Broadsearch - What happened when Arg off TOWIE went missing for a bit.

Arg scrolled through the #dailypussy, blindly feeling inside his Lonsdale satchel for the Pepperami that his mum had packed for the journey.

“Thanks mate!” he called to the driver, throwing a thumbs up as he climbed out of the car and headed towards departures, still scrolling.

Check in desk four, his mum had said as he left the house.

“Desk four desk four desk four deesskk…”he muttered under his breath, as he craned his neck to look towards the other end of the terminal.”..four!”

Arg joined the queue and began scrolling again, favouriting.

“OH MY GOD! It fucking is. I knew it fucking was! Arg! Arg!”

Arg hit the lock button, shoved his phone into his pocket before the girl could see what he was looking at and looked up. She was quite fit. Bit spotty, but great tits.

“Y’alright?” he chuckled.

***
“Fly hiiiiigh and let me go (let me goo-ooo)” Gary Barlow belted out from the diamante encrusted Samsung to an empty kitchen.

Patricia Argent sat bolt up right and looked at the time. It was 6:27.

It was James. Something had happened to James.

Patricia threw the duvet off of her legs and ran down to the kitchen to get her phone, the sudden movement jolting her husband Martin out of a particularly long bout of sleep apnea.

“James! Hello? James? It’s your mum…”

“Patricia, it’s Claire.”

“Oh. Is everything alright?” asked her son’s agent.

“Did James leave on time? Because if he didn’t Patricia, I swear to God... Look, he’s not here and we’re going to miss the flight. It’s embarrassing and, more importantly, it’s unprofessional and if there’s one thing that I’m not, Patricia, it is unprofes-“

“He left hours ago, Claire! I got him up myself. He left!”

***

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t accept your ticket. It’s for a flight departing from Gatwick. This is Stansted.”

“But my mum said desk four! She checked on the internet. Desk four!”

“Yes, sir, this is desk four, but it’s desk four at Gatwick. Your flight is from Stansted.”

Arg’s mouth opened and closed a few times, no sound coming out. He shook his head, dropped his shoulders, and sloped off out of the queue towards a metal bench by WH Smiths.

“…tit” he heard someone in the queue say.

Arg sank down onto the bench and got his phone out of his pocket. Nothing -  he pressed the home button and got nothing but his own darkened reflection. What the…? Of course, the #dailypussy. He’d left the #dailypussy open.

***
“No, I’m sorry Martin, but I can’t be as calm as you. I can’t sit and eat Weatabix whilst our only child is out there,” Patricia swallowed, “missing!”

“We have three children, Patricia,” Martin said as he wiped milk from his chin.

“I meant son. Our only son is out ther- Yes! Hello? Hello. It’s my son, officer, he’s missing. He’s James Argent, off the telly. He’s missing,” she walked out of the kitchen into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

***
“You’re Argie from Geordie Shore! Eh! Babby! He’s Argie from Geordie Shore!”

Babby stood up, straightening his ‘Can-poon’ t-shirt and knocking the table of half-empty pints slightly as he made his way across Stansted’s Whetherspoons towards Whitey.

“Whitey you fackin’ dick head, it’s Towie he’s from! Ain’t ya? You’re Argie from Towie?” Babby quizzed, throwing his arm heavily around Arg’s shoulders. “Come and have a pint with us, Argie! Get ‘em in, Argie! Come and sit with the lads, mate. We’ll all have a pint and you can tell us about throwin’ won up Gemma!”

The group of men cheered, some of them leaning their chairs back onto two legs and slapping the table.

“Argie’s one of the lads! He’s one of the lads!”

Arg looked down to the sticky surface of the bar and smiled.

***

***

“It’s just, it’s the bow ties, officer. He wouldn’t have gone to Mallorca without them. He went to Norwich last week and took seven,” Patricia explained, opening her son’s bow tie drawer, her hand hovering over them. Don’t touch them, she thought, they might need them for evidence.

It was clear to DI Alan that the young man in question was very fond of wearing a bow tie. There was no doubt about that.

