The Girlfriend

  It begins with a takeaway.  The food itself is of no real importance, but on the evening that Paul decides not to cook dinner, a certain chain of events is set in motion.  There is the walk down the road to the Chinese, there is the smile and hello from the tiny lady behind the counter, and then there are the five most depressing words in the English language: “Set meal for one, please.”

  Paul is certain the pint-sized proprietress has a certain smug, knowing look in her eye as she hands over the plastic bag and takes his money.  Those five lonely words form a circle around his heart during the walk back to his flat, squeezing the breath out of him.  A dead screen is the only thing that greets him when he opens the door, and he eats his chop suey straight from the container in front of Eastenders. 

  Half an hour of cockney melodrama plays out, and Paul doesn't recognise a single authentic moment.  Where in this monster of a capital is there a single street, let alone a whole community, where neighbours know each other by name?  Oh, London; Paul can't help wondering if anybody else but him can manage to feel so utterly alone whilst sharing the same polluted air and tube system as seven million other people.

  There's nothing on, so Paul switches the telly off.  After a while, with nothing to keep him company other than the sound of his actress neighbour loudly reciting lines through the paper-thin ceiling, he decides to go to bed.  For an indeterminate time he stares at the ceiling and considers getting a cat, but the thought is perhaps as equally melancholy as the set meal for one.  Having a Gizmo or Tibbles around would be making too much of a statement, like giving up on human contact all together.  And Paul is still holding onto a sliver of hope that he will end up with a companion of the female variety, and not the feline.

  The next day is a Tuesday, and that evening, the second domino in Paul's series of events begins to topple.  After an impossibly long day of fielding abusive phone calls at the centre, Paul meets his friends for a much needed drink.  Paul's immediate friends consist of two couples; Lee and Tara, and Shaun and Daisy. Happy, good looking people – Paul does sometimes have trouble remembering why they're mates with him, or vice versa.  The subject of tonight's conversation is his seemingly perpetual singleness. 

  “You don't know how lucky you are,” Daisy tells him.  “I mean, you've got your flat, and all to yourself, no less!  Do you have any idea how hard it is, trying to find a starter home?”

  “It's hell,” Shaun agrees, “having to stay with my parents until we get a place of our own that we can afford.  If it ever happens...”

  “Tell me about it,” Lee cuts in.  “Tara and me had to live apart for months until we found somewhere, didn't we babes.”

  “It was awful,” Tara nods and snuggles even further into the crook of Lee's arm.  “Although, it made the flat's christening even more fun...”

  Paul amuses himself with a fantasy of what it would be like to drown in his lager at this particular moment. 

  “Still,” Shaun grins at Paul, “it'll be a good stretch before you need to start worrying about all that, ey!”  He says it in a way that is probably supposed to sound pally, but it just sounds obscenely cruel, and Paul has had enough of this hard-edged friendship lately. 

  “Shows what you know,” he mutters.

  “What was that, sweetheart?”  Daisy leans forward.

  “Actually,” he finds himself saying, “I'm seeing somebody.”  The moment the lie leaves his lips, he knows he has made a huge mistake.  There's no taking this back, no laughing it off, not with this crowd.  Oh dear.

  “Really?”  Tara's ears almost visibly prick up at this new information.  “Well Paulie!  Since when?  What's her name?  How come you didn't tell us?”

  “We've not known each other long,” Paul says.  He can feel his face reddening; he's never been much of a liar.  “Her name's, er, Caroline.  I met her the other week, she works in a shop...”  He silences himself with a swig from his beer, before any other hastily made-up facts can come spilling out.

  “Look at him, he's blushing!”  Daisy squeals, eyes wide with surprise and pleasure.  “That is so bloody sweet, Paulie!”

  And so Paul's imaginary girlfriend is born.  Daisy and Tara try to elicit more information from him, but he feigns shyness and says there's not much to tell.

  “We've only been out a few times,” he says.  “I don't want to jinx things.”  After that, the subject is deemed closed, for tonight at least...

  * * *

  Naively enough, Paul thinks that his little fabrication will go mostly unnoticed.  A few nights later, he gets a phone call that blows this assumption out of the proverbial water.  It's from his mother.

  “So when are we meeting her?”  She asks, before he can even say 'hello'. 

