EVA WOODS grew up in Ireland and lives in London, where she writes and teaches creative writing. She likes wine, pop music and holidays. And she thinks that online dating is like the worst board game ever invented. This is her first romantic comedy.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Alexandra Turner,

my favourite primary-school teacher

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Endpages

Copyright

Prologue

If you believe the films, there should be a moment in life when it all comes together. When you’ve got everything you ever wanted, and your happy ending is here. The music is swelling. Everyone’s smiling at you.

Well, this was mine. This was my happy ending. And I was more terrified than I’d ever been in my life.

Beside me in the portico of the church, Dad was nervously tying and retying his cravat, ready for the short walk we were about to undertake. It was only thirty seconds, tops. But once it was over, nothing would be the same again. I’d be married to Dan. I’d be someone’s wife.

‘All right, Muffin?’

‘Just a bit … you know.’

‘Nervous?’ In fact, I was frozen in terror, unable to move my vintage-style Mary Janes a single step forward. ‘I don’t blame you. All those eyes looking at you.’ He shuddered. ‘It’s just like my recurring nightmare about being on Countdown and only able to make three-letter words.’

‘Yes, it’s exactly like that.’

‘Except I’ve got my clothes on in this one.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’ Inside the door of the church, the organ was already playing. I hadn’t wanted it—we weren’t religious, but it meant a lot to Dan’s family. I could see his mum, her enormous hat dominating the front row, and his dad looking frail, leaning on a walking stick. He’d had a stroke the month before and was still wobbly. I’d suggested we postpone the wedding, but Dan wouldn’t hear of it.

I clutched my posy of freesias, which was leaking water onto my ballet-length lace dress. My veil was snarled around my face, making me breathless. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes, Muffin?’

‘How do you know? I mean, how can you be sure? About the person you marry?’

‘Eh …’ He looked deeply uncomfortable, and not just because his tie was cutting into his neck. ‘You just meet someone, and you like them, and you make it work somehow. It isn’t hard. Not like Countdown.’

‘But at least Countdown has rules.’

‘You are … fond of Dan?’

‘Of course! Of course. We’re very happy.’ Eight years with barely a row, sliding easily into dating, cohabitation and now marriage. Of course we were happy. We’d even bought a house, in Surrey. After the wedding we’d be packing up and leaving Hackney with the police sirens and falafel joints and shop downstairs that still sold Panini stickers from the 2002 World Cup. Dan had casually suggested it a few months ago, right in the middle of wedding planning. There’d be more space, less crime, a garden. All those things you were supposed to want. I’d already given notice at my job in the cool little design agency above a tattoo parlour in Shoreditch.

‘Muffin,’ said Dad, growing alarmed at my failure to move. ‘We have to go in. Everyone’s waiting. Unless you …’

‘I’m fine! Fine! I’m just nervous!’ Through the crack in the doors, I could see eyes begin to turn, murmurs going up. Looking for me. At the front of the church, my sister, Jess, and my best friends, Emma and Cynthia, were already waiting in their lavender prom dresses. Jess as usual looked stunning. The vicar, a friend of Dan’s family, was in place. This was it, my moment. Just waiting for me to move forward.

Gently, Dad took my arm. ‘Come on, Muffy. You don’t want to go back, do you, call it all off? Because if you do …’

‘No!’ I loved Dan. We had a whole life together. I remembered what he’d said to me yesterday, before he went to sleep at his parents: ‘I’ll never leave you, Rachel. I promise we’ll always be together.’ He’d even stroked my face, although it was encrusted in an avocado skin mask.

‘Even if I look like this?’

He’d smiled. ‘You always look good to me.’

Dad patted my hand. ‘Well, if you can’t go back, you have to go forward. Your time’s up, Muffy.’ He began to hum the Countdown theme tune. ‘Do do-do do-do …’

‘OK, OK. I’m ready.’

‘You know what marriage is, Muffy?’

‘A nine-letter word?’

‘It’s eight letters, Muffs. Honestly, Maths never was your strong point. Anyway, it’s not a word. It’s a sentence.’

‘Um, that’s not helpful.’

‘What I mean is, it’s a beginning. It’s not an end.’

Far down at the end of the aisle, I could see the back of Dan’s head, his ears slightly red with the pressure of eyes watching him, his arms crossed in front of his dove-grey morning suit. I thought of our life together, our new house, our friends, our families. This was right. This was what you were supposed to do. I took a deep breath. ‘OK, Dad. Let’s do it.’

‘Excellent. Consonant, please, Carol!’

The music changed. The doors opened. I started to move forward.

Chapter One

Two years later

Things that suck about divorce, number three: at the exact moment your life has hit rock bottom, and all you need is a particular inspiring tune to lift your spirits and provide guidance and cheer, you can’t find the CD you want because your ex-husband, your soon-to-be ex-husband, has moved it and you can’t ask him where it is, because, you know, you’re getting divorced and it probably isn’t very high up his list of concerns.

I was lying on the floor on my stomach, feeling under the shelving unit we use—used—to keep CDs in. Where the bloody hell was it? Why would he take the KT Tunstall CD? KT Bumstall, he called her.

When my friends came back into the room, staggering under boxes, they found me still on the floor, weeping and trying to hum my own jaunty backing track in a voice choked with tears, dust and the two-bottles-of-Chardonnay hangover I was nursing from the night before.

‘Rach! What is it now? Did you find another one of his socks? Did you listen to your wedding first-dance song?’ Emma rushed over, dropping her box into Cynthia’s awkward embrace.

‘Careful, Em! That’s the Le Creuset in there! You could have crippled me.’

I was babbling. ‘KT … Can’t find it … Need the song!’

‘What song?’

‘That one!’ In the depths of my grief, I couldn’t remember the name of it. ‘The makeover montage song. From The Devil Wears Prada. You know, the one that goes—do do do-do do-do-do. I need it! So I can walk along in great shoes and get a dream job and nice clothes, even if my boss is mean to me, and everything will be OK!’

Emma and Cynthia exchanged a look, then Cynthia took out her iPhone and pressed some buttons. ‘Do you mean this one?’ ‘Suddenly I See’ began to play out of the phone, slightly tinny.

I was still crying. ‘This is rock bottom! I need to listen to this song and then feel better and walk along in my heels. You see?’

‘You aren’t wearing heels, darling,’ said Cynthia kindly. ‘You think they’re tools of patriarchal oppression, remember?’

On my feet were mud-encrusted purple welly boots, which I had donned for uprooting some of the plants I’d grown in the garden, thinking I might pack them in a box and take them with me, before realising this was crazy, as I had nowhere to live, let alone a garden. That’s what you do when you’re getting divorced. You go crazy. I started crying again. ‘I know! I don’t even have any heels! Everything is awful!’

Emma and Cynthia had a quick muttered eye-rolling chat, and then Emma called out to me in a ‘talking to a mad person’ voice: ‘Look! We’re walking for you, love!’ They were marching up and down my soon-to-be-ex living room on the exposed wooden floor, Emma in sensible walking shoes and Cynthia in expensive brown knee boots.

We had noticed several subtle changes in Emma’s character since she became a primary school teacher: one, an exponential increase in bossiness; two, a habit of asking did we want to go to the toilet before we went anywhere; and three, the total loss of any physical shame. Now she was prancing about the floor, accompanied by an eye-rolling Cynthia, who gamely waved her long limbs about, then broke off as the song stopped and her phone rang. ‘Cynthia Eagleton. No, for Christ’s sake, I said send them out already. Listen, Barry, this is a serious question—what do you mean that’s not your name? Never mind, I’m going to call you Barry. Can you not do anything for yourself? How do you manage to get out of bed in the morning? Just get it done.’ She hung up, sighing. ‘I swear it’s a miracle he can even blow his own nose, that boy.’

‘Was it hard for you to get a day off?’ I mumbled dustily.

‘Only about as hard as it was for Richard Attenborough and his mates to get out of that prison camp. But don’t worry, darling. I’m here to help. Barry, or whatever his name is, will just have to learn to tie his own shoelaces.’ Cynthia’s had a lot to contend with in life. Not just the fact her mum saw fit to call her Cynthia—there was some great-aunt’s will involved—but also the fact she was ten years older than her siblings, and the only one to be fathered by her mum’s first love, who’d been deported back to Jamaica before Cynthia was even born. Still, she’d clawed her way up to a top legal job, she strikes terror into the hearts of her colleagues and she does have really nice hair.

Emma looked down at me kindly. ‘It’s good you want to listen to this song, you know. You’re done with all that R.E.M., then? Sixteen renditions of “Everybody Hurts” in a row?’

‘Not sure,’ I mumbled into the floor.

‘Well, you’ll have to be, because I’ve buried the CD in the garden and I’m not telling you where.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want to get up now?’

‘Not really.’

‘Come on, love. I’ll give you a sticker.’

So this was me, Rachel Kenny, aged thirty, imminently to be divorced, having to be prised away from my hardwood floors, my back-garden hydrangea and my wind chimes and exposed-brick chimney piece. All those things I barely looked at but saw every day, and which were mine. I had floor dust down my front and was wearing an old college sweatshirt, partly because everything was packed, and partly because I had owned it before I met Dan, and I wanted to try to reset to that person.

This was the kind of crazy logic I was operating on at this moment in time. Things that suck about divorce, number seven: you go completely and totally out of your tree.

Finally, after two emergency trips back for things I’d forgotten that seemed really important at the time (hairbrush, muffin tray, mop), we were in the van Emma had hired me.

‘Ready?’ Cynthia asked me, settling into the wide front seat.

‘I don’t know. It’s … My whole life was there. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’

She squeezed my arm with her manicured hand. ‘I know, darling. But what’s that thing your dad always says?’

‘Um … Countdown’s never been the same since Carol left?’

‘No, I mean that other thing. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

I stared back at the house. Dan would be coming back later. I didn’t even know where he’d been staying while I moved my things out. This was what we’d come to. ‘Do you think I should leave him a note? I mean, I can’t just … go. That can’t be the last conversation we ever have. We were together for ten years!’

They exchanged another look. ‘We’ve talked about this, Rach,’ said Emma gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but this is just how it has to be.’

We drove off. The house receded in the mirror to the size of a Lego cottage, till I almost felt I could pick it up and pop it into the pocket of my hoody, and then I couldn’t see any more anyway because of the tears filling my eyes, spilling out and running down onto my dust-stained front. Cynthia passed me a flowery tissue and Emma patted my hand as she cut up school-run mums in massive Jeeps. I closed my eyes.

Things that suck about divorce, number nine: moving out of the home you spent years creating, with nowhere else to go. And remembering halfway up the M3 that you left the KT Tunstall CD in the car, which was no longer yours, along with all the rest of your life.

I cried four times on the journey from Surrey to London. One was in the forecourt of a garage while Emma filled up (Cynthia refused to get petrol on her green leather driving gloves). Dan and I had done a lot of driving when we first got married and bought our car, a fourteen-year-old Mini. When we still had things to say to each other. We’d get the worst compilation CD we could find in the garage—Seventy Valentine’s Day Rockers! Fifty Smooth Driving Tunes!—and sing along, eating crisps, our hands touching in the greasy packet. I wondered if I’d now be sad every time I went to a garage for the rest of my life. It would make popping out for a Twix quite problematic.

One good thing about crying is it’s quite a useful way to pass the time, if you don’t mind chronic dehydration and people staring at you, so the journey went by for me in a blur of motorways, hiccuping sobs and love songs on Mellow Magic FM, and soon we were at Cynthia’s Chiswick-based palace. She has three storeys and even a garden you could swing several cats in.

