HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU
MHAIRI MCFARLANE

Copyright

Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2013

Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007488063

Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007488049

Version: 2016-11-30

For Helen

A school friend who’s more like a sister

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
Rise Park Comprehensive, East London, 1997
The last day of term

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Mr Elton John!’

Gavin Jukes, in huge pipe-cleaner spectacles and a duck costume, strode out to deafening cheers. Well, strode out as well you can in canary yellow foam feet: a jaunty waddle. He sat down at the keyboard – with some difficulty due to the padded tail – and started bashing noiselessly at a keyboard, carolling along with ‘Are You Ready For Love’.

Standing in the stage wings, Aureliana adjusted the sash on her 1970s peach polyester maternity gown with knife-pleat skirt, and touched a hand to her hair-sprayed bouffant.

She took a deep, shaky breath, inhaling that school sports hall odour of tennis shoe rubber, Impulse body spray and ripe adolescent hormones.

The leavers’ Mock Rock was a simple but wildly successful formula: dress up as a pop star, the sillier the outfit the better, and mime along to an old hit.

And thank God, the crowd loved Gavin.

According to all witless graffiti that tackled the topic of Gavin Jukes, he was ‘a massive gayer’. And yet he’d fearlessly chosen to impersonate a flamboyant homosexual singer, to this rapturous reception?

Perhaps Aureliana Alessi, the weirdo who ate whiffy lasagne in Tupperware for lunch instead of Mighty White sandwiches, might also finally be laughed with, rather than at.

It was as if school had been a pantomime, with everyone merely playing roles, and villains and heroes alike came on to take their bows together at the end.

Even Lindsay and Cara, Aureliana’s most committed antagonists, dressed in minis and platform boots as Agnetha and Anni-Frid from ABBA, had studiously left her alone today.

Their coven members were swigging contraband ‘Minkoff’ brand vodka from bottles of Happy Shopper cola and watching her with their heavily Rimmelled eyes, but keeping their distance. Aureliana wouldn’t have minded a nip of something herself.

Maybe the Mock Rock magic came from the fact that popular older kids were already like rock stars to the younger. Apart from James Fraser. He was like a rock star to everyone. Aureliana glanced over at him and told herself again that this would be fine because she’d be on stage with James Fraser.

James Fraser. The mere music of saying his name made her stomach lining dissolve.

She’d been skiving PE in the library a week ago, re-reading a Sweet Valley High book, when he’d approached her.

‘Hi Aureliana. Aren’t you meant to be in PE?’

It was the most extraordinary moment.

James Fraser, God of Rise Park, was for the first time speaking to her. To her.

He knew her name. Not just the ‘Italian Galleon’ or ‘Pavagrotty’ ones.

He knew her timetable?

He smiled a lazy smile. Aureliana had never seen him this close up before.

It was like meeting your idol – all those hours spent obsessing over their every detail and suddenly confronted with them in the walking, talking flesh. And what flesh. That incredible white lit-from-within skin, like a church candle flame burning low and glowing through the wax. The oil-spill shiny black hair and the purple-blue eyes.

She’d actually tried to draw him in her Forever Friends diary once, using felt tips. It didn’t work, he ended up a ringer for Shakin’ Stevens. She reverted back to the usual hearts and flowers doodles, and the legend ‘AA 4 JF 4EVA’.

‘Don’t blame you. PE’s such crap.’

Aureliana made a sort of disbelieving honk noise and nodded vigorously. Sporty James secretly hated PE too?! This was proof. They were meant to be.

‘I was wondering, the Mock Rock. I thought doing Freddie Mercury and the opera singer could be funny? A duet, me and you? Fancy it?’

Aureliana nodded. He’d used the phrase ‘me and you’. Fantasies had become reality. Right then he could’ve said I’m planning on jumping out of that window. Doesn’t look a long way down, me and you, fancy it? and she’d have followed.

It was only in the days after that she pondered the wisdom of going on stage as one of Rise Park’s most fat, foreign and bullied, next to its sex god pin-up. What if all the worst bitches crucified her for it? But, she’d reasoned she’d never see any of them again after today, and they wouldn’t wreck James Fraser’s big moment.

She thought James might want to rehearse but he’d never suggested it, and she didn’t want to look pushy. He knew what he was doing, he always did.

Perhaps they should’ve conferred on wardrobe though. Aureliana thought the deal was that they went all out. She’d backcombed her hair into something approximating a soprano’s coif and plastered her face with pan stick. James, from what she could see, had only drawn on a cad’s pencil moustache. But then she didn’t know what she expected – he was unlikely to do a frontless leotard and stick-on chest wig.

Gavin was taking his bows. Oh, God. This was it. Here goes. James ambled over to her side and she’d never felt more important or special.

The Mock Rock’s MC, Mr Towers, cued the music. Dry ice gushed out with a soft hiss, and the opening bars of the ‘Barcelona’ track swelled.

They walked onto the stage to deafening cheers and applause. Aureliana gazed at the gallery of delighted faces, getting an exhilarating glimpse into what it was like to be James Fraser. To feel that much excitement and goodwill reflected back at the very sight of you.

She turned to him, to exchange a nervous grin of solidarity before the singing started, but James was giving her a funny smirk and backing away into the wings again.

It was a green Praline Triangle that got her first, glancing off her cheek and arcing onto the stage floor. She felt a small pain in her stomach as another missile hit its target, like a rubber band being snapped against her body. A purple one with the hazelnut sailed past her head and she ducked out of the way, only to catch a toffee penny on the chin.

And then came a hurricane of Quality Street, as the air filled with a blizzard of shiny, multi-coloured shrapnel. Mr Towers turned the music off and started shouting to try to restore order, but all in vain.

Aureliana looked over in desperation at James. He was bent nearly double with laughter. His friend Laurence had one arm slung round his best mate’s head, the other arm busy with a fist-pumping triumphal gesture.

Lindsay and Cara had tears of mirth streaming down their maquillaged faces, holding on to each other for support.

It took a moment for Aureliana to accept what was happening.

That this had been planned from the start. That someone had gone to the trouble of buying dozens of those big tins of sweets and handed them round the audience. That they had been given a cue to start lobbing them, and for everyone else, this was the extra helping of mock in the grand finale.

Slowly, it dawned on her that her crush might not have been as secret as she thought. This she found even more humiliating than being at the centre of the confectionery tornado.

She could see Gavin trying to remonstrate with them all from underneath his duck bill hat.

James Fraser was clapping and he uttered a three-syllable, single word, as he looked at her, enunciating clearly. Elephant.

Aureliana had long ago steeled herself not to cry under pressure. Not only did she not want to give her tormentors the satisfaction, she’d figured out the less reaction you gave bullies, the faster they lost interest. She saw no reason to break that rule now and start weeping in front of a vast and hostile audience.

Unfortunately, at that moment of dignified resolve, she was hit with a Coconut Éclair in the left eye, and they both started streaming anyway.

1

Anna stepped out of the stark autumn chill and squeezed into the steamy warmth of the restaurant. It was buzzing with conversations and pounding music, set at the weekend has started pitch.

‘Table for two please!’ Anna bellowed, feeling that flutter of nerves and anticipation, tinged with scepticism. When it came to crap dates, she had her proficiency badge.

Thanks to practice, Anna knew to choose lively and not-overtly-romantic venues to take the pressure off. And the trend for sharer plates that arrived at different times was a gift. With the traditional three courses, there was nothing worse than a date going badly, and knowing you were locked in the deadening back-and-forth of really and where are you from originally until the just an espresso for me, please.

Of course, you could simply go for a drink and cut out the dining. However, Anna vetoed alcohol and no food since an incident where she woke up at the end of the Central Line with only a patchy memory of how she got there, holding a plastic pineapple ice-bucket and a phone bearing eleven texts of increasing incoherence and pornography.

The intimidatingly young and cool waitress took her name and ushered her down into the dark basement.

Anna stood in the three-deep crush at the bar among the mouthy straight-from-work suits, wondering if tonight would be the night.

By ‘the night’, she meant the one she fantasised would be mentioned in the best man’s speech in the splendour of The Old Rectory, as he stood in a shaft of sunshine splintered through mullioned windows.

For those of you that don’t know, Neil met Anna on an internet date. I’m told he was attracted to her sparkling sense of humour and the fact she’d got him a drink without being asked. (Pause for weak laughter.)

She eventually part-screeched and part-semaphored an order for herself and her date, and found a corner to loiter in.

Honestly, she remonstrated with herself, an internet date is basically an interview for a shag. Isn’t that pressure enough without mentally spooling forward to imaginary nuptials? Anna wasn’t at all obsessed with getting married, per se; she was simply keen to find the person who mattered. She was thirty-two and the bastard was taking his time. So much so that she suspected he’d got lost en route and accidentally married someone else.

She scanned the throng for a ghostly echo of the face she’d seen in the pictures. Not only was it dark, but Anna was used to a disconnect between the profile photographs and reality. In her online profile, she’d tried to balance out a few flattering snaps against a realistic sample to avoid the horrific prospect of her date’s face dropping when she arrived. Men, she guessed, thought more pragmatically: once they had you in the room, their charisma could take over.

‘Hello, are you Anna?’

She managed to turn ninety degrees to see a cheerful, inoffensive-looking man with thinning brown hair grinning at her delightedly in the murk. He was wearing a Berghaus jacket. Fell-walking wear on someone who wasn’t fell walking. Hmmm.

On first impressions, Anna wasn’t too sure about Neil’s dress sense. I’m pleased to say she chose his outfit today, or he’d probably have said his vows in Gore-Tex …

He looked approachable and trustworthy, however, smiling his gap-toothed smile. Not a problem for her; Anna was not the slightest bit fussed about pretty boys. In fact, she was positively suspicious of them.

‘I’m Neil,’ he said, shaking her hand and going for a peck on the cheek.

Anna proffered the spare Negroni she was holding.

‘What’s that?’ Neil said.

‘It’s gin and Campari. A favourite drink from my homeland.’

‘I’m a beer man, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ Anna withdrew it and felt foolish.

Chrissake, wouldn’t you drink it to be polite? she thought. Then: maybe this is something we’ll laugh about eventually.

Apparently Anna was shocked to discover Neil didn’t drink cocktails and he made a great first impression by disappearing off in pursuit of a beer. Start as you mean to go on eh, Neil? (Pause for more weak laughter.)

Anna knocked back her Negroni and quickly made inroads with the second. At that moment, as ’80s Madonna hammered in her ears, she was Singlehood In London, distilled. It was all too familiar a feeling for her, experiencing intense loneliness in a room so crowded it must be nearing a fire regulation risk, feeling as if life was happening elsewhere. Right when she was supposedly in the beating heart at the centre of everything.

No! Positive thinking. Anna repeated the mantra she’d rehearsed a thousand times: how many happy couples trot out a dinner party origins tale about how they didn’t fancy each other at first? Or even like each other?

She didn’t want to be that woman bearing a checklist, always finding that suitors fell short in some respect or another. As if you were measuring space for a new fridge and moaning about the compromise in the dimensions of the ice-box.

Plus, it hadn’t taken her many internet dates to realise that the There You Are thunderbolt she’d so craved simply didn’t exist. As her mum always said, you have to rub the sticks to get the spark.

‘Sorry, a few of those and I’d be out for the count. Falling-down juice,’ Neil said, returning with his Birra Moretti. Anna wanted him to be nice and this to be fun with every fibre of her being.

‘Yes, I’ll probably wish I’d followed your example tomorrow,’ Anna shouted, over the music, and Neil smiled, making Anna feel she could make this work through sheer force of will.

Neil was a writer for a business and technology magazine and seemed, as per their previous communications, the kind of decent, personable and reliable sort who you’d fully expect to have a wife, kids and a shed.

They’d spoken only briefly online. Anna had banned the prolonged woo-by-electronic-billet-doux since the hugely painful disappointment of Scottish Tom the author, whose wit, charm and literary allusions she fell hard for, over a course of months. She’d started to live for the ping of the new message alert. She was halfway to in love by the time they finally planned to meet up, when he apologetically disclosed a) a spell in Rampton Secure Hospital and b) a ‘sort of wife’. After that, Anna changed her sort of Gmail address.

As the alcohol took effect, she found herself laughing at Neil’s tales about the ‘rubber chicken’ speaker circuit and shyster make-a-million industry gurus.

By the time they got to the table and over-ordered soak-up-the-booze-mattresses like meatballs, calamari and pizza, Anna was telling herself that maybe Neil was exactly the kind of solidly plausible candidate she needed to take a chance on.

‘Anna isn’t a very Italian name?’ Neil asked, as they both prodded battered hoops of squid and dragged them through a small pot of aioli.

‘It’s short for Aureliana. I changed it after school. Too … flowery, I suppose,’ she said, cupping a hand underneath her fork as the squid made a late bid to get back to the sea. ‘I’m not very flowery really.’

‘Hah no. I can see that,’ Neil said, which seemed a trifle presumptuous.

Her free hand involuntarily moved to her hair, which was in the usual messy knot. Perhaps she should’ve done more with it. And added make-up beyond reddish tinted lip balm, applied in haste while on the Tube. Start as you mean to go on, she always reasoned. No point pretending to be a dolly-bird type and disappointing him later.

‘The pork and fennel meatballs are the best variety, by the way,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve tried them all and can confirm.’

‘Have you been here a lot?’ Neil said mildly, and Anna squirmed a little.

‘A fair amount. With friends as well as dates.’

‘It’s OK. We’re in our thirties. You don’t need to pretend to be the blushing ingénue with me,’ he said, and Anna found something rather dislikeable in his pointing out her discomfort. Although maybe it was merely a slightly inept attempt to put her at ease.

Conversation stalled amid a loud Prince track, one of the ones where he went squeaky and frantic about wanting to filth a lady.

‘I’m actually poly,’ Neil said.

He’s actually Polly?! ‘Sorry?’ Anna leaned in sharply against the noise, fork in mid-air.

‘As in polyamorous. Multiple partners who all know about each other,’ he added.

‘Ah yes. I see!’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Of course not!’ Anna said, perhaps too enthusiastically, fussing with what was left on her plate, thinking: I don’t know.

‘I don’t believe monogamy is our natural state but I realise that’s what a lot of people are looking for. I’m willing to give it a try for the right person though,’ he smiled.

‘Ah.’ Good of you.

‘And perhaps I should say that I’m into mild sub and dom. All hetero, but I’m not vanilla.’