  “Pardon?”  Paul hasn't seen his friends in a few days and the newly christened Caroline had slipped his mind entirely.

  “Your brother was out in town the other night with Sheryl, and he ran into one of your friends... what's his name.  The builder, you know, the one who I said has a look of Wayne Rooney...”

  “Lee.”

  “That's right.  Well anyway, this mate of yours, he tells your brother that you've gone and found yourself a girlfriend!  What, you didn't think to tell your own mother?” 

  The guilt hits him before he even has a chance to remember that the new girlfriend is nonexistent.

  “Sorry Mum,” he begins, “it's just that...”

  “Oh I know,” she cuts in, “why bother telling me anything?  I only gave birth to you, for Christ's sake – how selfish of me then, to ask for a phone call every now and then, to be curious about what you're up to!”

  If it were his brother who'd got a new girlfriend, it wouldn't be news at all.  Jason's been falling in and out of love regularly since he hit puberty, and every other Sunday the family would meet his newest soulmate over roast beef and yorkshire puddings.  Paul, on the other hand, has been single since Rosamund left him last year.  And before she came along, he'd been on his own for pretty much his whole life.

  Paul hangs up after making some vague promise to bring Caroline “round for supper one night”, and then drinks his cold tea, wondering what on earth he's got himself into.

* * *

  It turns out having an imaginary partner isn't the worst thing in the world.  Whenever Paul talks to his friends, conversation seems to flow more freely.  Their words aren't weighed down with thinly veiled pity, and his aren't forced; suddenly they have common ground.  He's unwittingly become a member of the couples club.

  Little by little, Caroline works her way into the group psyche.  Despite having never met her, Daisy and Tara remain convinced that she's a complete sweetheart and, when she's eventually free for a night out, they're all going to get on like a house on fire.  The warmth that Caroline generates astounds Paul, and so he abandons his original plan to tell people that after a few more dates, he and she had parted ways.

  Instead, he nips into H&M on his lunch break and buys a top with flowers on it, to drape over the radiator in his flat.  “Caroline stayed the night”, he'll say when the lads come over to watch the footie.  “She leaves her stuff everywhere.”  Over the next week or so, his bathroom gains an extra (unused) toothbrush, a pink razor, some rapidly purchased tampons and various bottles of shampoo and conditioner that all claim to do amazing things, but Paul buys them because they smell quite nice, and he thinks that Caro is the kind of girl who likes her hair to be fresh and fragrant all the time.

  There's a certain element of fun to the whole thing; that freedom to imbue your girlfriend with any attributes you want.  “Caro spent six months doing volunteer work in Paraguay,” he says to Shaun one day on the spur of the moment (they'd been talking about Comic Relief).  “She's a real humanitarian, must come from her dad being a vicar.”  Of course there is also the task of tempering these fantastical qualities with some realism – after all, Caroline is a shop girl first and foremost.  She can be special, but not too much so; nobody should start to question what such an adventurous young woman is doing with a man like Paul. Or, heaven forbid, insist on meeting this famous girlfriend.

  “This girl's done wonders for you,” Shaun tells him one night when they've both had a few.  “But let's be honest... anything would have been an improvement on the other one.”  By the other one, he means Rosamund.

    Rosamund Stark.  There was a rose in there somewhere, but after two years Paul had found himself covered in cuts from the thorns and she was gone.  Funnily enough, it was her decision to leave him: he would have gladly kept throwing himself on the double edged sword of her love, despite her solely intellectual disposition which was lukewarm at its best, and rarely affectionate.

  Their mutually bookish natures had been what first drew them together, but while Paul was happy to put Sartre aside and go to the pub, Rosamund was only ever content when discussing the ins and outs of existentialism or postmodernist theory – if not with Paul, then with her cleverer, snobbier friends.  In the end it had been one of those brainy bastards that had stolen Rosamund from him, although Paul does his best to remember that she had never really been his to begin with; her scholastic pursuits were driven by a hugely independent streak.  No man would ever have Rosamund, not completely.