We had stopped. The girls were looking at me, worried. I wiped my face, feeling like one of those criminals who needed to be bundled out of court in a blanket. You messed up your marriage, Rachel Kenny! Even though you had three Le Creuset pans and a fixed-rate mortgage! This court finds you guilty of being an idiot!

‘Come on, darling,’ said Cynthia. ‘Let’s get you down for the night.’

‘I’m not a baby, you know.’

‘Funny,’ Emma said, ‘because with all the crying and dribbling, it is actually quite like being with a baby.’

I gulped. ‘At least I still have bladder control. Unlike you that time with the Red Bull shots.’

Emma smiled and patted me on the hand. ‘That’s my girl. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

Cynthia actually had a spare room, with a bed and soft white sheets and a carafe of water on the bedside table, plus arcane things like armoires and runners that I’d only ever seen in design magazines. Once I was settled into bed for the night—completely shattered, all my stuff in archive boxes, with no idea where my toothbrush might be—my phone bleeped with a text. Dan? My heart did a sort of funny swoop and fall, guilt and sadness and something else all in one. But no, of course it wasn’t Dan. I doubted he would ever text me again. It was Emma, asking if I was OK. I didn’t know how to answer that, so instead I composed imaginary texts to Dan, supposing he were actually talking to me and might listen to what I had to say.

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please let me come home.

I miss you.

I can’t do this on my own.

I didn’t send them, and for the rest of the night my phone stayed as dark and silent as the R.E.M. CD that was now buried somewhere under my bedding plants, ex–bedding plants, in a garden I’d probably never see again. I thought of him saying two years before: I’ll never leave you, Rachel.

Yeah, right. But then, neither of us had exactly kept the promises we made that day.

Chapter Two

When I woke up in Cynthia’s white-cotton-and-distressed-wood (why would it be distressed? It’s in a lovely house in Chiswick. I’ve never understood that phrase) spare room, I’d no idea where I was for a moment. Had I fallen asleep in a branch of the White Company? Then it all came back and I felt the first tears of the day push against my eyelids. None of that. Today I had to find somewhere to live. I got ready in the en suite, with its rainfall shower and roll-top bath (if I was very quiet, maybe I could just stay here forever) and dressed in jeans and Converse. I brushed my hair, as I had to appear like a normal functioning member of society today, and that was hard for me at the best of times.

Cynthia was at the scrubbed wood table with The Sunday Telegraph—she married a Tory; I know, but it can happen to your dearest friends sometimes—croissants and fresh coffee. Unlike how I’d have been on a Sunday in my own kitchen—toothpaste-encrusted jammies and butter in my hair—she was dressed in a grey wool dress and different, equally expensive knee boots. ‘There you are. Ready for the first day of the rest of your life?’

‘I thought that was yesterday.’

‘No, that was the last day of … a different bit of your life.’

‘Catchy.’

‘Croissant? Bagel? Scrambled eggs? Toast?’ Cynthia was one of those people who would hostess you to death if you let them.

‘Croissants would be lovely, thanks. Do you have any tea?’ It was tragically uncool, but I’d never learned to like coffee.

Cynthia found some PG Tips hidden shamefully in a cupboard, holding them away from her as if they were toxic waste, or a shopping bag from Lidl. ‘They must be the cleaner’s.’

Of course they had a cleaner.

She furnished me with tea, croissants, jam and bits of the paper. ‘What do you want to be depressed by? The stagnant house market, the rising price of ski holidays or the dangers of uncontrolled immigration?’

‘I’ll take immigration. I need a laugh. You know, you should get them to interview you. Young Tory lawyer who had a black immigrant dad. They’d choke on their crumpets.’

Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned her dad. But she only said, ‘I’m not a Tory. I just married one. It could happen to anyone.’

‘Where is Rich, by the way?’ It was easy to forget someone else lived in this palace of white and sisal; he was so seldom there.

‘Went into the office.’

‘On a Sunday?’ Of course he did. I shouldn’t have asked. I might have been a lot poorer than most of my friends— if we were the UN, I’d be Yemen—but at least I could lie in bed and mope whenever I wanted to. You couldn’t put a price on that.

I was reading an article on house prices and feeling gloom settle over me. ‘I’ll never get on the property ladder again. There’s a cardboard box here for sale for a hundred grand. Apparently, it’s “bijou” and “compact” and made of “environmentally friendly materials”.’

‘You’re not off the ladder. You’ve just stepped away for a while, is all.’

‘Fell off, more like.’

‘Frank fell off a ladder once. Broke his leg in three places.’

That was me, I reflected gloomily. Fallen back to earth with a crash, while up above me everyone else just kept on climbing that damn ladder. It was like doing gymnastics in PE all over again. ‘How are your mum and Frank?’

‘Fine. Talking about joining the Caravan Club, so that’ll be nice and embarrassing for Rich’s parents when we have them over at Christmas. They think caravans are for stable hands and New Age travellers.’

I wondered again how Cynthia felt about the fact her dad had never tried to contact her. I’d known her as long as Emma, the three of us meeting in the first term at Bristol Uni, huddling together in a refuge against the posh girls with long blonde hair, ski outfits and double-barrelled names, but sometimes I still had no idea what she thought about things.

‘So you’re house-hunting today?’ she said.

‘Urgh. Yes. Nightmare.’

‘You can stay here as long as you like, you know that?’

‘Thank you. But I think me and my existential crisis need a room of our own.’

Cynthia dropped me off at the station in her BMW, pointing out helpfully where I had croissant flakes in my hair, and I began the first of my viewings.

Two years ago, when we were still congratulating ourselves on our good life decisions—getting married, eating five portions of fruit and veg a day, opening pensions—Dan and I had bought a semi in suburbia, which wasn’t much but had two bedrooms, a bathroom that wasn’t incubating new species of mould, and a small scrappy patch of grass where we sentimentally thought our children would play, and before that our border collie, or golden retriever; we hadn’t got that far yet. Remembering some of the places I’d lived before this, I dreaded flat-hunting.

Now, I like to think I’m a fairly positive person.

I mean, I’m not, not at all, but I like to think it, and I try to give what my Buddhist friend Sunita calls ‘a cosmic yes to the universe’. Spending the day flat-hunting in London is enough to make you give a giant no, no, no, and hell no to the universe, and crawl back into bed with the duvet over your head, reflecting on how you can’t really afford a bed, or even a duvet. My day went something like this:

The ‘sunny studio’ in Sydenham turned out to be one room with a single bed in a house share of five other people, one of whom showed me the room wearing just a pair of Y-fronts and a jokey rape-themed T-shirt. ‘You’re OK with parties, right? One house rule though is everyone, like, has their own stash. It’s just cooler that way.’ No.

The ‘quiet garret room’ in Blackheath was a single bed in an alcove off the living room of a nervy older lady.

‘There’s no door?’ I said, edging to the window. The place was where light came to die and there was a strong smell of cat pee.

‘Oh, no. The little ones don’t like to be shut out.’ She said this cooing at one of the three cats I had spotted so far, a black tom with a scar over one eye and a malevolent glare out of the other.

The bedcover was chintz, approximately forty years old, and as she showed me it, a different, ginger cat jumped off the wardrobe and raked its claws over my neck. ‘Oh, he likes you!’

No.

The ‘lovely room in modern flat with friendly city gent’ in Docklands turned out to be a nice place, if a bit ‘chrome and leather are the only decorative materials that exist, aren’t they’ for my taste, but I was followed round at a distance of three centimetres by Mike, the owner, who told me at least five times he didn’t need the money, like, he earned a packet in the City, but he wanted a bit of ‘feminine companionship’ round the place. No.

The ‘delightful double in house with fun girl’ turned out to be the living room, turned into a bedroom, in the flat of Mary from Camden, who handed me a list of her ‘house rules’ when I stepped in. First was, always take off your shoes when entering and put on special slippers, which were embroidered with cat faces.

No, no, no, hell no.

The only thing that made house-hunting vaguely bearable was to imagine I was researching locations for a new gritty TV show where people got murdered in the dingiest possible flats. CSI: Croydon. I put in my headphones as I trudged about and asked myself what Beyoncé would do, as I often pondered in moments of stress. Well, probably she’d charter her private helicopter and get airlifted to one of her mansions, so that was no use. I repaired to a café in Kentish Town, trying to cheer myself up with tea and a Florentine. Then the bill came to £4.50 and I realised I might not be able to afford cafés at all after this. I’d have to be one of those people who knitted jumpers and always took their own sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, just like at school. This wasn’t what I’d grown up for. It was depressing indeed to realise you were no further up the pecking order than you were at seven.

I was on my phone, scanning the property websites for anything under £700 that didn’t look likely to have fleas/mould/sleazy landlords. Could I live in Catford? Was that even in London? Would I be able to stomach a large flat share, given I currently worked from home? Alternatively, could I live and work in a studio flat where you couldn’t open the fridge without moving the bed? Could I possibly get my freelance work going again to the point where I’d actually make some money?

I began scrawling figures on a napkin, but it was too scary, so I ordered another Florentine instead and then worried about money and calories and being single again at thirty. Not even single. Divorced.

I was getting back into some very bad thoughts—you should ring Dan, beg him to take you back, you can’t afford this, you can’t manage alone—when my phone rang. Emma. ‘Are you busy?’

‘No. Just contemplating the ruins of my life.’

‘Oh dear, is it not going well?’

‘Put it this way, the only person with less luck than me at choosing where to live is Snow White. I’ve seen most of the seven dwarves today—Grumpy, Horny, Druggy …’

‘Remind me again why you had to move out. It was your house too, and he was the one who wanted—’

‘I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own. And you know it’s better to be in London for work.’ Work that I didn’t have yet. I wasn’t going to think about that.

‘Well, check your emails. I just sent you something.’

‘OK, let me find my phone.’

A pause. ‘You’re on your phone now, Rach.’

‘Oh, right. What did you send?’

‘An amazing flat share. It’s in Hampstead, lovely garden and house, but, best of all, it’s free!’

‘What? How is that possible?’ I was thinking of Mike, the ‘city gent’.

‘There’s some house-sitting and pet-sitting involved.’

‘Pets?’ I said warily, thinking of the cat house—ironically, not in Catford.

‘A dog.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘I know. So call them now! When I get off the phone, I mean.’

Sometimes I wondered if my friends thought I was a complete idiot. ‘Thanks. You’re sure it’s not a sex trafficking thing though?’

‘You can never be totally sure.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve got the address just in case.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I can craft the orders of service for your funeral. I just got a new glue gun.’

‘I’m going now! Bye!’

I hung up and waited for the email to download.

A flip of excitement in my stomach—when you reached thirty, property websites gave you the same feeling that dating websites did in your twenties. Not that I’d ever dated. The house was beautiful—three storeys of red brick, set among trees, and there was even a turret! Oh my God. I read on. Underfloor heating, en suite room, massive kitchen with dishwasher—some of the places I’d looked at didn’t even have washing machines. What was the catch? As I’d learned from my property search, there was always a catch. Under price, it said ‘N/A’. Could there really be no charge? I looked at the number listed and on impulse dialled it. I was only ten minutes from Hampstead, after all.

It went to voicemail. A man’s voice, deep and clipped. Slightly posh. ‘This is Patrick Gillan. Please leave a message.’

Voicemails are my nemesis. Cynthia still talks about the time I rang her at work to tell her I’d seen cheap flights to America, and ended up singing ‘Hotel California’ down the line while her entire office listened on speakerphone.