As he’d stood in the Argent’s hallway, waiting for the lad’s mother to make the tea, he’d looked around at the photos on the walls. They were all of James. One was of a young James, aged around 8, crooning into an old fashioned Mike whilst his parents acted as backing singers. Another looked like an iconic Rat Pack shot, but with a twelve, he guessed, year old James posing as each member. Others were of an older James and were more moody; the kind of headshots that you see in gents hairdressers in Walsall.

James, regardless of age, was wearing a bow tie in all of them.

“We can’t…” DI Alan lightly scratched his forehead and exhaled, “Mrs Argent, we can’t build the case on bow ti-“

The officer looked at the saw the woman’s lip tremble and coughed.

“We’ll make some calls and get your son home safe, Mrs Argent.”

***

DC Andrews changed gear and looked quickly at her boss as she drove them away from the Argent’s home.

“We’re not really going to have to do this, are we, guv? Investigate this?”

“I hope not, Rachael. I really fucking hope not,” DI Alan scratched his forehead. “It’s the end for both of us if we do.”

***
“Argie bhaji! Argie! Bhaji!” The lads chanted as Arg held the onion ball to his mouth and posed for a photo.

Once they’d put their phones down he bit into it. It was one of those reheated ones from Sainsburys. The ones that are always cold in the middle, no matter how long they’re in the oven for. The ones that suck all of the moisture out of your mouth.

Whitey staggered back towards the group. “According to the bird on the desk, we ain’t goin’ no where ‘til tomorrow morning, lads. No where til ‘morrow,” he burped.

“Fackin’ ‘ell’” the group took turns to sigh.

“We gonna kip here then?”

“Nah, mate. I’m headin’ ho-home. Come back in the morning, I think. Thas the best thing to do, innit?”

“You wan’ a lift Arg?”

***

The sound of the key in the lock. When it she heard it for the second time, Patricia knew her son was home. James always got confused between the back door key and the front door key, despite the smiley face key cover that she’d put on the front door key to help him remember.

James stepped through the door, slipping his shoes off using his toes and setting down the bag of Fridge Raiders Roast Chicken Bites that he was eating in the bowl of potpourri.

***

“But your bow ties, James! You left all of your bow ties!”

“I was trying something new, Mum! I wanted to try polos again, with the collar buttoned up. Like Dan wears.”

“But James, you look lovely in bow ties! It’s what they used to wear! I thought you wanted it to be your thing, you were going to make them trendy!”

“I just wanted to try something new! I don’t wanna be the joke anymore, Mum! I’m just a joke. To everyone. To Lyds. To the boys. To everyone!“

“Ok, ok, calm down. We can get you some polos tomorrow, it’s alright,” she said, stretching her arms around his shoulders and kissing the top of his head. “But James?”

“What?”

“Don’t do bandanas, ok?” Patricia said into her son’s hair. “Not like Charlie, alright James? Not like Charlie.”

Depression made me a great liar.

I am a great liar. I know, it's not a particularly endearing character trait, but I try to only whip it out for small scale jobs, like pretending to door-to-door salesmen that I'm only 17 or offering a detailed description of a nightmare train journey to my boss as the reason why I'm late, rather than saying that I couldn't get my eye-liner right.

I feel like I really honed my skill, really crafted it into something spectacular, when I was depressed. I told a lot of lies when I was depressed. I would have made a great protagonist in a lesson-teaching children's book. Apart from the whole feeling like I had nothing to live for thing. That probably wouldn't have been so great for the kids.

You tell a lot of lies when you're depressed. You sort of have to in order to try and maintain some pretence of being totally normal and just like any other 22 year old who is having the best time of their life, doing stuff that is totally random and going to club nights called Chirpse.

There's the biggie, obviously; the “I'm fine” lie, but this is almost always a bit of a lie for most of us anyway, isn't it? I'm talking about the kind of lies that, if they weren't being said, would've left room for me to tell someone, or at least to suggest, that things weren't going great in the ol' noggin.
Some of those lies were as follows-

Also, I'm playing pretty fast and loose with the tenses here. Stick with it.

