Joshua: Do you want me to send you a video of me cutting a slice?
Gretel: Too early to send porn to each other, right?
Gretel: Food porn, I mean.
Joshua: Glad I’ve got this Viennetta to eat now to cool me down.
Joshua: It would be nice to see you again.
Gretel: Oh would it now?
Joshua: You free tonight?
Gretel: Alas, I’m out with my housemate Megan. But maybe another time this weekend?
I’m slightly worried Megan is about to fall off the wagon the moment I’ve climbed onto it.
‘I’m too stressed out,’ she announced on Thursday, her head facedown on the table – where it’s been so often this week that I’m surprised it’s not started to make a little head-shaped mark. ‘Can we go out tomorrow? I need a ride.’
My eyebrows drew up. ‘A ride? Since when are you Irish?’
‘Since I’m overworked and horny.’
‘And that makes you … Irish?’
‘Oh for God’s sake! Will you come out with me or not? I promise I won’t get emotionally attached to my ride.’
‘Please stop saying ride.’
‘It will just be sex.’ She raises her head from the table. ‘I’m so stressed with work, April. I have this stupid fucking launch to do, but they’ve not given me enough budget. And then my psychotic cuntbag of a manager is micromanaging me so hard I can’t get anything done, and then she keeps complaining that we’re behind and I’m like, HELLO, it’s because I’m having to reply to all your psychotic cuntbag emails.’
‘Why are so many managers so bad?’ I ask, deciding it’s probably a good idea to open a bottle of wine. For both of us. Megan’s stress is highly contagious when she’s like this.
‘Shit floats to the top, doesn’t it?’ she wails, before returning her face to the wood.
‘Megs, I love you, you know I love you, but are you sure this is a good idea?’
‘What’s a good idea?’
‘Going ride hunting?’
‘It’s fine! We’ll go somewhere super awful so I’ll find someone super awful who I have no chance of falling for. It’s just stress relief, April, honestly! I’m a modern woman.’
‘Whatever you say.’
Twenty-four hours later, and I’m all dolled up for Megan’s ride hunt, standing in a queue in a part of London I never go to, and feeling way too old for this.
‘I’ve not been to Calculus since I was 25,’ I whisper as we inch forward. ‘And even then it was terrible.’
‘You could totally pass for 25,’ Megan says, reaching out and squeezing my arm.
‘That is not my point.’
‘You should take that as a compliment. You never know if and when you’ll ever hear it again at our age.’ She smiles and rakes her fingers through her hair to fluff it. ‘And thank you for coming. It’s the easiest place to pull someone. That is the point of Calculus.’
‘Easy if they’re looking for an older woman. The boys here are so young they look like the kids wearing suits in Bugsy fucking Malone.’
Megan laughs. They really do. We’re sandwiched by a thick bread of fresh-faced and recently-graduated boys on banking graduate schemes, dressed in their first tailoring, hardly needing to shave yet, and playing at being grown up. The queue moves forward and we step along, being pushed slightly by a rowdy group of equally fresh-faced girls giggling behind us.
Calculus on a Friday night is where humanity comes to puke up just before it dies. A club in Bank made for one purpose and one purpose only – for bankers to go to pull girls who are only there to pull bankers.
‘Why bankers again?’ I ask Megan, quietly marvelling at the girls’ toned legs and wishing I was still at the age you could eat crap without your body noticing.
‘Because I hate them.’
‘That’s a very healthy reason to be trying to have sex with one.’
‘You don’t get it. That’s precisely why it’s healthy! I have literally no chance of getting psychologically attached to one. And you know how much I like to get psychologically attached to men.’
‘Who you? Really? Oww don’t hit me.’
We inch along towards the hell mouth, while I try to calculate if it’s possible that I could’ve mothered anyone here yet. Maybe I’m still a year or two away, but, regardless, this group of girls are doing nothing for my self-esteem. I twist around to grab a peek at them and their youth oozes out of them. A scent of naivety, optimism, and loads of still-viable eggs lurking in their ovaries. They’re conducting some complicated verbal orchestra – each of them interrupting and hardly listening – as they psychoanalyse an ex-boyfriend’s behaviour.
‘And then I said, look, at our age, it’s normal to want to label it. But he made me feel like I was crazy …’
‘They’ll do that. They’ll do that. How long had you been seeing each other anyway?’
‘Six months …’
‘And he still wouldn’t call you his girlfriend?’
‘He said labelling it ruined it, and he thought I’d be cooler than that.’
‘I’m so confused.’
‘Me too.’
‘Tim was like that, remember? I went to his grandma’s fucking funeral but he still wouldn’t make it official.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Fuck all of them.’
‘You can’t message him tonight.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You will. If you have more than five Jägers, I’m taking charge of your phone …’
‘No, I’ll be fine …’
Megan overhears too and rolls her eyes at me, before digging in her bag for a kirby grip. I twist back to the front, exhausted just from listening. I remember all those conversations. How my girlfriends and I would meet up and no matter how exciting the rest of our lives were, talk mainly about some guy: ‘Why did he do that?’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘No, I do think he loves me, he’s just not making it clear at all with any of his behaviour.’ I remember feeling exhausted even back then, as we collectively squeezed ourselves out of juice trying to convince ourselves men did really like us, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There were so many luxurious excuses we could lather on back then. Like we were young, and of course men don’t want to settle down at this age. We could sort of give them the benefit of the doubt, even though it hurt us and made us worry they wouldn’t get there by the time we needed them to. I remember wishing, just wishing, to be the age I am now, when I assumed all men’s lights would turn on, like taxi cabs that are finally ready to take you home. I imagined that once you were older you’d fly over previous hurdles, because we’d be grown-ups now and now is not the time to piss about any more. But nothing has changed. No one has evolved. Not really. Even my female friends who have managed to catch a husband in their determined butterfly nets whinge about men. Their marriages are more like an elaborate charade to cover the fact they’re essentially just babysitting a resentful, overgrown Man-Child:
‘Brought back all his friends the other night. Insane drunk. They all thought it would be hilarious to take their trousers off. Woke me and Charlie. Found that even more hilarious. I honestly thought he’d grown out of this … It’s his job. A bad influence. If he could just change companies, then I think it would all be fine.’