Page 1 of Hellisay Maybe

Chapter 1

Today was a bad day.

Nothing catastrophic had happened—no earthquakes, no dramatic organ failures, no biblical plagues—but emotionally? Spiritually? Cosmically? Jenn was circling the drain.

It had started, as these things often did, with a legit bucket of shit. Not metaphorical. Actual. She’d stumbled into the bathroom at 5:45 a.m., bleary-eyed but full of naïve optimism about her 6:30 a.m. yoga class, only to find the toilet… full. Overflowing. With what could only be described as the worst collaboration between a kebab, biology, and Satan. A condom bobbed there like a tragic party balloon. The wrapper too. The true pièce de résistance? No attempt whatsoever to flush.

Jenn cleaned it. Of course she did. Because apparently, she was the only person in the flat who had passed Basic Human Decency 101. She’d laminated a sign, for Christ’s sake. Laminated. Like she was running a prison, not renting a boxy Victorian flat with three fully grown adults.

She’d barely finished disinfecting her trauma when she shuffled into the kitchen, clinging to the hope of pre-yoga fruit. Gone. Stolen. Digested, most likely, by the same gremlin who’d committed war crimes in the bathroom. Her banana—initialled with a small, rational ‘J’—was gone too. Probably mockingly. She had drawn faces on them once. That had been a low point.

It wasn’t just about the banana. Or the toilet. Or the stolen yoghurt two Tuesdays ago. It was everything. A slowly mounting avalanche of indignities. Like her job. Or her total lack of life direction. Or the fact that her existence, at thirty-three, felt like a badly written sitcom that hadn’t been renewed for a second season.

Take her career, for instance. Yes, no one loved working—but surely, she deserved some sort of prize for enduring the fresh hell that was cold calling. Her job title? Professional phone nuisance. The woman who interrupted your dinner with: “We hear you were recently involved in a car accident…”

If she was lucky, they’d hang up. If not, she got to enjoy the full rainbow of human rage funnelled directly into her ear canal.

Why did she do it? She didn’t know. Why wasn’t she using her History degree? She didn’t know. Why was she permanently single, living with three flatmates who flushed nothing and stole everything? Big shrug.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. She probably could answer most of those questions. She just… hadn’t. Until now.

Because at 5 p.m. that very same day, she’d been fired. Fired. From cold calling. The turnover at that place was so dire she’d once seen a woman eat a burrito mid-call and get promoted. But apparently, Jenn wasn’t even burrito-level employable.

Which explained why, at 8 p.m., she was now slumped in a sticky booth in Wetherspoons, nursing a glass of warm rosé wine and listening to a grown man sob about his budgie. Who had cancer. No, not a metaphor. His actual budgie. With an actual tumour.

Jenn stared at him. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry or quietly expire. Her wine wasn’t helping. Neither was the migraine-inducing carpet, or the man beside her hiccupping moistly into his sleeve. This was her date.

His profile had said “vegan, sensitive, emotionally available,” and she’d foolishly thought that meant ‘a bit clingy, probably into astrology,’ not this. Not a full-on grief spiral about a dying parakeet over cheap lager.

She was trying to remember how they’d even matched when Budgie Man lurched toward her. Lips damp. Mouth open. A truly ill-timed nature documentary.

“Oh God,” Jenn muttered, jerking back—but not fast enough. There was tongue. There was suction. There was a taste of lukewarm Tennent’s. There was a brief, deeply traumatic, damp eternity before she shoved him away.

“Wasss’matter, Jen-nay?” he slurred, sounding horrifyingly like off-brand Forrest Gump.

“I’m going to be sick,” she croaked, bolting from the booth.

She sprinted to the toilets, shoved herself into a cubicle, and slumped against the wall, phone trembling in her hand, breathing like she’d just finished a marathon. A disgusting, saliva-themed marathon sponsored by Tennent’s.

‘SOS spoons’, she mumbled, typing into her phone with trembling fingers, then hit send.

Vivi, her designated Dating Disaster contact, replied instantly: ‘Be there in 10.’ No questions. No judgment. Just pure, best-friend efficiency.

Jenn closed her eyes.

Okay, Jenn told herself. Just stay put, breathe a little, and try not to collapse. She inhaled through her nose and breathed out through her mouth—yoga breathing, for the win. But the ads on the cubicle door were starting to swirl. The text was getting blurry. Fabulous.

She tried to remember the last time she felt in control of her life. There had to be something—a breadcrumb, a moment, a spark. A time when she wasn’t spiralling from job to job, date to date, flatmate toilet incident to flatmate toilet incident. But nothing came. Maybe this really was rock bottom. Maybe it was her wake-up call.

Maybe—God help her—it was finally time to do something big.

Something terrifying.

Something different.

Chapter 2

Jenn woke up in Vivi’s bed feeling like roadkill, and with the grim certainty that rosé wine was just bad decisions in liquid form.