“Yep, totally up for that. I'll be there.”
Yeah, I won't be there. In fact, as I'm saying “I'll be there”, I'm actually mentally drafting my apologetic, exclamation mark laden get-out text.
It's nothing personal. I want to be there, desperately; drinking warm, cheap white wine, doing that thing where you flip a beer mat off the side of the table and try to catch it, finding out who went back to a girl's house and pissed himself in her bed, all of that stuff.
However, I also can't think of anywhere I want to be less. I'm exhausted, despite sleeping or being horizontal whenever I'm not being paid to be sitting upright at work. I have fuck all to say. I've literally done nothing for the last two months. I'm not armed with hilarious anecdotes or amazing career news. Actually, if you ask me about my job then I will cry, because I am shit at it. Also, I feel like the most hideous person alive and the idea of people looking at me makes me feel sick.
I don't want to go because I feel so lonely and I feel so lonely because I don't want go to things like this. Depression is full of fun emotional palindromes like that.

“Sent out loads of CVs. I actually have a phone interview tomorrow.”
I eventually quit my job because I was depressed. It was a terrible job, for terrible people, so it was never going to make feel tippety-top, but combined with my own sense of inadequacy and incapability of doing anything well, it was a fucking nightmare.
I'd told myself that if I could find a way out of my job, then I would be myself again; the job was the problem, a bit like how when you eat something dodge you feel gross until you vom and then you feel fine. I needed to vom up my job.
I did vom and for about five days I felt better. I got  some sleep, I went shopping at two in the afternoon, I had a cream tea in a garden centre with my grandparents; it was nice. But then people (my mum) started asking what I was going to do next, job wise and I realised that I didn't really see much point in finding a career path that I could follow throughout my life, because I wasn't sure if I really wanted to be around for my life.
No one else needed to know that though (they did, they really did), so when quizzed by my mum when she returned from work to find me looking suspiciously unwashed, I would say “Yeah, I've sent out a few CV s, I've actually got a phone interview tomorrow.”
For about 3 months, I had a lot of phone interviews. Turns out, I'm shit at phone interviews.

“Just had a quiet one, really.”
Usually said in response to a co-worker asking me how my weekend was and not technically a lie, as such, more a deliberately misleading statement, perhaps?
A 'quiet weekend' usually implies things like watching The Graham Norton Show, sorting out your iTunes, drinking Rekorderlig, going to a Toby Carvery etc. It does not imply that I walked into my room on  Friday evening, stripped off and crawled into bed, only to drag myself out again at 9pm on Sunday when I would scurry to the bathroom and attempt to repair what wearing Friday's make up for 60 hours had done to my face.
My weekend was my bed. I actually got sore elbows from being in bed so much, how fucking awful is that?

I would be very careful not to move too much, in order to trick my flatmate into thinking that I left the flat really early and got back really late because I was out having the best time ever. I carefully timed my bathroom trips so that we didn't bump into each other in the hallway. This wasn't difficult, my bathroom trips were rare; I regularly used to give myself blinding dehydration headaches because I couldn't face leaving my room and I didn't think that 'myself' was worth getting a glass of water for.
My weekend was so quiet that I became painfully dehydrated.


I eventually reached my quota on lies. I officially ran out when I went to get my contraceptive pill prescription renewed and my GP asked if I was heading back to work after the appointment, a question to which I initially responded to by making the sound that a balloon makes when you scratch it.

So yes, depression made me a liar. It's also managed, somehow, to make me a bit more honest, I think.

I don't mean honest in a nice way, necessarily. I mean, if a cashier gives me too much change I still exit the shop quickly and don't look back. I also don't mean honest in “I just speak my mind and I don't give a shit” reality TV contestant way either. I don't always speak my mind and I do give a shit.

In fact, it's only really made me honest about depression.

Or at least want to be honest about it.

Depression is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but one thing it is not is stock photos of women wearing grey marl and looking tearful, whilst wiping their bright eyes and unblemished faces with a really pointy tissue.

Trust me.