She started the document on the 55 home at twenty past midnight, one-handed, half-drunk, with her phone at four per cent.
HOW TO LOSE A MAN IN TEN DAYS — working
Subject: B. 33. Advertising. Good coat, resoled shoes, mother's ink stain thing (check this, might be nothing).
Day 0. Met. Talked for two hours and eleven minutes at a gin thing. He is, and I want to note this before I start, genuinely funny — which is going to make this harder and also better, because there is no piece in a man who is boring.
Got his number. He offered it. That is important for the ethics and I would like it on the record for Bronte: I did not ask.
THE PLAN.
Ten days. One offence per day, escalating. Everything in every article ever written about what puts men off, done deliberately, in order, and I write down exactly what happens.
1. The immediate future. Talk about it constantly. Weddings, babies, where we'll live. 2. The pet name. It has to be humiliating and it has to be in public. 3. The mother. Ring her. 4. The shared calendar. 5. Turn up at his work. 6. Cry at something small. 7. The friendship bracelet. With both our names on it. 8. Redecorate something of his without asking. 9. The pet. Get a pet. Together. Non-returnable. 10. The Big One (TBC — Sunny says a tattoo, Sunny is banned from this document).
RULES (Bronte's, non-negotiable): — No names. No faces. Nothing anybody could identify. — He must not find out. — He must not get hurt. If it starts hurting him, it stops.
RULE 4 (mine): — Don't be a cow about it. This isn't a piece about a stupid man. It's a piece about what we're all told, and he's just the one holding the other end.
She read it back at the bus stop.
Then she added, at the bottom, because she was a little drunk and because it was twenty past midnight:
He said advertising is lying professionally and he's honest personally and it's why he hasn't got any friends, and he said it like it was a joke, and it was not a joke, and I have been thinking about it since Bethnal Green.
Delete this line before Bronte sees it.
She did not delete it.
It is still in the document. It is the eleventh line of a file that eventually ran to nineteen thousand words, and when she finally read the whole thing back, at four o'clock in the morning on the worst night of her life, it was the line that undid her.