Anna gave a grimace-smile and debated whether to say: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak kink.’

What was she supposed to do with this information? Blind dating fast-tracked the personal stuff, that was for sure.

‘I mean, I’m not that out there in the scene,’ Neil continued. ‘I’ve tried figging. But we’re not in the realms of the Shaved Gorilla though, hahaha.’

He was invoking shaving and animals in the boudoir. And figs, if that was what figging involved. Anna wasn’t disappointed any more. Disappointment was a motorway junction ago. She was passing through into severe bewilderment and at this rate she was likely to take the next exit into a Welcome Break.

‘You?’ Neil said.

‘What?’

‘Anything your “thing”?’

Anna opened her mouth to reply and faltered. She’d usually go with ‘none of your business’, but they were on a date and it putatively was his business. ‘Uh … uhm. Usual sex.’

‘Usual sex.’ Oh God. She was underprepared and over-refreshed. This was like that temp job in a cinema one summer where, during the fun selection process, she’d been asked: ‘If your personality was a sandwich filling, which would it be?’ She got brain-blankness and said: ‘Cheese.’ ‘Just cheese?’ ‘Just cheese.’ ‘Because …?’ ‘It’s normal.’ Normal cheese and usual sex. She shouldn’t even be on the internet.

Neil surveyed her over the rim of his water glass.

‘Oh. OK. From your profile I thought you presented as heteronormative but might be genderqueer, for some reason.’

Anna didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what the key parts of that sentence meant.

‘Sorry if this is quite confronting,’ Neil continued. ‘I’m a big believer in honesty. I think most relationships fail because of lying and hypocrisy and pretending to be something you’re not. Much better to say This Is Who I Am and be completely open than for you to say on our fourth date, woah.’ Neil held his hands up and beamed reassuringly, ‘You like piss play?’

So ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to charge your glasses and raise a toast to the happy couple, Neil and Anna. And to the blushing bride, bottoms-up. You’ll want a full bladder for later. (Applause.)

2

‘Right, I’ve got Inspector Google on this Shaved Gorilla bullshit,’ Michelle said, squinting at her iPhone screen, Marlboro Light aloft in the other hand, smoke curling upwards in the empty dining room.

Anna couldn’t have coped with so many bad dates without the prospect of her friends to flee to at the end of the evening. Fortunately they worked hours that made them ideally suited to nightcaps rather than nights out.

Michelle’s ‘traditional British cooking with a twist’ was served at The Pantry, just off Upper Street in Islington. It was Grade II listed, with antique chandeliers, potted palms and buttercream wooden panelling. The kind of place where you have wartime affairs with men called Freddy in BBC dramas, and use phrases like ‘it was a horrid business’.

Daniel, Michelle’s long-standing front of house, was one of those semi-famous maître d’s who got mentioned in Time Out for being a ‘character’. The word character could be a euphemism for ‘tiresome git’, but Daniel had genuine charm and authentic eccentricity.

It was partly his appearance: a sweep of thick sandy hair, a bushy beard and high-magnification glasses which gave him cartoon eyes. He looked like a Looney Tunes lion crossed with an Open University professor. He dressed like Toad of Toad Hall in vintage tweed suits and spoke with an arch, old-fashioned cadence, like a junior Alan Bennett.

The three of them often met for drinks once Michelle had closed up, draped across the waiting area sofas, as the stubby candles guttered on the tables. Michelle was businesslike in her chef’s whites and kitchen-only Crocs. Her short, shiny bob, dyed exactly the same red you found in curry houses on tandoori chicken, was worn tucked behind her ears. She had ginormous hazelnut-coloured eyes, a generous painterly mouth, and a statuesque figure that flowed from a prow of a bosom. A supermodel, but out of time. She was instead stuck in an era where people would call her a beauty but a ‘big girl’.

‘Maybe it’s not deviant,’ Daniel said from across the room, where he was sweeping up. ‘Maybe everyone else but us is doing the shaved gorilla and the funky chicken and the … jugged hare.’

‘I’ve had jugged hare on the menu and I can assure you it’s nothing you want to be a sexual euphemism, given the amount of blood involved,’ Michelle said, still peering at her phone.

Daniel set his broom down and joined them.

‘Someone asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hair net today,’ he said vaguely, as he poured out a port from the cluster of bottles on the low-slung table.

‘What? Who? Did you say “Do you think you’re in Pork Farms”?’ Michelle asked.

‘Your head hair, but not your beard?’ Anna asked.

‘No, they said that was unhygienic too.’

‘A beard net? Because there’d be nothing more reassuring than someone serving you food in a surgeon’s mask,’ Michelle said. ‘Hang on. Who asked you this? Was it table five who had the vegan, the wheat intolerant and the one who subbed the cheese for more salad in the Stilton and walnut salad?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did I know? A band of pleasure dodgers.’

‘Subbed the cheese?’ Anna asked. She could’ve applied her brain to it, but she was by now pretty drunk.

‘Americanism. Infuriating trend. Act as if they’re in a sandwich bar saying hold the mayo, extra pickle,’ Michelle said.

‘We’re firmly in the era of the fussy fuck I’m afraid and there’s nothing we can do about it,’ Daniel said.

His Yorkshire-accented lisp pronounced it more as futhy fug, so it sounded like it could safely be uttered on a Radio 4 panel show. This was Daniel’s secret in defusing problems, Anna thought: whatever the words, the expression was gentle.

Michelle ran her index finger up her phone screen.

‘Gotcha! The Shaved Gorilla … oh my,’ she said, as she read. ‘I’m not sure our grandfathers died for this.’

‘He did say this is what he isn’t into?’ Daniel said.

‘Dan, get with it. Classic grooming technique to float it as a joke first,’ Michelle said, shaking her head. ‘Brace yourself, it’s something gruesome with jism.’ She turned her phone screen to Anna, who squinted, read it and grimaced.

‘Want me to try figging?’ Michelle asked.

‘No! I never want to try figging! I want to meet a nice man who wants to have standard sex with just me. Has that really gone so far out of fashion?’

‘If something’s never been in fashion it can never go out,’ Daniel said, tweaking his own lapels, as Anna weakly shoulder-punched him.

3

‘I mean, where’s the romance and mystery?’ Anna continued, holding up her glass for a refill. ‘Mr Darcy said you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. Not, you must allow me to tell you I’m into this spunk-throwing thing.’

‘We don’t live in the right era for an Anna,’ Michelle agreed. ‘Not much formality and wooing. But, you know. If you lived in Jane Austen time you’d have teeth like Sugar Puffs and seven kids with no pain relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’

‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.

Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.

Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.

‘“Sane and pleasant enough” is aiming a bit low? I’ve hired staff that had more going for them than that.’

‘I dunno. I just spent an evening with a man who talked about weeing on people as a leisure activity and demanded to know what I like in bed. So in the face of that, I’ll take sane and pleasant. Try internet dating, and your expectations would tumble too.’

Michelle had people she called when she fancied a tumble. She’d had her heart broken by a married man and insisted she was not interested in looking for further disappointment.

‘But you make my point for me, my love. That was someone “safe”, so why not take a risk on Mr Exciting?’

‘Even if they agreed to a date, I don’t want to handle Mr Exciting’s disappointment when he turns up and meets me.’

There was a brief pause while Frank Sinatra bellowed his way through ‘Strangers in the Night’, from the stereo held together with duct tape underneath the till.

‘Are we going to say it?’ Michelle said, looking to Daniel. ‘Fuck it, I’m going to say it. Anna, there’s modesty, which is a lovely quality. Then there’s underrating yourself to a self-harming degree. You are bloody brilliant. What disappointment are you talking about?’

Anna sighed and leaned back against the sofa.

‘Hah, well. I’m not though, am I? Or I wouldn’t have been single forever.’

Anna’s British gran Maude had a dreadful saying about the lonely folly of romantic ideas above your station: ‘She wouldn’t have a walker and the riders didn’t stop’.

It had given eleven-year-old Anna the chills. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Some women think they’re too good for those who want them, but when they’re not good enough for the men they want, they end up alone.’

Maude had been an utter misery-tits about everything. But a misery-tits could be right, several times a day.

‘When did you get this idea you’re in some way not good enough?’ Michelle said.

‘That’d be school.’

A pause. Michelle and Daniel knew the stories of course, right up to the Mock Rock. And they knew about The Thing That Happened After. There was a tense pause, as much as anything could be tense when they were supine with alcohol at knocking one in the morning.

Michelle sensitively turned the focus, for a moment.

‘I’m not sure hanging round with us two does you good. We’re no help. I’m perma-single and Dan’s … settled down.’

There was another pause as Michelle used the phrase ‘settled down’ with some sceptical reluctance.

Daniel had been with the somewhat droopy Penny for nearly a year. She was a singer in fiddle-folk band The Unsaid Things and sufferer of ME. Michelle was deeply sceptical of the ME, and claimed Penny was in fact a sufferer of POOR ME syndrome. Daniel met Penny when she’d waitressed at The Pantry and been sacked for being useless, so Michelle felt she had some rights to an opinion. An unflattering one.

‘You are a help. you’re helping right now,’ Anna said.

‘By the way,’ Michelle waved at a bowl on the table, ‘you’ve heard of Omelette Arnold Bennett. Well these are Homemade Scotch Eggs from Arnold’s buffet. Dig in.’

For all her tough talking, Michelle was kind and generous to a fault, and had supplied food for a former customer’s funeral earlier in the day.

‘I’ve been eyeing them like a wolf for the last hour, but I feel guilty eating a dead man’s eggs,’ Daniel said.

‘They’re from the wake, Daniel,’ Michelle said. ‘No one goes to their own wake. Ergo, they’re not Arnold’s.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Daniel said. ‘Egg-scused. Eggs-culpated.’ He picked up an egg, and started eating it like an apple.

‘Arnold’s brother dropped them off. He told me what Arnold’s last words were. Well, strictly speaking, his penultimate words. His final-final words were not the cloudy lemonade, Ros but that wasn’t as profound. Are you ready? It’s a bit of a choker.’

Anna looked at her with glassy eyes and nodded.

Michelle tapped her cigarette. ‘He said he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time being scared.’

‘Of what?’ Anna said.

Michelle shrugged.

‘Didn’t say. Life terrors, I guess. We’re scared of all sorts of things that won’t kill us, aren’t we? The things we live our lives around avoiding. Then we realise when we get to the end that what we should’ve been afraid of was a life lived by avoiding things.’

‘Fear of fear itself,’ Daniel said, wiping breadcrumbs out of his beard.

Anna thought about this. What was she scared of? Being alone? Not really. It was her natural state, given that she’d been single almost all of her adult life. She was scared of never being in love, she supposed. Hang on, no – that wasn’t fear, exactly. More disappointment, or sadness. So what was the fear she was living around? Hah. As if she didn’t know the answer.

It was the fear of ever being that girl again.

She thought of the email that had dropped into her inbox a week ago, which had coated her in a sheen of unseasonal sweat as soon as she saw it.

‘Some fears are justified,’ Anna said, ‘like my fear of heights.’

‘Or my fear of bald cats,’ Daniel said.

‘How is that rational?’ Michelle said.

‘Cats keep all their secrets in their fur. Don’t trust one with nothing to lose.’

‘Or my fear of going to my school reunion next Thursday,’ Anna said.

‘What?’ Michelle said. ‘That does NOT count. You have to go!’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘To say, screw you all, look at me now. You didn’t break me. You could slay the demon forever, this way. Wouldn’t that feel good?’

‘I don’t care what they think of me now,’ Anna said, with feeling.

‘Actually going proves it.’

‘No it doesn’t. It looks like I’m arsed.’

‘Not true. And look, if he’s there …’

‘He won’t be,’ Anna cut in, feeling a little breathless at the thought. ‘No way would he go. It would be a million miles beneath him.’

‘Then there’s even less reason to avoid it. Do you ever want to be Arnold, wondering what life would’ve been like if you’d not wasted time being scared? This school show, the Glee thing where they were vile. You’ve never seen them since that day, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then it’s a loose end. An unfaced thing. That’s why it’s still got a hold over you.’

‘Great Crom!’ Daniel said, sitting up, looking in the direction of the restaurant’s picture windows.

Anna and Michelle turned in their seats to see a thirty-something man hooting with laughter. His trousers and pants were at half mast, while he looked over his shoulder at people beyond.

‘He’s flashing us!’ Anna said.

‘That’s the king and the privy council,’ Daniel agreed.

They stared some more and saw the lights of a crowd in the distance, the firefly blink of camera phones going off.

‘I think he’s mooning his mates and we’re getting the nasty by-product,’ Michelle said.

The man lost his balance and staggered forwards, landing with a soft but significant thud against the glass.

‘Woah, woah, woah!’ Michelle was fast on her feet and over to him, rapping her knuckles against the glass. ‘These windows cost five grand, mate! Five grand!’

A moment of slapstick comedy followed as a pissed man with his chap hanging out realised that there was a woman on the other side of the window. He screamed and ran away, trying to pull his jeans up as he went.

Anna and Daniel, weakened by alcohol, were left senseless with laughter.

Michelle returned, flopping down on the sofa and clicking at a fresh cigarette with her lighter.

‘Tell these fuckers what you think of them, Anna. Seriously. Show them you’re not scared and they didn’t get the better of you. Why not? If you avoid them, you’re wasting time being scared of nothing. Don’t let fear win.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Anna said, laughter subsiding. ‘I really don’t think I can.’

‘And that’s exactly why you have to do it.’

4

In the merciful hush of the empty office, James was nasally assaulted by the sticky, urinary smell of lager spill.

The odour was rising from the detritus of last night’s riotous session of beer pong. The cleaner had started fighting back against the mess generated by freewheeling urban hipster creatives, tacitly making it clear what was within her jurisdiction. Alcoholic games popularised by North American college students clearly fell outside.

Just as soon as James felt irritated about her work-to-rule, the emotion was superseded by guilt. Office manager Harris got stuck into arguing with the cleaner whenever their paths crossed and James didn’t know how he could do it. She’s your mum’s age, wears saggy leggings and dusts your desk for a living. All you should do is mumble thanks and leave her a Lindt reindeer and twenty quid at Christmas, or you’re an utter bastard. Mind you, on all the evidence, Harris was an utter bastard.

For about the last six months at Parlez, James had really wished someone would come in and shout at his colleagues. Not him, obviously. Someone else.