  And of course all men want what they can't have, Paul is more aware of this than most.  There are lots of things he knows he can never have.  Paul knows that he could never connect with the perfect woman, for instance; his life runs on too much of a budget railway for that to ever happen.  Hence, Caroline.  His dream girl, brought to life, if only in his imagination and the minds of others.  Is it so odd, for him to feel a vague sense of pride when Daisy says “Caroline sounds nice”?

  His friends love Caroline; the fact that they've never met her hardly seems to matter anymore.  They're happy for him and Paul basks in it, forgetting how it feels to be the one on the outside looking in.  And so he goes to bed, and gets the best night's sleep he's had in ages, blissfully unaware that somebody very close knows his little secret.

* * *

  Of course the girlfriend is a figment.  Jenny has just heard her neighbour rather loudly telling his mates how they've missed Caroline by minutes, she was just here, they'd watched Never Mind The Buzzcocks together before she went back to her mum's for the night.  But Jenny has been in all night learning her audition piece, and no noise has come from the flat downstairs.  Not from its occupant, not from the Buzzcocks, and certainly not from any young woman. 

  This isn't the first time she's overheard strands of Paul's life through the building's shoddy floors and partitions.  Ever since she moved in a few months ago, she's become used to hearing his comings and goings, probably much the same as he has hers.  And from this she knows that he leads a solitary existence, visited only ever by friends.  Jenny doesn't exactly lie on the floor with a tumbler to her ear, but she has never caught the sound of moans at midnight, or the innocent clinks and mutterings of two people sharing breakfast.

  Not that she can say much about Paul's lack of companionship, having become more than a bit of a loner herself since she decided to devote more time to her “craft”.  Now the word sounds ridiculous, an attempt to dress up her thirst for fame, or so other people say.  Jenny has never craved attention, but then for years she never went without it.  How many pretty blonde schoolgirls whine for want of admirers?  Not many, as Jenny recalls.  But school was a long time ago, and the number of nights spent alone has grown of late.

  If she were in touch with her family more, or if she had friends popping round all the time, would she feel the urge to feign happiness?  To hastily throw a man together out of nothing but air and longing, a simulacrum to be paraded around for guests and then put back into his box.  She likes to think she has more integrity than that, but who knows. 

  She's only ever met Paul once.  They crossed on the stairs shortly after she moved in and there'd been a slightly awkward introduction.  She had nearly laughed at the look on his face when she said “I'm an actress.”  It was like she'd sworn at him.  Obviously a narrow-minded guy, she'd thought at the time.  Someone with no imagination.  She knows better now, of course.

  That first meeting was months ago.  There's a small pile of junk mail addressed to Paul on Jenny's kitchen table; for weeks she couldn't be bothered to take it down to him, and she knew it wouldn't really matter because nobody misses their junk mail.  Now curiosity has got the better of her, and she is running down the thinly carpeted stairs two at a time, knocking on his door, and standing in front of him with a bunch of supermarket leaflets in her hand and no idea what to say.

  “Hi Jenny,” he says, smiling politely.  She feels slightly flattered that he remembers her name when she'd struggled to put a face to his when it fell through her letterbox.

  “Hi, Paul...”  She thrusts the leaflets at him.  “Just some post for you.  Crap, most of it, but I thought you'd want it anyway.”

  “Thanks,” he takes it from her and looks like he's about to say something else, then stops himself. 

  “Right, well... Best be going,” she says, and starts to turn away when he goes;

  “Wait?”

  She turns back.

  “You're an actress, aren't you...”  It's not a question, but she nods anyway.  “It's just that...”

  “Yes?”

  “I've just been wondering,” he says, but then stops again.  “No, never mind.”

  “Go on, Paul,” she smiles in what she hopes is an encouraging way.  He's not unattractive, she thinks.  Nowhere near as pale and grey-looking as he'd been the first time she met him.  Skinny, though.

  “Well I was thinking I might have some work I could put your way,” he says.

  “Really? That would be fantastic,” Jenny plasters on the grateful grin that she reserves for people who think they're helping when they volunteer her to be a clown's assistant at their niece's birthday party.  “What kind of work?”

  “It's a bit... unconventional,” Paul says, and Jenny's thoughts instantly veer towards the worrying and the seedy.  “It's just that I've been seeing this girl, Caroline, and it hasn't really worked out, but my friends are so in love with the idea of meeting her that I can't face telling them she dumped me.  And I know it's a long shot, but I was thinking-”

  “That I could play along?”  The puzzle pieces finally fit together in Jenny's mind and she nearly faints from the sheer incredulity of it all.  “You want me to be Caroline?”