‘Erm … hi. I saw your ad. I’d like somewhere to live. I don’t have much money at the moment—’ Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. Like with jobs and dating, the only way to get a room you really needed was to pretend you didn’t need it at all. ‘Erm … I mean, I’m looking to relocate and I am most interested in your room. I should like to view it at the earliest convenience. Erm … I’m down the road right now. Call me. Oh … it’s Rachel.’

I hung up. Classic rubbish voicemail, I’d managed to sound mad, posh and needy all at once. I paid for my biscuit and went out into the drizzle. Approaching me was a shiny red bus, slick with rain and the word ‘Hampstead’ on the front.

I’ve heard people say that they sometimes have moments when they feel as if Fate is tapping them on the shoulder and saying, ‘This way, please,’ like one of those tour guides with the little flags being followed around by Chinese tourists in matching raincoats.

I’ve never had this happen. Even if I did, I’d get stuck on the Northern Line and Fate would have left for another appointment. But that day I thought, sod it, I’m getting divorced, I have nothing to do and the bus is right there. So I got on. And, ten minutes later, I found myself ringing the bell at the house of Patrick Gillan.

Chapter Three

As I stood on the doorstep of a house on a tree-lined street in Hampstead, a dog started barking inside. I smiled. There really was one. I caught sight of myself in the shiny door knocker and sighed. My hair was frizzy with rain and I wore a fraying mac, jeans and holey Converse. When I worked in an office, tights were the bane of my life, like having cling film applied to your most delicate areas, always wrinkling round your ankles or laddering if anyone breathed in a ten-mile radius. So since going freelance—this was how I was choosing to describe my current circumstances to myself—I mostly worked in jeans … OK, pyjamas. The door had panels of stained glass, and I saw someone approach, turned different colours by the light. I stuck on my best ‘not a crazy person’ smile. The man who opened the door was holding a phone in one hand, and with the other had a barking Westie by the collar. ‘Shut up, Max!’ He, the man, not the dog, wore jeans and a soft blue-grey jumper. He had greying curly hair and a cross expression. ‘What is it? I don’t plan to vote in the council elections. Not until you do something about the disgraceful state of your recycling policy.’

‘No— It’s— I saw your ad. The room. I was in the area and …’

He stared at me for a few moments while the dog tried to climb up me.

‘I’m not mad,’ I said quickly.

‘That’s good to know.’

‘I suppose a mad person might say that.’ I laughed nervously.

He looked me up and down. Sighed. ‘You better come in.’

Sometimes, when you walk into a place, you know you were meant to be there. It just smells right or something. Dan hated this method I had of choosing houses. What do you mean it didn’t feel right? It’s got outdoor decking and a dedicated parking space!

‘It’s amazing,’ I said. The inner doors all had stained-glass panels, filling the hallway with a kaleidoscope of colour. The floor was old-fashioned parquet, a little scuffed, and the place smelled of coffee and daffodils, of which there was a large handful crammed into a jam jar. I could tell instantly it was a middle-class home because:

The man still looked cross. ‘Come into the kitchen. I’m in the middle of something, so I wish you’d waited, but never mind.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I said so, didn’t I? Do you want coffee?’

‘Oh, thank you, I don’t drink it.’ I may as well have said I didn’t believe in changing my socks.

‘You don’t?’

‘I don’t like the taste. I like the smell and I love coffee cake and those sweets you get in Roses. Isn’t that weird? I mean, hardly anyone likes those.’

He studied me. The phone in his hand chirped and he looked at it, frowned. ‘Tea, then?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘How do you take it?’

‘Milk, quite strong, but sort of milky if that makes sense.’

Once I sat down, the dog scampered across the kitchen and hurled himself onto my knee, where he crouched with his chin on my shoulder, panting. ‘Oof! Hello.’

‘He goes mad for new people. Sorry.’

‘It’s OK. I wish I had that effect on men.’ Oh, shut up, shut up, Rachel. Another side effect of working alone—you forget that there are supposed to be ‘inside head’ thoughts as well as ‘outside head’ sayings.

Patrick peered at the kettle. ‘So, Rachel—that’s you, I assume? What made you want the room?’

‘Honestly? I need somewhere to live at short notice. I also work from home at the moment, so I can’t really be in a big flat share.’ Or the sex slave of a rich city banker, come to think of it. All the sex-slaving would probably cut right into my freelancing time.

He was still frowning. ‘And where have you been living?’

‘Out in Surrey. I owned a place.’

‘Don’t you want to buy again, then?’

Things that suck about divorce, number fifteen: having to explain it to strangers. ‘My husband and I are splitting up. He’s keeping the house for now, so I have to move out.’ I cuddled the dog. ‘I’m in bit of a bind. But—’

‘You’re not mad.’

‘No.’

‘You’re getting divorced.’

‘Yes.’

He leaned against the counter and I saw he had no wedding ring on. ‘Join the club.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not much fun, is it?’

‘It sucks. In fact, I’m keeping a list. Things that suck about divorce.’

‘How many things are on it?’

‘Several hundred and counting.’

‘How about this one?’ The kettle had boiled, but he kept staring out the window. The phone beeped again, but he ignored it. ‘Having to find a lodger so they can dog-sit and look after the house, because you spend too much time at your job, and that’s why your wife left you in the first place, because with all the time she was on her own she had to find new hobbies, like, for example, having an affair with the next-door neighbour?’

I followed his gaze to the house just visible over the fence and nodded slowly. ‘I’ll put that one in after having to move out of the house you bought in the suburbs because your husband doesn’t want you there any more, but not being able to rent anywhere in London because you’re broke, so your only option is to move into massive house shares, or live with mad cat ladies or sex pests, or … answer weird ads that don’t list any rent.’ I paused. There were posh Waitrose biscuits on the table, so I crammed one into my mouth to shut myself up.

Patrick Gillan was watching me curiously. ‘Look, I have a demanding job, so I need someone here during the day, to be with the dog and take deliveries and maybe do some light au pairing, but I can’t afford a full-time housekeeper. I was just … thinking outside the box. I thought someone might do it in exchange for free rent. It was sort of a mad late-night idea, to be honest. I’m kind of at my wit’s end here.’

Free rent. FREE RENT. Suddenly, I was ripping up the calculations I’d done on the napkin and feeling a large weight lift from my chest. I wouldn’t be totally broke. I wouldn’t have to bring my own sandwiches when we went to Pizza Express and divide up the cost of each dough ball. He was still looking at me. ‘Why are you here, Rachel? I mean really?’

I was a little high on all this unexpected honesty, among the lies you get told when looking for a place to live, about south-facing lawns and nearness to transport and exactly how many cats there are in a given household. ‘Really? When I got married, we moved to Surrey and my husband, I mean, my ex—’ it was hard to say the word ‘—got me a job at the local council where he worked. Graphic design. But then he asked me to move out, and coincidentally, the next day, I was made redundant.’

He was still looking at me. ‘Kettle’s boiled,’ I pointed out. The biscuit was lodged in my dry mouth.

He shook himself and got a cup. ‘So you’re at home all day?’

‘Most days.’ I held my breath. This had been a problem with many of the rooms I’d looked at, landlords muttering about extra bills and so on. ‘I’m going to look for a job, obviously, but also try to build up my freelance work. I used to do a bit on the side.’

‘And you like dogs?’

‘Love them.’ I stroked Max’s head. ‘I was about to get one, but then—well. Everything happened.’

‘And would you mind sort of housekeeping a little, answering the phone, getting parcels, maybe sticking dinner on?’

‘Of course. I love cooking. And I don’t smoke and I’m … fairly tidy. You mean you literally wouldn’t charge me any rent?’ I looked at him suspiciously. ‘What’s the catch?’

He laughed, and instantly he looked ten years younger, happy, even a little wicked. ‘I was wondering the same about you. I suppose I should ask for references.’

‘Well. My previous landlord is my ex-husband, and my current boss is myself. Can you prove you’re not a mad killer?’

‘It’s hard to prove a negative.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Phone a friend, tell them where you are.’

‘But I would be dead by the time they found me.’

‘True, but at least you’d have a nice funeral.’

I was still thinking when there was a noise and the back door opened, and in trudged a small child in red wellies, clutching a big muddy bunch of daffodils. He was gorgeous—dark glossy curls, brown eyes. Maybe four or five. ‘I got some more, Dad.’

‘That’s good, mate. Give them here.’ Patrick looked at me over the child’s head. ‘I may as well explain—this is the catch.’

‘Cynth!’ I hissed.

‘Hello? Who is this? I’m not interested in PPI claims, thanks. Unlike some, I wasn’t stupid enough to buy it in the first place.’

‘It’s me. Rachel.’

‘Ohh! You’re still alive, then.’ I had emailed her to tell her about the possible flat share, figuring the more people who knew the better for retrieving my murdered corpse.

‘I took the room. God, the place is gorgeous.’ The room I was sitting in had more stained glass in the window, which looked out over Hampstead Heath. It was on the third floor, filled with light. I could put a drawing table in the window. There was an old wooden bed, a thick cream carpet and an en suite with a deep claw-foot bath. On the bedside table was a jar with more daffodils.

‘Alex,’ Patrick had said when he’d shown me up. ‘He won’t stop picking them.’

Ah yes. Alex.

‘So is it really OK? How on earth can he be offering it free?’

‘Well, there’s a kid.’

‘Ugh,’ she said. Cynthia felt about children the way most people felt about mould spores—some unfortunates had to live with them, but careful vigilance could prevent them from ever taking hold in the first place.

‘The dad, he’s getting divorced, so he has the kid.’

‘Where’s the mother?’

‘I’m not sure. Gone overseas to work for a while, I think.’

‘I see. He wants a free nanny.’

‘Well, Alex will be at school during the day. I think Patrick just wants someone to be here. Answer the phone, put the washing machine on.’ He’d described it as ‘Maybe I can help you, and you can help me’. I understood, I thought.

Cynthia was talking. ‘Make sure it’s not a de facto employee post, sweetie. You know how people are. Since you’re there could you just make the dinner, and do the shopping, and re-grout that bathroom … Working from home still means working.’

‘I know. But where else can I go? This is a million times nicer than anything I could afford.’

‘Well, OK. If you’re happy.’

I realised I’d talked myself into staying here, and before I knew it I was arranging to collect my things and move in that very night. Me, my ten thousand sketchbooks, my fifteen pairs of trainers and Bob the dog-substitute bear were going to make our home here.

Alex, apparently the world’s most biddable child, had presumably gone to bed when I came back with the van, and Patrick was in the kitchen with an iPad and glass of wine. There was a smell of stew in the air and a Le Creuset dish soaking in the sink. It felt weird. Like coming home, but to a home that wasn’t mine. He jumped when I let myself in, and I wondered if he’d forgotten he’d given me a key or, worse, forgotten me entirely. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hi. You’ve got … things?’

‘Yes.’

‘I better help you.’

We hauled my meagre goods up the stairs. ‘What’s in here, rocks?’ Patrick asked, and I’d had to admit that yes, there were rocks in some of the boxes; I collected them for drawing practice. Dan had kept all the Ikea/Argos chipboard that furnished our marital home, so there wasn’t much. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Patrick said, when the room was a mess of boxes and cheap Ikea blue bags.

I did, but I felt odd about sitting with him, and I was worried I’d been drinking too much as my marriage fell apart. ‘I’m OK, thanks. I’m very tired.’

‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’

I liked to think I was fairly spontaneous and fun. The kind of girl who’d jump on a train to Madrid with only the clothes on her back and not even book a return flight in advance. The kind of girl who bought train tickets at the station instead of getting them online for up to a third less. Who didn’t know what they were doing three weekends hence but was fairly sure it would involve a music festival and a twenty-four-hour drugathon with dubious men in goatees, and not a trip to Ikea for a new magazine rack.

