–AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM TRUE LOVE MAGAZINE—

What has love stolen from you?

Is there something you always wanted to do but stopped pursuing it when you fell in love? A hobby or dream? What negative effects did falling in love have on your life? What love advice do you have for me?

Perhaps some of you are interested in going on your own Love Quests, taking back what love has stolen. It doesn’t matter if you are in love, out of love, searching for love, avoiding love, married, divorced, gay or straight. True Love wants to hear from you.

Can’t think of anything? Then let’s turn this on its head. Ask yourself the following questions: ‘If you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life alone, you would never fall in love, never settle down, never have children, what would you want to do? What would make you happy? What would fill up your time, your heart, your soul for the rest of your days?’ The answers to these questions are the dreams we need to get back.

I’m going on quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole.

I have missed my own love boat. I am loveless and boatless with a whole lifetime to fill. I’m going on a quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole. So, are you with me? Do you want to join my ship?

Pirate Kate xx

Love is a Thief
Claire Garber

www.mirabooks.co.uk

prologue

The bog standard public display of being over your last relationship is when you get yourself into a new one. It’s like holding a giant banner in the air that reads:

‘Look at me, everyone! I have found someone else. I am OK. Someone else wants me. Someone else needs me. Someone else chooses to be with me. My last relationship was insignificant, barely noticeable in fact, like bellybutton fluff. My ex-girlfriend is just like the fluff from my belly.’

I think it’s all crap. I think the public sign you are over your last relationship is when you don’t care about the public sign. That said, I do have feelings, and Gabriel starting a new relationship just a few weeks after we broke up, well, that was emotional pain on a level I’d never previously known. Whether or not I believed in the validity of his stupid relationship with an emaciated French girl with fake tits and limited intellectual abilities, he had found someone else, they were on holiday together, and they were taking photos, lots of photos, and putting them on Facebook in an album entitled True Love while I was, well, I was bellybutton fluff.

But it wasn’t just that I had lost Gabriel, it was that I was so goddamn sad about breaking up with him that even the thought of being with someone else made me feel sick. I didn’t want to kiss anyone else. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I didn’t want to share my home with anyone else. I wanted him. So as I couldn’t cope with replacing him, and I couldn’t speed up the process of healing from him, I just needed to fill up the time.

Because the reality is, I might just be ‘that’ girl. You know the one. The girl who, for no particular reason, doesn’t get the guy, doesn’t have children, doesn’t get the romantic happy ever after. So I needed to come up with a plan. I needed to get back to basics. I needed to ask myself a few important questions:

What did I like doing?

What didn’t I get to do because I was with Gabriel?

What didn’t I get to do because I fell in love?

More importantly, what would I be happy spending the rest of my life doing if love never showed up again?

Now that was a starting point I was interested in.

the beginning

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

In 1990 a man called Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. He was trying to find a way for particle physicists to access the same information at the same time from wherever they were working in the world.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

As with so many things in life, the end result turned out to be a little different from the initial objective. The seed he planted grew into something so far-reaching it touched every single one of us in an infinite number of different ways.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

The Internet now provides us with free accessible education. It can teach you a second language, how to cobble a shoe, how to install a new kitchen or build a satellite that will orbit the moon.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can run your business off it, meet the love of your life on it, find the recipe for a mushroom risotto before fixing your own kettle then learning the origins of the word ‘broken’.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can also see images of just about anything you want. I’ve seen the inside of an atom; the surface of Mars; the expression on Mandela’s face the day he was released from prison.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

But what the Internet has most recently shown me, its greatest gift of all, is a set of photos of my ex-fiancé on holiday with what I can only assume is his new girlfriend. And in these photos, although I’m no Tim Berners-Lee, I’m pretty sure I can see his fully functioning, fully operational, Internet-connected mobile phone. The very same phone he currently seems unable to answer.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

‘Well, she’s obviously not going to get off the floor,’ Federico said, to my grandma. They’d stopped speaking to me about 45 minutes earlier. They spoke about me, around me, over me, across me, but never actually to me. My grandma reached down and tried to take the phone from my hand but my fingers were stuck around it like a human claw or a strange device that unconventional men might purchase in Soho.

‘Darling Kate, you need to give me the phone,’ she said, trying once again to prise it away. I gripped on as if it were my only remaining portal back home. A small circle of people had formed around us. Apparently it’s not commonplace for a 30-year-old woman to sit in the middle of Heathrow Terminal Five, surround herself with her own luggage and start weeping.

‘Just one more try?’ I pleaded with Grandma while Federico wandered from person to person regaling them with stories of the origins of my tears.

‘Well, I told her that, yes, I did. I told her when she moved there. I said, “You can’t trust the French,” and not on account of their political history, of which I am a great great fan, especially that adorable Marie Antoinette—have you seen the film? Fabulous costumes, fabulous, although terribly restrictive of the female form. No, I mean on account of the language barrier. Because how do you ever know if you are truly understanding one another? Who, for example, decided that a pomme was an apple? And what if they were pointing to a tree when they said pomme, but we were looking at an apple because we were a little bit hungry so we called a tree an apple, and now the French are confused by Tesco’s obsession with stocking as many different varieties of edible tree as is genetically modifiably possible to create? Well, it’s a complete disaster is what it is!’

‘How can he be with someone else?’ I pleaded to my audience of 19 women of varying different ages and a security guard called Albert. The other security guard, Jim, had gone to speak with UK Border Control, who were concerned I was a suitcase-laden bomber. ‘How?’ I asked them again. ‘If one person is meant for one person then he must be feeling incomplete and restricted, like a piece in the wrong puzzle. He’s in the wrong puzzle!’ I said, getting high-pitched and red-faced. And I don’t think anyone thought Gabriel was in a puzzle, unless a puzzle was a dirty great metaphor. ‘So? What should I do?’

‘Perhaps she could try him one more time?’ one lady nervously suggested to Grandma. I looked around the human fence surrounding me and they all nodded confirmation. My grandma sighed and rolled her eyes. So I switched my phone to speakerphone and pressed redial for one final try. I held the phone in the air so everyone could hear. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. Then we all looked at the phone.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel,’ the phone said. ‘I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

Then everyone went a little bit silent. Actually I don’t think you can be a little bit silent. It’s an either/or sort of thing. We were silent. And no one would look me in the eyes. So I switched off my French mobile for the last and final time and I handed it to my grandma, who put it straight in the nearest bin.

Then I just sat there, on the highly polished floor of Heathrow Terminal Five, I just sat there, surrounded by every single one of my possessions, and I wept, and I wept, and then I wept some more. If every teardrop were a piece of my soul they would never be able to put me back together.

six months later …

It’s the thing I hate most in the world, after eating noises. First place definitely goes to the noises people make when they eat; mostly it’s the chewing-swallowing noises I hate, but also the preparation noises: the chinking of knives and forks against plates in a quiet room; the noise as someone opens their saliva-filled mouth; and Lord forbid if someone actually clinks their fork against their teeth when placing food into their noisy gob. But after that, after the food-noise thing, the thing I hate most in the world is heartbreak, and I am surrounded by it every single day at work, because after the ‘incident’ at Heathrow Terminal Five my friend Federico invited me to work with him at True Love magazine.

It was Grandma Josephine’s idea originally. She’d said it was important to keep oneself busy when one was feeling broken and empty on the inside. Then she’d said something about paying one’s own rent and there were mutterings about inflation and pints of milk. So now I go to work every day, Federico by my side, and once there I am exposed to a multitude of grotesque eating noises and bucketloads of daily heartbreak, although we never let our readers know about the heartbreak. No, True Love makes everything look love-covered and golden, and I hate that. I hate the love-covered golden heartbreak.

‘Well, it’s a twatting mystery is what it is,’ Chad said, pacing around the huge heart-shaped table in the middle of the huge heart-shaped boardroom. ‘When was the last time we had this much post?’ he said on his second circuit of the room. Loosie, his officious 24-year-old American assistant, strode after him flicking through her notebook like an obnoxious linesman.

‘Two thousand and one, Chad,’ she said, flipping to the correct page. ‘Just after 9/11.’

‘So what the fuck am I missing?’ Chad said, looking to everyone in the room. ‘Why are there 27 sackfuls of post? What the fuck did we write about last month?’ It was common knowledge that Chad never read his own magazine. He didn’t even check the copy before sending it to print. ‘Well? What did we advertise?’ he asked the room. ‘Have Royal Mail fucked up and forgotten to deliver the post for the last 11 years?’ He looked from face to face. ‘What-the-twat was so exciting about last month’s edition?’

Every face in the room turned to me. It was like white-faced choreographed mime at its most terrifying. I say every face turned; Chad’s didn’t. He’d started on his third circuit of the room, tearing around the enormous table, which was bright pink, glass-topped and viciously sharp-edged. In fact that table was more unexpected than the postal situation and had injured 11 members of staff in the last week alone: nine on the jagged edge of its glass top; the tip of the glass heart had drawn blood twice, and Mark from Marketing cracked his knee on it two weeks ago and still walked with a noticeable limp.

‘It’s not just the post, Chad,’ Loosie said, scowling at me, flipping over another page of her notebook as Federico emitted a strange squeaking noise from the other side of the room. If he could have climbed inside his Nespresso machine and drowned himself he would have done. I knew the minute the postman arrived we were in 27 sackfuls of trouble and I’d deliberately positioned myself next to the boardroom exit. And excuse me, but I’m not one of those girls who’s ashamed of running away. I’m not ashamed of anything after being forcefully removed from Heathrow Airport by mental health professionals.

Loosie opened her mouth to speak and Federico crouched down as if he were expecting an explosion. I leant forward and rested my forehead on the cool surface of the dangerous glass heart. There was absolutely no way we were going to get away with it.

You see, my job at True Love was supposed to be the easiest at the magazine, and by that I mean it should in theory be impossible to mess it up. All I have to do is read the letters our readers send us then rewrite them into something more interesting. That’s it. Our readers write in (normally in their hundreds) and share stories with us: stories of how they met their one true love; or how much they gave up to save their one true love; or perhaps how they reignited their one true love. I then pick the best ones, call them up, interview them, then rewrite their special intimate moment into a thousand words of tear-jerking genius for an insubstantial salary and absolutely no writing credit. In the writing world I am the lowest of the low. They call me the ghost-writer. I’m a ghost, in the literary sense of course.

Now before we go any further I just want to state, for the record, that I am a hopeless romantic. I am a love lover. I am a princess waiting patiently for her Prince Charming to arrive, on a horse, or a donkey, or even in a London black cab. Or at least I was. Prince Charming was supposed to whisk me off my feet, take me somewhere super and tell me not to worry about the impossibly high house prices or how I will fund my retirement. He was also supposed to be handsome, funny, an emotional mind-reader and have an average to large penis. But the readers of True Love kept telling me that getting Prince to turn up at all was pretty difficult, and only the beginning of your prince-related troubles. Because Princey may not possess the above clearly defined characteristics; in fact some readers told me their prince didn’t possess any at all. But they fall in love regardless only to discover love involves focus; love involves compromise; love involves sacrifice. It’s hard to maintain it, difficult to look after, impossible to control. Eventually, almost all our readers lost the bloody thing and became Waiting Princesses again.

Not that we let the public know this. We only showed them the end result, when all the pieces were perfectly back in place. But I saw the void in between. I heard about ‘the time I lost him’ or ‘why wasn’t I enough for him?’ or ‘I gave up 15 years of my life for him; he didn’t want kids; I gave up my place at university; delayed something; didn’t travel somewhere; he doesn’t eat spicy food so I haven’t eaten Indian for 12 years; he prefers me blonde, skinny, fat, tanned, waxed, hairy.’

Women seemed to be constantly subjecting themselves to men, not that the men asked them to, I never heard that, just that women seemed to do it anyway.

My grandma always says, ‘Don’t subject yourself to a man, Kate, subject them to you!’ and I think what she means by that is decide what you want in life and get the man to fit to that, not focus on the man’s needs and try to accommodate, mould, shape, change, compromise yourself to please him. I always found it a bit confusing because I thought subjects were things we studied at school. But subjects or rather subjecting yourself is apparently a universal force, like some kind of giant whip, or invisible force field that humans can apply to one another. My grandma knows this stuff because she’s a world-renowned feminist, and a prolifically productive one at that. She’s written books and papers on just about everything to do to with women, and men, and force fields of oppression. Living with her as a child, I was constantly surrounded by paper towers of manuscripts and books. I ran around them with my best friend, Peter, and we pretended the towers were actually paper trees in paper forests, which was odd because they were trees before they were chopped down by a burger company wanting to graze cattle on the newly deforested land, then made into paper for us to build paper trees with …

And that’s what I wanted True Love to write about—not the cows and the trees and global deforestation; that’s more Time Magazine than True Love. No, I wanted True Love to write about the things love took away. I wanted to help women go out and get those things back. I wanted to help them reclaim all the things that love had stolen. And I wanted to ask what they’d do if they were me, a 30-year-old girl who found herself at relationship and life Ground Zero having well and truly missed her own love boat. So I’d suggested this to Chad. I’d said, ‘Chad, I want to go out and get back all the things love stole. It’s going to be like Challenge Anneka¹ but with love and boats and the occasional high five. Please let me do it, Chad, please. Give me something to believe in after my bed for two became a bed for one.’

And I had planned to do that every day. I was going to help people reclaim their love-stolen dreams until the pain in my heart went away and the word Gabriel, or Gabe, or on the odd occasion the ‘Ga’ sound no longer brought me to tears. Because as Prince Charmings go mine turned out to be gut-wrenchingly rubbish, and I don’t think I’m the first girl in the world to think their allocated prince was a little bit shit, but Chad had said, ‘No.’