When he’d first arrived here – a multi-channel digital partner offering bespoke, dynamic strategies to bring your brand to life – he thought he’d found some kind of Valhalla in EC1. It was the kind of place careers advisors would’ve told sixteen-year-olds didn’t exist.

Music blared above a din of chatter, trendily dressed acquaintances drifted in and out, colleagues had spontaneous notions that they needed to try Navy strength Gimlets and did runs to the local shops.

Work got done, somewhere, in all the bouts of watching YouTube clips of skateboarding kittens in bow-ties, playing Subbuteo and discussing that new American sci-fi crime drama everyone was illegally downloading.

Then, all of a sudden, like flipping a switch, the enlivening chaos became sweet torture to James. The conversation was inane, the music distracting, the flotsam of fashionable passers-through an infuriating interruption. And he’d finally accepted the immutable law that lunchtime drinking = teatime headache. Sometimes it was all James could do not to get to his feet and bellow ‘Look, don’t you all have jobs or homes to go to? Because this is a PLACE OF WORK.’

He felt like a teenager whose parents had left him to run the house to teach him a lesson, and he well and truly wanted them back from holiday, shooing out the louts and getting the dinner on.

He thought he’d kept his feelings masked but lately, Harris – the man who put the party into party whip – had started to needle him, with that school bully’s antennae for a drift in loyalty. When Ramona, the punky Scottish girl with pink hair and a belly-button ring who wore midriff tops year-round, was squeezing Harris’s shoulders and making him shriek, he caught James wincing.

‘Stop, stop, you’re making James hate us!’ he called out. ‘You hate us really, don’t you? Admit it. You. Hate. Us.’

James didn’t want to sound homophobic, but working with Harris, he thought the stereotype of the bitchy queen had possibly become a stereotype for a reason.

And the humdrum petty annoyances of office life were still there, whether they were in a basement in Shoreditch with table football or not. The fridge door was cluttered with magnets holding ‘Can You PLEASE …’ snippy notes. The plastic milk bottles had owners’ names marker-penned on them. People actually got arsey about others using ‘their’ mug. James felt like putting a note up of his own: ‘If you have a special cup, check your age. You may be protected by child labour laws.’

James told himself to enjoy the rare interregnum of quiet before they all arrived. The sense of calm lasted as long as it took for his laptop wallpaper to flash up.

He knew it was slightly appalling to have a scrolling album of photos of your beautiful wife on a device you took to work. He’d mixed the odd one of the cat in there but really, he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was life bragging, plain and simple.

And when that wife left you, it was a carousel of hubris, mockery and pain. James could change it, but he hadn’t told anyone they’d separated and didn’t want to alert suspicion.

He’d turn away for a conversation, turn back, and there would be another perfect Eva Kodak moment. White sunglasses and a ponytail with children’s hair slides at Glastonbury, in front of a Winnebago. Platinum curls and a slash of vermillion lipstick, her white teeth nipping a lobster tail on a birthday date at J Sheekey.

Rumpled bed-head, perched on a windowsill in the Park Hyatt Tokyo at sunrise, in American Apparel vest and pants, recreating Lost in Translation. Classic Eva – raving vanity played as knowing joke.

And of course, the ‘just engaged’ photo with James. A blisteringly hot day, Fortnum’s picnic at the Serpentine and, buried in the hamper, a Love Hearts candy ring saying Be Mine in a tiny blue Tiffany gift box (she chose the real article later).

Eva was wearing a halo of Heidi plaits, and they squeezed into the frame together, flushed with champagne and triumph. James gazed at his grinning face next to her and thought what a stupid, hopeful idiot he looked.

There was that sensation, as if the soft tissue in his chest and throat had suddenly hardened, the same one he’d had when she’d sat him down and said things weren’t working for her and she needed some space and maybe they’d rushed into it.

He sighed, checking he had all his tablets of Apple hardware of varying size about him. He was probably worth about three and a half grand to a mugger.

His mobile rang; Laurence.

‘Jimmy! What’s happening?’

Hmmm. Jimmy wasn’t good. Jimmy was a jaunty alter ego that Loz only conjured into existence when he wanted something.

‘This school reunion tonight.’

‘Yep?’

‘Going?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because your best mate begged you to go and promised to buy you beers all night, and said we could get gone by nine?’

‘Sorry, no. The thought gives me a prolapse of the soul.’

‘That’s a bit deep.’

‘You realise that at our age everyone will be doing that competitive thing about their kids? It’ll be all about Amalfi Lemon’s “imaginative play”. Brrrr.’

‘Think you’ve forgotten our school. More like “Tyson Biggie is out on parole.”’

‘Why do you want to go?’ James said.

‘Naked curiosity.’

‘Curiosity about whether there’s anyone you’d like to see naked.’

‘Don’t you want to know if Lindsay Bright’s still hot?’ Laurence asked.

‘Yurgh, no. Bet she looks like a Surrey Tory.’

‘But a dirty one, like Louise Mensch. Come on, what else are you doing on a Thursday, now you’re on your own? Watching Takeshi’s Castle in your Y-fronts?’

James winced. His Brabantia bin was crammed with Waitrose meals-for-one packaging.

‘Why would my telly be in my pants?’ he parried, sounding as limp as he felt.

‘Wap waaah.’

James’s phone pipped with a waiting call. Eva.

‘Loz, I’ve got a call. We’ll continue “me saying no” in a minute.’

He clicked to end one call and start another.

‘Hi. How’re you?’ she said.

James did a sarcastic impression of her breezy tone. ‘How’d ya think?’

Sigh.

‘I’ve got some ear drops for Luther. I need to bring them round and show you how to give them to him.’

‘Do you drop them in his ear?’ James hadn’t necessarily decided relentless bitterness was his best tactic, but unfortunately the words always left his mouth before he’d put them through any security checks.

‘Can I come round tonight?’

‘Ah, I can’t tonight. Busy.’

‘With what?’

‘Sorry, is that your business?’

‘It’s just the tone you’re taking with me, James, makes me think you might be being needlessly obstructive.’

‘It’s a school reunion.’

‘A school reunion?’ Eva repeated, incredulous. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was your sort of thing.’

‘Full of surprises. So we’ll have to find another night for Luther.’

After they’d rung off, James allowed himself the sour pleasure of having won a tiny battle in the war. The satisfaction lasted a good three seconds before James realised that now he was going to have to go to this school reunion.

He could lie, but no. This merited some small stray reference on social media as incidental proof – a check in, a photo, a ‘good to see you too’ to some new Facebook addition – to let Eva know she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.

‘Morning!’ Ramona unwound sheep face ear-muffs from her head. ‘Och, why did I drink on a Wednesday? I am dying, so I am.’

‘Hah,’ James said, which meant, please don’t tell me about it.

Naturally, he spent the next quarter of an hour hearing about it, then she repeated the tale to each new arrival. Wine served in plastic pint beakers got you pissed, who knew.

5

Anna tapped ‘Gavin Jukes’ into Facebook, hoping his name was rare enough to make him easily flush-outable. She wasn’t completely sure why she was looking him up. She wanted one person she could safely say hello to, should he appear.

And there was his profile, second down – she recognised the long nose and chin. She clicked his page, the photo a family portrait. Wife, three kids. Turned out his own gender was not his thing. Lives: Perth, Australia.

Good for you, Gavin. When it came to Rise Park, she could see the appeal in going so far away that if you went any further, you were getting nearer again.

The phone on her desk rang.

‘Parcel for you!’ trilled cheery Jeff on reception.

Anna put the phone down and bounded down the stairs. Jeff was resting the delivery on the counter, a wide, shallow black box with glossy embossed letters, tied up with wide satin ribbon. It subtly but unmistakably trumpeted I have spent more money than I needed to.

‘Something nice?’ Jeff said, then muttered ‘none of my business, of course,’ flushed at the evident thought it could be Agent Provocateur-style rutting wear, the sort of thing with frilly apertures and straps with buckles dangling from it.

Even though it wasn’t, Anna went warm in the face too, knowing she couldn’t correct it without making the suspicion stronger. It was like using the toilet stall with the foul smell and then not being able to warn the next person without them thinking you were trying a poo double bluff.

‘A dress,’ she said, hurriedly, ‘for an … event.’

‘Ah,’ said Jeff, ‘that’s nice,’ avoiding her eyes. In his head, she was obviously already in an Eyes Wide Shut, pointy nose opera mask, grinding away to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’.

She carried the box up the stairs, back to her office on the flats of her palms, like a pizza. The University College London history department was spread over a row of Georgian townhouses, with high ceilings and huge sash windows.

It was a magical place to work. In her more sentimental moments, Anna felt it was a spiritual reward for schooldays – the dream after the nightmare. The building had that lovely old-fashioned carpety smell and yellow light from large round pendant lamps, as if you were living inside a warm memory.

Anna pushed her office door open with her back, pleased that no one had spied her. She’d feel self-conscious at any cries of ooh let’s see it on then.

Anna might’ve lost her schoolgirl weight and become a perfectly standard dress size, but it didn’t mean she thought and acted like the person she now was. She retained an intense dislike of clothes shops. The advent of online shopping had been a revelation. She would much, much rather use her office as a dressing room.

So when she realised the reunion needed a dress – no, not merely a dress but something truly flash, that would raise two fingers to them all in the form of fabric – she’d gone straight to an expensive designer website and spent the cost of a nice weekend away.

She dislodged the lid, rustling through the layers of tissue paper. There the exorbitant dress lay. Not a lot of material for … well, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

Anna laid it carefully over a chair and checked the office door was locked, then wriggled out of her shapeless Zara smock, swapping it for the evening gown. She twisted it into place with forefingers and thumbs very carefully, as if it was gossamer, and pulled up a reassuringly chunky zip, with only a little breathing in.

Hmmm. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror. Not quite the transformation she’d hoped for. A black dress is a black dress. She flapped her arms up and down and watched the diaphanous chiffon sleeves waft in the breeze. She heard ‘The Birdie Song’ in her head.

On the website’s mannequin, with its blank white Isaac Asimov robot face, the black Prada shift had looked ‘Rita Hayworth during Happy Hour at the Waldorf Astoria’ chic. Now it was on her, Anna wondered if it was in fact rather blowsy. Like a cruise ship singer who would launch into ‘Unbreak My Heart’ while everyone enjoyed their main of breadcrumbed veal with sautéed potatoes.

Inevitably, as she stared at herself, she remembered that other day, that other dress. And that other girl.

Eventually she picked up her phone.

‘Michelle. I’m not going to the reunion. It’s rank madness and the dress makes me look like Professor Snape.’

‘Yes you are. After you’ve been, you’ll experience an incredible sense of lightness. Like a colon cleanse. Barry! Prep that squid and stop playing Fingermouse with it! Sorry, that last bit wasn’t for you.’

‘I can’t, Michelle. What if they all laugh at me?’

‘They won’t. But even if they did – doesn’t part of you want a chance to live that moment again, but this time, you tell them all to go to hell?’

Anna didn’t want to admit what she was thinking. What if she crumbled, cried and had to face that she was still Aureliana? Aureliana, holding more exam certificates and carrying less weight.

‘Do I look alright in this dress you can’t see?’

‘Is it the Prada one you sent me the link to? BARRY! Get that off that sausage! Do you think you’re working for Aardman fucking Animations? There’s no way you won’t look good. Your problem is going to be you’ll look so good no one will be looking at anyone else.’

‘Knock knock! Permission to enter the bat cave!’ Patrick sing-songed through the door.

‘Michelle, I’ve got to go.’

‘You’re right. You have got to go.’

Anna half laughed, half groaned.

‘Come in!’ Anna called. Cave was a reasonable adjective for Anna’s sinfully messy space on the second floor.

As a lecturer, expert in the Byzantine period, she was allowed some stereotypical nutty professor licence. When it came to housekeeping, she took it. Books were piled on folders piled on more books. The disarray was an insult to a lovely room though, and Anna felt some guilt about it.

Patrick lived down the hall, teaching the wool trade in the Tudor period. They’d started at UCL at a similar time and shared a passion for their work, as well as an ability to laugh at it and talk about something else entirely. This wasn’t to be underestimated in academia. Many of their colleagues were incredibly earnest. Something about experiencing life on an exalted plane of ‘clever’ could lead to malfunctions on the everyday level. As Patrick put it, they were people with brains the size of planets who couldn’t boil an egg.

Patrick often began his day by bringing Anna a cup of tea, drinking his while sitting on the bright blue office supplies chair, once he’d moved a pile of box folders, Anna’s coat and sundry items of course. Anna usually sat at her desk, scanning her emails and gossiping.

Patrick passed Anna her cup.

‘Goodness me, new frock?’ he said, watching Anna set her tea down.

‘Ah, yeah.’ She turned back and stood with her hands on her hips and legs slightly apart, as if she was a plumber about to give her price for addressing a particularly capricious combi-boiler.

‘Is it for the Theodora show? I thought that hadn’t kicked off yet?’ Patrick added.

‘No, I wish. School reunion tonight. Not sure if I should go. I had a molto horrifico time at school.’

Patrick squinted. ‘Oh. Right. So why are you going?’

‘My friend said it would be a defiant gesture. She’s mad, isn’t she? I don’t think I can do it. It’s a stupid plan. Oh, and do us a favour while you’re over there, and top Boris up?’ Anna said, nodding towards the large, beleaguered-looking cheese plant, and a scummy-looking milk bottle of water on the windowsill. ‘I’m thinking Prada and spillages don’t mix.’

He obligingly tipped an inch of greyish fluid into Boris’s soil.

Patrick had very neatly-cut auburn hair and the quivery, undernourished look of someone who had been shucked from a shell, rather than woman-born.

His uniform was fine knit V-necks and a mustard-coloured cord jacket with leather elbow patches. He claimed it had become such an academic cliché it had gone right through cliché and come out the other side as original.

He looked up at a portrait on Anna’s office wall.

‘Ask yourself this. What would your heroine Empress Theodora do?’

‘Have them all killed?’

‘Then second best; knock ’em dead,’ Patrick said.

6

Anna stood on the stairwell in front of a Blu-tacked sign in a distinctly ungentrified pub in East London with two stark options spelled out in Comic Sans.

Damn, she wished she knew Beth. It was a young name. Probably off to travel the world. She could hear a very bad karaoke rendition of Take That’s ‘Patience’ drifting from Beth’s party HQ.