I wasn’t spontaneous. Plus, I hated goatees. Things that suck about divorce, number twenty-two: nothing is where it should be. If you wanted to make your famous lemon risotto, the recipe books were still in the house, and you didn’t manage to get custody of the food processor. If you wanted to go hiking, your boots were in the car your husband/ex-husband was still driving to work every day. You wanted to wear a blue dress and realised it was at the dry cleaner’s, the ticket God knows where, and you weren’t making the thirty-mile trip for a frock from New Look anyway.

Nothing is where it should be. Not you. Not your heart. Not your life.

Finally, I’d unpacked nothing but my toothbrush and pyjamas, but I was in bed and was listening to the unfamiliar house around me. The trickle of old plumbing. The creak of the attic. I took out my phone—my screen saver was still a picture from two years ago, Dan and I doing a selfie at our wedding. He was planting a kiss on my cheek and I was smiling widely, as if I couldn’t even imagine a time when we wouldn’t be that happy. I thought about texting him to tell him I’d found somewhere, but I knew he wouldn’t care. That was another thing that sucked about divorce. You were hurting and lost and alone, and the only person you could think to tell about any of it was the one who no longer wanted to talk to you at all.

Chapter Four

When I woke up, it was the day after the first day of the rest of my life. No one ever talked about that. That’s the day when you have to live with your momentous decision, start redirecting post, unpacking boxes. My overwhelming wish was to lie in bed, sorrowfully dwelling on the terrible mess I’d made of my life. When you’re freelance, you see, you have those luxuries. But I didn’t get the chance, because I was woken at six by a tapping on the door. Mice? Ghosts? I cleared my throat. ‘Hello?’ Indistinct mumbling. A shy ghost? ‘You can come in!’

There was a fumbling and the door creaked open. In flew twenty pounds of overexcited dog. Max leapt up on the bed, where he rolled over with his feet in the air, indicating I could do as I wished with him. Sadly, it was only dogs who reacted this way to me in bed.

In the doorway stood Alex, holding yet more dripping daffodils. He wore one red welly, the other foot clad in a stripy sock, and a pretty on-trend onesie with Thomas the Tank Engine’s face on front. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘’Lo.’ He stared at me out of his dark eyes.

‘Those are nice flowers.’

‘Flarrs for you,’ he muttered, darting in and crushing them onto my bedside table, where they left green smears.

‘For me? Thank you, Alex.’

‘Mummy likes flowers.’

Awk-ward. ‘I’m sure she does. And how is Max today?’

‘He’s not allowed on the bed.’

‘Is he not? He’s naughty, then, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Can I come in the bed?’

‘OK. The more the merrier.’ Alex needed my help to get up, and I suggested he leave the remaining welly behind. He sat cross-legged, looking at me.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Rachel.’

I pitched around for four-year-old conversational topics. I liked kids but was still having conflicted feelings over whether I wanted them or not. Dan and I hadn’t even been able to manage a dog. I could feel the panic reach up in me from the pit—the one of ‘I’m broke and thirty and I’ll be alone forever’—so I focused on Alex. It’s hard to have existential horror when you’re with a four-year-old. They barely understand the concept of ‘tomorrow’ let alone ‘the rest of my miserable life’.

‘So who’s that on your onesie?’

‘’S Thomas.’

‘Oh yeah? Who’s your favourite person in Thomas?’

Alex and I were having a little chat about animated trains—I bluffed my way through, my sister has kids—when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Patrick burst in. He too wore a onesie in a fashionable nautical stripe, a thick grey jumper on top. ‘Alex! I told you to leave Rachel alone. She was sleeping.’

‘No, she wasn’t,’ said Alex, with impeccable logic. ‘Brought her flarrs.’

‘Yes, we’ve talked about this, mate. We have to leave some of the flowers in the garden or there won’t be any more. Come on, get down. You too, Max.’ Child and dog slid off the bed. Max waddled out, wagging his little tail and wheezing. Alex clung to his dad’s hand. Patrick took a look at me, in my alluring sleepwear—Bruce Springsteen T-shirt, fleece pyjamas with sheep on. ‘I’m sorry about them.’

‘It’s OK. It’s a nice way to wake up.’ Then I worried he’d think I meant him in his onesie, so I quickly said, ‘Max and Alex, I mean—I’ve always wanted a dog.’

‘That’s fortunate, because Max is very hard to shake off. I found him inside my coat the other day. I’ll try to keep them both out of here.’ He looked round at the mess of boxes and bags, paintbrushes rolling on the desk, reams of paper stacked about the place. ‘You’re an artist, are you? I didn’t quite catch what it was you did.’

‘I’m a graphic designer really, but I used to also be a sort of freelance cartoonist. I do caricatures of people, for weddings and birthdays and that, and sometimes a bit for magazines.’ As I said it, I realised this sounded like the world’s flakiest career, like ‘vajazzalist’, or ‘toenail consultant’. I also realised the room was an absolute tip.

‘I’m not finished unpacking,’ I said hurriedly. I was not tidy. I liked to pretend it was something to do with my artistic temperament, but really I was just a slob and quite forgetful. I’d put down bits of toast and then wonder what happened to them and make some more. It used to drive Dan crazy. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? When you start out, when you’re in love, it seems as if these things could never matter, as if they’re just crumbs in the bed of your love. Then as time goes by, all you can feel is the crumbs. They’re itchy. They keep you awake. I suppose all those little crumbs become a big loaf in the end, rising between you, keeping you apart.

That wasn’t the best metaphor I’d ever come up with. Moving on …

Once I was up, showered in my lovely en suite, and had pushed some of the mess into the fitted cupboards, I stuck on Destiny’s Child’s ‘Survivor’ on a loop, looking for inspiration, and sat on the bed with a notebook to make a list. A list for the rest of my life.

I liked lists. They were my way of trying to put some order on the desperate mess of my life. In fact, I even had a list of my favourite lists, ones I’d been keeping for years:

I opened my notebook—a pretty one with a pink silk cover, my lists deserved the best—and chewed on my pen.

I’d thought my life was going to be all Volvos and trips to Sainsbury’s, dogs and mortgages and maybe babies in a few years. My friend from yoga suggested I think positively about all the things I could achieve now I was ‘on a different life path’—Buddhists are always saying things like this. For example, I’d always wanted to try lots of hobbies. Languages, maybe. Kick-boxing. That looked like fun and would come in handy with all the awful men I’d probably have to date now I was single. Oh God. Dating.

The thought was so depressing I crawled back under the covers, in my jeans and jumper, and lay there panicking about being alone forever.

After a while of this, the phone rang. It was Emma. ‘Hello! Are you lying in bed panicking about being alone forever?’

‘No. Well, yes, but least I got dressed.’

‘Good girl. Now, can you come over tonight? Cynthia has promised she’ll leave work by seven, and Ian will cook.’

‘Will you help me with my list?’

‘Which list is this?’

‘The list of what to do with the rest of my life.’

‘Of course. I love a good list.’ It was true. It was one of the main reasons we were friends.

I agreed to come over and settled down for a good long worry about life.

I must practise some conversation topics for tonight, I thought. House prices might be a good one.

Chapter Five

Emma and Ian lived in Acton, clinging on to the very edge of London under the flight path of whooshing aeroplanes. The flat smelled of curry and oil—Ian was seriously into bikes, both motor and road, and when you went for a wee it was quite normal to see bits of inner tubes in the bath. Emma opened the door in what looked like pyjamas.

For a moment I was confused. ‘Did I get the wrong day?’ I’d like to say this had never happened before, but …

‘No.’ Emma looked puzzled, taking my bottle of cornershop wine, the £4.99 sticker clearly visible. ‘Oh, you mean the onesie. Isn’t it cool? Come out here, Snugglepuss.’

Ian appeared with a pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. He too had donned a onesie shaped like a dog, with little ears on the hood. Emma’s was purple with stars on. ‘Aren’t they great?’ She beamed. ‘They’re so cosy, you wouldn’t believe. We’ve saved a fortune on our heating bills.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said weakly. Onesies? Did everyone except me get the memo about this trend? I remembered when Emma was famed for streaking our graduation ceremony in a protest at the uni’s continued stocking of Nestlé-made Kit Kats. Her boobs had been on the front of the local paper—it was pixelated out, but you could tell it was her by the Danger Mouse pants. Now it was all onesies and pukey pet names.

In the background, an episode of University Challenge was playing, which they were watching so they could keep score on the whiteboard they used every week. On one side it said ‘overprivileged students’ and on the other ‘Emsie and Ian’. They were also hosting me to death. ‘Drink?’ asked Ian, going back to the kitchen. ‘Beer? Wine? Vodka? Meths?’

‘Or water first?’ Emma frowned at the TV screen and shouted: ‘Swim bladder!’

‘Bread? Crisps? This will be ready soon. Potassium chlorate!’

I felt it should be me in the onesie, with them as my helicopter parents. ‘Beer, please. Who else is coming?’

‘I asked Ros, but of course she never leaves her own postcode. The dissolution of the monasteries! She says she’d love to see you soon and lend an ear though.’

Get all the juicy details, more like, while revelling in her own two kids and semi in Hendon. I was becoming very bitter with all the solicitous, coupled-up friends who wanted to mother me. ‘Any sign of Cynth?’

‘Isiser? No, it’s not the eighties.’ Ian laughed to himself. ‘Henry the Fifth! Oh, come on, that was an easy one.’

Emma rolled her eyes. ‘Snugs, that was dreadful, even by your standards. She said she’d leave at seven. Burkina Faso!’

‘Reckon she’ll come?’ Often she didn’t leave work at all, just stayed up all night and sent out to La Perla in the morning for clean knickers. This was called ‘living the dream’, apparently.

However, I’d barely eaten my way through five hundred poppadoms when she turned up, dispensing kisses and clinking carrier bags. ‘Hello, darling.’ Immediately, I felt bad that I had brought only one bottle. But then, I was broke and she could afford to chuck away La Perla knickers, so perhaps everything was relative. I was sure there was a Bible story just like this, except without the undies—Jesus being strictly an M&S guy, I feel.

‘They let you out for good behaviour?’ In the kitchen I could see Cynthia saying hi to Ian.

‘Bad behaviour. Apparently, it’s worth more by the hour. Mmm, smells yummy. I think the last time I cooked we still thought fringes looked good.’

‘Taste.’ He held up a spoon for her to try and she closed her eyes for a second.

‘The Kelvin scale!’ shouted Emma.

‘Mmm. I can really taste the … whatever random ingredient you used that we’re supposed to be able to detect.’

‘Galangal.’

‘Yep. I can definitely taste that, whatever it is.’

‘Björn Borg!’ shouted Ian. ‘God, this lot are really thick this week.’

‘Is it nearly done, Snugs? Fermat’s Last Theorem!’ called Emma.

‘Just about. Honeybunch, don’t use those plates. They don’t match.’

‘We don’t own four that match, Snugs. You broke one last week doing air guitar to “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. The Appalachians!’

‘Oh yeah. They’ve got some on sale at Sainsbury’s. Should I pick some up?’

‘OK, and get some more cleaning wipes. We’re out. Samuel Pepys!’

I tried not to catch Cynthia’s eye during this, partly because I still couldn’t believe this was our rebellious Emma, who’d once refused to shop in supermarkets for an entire year until they started charging for plastic bags. But also because I missed having this with someone, passing words back and forth like dishes, barely listening to what you were saying. Reminding someone to buy milk. All that.

Ian, like many men, required you to make a whole performance of admiring his food whenever he cooked. You had to look at it, smell it, guess what spices he might have used, and only then were you allowed to dig in. Dan and I had given up cooking when things got bad. We were on first-name terms with the Papa John’s delivery man—I’d even given him a Christmas card, to my shame.