Then I’d starting crying, because since the break-up I’ve become something of a continuous weeper. Prior to this I thought us Brits were stoic and watertight, but now the tears come fast, in plentiful supply and with the most minimal of provocation.

And since then the most controversial thing the magazine had published was 400 words on the physical effects of heartbreak being directly comparable to Class A drug withdrawal (which is totally true, by the way, for any of you feeling violently ill after a recent break-up). No, True Love had continued to eulogise the positive benefits of love, teaching readers how to secure as much of it as possible, often through purchasing one of the many products Chad sold advertising space for, and, when they finally did get it, encouraging them to write in and share it with a love-hungry world. Or at least that was our position until last Friday…

And just for the record, before that Loosie starts speaking again, you should probably know that she’s had it in for me since I made fun of her funny American accent, and the fact that she speaks with the speed and intonation of a concrete-cracking power drill, and the silly spelling of her name …

‘As I said, Chad, it’s not just the post.’ She glared at me. ‘We’ve received an unusual amount of voicemails; three hundred on the main phone line, a hundred and twenty on the back-up line, and there’s something called a facsimile machine that keeps ejecting pieces of paper with what looks like handwritten messages. I’ve called IT and asked them to take it away. We’ve also received various gift boxes from motivational speakers; have been contacted by the publishers of almost every self-help author in Europe; and the BBC called, three times; and Kate, well, Kate seems to have received an awful lot of messages today too.’ You see, I told you. She hates me. ‘Yes, lots of people have called saying they want to speak to Pirate Kate.’ Oh no. ‘And most of the post seems to be addressed to Pirate Kate—’ I looked across the room but Federico was quietly humming to himself and looking the other way ‘—and everyone seems to want to talk about their love-stolen dreams.’

‘Their what?’ Chad said, spinning on the spot to face me.

‘Their love-stolen dreams, Chad,’ Loosie repeated, even though Chad had heard perfectly well the first time. At that moment, thankfully, Mark from Marketing burst in the room. Actually he hobbled on account of his knee injury from the giant heart-shaped table, but that sounds less dramatic, so imagine he burst.

‘The servers are down!’ he yelled, after bursting.

‘The servers are down for what?’ Chad said, super irritated, with me.

‘For everything, Chad, for everything, the main site, the micro-sites, client side—everything’s crashed. Too many people are trying to access them at the same time.’ Mark’s voice sounds as if he’s got an apple pip stuck up his nostril, if you know what I mean.

Chad looked between me, Federico and Mark.

‘Everyone, back here, tomorrow, 9 a.m.,’ he yelled before marching out of the boardroom followed by Mark, who, for the sake of the dramatic content of this scene, also marched out.

¹Challenge Anneka - British television show. Aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Anneka (tall, bottom-length hair, wore jumpsuits and used mobile telephones way before the rest of the world) would be set a challenge. Anneka and her helicopter-flying, mobile-phone-wielding team would then have a limited amount of time to complete the task. Anneka managed such things as repainting a Romanian orphanage, building a seal pool and ‘finding’ 10 double-decker buses for the National Playbus Association. She was a bit cool, super charitable and also a really really fast runner.

the pianist—beatrice van de broeck—90 years old

What didn’t I do because of love? Well, I didn’t study piano. It was 1936 and I was offered a place at the Juilliard School in New York. You’ve probably never heard of it but Juilliard was already one of the greatest music schools in the world. Some of the most successful pianists of our time have graduated from that school.

Well, my father, a very conservative Belgian man, toyed with the idea of allowing me to go but the school couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to find work after graduation. To have a daughter move to America was one thing, but for her to become an unemployed musician, well, that was quite another. Ultimately he gave me the choice. To do what was expected of me and marry a wonderful man who I was very fond of, or to go. Of course I agreed to marry. That was the right thing to do, the proper thing. And my husband bought me the most beautiful Steinway piano as a wedding gift. I played it every day until the day he died, God rest his soul.

But after passing up my place at Juilliard I never took another piano lesson. I stayed just as I was; good but not great; a pianist but not a musician, not a performer. So if there had been no husband, if there had been less of an obligation to marry and settle down, if I had been free as a bird like you are now, you beautiful young girl, that is the first place I would go. That would be my love-stolen dream. And if I was there I would cross my fingers and all my toes and hope that love never showed up so I could stay there forever.

grandma’s villa | pepperpots life sanctuary

‘We will do everything possible to make sure you keep your job. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to the ghostwriting team at True Love. Your writing equals a young Barbara Cartland,’ and other such platitudes had spouted from the mouth of Federico as soon as we realised the trouble I was in. Then we’d jumped in my car and driven straight to see Grandma Josephine at Pepperpots Life Sanctuary, the most exclusive old people’s home in Western Europe². There’d been no mention of Federico’s involvement in my current predicament. No, we’d skipped over that like Dorothy sprint-hurdling down the Yellow Brick Road. But within seconds of actually arriving at Grandma’s villa Team Kate had fractured, with Federico knocking me to the floor as he pelted down the hallway diving head first into Grandma’s impressive walk-in wardrobe. He re-emerged a few seconds later screaming, ‘Where’s the Chanel?’ before dragging most of the contents into the middle of Grandma’s enormous open-plan lounge. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying on an assortment of different furs, spinning backwards and forwards on the spot like one of those figurines in a music box.

‘Well, I told her to start small,’ Federico said, trying on his third fur. ‘Didn’t I, Kat-kins? I said, “Make Chad think it was his idea,” but she went ahead and did it anyway, yes she did, like a boisterous young bullock filled with his first flush of hormones.’ He took a sip from a large Margarita and threw on another fur. And just for the record he’d done no such thing. He’d said, ‘Go big, Kat-kins!’ high-fived me, poured an Appletini down my throat then substituted my diligently ghost-written True Love reader story for a two-page advert inviting the readers to get in touch and share their Love-Stolen Dreams. But apparently the truth held no place in Grandma’s colossal lakeside villa.

‘What we don’t understand,’ Grandma began, her best friend Beatrice nodding along, ‘is why Chad will just assume it was Kate.’ Beatrice and Grandma were dressed head-to-foot in black Lycra Parkour³ outfits and looked like Bond girls for the over-80s. ‘Federico, you must tell this Chad someone else submitted the advert. He’ll listen to you.’

‘I see your point, Josephine, yes, I do,’ Federico said, collapsing into a pile of dark brown furs, looking like the walnut on top of a giant Walnut Whip. ‘But if we are stood in Truth Town, Josephine, and it feels like we are, Chad doesn’t always listen to me in the work environment, no he does not. In fact sometimes that handsome mountain of a man doesn’t listen to me at all. But that is a totally different work drama of mine and today isn’t about me, it’s about Kat-kins, but let’s just say if we are touching on the subject, and it feels like we are, that I need to work on establishing better boundaries; emotionally, professionally and sexually.’ He whispered that last word before sipping on yet another Margarita. I was still dry as a pre-ignited bush fire. ‘And Chad thinks it’s Kat-kins because she presented the idea to him a few months ago.’ He passed Grandma a piece of paper that I recognised as my colourful and mostly felt-tip-based A3 presentation. Grandma unrolled the paper then shielded her eyes.

‘I know,’ Federico said as he scurried to the other side of the room to try on what looked like a man’s dark blue blazer. ‘It’s like she’s taken it to the local preschool and asked a group of mentally challenged under-5s to create her important business proposal for her. Did you do that, Kat-kins, did you?’

‘I thought I’d brought you up better than this, Kate.’ Grandma tutted, holding the presentation in my face. Personally I think it’s hard to quantify whether Grandma brought me up better than a colourful A3 presentation. Certainly she brought me up better than my parents, but they are really odd and thankfully almost constantly away. They call themselves Peaceful Extreme Non-Violent Dangerous Environmental Activists (PENDEAs) but I know that they are not non-violent and last week I saw images of them on Channel 4 News. They were wielding machetes on the deck of a recently impounded aid ship entering the Gaza Strip. Dad had face paint on, Rambo-style. I don’t know you well enough to tell you what my mother was doing, but let’s just say that occasionally she feels exposing her breasts is the best way to evoke peace. So my upbringing was better than hanging about with them, but better than a colourful A3 presentation? I wasn’t 100% sure.

‘Well, Kate, there is only one way you can save your job,’ Grandma said as she threw my presentation in the fireplace and lit a match, the felt-tip-covered page burning with a greeny-orange flame. ‘You must find something impressive to write about so that Chad doesn’t want you to leave.’

‘By tomorrow?’ I guffawed. ‘I’ve got more chance of inventing a time machine and catapulting myself back into the past.’

‘Well, she could write about that lovely Delaware,’ Beatrice suggested. ‘People always like to hear news about her.’

‘Delaware!’ Grandma nodded before punching the air victoriously. ‘You must speak to Delaware O’Hunt!’

‘Why would Kate be able to interview Delaware O’Hunt?’ Federico said, grabbing hold of Beatrice’s shoulders. ‘Why, I ask you? Why?’ He was trying to stay calm but he was shaking her quite violently.

‘Because she lives next door,’ Grandma said, walking out to her terrace and peering over the fence, ‘and normally she pops in for vino before her jazz fusion rock dance class.’

‘How did we not know about this, Kat-kins?’ Federico shout-whispered. ‘The most media-shy actress from the golden age of film living here, next door to Grandma, and you let me come here, drink Margaritas, eat lovely sushi wraps, of which there doesn’t appear to be any today,’ he said, looking about the place, ‘and we never knew about Delaware? This is slapdash, Kat-kins! Totally slapdash!’ He placed his forehead against the window overlooking the next-door villa. ‘I love her,’ he quietly wailed to himself as his breath created misty patches on the glass. ‘I completely love her.’

You see, Delaware O’Hunt wasn’t just an actress. She’s a screen idol of the 1950s. She made more movies than any other actress, starred with all the greats, made plays, musicals, films, won an Oscar, got married, then divorced. She had a tumultuous love life and wore the most incredible clothes. In fact there is nothing in Delaware O’Hunt’s current wardrobe that I wouldn’t run over hot coals to wear even now she is a proper pensioner. But I can’t for a second imagine how love negatively affected the gorgeous Delaware. Love was all around her; love chased her down the street; love made posters of her; documentaries about her; sang about her. She was a world-famous actress, one of the greatest of the greats. It didn’t look as if love stole anything at all.

‘Darling, she doesn’t seem to be in so why don’t you pop back at the weekend and I’ll arrange for you to have a chat? Federico, if you come early we can go rock climbing together.’

‘Thank you, Josephine, thank you.’ He was speaking like a 1940s actor. ‘I’ll be back at the weekend, first thing, first thing I tell you.’ He punched the air with Delaware-inspired enthusiasm. ‘Oh, and Josephine,’ he said, extracting himself from the dark blue blazer that looked in my opinion to be from Hugo Boss Menswear, ‘I L.O.V.E. the jacket. It’s so on point. Try it, Kat-kins, try it,’ he said, passing it to me. ‘Girl in Boy is black to last season’s pattern on print.’

‘Oh, that’s not Josephine’s jacket,’ giggled Beatrice. ‘He thinks it’s your jacket! No, that’s Peter’s jacket, isn’t it? He left it here when he came for lunch. I remember because I thought it brought out the colour of his eyes. Well, it did, didn’t it?’ she said to Grandma, who looked uncharacteristically startled.

‘Peter who?’ I asked Grandma. Beatrice seldom feels the need to contextualise.

‘Peter Parker is his full name,’ Beatrice continued. ‘Isn’t that right, Josephine? I’m sure it was Peter Parker because I very much enjoyed the alliteration.’

‘Peter Parker as in Spiderman?’ Federico asked with reignited interest in the jacket I now held.

‘No, silly,’ Beatrice chortled, ‘although he was terribly serious. No, Peter Parker is Kate’s childhood friend.’

‘Peter Parker!’ I turned to Grandma. ‘Peter Parker!!!’ I was getting a bit shouty. ‘You had lunch with my Peter Parker? How? When? How?’

‘It was a lunch, darling. Can’t I have a lunch? Everyone has to eat.’

‘Grandma!’

‘He got back in touch recently, darling, which has been very nice, if I’m honest. Well, aren’t people allowed to contact me any more? And he’s been very supportive of me regarding my move to Pepperpots. It was a huge decision to give up the family home, such an upheaval. And I hope I have been equally supportive of Peter regarding his divorce. It’s so hard to maintain a long-term relationship in this current socio-economic climate. I said to him, I said, “Peter, if you are looking for stability in the post-post-modern modernist age you’ll struggle.”’

‘Peter Parker got married? My Peter Parker got married? I mean, divorced, I mean, Peter Parker is single?’ I really didn’t know what I meant.

‘I suppose technically I’m all three,’ said Peter Parker from behind me.

It was the first time I had heard his voice in over 15 long years.

²You can’t really call Pepperpots an old people’s home. It’s more like a luxury retirement theme park set over 570 acres with its own spa, floating restaurant, dance studio and rock-climbing centre—the final stop-off for the brightest, wisest and most physically capable minds of yesteryear.

³Parkour - or ‘free running’ - is a sport in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles using only their bodies. Skills such as jumping, climbing, vaulting, rolling, swinging and wall scaling are employed. Parkour is most commonly practised in urban areas. It is not commonly practised by pensioners.

—AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM TRUE LOVE MAGAZINE—

WHAT DID YOU MISS OUT ON BECAUSE YOU FELL IN LOVE?

Dear True Love Readers,

This year, as the clock struck 30 years old, I found myself jobless, homeless and abandoned in France by my French fiancé. I had given up everything in a fight for love, and I’d lost, knocked out in the 7th round, sucker-punched.

