The Men in her Life

people lived there too. She had been at the bottom of the hierarchy with the smallest room and bathroom-cleaning duties. The other tenants came and went, but Holly stayed, and after a couple of years she had the biggest room along with the responsibility for paying the bills and advertising for new flatmates. As her career progressed, she found she could afford not just the biggest room, but the little one at the back too, which became a kind of cupboard for all the stuff she didn’t want in the big room. And when that filled up, and yet another flatmate moved out to take up a mortgage on yet another dingy one-bedroom flat in Tooting, Holly took over their room too, and so, without really thinking about it, she had the whole flat to herself. Most of the time she liked living on her own; knowing that the grime on the draining-board was her grime and that if there was no toilet paper it was because she hadn’t bought any, but just sometimes, when she put her key in the lock at the end of the day, she longed for someone inside to call out ‘Hi! Had a good day?’ and offer her a glass of terrible white wine.
    Holly dumped her cardboard carrier bags in the middle of her bed and changed out of her blue jeans into the pale orange ones the assistant had called papaya. She pulled a white Gap T-shirt over her head, and clipped a pair of enormous plastic daisies onto her ears. She had bought the earrings on her last trip to Los Angeles , but never worn them because, she realized, with long hair, they had made her look like an overgrown seven-year-old. With short hair and a pair of white plastic sunglasses they looked rather American retro, she decided, doing a hand jive in front of the mirror.
    A quick flick through the TV channels showed that Tony Blair’s car was on its way to Downing Street . She wasn’t sure whether she could hear the sound of crowds cheering outside, or on the television. Holly grabbed a couple of notes from her purse, shoved them into the back pocket of her new jeans, slammed the door behind her and hurtled down the stairs to the courtyard, almost crashing into Simon in her haste.
    ‘You’re home early,’ she said breathlessly, not wanting to stop and chat.
    ‘Is that label meant to be sticking out at the back of your neck?’ he asked.
    ‘No.’ Holly craned her neck as Simon manfully Wrestled with the stubbornly strong plastic filament ^at attached the price tag to her new T-shirt.
    Simon had lived in the courtyard almost as long as oily had, both of them refusing to join the mad rush to buy property that had left almost everyone else in their age range with negative equity and a subsiding house in Willesden or Stoke Newington, or some other area of London that was supposed to be on the point of coming up, but never somehow did. Holly had never wanted to move because she thought you only got that lucky once. A flat right in the centre of town, within spitting distance of the best Chinese restaurants and all the major cinemas, just didn’t happen in London . It happened in New York and in the movies. She sometimes felt she was living in a kind of 1990s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the film after which she had been named. Except that unlike Audrey Hepburn, none of the men she slept with gave her money for the powder-room.
    Simon was the George Peppard character in the film, Simon was the boring guy downstairs (except that Simon lived across the courtyard). Simon was Holly’s sensible, good-looking-in-a-conventional-kind-of-way admirer, who always had a sachet of Resolve to help her with her hangover. Simon had not joined the property-buying lemmings of the Eighties because he had bought a small yacht and he spent most of his weekends sailing. Simon was what Mo would call ‘lovely boyfriend material’.
    ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked.
    ‘ Downing Street !’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The Blairs are about to arrive. I want to be there. I don’t know why exactly. I just want to be part of it…’
    ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Mind if I come along?’
    ‘Of course not,’ Holly told him, wishing there was time for him to change out of his very old Conservative-looking suit and into some New Labour jeans, but there wasn’t.
    ‘You’ve had your hair cut!’ Simon suddenly exclaimed as they strolled across Trafalgar Square , as if he had been trying to figure out what the difference was.
    ‘Like it?’ she asked, pirouetting in front of him.
    ‘It’s very short. But I expect I’ll get used to