‘So,’ said Emma, as soon as she’d finished wiping her plate with naan. ‘It’s Rach’s first night with us alone.’

‘Not really,’ Ian pointed out. ‘She hadn’t brought him out with her for at least the past year.’

‘He was always so busy with work,’ I said defensively. ‘I brought him. Sometimes.’

Things that suck about divorce, number thirty-four: finding out that none of your friends or family really liked your spouse in the first place; they just didn’t say so at the time when you could actually have done something about it. We’d all been at university together, so my friends had had a good ten years to get to know Dan. It was sad to think he was going to slip out of their lives too, without a backward glance.

‘It’s her first night properly alone,’ Emma repeated.

‘Do you have to keep saying “alone”?’ I was still working on my third curry helping and most likely only seconds from an Ian pun about passing out in a korma. Unlike those pale tragic women in books, misery made me eat everything in sight.

Cynthia rubbed my arm. ‘You’re not alone, darling. You’re independent and fabulous.’

Easy for her to say when she was going home to Richy Rich and their mansion with a cleaner and once-a-month gardener.

‘Anyway.’ Emma was doing her ‘could the class come to attention’ voice. ‘Rach, I know you’re feeling a bit wobbly at present.’

‘You could say that,’ I mumbled through curry. ‘Is anyone eating that?’

Ian passed over more naan. ‘Your naan,’ he said. ‘Geddit? Like your mum.’

‘Could you listen, please?’ Emma was waiting. ‘I think what you need is a project. All the books say the first few months post-split are the hardest.’

‘You read books about it?’

‘Of course. I wanted to support you.’

‘It’s a bit worrying seeing a book called Steps Through Divorce beside the bed,’ Ian said, chewing.

‘You have to be married to get divorced,’ Emma said, with a slight edge in her voice, which made me hurriedly swallow my curry.

‘So you’ve got a project for me?’

‘Better.’ She smiled triumphantly and pulled out a small notebook. ‘I’ve got a project plan.’

We all groaned. Cynthia said, ‘Not again, Em. I thought we’d talked about this scrapbooking issue.’

‘It’s nothing! Just some glue-gunning, and a bit of découpage and sketching … you know.’

‘Don’t make us do another intervention. Remember my wedding invites.’

I winced. ‘I thought we’d agreed, we do not talk about the wedding invites.’

Emma was huffing. ‘I don’t see what the fuss was about. They looked lovely. Everyone said.’

Cynthia ticked it off on her fingers. ‘They cost five hundred pounds in materials! I could have got them at the Queen’s stationer for that! They put indelible pink stains on everyone’s hands!’

‘Hand-dyed paper! It was a lovely touch.’

‘Touch was exactly what they couldn’t do.’

Ian met my eyes, pleading, as he gathered up our plates. ‘Can I see the plan?’ I said. I was the peacemaker in the group, which meant, like many peacekeepers, I was often riddled with metaphorical crossfire bullets. ‘Thank you, Em. It’s pretty.’

Emma was an excellent primary school teacher. She was authoritative, briskly kind, organised and on top of this a dab hand at cutting and gluing things. Unfortunately, she couldn’t curtail this, and so was prone to a vice you might call ‘scrapbooking gone mad’. Every page was decorated in sparkly gold pen, with glued-in photos and drawings. ‘So what’s the—’

‘Well,’ she jumped in, ‘I read in this book that the best way through a big life change is to have a list. A to-do list.’

That didn’t sound so bad. Lists were my comfort zone—I’d had interventions about this too. I turned the leaf. Page one said—do stand-up comedy. It was accompanied by a picture of me rather drunk, in a party hat, in the middle of saying something that was clearly very important. I looked up at them. ‘What is this?’

‘It’s a bucket list,’ said Cynthia gently. ‘Except you’re not dying, of course. Sort of an embracing-life list. All the things you said you wanted to do for years, then never did because you were living in the suburbs with Dan.’

‘I never said I wanted to—what’s this—eat something weird? Ew, is that a snail in the picture?’

‘We sort of … extrapolated for some of them.’

‘You extrapolated that I wanted to … sleep with a stranger? Nice abs on that dude though.’ I tilted the book for a better look at the picture.

‘You could do both of those last ones together,’ called Ian from the kitchen. ‘I mean, if you slept with a stranger, you probably would eat something weird. Two birds, one stone, etc.’

‘Go away, Ian,’ said Emma and Cynthia in unison.

I was leafing through the lovely rough handmade paper pages, with their crazy gold-penned instructions. ‘Guys, what is this about? I didn’t say I wanted to … do yoga properly. What?’

Emma leaned across the table to me earnestly. ‘Rach. What’s happened is you’ve had a disastropiphany.’

‘A what?’

‘A terrible thing has happened to you, but you can use it to make changes in your life, and generally become much happier.’

‘Like in Eat Pray Love,’ Cynthia chipped in.

There was a problem with that—no one was going to pay me to go round the world shagging Javier Bardem and eating ice cream. Julia Roberts would definitely not play me in the film of this. Maybe Kathy Burke. There was no way I could pull off prayer beads as a look. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You must really think I’ve messed things up.’

In the silence that followed Ian pushed a large vegetable through the kitchen door. ‘What do you think, eh? It’s what Prince was singing about. “Little Red Courgette”? Eh? Eh?’

‘Courgettes are green,’ said Emma stonily. ‘And get on with the dessert, will you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ In the kitchen we could hear him singing over the noise of the blender. ‘She made some raspberry puree … the kind you find in a fruit and veg store …’ Emma rolled her eyes affectionately. At least I hoped it was affectionately.

She lowered her voice. ‘To be honest, Rach, when you and Dan split up, it made me think—is this all there is, working all day and every evening, falling asleep in front of box sets, saving for a deposit on an even smaller flat somewhere further out?’ There was a silence from the kitchen. She went on. ‘You’ve been so brave, Rach. You changed your life. Hardly anyone ever does. They just put up with it.’

I swallowed hard and look at Cynthia. ‘You too?’

She squirmed. ‘I’m all right, but, you know, Rich is away so much. I don’t see him at all some weeks—it’s like we have a timeshare on the house. I think what happened to you was a wake-up call, that maybe we all needed to try to have more fun.’

I pushed away the book. ‘Guys—I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate that, really I do, but I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I can’t afford this stuff. I’m living in the box room of a stranger who is possibly a serial killer.’ I was exaggerating here for effect. It was hardly a box room, and Patrick seemed nice enough, if a bit grumpy.

‘We thought of that,’ said Emma calmly. She didn’t respond to passive-aggressive guilt trips—something to do with being told fifteen times a day that small children hated her and she wasn’t their real mum. ‘I’m going to organise it all, as an outlet for my madness—I’ll be Official List Arbiter—and Cyn …’

‘I’m going to pay,’ she said. ‘No, no, not in a patronising way. I’m going to do some of the tasks too, and I need you to make sure I actually go and don’t stay in to work all night. You’re going to be my social assistant.’

I glowered at them. ‘Funny, because that sounds totally patronising.’

She sighed. ‘Rach. Do you know how many pairs of pants I had to buy last month because I slept at the office? Twelve. I don’t even go to La Perla now. I go to … Primark. I get them in packs. So you see, Rach. I need your help.’

Emma nodded solemnly. ‘Her gusset is depending on you.’

When I left that night, slightly tipsy and falling over my biker boots, I’d agreed to follow Emma and Cynthia’s ten-step plan for the post-split, pre-divorce lady of a certain age (thirty). I must have dozed off on the tube from Acton, because I woke up at Tottenham Court Road in a panic—when was my last train? Did I miss it?—then I remembered I lived here now. In the city, not the sleepy suburbs. Back at the house, I struggled to get my newly cut key in the lock and, to my embarrassment, Patrick was still up in the kitchen. He had a bottle of red wine and the paper spread out on the table, classical music on the stereo. He was wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a red jumper. I felt myself relax as I stepped in. It was warm, and it smelled like flowers and beeswax polish.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said to Patrick automatically.

He looked puzzled. ‘You can come and go as you like, Rachel. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.’

‘Oh. OK.’ I realised I’d taken my shoes off, and it made me sad suddenly, all the nights I’d had to sneak back in beside Dan, cold and tired, and pretend I hadn’t enjoyed myself. Waiting to hear the inevitable accusing voice. You’re late. I take it you had a good time. Praying he’d be asleep already. ‘First night out,’ I explained. ‘Since … you know.’

‘I don’t think I’ve been out since. Alex was so … I wanted to make sure he was OK.’ He looked up. ‘Would you like a glass of wine? I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, at least not about more than Lego or walkies.’

At the magic word ‘walkies’, a little head popped up from a basket by the door. Max was awake. ‘Woof!’

‘Not now, silly dog.’

I sat down and Patrick got me a glass, patting the dog as he did. ‘Thank you.’ I was keen to hold on to the fragile, slightly drunk air of intimacy from the evening, so I took a big swallow. ‘Can I ask—when did she go?’

‘Michelle? A month ago.’ He said the rest quickly. ‘A month and three days.’

‘Not seven hours and fifteen days?’

‘Longer than that.’

‘No, it’s a song … Never mind.’

He smiled thinly. ‘She just left. There was some big job in New York—she’s from there, you see, and before Alex she was high up in banking—and we were fighting a lot, because I’d just found out about her and Alan from next door, and that was it. Sometimes it takes forever. Sometimes it all falls apart in what feels like days. Supposedly it’s just for a few months, the job, but I don’t know what will happen with us.’

‘We were the opposite.’ I was rubbing my finger where my wedding ring used to be. ‘It feels like it was on life support for years—just dying day by day.’

‘Sounds awful.’

‘Yeah. But even with that, there’s only one last time, you know? Like the last time he makes you a cup of tea or you watch Mad Men.’

‘Like the start of a relationship, but in reverse.’

‘Just like that.’

We lapsed into a sad silence.

He said, ‘You had fun tonight?’ And he actually meant it. Not like Dan’s ‘I can see you had fun without me’ version of the question.

‘I did. I saw my friends, and we had a curry.’

‘What are they like?’

‘Oh, insanely bossy. One’s a lawyer, one’s a teacher, and her boyfriend’s a social worker. They sort of manage me.’

‘Can’t you manage yourself?’

‘They think not. Look.’ I fished the book out of my bag. ‘Can you believe this? They’ve actually made me a list of things I’m supposed to do to get me through the post-split slump. They’ve even already booked one—supposedly we’re doing a tango class next week.’

He peered over. Unfortunately, it had opened on the page that said ‘sleep with a stranger’. ‘Um … that one’s just a joke.’ I turned over hurriedly to ‘do stand-up comedy’.

‘Is that something you’d like to do?’

‘I don’t know. I used to rant about it, when we were at uni. How the comedians in clubs were always racist and sexist. And with my cartoons—I try to be funny with them. But I’d never have the guts to get on stage and be heckled.’

Patrick was looking thoughtful. ‘I think this is a really good idea, you know. I used to do lots of things, before I met Michelle. She was so organised, really had her life planned out, so there wasn’t time for hobbies. Then before I knew it I was married, and she was having Alex, and we were buying this place. I feel like I haven’t done anything fun for about five years.’

‘It’s lovely though. The house.’

His face softened. ‘You know I remodelled it myself? I don’t know if I said, but that’s what I do. I’m an architect. When we bought it, ivy was growing through the windows—the previous owner had been in a nursing home for years, no family to keep it up. So it was a wreck. Michelle wanted to gut it, put in beige carpets and take the walls down. But I wouldn’t. Only time I managed to stand up to her. It took months, but it was like … finding hidden treasure. Those windows—I found them by scraping off the dirt. And the garden—there were all these roses among the weeds.’ He stopped, as if realising he’d said a lot more than he meant to.