With absolutely nothing to my name, no home, no money and no job, I had well and truly missed my own love boat. If I had been younger I would have soothed my broken heart through the tried and tested method of boyfriend replacement and/or alcohol consumption. But this time I couldn’t. This time the pain in my heart was too great, the love lost was too huge. For many dark months all I could manage, in between fits of sobbing, was to ponder upon the following:

What on earth do I do next?

Because my One True Love had already been and gone; as had all our future plans, our dreams, our as yet unrealised wedding anniversaries, our as yet unborn children. That part of my life was over before it had even begun. So with no guarantee that love would ever show up again I needed to find out what would make me happy in the absence of love. What could I do with my time until love showed up, if love ever shows up at all. And this is where you come in.

You see, I have started to make a list of all the things I didn’t get to do because I fell in love; a list of all the hobbies, ambitions and secret dreams that were put on the back burner the day I fell in love. And I am going to go out and do all those things. I am going to go out, like a pirate on the giant sea of life, and I am going to take back what love stole. And here at True Love we want to know what you gave up for love. Is there something you always wanted to do but stopped pursuing it when you fell in love? A hobby or dream? What negative effects did falling in love have on your life? What love advice do you have for me? Perhaps some of you are interested in going on your own Love Quests, taking back what love has stolen.

It doesn’t matter if you are in love, out of love, searching for love, avoiding love, married, divorced, gay or straight. True Love wants to hear from you.

Can’t think of anything? Then let’s turn this on its head. Ask yourself the following questions:

‘If you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life alone, you would never fall in love, never settle down, never have children, what would you want to do? What would make you happy? What would fill up your time, your heart, your soul for the rest of your days?’ The answers to these questions are the dreams we need to get back.

I have missed my own love boat. I am loveless and boatless with a whole lifetime to fill. I’m going on a quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole. So, are you with me? Do you want to join my ship?

Pirate Kate x x

PIRATE KATE

Please send all response letters to: Pirate Kate; PO Box Love-Stolen Dreams, c/o the True Love London Office

NEXT WEEK IN TRUE LOVE: MR PURRR-FECT

—how a feline companion can take the pain out of living alone

BOTOX OR NOTOX

—should you plump and fill for your special day?

AND HOW TO CREATE YOUR PERFECT WEDDING DRESS FOR LESS THAN

£69.98

paper towers of paper souls

big red | true love office | london

Jenny Sullivan doesn’t work in a wee pod. That’s how I knew she was important when I first joined True Love magazine; that and the fact that I’d already seen her on a million different billboards, a thousand different TV adverts, a hundred different talk shows. But in terms of my working day, the reason I knew she was important was because she didn’t work in a pod. You see, the offices of True Love magazine take up the entire top floor of a converted warehouse. They are completely open-plan with one large glass room in the middle, the boardroom, then one corner office for Chad and another for Jenny Sullivan. The rest of the office is dotted with enormous brightly coloured pods each standing eight foot tall with a desk inside and a small arch to get in. They resemble giant dinosaur eggs and make the office look like an incubation chamber in an ethically questionable science laboratory—one growing human clones with above-average writing skills and the ability to sell full-page advertising space. And while there is no scientific evidence that working in giant eggs improves productivity Chad did produce a historical document claiming the Incas had done so. His historical document looked suspiciously like a normal piece of A4 paper stained with tea. And the ‘facts’ were un-referenceable on Google. Nevertheless all the staff at True Love were made to work in Work Evolving Egg Pods, or wee pods; everyone, that is, except Jenny. And I had been hiding inside my wee pod, affectionately named Big Red, since 09:15 this morning listening to them fight in True Love’s boardroom.

‘Chad, I’m just saying, Chad, this idea, it doesn’t sound very “us”, does it?’ Jenny said, manically twisting her gigantic wedding ring around her finger, ‘because people here are into love, Chad.’ Jenny drew a heart in the air with her index finger. ‘This magazine is into love, Chad.’ She did it again. She could have just pointed at the boardroom table. ‘That’s why we are called True Love magazine, Chad.’

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this yet, but Jenny Sullivan likes to overuse people’s first names. It’s a technique she read about in a book called ‘Own it—Take Life by the Bollocks’. She once said my name so many times I disconnected from it entirely.

‘Chad, I’m just thinking of you, Chad.’ You see. ‘Because we can’t suddenly start writing about how shit love is, become love pirates, steal love ships and go on bloody love missions. What will our poor stupid readers think?’ She looked from Chad to Federico, who was standing like a statue in the corner of the room. Chad, on the other hand, was pacing up and down the boardroom, throwing handfuls of Haribo in his gob. ‘Because I have other things I can do if this magazine folds, Chad. I’d just carry on with my modelling career,’ she said, smoothing out imaginary creases in her clothes. ‘Not a day goes by that I’m not asked to endorse some beauty product or fashion brand. It’s such a bore,’ she said to Federico, as if he’d understand such a burden, even though the only thing Federico’s ever been asked to endorse is mouthwash at Paddington Station, and that was more of a general customer satisfaction survey than a traditional celebrity endorsement. ‘And that’s before we take into account my writing career, Chad. My publisher is constantly on the phone demanding I write another bestseller. Or I could just take some time out, spend more time being a good wife, fuss over my wonderful husband and—’

‘Oh, for twat’s sake, Jenny, would you please just shut the fuck up?’ Chad said, coming to a sudden stop. ‘It would be less twatting offensive if you just put all your awards, and your accolades, and your precious photos of you and your perfect Ken Doll husband, and printed them directly onto your twatting clothes, let the fabric speak for you, then my ears wouldn’t feel like they were haemorrhaging every time you start twatting talking.’

Federico clamped his hand over his own mouth, his bulbous eyes whizzing between the two of them.

‘I get it, Jenny,’ Chad continued. ‘I get it. You are twatting f-ing great.’

Jenny looked for a second as if she was about to cry. Her bottom lip was a tremble away from a tear. Federico turned away and shielded his eyes. He says that seeing an incredibly beautiful person cry is like seeing a big shit in the middle of freshly laundered sheets. It just shouldn’t be allowed.

‘Look at the letters, Jenny,’ Chad said, pointing to the corner of the room. ‘Look at the twatting letters!’

There was a tap on the side of my wee pod. It was Chad’s assistant, Loosie. She climbed in, notebook attached to her hand, blocking my view of the boardroom. She harrumphed before speaking just to let me know how tiresome she found me, and everything to do with everything to do with me.

‘Kate Winters,’ she began, ‘on the assumption that you are responsible for the advert that ran unauthorised in the last edition of True Love, and Lord knows the way you have been pining after your ex-boyfriend we all assume that it’s you, that and the fact that no one else would be stupid enough to a) actually pitch the idea to Chad, be rejected, then pursue it anyway and b) publish what is for all intents and purposes an advert actually encouraging our readers to, Lord forbid, get in touch, you have another 29 postal sacks of letters addressed to Pirate Kate. They were by your wee pod but Chad, and by Chad I mean me, dragged them into the boardroom. You also have a gift box from a motivational speaker called Bob. He wants to take a meeting with you. And by you I of course mean “Pirate Kate”.’ She made inverted commas with her fingers. ‘And you have phone messages: your grandmother called three times wanting to speak to you about someone called Mary, someone called Delaware and someone called Beatrice. She spoke as if I should know who these people are. She also wanted to know why you didn’t start work at 9 a.m. Personally I would like to know the same thing. Your friend Leah called, twice, wanting to talk to you about her love-stolen dreams, and a man called Peter Parker called—’

I knocked over my coffee at the sound of his name. Loosie watched me, as if I were poo on a sheet, as I tried to mop it up.

‘Peter Parker—’ she paused, waiting to see if she could make me spill it again ‘—spelt his name out for me, twice, very slowly. Please tell … Peter Parker … I am not a retard. And does he know he’s got the same name as Spiderman? Don’t answer that. Federico asked to see you when you get in, Jenny Sullivan’s on the warpath for you, and Chad said to say, and I quote, “Don’t even think about starting your twatting day sitting your skinny little arse down or sniffing at a cup of morning twatting coffee before seeing me,” and by me I mean Chad—it was a quote. BTW there is a stain on your top that looks like tomato juice, but it could be ketchup. Either way we both know that it’s not from any kind of vitamin drink. Kate? Kate, where do you think you are going?’

‘I am going to get fresh coffee,’ I said, clambering out of Big Red.

‘Didn’t you hear me, Kate? You need to go to the boardroom. We are having an Early Morning Focused Focus Meeting. Go! Now!’

the boardroom | true love

As I nervously slipped into the back of the boardroom Chad was a partial blur, silently spinning himself in fast circles on his special velvet heart-shaped chair. Federico was attached to the Nespresso machine and frantically waved as I walked in. Jenny Sullivan was sitting straight-backed and straight-faced at the blood-drawing tip of the glass heart. It looked as if the heart were literally growing out from between her perfect breasts. The rest of the office were skim-reading a Time Magazine article that Loosie was silently handing out but with a noisy sense of self-importance.

The 2009 article claimed there was a link between obesity and love. It stated that within a few years of getting married women were twice as likely to become obese compared to women who were merely dating. The research had monitored over 7,000 women and found that unmarried women living with partners for up to five years had a 63% increased risk of obesity. One of the researchers wrote that, ‘The longer a woman lives with a romantic partner, the more likely she is to keep putting on weight.’ This was by no means the first piece of research to highlight this link, or the more general negative effects relationships can have on women, but it was the only piece of research Chad could get his hands on before our ironically named Early Morning Focused Focus Meeting—a meeting that has never once been focused, never once (before today) been held early in the morning and has occasionally involved several members of staff crying. Afternoon Mothers Meeting would have been a more appropriate name, or Let’s all listen to one of Chad’s never-ending monologues and try to guess how many expletives he will use.

‘I’ve decided I want to take True Love in a new direction,’ Chad said, mid spin, the words flying from his mouth as if from a spinning top; the sounds of the beginning and end of his sentence whizzing off in different directions. ‘Now, I know I didn’t run it past you lot first, but why the fuck would I? So keep up. I’m introducing a new section to the magazine and I’m calling it Love-Stolen Dreams.’ He locked eyes with me for a split second of every spin. ‘LSD for short.’ He grabbed the edge of the glass heart and came to a violent stop. ‘I want True Love to start having a more balanced view of love and I’ve decided to start with the twatting fat people.’ He got up to start pacing around the boardroom, but his legs buckled under him like a puppet with no master—too many spins—so from the boardroom floor he began his focus meeting speech. ‘Now, before any of you get all squeaky and high-pitched I’m not judging the fat, OK, so let’s just get that out there for any of you liberalists who are pro the obese and all that. My mum had a lifelong battle with the bulge so I know first-hand how a larger lady can feel. But our readers fessed up, OK. They put it out there. They wrote in, in twatting sackfuls, to say they blamed men for getting fat. Obviously it’s not true. I have about as much effect on a woman’s weight as a plastic satsuma but we are going to write about it anyway because apparently they give a crap. Marketing guy, put up advertising rates by 15% and call out all the diet-pill companies. In fact call anything weight-loss related: step machines, personal trainers, Paul-twatting-McKenna and his I Can Make You a Skinny Fuck book. We want it all. Yellow WEE Pod, I want a selection of short articles about celebrities whose weight has been affected by love, maybe something about the amount of calories sex burns, but how they got fat afterwards, otherwise we’ll lose the fat readers. Blue, black and silver WEES, I want to know about readers who lost material possessions because of love: houses, iPads, cars and so on. Pink WEE, I want you to write about people who cancelled travel plans for love. And I want something about how love killed someone, preferably through starvation, or through having an actual broken heart. We want the readers to go on a roller coaster of twatting emotions. Jenny, read up on queens or princesses, find one who gave up something for love, the right to the throne or something.’ Jenny rolled her eyes and huffed so heavily she could have blown herself, on her chair, across the room. ‘And, Kate—’ I went cold as he said my name ‘—let’s not forget little Kate Winters.’ I could feel everyone in the room bristling with delight at the prospect of seeing me publicly fired. ‘Kate, you have illegally published something in my magazine. You are therefore responsible for all these twatting letters.’ He pointed to the far corner of the room and I turned to look. ‘It was the ultimate breach of trust, not only that you found a way to access my copy, ergo millions of our readers, but that you then used that open channel to involve them in your own quest. Give me one magnificent twatting reason why I shouldn’t fire you then call the police and have you arrested?’

I didn’t know what to say. All I could see were the letters: thousands upon thousands of them on tables in the corner, towers of letters bigger than any paper forest Peter and I had ran around as kids. And each one was a woman, a living breathing woman wanting to share, wanting to speak, wanting to reach out and connect; every letter a different voice, a different soul. Women did want to take back their love-stolen dreams. They were like paper towers of hope. I felt my eyes twinkle at the prospect. This would keep me busy forever.

‘Oi! Pirate Kate! Give me one twatting reason why I shouldn’t fire you!’

Everyone in the room expected me to crumble, or beg or just pack up my desk and leave. But not now, not with all these love-stolen dreams laid out in front of me. Chad would have to drag me from the building by my ankles if he thought I was going to give up that easily.

‘I can give you two,’ I said dramatically, turning to face the room, who gasped. ‘Actually I can only give you one, but it consists of two words—’

‘This isn’t twatting charades!’

‘How about an interview with the media-shy Delaware O’Hunt?’ The room gasped again.

‘Actually that’s quite a lot more than two words …’ Federico muttered. ‘Even Delaware O’Hunt is three words, if you think about it, and then there was the rest of the sentence, which takes us closer to ten, although I don’t actually know if the O apostrophe gets counted with the Hunt. Does anyone know that?’ He looked around the room. ‘Anyone?’

