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you” sound like “Burn in hell, you unfortunate bag of crap.” It was a bad sign that she’d taken over door-answering duties, because it meant without question that she’d been spending every second since The Proposal at Mel’s, rubbishing my good name.
    Julie—whom I referred to in private as Nosferatu, Princess of Darkness, for no other reason than it made me laugh—was Mel’s best friend and my archenemy. The first time I met her I was incredibly nervous, because Mel had told me that if I could pass the Julie Test, then meeting her parents would be a piece of cake. Over poached oysters with iceberg butter sauce at Julie’s house, I watched her mentally ticking off the points against me as I revealed I was a temp (-4), had dropped out of university (-2), was constantly broke (-6), considered amusing people in the back room of a pub was a smart career move (-4) and was doing little to rectify any of my point-minusing situations (-10).
    At the end of the evening it was clear to both me and Mel that I’d failed the Julie Test with a record-breakingly bad score. I remember thinking,
If my performance tonight is anything to go by, Mel’s parents are really going to hate me.
Julie, however, loved Mel just like Thelma loved Louise, although without the lesbian subtext, and so for her sake she tolerated me as if I was a bad habit—like nail-biting or not washing your hands after you’ve used the toilet—that Mel just couldn’t break.
    Julie lived with and was engaged to Mark, whom I quite liked but for the fact I was totally intimidated by his success. He made music videos for hideously famous bands, was always traveling to glamorous places and to top it all was two years younger than me—which galled me immensely. Mark was one of life’s doers. While I’d been drinking cider in the park and chasing girls who didn’t know better, as a teenager he’d been writing and shooting short films on a Super 8 camera. We had no common ground whatsoever. Occasionally when we all went out together he’d try and draw me into a conversation about high-performance sports cars, trekking holidays in China or his latest music video, and every time without fail I’d just look at him vacantly, desperately hoping that at some point he would ask me what was going on in
EastEnders
so that I’d have something to contribute to the conversation.
    Together, Mark and Julie were couple perfection at its Two-newspapers-on-a-Sunday-his-’n’-hers-Birkenstocks-three-foreign-holidays-a-year-and-smug-about-it worst. But there was no escaping them because we “double coupled” all the time, usually at Julie’s insistence. I never understood why she stipulated that we did so many things together. It was as if because she and Mark were a couple they were only allowed to socialize with other couples for fear of catching single-people disease.
    “All right, Jules?” I said chirpily. Julie loathed being called Jules more than anything. “Are you going to let me in or what?”
    Guardedly Julie opened the door to the communal hallway of the house and let me in, but I could tell she was in two minds about whether to do so. “What do
you
want?”
    “I’ve just popped round to hear what you think’s wrong with me this week.”
    “How long have you got?” she snorted, flicking a stray strand of strawberry blonde hair out of her eyes.
    “As long as you want,” I said, grimacing.
    She let me in and we squared up to each other in the hallway like two gunfighters at the O.K. Corral. As I stared deeply into her defiant pale blue eyes, I was reminded of something I’d read once in a magazine. Apparently when two animals hold each other’s direct gaze for longer than a minute, the laws of nature state they will either tear each other to pieces or copulate. The thought of having carnal knowledge of Julie unsettled me so much that I began to smile nervously.
    “Well, for starters,” said Julie, ignoring the grin fixed to my face, “you’re