Anna felt the vodka and oranges she’d had for Dutch courage sizzle acidly in her gut and trudged up the creaking, threadbare stairs and along the musty-smelling corridor to the appointed door. She had the pulse-in-the-neck trepidation of someone navigating the Ghost House at a funfair, her whole body tensed for surprise. Underneath the Milanese chiffon, she was clammy.

Another, deeper breath. She remembered what Michelle had said, that this was a demonstration of strength. She opened the door and stepped into the room. It was near-empty. A few people she didn’t recognise glanced over, returned to their conversations. In her many, many rehearsals in her head, a gallery of familiar faces turned towards her, accompanied by a needle scratch noise on a record. But no, nothing.

The worst of them weren’t even here yet, if they were going to turn up at all. Was she relieved, or disappointed? Weirdly, she was both.

A sagging banner above the bar announced a school reunion: 16 YEARS SINCE WE WERE 16!!!!!! Oh dear, multiple exclamation marks. Like having someone with ADD shaking maracas in your face.

Anna got herself a glass of bathwater-warm Stowells of Chelsea white wine and retreated to a wallflower location on the left hand side of the room. She judged that everyone was only one alcohol unit away from circulating more freely, and she would be approached. She’d throw this drink down and get gone. There, she’d put her head in the lion’s jaws. Done. Extra points for doing it alone. She wasn’t quite sure why that felt so necessary, but it did. Like when the action hero growled: ‘This is something I have to do for myself.’

It was an anti-climax, but wasn’t it always going to be? What did she expect, that everyone would be queuing up to make their apologies?

The wall opposite held a collage of pictures on large coloured sheets of sugar paper, with childish bubble letters spelling out Class of ’97 above it. Anna knew she wasn’t on it. No one would’ve asked her to squeeze – squeeze being the operative word – into the disposable camera snaps.

Below the display was a congealing finger buffet that sensibly, no one was touching. When everyone was pissed enough, a few dead things in pastry might get snarfed, but the crudités were strictly for decoration.

The room filled steadily. Every so often there’d be some ghostly reminders – no one that prominent, but the odd aged version of a face Anna faintly recognised from groups in the lunch hall, or the playground, or the sports field. There was one semi-significant: Becky Morris, a chubby girl who’d made Anna’s life a misery in the third year, to make it clear they were nothing alike. She still looked like a malevolent piece of work, Anna noted, just a more tired one.

It was a strange thing, but their flat ordinariness felt diminishing to Anna, rather than wickedly triumphal.

She’d let such people bring her so low? The banality of evil, the pedalling wizard behind the curtain in Oz. By comparison, Anna felt as if she was an inversion of a Halloween mask, moving among these people as one of them, a normal visage concealing the comic horror beneath the surface.

Hang on … was that … could it be? NO. Yes. It was.

Huddled in the far corner were Lindsay Bright and Cara Taylor. It was so strange looking at them. They were instantly recognisable, and yet all the vibrancy of her memories had leached away, like photographs that had lost their colour.

Present Lindsay’s long blonde hair was now mid-length and slightly mousey, with roots that needed doing. Her middle had thickened, though her tight dress displayed fake-tanned legs that went on forever. The teenage hauteur had set as lines, giving her once-pretty face a set-in scowl. Anna could close her eyes and see Past Lindsay in a hockey skirt, chewing Hubba Bubba with a casual, glamorous menace.

Cara’s dark hair was short, and she had the unmistakable sallow, pinched complexion of a behind-the-bike-sheds smoker who hadn’t stopped. She used to hit Anna on the back of her legs with a ruler and call her a lezzer.

So this was the revelation that was supposed to make her feel better. They weren’t terrifying, glittering ice princesses any more. They were slightly beaten, early middle-aged women who you wouldn’t notice pushing a trolley past you in Asda. Anna didn’t know how she felt. She was entitled to gloat, she guessed. But she didn’t want to. It didn’t change anything.

They both looked over at Anna. Her heart hammered. What would she say to them? Why hadn’t she prepared something? And what do you say to your former tormentors? Did you ever think about me? Did you ever feel bad? How could you do it?

But there was no light bulb of recognition in return. Lindsay and Cara’s eyes slid over her and they carried on chatting. Anna realised they were probably looking at the only other dressed-up woman in the room.

And then, as time ticked by, Anna had a realisation. No one knew who she was. That’s why they weren’t speaking to her. She was so changed she was anonymous. They weren’t going to risk admitting they’d forgotten her to her face.

The door to the function room opened again. Two men walked in, both wearing an air that suggested they thought the cavalry had arrived, and the cavalry wasn’t much pleased with what it saw.

As their faces turned towards her, she had one of those funny moments where your breath catches in your throat, your heart high-fives your ribcage and all sound seems distant.

7

James really had to ask himself who he’d become if he’d put himself through this to score a tiny point against Eva.

Stuck in a windowless function room upstairs in a dingy boozer, pear-shaped pairs of semi-shrivelled balloons were dotted about the place, like garish testes. As always with forced gaiety, it came off as the very antimatter of fun. There was textured wallpaper painted the colour of liver below a dado rail, and the stale musk of old, pre-smoking ban tobacco. These were the kind of pubs he never went in.

Against one wall stood a trestle table with paper tablecloth and plates of mini Babybels, bowls of crisps and wizened cocktail sausages. In a nod to nutritional balance, there were withered batons of cucumber, celery and carrots arrayed in a sunburst formation around tubs of supermarket guacamole, bubblegum-pink taramasalata and garlic and onion dip. Only a sociopath would eat garlic and onion dip at a social event, James thought.

The room was sparsely populated and had divided broadly into two groups, each single sex, as if they had rewound to pubescent years of the genders not mixing. There were the men, many of whom he recognised, their features softening, melting and slipping. Hair migrating south, from scalps to chins.

James felt a shiver of schadenfreude at still looking more or less the way he did when he was a fifth-former, albeit a good few pounds heavier.

Everyone had given him quick, hard, appraising stares, and he knew why. If he’d gone to seed, it’d be the talk of the evening.

And hah – he’d said hello at the bar, and Lindsay Bright had actually blanked him! She may be an ex-sort-of-girlfriend, but surely she didn’t still have the hump about things that happened seventeen years ago? I mean, they could have a kid doing A-levels by now. Perish the thought.

Returning with two pints of Fosters, Laurence nodded back towards where Lindsay stood.

‘Blimey, she’s not aged like fine wine,’ Laurence muttered. ‘Made of lips and arse now, like a cheap burger. Shame.’

‘So can we go?’ James said, under his breath. Bloody Laurence and his bloody schemes to meet women. These were even women he’d met already. ‘I don’t think there’s anything here for you.’

‘Yeeeaah … No. Wait. Holy moly. Who the hell is that?’

James followed Laurence’s line of sight, towards a woman standing on her own. James realised he’d overlooked her numerous times but it wasn’t because she wasn’t worth looking at. She was dark: black hair, olive skin, black clothes, so much so that she had disappeared into the background like a shadow.

Mysterious Woman was done up to the nines in something that he thought looked a bit ‘Eastenders trattoria owner throws a divorce party’. He could imagine Eva telling him it was doing things the male mind was too crude to appreciate.

She radiated a kind of European art house film or espresso-maker advert beauty. Heavily lashed, vaguely melancholy brown eyes, thick eyebrows like calligraphic sweeps of a fountain pen, big knot of inky hair in an unwinding bundle at the crown of her head. All in all, it wasn’t especially his thing, but he could certainly see the appeal. Particularly in these drab surroundings.

‘Oh, we have got to say hi. I am appalled that she must’ve done an exchange programme and we didn’t introduce her to our country’s customs,’ Laurence said.

‘You realise you’re getting to the age where this is grotesque?’

‘You’re not the slightest bit curious about who she is?’

James glanced over again. Her body language was that of someone desperate to be left alone, the arm holding her glass clamped tight to her body. It was a puzzle who she was, and why she’d come here. If James was on his own, he might approach her, given she was the only point of intrigue in the room. He didn’t want to spectate a Laurence seduction attempt, however.

‘I know who she is, she’s the wife of the guy who’s going to punch you in about fifteen minutes,’ he said, brusquely.

‘Plus one?’ Laurence asked.

‘Of course she’s a plus one.’

James knew without question this woman was an exotic outsider. She hadn’t gone to his school. No way his libidinous adolescent radar wouldn’t have picked up the slightest incoming blip. Obviously some trophy wife, dragged along reluctantly. And the women here clearly didn’t know her, bolstering the theory.

‘Whatever her marital status, she’s gorgeous.’

‘Not that hot and not my type,’ James snapped, hoping to shut Laurence down. As James spoke, she glanced over. Mysterious Woman swigged the last of her drink and shouldered her handbag.

‘Shit no, Penélope Cruz is leaving? I’m going in,’ Laurence said.

8

In her twenties, Anna had a few fantasies about running into James Fraser again, and constructed elaborate imaginary verbal takedowns. Bitter excoriations in front of his wife and kids and co-workers about what a completely vicious conceited bastard he was, which usually ended with everyone applauding.

Now here he was. Over there. The man himself.

Anna could stride over and say anything she wanted to him. And all she could think was: yuck. I never want to share the same carpet square with you ever again.

He’d kept his looks, she’d give him that. Still the obsidian black hair, now worn artfully mussed, instead of those silly floppy curtains all boys had in the 1990s. And the shaving advert jaw line was hard as ever, no doubt much like his heart. It was a type of ‘stock model in a water filter infomercial’ handsome that didn’t move her in the slightest now.

He was in a very thirty-something trendy combination of plaid shirt, buttoned up to the collar, grey cardigan and desert boots. What was with this thing of dressing like a grandpa, lately? Anna did a young fogey job but she didn’t go around in orthopaedic sandals.

The youthful smirk had been replaced with an ingrained look of distaste. Exactly as she anticipated – he was surveying the company with the expression of a Royal being shown the pig scraps bins at the back of a chippy. Why deign to turn up, if he thought he was so far above the company? Wanted to reassure himself he was still top of the heap, perhaps.

And God, he was still with that lanky Laurence, court jester to James’s king. Laconic Laurence, who once fired off machine-gun-like rounds of quick fire ridicule at her. She felt their eyes move to her. But unlike everyone else’s, their gaze didn’t move on. In fact, when she risked looking back their way, she got the distinct impression she was being discussed.

A self-conscious warmth started creeping up her neck, like a snood of shame. Had they recognised her …?

The thought sparked great comets of stomach acid, making her hands tremble. She suddenly felt as if she was nude in the middle of a crowded space, an anxiety dream made reality.

And at that exact moment, she could perfectly lip-read James Fraser’s words.

‘Not that hot. And not my type.’

Amazing. She’d come all this way, and he still found her wanting. Only this time, he could go to hell.

She chugged her drink and headed to the door. She was intercepted by Laurence, cutting right across her path.

‘Tell me you’re not leaving,’ he said.

‘Er …’ once again, Anna felt her lack of a script. ‘Yes.’

‘Put us out of our agony and at least tell us who you are. My associate and I have been completely foxed.’

Laurence put a caddish emphasis on the last word, making it clear this was a chat-up.

Anna glanced over at James, who didn’t look like he wanted to speak to her at all.

‘Anna,’ she said, dumbly, as she frantically calculated how to play this. She knew what happened next if she answered him honestly. He’d whoop with disbelief, say patronising, oleaginous things about how she was looking fantastic.

Then he’d call others over: Hey everyone, this is Aureliana! Remember her? As if she was so stupid she wouldn’t decode the Bloody hell, how did this happen? And she’d feel like something in a zoo. They always did treat her like a separate species. She should never have come.

‘Anna? Anna …?’ Laurence shook his head and waited for the surname.

Mercifully, magically, letters in Comic Sans came back into her head.

‘… I’m supposed to be at Beth’s leaving do, next door. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place, I don’t know many of the other guests. I was trying to finish my drink and slip out before anyone noticed.’

A wolfish grin spread across Laurence’s face and she could see he was delighted at having a conversational opening.

‘The whole SCHOOL REUNION banner thing didn’t tip you off?’

‘I … uhm. Usually wear glasses, the words were fuzzy.’

‘Well, you’ve just settled a bet with my friend,’ Laurence said, calling out: ‘You were right! She’s not from Rise Park. We were agreeing there’s simply no way we wouldn’t have remembered you.’

And before Anna could stop him, he’d beckoned James Fraser to join them.

9

‘James, this is Anna. Anna, James.’

‘Hi,’ James put his hand out to shake hers. It was chilly and slightly damp. She gave him a look that was simultaneously intense and unreadable.

‘Anna here is actually meant to be in Beth’s leaving do in the next room. But lucky old us, she stumbled in here by mistake.’

Anna looked awkward and James tried to convey with his eyes that he wasn’t encouraging or condoning Loz’s hitting on her.

‘Who is Beth and to where is she departing?’ Laurence asked.

‘Uhm. She’s my cousin,’ Anna said.

‘And …?’ Laurence made a ‘tell us more’ circling gesture with his hand.

‘And …’ Anna’s line of sight cast around the room, as if looking for escape. ‘She works at Specsavers. She’s travelling round Australia. Flying to Perth.’

Poor Anna was clearly dying to be released to Beth from Specsavers’ karaoke song murdering party. James was wishing very hard he’d reminded Laurence that striding over and introducing yourself to sultry strangers rarely went well. Not that it would have stopped him.

‘Wait, wait. Are you saying you came in here without your specs, but you literally shoulda gone to Specsavers?’ Laurence hooted.

Anna waited for him to finish laughing. James rolled his eyes in what he hoped came off as tacit apology.

‘Anyway. Australia!’ Laurence said. ‘Always quite fancied the Outback. James here says Oz is the choice of boring uncultured beer monsters, but I disagree.’

Oh my God, we’re playing good cop, bad cop now? You utter … James was going to have some words for Laurence when they left, not all pre-watershed.

‘Not exactly,’ James said.

Anna looked at him with burgeoning hostility.

‘James here works for a digital agency, lots of big impressive clients. And I’m in sales. Pharmaceutical sales. So if you’re fresh out of Anusol, I’m your man.’

‘Loz, how about we let Anna get to the right party?’ James said, hoping to redeem himself and halt the haemorrhoids chat. She scowled at him, as if he was trying to get rid of her.

‘I’ve got a better idea. Given this reunion has all the atmosphere of a Quaker quilting party, how about you smuggle us in to Beth’s do, and we buy you drinks by way of thank you?’

‘Loz!’ James said, sharply, writhing with embarrassment.

