Fen. Freya North
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window, whose frame is clearly visible through flimsy curtains. Pinch and a punch for the first of the month. What kind of idiot starts a new job on April Fool’s Day, Fen wonders as she gazes across her room?
After Thought for the Day, which Fen doesn’t think much of today, she leaves her bed and checks her reflection in the mirror.
My hair needs a wash. What do I feel like wearing? What ought I to wear? Do I dress for the weather? Or for the job?
She peers out through the curtains but soon enough she forsakes meteorological reasoning (it’s sunny and bright) for sky gazing instead. But that gets her nowhere so she goes to her cupboard and looks inside. Then she looks from the palm of her left hand to the palm of her right, as if reading one theory and then another, pros and cons; an idiosyncrasy that she knows causes friends and family much mirth and sometimes irritation, but which provides Fen with the answers she seeks. She regards her left hand.
It’s April, it’s positively spring-like. Time for my Agnès B skirt – bought in the sale and worn only once so far.
She looks at her right hand.
I’m an archivist. My office is to be a small room of dusty papers, acid-free boxes, brass paper-clips and shelving with sharp edges. There’ll be no one to see me in Agnès B.
She dons jeans.
‘I’ve hardly slept,’ Abi moans, sitting at the table-cum-storage-surface in the sitting-room-cum-dining-room, rubbing the small of her back and rolling her head cautiously from side to side, ‘bloody bloody bed.’
‘Ditto,’ Gemma says drowsily from the settee, holding a mug of hot tea, her eyes, though partially hidden by her mass of dark curls, drawn to breakfast TV with the volume off. ‘God, my head. Why do I invariably start the week as I end it – with a hangover? Why don’t I learn?’
‘I slept like a babe,’ says Fen, who has appeared at the foot of the stairs, ‘and awoke to a room spic, span and fragrant with Shake ’n’ Vac.’
Abi and Gemma regard their housemate, who looks annoyingly fresh herself both in countenance and clothing.
‘Take your halo—’ Abi starts.
‘—and shove it!’ Gemma concludes.
Fen grins and makes much of sashaying past both of them en route to the kitchen. ‘Toast?’
‘Can’t eat a thing,’ Gemma groans, ‘bloody hungover.’
‘Can’t eat a thing,’ Abi bemoans, ‘bloody on a diet.’
Fen returns with heavily buttered toast and takes a seat at the table next to Abi, balancing the plate on a pile of CDs which are themselves atop a heap of Sunday papers.
‘It’s one of life’s great injustices,’ Abi decrees, glowering at Fen’s plate, ‘that you basically have toast with your butter and you’re still slim and spot free. Bitch. I hate you.’
‘Hate you too,’ Fen says with her mouth full. The two of them sit affably and procrastinate over 14 Across in Saturday’s Guardian crossword.
‘And me,’ Gemma chips in, having been momentarily distracted by the weather girl’s quite staggering choice of lipstick, ‘I hate you.’
‘Hate you,’ Abi stresses non-specifically.
‘Hate you,’ Fen says with no malice and to no one in particular.
‘Hate hate you,’ Gemma recapitulates. And then they all laugh and sigh and say oh God, what are we like? Sigh some more and moan about Monday mornings.
‘Are we going to Snips this evening?’ Fen asks.
‘Yup. Every sixth week at six o’clock,’ Abi confirms.
‘Do you think it a bit odd,’ Gemma wonders, though her eyes are caught by TV presenters doing extraordinary things with sarongs, ‘our obsession with little rituals?’
‘It makes sense to have a communal outing to the hairdressers,’ Abi shrugs, analysing her housemates’ hair: Gemma’s ebony ringlets, Fen’s dark blonde long-top-crop. She twists pinches of her own hair, bleached and razor-cut short into pixie-like perfection. ‘It’s all about synchronization. What’s the point of spending time apart on the mundanities, when we can actually make them something of an institution?’
‘What, even the dentist?’ Gemma asks, turning away from the television, the sight of cooking in a bright studio kitchen making her decidedly queasy. ‘And leg waxing?’
‘Which reminds me,’ Abi says, stroking her calves.
‘Not yet!’ protests Gemma, for whom the pain of a leg wax is on a par with her fear of the dentist.
‘How did we manage to coincide our periods?’ Fen wonders, dabbing at toast crumbs and thinking she could do with another slice, were there another slice left to toast.
‘That’ll be the Moon Goddess,’ Abi says, very earnestly. ‘We’ll dance in her honour next time we’re on Primrose Hill.’
‘Abi,’ says Gemma, ‘you need help.’
‘I’m not going to bother to wash mine this morning then,’ says Fen.
‘Wash what?’ the other two shriek.
‘My hair – if we’re going to Snips.’ Fen fingers her locks gingerly. ‘Anyway,’ she reasons, ‘who’s going to see me in my little archive? Just a bunch of dead artists and benefactors.’
‘Are you excited?’ Abi asks, excited for her friend.
‘Nervous?’ Gemma asks, nervous for her friend.
Fen upends her right palm. ‘Nervous? Yes,’ she says. Then she upends her left palm. ‘Excited? Yes,’ she says. Then she clicks her fingers and punches the air: ‘But I get to have Julius all to myself!’
‘Bloody Julius,’ mutters Abi, when Fen has shut the front door behind her.
‘Bloody Julius,’ murmurs Gemma. ‘Fancy fancying a dead sculptor.’
Abi sighs. ‘It’s not the dead sculptor she’s obsessed with but some lump of marble he made in the shape of two people having a shag.’
‘Our Fen is way overdue a bonk,’ Gemma reasons.
‘So am I,’ Abi rues.
Gemma counts the months off on her fingers. ‘Er, and me.’
‘Maybe we should set aside some time and synchronize,’ says Abi.
THREE
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence.
Byron
Oh God. Oh Gawd. Oh Jesus. Matthew Holden has just woken up. The start to the day, to the week, could not be much worse. He has a hangover. He has a bad taste in his mouth. He’s late for work. And his ex-girlfriend is lying in bed next to him. With a contented smile on her sleeping face. He has a very bad taste in his mouth indeed. He tries closing his eyes but realizes that to stare at the ceiling, at the blooms of new paint on top of old, is far preferable to confronting all the current hassles of his life which parade around his mind’s eye as soon as his eyelids touch. Wake up. But he’s so damn tired. Wake up. Stay awake. Force eyes open. Monday. Monday. April Fool’s Day. Only this is no joke. No prank. He’s been a fool, full stop. It would be easier to just go back to sleep, slip into nothingness, to will it all to be a bad dream. However, while sleep might be a good antidote to his raging hangover, it won’t actually remedy the situation in hand or make it any less real. In fact, he’d have to wake again and do the whole oh God oh Gawd oh Jesus thing once more.
He