‘I twatting love Delaware O’Hunt and you know it,’ Chad barked, sitting heavily in his heart-shaped chair. ‘Kate Winters, I swear to you now, if that interview doesn’t materialise, or you piss her off like you’ve pissed me off, then you will be thrown from the building.’ And he meant from the roof. ‘You are officially on probation. If you submit anything else to my magazine unauthorised you will be fired. If you come into the office late you will be fired. If you wear a pair of shoes I find offensive you will be fired.’ I looked down at my shoes to find they already offended me. ‘You are here because of the promise of Delaware and because a certain someone believes you are talented.’ Federico pointed at his own head. ‘I’m not so sure, so let’s see how your Love-Stolen Dreams idea pans out. But you will no longer write anything under your own name.’ I didn’t anyway. ‘You will go nowhere near the copy for next month’s edition, and as a special treat you can read every single one of the letters you helped generate. I am going to work you so twatting hard you won’t know what’s hit you. So dive in, go wild, pick your favourites then rewrite them for the magazine, in first person, obviously. And when the Delaware copy is ready email it to Jenny. Obviously it will run under her name. We can’t have a nobody writing our main twatting feature, otherwise what do I need Jenny for?’ Jenny went a bit pale and locked eyes with Chad, just for a second, before they both smiled sycophantically at each other. ‘So!’ Chad said, clapping his hands together. ‘I will be checking the copy for this edition and I read slow so everyone’s deadline is two days early.’ There was a communal groan. ‘Button it, you lot, and let’s take a moment. Close your eyes, take a breath and let’s say it together. “Thank twat for the twatting fat people.”’ He threw his unfinished apple over his shoulder and marched out of the room, Loosie in tow. Then everyone turned to glare at me. I say everyone turned; Federico didn’t. He sat in the corner giving me a mini round of applause before getting distracted by something invisible on his sleeve.

‘Well, look at you,’ he said as everyone left the boardroom. ‘True Love magazine chasing down Love-Stolen Dreams; a new direction; a new era; an extra-heavy workload for the rest of the office as a result. Well done you!’ He squeaked the word ‘Yeah!’ and shook his fist in the air.

Federico was right. It was worth a fist shake and a silent Yeah. I had a virtual conveyor belt of love-stolen dreams to busy myself with, taking back what love had stolen; helping women reconnect with themselves; spreading happiness and joy and hoping it was contagious like an extra-virulent strain of Pig Flu. And after a few of the postal sacks had been sorted through and skim-read we found Chad had most definitely been right. There did seem to be an awful lot of women who felt their bodies had changed since they’d fallen in love. So Federico and I decided to invite 20 of them to join a Fat Camp. We wanted to get back their pre-love bodies. We wanted to make them feel pre-love happy and light. Maybe we could learn why they gained the weight in the first place, because everyone wants to feel beautiful and, excuse the pun, worth it, so why did so many of us feel the exact opposite, and why was love bringing about this change?

As I packed up my belongings that morning, on the first official day of Love-Stolen Dreams, I felt a glimmer of excitement, a spark of hope, a hint of happiness, which were all feelings that had been absent in my life for some time. But they were quickly replaced by fear and apprehension as Jenny Sullivan breezed past me in a gust of perfection and skinny hatred, and although I never saw her lips move I swear blind I heard her whisper, ‘You’ll pay for this, Winters,’ as she marched into Chad’s office, slamming the glass door behind her.

the story of peter parker—the boy who never smiles

I grew up living next door to a boy named Peter Parker. Not the emotionally burdened alter ego of Spiderman, but the emotionally burdened son of parents unfamiliar with the world of Marvel. Peter is my oldest friend. He was my best friend. And between you and me he was probably my first crush.

our official timeline

Age 2¼ – Peter and I met at our local preschool. Actually I’m not sure you can really meet someone at 2¼, more accurate to say we were placed next to each other and shared the use of a black and white Etch-A-Sketch.

Age 3½ – Peter and I discovered the duck pond. There I made him eat 24 tadpoles telling him they were a new kind of Cola Bottle. For the next 11 years he ate almost anything I gave him and I followed him almost everywhere he went.

Age 4 – Grandma tried to make us kiss at my birthday pool party. Peter refused and burst into a volcano of girl-hating tears. So did I, but for profoundly different reasons.

Age 5 – Peter kissed a different girl at a different pool party, this time voluntarily. Her name was Annabel, she carried a Care Bear and she always smelt of strawberries. This time I was the only person crying.

Age 6 – The local kids started violently flicking their wrists in Peter’s face and making strange saliva-infused whooshing noises. It was one of the toughest years for Peter at school and culminated in a hysterical outburst when our teacher tried to make him wear a Spiderman costume for Halloween.

Age 7¼ – Peter Parker’s mum died, quite suddenly, and I was never really told how.

By age 8 I realised Peter Parker no longer smiled. I only saw his front teeth exposed when he played with his pet dog, Jake. Then he would laugh and giggle and occasionally, if he didn’t think anyone was watching, he’d do a sort of high-pitched excited scream. We lived next door to each other so I was always watching.

Age 8¾ – I made it my official life mission to make Peter Parker smile again because when he did, even for a second, he could light up a room. I etched my promise onto the bark of a tree and pricked my finger with a needle until it bled. As an 8-year-old that was the official way to make a life’s promise to oneself. The tree is still standing and I still have a tiny scar.

I was more or less constantly preoccupied by Peter until age 14. He was the man in my life, or at least the unsmiling boy in it. Then, just before my 15th birthday, his father sent him to an international school in Switzerland; the kind of school with no formal curriculum and a lofty focus on developing the individual. Peter didn’t say goodbye, he didn’t leave a note and I never heard from him again.

peter parker the adult is a handsome, expressionless man. He has thick dark hair, dark blue eyes and sports the complexion of an A-list Hollywood actress. His clothes are always ironed, he smells just the way you’d want your boyfriend to smell and has the ability to retain inordinate amounts of information. Grandma tells me that he completed a Physics degree in Switzerland, a Master’s degree in Paris and a PhD in America. He now specialises in the development of renewable sources of energy, and in handsome frowning.

peter parker’s favourite thing—dogs and any kind of physical challenge, including sit-ups.

peter parker’s favourite activity—running at high speed with a dog and any kind of physical challenge, including sit-ups.

mary the cleaner—68 years old

Mary the cleaner worked for my family for over 30 years. She was plump but not fat, rosy, but not red, jolly, but not funny. When drinking tea, in between sips, Mary always held her mug in both hands against her chest, as if warming her own breastbone.

‘Little Kate Winters! Look at you,’ she said as she opened the front door of her terraced house. ‘My goodness, don’t you look lovely? Just lovely,’ she said, pulling me inside. ‘You know it was just the other day your grandma told me you were back. I am so sorry things didn’t work out with Gabriel.’ She hung my coat over the banisters and turned to face me. ‘I remember the two of you at your grandma’s birthday. You were quite the smitten kittens. I was sure the next time I’d see you you’d have a trail of beautiful children running along behind you. How are you feeling about it all?’ she said, looking deep into my eyes. Now, even though I thought I was fine, and had turned up like a proper journalist with a Dictaphone and giant pack of chewing gum, a childlike lump appeared in my throat and my voice all but disappeared. Because adult women have the ability to reduce me to tears by uttering one simple harmless sentence … ‘How are you feeling?’ Mary looked startled as tears spurted unexpectedly from my eyes.

‘Oh dear, oh dear, you know it was just the same for our Laura,’ she said, patting me on the back. ‘She used to be with a lovely lass called Carly, who we all adored. Carly was into aromatherapy. Have you heard of it? Well, we were sure there’d be wedding bells and civil ceremonies any day. I bought a hat. But Laura messed it up as only Laura can and ran off with a fitness instructor called Tessa, who, excuse me, is terribly masculine and terribly rude. Well, what’s the point of being a bloody lesbian then setting up home with a woman who is the spits of a ruddy great man?’ And now Mary needed a hanky and a hug. Eventually we steered the conversation back onto Mary and my idea about Love-Stolen Dreams.

‘Well, it made me laugh when your grandma called the other morning, wanting to know about my deepest desires.’ Mary took a sip from a mug commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles to Princess Diana. ‘I felt like I was on one of those TV phone-ins!’ she said, pushing herself further back into her 1980s floral sofa. ‘And it’s not that I’m unhappy, Kate. I am very content. And I would never want Len to think otherwise, poor old bugger! It’s just your grandma’s such a pushy what-not. She wouldn’t get off the phone until I told her at least one unfulfilled dream or interest.’ Mary tutted good-naturedly before offering me a strawberry Quality Street. ‘And it’s silly that I even think about it. I don’t think about it. It’s nothing. Well, now I’ve gone and made it sound like something! Bloody Josephine! For the record I am happy watching a bit of Top Gear and sitting with Len while he fiddles with his cars, but, if I was going to spend the rest of my life “alone” as your grandma rather dramatically told me, then I suppose learning about cars would make me quite happy.’ She offered me another Quality Street. I took another Strawberry Cream.

‘What do you mean you want to learn about cars? Like, you’d want to understand the different makes and models?’

‘Oh no dear, I’d want to learn how to take apart and put back together a combustion engine,’ she said, straightening out her flannel dress and cardi combo. ‘I’d want to train to be a mechanic.’ My half-chewed Strawberry Cream nearly fell from my mouth.

‘OK,’ I said, nodding my head. ‘Cool.’ Lots more head-nodding. ‘So, er, have you had any mechanical, combustion-type experiences so far …?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Kate,’ she said, tapping my knee, ‘I did do a little something about six months ago. There was an old part from one of Len’s cars and he was going to throw it out, but I knew it wasn’t broken. I was sure of it. So when Len went to work I took the part out the bin, took it apart, cleaned it up and put it back together. I gave it back to him and told him I’d got it from Jim at the scrapyard. Well, I never tell lies, Kate, but I was desperate to know if it worked. And it did! He put it in the car and it worked!’ Mary was squeezing her podgy hands together in her lap as if shaking her own hand with praise.

‘Wow! Mary, that’s amazing! You must be so proud!’

‘I felt on top of the world about it, Kate! Still do! It worked because I had fixed it. Can you imagine that? You see something broken and you put it back together, you fix it, with your own bare hands.’

For some reason the image of my own heart popped into my head, bright red, shattered on a stone floor. I saw hands picking up all the pieces, squeezing them back into shape like a plasticine toy. But all the pieces wouldn’t stick; they kept falling off and tumbling back to the floor, like overly floured pastry. I shoved another Quality Street in my mouth to fill the void.

‘So, Mary, how did you feel when you were actually working on the part?’

‘Well, I’m not sure if it’s like this for you, Kate, but normally I have a hundred things going on in my head. While I’m ironing the sheets I’m scanning the room looking for my next job, thinking about what’s in the fridge for dinner, wondering what time Len will be back from work. But when I sat at the kitchen table fixing that part I was completely into what I was doing. And that felt … peaceful. When I finished I felt this warmth, right here.’ She placed the palm of her hand against her breastbone and left it there for a few seconds. Then she picked up her mug of tea and rested it on the exact same spot. We both fell silent. My red plasticine heart was still in pieces on the imaginary floor in my mind’s eye.

‘Mary, do you think you might be interested in doing some kind of mechanics course with me? I could organise it all through work. And what goal do you think we should aim for? Would your dream be realised the first time someone pays you to fix a car or—?’

‘Well, I never!’ Mary flushed bright red. ‘Someone paying me to fix an engine!’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not possible, Little Kate. It’s a silly idea.’

‘Mary, if you find it hard to imagine yourself as a mechanic, why don’t you try visualising a version of yourself in a parallel universe, a Power Mary, who isn’t worried about what Len might think, or the kids, who only has herself to please? What would that Mary be doing with her days? I bet she’d work on cars! Try it,’ I urged. ‘Close your eyes and imagine a Power Mary in an alternate universe.’ Mary looked at me suspiciously before good-naturedly closing her eyes. ‘What would Power Mary’s perfect car-related day be? How would it start?’

‘Well, I can’t do a thing before I have a cuppa so Power Mary would need to start her day the same way. Do they have tea in this universe?’

‘I think so.’

‘And she’d need her own toolbox, which would be nice, and somewhere to work.’

‘Where would that be?’

Mary kept her eyes closed, frowning with concentration.

‘Well, there are the arches down near Tessa’s gym. Power Mary could have an arch down there.’

‘And is Power Mary by herself or are there other people with her?’

‘Well, it would be nice to work with other people, wouldn’t it—maybe some other ladies? And Power Mary would need to stop for lunch because Len and I do like to eat together. But in the afternoon she could carry on, as long as she finished by four because I like to have dinner ready for when Len gets in. So Power Mary could go home, have a quick shower, put her overalls in the wash then make Len a nice stew, although if this is an alternate universe it would be lovely if Len could work a washing machine.’

‘Mary, that sounds so achievable.’

Mary opened her eyes.

‘Me working in a garage!’ she scoffed before gathering up the mugs and hurrying into the kitchen. ‘Why on earth would I learn to do this at my age?’ she said over the sound of frenzied washing up. ‘I am who I am, Kate. I have what I have and I am happy. What would poor Len think if I suddenly decided to copy his hobby after all these years? I’d feel like I was taking something from him.’ She came back into the lounge with two fresh cups of tea. ‘And what if I was better than him, Kate, which, I am not going to lie to you, would probably happen. Lord knows how any of our cars have kept working over the years. No, we are fine as we are. I was brought up to be grateful for what I have and what I have is this.’

