Just Last Night(19)

I could call in sick, but my job is not super secure, and given it’s only eight hours until the weekend, I should soldier through, powered by Diet Coke, Frazzles, and spicy shame.

I work for a website that covers what we loosely term the entertainment scene, called City Nights—long since imaginatively christened Shitty Nights or City Shites by the workforce.

As a user, for a subscription fee, you log in, type in a date, and it tells you what’s on around the country and has tickets left, or a table for four free, that kind of thing. “Like Last Minute Dot Com for your social life!” is the ad line. We cover the East Midlands but it’s a national service.

There’s two members of staff who we could politely call reporters who are, more accurately, twenty-something raw data harvest monkeys, Lucy and Seth, and then two more staff, of whom I am one and Phil is the other, who we could politely call sub-editors or, more accurately, an over-thirty and an over-fifty ex-journo, who have no other way to use a near-redundant skillset.

I check the copy for legal risks and basic English then slap it online with photos and very millennial-wanker, nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of clickbait captions. Like:

My boyfriend says he’d leave me for this peanut dipping sauce at Leicester’s newest Japanese restaurant: should I be worried?

Or:

What’s better than one Lewis Capaldi date at Nottingham Arena? That’s right: TWO (it’s not “none,” how dare you).

No, I don’t have strong self-esteem or record high levels of creative satisfaction, thanks for asking.

I used to be a writer on the local newspaper. As I felt the print industry tanking, I scuttled over to this ship, which was only marginally more afloat.

My ex Mark always said I needed to go to London, to a national, if I wanted to springboard into something better. He was proved right about that. He was right about a lot of things, making me worry he might also be right about other things that I was sure he got wrong.

Stripy Roger has no respect for my fragility and is standing on the kitchen table roaring, to summon me and his breakfast, as I enter the kitchen.

I find his food in the cupboard and try not to gag as an oblong of Whiskas chunks in amber jelly slithers out of the packet and into Roger’s bowl, whiffing of liver. He makes Cookie Monster noises as he piles into it.

I trudge upstairs, peel off my pajamas, and stand in a very hot shower. I can’t help but gaze down despondently at my apparently revolting tufted pudenda under the running water. I’d heard tell of this hairless breed of men who demanded similar, but I vaguely expected them to live in gyms, and/or the capital’s trendy boroughs.

It feels too karmic that a one-night stand that I attempted partly for vanity—look how easy it is for me to get tail—has ended up with me feeling like the last old mangy stray at the rescue shelter. I have minge mange.

I pull out a nicer dress than usual because, today of all days, my ego can’t take being clad as an “escaped toad disguised as a washerwoman,” as Susie and I describe our off-days style.

On the lurching bus ride into town, I consider taking my mind off my nausea by texting Susie a trailer for the Bald Ballsack Zack (ballzack?) anecdote, but I’m distracted by persistent calls from an unknown landline. Only total amateurs answer unknown numbers; you could be tricked into all sorts of unwanted conversations.

My office is in a fashionably bohemian part of the city center, Hockley, but—less pleasingly—in a basement. You don’t realize how much humans need daylight until you’re without it. Even Goth humans like me.

“Morning, cunts!” says my desk mate, Phil, as I and my young colleague Lucy walk in. “Oof, big night last night was it, Eve? You’re as green as a pea.”

“Thanks.”

“A lovely pea, I stress. A feminine pea. You’re not the ‘witch from Oz’ sort of green hag.”

“A feminine pea. That’s me.”

I pour myself a black coffee from the filter jug on the sideboard. Phil is in his late fifties and has what my colleague Lucy calls “a council meeting beard,” which somehow made me honk with laughter. (“You know, like Bill Oddie’s or Jeremy Corbyn’s. Not like a ‘worn with beanie and sleeve tatts beard.’”)

Phil has confused “being crudely offensive” with “a great sense of humor and big personality.” Nevertheless, we generally get along, due to my pragmatic decision to take no offense. I would a thousand times rather an abrasive but straightforward Phil, than a snaky, conniving alternative.

“Are you doing the roller-disco pieces?” he asks, and I confirm that I am. Given I’m physically broken, I’m going to lean hard on puns.

Wheels on Fire? Starlight Ex-YES? Oh God that’s awful. Rock ’N’ Roller?

My mobile flashes with Ed’s name. Ugh: this is unusual timing and it must be because he wants to talk about the proposal. I’m the last person who owes it to Ed to make him feel OK about saying yes. Nope. No way. I pop a couple of Advil out of their plastic casing while scowling at the illuminated handset.

“That’s a waste of money, you know,” Phil says, nodding at the pills. “They’re ibuprofen. You’re paying that much more for branding.”

“I’m a fan of late-stage capitalism and being in debt,” I say.

“You must love this job then.”

“With all my heart.”