I was so grateful that this tall, handsome man had shown interest in me I bought every round of drinks and thrust my phone number into his hand at the end of the evening. I didn’t hear from him again until two agonizing weeks later. I realize now that even that was significant. He kept me at arm’s length for our entire relationship, occasionally pulling me in to give me a glimpse of what a funny, sensitive person he could be, but only when he chose to. So while I wanted to be swept off my feet, in reality I was just tripped up occasionally. That bastard has a PhD in manipulation, and I swear if you looked up ‘fucker’ in the dictionary, there would be a photo of him, holding my heart, and possibly my severed head, looking victorious and doing a little jig. I could never quite live up to his expectations … I wasn’t educated enough or groomed enough or impressive enough. I just wasn’t enough. I wasted four years with someone who was completely underwhelmed to be with me. That’s the real kick in the vag. What a waste of time.

  I spent over five hundred pounds on therapy in the last year with a forty-something-year-old American therapist called Pam Potter, whose name makes her sound like a garden gnome, but who happily listens to me bitch and whine in exchange for fifty pounds an hour (she was marginally cheaper than the psychologists with real names) and then says, ‘I hear what you’re saying, Phoebe.’ The fact she had two working ears leads me to believe this was true, but not entirely helpful. However, it did help me come to the conclusions that a) I am still angry about the whole Alex thing, and b) although I wasn’t completely blameless in our relationship, I did deserve better. No, I do deserve better. This year, I have to get Alex out of my system once and for all.

  Monday January 3rd

  It was Pam Potter’s idea that I keep a diary. Apparently this whole ‘writing down my feelings’ lark should be therapeutic, but it just feels weird.

  I haven’t kept a diary since I was a fifteen-year-old loner with an ear cuff and a mono-brow. Back then my diary was hidden under my mattress and contained 13,000 different swear words to describe my parents along with some angstridden poetry about a boy in my class who never spoke and wore eyeliner. As it is, I still fancy boys who wear eyeliner, but I’m less inclined to insult my parents these days, except for when they send me those organic chocolates I hate at Christmas.

  Despite it being a holiday, I had my first monthly session of the year with Pam this evening. She’d dyed her hair brown over Christmas and looked remarkably like Tina Fey.

  ‘How was the New Year for you? In our last session you mentioned you were still struggling with your break-up. Has that changed?’

  ‘God, no. I feel as if all I do is think about him … or moan about him … or just miss him. Recently I am seeing things more clearly, though.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I threw myself into that relationship head first. I’ll be the first to admit that I was lonely, and when he showed interest in me I clung on to him. I might have been needy, but he was worse – he was lazy. He was too lazy to end it so instead he just kept me there until someone better could replace me. He couldn’t even be bothered to have his affair somewhere private. I remember when I caught them in our bed. OUR FUCKING BED!’

  Pam just nodded, but I’m certain that if she wasn’t being paid to sit through this story for the millionth time she’d have happily drop-kicked me out the office window.

  I could feel myself shaking as I visualized the moment I caught Alex. I’d arrived home early from a concert that had been cancelled at the last minute. I came in and threw my jacket on the couch and watched it fall on top of a bra I didn’t own. It was bright pink and about three cup sizes bigger than mine. The moaning from the bedroom gave me the answer to a question I hadn’t even had time to ask myself. ‘I walked into the room and stood there like an idiot. I couldn’t even speak. He just shrugged and said, “This was bound to happen. You knew things weren’t right between us.” I stayed with Hazel until I found my own place. She’s been very supportive. All my friends have.’

  ‘Good. That’s important. But it’s been almost a year, Phoebe. How do you feel you can
move on from here? You’ve expressed the desire to on several occasions.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about New Year resolutions. I need to change the way I think, otherwise I’m going to be stuck in this cycle forever. I’m going to change. I’m just not sure how yet.’

  After my session with Pam, I called Oliver to tell him my plans. I could practically hear him rolling his eyes at me.

  ‘You don’t need to make a list of stupid resolutions you’ll never keep, Phoebe. Remember last year you were going to start running?’

  ‘I did start running. I totally ran. And anyway, I’m just making one resolution this year, one that matters.’

  ‘You ran once round the park and then you vomited in a hedge, Phoebe. That doesn’t count. You need to stop being so uptight and planning things. You never used to be like this. You used to be fun and carefree! We used to get pissed and you’d tell me all your secrets and we’d dance to really shit pop music at 5 a.m. Now you’re like the anti-Phoebe.’

  So much for the support of my friends. ‘I got a little lost,’ I said quietly. ‘You know it’s taken me a while to get back on track after I split with Alex.’

  ‘I know that, but I suggest it’s time you start getting found. And laid. You need to get your groove back.’

  ‘Jesus, you sound just like Lucy. You two are obsessed.’

  ‘You sound repressed.’

  ‘I’m going now. Save your sex advice for Pedro. I have plans to make. Talk later.’

  Trust him to piss all over my chips. He knows nothing.

  Tuesday January 4th

  Back at work today after my New Year break and I immediately wanted to set myself on fire. I’ve been working at this newspaper for three years, and approximately three weeks have been enjoyable. After running screaming from high school at seventeen, advertising sales was pretty much the only job for which my supposedly winning personality was more important than my qualifications. This was just as well, as I scraped a C pass in English and a Masters in forgery after faking my mother’s handwriting on sick notes throughout my final year. I’m surprised they didn’t have some sort of fun run to raise money for my recovery. The trouble with my job is that I’m meant to be good with people. Charming, even. Be interested in what they have to say and make them trust me, nay, LOVE ME to the point that they name their first child after me and then leave the kid out of their will because they love me more. But in fact I’m rubbish at small talk, I hate it, and if someone doesn’t want to take advertising space that’s fine with me; I honestly couldn’t care less. That last statement perfectly sums up my attitude towards my job: I couldn’t care less. But I do my best to talk a good enough game and sell my soul on a daily basis because I need to pay the rent. We share office space with ten other companies, most of which are in the financial sector, so I often have to share the lift with ball-bags who wear ridiculous ties and talk about numbers and golf. On the upside, the location is brilliant: a two-minute walk from the train station and upstairs from a pub and a sandwich shop where I’m found most mornings buying coffee and toast. The sales floor is mostly open-plan, and my desk is unfortunately directly in front of my boss Frank’s office, giving him a perfect view of what I’m doing all day (which is usually nothing). Most of the other staff have pictures of their family on their desks, but my ‘unkempt shambles that I call a workspace’ (Frank’s words) is decorated with a picture of a cat with a watermelon on its head, mostly obscured by empty coffee cups and aspirin packets. Today’s regular morning meeting was painless enough – lots of encouragement from said boss, who is the most horrendous blowhard to have ever walked the earth, which no one paid any attention to. Then I caught up on four hundred emails that had arrived over Christmas and the skeleton staff had ignored. Lucy arrived late as usual, stuffing her face with a breakfast bagel and swigging coffee from her glittery flask. ‘You all right, my lovely?’ she shouted over. ‘Recovered yet?’