‘I think Beth might mind,’ Anna said.

‘Nah. Sounds like there’s karaoke in there? I do a belting “Summer of ’69”. Come on. Don’t you think it’d be a laugh?’

‘Nope,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘Bye.’

She slipped away through the door and Loz let out a low whistle. ‘Was that a second or third degree burn?’

‘You can’t hustle a woman you’ve never met before into drinking with you, without her exerting her free will to tell you to sod off,’ James said, shaking his head.

Laurence gazed at the door, as if Anna might come back through it.

‘Do you think that was a hint for us to follow her?’

‘No, Loz. Now can we go?’

Laurence shrugged, scanned the room and necked the last of his pint.

Minutes later, debating ‘more beer or kebabs’ on the pavement outside, Laurence prodded James’s arm. He urgently gestured down the street.

There, a few yards away, was the Mysterious Anna, climbing into a cab.

‘Can you believe it? The lying …’

‘Haha!’ James liked her style.

‘If she wasn’t really going to that leaving do, why was she in ours?’

‘She was left so depressed by one encounter with you, she couldn’t face any more socialising?’ James said.

‘No. This is officially weird. Maybe she did go to our school and didn’t want to say.’

They watched the cab turn the corner and then set off down the street in the stinging chill, chins angled down into coat collars.

‘Do you remember any Spanish-looking girls at our school?’ James said.

‘Nope. You know, her whole story was off. How could you not read a banner that big? You’d need to be Stevie Wonder.’

‘OK, try this for an explanation. Someone from school is a suspected terrorist and she’s an MI5 spook. The suspect’s gone to ground and the whole reunion was a herd and trap ruse by the British secret services to lure the target out. This Anna is their top woman, on secondment from Barcelona. But crucially, they forgot that to pass muster undercover as an ex-pupil of Rise Park, you need a KFC-zinger-tower-and-twenty-a-day complexion.’

James glanced over at Laurence and started laughing.

‘What?’ Loz said.

‘Oh, just the fact you were actually considering that as more likely than an attractive woman not wanting to talk to you.’

10

‘So, how did the reunion go?’ Patrick asked, as Anna put down a cup of tea on his desk.

Patrick’s office was as forensically neat as his clothing and, unlike Anna, he didn’t use chairs as receptacles for overflow from his shelves.

‘It was … peculiar.’

Anna debated saying no one recognised her but she realised that would involve pulling worms out of cans like streamers.

‘Didn’t run into any old flames?’

Patrick was a ‘committed’ – read: resigned – bachelor. His terror that Anna might betray singles club by finally meeting someone was only matched in scale by her equal certainty that she never would. She sipped from her own cup of tea and hovered.

‘You must be kidding. No old flames at Rise Park, more scorch marks.’ She wanted to talk about something else. ‘How’s The Guild doing?’

‘Good thanks. Spent the weekend disciplining wayward teenage Danish warlocks and facerolling our way through the current wave of raid progression.’

‘Much like here then. You’re still a panda?’

Patrick always knew he could discuss his hobby without fear of judgement from Anna. She might not be a gamer herself but there was a geek solidarity.

‘In Pandaria. Only temporarily. I used to be a female orc. A shaman.’

‘Ah.’

Patrick was mostly into what Anna had learned to call ‘immersive’ games like World of Warcraft. He always tried to persuade Anna to give it a go, but she was dubious, especially when she found out he wore a headset microphone.

‘Still, glad you went to the reunion, all told?’ Patrick said.

Anna pondered this. She was more perplexed by it than anything.

‘It was a useful reminder of everything and everyone I don’t have to put up with any more, put it like that. Like a vaccine shot of aversion therapy in the buttock. After that, I appreciate every single little thing about work today.’

She beamed and Patrick beamed back, perfectly in tune.

‘Oh woe, I have first years at ten a.m. I challenge you to appreciate them,’ Patrick said. ‘I think this lot are the worst yet.’

‘We say that every year.’

‘I know, I know … but were we ever this bad?’

‘We did go on to become batshit old lecturers ourselves, so we’re hardly typical.’

‘I suppose so.’ Patrick swilled his tea. ‘I had one last week who sat there and said “Henry VII was brilliant, just brilliant.” As if you can skip the set texts and get your pom poms out and cheerlead instead. And I said “Brilliant how?” and he said’ – Patrick mimed a blank stoner face – “Just … brilliant.” Roll over Simon Schama, there’s a new guy in town. Another of them thought parsimony had something to do with income from parsnips. They should get a TV show together, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Historical Adventure.’

Anna laughed. ‘’Fraid I can’t say the same in return. My freshers are eager beavers. Plus, Operation Theodora Show kicks off this week.’

‘Well done you. Can’t wait to see it. Feather in your cap with poison Challis, too.’

‘Hope so.’ Victoria Challis was their head of department. She didn’t have a warm and inviting demeanour, it had often been noted. She did, however, have the keys to the research funds and promotions cabinet.

‘Lunch later?’ Patrick said.

‘Yes! My shout. It’ll take my mind off having to go wedding shopping with my sister tonight.’ Anna picked up a folder on Patrick’s filing cabinet and lightly batted it against her forehead.

‘Ah. Choosing flowers and trying different flavours of sponges and so on?’

‘She’s looking for her wedding gown—no, NO sentiment,’ Anna held up a finger as Patrick formed a soppy face. ‘There’s the “aww” factor and also the “argh”. If Aggy finds The Dress and it’s huge, I’ll have to follow the showy theme as a bridesmaid. It’ll be tangerine or canary yellow shot silk with a zebra print fur trim, like some “Santa Baby” swingy thing. My sister’s taste is very “Miami”. She has already uttered the bowel-freezing phrase “seen something in the Ashley and Cheryl Cole wedding”. Given they’ve divorced, it might even be the actual thing on eBay.’

‘Ah. Well. I am sure you’d look marvellous in a refuse sack.’

Anna made her umpteenth face of gratitude. ‘Thanks. See you later.’

Patrick beamed, doing a little wave as she exited.

Returning to her office and sitting down to her computer, Anna saw a name she didn’t recognise in her email and realised it was Neil from Friday. She could see from the preview window that this said rather more than she required; it used the word ‘lovers’. And an emoticon. Christ’s fuzzy clackers.

She opened and read it, feeling her piss steadily boiling as she did so.

Dear Anna,

I am sorry you didn’t feel our date had the required ‘spark.’ I enjoyed it very much. If you will allow me to give you some feedback in return, I think you may be more likely to discover this elusive ‘spark’ if you are more open in your attitude. I found it difficult to get you to enter into a real conversation and our topics rarely strayed from the superficial. In fact, I got the sense you found honesty positively intimidating. I require a little more confidence in my lovers. And in general, I am tired of women over thirty who claim to want to meet an available man, then play the game of ‘catch me if you can’ once they know he’s interested. This rigmarole is not for those of us not in the first flush of youth

However, having said this, I’d be prepared to try a second date if you persuade me it is worthwhile.

Best wishes,

Neil

Anna wrestled the temptation to craft a stinging riposte. She should resist. Ah, sod it. She opened a reply.

Dear Neil,

I’m not playing any game, I’m simply saying no thanks to another date. Maybe you’d have had more luck if you didn’t make presumptuous and egotistical judgements like this about women you don’t know. Or make rude observations about their age. Or quiz them on their sexual preferences on the basis of a half hour acquaintance.

Best,

Anna

She hit send and took an angry swig of cooling tea.

Online dating could turn the most spangled romantic into a grizzled cynic. Wasn’t the internet supposed to herald a new era of ease and democracy in such matters? Instead it made the league tables, and winners and losers of the game, even more explicit.

Here was its stark reality: seeing that the person who hadn’t replied to your days-old message had logged in mere hours ago. Or noticing that the exciting entrepreneur who told you he was moving to Amsterdam, and thus sadly not free for a date, appeared to be very much still in the UK and available to other women.

Spotting that for all the ‘I want fascinating conversation’ claims, the site’s most popular of either sex were always the conspicuously beauteous. It was really ‘Am I Hot Or Not’, with some bullshit tacked on about how you liked crunchy peanut butter and the cool side of the pillow.

Oh, and men still tended to date five years younger than their own age.

Some people imagined Anna was grandly holding auditions, enjoying testing her market value. Or gadding round as if life was some Nora Ephron film, the world bristling with potential suitors you’d bump into while holding a brown paper bag with a baguette sticking out of it.

No, Anna was searching for a soulmate who probably didn’t exist, in a place where he almost certainly wasn’t.

Well-meaning types would say: ‘You’re the last person you’d expect to still be single! The world’s gone mad!’

Anna had to disagree there. For her, the world had always been this way.

11

There wasn’t really the conventional phraseology to describe what had happened to Anna, in terms of her physical transformation. If she said something understated like ‘I used to be heavier’ or ‘I blossomed after university’ or ‘I was a bit of a duckling’ people nodded and said ‘oh me too, I didn’t really come into my own until my mid-twenties’, or similar.

But to end up looking like a completely different person, one born to a radically different genetic fortune? That journey was so rare as to only usually feature in saccharine films with makeover montages. Bonsai supermodels ‘disguised’ in dungarees, ready to remove the specs and shake their glossy Coke can-sized curls out of a barrette.

Anna had not been a plain child. Plain suggested unremarkable, average, easy to miss. She was very eye-catching. A combination of her inflatable size, oily complexion, orthodontics, heavy metal singer mop of untamed black curly hair and homemade outsize clothes (God how Anna came to hate her mother’s Singer sewing machine), made her stand out.

Seeing any glamorous potential in her future would’ve been deemed blind optimism, emphasis on the blind. Anna was, as her Rise Park peers often reminded her, fat and ugly.

She lost the weight when she was twenty-two. ‘The weight’ as opposed to just ‘weight’ seemed the right term, as her size had become a thing, an entity. Because Anna was A Big Girl. The fact followed her around and defined her. It was the monkey on her back that tipped the scales at an extra four stone.

The process of changing had been kick-started by a simple thought, after coming home in tears from a ‘Oy, Ozzy Osbourne – who ate all the bats’ heckle from a white van not long after she’d started her PhD.

She was intelligent and capable, and ran every other part of her life with rationalism and success. So why did adjusting the ‘calories in/calories used’ ratio to achieve an average BMI defeat her?

Like a lot of people who were overweight in childhood, by the time Anna fully awoke to the fact she was larger than other girls, it seemed incontrovertible.

Her younger sister Aggy was a whippet-thin livewire like their mother. Anna, they all said, was built like her dad. Their father Oliviero was a Central Casting roly-poly ‘baddabing geddoudamah kitchen’ Italian paterfamilias with a big broom of a moustache who advertisers would use to sell olive oil.

Anna’s mum made his native cuisine in trencherman portions as an apology to her father for not being in his sunny homeland, even though he had left under his own steam in 1973. And while he loved Tuscany and often complained about London, he never expressed any serious desire to return.

She extended the policy of indulgence to Anna and her sister, who managed to combine the most fattening elements of two cuisines. Cheese, pasta, ragus as nod to their Italian roots, Oompa Loompa orange chicken nuggets and oven chips in nod to their Barking surroundings. Plus Somerfield’s Neapolitan ice cream to notionally combine the two.

Anna was ten stone by the time she was ten years old.

Slimming was both mind-bendingly simple and psychologically complicated, all at once. Anna realised that seeing off a whole Marks and Spencer’s tiramisu in one sitting was not her reward for being exiled from the world of the normal-sized, it was what was keeping her there. She swapped the stodgy carbs for fish and salads, and began running, pounding the streets in flapping old tracksuit trousers.

And Anna joined WeightWatchers. She didn’t do it expecting results, she did it in the spirit of testing the hypothesis she was born to be hefty. If it didn’t work, she could cross ‘ever being slender’ off the Bucket List.

As she lost pounds, then stones, her former identity melted away and a strange thing happened. She discovered she was pretty. The possibility had never occurred to her and, she was fairly sure, anyone else.

Previously, her expressive dark eyes, neat nose and sardonically amused Cupid’s bow of a mouth had been completely lost in a pillowy face, like raisins and fruit peel in dough. But as her bones sharpened, indistinct features were revealed as the regular ones of the conventionally attractive.

‘Aureliana looks like an actress!’ trilled her aunty, on the first Boxing Day where Anna was not doing the ‘roast potato challenge’ with her Uncle Ted. For once in her life, when Anna pasted on a shaky smile, then ran away and cried, it was with happiness.

Initially, the wonders didn’t cease. Anna learned there was a whole secret world of coded glances and special treatment from the opposite sex that she never knew existed before. It was like joining the Masons, with arse-pinching in place of handshakes.

Even now, ten years on, when a student was sitting slightly too closely as she leafed through their work, or she got her coffee loyalty card peppered with stamps after one drink, she had to remind herself: they’re flirting with you.

Some larger people could never adjust to being smaller, kept picking up Brobdingnagian trousers and getting halfway to the till before they realised they weren’t the width of a doorway any more. Anna suffered the same perception shortfall. She couldn’t get used to being thought attractive. ‘Gorgeous and insecure, the chauvinist’s dream,’ Michelle said.

Having assumed she would only ever have the pick of serious young men of the kind she dated at Cambridge, with huge IQs, dour expressions and well-ironed shirts, suddenly, the doors to a kingdom of choice had swung open.

So who did she want? It turned out, she didn’t know.

At first, out of a sense of loyalty to her tribe and in some confusion, she dated the same kind of quiet, studious men as before, when she was bigger. These failed experiments had a pattern. At the start, she was worshipped like a goddess, as if they couldn’t believe their luck. Eventually, they decided they definitely didn’t believe it and the relationship collapsed, eroded by corrosive suspicion and buckling under the pressure of extreme possessiveness.

Anna had been completely committed to clever Joseph, her only long-term boyfriend to date, who understood jet propulsion but didn’t understand how it was possible for Anna to spend an evening out that wasn’t a hunt for his successor.

As for good-looking, confident men who sought a similar woman to be their matching bookend: Anna was too sardonic, too aware of their machinations to be suited as a partner. She bristled at any sense that it was beauty rather than her brain that had piqued their interest, and it manifested in prickly defensiveness.

And there were some negative consequences with women, too. There were rules of engagement when you were a ‘looker’ that she was very late to learning.