‘Mary, have you even spoken to Len about this, or asked him if he would mind?’

‘Oh no dear. No, not at all.’ She opened the box of Quality Street. I found yet another Strawberry Cream in my mouth. It’s physically impossible to have too many strawberry Quality Streets. They don’t take up any space in your stomach, like popcorn and cheese and most kinds of chocolate. ‘No, I would never talk to my Len about this. Well, it really is lovely to see you again, Little Kate. Such a treat. And young Peter is back too. You are all back home again.’

‘Have you seen him?’ I asked, as casually as a World War II interrogation expert.

‘Oh, yes, he came straight round to see us when he got back. Such a lovely boy. He’s got a PhD from America—did you know that?’

‘No, I haven’t seen actual proof. So did he say how he was, what he’s been doing, why he got married, why he got divorced, why he came back?’ Cool as a cucumber.

‘Well, he told me about an art exhibition he’d been to recently. Oh, and he told me about his running shoes—did you know they’re made from recycled bottles? Such a clever boy,’ she mused, chewing on a toffee. ‘I remember the tears after he left for Switzerland.’ Mine not hers. ‘It was worse than when your pet cat Rupert died.’

‘Peter’s hardly like Rupert the cat, Mary. Rupert was loyal and communicative and didn’t leave without writing a note.’

Rupert can’t actually write. I was making a point.

‘Well, I always liked that Peter Parker. Truth be told, I would have loved it if he’d fallen for one of my girls. Such a lovely young man,’ she cooed, placing her mug against her breastbone.

The thought of Peter Parker falling for either Laura or Yvette made my own breastbone warm, but in more of an acidic lung-crushing way than a soul-completing spiritual way, so I sipped on my hot tea to distract myself, but it was slightly too hot so I burnt my own tongue, which had the intended effect.

quest | mary to train as a mechanic

when a rain cloud meets a rainbow

Sport in London is not something I know a great deal about. My normal form of exercise over the last few years has been snowboarding at high speed down a mountain behind Gabriel while he yelled, ‘I am in love with Kate. I love Kate!’ to whomever he passed before we’d disappear off piste, through a forest, down a secret snow path to a secluded chalet where we’d make love by an open fire before naming all the children we wanted to have while I crossed my fingers, and sometimes my toes, and hoped I’d just been impregnated by my future husband … or something like that.

So ‘conventional’ sports, involving gyms, training sessions, boot camps and clothes, were as unfamiliar to me as German men; in that they were both a bit foreign and both seemed unnecessarily formal. Someone who did know an awful lot about gyms, training sessions and being painfully over-formal was Peter smile-free Parker, the boy who never dialled. Grandma had called to inform me that Peter was an expert on everything to do with fitness; was a triathlete; an occasional marathon runner and, rather bizarrely, a dab hand on a trampoline. Grandma knew I needed help formulating fitness plans for True Love’s proposed Fat Camp and said Peter Parker was the only man who’d know how. With less than a week before Fat Camp was due to start and with no budget to hire a professional adviser, I had reluctantly called Peter Parker, at Grandma’s request, to ask for his sport-related assistance.

I had tried not to bother myself with thoughts about Peter after bumping into him that day at Pepperpots. Actually, we hadn’t so much bumped into each other as I had bumped into a chair, tripping backwards at the sound of his voice, landing on my arse and righting myself by completing a slow and wobbly backwards roll. It was an odd and impromptu display of adult amateur gymnastics, finished up with some stuttering nonsense that my mouth wanted to contribute. Something along the lines of,

‘Hi, Peter, it’s been a long … you just … where did you … why … you didn’t ever …’ Then I fiddled with my hair before muttering, ‘You could have called.’

‘What did you say, darling?’ my grandma had bellowed as she absolutely can’t bear mumbling. Personally I think she’s going a bit deaf but she won’t hear of it, excuse the pun. She even accused Michael Parkinson of being a mumbler the other day, at his book launch, and they don’t come more eloquent and enunciated than Parky.

‘I said he could have called, Grandma!’ I yelled back. Then, because I’d raised my voice for her benefit, I continued at that level for Peter. ‘It’s been fifteen years, Peter! Fifteen years! You didn’t call! You didn’t write—you didn’t even tell me where I could find you.’

Peter had looked at me blankly as if what I’d actually been doing was pointing at his foot and saying, ‘That’s a shoe, Peter! That’s a shoe, that’s a shoe, that’s a shoe!’ rather than having formed a coherent question about the premature and rather dramatic end to our intense childhood friendship. Although in his defence I had just done a backwards roll.

‘Well, I’ve always considered Switzerland to be very insular,’ Grandma had continued, nodding her head reassuringly at Peter. ‘I can’t imagine that I’d keep in touch with anyone if I moved there.’ She smiled affectionately, gently squeezing his arm.

‘It is very secluded,’ Peter confirmed, eyes fixed to the floor.

‘Oh, of course!’ I’d said, slapping my own forehead. ‘Silly me! That’s why it’s a tax haven! Because there are no phones, or computers, or pens to write letters, or even post offices to buy stamps. Rich people literally disappear there like dropping into a landlocked Bermuda Triangle, and they never resurface. I admit I tried the same thing with the Inland Revenue but the bastards just turned up at my office anyway. “I’m Swiss,” I told them. “I don’t do contact. I’m a landlocked island of secrets,” but they made me pay my taxes and they made me do it by handwritten bloody post!’ What on earth was I talking about?

‘Goodness, Kate, you are getting very shouty. Not all of us can be Anne bloody Frank.’

‘I’m not asking him to get under the floorboards and write me a diary, Grandma! Peter, you totally disappeared!

‘He was in Switzerland, darling. You knew he was in Switzerland. Isn’t the boy allowed to educate himself? And I don’t know why everyone is obsessed with communication these days,’ Grandma had said wearily, sitting herself down. ‘Social media, they call it. I don’t think it’s social at all. I think it’s nice to be quiet and peaceful and left alone to do one’s studies. I imagine that’s what Switzerland must be like.’

‘I’m not on Facebook,’ Peter offered, quite randomly, before reaching over and gently taking his jacket from my hands.

‘Well, of course you’re not on Facebook, Peter, or I would have found yo …’ My voice petered out as I revealed myself to be a bit of a creepy Internet stalker. Peter had stared at me blankly. I’d stared back. He’d practically trebled in attractiveness since the last time I’d seen him. I was fifty shades of grey in comparison to him and I’m not referring to the literary equivalent of soft porn. I’m referring to the drab colourless mist that doesn’t even feature on a rainbow. Peter Parker was a bloody great rainbow and I was the grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud in the distance. Switzerland must be the aesthetic equivalent of Lourdes.

‘Would anyone like a herbal tea?’ Grandma had asked. ‘I’ve got some lovely fresh mint we could use.’

‘Grandma!’ I yelled, for the second time that evening, before storming off towards the front door with such force I looked as if I were wading through imaginary syrup or performing dramatic high-elbowed mime.

‘I’d love a mint tea,’ Peter had said as I yanked open the front door. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had fresh mint,’ he said with flat-toned enthusiasm as the door had slammed shut behind me, narrowly missing Federico, who’d pelted after me like an abandoned child.

I’d stood on the doorstep for several minutes, shaking from a mixture of shock and anger, while Peter, my oldest, bestest, long-time, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth friend, and Grandma, my primary carer in the world, sipped on fresh mint tea inside, both of them acting as if it were perfectly normal for him to have reappeared after all these years, which would be fine and excusable if they were script writing for Dallas. And why would Grandma allow me to bump into Peter Parker for the first time in 15 years wearing Primark? Why? Why!

Anyway I am completely unbothered by the whole thing. If they don’t think I deserve a proper explanation for the disappearance-reappearance I will never again ask for one. I will surreptitiously gather clues, draw wild conclusions, make generalisations then spring them on them at a later stage, probably while pissed. But I will never ask for the facts. Facts are dull. And on the plus side, as I have decided to look for the silver lining of every cloud (or at least my own grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud) I did get to test out my backwards roll, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Traditionally it has always been my weakest basic gym move and Mrs Franklin, my seventh-grade teacher, once said to me,

‘Kate Winters! You get back down on that gym mat and you practise that backwards roll. You never know when you are going to have to backwards roll yourself out of a dangerous situation!’

And I think that day in Pepperpots proved to us all that Mrs Franklin was bloody well right.

the sport-related meeting with peter parker

I walked into the boardroom to find Federico standing on top of the heart-shaped table in a ninja position doing wrist-flicking impersonations of Spiderman.

‘So there’s no connection at all?’ Federico asked before making a whoosh noise and shooting another invisible web across the room towards Peter Parker. Peter didn’t respond. He just stood behind Chad’s special heart-shaped chair, cross-armed, stern-faced, handsome. ‘Because you really do have the same highly burdened energy, yes you do, a man with a past, a man with a hidden secret, a man who can scale walls and—’

‘Please don’t do this,’ Peter said, without moving a single muscle on his face.

‘Well, who needs to be a superhero when you already look like a ruddy great Gucci model is what I say!’ Federico said, jumping off the table doing one last mid-air wrist flick that made Peter flinch. ‘So, Kat-kins, do you have your notes ready, because our Fat Camp auditionees are due any second. Not that they are auditioning to be fat,’ he said to Peter. ‘Not at all—they are fat, Peter. We are working with genuinely miserable members of the public who are overweight. Although aren’t we all these days? What with all those hidden calories. You need a PhD in label-reading to get through life a size zero. It’s like playing hide-and-seek every time so much as a morsel passes my lips. “Is there a calorie?” I say to myself. And then normally I eat it anyway.’ His phone started ringing. ‘I have to take this. Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Federico.’ He shoved me out of the way only to stand three feet away and shout loudly into his teeny-tiny phone. I looked from Federico to Peter, who seemed to be standing at the furthest point away from me on the other side of the room.

‘So this is where you work?’ he said, looking around the room. ‘A writer at True Love magazine; saving us from the destructive influences of love …’ His jaw flexed. ‘How ironic.’

I didn’t think it was particularly ironic, but perhaps the lack of irony was in fact the ironic part?

‘Well, I’m not sure I’m saving anyone just yet, except myself, from being thrown from a top-floor window.’ I chuckled, but Peter didn’t laugh. He just watched me, like a statue, or an overly judgemental Greek god. ‘Thank you for doing this,’ I said, nodding my head like a talk-show host. ‘Grandma said you’d be the right person to talk to. “Peter knows sport,” she said to me.’ I said that last bit in a strange high-pitched imitation of Grandma. ‘And she said you were married. “Peter got married,” she said.’ Same strange voice. ‘Although actually she said, “his divorce,” then I said, “Peter got married?” and then—’

‘I was there, Kate.’

‘Yes, you were,’ I said with yet more head-nodding. ‘You were totally there, for that, for that moment …’ I sighed. He watched me. The silence between us was long and heavy and made me want to tear out my own eyes. Peter knew damn well I’d eventually have to fill it. I counted as far as fourteen pink elephants before.

‘I didn’t get married!’ was volunteered into the dead, noiseless space that was eating me from the inside. ‘I thought I was going to—there were plans for that,’ I said, stretching myself out as if I thought I was at the bloody gym. ‘Yep. It was a serious relationship,’ I said, doing a lunge. ‘It was a serious marriage plan.’ I moved on to a triceps stretch. ‘But here I am anyway, not married but writing about love every single day, which I definitely prefer.’ Three short boxing jabs. ‘But you, Peter, you must be an expert in loving—I mean in the emotion, not the sexual act. I don’t know how you are with the sex. I’ve always assumed probably great on the odd occasion that I’ve thought about it, which is certainly not all the time, maybe once in my teenage years, and then last week when I was watching Twilight—’ Oh, my God. ‘What I meant to say is that you must be an expert in relationships, having been married. I’m sure that you were lovely both as a husband and as a love-maker. Well done you,’ I said, shaking my fist in the air, then sighing heavily and looking at my shoes. Why, oh, why was I so excruciatingly odd?

Peter walked across the room until he was in front of me. I was expecting him to perform a quick sidestep and make a dash for the nearest exit but he didn’t. He just leant down and gave me a little kiss on my right cheek.

‘It’s nice to see you again, Kate,’ he said, studying my face for a few moments. He was about to speak again when Federico snapped his phone shut and spun on the spot, espresso in hand.

‘Well, look at you two! Childhood friends back together again, in London, big grown-up adults in the city. Who’d have thought it?’ He took a little sip from his tiny espresso cup.

‘Well, certainly not me,’ Peter said to Federico. ‘The last time I saw Kate she was obsessed with living somewhere in the Amazon and teaching pygmies to Moonwalk.’

Federico clasped his hands together in delight.

‘Well, last time I saw Peter he was 15 years old and suffering a bout of embarrassing and uncontrollable erections in Geography lessons.’ I chuckled. ‘People change.’ Federico spat his coffee across the glass heart. Peter looked horrified.

‘I told you that in confidence, Kate, as you well know, but you are obviously in one of your argumentative moods and trying to evoke some kind of emotional response, which won’t work.’

‘So back to Fat Camp’, Federico said, studying the potential candidates’ headshots that were stuck all over the walls of the heart-shaped room.

‘And every adolescent boy suffers from ill-timed erections,’ Peter continued. ‘It’s a normal and healthy part of growing up.’

‘Like abandoning your best friend?’

‘OK, this really doesn’t feel like it’s about Fat Camp.’ Federico giggled nervously.

‘I went to school somewhere else, Kate. That’s all. Can you honestly say you are still in touch with every single person we knew as kids?’ I was still in touch with exactly none of them.

‘I wasn’t just someone from school, Peter!’ Or perhaps I was, because Peter had gone horribly silent and glaring at me, jaw clenched.