‘Well, it’s lovely,’ I repeated. ‘You should be proud.’ Silence fell again, and I racked my brains for something to say. ‘So what would be on your post-divorce list, if you had one?’

He frowned and got up to wash his glass. ‘Oh, who knows. Don’t get divorced, I suppose.’

‘It doesn’t work that way. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

‘Is that a quote?’ He dried his hands on the tea towel, then straightened it neatly over the oven door.

‘Mmm … dunno. A quote from my dad, maybe.’

‘I like it.’

‘So what kind of things did you used to do?’

He was thinking. ‘I used to be quite into extreme sports—skiing, climbing, that sort of thing.’

I was trying to suppress a shudder. ‘You can do that again. Easy.’

‘I haven’t since Alex.’

‘He could go skiing, couldn’t he? All those French kids do. I went once. I felt like I should be on a Zimmer frame.’ Dan had taken me—he was into snowboarding, or he had been before he stopped being into anything but TV and pizza. I’d fallen over on the first slope and spent the rest of the trip mainlining mulled wine while being jumped over by disdainful European tots on skis.

‘He can’t go skiing.’ Patrick was surprisingly firm.

‘Oh. OK.’ Silence fell between us again. The wine was gone, and I felt the loneliness settle on my shoulders again, like a cat that had been lurking on a wardrobe all day (bad memories). ‘You could come to some of it,’ I heard myself say. ‘When we do the dancing and the comedy and all that. Not the sleeping with strangers part … er, that’s a joke, but the rest. I mean, if you want to.’

He turned from the sink, leaning on it for a moment, and I thought how sad he looked, how tired. I wondered if I looked the same, after years of trying and failing, trying again, failing differently.

‘Maybe,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a long time since I did things like that. And there’s Alex.’

‘Does he have a regular babysitter?’

Again, Patrick looked annoyed. ‘There are a few people, but … I don’t like to leave him. It’s … Well, it’s a little complicated.’

I knew enough about dodgy emotional situations to recognise that ‘it’s complicated’ meant ‘please stop asking about that, you nosy cow’. I stood up. ‘Right, better go to bed. I’ll be working here tomorrow if you need me to do anything. Housework, that sort of thing.’

He started out of whatever he’d been brooding about. ‘You could hang out some washing, if you don’t mind. Alex will be at school, and then after-school club. I pick him up at six.’

That seemed a very long day for a four-year-old, but it was none of my business. ‘Should I walk Max?’

‘Would you?’

‘Of course. I love dogs. You know those crazy women who hang around outside shops and nick babies from prams?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Dan—my husband, my ex-husband—he used to say I was like that with dogs. He was afraid he’d come home one day and there’d be hundreds, like in Dr Doolittle. So yes, I’d love to walk Max.’ Sometimes, I found if I ended the speech on the right note, it left people with the impression I’d said something vaguely sensible.

‘That would be great. I’ve been trying to cut back on work, but they keep really insane hours at the partnership. I’ll put out his lead and things. Just keep him on it, he’s a bit overexcitable.’ Max peeked over the basket again at this, as if he understood he was being slandered.

‘Why’d you get a dog?’ I asked. It was late and I was so tired and drunk I felt I could ask anything. ‘I mean with you working so much.’

‘I thought it would make us more of a family, I suppose. We were both so busy at work, and trying to look after Alex. She’d cut her hours way back at the bank, but she wasn’t coping well. It was supposed to be a compromise, but of course that just means no one is happy. She hated Max. Didn’t like his mucky paws and hair all over her beige furniture. But I wouldn’t get rid of him—I think once you take something home, you’re responsible for it.’

I wondered if he would feel the same about me. ‘Have you never had a nanny or au pair or anything?’

He clammed up slightly. ‘No. We never left him with anyone. It … We just decided not to.’

‘Oh.’

He hesitated. ‘Can I ask, what happened with you and … what was his name?’

‘Dan. What happened?’ God, not this question. ‘I …’

I paused for too long, and he began to talk over me. ‘Sorry, sorry, none of my business.’

‘It’s OK. It’s just that I …’

‘No, no, I shouldn’t have asked. I’ll let you get to bed.’

‘OK. Goodnight. Thanks for the wine.’

‘Goodnight, Rachel.’ The use of my name was jarring, after we’d talked so frankly. It felt almost as if he was trying to remind me I wasn’t his wife, and he wasn’t my husband. We were just strangers, sharing the same space. I went to bed, taking out the list book again to read in the pool of lamplight.

It seemed a paltry lot of things when set against the list of things I’d just lost—job, house, probably the chance of ever having a baby or dog, car, Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker … I put it aside and turned off the light. In the night I woke up, lost, somewhere halfway down the big bed. ‘Dan,’ I whispered, to the empty dark. I’d been looking for his warm back, snoring away, but it wasn’t there, and it never would be again.

Things that suck about divorce, number thirty-eight: there’s no one there. Not to tell you off for being late, not to cuddle you close and warm your cold feet, not to snore and keep you awake. There’s just you, alone again. Naturally.

Chapter Six

The next day I woke up alone in Patrick’s house. Because I had to think of it that way, even if I lived here too. It was very definitely not my house. There were traces of other people all over the place—the old brass clock someone had placed in the bathroom, the candles clustered on the living room fireplace—Diptyque! If I ever had a Diptyque candle, I wouldn’t even take it out of its packaging. They’re about £1 a whiff. In the hall was a wedding photo, Patrick looking stiff and formal in a top hat and tails. Since he was already a head taller than anyone else in the bridal party, the hat just made him look ridiculous. He was frowning into the camera, as if the light was in his eyes. On his arm was a tiny, beautiful woman—she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Patrick had mentioned that Michelle’s mother was Chinese, and it meant her daughter had been blessed with poker-straight dark glossy hair and a pretty, heart-shaped face. Her wedding dress had been an enormous meringue of lace and tulle, almost but not quite hiding her slender arms and neck. This, then, was Michelle, whose house I was living in, whose dog I was walking, whose husband I was chatting to at night.

The rest of the house was beautifully decorated—arty photos in shabby-chic frames, expensive patterned wallpaper in the bathroom, polished wooden floors, a beige sofa that seemed a startlingly impractical choice with a small child and a dog in the family. There was an astonishing lack of clutter, no dishes left out in the kitchen, no toys on the stairs, no crumbs on the table. I began to feel guilty about the explosion of clothes and books I’d left in my third-floor turret. Even Alex’s room was perfectly neat, his toys put away in blue boxes, his Thomas bedspread pulled straight. Patrick had already given me a list of ‘house rules’, mostly about what went in which recycling bin and how to sort the laundry correctly.

Luckily, Max was just as messy as me. I found him sprawled in his basket, with several chewed socks in there for company. He peered back at me, giving out a vague whiff of damp, ageing dog. Bless him.

I trailed around the kitchen, opening cupboards and trying to orientate myself. It was so strange being alone in someone else’s house. Like having a good poke about inside their heads. They never kept anything in a logical place—the tea beside the kettle, surely? The vegetables in the salad drawer? Patrick—and Michelle, the ghost in the house—had a bread bin shaped like a cat. I wondered how Max felt about this. He seemed to be staring at it sadly, as if to say, Oh, stationary cat, why do you taunt me with your stillness?

There was a whole cupboard of herbal teas, and that’s how I knew Michelle and I would never get on. I liked my tea the colour of brick and with a biscuit dunked in. I suspected she was the type of woman who considered ‘celery with a dab of almond butter’ to be an acceptable snack. I wasn’t even sure what almond butter was. Marzipan?

I felt a presence and realised Max had got out of his basket and was so close he was breathing on my leg. ‘Just having a look,’ I told him defensively. ‘I do live here now.’ Even so, I felt like a burglar. I’d ascertained which cupboards held the cleaning stuff, the biscuits, the canned goods—there weren’t many of them; this being very much an organic quinoa sort of house. There seemed to be one small cupboard on the end that was closed with a padlock. ‘What’s in there, Maxxy?’ I frowned at it. Murder supplies? The heads of Patrick’s previous lodgers? I wondered what my new landlord wasn’t telling me. I could hardly protest, given everything I wasn’t telling him.

‘This is an awful idea.’

‘Oh, come on. It’ll be fun! Remember we’re embracing life and making the most of it!’ I wasn’t sure I liked this new Pollyanna-style Cynthia. She’d actually arrived on time, changing in the loos of the bar from her terrifying work suit to a flowery dress with high strappy heels. I was wearing jeans and Converse, of course, but she had a cunning plan to get me out of them. ‘Ta-da!’

A shoebox with similar heels to hers—black patent Mary Janes. ‘But I can’t …’

‘Of course you can, darling, they were on sale. I practically made money.’

I glared at her. ‘You have to stop this. I feel like a charity case.’

‘Well, just borrow them, then, if it upsets your communist sensibilities. But you can’t dance in Converse.’

I gave in, because she was right, and also because I was amazed she was there—albeit tapping constantly at her phone. ‘How’s work?’ I asked. ‘Where are we right now on The Great Escape scale of awfulness?’

‘We’re dropping soil out of our trousers in the exercise yard.’

‘So, making progress?’

‘Making progress. What about you?’

‘We-ell, I’m not having much luck getting interviews. A few possibilities.’ I’d applied for every single vaguely art- or design-related job I could find in London, but my inbox was deafeningly empty. When I thought about it, I got a gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach, so I tried to push it away as Emma ran in several minutes later in her work clothes, sensible trousers and a blouse, with paint on her hands and a foul expression. ‘God, whose idea was it to meet in town on a school night?’

‘Yours.’

‘Hmph. Well, I suppose we better do it.’ Cynthia gave her a look. Emma forced a smile. ‘I mean, it’ll be great. Yay! Dancing! My favourite thing! Embracing life!’

Emma had certain physical skills—I’m told at school she was the terror of the netball court, bearing down with murder in her eyes on hapless Goal Defences. She could lift up small children who were having hissy fits over the allocation of the class pencils and carry them right into the ‘timeout corner’. She could make a working model of the London Eye using only drinking straws and toilet roll tubes. But one thing she couldn’t do was dance. In fact, at uni we had a little dance routine we called ‘the Emma’, which involved stepping from foot to foot and waving your hands as if trying to dry nail polish. Cheered by the thought that someone might hate this more than me, I pulled on my shiny new shoes and stood nervously on the dance floor.

We were in a bar near St Paul’s, all dark lighting and wooden floors. The tables had been pushed back to create an empty space, and around it were gathered twenty or so students, all wearing the same ‘going to the guillotine’ look of British people who are going to be called upon to dance in public without the aid of alcohol.

‘Hiya, everyone!’ The teacher was a dancer. I mean, of course she was. But she was really a dancer. Slender, graceful, wearing leg warmers over her dancing shoes and a pink leotard. All the men in the room visibly straightened their spines. ‘I’m Nikki, yeah.’ She spoiled the graceful impression somewhat with a hard-as-nails Cockney accent. ‘If everyone’s here, then—’

There was a noise at the back of the room and someone bumbled in, a blur of expensive suit. I saw to my surprise it was Rich. ‘He’s here?’ I said to Cynthia. ‘He actually left work?’

She tossed her hair vaguely. ‘I thought we’d better try new things—you know what I said about us both working all the time.’ He was coming over. Her face morphed into a smile. ‘Darling. You made it!’

