Temporary Girlfriend

But, on the off chance that one of them might work unsociable hours, Elyss rang. Nikki was home and sounded so sweet and friendly that Elyss instantly warmed to her. Elyss arranged to go and look at the flat that evening, when the two other residents would be there.

‘How did you get on?’ her mother asked the moment she returned.

‘You know you were sending to auction the furniture you won’t be taking to Devon? Well, can I have some of it?’

That had been over five months ago. She had started work at Howard Butler and Company—and had been quietly appalled at the state of his accounting system. How on earth had he ever been able to muddle through? It was a challenge.

A challenge that kept her very busy as she sorted out accounts unpaid and politely chased up the money, and also paid accounts that Howard Butler’s company owed. She was currently employed on setting up a more efficient system and ensuring it was working smoothly.

As Howard Butler had said, he couldn’t pay her as much as her father had paid her. And what with paying rent, her share of the flat’s outgoings, and running her car, Elyss found it a struggle to last from pay-day to pay-day. It was a comfort to know that Louise, Victoria and Nikki had the same problem.

Where was Nikki? Concern over Nikki’s present unhappiness had been niggling away in the background the whole while. Elyss turned over in her bed to check the time on her bedside digital clock. Grief, it was ten past one! Where was Nikki?

Elyss tried again to sleep, but found her concern for Nikki getting to her. She wondered if Louise and Victoria were awake too and if, like her, they had started to grow anxious about Nikki—the sometimes timid, sometimes funny, scatterbrained, occasionally downright annoying, bag-of-nerves, childlike but most often extremely likeable Nikki.

With sleep nowhere near, Elyss switched on her bedside light and sat up. She wondered about getting up and going to make a warm drink. She could make one for Louise and Victoria too.

Grief! She was getting as dizzy-headed as Nikki. Victoria and Louise were probably fast asleep in dreamland. She stood to risk waking the pair of them if she went clattering around in the kitchen.

She was just about to try again to sleep, when, at last she heard Nikki’s key in the door. Thank goodness for that. She hoped Dave had been kind to her and that there was some good reason for him standing her up. Nikki just didn’t deserve that sort of treatment.

Elyss’s hand went to the lamp—but she did not switch it off. For just then, and in a flurry of agitation—clearly she was too agitated to knock first on Elyss’s door, which was one of the few ‘house’ rules—Nikki hurried in.

‘I saw a line of light under your door. This won’t wait until m-morning!’ Nikki blurted out in a rush, tears streaming from her deeply unhappy pale blue eyes.

‘Oh, Nikki. Nikki, love,’ Elyss cried, hating Dave for doing this to her. ‘Come and sit down.’ She waited until the broken-hearted Nikki had seated herself on the edge of her bed, and then gently probed. ‘What happened? Was Dave...?’

‘I d-didn’t see Dave,’ Nikki wailed. ‘I waited and waited and waited, rang his bell, went and tried to phone him, and then went back and rang his bell again, and waited again. And h-he didn’t come home!’

‘Oh, Nikki, I’m so sorry,’ Elyss tried to soothe.

‘S-so am I,’ Nikki sobbed. ‘I w-was so upset when I drove away from D-Dave’s place. I just wasn’t thinking and—’ She broke off to catch her breath, and with fresh tears spurting, she ended, ‘And, oh, I’m s-so sorry—I cr-crashed your car.’

‘You cr—?’ Elyss didn’t take it in for a second. ‘You crashed my car?’ she checked, somehow unable to believe what she was hearing.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nikki wept. ‘I didn’t mean to. It just...’

‘I should...’ Elyss bit down sharp words. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said firmly, swiftly getting herself together. ‘You’re not hurt?’ she checked; first things first! ‘You haven’t been to hospital or...?’

‘No. No. Not a scratch. H-he put me in a taxi and told the taxi driver to bring me here.’

‘He?’ Elyss questioned, taking it slowly—Nikki could get her wires crossed at the best of times. Now, if Elyss was any judge, Nikki was in shock. She would be as brief as possible and see her into bed.

‘The m-man I crashed into,’ Nikki answered.

Oh, my... ‘You crashed into a man?’ she asked faintly, pinning her hopes on the fact that if he’d been able to organise a taxi for Nikki then he must still be in one piece.

‘Yes. Well, not him particularly. ‘I smacked into the s-side of his car.’

‘But he—this man—he, and any of his passengers, he—they—they’re all right?’

Nikki nodded on a shuddering sob. ‘He was by himself—he didn’t seem hurt. He was a bit short with me to start with actually—called me feather-brained—but then, when he could see I was in a bit of a state, he muttered something that didn’t sound very complimentary about my driving. He looked at your c-car and said s-something to the effect that I wouldn’t be driving that heap again in a hurry, and sent me home.’

Oh, heck—by the sound of it, her car was a write-off. Elyss looked at Nikki, half a dozen questions rushing to be asked. But then she took in how beat, defeated, Nikki looked. Added to that, Nikki was ashen and shaking. So Elyss reckoned that any further questioning could wait until morning.