‘Well, this feels lovely and awkward, doesn’t it? Like tattoo removal, and those days when we all pretend we didn’t just hear Chad fart in the middle of one of his focus meeting speeches. Although I would just like to say,’ Federico continued in a whisper, ‘the erection thing, well, I concur. Mine was up and down like a car-park barrier for the best part of three years. I’m sure there are parts of my body that were oxygen starved as a result. I still can’t feel my little toe,’ he said, looking at his feet.

‘Kate, I am here because your grandma asked me to help you. Not to justify educational choices made as a teenager.’

‘It happened again when I was living in Miami,’ Federico continued. ‘Well, honestly, no one wears a stitch of clothing over there and there are some exquisitely attractive Mexicans flaunting themselves on the beach.’

‘Kate, I had actually been looking forward to seeing you today. But I had completely forgotten your inability to let things go. And you always have to have the last word.’

Federico clamped his hand over my mouth.

‘Kat-kins, we have asked Peter here because we want his help with Fat Camp, which is something you care about, is it not? Peter very kindly agreed to help. Which is a nice starting point for this, and a preferable one to Peter’s penile function, which, while I admit I am interested, probably not in this current context. So, Kat-kins, do you want Peter’s help or not?’

Peter and I stared at each other.

‘Kate, would you like my help or not?’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first of the Fat Camp auditionees nervously waiting in our reception.

‘Yes … please.’

‘Then I’ll help.’

‘Well, isn’t that nice? Kat-kins asked Peter nicely; Peter said yes. It’s like an adult game of Simon Says but with obesity problems and two adults with mild to severe anger issues.’

I turned away from both of them and pretended to type something on my phone. If we were playing an adult game of Simon Says then a small part of my brain I had absolutely no control over had gone back to thinking about Peter Parker’s penis, and I hated that part.

‘I have to go,’ Peter said, heading for the door, ‘but I have a good idea of what you need. Everything will be here by tomorrow.’ He marched off through Reception, the entire office watching with inappropriate levels of lust, everyone except Mark from Marketing who shot an imaginary web at him as he passed the photocopier.

The very next day two men from FedEx arrived at the office. They had hundreds of parcels from Peter Parker. He’d sent fitness packs for our Fat Campers, motivational books, motivational CDs, handwritten lists of personal trainers, therapists, Women Only gyms, central London park runs, and suggested a fitness timetable. He sent over pedometers, booked sessions at running centres for the women to be fitted with proper running shoes and booked a session at Rigby & Peller for the women to be fitted with proper sports bras. From that moment on until the end of universal time Federico Cagassi was in actual love with Peter Parker—the boy who never smiles.

the story of assumption

A boy met a girl and a girl met a boy, they looked into each other’s eyes and they fell in love.

But the girl was from a different land, across a great sea, a land where people loved teapots, umbrellas and rain.

The heart of the boy and the heart of the girl ached when they were apart.

So the girl packed her bags and crossed the great sea, travelling high up into the mountains where the boy lived with many frogs and a selection of friendly snails.

She knocked on his door. He asked her inside. They looked into each other’s eyes and they knew they were in love.

Over time the girl became lonely. All her friends and family—the teapots and umbrellas—were all far away. The boy grew sad. He blamed himself for taking the girl away from her beloved afternoon tea paraphernalia. The feelings of blame became feelings of guilt. The boy withdrew from the girl, assuming she regretted her choice.

The girl didn’t understand why he no longer held her gaze, assuming he’d stopped loving her.

Their seeds of assumption grew like ivy; every day they assumed a little more based on the assumptions of the previous day.

One day the girl found herself packing to leave, packing to return to the land of rain and crumpets. Her eyes filled with tears, not love, her heart in pieces on the floor of lost dreams. She did not know what was left in the boy’s eyes because he no longer came home, too fearful was he of what he would see if he looked at her.

The boy lives in the mountains. The girl lives in the rain.

He assumes she’s happy now. She assumes the same.

money & the dream crusher—leah—31 years old

OK, so I am probably not the best person to ask because I hate my ex-husband, he is the devil incarnate, but if you want to know what I gave up for love I would say Every Single Part of My Very Self. For example, my ex’s bog-standard response if I wanted to pursue any of my own personal interests, ambitions or dreams was, and I quote,

‘How dare you spend that money on yourself? You are so selfish. We are supposed to be a family.’

He could never see that my happiness and contentment might benefit us as a couple; that an extra qualification might further my career, increasing the amount of money I could earn for us as a family; or that me feeling more complete as a person would have a knock-on positive effect on our marriage. In fact sometimes I think my possible self-development threatened him. At the mere suggestion of me spending money, on anything, he would say,

‘Well, if you’ve got enough money to do that we could spend it on—’

And then there would always be a ‘something’ for the house, the car, his hobbies. Once I gave up a place on a Reiki course so he could buy a pet snake and a games console, both apparently for our son, neither of which our son has ever played with; the Reiki course would have qualified me to teach, providing a valuable second income for our family.

Even if we were trying to arrange something nice, like booking a family holiday, most of the things I wanted to do didn’t interest him. No matter how passionate I was about a place or country he would say no. And when you are married at some point you get tired of battling, tired of fighting, tired of trying to maintain certain boundaries. So you give in, you agree, you give up. I was married from 22 years old to 30. This is the first time in my adult life I can really identify my own wants and needs and then, with a lot of hard work and planning, start to pursue the things, the longings sitting deep in my soul that are not connected to anyone but me. I’ve never been so excited about my future.

coffee shop | spitalfields market | london

Good God! I had awakened the beast. It wasn’t just that Leah had a lot to say. It was that she wanted to say it all at once, and she wanted to say it all to me. Mostly because I am one of her best friends, but also because I had put a key in a previously unused lock and the door had exploded wide open. If we were in an American action film Nicholas Cage would have been standing by that door of love-lost dreams putting Semtex on the lock, frame and anything else in the surrounding door area. Leah was finally free.

‘So I’ve been working through my list of love-stolen dreams,’ Leah said, extracting an enormous phonebook-sized document out of her handbag. ‘And I think that I’m making good progress. I’ve completed the Reiki course, as you know, and, Henry, Henry, put that down!’ Henry, Leah’s son, had her iPhone in his mouth. ‘And I absolutely loved it, box ticked.’ She ticked an imaginary box in the air. So did Henry. ‘And I’ve got some other love-stolen dreams organised. There’s a lot to get through,’ she said, patting the gigantic document that was in fact her handwritten list of love-stolen dreams. ‘But I thought it would be nice to understand why I’d let myself get to a place where I was manically dribbling into my porridge, staring at my ex-husband across the kitchen and wanting to throw Petits Filous Frubes at his head. I mean, I wasn’t always a passive-aggressive downtrodden wife.’ She was more aggressive than passive but it wasn’t the moment. ‘So I’ve decided to do a bit of alternative research, which means that if you do that you won’t have a brownie, I told you, Henry, behave or no brownie, so you are going to have to be pretty open-minded when I tell you my idea.’

‘I am not here to judge. I am here to take back what love stole.’ This has been my mantra since the early shock of Mary’s mechanical revelations.

‘Well, it was my Reiki teacher’s idea really. She thought one way to better understand the obstacles and mistakes of this life would be to understand the obstacles and mistakes of all my previous lives. Apparently there’s this thing called past life regression and it helps a lot of people make sense of themselves and the things they do.’ Henry was presented with a brownie and dropped half of it straight down his front. ‘And it’s absolutely not something I would have done while I was married, because I couldn’t bear his disapproving face, or his voice, or the way he held his cutlery, so that qualifies as a love-stolen dream, doesn’t it? In fact it was already on my list.’ She flicked to page 17 to show me where Past Life Regression had been carefully written in blue biro.

‘If I’m honest, Leah, this is not exactly what I was expecting us to be talking about today. I’d found an equestrian centre close to your house. I was going to suggest we go horse riding together. You said you stopped riding when you got married. I think it was LSD 88?’

‘It was 87.’

‘OK, number 87, but it was on the list. I thought we could go hacking. That’s what people do on horses, isn’t it? They hack? Computer hackers hack too, obviously, but they do it in a more let’s bring the government to its knees kind of way, which wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of a slow trot, through woodland. But if you want to get back love-stolen dreams from the past—I mean from the past past, that’s very cool. And thorough. Adds a whole new dimension. I like.’ I totally didn’t get it. ‘Well done!’ Phew.

‘Thank God, Kate! Because I was sure you were going to say no. Federico said you wouldn’t do it—’

‘What?’

‘I said I wanted you to do a past life regression and he said you absolutely wouldn’t do it. He said, “Past life regression? Walking, talking fashion regression, more like,” then he went on about some cardigan you bought from Deptford Market last week and how he’s had a metaphorical allergic reaction to it. Short version of this story is that he said you’d say no. He thinks he knows you so well, that Federico Cagassi.’ She typed a message into her constantly beeping iPhone while Henry fell asleep face first in his brownie. And just for the record that Federico Cagassi does know me quite well. He knows me well enough to know I’d rather put hot coals on my bare-naked tippy-toes than regress myself into the past, which is why I whispered,

‘I don’t want to do a past life regression,’ into my hair before bursting into a fit of fake coughing. Which is when things got a bit awkward …

You see I’d never given much thought to what I’d be asked to do for Love-Stolen Dreams. I hadn’t set any guidelines or parameters. I just saw myself as a champion of others, dashing about, problem-solving, drinking protein shakes and facilitating the journeys of others. But jumping through the windows of time, to right love’s past-life wrongs, well, it was like Quantum bloody Leap but for real and I suspect without the help of that middle-aged man who smoked cigars and had communication devices wired up to the present.

‘Oh …’ Leah looked at me with disc-sized brown eyes. ‘Oh, sure, of course.’ She looked at the floor and started fiddling with her hands. ‘I just thought that you wanted to help women reconnect with themselves. I thought this was a selfless quest to take back what love had stolen, not you picking and choosing a few things that you really fancy doing, like learning to trot on a bloody great horse.’ She was getting a bit shouty. Henry woke up and crawled under the table. He knew the signs. ‘Remind me again of your new mantra, Kate.’

‘I’m not here to judge,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am here to take back what love stole.’

‘That’s a great mantra,’ she said, draining her coffee mug and starting to pack up her things. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to leave. She was going to leave, without getting properly mad, and I’d feel like a rubbish, disappointing friend and it would be awkward and uncomfortable but she’d never mention it again and I’d never forget. It would become like a humungous white elephant who sat between us everywhere we went, an elephant called Awkward Stan, and Awkward Stan would always be there, an accessory to our friendship for the rest of my entire elephant-infested life. Good God, she was manipulative!!!

‘It was just a little past life regression,’ she muttered as she wiped Henry’s face with a wet wipe. ‘We could have found out what love stole from us in the past to find out why it keeps stealing stuff in the present. The answers are in the past. I just know it.’

‘I thought the answers were on this list!’ I said, shaking the heavy paper document in her face. She blinked violently as I did it and I knew I’d gone too far. There’s never any need to shake paper.

‘Kate, all I want is that if you put that iPhone in your mouth one more time I will make you eat the thing, do you hear me, Henry? I will put tomato ketchup on it, put it in a burger bun and I won’t feed you another morsel until you have eaten it. Your choice, you are in control of your own destiny. So, Kate,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘A little regression? Making sense of the future by unlocking the love-stolen secrets of our past—speaking of the past, did I tell you I bumped into Peter Parker the other day? When did he get back?’

‘What do you mean you bumped into Peter Parker? Where was he? What was he doing? Did you speak to him? What was he wearing? Did he speak to you? Did he smell nice? How did he seem?’

‘He seemed fine. To be honest he spent the entire time explaining to Henry how his juice box would eventually end up as a biodegradable roof tile, which neither of us really understood, well, especially not Henry as he can’t count past five. Think about the regression, Kate,’ she said as she headed to the door, Henry under one arm, twelve bags under the other and quite a large piece of Henry’s chocolate brownie stuck to her bum, which, in retrospect, I probably should have mentioned…

request | regress myself into the past

let’s chew the fat of love

‘What did I lose as a result of love? My thinness.’ (Susan, 58)

‘The effect of love is that there is a whole section of my wardrobe filled with clothes that no longer fit. I am keeping them in case we ever split up.’ (Jane, 33)

‘I’ve put on weight.’ (Miriam, 23)

‘It’s like I didn’t value myself any more. I fell in love, we got engaged and leading up to the wedding I had this goal: come hell or high water I was going to be skinny on the day. But after that I sort of gave in to it and the weight started slowly piling on.’ (Clarissa, 38)

‘I got really fat. I am really fat. I stayed fat. Thanks, Love.’ (Rosanne, 47)

‘For me it was hardest after the kids arrived. I just couldn’t shift the weight I’d gained. And it seemed selfish to insist that I needed time out a few times a week to go to the gym or for a run; my husband didn’t have time to do these things so why should I? And I wasn’t really sure what my motivation was. To say it was just about feeling good about myself, feeling sexy and enjoying my body seemed inappropriate. I was a wife and a mother, not a hormone-filled teenager. So maybe love stole my focus? It was certainly that lack of focus that ultimately played a massive part in the destruction of my marriage. I didn’t feel sexy. I started to dislike myself and my body. Eventually he felt the same way.’ (Hina, 42)

the birth of fat camp

the boardroom | true love

They sat there nervous. They sat there scared. Some of them sat there defensively as if they had already changed their minds in the lift on the way up and now, faced with a hyperactive Federico, who had changed into a white T-shirt that said ‘skinny people are happy’, were going to do everything possible to stay the size they were. One had her hand in a bowl of red Haribo, a second was munching her way through a bag of Kettle Chips, a lady in the far corner was nibbling on one of those chocolate diet bars that tells you it’s fat free, which of course it is, it’s totally fat free and 100% sugar-coated and will make you balloon faster than a hydraulic tyre inflator. In fact the only person in the boardroom who wasn’t eating was Chad. He stood silently in the corner watching Federico, who was running from lady to lady telling them they were all so much more beautiful in the flesh before grimacing at their headshots pinned on the wall.