Rich was frowning and stabbing at his BlackBerry. ‘Had to cut the damn meeting short. The partners are not happy.’

‘Well, you’re here now. There’s Rachel.’

‘Hi, Rich,’ I said, making a vague forward movement to hug him, which wasn’t reciprocated, so I turned it into a pre-dance stretch instead.

‘Hi,’ he said briefly. He didn’t ask how I was, though this was the first time he’d seen me since the split.

We were all amazed when Cynthia turned up with Rich on her arm. It was Emma’s birthday, her twenty-sixth, I think, and we were at a World War II–themed dance. Emma had on red lipstick and a tea dress, and Ian was in a shroud—his idea of humour. I had on a pair of overalls and my hair in a victory roll, which fell out after half an hour. Dan, who didn’t really do fancy dress, had reluctantly worn combats and carried a plastic gun. Rich, however, rolled up in a full Navy uniform, which it turned out had actually belonged to his grandfather Admiral Lord Richard Eagleton. At uni, Cynthia had joined us in mocking the public-school boys who banged on about rugger and tuck. Now she’d fallen for one. Granted, back then Rich had been tall, fair and strapping, though now corporate lunching and long hours were leaving him with a distinct brick-like appearance—red, square and hard.

Cynthia stood close to him, snuggling into his arms, and I was left with scowling Emma, who was limbering up as if going into the boxing ring. ‘Right. At least I can dance with you if I have to …’

‘Male-female partners only, yeah,’ called Nikki. ‘This is tango, innit. The dance of love. Maybe you will fall in love tonight.’

She made us pair up. Cynthia clung to Rich and I got the feeling that if forced to move she’d draw up some kind of contract to show that her rights of dance partnership were clearly asserted. Emma, still sulking, had somehow been paired with a slightly geeky but cute man in glasses. And me, of course, I got Mr Groper. The only man in the room who was over fifty. He had awful breath and insisted on squeezing me tight. ‘It’s how you do it,’ he said in that man-splaining way of men doing any activity. ‘It’s a dance of submission. I lead. You follow where I say.’

‘We’re not doing that,’ I heard Emma say to her partner. ‘It’s 2014, for God’s sake. I’ve read The Female Eunuch.’

‘Um … me too,’ stuttered Sexy Geek Man—I upgraded him on the basis of the Germaine Greer reading.

Nikki had us learn a sliding step—we had to get up close to the other person and then sort of slide our feet round theirs. I kept hearing Emma say sorry as she stepped on Sexy Geek Man’s toes. ‘Look, it’s really better if you just let me lead.’

‘It is,’ called Cynthia, as she glided past in Rich’s arms. Although she was naturally tall and gangly, she’d trained herself out of it with dance lessons before her wedding. Rich had learned at public school, and I’d remembered watching with a sort of mounting fear while he hurled her about the floor during their first dance, in a series of pre-learned moves to the strains of ‘You’re Beautiful’.

Dan had refused to get lessons for our wedding, pronouncing it ‘totally naff’. So it was just us plopping about aimlessly to ‘Dancing in the Dark’, to totally different rhythms. Sort of a metaphor for our whole marriage, really.

‘Not like that. Here, let me show you.’ Mr Groper put his hand on my lower back. My very, very lower back.

I’d had enough. ‘THANK YOU. I get it.’

Thank God Nikki then told us to change partners. I was hoping for Sexy Geek Man, but he got snapped up by an aggressive-looking girl in spandex, and Emma was on to someone on the far side of the room. Cynthia had Mr Groper, God help her, and I saw Rich had ended up dancing with the teacher, who seemed to be laughing at something he was saying—maybe she found corporate tax really funny. I’d wound up with Adrian. He was very nervous—his palms felt wet against mine and he had sweat stains under the arms of his beige shirt. He was nice, but after a few minutes being manhandled by him, coated in sweat and constantly apologised to, I was a bit fed up. How was this supposed to help me get over my disastropiphany and find a more joyful and fulfilling life? It wasn’t fair. Eat Pray Love woman got to go to Italy and Bali, and I got to dance with sweaty men in East London.

Things that suck about divorce, number fifty-seven: other women thinking you’re suddenly after their short, ugly, balding menfolk. I could catch the suspicious looks when I took a man’s hands for the dance, as if I was just dying to seduce Derek, who worked in Accounts and had the remains of his lunch down his tie. I was starting to realise why people talked about their ‘other half’. There were some things you just needed another person for. Dancing was one. So was Scrabble.

Another was, well, sex. I remembered that this was on the list too. Did that mean I’d also have to sleep with short men who had sweat issues? I tried to think of things I could do on my own. I could dine in restaurants, smiling mysteriously when asked if it was just for one. I could play solitaire and cook gourmet meals, then eat them by myself with a single candle burning. Oh God. It sounded even worse than sex with a Derek.

‘Time for the circle dance, innit,’ called Nikki. ‘Change partners, yeah.’

I looked around, blinking, to see if my knight in shining armour would appear, dishevelled and gorgeous, having been tempted along to the dance class by his supportive wise-cracking friend, in order to get past the traumatic break-up/bereavement/death of his cat he’d just suffered. He’d see me there in my new shoes and the socks underneath that had pigs on them and think, yes, this is the girl for me …

‘Lady needs a partner!’ Nikki was yelling behind me. ‘Single lady here! Needs a partner! Here you go, handsome gent for you, darlin’.’

I turned hopefully, looked up … then looked down. ‘Hi,’ said a voice from somewhere near my ribcage. ‘I’m Keith.’

As I reluctantly smiled down—way down—I heard an agonised cry from the other side of the room. Emma seemed to have broken Adrian’s foot.

I headed home after another day in the post-divorce world—or the post-split, pre-divorce world—tired, a little tipsy, with blisters on my feet from the new shoes. I wondered if this would be my life now. When we were at uni, I used to have a theory I called shoeology—studying Art History leaves you with a lot of time on your hands. The theory was this: relationships are like shoes. There are pretty ones you can’t bear to leave in the shop, though you know they will hurt you and ruin your bank balance. You walk tall in those, feeling sexy and strong—until the blisters start. Then there are comfy ones, which let you run and walk easily, until they start to lose their shape. You don’t want to wear them out of the house any more. You slump in those shoes, instead of walking tall. And with repeated wear they will simply fall apart.

There are relationships that are like slippers—nice for indoors, but you don’t want anyone to see you wearing them. There are situation-specific relationships, like flip-flops or snorkelling flippers—fine for holidays, for example, but with no place in your real life. A key point of shoeology was that nearly every pair hurt at first—like my new dance shoes had chafed. Perhaps the first time I went on a date with someone it would be the same—leaving me with cuts and blisters until I broke them in. And who even was there? Sexy Geek Man had, it turned out, come with his fiancée, a dumpy blonde with a ponytail who commandeered him for the cha-cha.

As I turned my key in the door and went in through the living room, I saw Patrick was putting something into the cupboard on the end—the locked one. ‘It’s me!’ I called needlessly. As I rounded into the kitchen, I saw him click the lock back on and wondered again what was in there—was it possible he shut away his valuables, that he didn’t trust me? That was a little depressing, though I supposed we hardly knew each other.

‘Oh, hello. I was just going to open some wine.’ I wondered if he drank a bottle every night. Dan and I used to do that, when things were very bad and we couldn’t talk about it, but I’d cut back since Cynthia had given me a booklet called ‘Are you an early-stage addict?’ after the night when I had to go and make myself sick in the toilets at All Bar One. I decided I’d just have a few sips. He did pick the best wines, rich and bursting on the tongue. I suspected he did not buy the ones with orange stickers on from the Londis round the corner.

‘Good night?’

‘Mmm. I’m not sure.’ I told him about the Keiths and Adrians, the sweating and the difficulties of correctly crossing in the tango. ‘I used to think I was a fairly good dancer, but seriously, I couldn’t even do it right once.’

He stood up, holding his hands out to me after wiping them on his cords. ‘Come here a second.’

Startled, I did. He was very close suddenly, and the wool of his jumper tickled my face. He smelled of lemons and fabric softener. ‘Is it like this?’ And he’d twisted me into a perfect cross.

‘Yes! Why couldn’t I get it before?’

‘The man is supposed to lead. If it’s not working, then it’s his fault.’ He dropped my hands quickly, sat down again. ‘We had lessons. You know, for the wedding and that. Me and … my ex-wife. Wife. Whatever.’ He seemed unable to say her name. ‘She wanted this whole routine, to wow people. I’d always hated dancing, but I suppose I sort of enjoyed it. She didn’t like letting me lead though.’

‘Yeah, it is a bit sexist.’ Oops, half the delicious wine was gone already. ‘How’s Alex feeling about the whole thing?’

His face changed. ‘He’s fine. They keep in touch, and there’s Skype and stuff … you know. I’ve been trying not to let him hear anything about her affair. It’s always assumed men are the ones who do it, but when you find out your wife cheated, well, it hurts.’

The topic was making me squirm. I didn’t want to talk about this, or think about it. He misread my reaction. ‘Rachel. I’m sorry. I’m completely oversharing and we barely know each other.’

‘No, I don’t mind. It’s …’

‘I’m sorry. I should let you get to bed. I tend to ramble on, I know.’ Suddenly, we’d gone back to landlord and tenant, not what I wanted. He was washing the dishes, putting the bottle in the correct recycling bin, so I went up the three flights of stairs with my new shoes in hand. My blisters throbbed as I slipped my feet under the covers. I used to think Dan was a one-in-a-million shoe—those sexy heels you can dance in all night and still run in to catch the bus, that would shield me from the broken glass and chewing gum of life’s pavements, and would never leave me with blisters. Then they started to chafe and bind, so some days I felt as if I might leave bloody footprints on the ground.

There’s a lesson there—it’s hard to wear one pair of shoes for the rest of your life. That and always keep the receipt.

Chapter Seven

Outside the door was the sound of squishing. Blop blop blop. I put down the box I was reluctantly unpacking and listened. ‘Alex?’

There was quiet for a moment. Then a small voice said, ‘It’s not me.’

I got up from my table and opened the door. ‘Hey, look, it is you.’

His face creased in existential uncertainty. He was wearing his yellow mac and red wellies, and on his head his train driver’s cap flattened his gorgeous dark fuzz. ‘What’s in there today?’ I indicated his wellies. Patrick encouraged him to wear them for some reason, both out of the house and in.

He stepped carefully from one foot to the other. ‘Guess.’

Something dry. ‘Crisps?’ I guessed. He nodded. ‘What type?’

‘Orange ones.’

‘Wotsits? You’ve got Wotsits in your wellies?’

He nodded solemnly.

In the time I’d spent in this house so far, I had picked up that Alex had a weird habit of putting things in his wellies. Mostly food—Angel Delight, avocado, biscuits—but also gravel, marbles and once his friend Zoltan’s hamster. Luckily, Harry was rescued before any feet went into the boots, and Alex received a lecture about not putting living things in the wellies—and yes, frogspawn counted.

‘Why does he do it?’ I’d asked Patrick, over what had become our nightly glass of wine.

‘I think it’s something to do with safety—he puts in things he likes. To keep them there, maybe.’

I didn’t want to ask why Alex would be afraid of losing the things he loved, and for a moment, I felt stunned by gratitude that Dan and I hadn’t managed to have a baby. I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into the middle of everything that was going on.

‘What are you doing?’ Alex was watching me setting out my art supplies on my new desk. ‘Are you colouring in?’

‘Sort of.’ I showed him some of my old drawings, drafts of wedding caricatures and funny sketches for magazines. ‘People ask me to do pictures for their birthdays, or weddings. Cartoons.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Cartoons like on TV?’