She didn’t recognise the signs of jealousy when they flared, and rush to douse them with buckets of self-deprecation. Or join in when females were enthusiastically listing their flaws, which had occasionally been taken to mean she didn’t think she had any. Anna had never needed to itemise her shortcomings, as it had always been done for her.

She never felt she fitted in, the same way she hadn’t before.

Anna was unusual, a one off, an awkward oddity, and thus finding what people blithely called their ‘other half’, someone who tessellated, seemed impossible.

It was no coincidence her best friends were Michelle and Daniel, two people for whom image meant little.

And as desperately as Anna didn’t want to be defined by those terrible younger years, she still felt much more like the girl who got called a hairy beast, than the woman who was wolf-whistled.

12

James knew the moment of reckoning would arrive eventually, and arrive it did, at 11 a.m., after Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits had left him feeling destitute.

‘Guys, just confirming we’re still on for the big night out for the company’s fifth birthday. I’ll email the itinerary soon,’ Harris said to the room. He was in his ironic t-shirt that said BOB MARLEY under an image of Jimi Hendrix and a pair of tartan drainpipes. ‘We all good?’

James had turned the options over already. He could play for time and simply say yes, he and Eva were still coming.

But the deposit was £100. He’d need a reason for Eva’s no-show. Something gastric, or a family crisis. James would be telling the kind of fibs that tie you in knots, bind your legs together and trip you over, face down onto a hard surface.

So far, failing to tell them he and Eva had split up was a lie of omission, navigating little semantic slalom courses when someone asked what he’d been up to at the weekend.

This would require active untruths – doctor’s appointments and non-transferable flights to Stockholm and remembering who’d done what, and to whom he’d told it. And when the truth of her absence was finally revealed, they’d work backwards and work it out. He could picture Harris, in one of his Playdoh-bright tank-tops, holding a hand up and saying: ‘OMFG, dudes. That was why she didn’t come to the five bash? I always thought the cancerous nephew was a crock of plop.’

The pity would be all the greater, mixed with derision. It was bad enough they had to know; James couldn’t bear them knowing he minded them knowing.

‘Uh. Actually, change my plus one. Eva and I have split up.’

Harris goggled at him. Ramona’s jaw dropped almost as far as her Tatty Devine MONA plastic nameplate necklace. A hush fell over the room, a hush punctuated by the squeak of half a dozen people turning in their chairs at once. Lexie, the pretty new copywriter, audibly gasped. Charlie, the only other married member of staff, who still dressed like he’d wandered off a skate park, mumbled a sorry mate.

‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.

No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.

‘Seriously.’

‘Why …?’

James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.

‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’

He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.

‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.

James wrestled with the stigma of divorcing loser. Wrestled with it for only seconds.

‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’

Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.

‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’

James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.

‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.

James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.

So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.

13

‘Welcome to Sleeping Beauty. I am Sue and I can make your fairytale dreams come true!’ the boutique owner chirruped, which Anna thought was a fairly mental claim. Wasn’t Sleeping Beauty in a persistent vegetative state for a century?

Sue looked like a backbench MP in a skirt suit and pearls and Anna guessed her sales techniques would be brisk, despite all the wispy pouffiness around them.

Aggy and their mother’s eyes shone at her words, and Anna knew she was a lone cynic in the realm of true believers. It was an enchanted grotto for those who wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Best Actress Oscar nominee.

The salon was softly lit by peachy bulbs. It had a deep, spotless cream shag pile and lavender wallpaper with a dragonfly print, and rococo oval dressing-room mirrors – the sort wicked queens consulted.

The air was heavy with a sweet freesia scent, like some kind of sedative love gas. Michael Bublé crooned from hidden speakers, no doubt using subliminal hypnosis techniques.

Promise me your heart, give me your hand … and the long number on the front … now the expiry date, yeah baby.

There were racks of giant gowns, stiff and sticky-outy with net and bustles and laced corsets and an ‘aristocrat before the French Revolution’ attitude to making a bit of a show of yourself.

Sleeping Beauty could have been called Go Big Or Go Home. It was one big Pavlovian memory-trigger to Disney fantasies, in a world where the magic wand tap was the swipe of the Visa card.

Brides-to-be disappeared into a changing room through a crystal beaded curtain, to reappear transformed. Anna tried to imagine uttering the words ‘something simple’ in here, and failed.

‘You must be my bride,’ Sue said to Aggy. ‘I can tell you’re going to suit everything. Some fresh-faced young women simply make natural brides. And a sample size ten; the world’s your oyster when it comes to choosing a style.’

Anna itched to say: ‘What happens to the old broiler chickens then? Do you not flog them stuff?’

Aggy near-gurgled at the flattery. Physically, Aggy was a more angular, shorter version of her sister, but what she lacked in height and width she made up for in noise.

Aggy worked in PR, specialising in event management, and she was superbly suited to the job. She’d been organising things to her liking since she was very small, and her wheedle power was second to none. You wouldn’t mistake Aggy for an academic: today she was in a puffa coat, high-heeled boots and carrying a Mulberry Alexa. She lived life in caps lock. GETTING MARRIED LOL!

There were two years between the sisters, and in some ways, a chasm of difference.

‘This must be the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride,’ Sue said, speaking to their mum as if she was serving her a soft-boiled egg in an assisted living facility. ‘And this is the gorgeous sister and chief bridesmaid.’

‘Judy’ and ‘Anna’, they said in turn, as Sue clasped their hands and gazed at them with expression set to ‘purest bliss’.

Aggy had booked an hour-long private appointment, and whilst Anna hated a stalking sales presence, Aggy revelled in the attention.

Anna shrugged her grey duffle coat off. Her family characterised her as a tomboy in contrast to her sister’s girly-girliness, but she felt it was a simplification. She liked some girly things. Romance – in art if not in life, so far – and dresses and shoes and fizzy wine.

She just didn’t like the full range of girly things that Aggy did. Such as nights spent on the sofa with Vogue, toe separators, Essie polish, spoon wedged in Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Me Up, white iPhone welded to her ear on the gossip grapevine. Instead of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, Aggy travelled in a Fiat 500 with rubber eyelashes on the headlamps and a bumper sticker revealing the worrying news for Saudi oil barons that it was Powered by Fairy Dust.

Anna was glad she liked Aggy’s intended. Aggy was capable of marrying lots of men Anna wouldn’t like, but luckily it was the affable, laddish Chris, a painter-decorator from Hornsey. He sincerely loved her sister and also knew when to say, ‘That’s henshit, Ags.’

They were tying the knot in the splendour of the Langham Hilton ballroom this Christmas.

Since the family dinner where Aggy arrived wearing a diamond solitaire the size of a glass brick and her sister and her mum did lots of squealing, Anna had felt the tiniest bit nervous.

The one thing Aggy couldn’t successfully manage was her own expectations. Anna was pretty sure the way the wedding was being organised was thus: Aggy choosing exactly what she fancied (which was usually at the top price point), and finding a way to pay for it afterwards.

Chris looked increasingly hangdog each time Anna saw him. Chris would’ve been happy with an Iceland party platters buffet at the Fox & Grapes, driving them to the venue in his company van, furry trapper’s hat sat on head, ear flaps flapping, singing along very loudly to Smooth Radio.

At this rate, Anna feared her sister might end up adjusting her priorities too late to save causing damage to sanity, relationship and credit rating.

‘Bubbles before we start!’ Sue said, pointing to a silver tray with three flutes and a bottle on the marble-topped coffee table, next to a pile of glossy bridal magazines and a bowl of water with floating lotus flower candles.

Aggy was only a mouthful through hers when Sue cried, ‘Let’s get you into the first dress!’

Aggy and Sue disappeared through the beaded curtain and Anna and her mother exchanged smiles and tapped their feet.

‘Do you think Aggy’s in for the long haul here?’ Anna said eventually, scanning the scores of lampshade skirts.

‘Of course she is, Aureliana! It’s till death do you part.’

‘No, I meant …’

‘Dum dum de dum!’ Sue sing-songed, holding the beads back for Aggy to re-enter, unsteady on cream satin bridal shop stilettos. She was in a halterneck gown with a simple A-line skirt and lots of Swarovski sparkle.

‘Oh, lovely!’ Judy said.

‘Anna?’ Aggy asked, uncertain.

‘Your collarbones look nice. I’m not sure about the cowgirl rhinestones though. Could be worse. I give it three enchanted slippers out of five,’ Anna said. ‘It’s … cut quite revealingly around your ta-ta’s, too.’

‘The modern way is to show slightly more skin,’ Sue said, through a taut smile. Then reassuringly to their mum: ‘Nothing tacky. Merely a hint of what lies beneath.’

Anna tipped her head to one side. ‘Hmmm. I’m getting significant side boob, with the promise of full udder swing if she leans down to kiss a flower girl.’

‘Ah no way, I don’t want some rancid randy vicar being all “to have and to hold”.’ Aggy did a Rocky Horror pelvic thrust.

‘Agata, the vicar will not be randy!’ Judy exclaimed. ‘Stop this!’

‘We can tighten it,’ said Sue, shooting Anna a look that suggested Sue was already doing some tightening of her own.

‘Er mer GERD.’ This was Aggy’s latest expression. ‘Did I ever tell you what happened to Clare from work? Strapless dress, bridesmaid trod on the train walking down the aisle, pulled it right down,’ Aggy indicated waist level. ‘But Clare said she didn’t mind because she’d dropped five grand on saline implants in the Czech Republic. She was like,’ Aggy pointed at her chest with both her index fingers, ‘Feast your eyes, it’s a banquet.’

‘Surely a properly fitted dress couldn’t be pulled down that far?’ Judy said. ‘That’s a failure of the boning.’

Anna and Aggy exchanged a look.

‘Maybe like Aggy said, she was an exhibitionist. Maybe she’d booby-trapped it,’ Anna said, making a ‘winding a handle’ movement and a whirring noise.

‘Possible, she was quite a rowdy skanger when she got a drink in her. Marianne said Clare with wine was like a Gremlin with water,’ Aggy said. ‘She used to show clients her bikini-line tattoo that said mama is forever in Sanskrit and our boss had to tell her to stop because the older ones haven’t heard of vajazzling yet and she could upset them.’

‘What does mama is forever mean?’ Anna asked.

‘Her mum died of an aneurysm in Bluewater. It was a tribute.’

‘A tribute in the form of writing on her fanny? Who wants that? Mum, would you like me to get RIP JUDY down there?’ said Anna.

‘I can’t say how I’d feel if I’d died,’ her mum said. ‘I think I’d rather have a memorial fig tree at St Andrew’s.’

‘So that’s a pass to this one?’ Sue interjected, desperately.

Anna felt a whisper of remorse that Judy wasn’t sitting next to someone who’d do firework show gasps of ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the gowns, but to some extent you played the role that fell to you in a family. There was no question Anna had pulled the voice of reason straw in hers.

People often reacted with disbelief that Judy was their mother, firstly because she was youthful-looking and expensively blonde-streaked for her fifty-something years. And secondly, what with coming from Surbiton, entirely un-Italian looking. She was inordinately proud of her daughters’ continental heritage and made a point of using their full names. Their father, funnily enough, was less of a fan, pronouncing Aureliana and Agata as ‘not traditional’.

‘Your mother goes and registers these fooling names behind my back, saying it was her hormones! She does this twice! Can you believe it?’

Anna certainly could believe it. It was also very like her dad to let her mum have her way.

‘Mum. How is Aggy paying for all of this?’ Anna said in a low voice.

‘She has a good salary. And savings. And Chris has money.’

‘Not that much money. Do you not think this might be getting out of hand?’

‘You only do it once. I know it’s not your sort of thing, but it’s her special day.’

Anna bit her tongue. She’d have a quiet word with her dad instead. The family had two distinct factions: Anna and her father’s more sober self-containment, and her mother and Aggy’s silliness. As Aggy changed again, Anna feared Sleeping Beauty was the start of a very long hike around London’s upscale dress shops.

There was a loud shriek from the changing rooms.

‘Has her false leg fallen off?’ Anna said.

Sue appeared, only her head poking through the brothel curtain, wreathed in stagy drama.

‘We’ve got something rather special here,’ which Anna took to mean, I think she’s about to buy this, so stay on bloody message, bitches.

Aggy walked out wearing a sheepish smile and what was obviously The Dress. It had a full Tinkerbell skirt in glistening layers of raggy tulle and a strapless, thimble-sized bodice, which Anna wouldn’t have been able to wrestle her ribcage inside. Aggy looked like she should be onstage in a ballet, and rather wonderful.

‘Oh Agata!’ Judy said, bursting into tears and jumping up to hug her.

‘S’amazing, Mum,’ Aggy sniffled. ‘I feel like a princess.’

Anna stayed put and let her mum’s raptures subside while she poured the last dregs of the cava into her glass.

‘Don’t you like it?’ Aggy called to Anna.

‘I do. I’m toasting a job well done. You look like you’re really getting married in that. And only the second dress. Good going. Honestly, you look beautiful. It’s “big wedding” but it’s tasteful.’

Aggy twirled and pinched at layers of the skirt, letting them drift back down. ‘You know how they say when you meet The One, you know? I’ve just met the one.’

After sufficient cooing, sighing and ogling had taken place, and an elated Sue had dashed off to find the paperwork, Anna asked how much it was.

‘Three,’ Aggy said.

Anna’s mouth made an ‘O’.

‘And a half,’ Aggy added. ‘And another 250. It’s £3,750. Veil not included.’

‘Gordon’s alive, Aggy! Four grand on something you’re going to wear once?’

‘Don’t you like it?’ Aggy pouted.

‘I think you look amazing, I think you could look amazing for half that though. A large proportion of the amazing is you. Like Sue said, you’d look lovely in most things.’

‘Hmmm,’ Aggy twirled again. ‘Mum?’

‘You look like Audrey Hepburn! Or Darcey Bussell in The Nutcracker!’

‘Soon you’ll need to be a safe cracker.’

Aggy giggled.

Anna was in a bind. If she counselled against the expense of this dress any further, they’d simply question her motives. She’d be accused of letting bitter spinster wrath wreck Aggy’s happiness. Nevertheless, Anna genuinely felt no unsisterly envy. She’d need to want to marry someone before she could seriously covet a wedding. She couldn’t put the gown before the groom.

‘I’m going to make sure single men come to the wedding. For you,’ Aggy said, as if her mind was running along similar lines.

‘Yes. You should get out and see people, Aureliana,’ their mum said, as if this was the moment to finally address her elder daughter’s agoraphobia.