Bob, the man we had all been waiting for, finally arrived at 10 a.m. He was a famous motivational speaker from California and was going to be Fat Camp’s life coach: the positive voice to help make the positive change that would positively reduce in a negative decreasing way their physical size. He had called True Love as soon as my unauthorised advert had gone to press.

‘Kate …’ he had said, sounding exactly like Woody Allen (and on meeting him I discovered he was the exact same size). ‘Kate, this is such a wonderful idea. People become stuck, Kate. They become stuck. To give them a chance to realise their dreams, however small or large, to let life surprise them, in a good way, well, that is truly a wondrous endeavour. I want to be involved.’ He then emailed me a hyperlink to a TED talk⁴ on achieving change, and a 10% discount for his new book available on Amazon and Kindle.

‘Ladies, we all know that certain foods aren’t good for us,’ Bob began, positively beaming at the room. ‘We know that exercise can make you thinner, that if you exceed your calorie intake you’ll store the food as fat. We probably also know that a lot of people get bigger when they fall in love. There are literally thousands of studies published on the subject. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the woman who lives down the street from you, let’s call her Catharine. Catharine meets a new guy. She falls in love. She moves in with him. Someone asks you how Catharine’s doing and you say “Oh, she looks really well,” but what you really mean is that she looks really happy and she looks really really fat, because that is what most of us do. Not the Brangelinas⁵ of this world—us, the real people, the normal people. We meet someone. We want to stay in with them. We want to kiss them. We want to feed them nice food. We’ve waited so long to meet this special person we want to indulge in it. And we should. And … we … should! Plus our boyfriend says he likes our new curves. We love him so much we find his squishy new tummy so cute and sexy. But when the honeymoon period comes to an end, and it always does, you don’t feel sexy and curvaceous any more. You wonder why you can’t fit in most of your clothes, why your thighs spread to fill the chair when you sit down, or your boobs barely fit into your bra. And that’s before we mention those bat wings under your arms, or your bum that is bigger but also somehow closer to the ground like a blancmange slowly sliding off a plate. And his love handles, they’re not so lovely any more. And everyone feels a little bit less sexy and a little bit fed up. You have lost your body and somewhere along the way you have lost a little bit of yourself, while gaining a whole load more of yourself if you know what I mean!’ He beamed. The room was very very quiet. Bob did nothing to fill the silence. He just looked off into the middle distance, for ages. Eventually his thoughts came back to the room and he put his hands in a pray position, resting his index fingers on his lips. He looked from face to face before speaking.

‘I’m sorry, guys, I can’t lie to you. You all seem like really nice ladies, you really do. So I have to admit that I don’t know anything at all about weight loss.’ There was a group gasp and the Fat Campers started looking to each other, and to me, to see if he was joking. ‘I don’t know anything at all about diets. Everyone in this room probably knows more about calories and eating plans. You all,’ he said, pointing to the headshots on the wall, ‘you all already have the information you need to be slim. You could probably open your own healthy-eating university and lecture on it. Fat people always know a lot about food.’ He nodded his head, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘You have all the facts and yet you are all so fat.’ He crossed his arms and sat heavily in Chad’s red heart-shaped chair. ‘And yet you are all so fat!’ Bob yelled. This time the group gasp was louder, angry, insulted. Bob bounced excitedly out of the chair and started smiling. ‘And that is why I am here!’ And now he was speaking fast. ‘We don’t need to overthink this. Two plus two doesn’t need to equal four. We don’t need to know the facts. Knowledge doesn’t lead to solution. Do you think the smokers of the world don’t know cigarettes cause cancer? Of course they do!’ he squeaked. ‘But they can’t stop! Do you think the alcoholic thinks drinking is improving his life, making him smarter, sharper, richer? No! But he drinks anyway. People can’t stop. Knowledge doesn’t equal power. The fact that you haven’t lost weight in spite of your knowledge is not your fault. We are all the same. But for those of you in this room, today marks something new. The way we will work is in 30-day blocks. Every 30 days, as in every month, we will try something new. Anyone can commit to one thing for 30 days. I know a man at Google who lives his whole life by the 30-day rule. Every month he promises himself he will do something new. In the month of August he learnt a Spanish word every day. In July he gave up sugar. In December he took one photograph every single day and made them into a photo-book. His life is coloured by new experiences, of growth and development. And he could pack so much in. One month he made himself write 1,500 words every day. Some days he wrote total nonsense, but he did it anyway. At the end of it he had 45,000 words. That’s the length of some novels! So he self-published and now he’s got his own book of nonsense!’ The room giggled. ‘Sounds like fun, hey! It is fun. So we start today, and our 30-day challenge this month is that we will all do one form of physical exercise, together, every single day. One thing, even if it’s just for 15 minutes. The more fun, the better. No questions asked. All we have to do is show up every day, just show up, and we will arrange everything. Everything you need is here.’ He nodded to Federico, who started handing out Peter Parker’s gift packs. ‘And showing up will be a common theme throughout our experience together. If you tell the universe you really want something and every day you show up for it, you turn up, you drag yourself out of bed and you yell, “Universe, I am here! I want this! I need this! But I can’t do this alone, help me!” you will be surprised how often the universe delivers. And what you ladies don’t realise is that you already did just that. The day you wrote to True Love, the day you agreed to join this programme was the day you set an intention, showed up and said, “I want something! I need something! Take notice! Here I am!” And guess what, people? Guess what? We took notice. This is the beginning of your new life. Welcome.’ The room burst into rapturous applause while Federico sat weeping in the corner.

‘I am a Human Fountain,’ he mouthed at me before blowing his nose into an enormous silk hanky then running into the middle of all the over-excited ladies and squeezing them all very very hard.

⁴TED Talk - TED.COM - website with hundreds of inspirational talks from an assortment of incredible people. TED believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. Their website offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, including Bob.

⁵Brangelinas - Brad and Angelina, somehow greater together than the sum of their parts. Ridiculously skinny and beautiful in spite of love, and childbirth and crippling work schedules. In short … not the norm.

pepperpots life sanctuary

‘to be a star you must shine your own light, follow your own path, and never worry about the darkness for that is when the stars shine brightest’ (anon)

The floating restaurant at Pepperpots is one of the most bizarre eating establishments I have ever come across. It’s a circular building constructed in the middle of a giant lake accessed by a wooden footbridge that resembles the Millennium Bridge⁶. The restaurant itself stands one storey high, is completely glass-walled and has two enormous decked terraces on either side. And it was here that I had been instructed to wait for Delaware O’Hunt, the movie starlet from the golden era of the silver screen.

It had taken some time to secure a meeting with the elusive Delaware. She’d cancelled twice, not shown up once then one day, out of the blue, she’d called and invited me to come and meet. We’d agreed upon the afternoon before Pepperpots’ annual fireworks display and I’d arrived early so I could watch Grandma in all her organisational glory. She was coordinating the evening’s sparkly event and I could see her on the shoreline assembling a herd of volunteers who just happened to be a gaggle of handsome axe-wielding men. Grandma had them chopping large bits of wood, dragging around heavy pieces of scaffolding and generally doing anything that might result in them getting hot and sweaty and taking off their shirts. As yet another man removed all but his trousers and boots I noticed out of the corner of my eye the legend that is Delaware O’Hunt step gracefully onto the deck. She walked purposefully, no, she glided across to meet me. She was rumoured to be close to ninety years of age but looked a glamorous and beautiful seventy. She wore dark glasses and a camel-coloured wool coat and as she crossed the deck in the last of the autumnal rays it felt as if the sun’s sole purpose were to illuminate her. Every head turned, in the restaurant, and from lake’s edge, and even Grandma, not a gesticulator at the best of times, waved manically in the distance. Delaware waved back before gracefully seating herself on a chair next to me. I on the other hand sat heavily, as if under the influence of a completely different gravitational pull. I shifted my chair to face her. She stayed exactly where she was. Then she began absent-mindedly stirring warm milk into her coffee.

‘Kate,’ she said to me from behind dark glasses. ‘When your grandmamma explained to me your idea I was unsure how I would be able to contribute.’ She spoke in a slow and considered way, every syllable carefully pronounced, the words trickling like honey wrapped up in the thickest Texan drawl. ‘I am from a different generation from you, darl, so I can speak my truth but I’m not convinced anything I say will resonate with the women of today.’

‘I’m sure—’ I squeaked before clearing my throat and starting again. ‘I’m sure everything you say will be relevant.’ I was practically whispering. ‘So many women are trying to balance a working life with a relationship, with having kids, with maintaining friendships and hobbies.’ I could barely look at her. ‘You were among the first generation of women to do this. You are exactly who we need to speak to. You started the revolution,’ I said, performing a gentle and uncommitted fist shake while looking slightly past her right shoulder.

‘That’s sweet,’ she said, placing my fist-shaking hand back by my side. ‘But it didn’t feel like a revolution, that’s for sure. Back then, when I was working all the time, I felt mostly overwhelmed, sometimes a little scared and almost always unsupported. It was a man’s world and I was a silly little girl who had accidentally ended up with a big career. Certainly to the outside world I had it all. I was acting with some of the greatest actors of the time, with incredible directors, I had to kiss some dashing fellows as part of my day job, most of them gay if the disappointing truth be told, but for the early part of my career I always remember feeling somewhat empty.’

‘Do you think that emptiness was because you hadn’t fallen in love?’ I winced at the sound of my own voice.

‘Well, I was certainly aware of love and the lack of its existence in my life. As my girlfriends paired off, which they all did more quickly than me, I suppose I wondered why love had not come into my life. If perhaps I wasn’t the type of girl who got to fall in love, that perhaps you couldn’t have it all.’

‘Were you actively looking for love?’

‘You mean going on dates?’ She smiled. ‘Darl, I went on so many dates I could write you a handbook! And it’s funny you should ask because I was reading through some of my old diaries and I came across an entry I had written after one such evening.’ She reached into her handbag and brought out an old leather diary. ‘If you don’t mind I would like to read something to you.’ She cleared her throat and began. I felt as if I were watching her in one of her films.

‘June 5th

I went on another date last night with a man who works in Wall Street. He was handsome in a banking sort of a way and very interested in the play I start next week. But I knew, within 30 seconds, that he wasn’t for me. How could I know such a thing so quickly? I should know better than to judge any book by its cover. I am supposed to be a curious individual, an artist absorbing and embracing every single experience. But because I had decided he wasn’t The One I couldn’t enjoy the rest of the evening. This man never said, “Delaware, come to dinner. I am the man of your dreams.” Yet on some level that was my expectation of him, or at least my hope, a hope so hidden that for the most part I don’t even know it’s there.

How is it possible to miss something you have never had? How can I ever really embrace any moment if I am always subconsciously searching for a thing called love? And what is this overwhelming human desire to define oneself by being in a pair?’

‘But you did fall in love!’ I squeaked. ‘You married Richard!’

‘I married Richard.’ She nodded before looking off into middle distance. ‘I knew the minute he walked in the room that he was the one for me. We met at an after-show party for a play I’d been starring in on Broadway. At the time he was still a young director but with big ideas and absolutely no sense of life’s boundaries that constrain the rest of us. He was intoxicating to be around. I had feelings in my body that I was completely at the mercy of, feelings I knew were never going to go away. Thank God he felt the same way. I had a girlfriend who fell so in love with a Swiss man and he resolutely didn’t feel the same way about her. What an awful predicament for a woman to find herself in. Your One True Love doesn’t want to be your One True Love.’

I loved the way predicament sounded in her Texan drawl, each syllable exquisitely over-pronounced: pre-dic-a-ment.

‘So when Richard arrived, when love showed up, how did it affect your life?’

‘Well, Richard and I began working together almost immediately.’ She nodded. ‘To share one’s passion with the man you are also passionate about was a dream come true. He was creatively brilliant and is responsible for some of the greatest performances of my life. He transformed my life on every single level.’

‘So falling in love was a positive experience for you?’ I knew it. Chad was going to throw me head first from the roof.

‘I believe in balance in life, for every high there is an equal low, and so it was with Richard. My career sky-rocketed, thanks in large part to him, but when dream acting jobs came along I didn’t want to take anything that would cause us to be apart for long periods of time. I certainly couldn’t take roles where he’d been turned down as Director or where I would be working with a director he felt was a competitor of his. So my career, and love life, started to become like a game of chess. For each opportunity I had to predict the next five moves. What would this role lead to? Where would I end up living? How would Richard get to see me? Would me taking the role undermine his confidence as a director? Ultimately the more I moulded and shaped my decisions to stabilise my relationship, the more unstable it became. In hindsight if I had just been consistent, consistently choosing the right roles for the right reasons, Richard would have always known what to expect from me. And I think consistency is underrated in relationships. Your partner being able to predict you, be certain of your choices, of who you are, it has a stabilising effect on a relationship. When you become a smaller version of yourself in order to keep your relationship on track, all that happens is that your partner no longer recognises you. You are not the woman he fell in love with, he starts to lose respect for you, and you lose respect for yourself, the small compromised version of the woman you used to be, and then one comes to resent the other. And so it was with Richard. Love was the greatest joy in my life, and my greatest pain. The breakdown of my marriage nearly killed me. The pain of it ending, the separation from him, the shattered hopes and dreams, it was all too much. I am sure you are aware of the four-year break in my acting career following the end of my marriage. My world collapsed. I don’t know why we couldn’t be together as a couple. It is one of the greatest mysteries and the greatest sadness in my life. And I know that we will love each other until the day we die. He is me. I am him. But together we are somehow too much and at the same time too little.’ She took a sip of coffee. Her words resonated with such depth it was as if she were playing a string instrument in my chest. I struggled to find my voice.