She took Nikki to her room and advised, ‘Get into bed,’ and, unsure what the treatment was for shock, she added gently, ‘I’ll go and get you a couple of aspirins and a cup of sweet tea.’

‘No thanks. I don’t want anything. I j-just want to die.’

‘Oh, come on, love. It isn’t as bad as that,’ Elyss said bracingly. ‘I’ll go and get you a hot water bottle.’

Nikki was in bed when she got back. Elyss handed her the bottle, told her that she mustn’t worry about a thing—and left her to go and do some worrying of her own.

Her first concern was Nikki, who she could see was extremely troubled. From what Elyss had just observed, Nikki just wasn’t up to anything else going wrong with her world. Another disaster, and it seemed to her that her hare-brained flatmate would be even more emotionally distressed.

Well, Nikki would get no pressure from her. Okay, so Nikki had written off her car. Written off—oh, grief! How was she going to get to work in the morning?

Perhaps Nikki hadn’t exactly wrecked it. Perhaps it just looked that way. And why worry about work in the morning? By the sound of it, she was going to have to spend her morning in arranging to get her vehicle towed away from where Nikki had abandoned it, and in making contact with her insurance company.

For the man Nikki had crashed into to be able to tell the taxi driver where to take her meant that Nikki had obviously exchanged names and addresses. Elyss remembered how, only a couple of months ago, she had written a cheque when her car insurance had become due. Nikki would have been able to tell the other driver the name of her insurance company too, Elyss reflected, looking for good points in the whole of this mess. Because by sheer chance Nikki had had a job interview near to the insurance company. ‘Save yourself a stamp,’ she had chirruped in that sweet way of hers. ‘My interview’s tomorrow; I’ll drop your cheque in as I’m passing.’ Nikki had not got the job.

Elyss’s thoughts stayed with insurance companies, hoping that she hadn’t given herself a problem with hers by allowing Nikki to drive her car. She must check that with Victoria in the morning.

Elyss adjusted her alarm to go off a half-hour earlier in the morning. Perhaps with an early start she might not have to take the whole of the morning off work. She fell asleep pondering. If no one was hurt, was one obliged to report an accident to the police?

Having had less than four hours’ sleep, Elyss did not want to get up when her alarm wakened her. She opened her eyes, remembered—and stifled a groan. Shrugging into her robe, she pattered into the kitchen to find that Nikki was already up.

‘Oh, Elyss, I’m so sorry,’ she apologised fretfully once more, before Elyss could so much as wish her, Good morning.

Nikki had a little more colour in her face now, Elyss was glad to note, but she still had that anxious, haunted look about her. ‘Try not to worry,’ Elyss smiled, while trying hard to keep her own worries down. ‘The insurance companies will settle both claims, and I can travel by bus until—’ She broke off. Nikki had gone ashen again. ‘Wh—?’

‘Oh, Elyss. I really am so sorry,’ Nikki apologised yet again, only this time she put her hand in her dressing gown pocket and handed her an envelope—and started to cry.

‘Don’t cry...’ was as far as Elyss got before glancing down at the envelope; she recognised her own writing. It was the envelope she had addressed to her insurance company a couple of months ago!

A feeling of dread shot through her. Even while part of her brain was denying what Nikki’s tears and the sealed envelope might possibly mean, Elyss began to experience panic.

Quickly she slit open the envelope. At speed she took out its contents. Oh, no! It couldn’t be! But—it was. There, in her hand, along with her letter and details, was the cheque she had written to the insurance company. ‘You didn’t...’ she choked hoarsely.

‘I forgot,’ Nikki agonised, her distress quite desperate.

‘It was only when—in between worrying about Dave and your poor car, but thinking how your c-car insurance would pay for everything—I suddenly realised that I’d never handed the cheque in. I know it’s no excuse, but I put that envelope in a separate compartment in my bag so it wouldn’t get all crumpled. Only, as the hours and minutes ticked by and that job interview got nearer and nearer, I got so jittery—that everything else went out of my head.’

‘And you didn’t think about it afterwards!’ Elyss gasped, belatedly realising she had been remiss herself in not following up when no certificate of motor insurance had come through the post. When it hadn’t arrived she had just assumed it had gone to her old address by mistake and would catch up with her. She supposed she should blame pressure of work, staying late reorganising, for making her forget all about it. But, oh, grief, she had been happily driving around these past two months without motor insurance. Oh, heavens, she was uninsured!

So much for thinking that there must be some clause in her insurance that allowed Nikki to drive her car. Neither of them was insured. Oh, my sainted aunt, to have moved that car so much as an inch on the highway had been a criminal act!

‘Oh, don’t be cross with me! Please don’t be cross with me, Elyss,’ Nikki begged, fresh tears falling. ‘Everything’s going so terribly wrong for me just now.’