‘I meet people!’ Anna said.

Aggy was twisting her hair into a chignon and pouting, angled towards a mirror. Judy bustled off for a confab with Sue.

‘I went to a school reunion,’ Anna said.

‘Did you?!’ Aggy said, hand slipping from hair and jaw falling open, reflection momentarily forgotten. ‘Why?’

‘Thought I’d face my fear. It was pointless, as it turns out that fear didn’t know my face. Seriously Ags, not one of them twigged who I was. I don’t know whether to be pleased or not. Michelle says it’s proof I’ve left it behind for good.’

‘Did you see … any of them?’ Aggy said.

‘Er … oh. James Fraser?’ Anna said, with a hollow little laugh.

‘James Fraser?! What did he say?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t know who I was either. Still so far up himself it’s unbelievable. I felt like saying to him, you know you were only a hero when you were sixteen? Now you’re nobody.’ Anna surprised herself with the vehemence in her voice.

‘Real talk. Is he still totes bangable?’

‘Depends on whether you like cardigans and cancer of the personality.’

‘Aw, does he look like Elmer Fudd now? No way!’ Aggy placed a hand on her hip and turned, with difficulty in the fantasy dress.

Anna smiled.

‘He remains vile and arrogant but also still good-looking, which is all that matters, obviously.’

‘I simply need to take a deposit!’ Sue said, emerging again, triumphant, their mother in tow. Aggy demanded their mum bring her Alexa handbag.

They left, showered in Sue’s love, with Anna feeling distinct unease at her sister’s spendthriftery.

After hasty goodbyes outside in the miserable weather, with their mum having to rush to catch her bus to Barking, Anna tried to reason with Aggy.

‘You can get a dressmaker to recreate that design for loads less, you know.’

‘Marianne did that, and it never looks as good, honestly. You spend the whole day thinking about the other dress.’

‘If you spend the whole day thinking about a dress, something has gone wrong anyway.’

Aggy tuned out remarks like that.

‘Your dress next, Anna! We’ll make a day of it, go for lunch.’

‘OK. Nothing ridiculous, promise me.’

‘Ridick! You’re going to look the best you’ve ever looked in your whole life.’

‘Setting the bar quite low,’ Anna grinned.

Aggy looked as if she was hesitating about saying something, which was rare.

‘I never knew what they were going to do, you know. At the Mock Rock. I was telling them to stop.’

‘Oh God, I know. Don’t worry about it.’ Anna felt a familiar and severe twinge of pain and shame. No matter how many times she reassured Aggy she didn’t blame her for being in the audience, this always came up.

Aggy’s eyes welled and Anna patted her shoulder. It was typical Aggy that in trying to console Anna, Anna ended up consoling her.

‘And when Mr Towers made us clean up the Quality Street,’ she said, tears coming in a stream, ‘I didn’t eat any on principle.’

14

An hour before Eva was due to arrive at the home they once shared, James showered and got into his running gear. He wanted to show her he was active, virile and not at all pining or depressed.

As much as part of him fancied doing the takeaway cartons strewn around, dark-shadowed eyes, whisky-on-the-breath suffering pose, he feared it might be self-defeating. He reasoned that only by showing what a stupid thing it was to pass him up, was he going to win her back. Eva was never one to love a loser.

It was still a humiliating piece of theatre though and as he laced up his trainers with more force than was necessary, James tried not to think about it too much.

It was two months since Eva had dropped her bombshell that she was leaving, after only ten months of married life and virtually no signs of discontent that James could pinpoint, other than her seeming slightly distracted. It was like as soon as they finished decorating the house, she ran out of things to keep her occupied.

Now he was in this mortgaged-up-to-the-eyeballs millstone, deep in Farrow & Ball front-doored, Bugaboo-and-babyccino country, where he’d thought they’d start a family.

Eva was coming round to ‘pick up a few things’ again. She’d potter about and clank in the cupboards, as if life was normal. As if she hadn’t recently sat him down on a Saturday morning, punched her fist into his chest cavity, taken out his still-beating heart and minced it into something fit for a pouch of Whiskas Senior.

Speaking of the other inconvenient, costly responsibility he inherited.

Luther was a Persian Blue, one of those pedigree breeds that looked unreal and toy-like enough to be sold in Hamleys. A football of fag-ash-coloured fluff with spooky little vivid yellow pebbles for eyes and a permanent frown, or a criminal forehead – James couldn’t decide which. Eva had taken the breeder very seriously when they’d said it wasn’t safe to allow him out, so the cat was also captive.

Luther had been named after their first dance song, Luther Vandross’s ‘Never Too Much.’ Nicely ironic, as it turned out a year would have been too much. Given Luther was entirely an Eva-driven acquisition, James had been astonished – and not a little disgruntled – to find she wanted to leave him behind in the separation. He knows this house, I don’t have the space at Sara’s for now, it would be selfish of me to have him.

But then, if Eva could abandon a husband, he guessed a cat was small beer.

The doorbell sounded. James tried to greet Eva with an expression that wasn’t set into cement-like hostility, but wasn’t a fake smile either.

He didn’t know how Eva could still do this to him – three years now since they first met – but every time he saw her, he was struck by how breathtaking she was in the flesh. It was as if the full impact of her beauty simply had to be seen to be believed. It was a physical sensation as much as an intellectual appreciation of proportion and symmetry.

That heart-shaped face, and generous mouth that he’d initially thought might be too wide, and seconds later, realised was the best mouth he’d ever seen. Her slanted eyes, dimples and her hair; naturally dazzling Timotei white-blonde.

If she wanted something and turned on the charm, she’d let her hair fall across her face, then delicately pick a strand between forefinger and thumb and draw it back carefully across her ear while keeping her gaze fixed on you, lips slightly apart.

Early on in their courtship, James thought she had no idea how madly seductive this was. Then, on a mini-break, they’d inadvertently landed themselves with a gigantic restaurant bill in Paris. The prices were already set at dialysis levels and they’d bungled the conversion to sterling with the wine list. James had nearly fainted at the final figure.

‘I’ll explain,’ Eva said, summoning the head waiter, speaking in halting pidgin French – even though she was fluent – and using that look, while James watched his then-girlfriend’s machinations in awe.

With pinwheel eyes, this man, a snobby Parisian no less, had fallen into a trance and for no reason other than he was being asked to, agreed to halve the cost of a dusty bottle of Château D’Oh My Christ I Missed the Last Zero.

If Eva hadn’t been an art teacher, then hostage negotiator or shampoo model could’ve been equally plausible options.

Standing at the door now, she looked daisy-fresh, sylph-like and about twenty-five in a dove-grey belted cape coat and skinny indigo jeans. Resentful as he was, James ached, just ached, for her to say ‘What on earth was that all about? I’m such an idiot!’ – and fall back into his arms.

‘Hi. Are you about to go out?’

James looked down at his clothes, forgetting what he’d put on.

‘Oh, no. Well, yeah. Once you’re gone.’

‘You can leave me alone in here, James, I’m not going to steal your DVD player. Is that a beard? Is it staying?’

James’s hand went to his chin. ‘Maybe. Why?’

He was ready to be snappish about this – it’s no longer any of your business – but he’d already lost her attention.

‘Oooh! Hello you!’

Great. Wild excitement at seeing a sullen in-bred feline, after a greeting with her husband that could be measured with a spirit level.

Eva danced round James to the spot where Luther was hovering on the stairs, picking him up and nuzzling his blankly uncomprehending, angry-looking face.

‘Aw! How’s my best happy hair baby?’

James was starting to really hate the happy hair baby. ‘Happy’? How could you tell, when you’re dealing with something that looked like a tubby dictator in a mohair onesie?

‘And how’ve you been?’ she asked, as an afterthought.

He hated Eva asking this. She knew full well the honest answer was more than his pride could take, and the alternatives let her off the hook.

‘Same. You?’

‘Good, thanks. This year’s intake seem a cute bunch. They really behave for me.’

‘No doubt.’

Eva worked at a redbrick private school in Bayswater and her miraculous crowd control was not unconnected to her aesthetic appeal.

Every so often, she’d come home with some smitten pupil’s unsubtle daubing of a full-lipped blonde, possibly floating Ophelia-like in water. It was usually a stealthy excuse to paint Miss in the scud. James had been irritated at being expected to look at this febrile fan-fic pinned to the fridge door.

‘Here are the ear drops for Luther,’ she dumped her bag on the table and rummaged for the packet. ‘Twice a day and some brownish discharge is normal.’

‘Fantastic. Looking forward.’

‘I’m going to get some more clothes from the spare room.’

‘Knock yourself out.’

‘There’s no need to speak in such a … diminishing way, all the time.’

James rolled his eyes.

Eva stalked upstairs and Luther padded off to the kitchen, with a flick of his tail to express his disgust at James’s inability to keep a woman.

After she had rifled through it for the ear drops, Eva’s tan shoulder bag gaped open enticingly in front of him. James could see a folded piece of paper and made out a name, ‘Finn Hutchinson, 2013’ with multiple kisses. Pupils were painting her this early in the term? He peered more closely. If he acted like a jealous spurned lover, that’s because he was one.

Listening to her moving about on the floor above, James pulled the drawing out. It was textured, thick cartridge paper, the sort you get in art supply shops.

He unfolded it and stared at a charcoal outline of his naked wife, legs hooked over the arm of a sofa, arms thrown back, staring at him unrepentantly from heavy lidded eyes, hair pooled in serpents behind her head.

This could, of course, be another Eva tribute. Nevertheless, something told James this had been sketched from real life, notably the accuracy of the detail.

For as long as he’d known her, Eva had favoured a bikini wax that left only a vertical, cigar-shaped strip of hair. The small smudgy line between the thighs was a sure sign that the artist was gifted with first-hand knowledge. The smoking gun pubes.

James left the portrait unfolded on the table and leaned against the wall, breathed out, and folded his arms.

Feeling nauseous, deathly cold and yet in control, he measured each minute she remained upstairs as an eternity.

15

When Eva walked in, James took savage pleasure in the moment of grisly silence as she pieced the scene together.

‘You went through my things?!’ she blurted. There it was. If any doubt remained that this was a memento from her new man, her reaction sealed it.

‘You left your bag open. What is it?’ James asked, dully.

‘It’s a drawing. You’ve seen them before.’

‘You’re going to lie to me? Even in the face of this?’

‘How am I lying?’

‘Because this isn’t from anyone’s imagination, Eva, it’s you. Do you think I can’t recognise my own wife?’

A pause. Her face dropped, her shoulders heaved and she started to weep. Frustratingly, James felt automatic guilt at making her cry. He knew he was being manipulated and his fury broke.

‘No, don’t cry! You don’t get to cry. You’ve done this to me, to us! How the fuck do you think I feel? Do you think I deserve to find out you’re having an affair via a doodle of your tits?’

‘I’m not having an affair!’ she said, blearily.

‘What word would you prefer?’

‘I knew you’d make this about Finn when it’s not.’

‘Oh I think it’s a bit about Finn now you’re shagging him, don’t you? How long has it been going on?’

When they first split, he’d asked her if there was anyone else and it was no, no, no – absolutely not.

Eva shook her head. ‘Nothing happened until we’d separated.’

‘Hah. Right. You obviously finished things to start this. Thanks for the Bill Clinton definition of honesty.’

Eva shook her head vigorously. ‘No.’

‘Is that too straightforward for you? Does trashing our marriage have to be about higher, spiritual needs than you being into someone else? That would be so ordinary, wouldn’t it? And make you in the wrong. Heaven forbid we call it something as shitty as you CHEATING.’

James had built up to shouting and Eva was wiping at her cheeks, head bent, hair falling forward over her eyes. It wasn’t remorse, it was a tactic to make James the villain of the piece and he wasn’t having it.

‘Who is he?’

‘He did some life class modelling. We’ve become closer recently …’

‘How close? This close?’ James gestured with his hands apart. ‘Or let me guess. This close,’ he put his palms together.

Eva shook her head and sniffled.

Wait. Finn. Life modelling. She’d talked about him. She’d met him at a launch, with her restaurant PR friend, Hatty. He’d offered to model for her students and she’d said they couldn’t afford him.

Then a few weeks later there’d been a giggly, supposedly disparaging tale about how this ‘Abercrombie & Fitch type’ had swaggered into school to pose, dropping his robe and flirting with the blushing A-level students.

James remembered saying, ‘What, flirted while flopped out? I have to admire his confidence.’

Eva had demurred with talk of strategically placed towels, and said something about how he was an up-and-coming who was signed with a major modelling agency.

James realised now that cocky Finn had made rather a big gesture in working pro bono.

Eva had gaily wondered which of her sixth formers might have a fling with him. James now detected the sleight of hand, with hindsight: it was Eva he’d met, before he posed. It was a gesture to impress her.

‘How old is he, Eva?’

‘Twenty-three.’

James put a hand over his forehead. ‘Twenty-three? What the—? You’re into kids now? Harold and Maude?’

‘Oh that’s right, start running him down and making your James jokes. Let’s not discuss this in a mature way.’

‘How do you expect me to behave? Did you think I’d be calm and reasonable in the face of finding out you’re sleeping with someone else?’

He nearly said how would you feel if the situation was reversed, then realised that question might not do him any favours.

She shook her head in a patronising way, as if it was James who had something to be ashamed of.

It was at this point that Luther decided to interrupt, the treacherous scruff-sack making distressed yowling sounds at Eva’s feet. She scooped him up and made extravagantly soothing noises, as if it was James breaking up happy homes and cat’s hearts.

‘I’m not having sex with him,’ Eva said, without much conviction, over Luther’s giant feather duster of a squirrelly tail.

He shook his head in disbelief.

‘Put that thing down, will you.’

Eva bent and dropped him.

‘We meet for coffee. I’ve only been to his flat once. To pose for him. He’s interested in art.’

‘What the …? I’m supposed to believe that you then put your thong back on and shared Muller Corners? And by the way, tell him not to give up the day job. You look like Richard Branson in that sketch.’

‘Posing is not a big deal for me. That’s a British hang-up, sexualising nudity.’

‘And Finn’s Scandinavian is he? No? British and male and heterosexual? Ah right. So you’re telling me nothing happened after that?’

‘Not … I told you.’

Her hesitation about how to categorise their activities was worse for James than an outright confession of Biblical knowledge. She might as well take a knife, slice a flap in his stomach, and tuck in with a chilled spoon.