  Paul's cheeks redden.

  “It doesn't matter,” he says, already retreating back into his flat, “forget I said anything.”

  “I'll do it,” Jenny says, and nobody is more shocked than her.

* * *

  It will consist of a night out with his friends, all of whom have heard lots about the famous Caroline.  Paul will pay for everything, naturally, and there was some talk of a sum at the end for her efforts.  The exact maths of it all escape her, and Jenny wonders how a person would go about calculating their fees for such an engagement; after all, this is hardly her chosen sphere.  So she decides to do a little research, ask one or two of her more worldly acquaintances, and this is what she discovers:

  Prostitutes call it “the girlfriend experience”.  It's hugely popular, Jenny learns, much more so than the worrying fetishes one might instantly associate with the oldest profession.  Some men like to shrug off their lonely reality for an hour or two, and pretend that they are a lucky man with a gorgeous wife, girlfriend, fiancée, whatever.  To Jenny, in a certain light, it doesn't seem seedy at all – charitable perhaps, worthy even.  What could be kinder than to grant short reprieve from an empty life, to give solace.  The more she thinks about it, the more ordinary the idea becomes.  Her cousin is a Samaritan, and he does basically the same thing over the phone (minus the fee, of course).

  It's also a fantastic opportunity to hone her craft.  This is how she rationalizes it to herself when she first agrees, but truthfully she is doing it because Paul fascinates her.  He hasn't yet admitted that Caroline is fictional, is still keeping up the pretense of her having dumped him – Jenny has never met a more dedicated liar.  But she's willing to leave that be for now and play along, because her self-esteem has been given the kiss of life; Paul asked her to play his dream girl.  Jenny can't think of a bigger challenge or compliment for a woman, regardless of being an actress.

  So it's a win-win situation; Jenny gets the role of her career so far and Paul gets to continue evading his loneliness, just like any other man seeking the girlfriend experience.  (The thought that Jenny keeps quiet, even from herself, is that she knows exactly how these lonely, lonely men feel.)

* * *

  It's Opening Night, so to speak, and Jenny is so nervous she feels she might throw up.  Paul picks her up at eight (how dashing of him, coming up one flight of stairs) and they get a taxi to the bar where they're meeting his friends.  Jenny recites their names under her breath; Daisy and Shaun, Tara and Lee.  Wait, is that the right way around?  Or does Daisy go out with Lee...  It was like this at school when they did A Midsummer Night's Dream; Lysander this, Hermia that, and all that wife swapping – how's a girl supposed to get her dramatis personae straight?

  Paul gets a text shortly before they arrive that lets them know his friends are already there, sat in a booth near the back of the room.  They should get drinks and then join them.  They enter the bar at the same time as another two dozen people, and end up queuing.

  “I'll have a double vodka and orange,” Jenny says when the harassed looking bartender is finally free.

  “She'll have a white wine spritzer,” Paul interjects.  The barman freezes with his hand halfway to the vodka bottle.

  “Excuse me?”  Jenny turns to him, eyebrows raised.

  “Caro always drinks white wine and lemonade,” he explains quietly, apologetically, obviously embarrassed for butting in like an arse, “it's just something I said to them.  You know what, never mind, they probably won't remember – .vodka's fine, mate,” he adds to the barman.

  “No,” Jenny raises her hand to stop him.  “I want to be as authentic as possible.  Make it a medium white,” she flashes the poor barman another smile.  What must he be thinking about us two, she wonders, before realising she doesn't care.  After all, she isn't Jenny tonight.

  She'd read the three pages Paul had given her, packed with tiny, meticulous facts about Caroline, and tried to commit as much of it as possible to heart.  On paper, Caroline sounded nice: generous, loving, intelligent, optimistic.  Things that Jenny could never be accused of. 