‘Delaware, what would you do if you were me and found yourself unexpectedly alone and 30 years old? I mean, if someone had told you on your 30th birthday that you would be alone for the rest of your life, what things would you have chosen to do differently? What advice do you have for me?’

‘If I were you and free from love?’ She gazed out across the lake. I did the same and noticed a somewhat familiar-looking torso on the shore chopping wood. The half-naked man turned around and stared back. ‘Well, I would have made some different creative choices, that is for certain. There are several film roles, films you would have heard of, that I would have taken. And none of my partners ever wanted children, not one of them, which is a strange thing in itself. So I suppose I would have had a child if I had only myself to please and not a man’s feelings and needs to take into consideration.’ She pulled her coat closer around her. The familiar half-naked torso was now running along the edge of the lake towards the footbridge to the restaurant. ‘You know, darl, I don’t like to list negatives, to think about what-ifs. I think if I had just gotten into the habit of making good choices for myself I would not have missed out on anything at all, whether there had been love in my life or not. Because when you start making choices with someone else in mind, second-guessing them and their wants and needs, it’s like a game of Chinese whispers that over the years slowly unravels into a story you don’t even recognise. And you will probably end up losing the one thing you were trying to keep hold of. So be true to yourself. Then everyone else can rely upon that fact.’ She paused for a moment before smiling to herself. ‘And I wouldn’t waste a second of my life worrying about what I look like, that should be forbidden until you are at least in your 70s and even then I think women look goddamn beautiful! I’m sorry, doll, if I’ve disappointed you. I expect women today want me to tell them to have lots of sex, run along the Great Wall of China and throw themselves out of a plane. But my only true regrets in life are when I let myself down, when I abandoned myself; nothing good ever came from those choices. So get good at being good to yourself. That is what love stole from me. That is what I took back after love had gone and that is what I would want you to do now.’

advice | get good at being good to yourself

Delaware was perfect. The interview was perfect. I clicked off my Dictaphone and took a sip from my now freezing cup of coffee. The half-naked torso appeared at the door to the terrace and marched across to our table, sitting himself down in the chair next to mine. His upper body was horribly lean and muscular in an incredibly clichéd ‘I’m so gorgeous and toned’ kind of way. And there were bits of woodchip and dirt stuck to his sweaty naked skin.

‘So?’ He pulled his chair closer to mine. ‘Did Fat Camp receive the training bags? Have they read all the literature? Did they have their appointment at the running clinic? And the bra-fitting shop? Because they need to be well supported before they start running, emotionally, but also in the breast region. It’s important.’ Peter Parker was here, naked, and talking about tits in front of Delaware O’Hunt. Brilliant.

‘Peter, what are you doing here?’

‘Your grandma said she needed help setting up the firework display so I offered. Are you helping?’ I looked down at my incredibly smart dress, unsure what part of my outfit screamed Firework Preparation and Installation Expert. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ Peter said, leaning across me, leaving a trail of woodchips on my dress. ‘How rude of me, Delaware—how are you?’ he asked, kissing her firmly on each cheek with his big sweaty man face. ‘How is the fusion dance coming along? I still can’t perfect those moves you showed me.’

‘You don’t smile but you do fusion dance?’ I guffawed. That, as far as I was concerned, was ironic.

‘I told you, darl, it’s in those hips. You just have to practise. He’s a wonderful dance partner, Kate. You should get him to take you.’

‘Oh, Kate doesn’t dance,’ Peter said, brushing the woodchips from my dress as he sat himself back down. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said as he picked off the last woodchip, which was located very close to my well-supported although disappointingly small right boob. ‘No, Kate’s practically allergic to dancing. It’s an affliction.’

‘What do you mean I don’t dance? I can dance. I dance! I’m a dancer!!’ Peter frowned at me.

‘OK … You can dance. I mean, you can’t dance but if it makes you feel better I can say that you do.’

‘It’s not about me feeling better, Peter. It’s about operating within the realms of truth.’

‘I think you mean the realms of possibility. It’s possible that you could learn to dance with some instruction and dedicated practice. But the truth is that you currently can’t.’

‘You’ve been away for 15 years! How on earth do you know what I can and can’t do? I could have won the bloody Dance Olympics in that time!’

‘Well, did you? What year? In what dance category? Who designed your dress? Who did you compete against? What was your most complicated dance move?’

Why was he obsessed with the details!?!

‘Well, we have had lovely weather today, haven’t we, darl?’ Delaware cooed. ‘And Kate and I have been busy reminiscing—’ she patted my knee ‘—helping me reconnect with my younger self. Although I’ve been talking nonstop and I know nothing about dear Kate, apart from the fact that you are a dancer,’ she said reassuringly.

‘She’s not a dancer,’ Peter muttered. ‘Fictitious Olympic appearances or otherwise.’

‘So, Kate,’ Delaware continued, ‘tell me a little bit about you.’ For the first time all morning she took off her dark glasses and put them on the table in front of her. ‘What exactly are you trying to do here?’ she said, looking me directly in the eyes. ‘What is this all about?’

I looked from Peter, who was still frowning on account of my truth-bending, to Delaware.

‘I want to know what people gave up when they fell in love, so I can help get those things back. It’s a quest.’

‘I know that, darl. I just don’t understand why.’

‘Oh, well, I, well …’ I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat. ‘I, er, I want to—’ Peter turned away and pretended to stare at something fascinating on the shore. I turned back to Delaware but spoke more to my knees. ‘I would like people to acknowledge the preoccupation you mentioned in your diary.’ She nodded along, encouraging me. ‘I want people to live more in the moment, to be more present, for people to truly know what they want for themselves. People sometimes forget the things that make them happy when they fall in love. The relationship becomes the source of those feelings. It becomes the source of everything. So I suppose my goal is for people to reconnect with that lost part of themselves and stay connected to it. But I’ve found that lots of people don’t even know what makes them happy. So if I ask them what they’d be happy doing for the rest of their life in the absence of love it seems to help them answer from a place of naked truth.’ I couldn’t help but glance at Peter’s body when I said the word naked. He was still staring out at the lake. ‘And with that knowledge they’ll never lose themselves again, whatever happens in their life. They’ll be their own energy source, their own sustenance, their own sun, if you will.’ By this point I had pretty much faded out to a whisper.

‘But, Kate, darling girl, there are a million things you could be doing at this point in your life. Why would you want to spend all your time doing this?’

‘Because I plan to live the rest of my life alone, so I have the time. And I think if I could prevent even one person feeling how I felt, going through what I did, am, then it would be worthwhile. So that’s why I spend my time doing this, helping others to help themselves, helping others become their own sun.’

‘Well, that is very noble, isn’t it, Peter?’ she said, turning to Peter Parker. ‘Peter?’

I looked around to find Peter staring blankly at me. I had an odd and unfamiliar feeling in my chest when our eyes met and Peter looked as if he’d been severely winded.

‘I should be helping your grandma,’ he said quietly before getting up and slowly walking off.

He spent the rest of the afternoon standing next to the unlit bonfire in deep conversation with Grandma Josephine. He left just before it was lit.

⁶Millennium Bridge - steel suspension bridge for pedestrians crossing the River Thames, London

two peas in the proverbial pod of happy coupledom

‘Kate Winters! Or should I say bonjour!’ Jane Brockley-formerly-Robinson answered the door wearing a Cath Kidston apron and strawberry-shaped oven gloves. ‘You lot will have to excuse me,’ she said, ushering me, Federico and Leah through her front door. ‘I’m just taking something out of the oven. I’ve been trying out new recipes for gingerbread men and something is always missing. It’s driving me crazy. Come through, come through,’ she said, marching off. We followed her down the hallway passing a coat stand covered in hundreds of brightly coloured raincoats. It looked like a multicoloured willow tree. Federico and Leah both stifled a giggle.

You see, Jane Brockley-formerly-Robinson, a friend of mine from college, is totally colour obsessed. She always has a waterproof of some description on her person and it is always brightly coloured or highly patterned. I’m actually a fan of colour too. I rarely wear black, or white, and when clashing primary colours were in fashion I was in block-colour heaven. But Jane is the kind of colour wearer that makes you think she wasn’t allowed coloured clothes as a child. Every colour of the rainbow and several the rainbow is not even aware of can be found on the raincoats of Jane Brockley-formerly-Robinson. Then there are the plastic coats; hundreds of waterproof coats covered in smiling cats, Christmas trees or flowers. A vomit-inducing collection of colour was Jane’s signature style. As was introducing herself as ‘Jane Brockley-formerly-Robinson’ as if without this extra piece of information a person who knew Jane premarriage would forget all about her. Jane’s 1998 pink plastic Pac-a-Mac covered in light grey mice building things and driving small mouse cars would be the primary reason no one would forget pre-married Jane; that and the fact that she’s ever so slightly boss-eyed.

‘James is just through there. Why don’t you go through and say hi? I’ll be in in a minute,’ she said, gesturing for us to walk through an archway from the kitchen into the lounge. There we found Jane’s husband, a rotund gentleman called James. His well-fed self was watching rugby on a large leather sofa with a cat they call Nibbles. Nibbles eyeballed me as we walked into the room. James was wearing a non-ironic burgundy cardigan.

‘Katie!’ he said, getting up to greet me. ‘I was saying to Jane just last week that we’ve barely seen you since your return from France, lovely to see you now, and, Leah, terribly sorry to hear about your divorce. You must be crushed, totally crushed. My second cousin Susan just got divorced and it has totally destroyed her life. And of course he’s immediately pushed off with someone else, as is always the way—isn’t that right, Katie? Jane said it was the same for you. Gabriel immediately ran off with someone a lot younger. Yes, younger or slimmer I think is the normal way of doing things. You know, I really rather liked that Gabriel. He was terribly attractive. Did you meet him?’ he asked Federico. ‘Probably almost a challenge for someone like that to actually stay single. Incredible skiing instructor, really incredible—well, these boys start skiing before they can walk. I mean, he could do things on the mountain that I just …’ He started welling up. ‘Well, let’s just say that he skied up a mountain once to save me when I found myself in somewhat of a sticky situation. And I remember seeing him skiing down the mountain carrying Katie in his arms a few times. Good God, if I could do on skis what that man could do …’ He dabbed the corners of his podgy eyes. ‘Britain needs a strong ski team, we really do. Yes, they were probably lining up the day you left, offering him a shoulder to cry on. Don’t take it personally, Katie darling. We can’t be alone, us men, can’t bloody well be alone.’

an emotional interlude

When the existence of a man called Gabriel is mentioned in my new life, by my highly patterned friend’s sensitive husband, it feels like a door blasting open into a room I’ve spent weeks and months tirelessly boarding up, and it scares the crap out of me, because I’d started to forget the room was even there. So I have to start all over again, closing it all back off, nailing it shut, triple-checking the locks are in place so that I can safely turn my back on my past. And that’s just in my waking life. Different distorted versions of Gabriel live in my dreams most nights. Gabriel lives in my head, my heart, my subconscious mind and on days like these my defences seem futile, useless, ineffective, because just the sound of his name, seven letters put together to form a noise, can blast open all the doors and windows of the derelict house in my heart. And suddenly he exists again, as powerful as before, and I wonder if anyone ever felt as broken inside as I do.

‘Well, do take a seat,’ James said, pointing at the sofa. ‘Make yourselves at home. Wine, anyone?’ He trotted out to the kitchen as we all tried to squish on a sofa meant for two. Nibbles rolled onto his back on the big sofa and stretched out to full length. Then he started a barely audible growl. You see, Nibbles is their pride and joy. He is their baby. If there was an overly expensive local cat primary school they would have enrolled him at birth. But Nibbles is actually a highly duplicitous creature who snuggle-wuggles against his owners as if butter wouldn’t melt only to lash out like a sabre-toothed tiger when their backs are turned. That cat is responsible for at least five of the seven permanent scars on my body and once attacked the neighbour’s German Shepherd, permanently damaging its right eye. Sometimes when I visit it feels like I’m in the cat version of Orwell’s 1984, Nibbles being Big Brother and everyone buying into his bullshit. Everyone that is except me, and that poor one-eyed German Shepherd.

James wandered back into the lounge with a bottle of wine, Jane with a plate of hot gingerbread men. Then they perched on the edge of the coffee table (so as not to disturb Nibbles, who pretended to sleep) and they stared at me, expectantly, as people often do when I visit their houses, as if I am a West End show or human-sized television set with only one channel and more often than not only one volume setting.

‘I er, we, I wanted to pop in, to say hi, obviously, and also because I wanted to ask Jane a question. It’s a work thing really, a little investigation. I just wanted to know if there was anything you didn’t get to do because you met James and, well, fell in love.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jane looked flustered and brushed her fringe to one side with an oven-glove-covered hand. ‘I think we have done everything we’ve ever wanted to?’ she said, looking to James for confirmation.

‘There isn’t one thing, one small thing that you haven’t had a chance to do, alone; a course you wanted to take; or an experience you haven’t had? One little thing that was stolen, by love.’

‘I’ve asked Kate to do a past life regression,’ Leah said, mouth full of gingerbread. ‘But apparently that’s not the right kind of request, so now I’m not sure what I’m going to do.’ Manipulative.

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