‘If you’ve done things with him that would get you arrested if you did them in public, Eva, you’re sleeping with him. Sorry to be so old-fashioned. It’s just with me being your husband, I get terribly hung up on the detail.’

There was a pause where Eva didn’t demur.

‘Is it serious?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘All this for “I don’t know.”’ James put his hands on his head. ‘I’d prefer it if you said yeah, he’s the love of my life, it had to be done.’

He wouldn’t. James was picturing this Finn’s eyes, hands and possibly tongue on Eva and trying not to cry, vomit or punch a wall.

‘Maybe your inability to comprehend that this isn’t about someone else is the kind of attitude that put a distance between us.’

‘What the fuck’s that meant to mean?’

‘It means that the fact I could feel anything for Finn shows something wasn’t right with us.’

James swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple had apparently swollen. ‘I think you’ve got this back to front,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice even. ‘The whole point of being married is you resist the temptation of other people.’

Eva picked up her bag, eyes downcast.

‘Since we got married, things haven’t been the same. More routine, perhaps. I can’t explain it.’

‘There will be some routine in a marriage, that’s how it works. We have a home, and jobs.’

Eva looked at him contemptuously, as if to say is that it? That’s all you got?

‘Am I supposed to wait this out, while you decide if you’re gone for good or not?’ James said, though with less fire than before.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything, James.’

She was composed now, contrition over. That was Eva. Maddening, supremely self-assured Eva, who he was inconveniently hopelessly in love with.

James had no idea what more to say, or what to do. Any threats were bluffing. When someone took a shit on your heart like this, they either lost you, or discovered they had all the power.

‘When you’ve calmed down, we can talk.’ She let herself out, and left James slumped on the sofa.

Was it true? Had he trapped Eva like a schoolboy with a butterfly in a jam jar, and watched her wither? No, bollocks to that. Eva was no fluttering helpless creature, and North London had plenty of oxygen.

She’d spoken as if their life together was something he’d designed, and sealed her inside. They both wanted this, didn’t they? Looking at the house, it was Eva-ish in every detail, bar his PlayStation 4.

But he was boring. Life with him was boring. How did you fix that? How did you make your essence interesting to someone again? He did want to fix it.

Whilst he hated Eva right now, and she was making him utterly miserable, he felt more addicted to her than ever.

When James was eight and his parents had sat him down and told him they were separating, he’d not understood why his dad couldn’t be around for some of the time. Surely to go from living together to nothing at all made no sense? Stay for weekends, he’d said. Or Wednesdays. Wednesdays were good, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was on and they had pasta bow-ties with the red sauce.

They’d both smiled sadly and indulgently. Now here he was with his own marriage falling apart, and although he now understood why they couldn’t be saved by scaling back their hours, he wasn’t sure he understood them any better either.

And yet again, Eva hadn’t mentioned the ‘D’ word. Knowing her, she’d probably stick it on a text. ‘Got Luther something 4 his tickly cough. PS Decree Nisi on way 2 U.’

James tried to push the bad thought away, the worst thought, even worse than her being scuttled by some idiot with a Smurf hat and no belt in his jeans. If she does come back, how are you ever going to feel sure of her again?

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Luther was in front of him on the rug, staring at James with an accusatory menace, breathing like Darth Vader.

‘C’mere, you grumpy git.’

James picked the cat up and held him to his face, letting his thick fur absorb the tears as he sobbed. Luther smelt of her perfume.

16

When she was eight years old, on a trip to see the Italian family, Anna’s dad had taken her to see the Ravenna mosaics. While her mother, with a trainee consumerist in Aggy, had done the rounds of the boutiques, Anna was stood with cricked neck in the saintly hush of the Basilica of San Vitale. Her father told a sketchy outline of the story of Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora.

It was enough to get her hooked. She was utterly lost in the story of the daughter of the bear-keeper of Constantinople’s hippodrome who became an actress, prostitute – her dad had gone with ‘she made money from her adventures’ but Anna wasn’t stupid – and Empress of the Roman Empire. She stared at the regal beauty depicted in those tiny glittering tiles and felt as if those lamp-like dark eyes were staring directly into her own, communicating across the distance of centuries.

It was as close as she might come to a religious experience; the sense of finding something you were looking for, being transformed in a moment. Anna’s family weren’t religious, but in some ways, Theodora became a deity for Anna. Here was an inspirational woman who’d travelled very far from her beginnings, who demonstrated that the start point need not define you. She was a heroine, a role model. Well, there had been some fairly wild activity in the process of making a name for herself, involving all the orifices, and Anna wasn’t going to try that. But in general.

Her parents had tried to slake her newfound thirst for knowledge by buying her one of those hardback A Brief History of All the History There’s Ever Been books, with lots of pictures. She devoured it in days and wanted more. Eventually her mum let her have free run of a library card and Anna was able to get to the good stuff, proper detailed lurid biography.

Books showed Anna other universes, promising her there was a big world beyond Rise Park. It might not be overstating it to say books saved her life. She never understood why some of her friends thought history was dry and dusty. Young Theodora was getting up to shit a sight more colourful in AD 500 than any of them in the twentieth century, whatever Jennifer Pritchard was claiming went on in Mayesbrook Park.

Some went into teaching because they loved imparting knowledge, or more often, bossing people about. Once Anna overcame her fear of standing up in front of an audience – through therapy and practice, and in the early days, a gin miniature – Anna enjoyed lectures and tutorials well enough. But for her the raw thrills were in research.

It was the ‘eureka’ moments – where she felt like the first detective on the scene, finding the vital clue. Then she wasn’t merely consuming historical fact, she was adding to its sum.

It felt like some kind of full circle, punch-the-air joy when lovely John Herbert, curator of Byzantine history at the British Museum, had got in touch and asked if she would help him put together an exhibition on Theodora. Her inner child, who’d stared up at that gilded, domed ceiling and been transported to another time, was dancing a jig.

Anna was translating texts and helping to choose and caption the exhibits. She couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than getting to fiddle around with bits of the past, to raise the dead in some small way. Anna had only assisted with the odd aspect of exhibitions before, a good excuse to poke around at the British Museum.

This was the first time she’d been a behind-the-scenes driving creative force. She’d worked late for months to prep for it, willingly.

As she tripped off for her first meeting about Operation Theodora, she enjoyed every second of the walk through Bloomsbury, even beaming foolishly at passing strangers. This was a chocolate-box pretty part of the capital, the London of films and TV. Peaceful, wide streets, the green space of Russell Square, red phone boxes that were now historical monuments themselves, existing only for overseas tourists’ photographs, ransom demand calls and massage parlour business cards.

She arrived at the back entrance of the museum, like a VIP. She signed in, with a nod of familiarity from the reception desk, and made her way to the meeting room. It was a blazing brilliant modern white, with desks arranged in a horseshoe, as if they were having a table read for a drama. Anna would’ve much preferred something full of careworn wood and leather that was reassuringly cluttered, dust motes dancing in cidery-yellow autumnal light. Order and fluoro-lighting reminded her too much of classrooms.

John smiled benevolently at the sight of her.

‘Ah, the woman of the hour. Everyone, this is Anna Alessi from UCL. She’s our academic liaison and resident expert. You might think I’m the resident expert. However, I’m a glorified shopkeeper. She sources the products, checks what’s fit for purpose for sale, as it were …’

As he spoke, Anna scanned the room, smiling and nodding hellos in turn, until her eyes met James Fraser’s.

She almost physically started with surprise, and couldn’t be entirely sure whether she made a noise.

Her bouncy cheerfulness stopped so abruptly it almost had a sound effect. She knew her face was a mask of repulsion but it was too late to rearrange it. What. The. Fuuuuccckkkkkkk …?

James looked very disconcerted, if not quite as ruffled as she did.

John was still talking: ‘… So this is James from our digital helpers over at Parlez. James is the project leader, and his colleague who handles the technical design and development, Parker …’

Anna mumbled a vague greeting at a skinny twenty-something with asymmetric hair, and dropped with a thud into her seat.

She fussed with getting the notes out of her bag as a way of not having to meet the eyes in the room. Her heart was making a ker-plunking noise. She could hear the valves pulsing, as if they were amplified.

How in the hell had this happened? What sort of grotesque prank was being played on her this time?

17

As conversation continued and John outlined the themes of the exhibition, Anna joined the dots; John joking about the necessity of having ‘the digital johnnies’ as well as marketing and comms people at the initial get together to discuss the exhibition.

At the reunion, Laurence saying of James ‘… digital agency, lots of big impressive clients.’

It was a gruesome turn of events. And it wasn’t lost on Anna that if she’d swerved the reunion, she’d have the upper hand. He’d still have no idea who she was.

So much for enlivening ideas about facing your demons. How long had that taken to bite her on the arse? Those demons weren’t meant to pitch up a few days later in navy John Smedley cardigans in professional interactions. Only this time, unlike the reunion, she’d been introduced with her surname. Would he realise who she was?

Oh God, she hoped not. It was impossible to know if he’d figured anything out. All she could do was to try to look aloof, dignified and glacially in control.

Conversation moved on, with John doing most of the talking. He concluded, ‘And now I should hand over to James, who will take us through plans for the exhibition’s multi-channel strategy …’

The academics in the room looked politely blank while Parker put both hands on his hair and shaped it into a quiff.

‘Erm, yeah, thanks …’ James said, clearing his throat. ‘Obviously, the principal thing we’ll be designing is the official exhibition app for iOS and Android devices and so on. This is key in giving the show a higher profile and will help with media coverage.’

He looked round the room and Anna thought sourly, hardly any need for this pitch spiel, when you’ve already been hired. She sensed he was nervous but she had no interest in empathising.

‘The app will include a lot of imagery from the show, and text from yourselves. Rather than merely transpose the material from the exhibition, we want to make the app hold real unique value, with original content. We were thinking of some talking heads …’

‘That’s experts, talking, not Talking Heads the old music,’ Parker said, tucking his pen behind his ear and grinning widely.

‘Old,’ John Herbert chuckled.

‘Yes. Thanks, Parker,’ James said, eyes narrowing. ‘And we want to build an A.R. layer for the exhibition, with digital versions of the artefacts we don’t have or can’t move here. What we thought we’d do is take personalities from the mosaics, and use actors in costume to film recreations of interactions. We can have them walking about the space. A virtual Theodora and Justinian and so on.’

Anna’s nerves overcame her and she spoke before she could stop herself.

‘It’s not going to be all rotating 3D scans of people’s heads, like “Wooh, heads”’ – she made a gesture with her hands, thinking, I have no idea what I’m on about either, but I sound a bit angry so people won’t dare laugh – ‘And no text, is it?’

There was usually a small tension between academics and designers over such issues and Anna was minded to make it a larger one.

‘We’ll have space for captions with each artefact. Written by yourselves,’ James said, making an ‘I am taking you very seriously’ business face.

‘How many words?’

‘Around 150 or so.’

‘That’s not a lot.’

‘I think people have a limit for how much information they can take in per artefact.’

‘We were thinking the show might attract quite a few “readers”,’ Anna said, caustically.

‘Our research suggests people start skimming after 150,’ James said, tapping his pen on his pad.

‘Well, what does actors titting about really add? Do people need reminding what people look like? We haven’t evolved significantly since Theodora and Justinian. They didn’t have prehensile features.’

James blinked.

‘It’s a way of making the artefacts more vivid. The emphasis with what we do is on the experiential.’

Experiential. These people always brought their made-up words.

‘No, I mean it’ll get in the way of looking at the mosaics, which are the point of the thing aren’t they?’ Anna said. ‘Won’t it mean visitors spend their time playing on video games, instead of looking at the exhibits?’

James put his head on one side and made a ‘trying to find a respectful way to answer a question I think is stupid’ face.

‘It’s an “as well as” not an “instead of”. To help people visualise the world and bring the scene alive. We’ll tag the videos to objects so people can choose to watch the sequences if they’re interested.’ James paused. ‘It’s a modern way of engaging visitors.’

‘Ah, that’s the thing about history. It’s not modern.’

‘But the people going to see this are. Are you doing without electricity as well?’

James only half-phrased this as a joke and all the backs in the room stiffened. Except for Parker’s.

‘The point of the app is that it’s something different to the exhibition itself, something that complements it,’ James said, aiming for an air of finality.

‘I don’t understand why the emphasis is on recreating stuff that isn’t there, to distract people from stuff that is there. It’s as if the artefacts aren’t interesting enough in themselves.’

‘It’s about narrative. People are principally going to be interested in Theodora as a person, right? She’s the focus of the exhibition. Along with Justinian. They’re the story.’ James was matching Anna in vigour now. It was that kind of terse politeness that strained at the leash to romp into full-blown rude.

‘Yes but that’s not to turn the show into a Ye Olde Posh and Becks power couple.’

‘Justinian Bieber,’ Parker said, guffawing. Everyone in the room dead-eyed him.

‘We’re coming at this from different angles but our aims are the same,’ John intervened. ‘Wait until you see it, Anna. The Royal Manuscripts app was really something, I’ll get James to show it to you.’

James nodded. Anna simmered.

‘We’re drawing up some questions on the themes of the exhibition, to help us develop our side in line with your vision for the key messages of the show.’

Key messages! Like it was an ad campaign. Buy Zantium! That’s all these digital gits were, Anna thought. Advertisers, with a big shiny social media sheen pasted over the top. Might as well be flogging chamois leathers as the artefacts of the sixth century. James Fraser did look like Don Draper from Mad Men.

James cleared his throat. ‘We were playing around with a “medieval bling” theme for the digital pre-launch presence …’

‘Bling?’ Anna said, her intonation holding the word between finger and thumb, at arm’s length.

‘Yes …’ James said, but this time had the decency to look embarrassed.

‘You know, bling, like, big rocks, baller ass, fly, dope …’ Parker began.

‘We were thinking it was an accessible way to represent the wealth of the period,’ James cut in, desperately. ‘Obviously we can work on this in tandem with you.’

‘The “whore” angle is strong for grabbing attention, but causes problems with your younger, school age demographic,’ Parker said, in a solemn tone that made it sound as if he was quoting someone else.

School. Anna’s throat tightened.

‘We’ve been throwing ideas around, nothing’s set in stone,’ James said.

‘Not sure about the use of the word “whore” really,’ John the curator said, mildly. ‘It’s a bit of a value judgement about a female.’

‘Yes. It’s not as if you’d ever call a show Genghis Khan: Mongol Warlord, Massive Shagger

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