  The foursome that make up Paul's friends greet them warmly and Jenny is enveloped in an intimidating hug by the two girls.  As soon as they all sit down with their drinks, she feels her nerves evaporate; this is it, the performance rush.  Daisy and Tara inundate her with friendly questions, and she slips into the role of Caroline like a silk robe.  But as welcoming as Paul's friends are, there is no mistaking their status as a group of four, made from two couples.  Jenny can't imagine Paul ever having a place here. 

  Her unpleasant feeling about the foursome grows when Tara makes a supposedly in-jest remark.  “I've got to say, Caro, we're relieved.  Being good enough to take on our Paul, we just began to assume you had a white stick and a dog!”

  Jenny barks out a laugh, and accidentally on purpose sloshes half of her drink onto Tara's ugly top.  The lads are already pissed enough to think this is hilarious.  Paul chuckles as well, just about.  Jenny makes a show of putting her hand over his over the table.

  “Well you know what they say,” she raises her now almost empty wineglass to his pint and leans into him; “love is blind.”

  She hopes that she isn't overdoing it.  You're not doing Panto In The Park anymore, she reminds herself.  Nuance, Jenny, nuance. 

  Paul's little slip at the bar has made her think how much time he must have put into building this character, bit by bit.  She met a playwright once who could tell you the preferred taste in food, drink and film of all his characters, even those he'd created ten years before.  It had impressed her at the time, he had impressed her.  Well, before he got a bit frisky.  Jenny doesn't think there's any danger of that tonight; Paul isn't desperate for sex.  Just sitting next to him, she can feel his body language opening up, his smile widening.  This is a man who thrives around people.  Not when he's getting attention, but when people really see him.

* * *

  The girlfriend is a hit.  The foursome all hug her goodnight and tell Paul how well he's done for himself, then clamber into their respective cabs.  Paul and his companion do the same.

  Later, when they are back in their building and he is making coffee, Jenny confesses to knowing the truth about Caroline.  He had expected to be embarrassed when this eventually came out, but what he feels is relief.  At this point, neither of them thinks that it would really change much if she was ever real or not.

  “Have you ever had a relationship with a real woman?”  It sounds cruel when she asks it, but it comes from genuine curiosity.  Paul can't remember the last time somebody wanted to know about him.  He almost wonders aloud if Rosamund counts as a real woman, and he utters her name without realising it.  Jenny's eyes light up like candles; what a novelty, they both say to themselves.  A living, breathing ex-girlfriend.

  “Tell me about her,” she says, leaning forward.

  And he does tell her.  How she'd always acted cleverer than him even though they both had similar degrees, how she'd only ever acted as if their relationship was temporary, until something better came along.  And how despite this, Paul had felt lost without her when she left.  Mostly, he just stayed indoors, playing Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U, wanking and crying (although he leaves that part out of the conversation).

  Jenny thinks she understands; she went through a phase in her teens when any nightmare of a boyfriend had seemed better than no boyfriend at all.  She learned her lesson there, though.  And she doesn't need to know much about the vicious Rosamund to gather that Paul has probably learned his, too.

  The two mugs of coffee in front of them have gone cold, and Jenny doesn't particularly want another one.  It's nearly midnight; on any other evening she would have been in bed long before now.  She stands up and heads for the front door, looking upwards as she goes.  Her life is waiting for her upstairs, through a thin layer of plaster and some dodgy beams.  The girlfriend experience is over and done with.

  “Leave the money,” she says, “tonight was fun.  I enjoyed being her.”

  “Well, thank you again.  You don't know what you've done for me.”  Jenny has a fairly good idea.

  “No worries.  Just let me know when you're ready for our second date.”

  “Second?”

  “Daisy mentioned that your family are desperate to meet me.  Her.”

  “Oh, right...”

  They both smile shyly.  Jenny suddenly doesn't want to go upstairs anymore.  This could be the role of a lifetime, of her lifetime.  She imagines what it would be like to fall into character and never come back out.  The thought is incredibly appealing.

  “Well, it's late,” she says, taking the tiniest step backward.  “We should be getting to bed.” 

  Paul shows his agreement by closing the distance between them and she is already reaching out to clasp her arms around his back.  The kiss is clumsy, and who can blame either of them?  It's been an age.  It is clumsy, but it is also warm, and not too soppy, and definitely not imaginary.  Paul murmurs her name into her neck, and she ever so slightly shakes her head.

  “Call me Caroline,” she says.