‘Well, yes, those start off as pictures too.’

‘They’re on TV.’ Alex was sceptical.

I gave up trying to explain animation, largely because I couldn’t understand it myself. Alex fixed me with his dark eyes. ‘Will you do a funny picture for me, Rachel?’

I looked at my things, my Japanese paper inset with silk, my fine ink pens, my paintbrushes and easel. It would be the simplest thing in the world to pick them up and draw. After all, I used to make money from it. I knew I could do it. And yet I hadn’t lifted a pen or a brush since the Incident. ‘I don’t know, Alex. I …’

‘Oh, please! Max really wants one. He told me he did.’

I sighed. I had to start sometime, and no one else had to see it except a small child and a dog, after all. I selected a fresh sheet of card and lifted my favourite drawing pen, feeling it snug between my fingers. I took a deep breath. ‘What would you like a picture of?’

‘Max,’ he said immediately. On cue, the little dog emerged from round the door and took a leap onto my lap, putting his head on the table. Two pairs of dark eyes watched me. I’ve never really wanted to draw ‘straight’—which is why I didn’t go to art school and failed Art A-level—but I could do funny things, doodles and caricatures, and people seemed to like them. Or at least they had before the Incident. I quickly drew Max, a sad-faced dog, all droopy ears and big eyes. ‘There you go.’ In a thought bubble was a picture of some biscuits surrounded by hearts.

Alex’s laugh went right to my heart, the purest sound I thought I’d ever heard.

I held out my hand to him. ‘Come on, let’s go and have a biscuit ourselves. But you can’t eat it with your boots on.’

‘Why not?’ His hand was warm and sticky.

‘Um … it’s a very old rule. Bad manners.’

With this combination of bribery and lies, I persuaded him to let me rinse the Wotsits off his feet. Then I followed him downstairs, plucking up washing and toys as I did. I’d fallen into this routine in the two weeks I’d spent in the house, and it was a peaceful, ordered existence. When the kid was in bed, Patrick and I talked, getting to know each other, gently skirting around the topics of Michelle and Dan. It was so nice to have someone to cook for—for the past year or so Dan had rarely stopped working for dinner, or ate with his BlackBerry in his lap. Patrick was a real foodie, and when he cooked it was all seared scallops and marinated venison. My parents would have choked—Monday night was Dolmio and pasta for them.

‘Rachel!’ came an impatient voice up the stairs. ‘You said I could have a biscuit!’

‘Coming,’ I called, scooping up the disembodied face of James the Red Engine on my way downstairs.

Today was going to suck anyway, because I had to see Dan’s mum. Jane was everything I wasn’t—elegant, controlled, decorous. I had never once seen her without heels on, even round the house. She’d been a nice mother-in-law, I supposed—all thoughtful little gifts and cards in the post when I had an interview, or an anniversary, or it was the pot plant’s birthday, that sort of thing. But often I’d wished Dan had a gaggle of siblings milling about, so I wouldn’t have to go to that beautiful empty house and answer questions in strained silence as the clock ticked.

It was Saturday, so Patrick was at the kitchen table as I tried to leave, watching me flap about trying to find my shoes while he drank coffee from his posh silver machine. I was scared of that thing. It had more buttons than a NASA launch pad. ‘What is it today?’

‘Mother-in-law,’ I said miserably, lacing up my Converse with one foot on the stairs.

‘Ah.’ He winced. ‘Luckily, my in-laws are in New York. I had to ask Michelle’s father, the congressman, for permission to marry her.’

‘Isn’t that a bit medieval?’ Dan had suggested the same, and once I had stopped laughing I’d told him not to be daft. I hadn’t asked Dad for permission for anything since I was seven, and unless it was about Airfix models or Countdown, he wasn’t going to have an opinion.

‘She insisted. I keep wondering if I’m supposed to sign her back in again like a hire car.’ Look at him, making jokes about divorce while he ate those little teeth-shattering biscuits he liked. He had come on.

Finally, I was ready. A bit of dishevelment would probably help my case anyway. ‘I better go,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Good luck,’ Patrick crunched.

‘Thanks. I need it.’

Things that suck about divorce, number fifty-nine: having to prise yourself away from your in-laws.

Jane was early. She was always early for everything and, as I was always ten minutes late, this stressed me out. I could see her through the window of the café, her hair perfect, her suit pressed, looking anxiously at her watch. For a moment I was tempted to run away, never have to see her again in my life—wasn’t that what divorce was for?—but I remembered what I had to do, took a deep breath and jiggled open the door.

She put on a strained smile. ‘Rachel, darling.’

‘Hello.’

There was an insanely awkward moment where she reached to hug me and I backed off, so her Chanel lipstick smudged on my cheek. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘Oh, you’re not—’

‘Well, I am—’

‘Well, that’s all right. Would you like coffee?’ A slip-up, rare for Jane. She must have been nervous. I don’t drink coffee and never have, and she’d been pointedly remembering this since I first came to her house aged twenty, in my muddy red Converse that I’d drawn on with fabric pen.

‘Tea, please,’ I told the waiter.

Jane and I looked at each other. ‘I—’ I reached into my bag and took out the lump of cotton wool. ‘Before I forget.’

She coloured. ‘Oh, thank you. You didn’t have—’

But I did. When someone gave you a family heirloom for an engagement ring, you couldn’t keep it when they decided they no longer wanted to be married to you.

She unwrapped it—why, I wasn’t sure, to check it was there, or more likely just for something to do—and the wink of diamond and sapphire filled my eyes. I couldn’t believe it when Dan presented me with this rock and I was supposed to put it on my nail-bitten, ink-smeared left hand. Jane stowed it in her expensive bag and I said a brief farewell to the ring that had weighed me down for three years.

‘So. Are you all right, dear?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s been hard. It wasn’t easy to find a place, but I’m settling in now. It’s been tough trying to find a new job, but I have a few interviews lined up and …’

Jane’s face had tightened. Like many people who didn’t lack for money, she hated talking about it.

‘How’s Dan?’ I asked carefully.

‘He’s— I’m not sure. Won’t talk, but he’s working a lot and eating junk food. I worry. It just seems such a shame,’ she said. I stiffened. ‘You seemed so happy. I was looking at your wedding photos this morning. It was such a nice day. And of course, Michael was so happy …’ Her eyes filled with tears and I felt my own nose sting. Dan’s father had died six months after we got married, another sudden stroke carrying him away for good. It had been a lot to take so early on in our marriage.

Our drinks arrived, and I stared at the poncey infuser that came with my tea. I’d been doing my best to block out our wedding, how much I’d loved my dress, how the sun shone even though it was only April, how my mum got drunk for the first time in her life and danced on stage to ‘Tiger Feet’.

I could feel it rising up in me, that wave of dark that drowned out even tears. I gasped for breath and said with difficulty, ‘We were happy then. But we changed.’

‘People don’t change, darling. He’s still the same Dan he was. I know his silly job has eaten him up, but maybe a holiday …’

‘We had a holiday.’ A few months before, we’d gone to Antigua on a last-ditch ‘making the effort’ trip. It was a disaster. I could almost hear the pounds cascading out of our bank account with every suck and hum of the air conditioner. We were miles from anywhere in a package hotel full of Russians in thongs—and that was just the men. The drinks were watered down and the evening buffet gave Dan raging food poisoning. He stayed in the room for days, groaning, and I walked listlessly between the bar and the pool, trying to avert my eyes from Vladimir’s hairy nether regions. I don’t think I’ve ever been as unhappy in my life as I was on that ‘luxury’ holiday.

‘What about couples counselling?’

We’d actually tried that too, for two sessions, which ended when Dan had stormed out kicking the door and calling me a particularly horrible name. I know he was … upset about what happened, but still.

Jane was speaking very carefully. My heart began to thud. ‘You know, people can forgive a lot. I’m sure this thing now, with the girl … it won’t last. He’s just upset. I know him.’

I kept my face very still. What girl? What girl?

‘So maybe if you both could get past … everything that went on, give it another try …’

I had to get out of there. My voice came from my stomach, weary and desperate. ‘No, Jane. People don’t get past it. I tried. He kicked me out. So no. I’m sorry. He said there was no chance.’

She dabbed at her lips, leaving a red stain on the napkin, like a tiny ruined heart. We jostled awkwardly over the bill, and then I abruptly left. I could see her through the steamed-up café window, the woman I’d thought I’d know for the rest of my life. Now I’d probably never see her again. Things that suck about divorce, number sixty-seven: wondering whether you’re pleased about that, or hurt, or somewhere in between, and what that says about you.

I walked back to the house past the shops of Hampstead, the dinky baby boutiques and upmarket clothes shops. Everywhere were yummy mummies with Boden tops and knee boots, crunching biscotti while adorable toddlers ran about in yellow macs. I was alone, adrift. I walked and walked to try to stay ahead of that wave inside me. I knew what it was like when it hit—the black water filled with rocks and debris, the suffocating slap of it. I walked until I was almost running, panting, not sure of what it was I was trying to get away from. What was I even running to? I had nowhere to go.

I was trying not to think about what Jane had said, wrapping the words in cotton wool like the ring I’d given back. Dan had a girl. Who was she? Who was she? In my mind I rifled through his Facebook friends. Someone from work? Most likely, he practically lived there. So who?

I couldn’t believe he was ready to see someone else. I was nowhere near it. I was like an emotional octopus—legs everywhere, suckers desperately trying to attach onto anyone I could find. Just trying not to get swept away. He was moving on, swimming happily in the ocean of single life, and I was belly-flopping on the beach. I needed to work on that metaphor too.

Patrick was still in the kitchen. Damnit. I wanted to eat a thousand Jaffa Cakes and curl up to cry. ‘You’re back early.’

I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘I thought I might walk Max.’ Anything to keep moving.

‘I walked him earlier.’ He saw my face. ‘Was it rough?’

I could only nod, and then the wave hit and my voice was drowned in thick, choking tears. Patrick did what any man would do when a woman started crying in front of him—looked awkward. ‘Oh. Let me get some tissues.’ I managed to get a hold of myself while he was searching for the lavender-scented, balm-infused tissues Michelle bought—no Kleenex for that lady—so when he came back I was just staring at my hands, callused and bare, and snivelling a bit. He made me tea and found biscuits, until finally there was no more displacement activity and he had to talk to me. ‘Did you fight?’

‘No—she’s very kind. Always has been. That’s what makes it hard, especially when I don’t de-de-deserve it.’ I blotted my leaking eyes. I tried to think how I could explain. It’s hard to tell your worst, darkest secrets to a stranger. ‘During the end of the marriage, there were … things … things that made it worse … you know … and now she says he’s seeing someone, already, and I guess it’s my fault …’

He was standing behind me and, for a moment, I felt his hand on my shoulder. ‘You mustn’t beat yourself up. A failing marriage is like a war, Rachel—you’ll both do terrible things, and neither of you will win. Even if your ex is seeing someone, it’ll be a rebound thing, a disaster. You know that.’

‘Hmm.’ I stared at my hands, thinking—he wouldn’t say that, if he knew.

‘I know,’ he said brightly, ‘why don’t you plan something off your list? I’ll get it.’ He took his hand away and I got a whiff of his sharp citrus smell, and it flashed into my head—number five: sleep with a stranger.

‘Sounds good,’ I said shakily, making a mental note to avoid that page. ‘But which one?’

He was leafing through the book, which I kept on top of the fridge. ‘How about stand-up comedy?’

I smiled. ‘Yes, I’m hilarious right now. Would you suggest the routine where I cry hysterically, or the one where I blow my nose loudly?’

‘I think you’re very funny. You always make me laugh when you’re talking to Max.’

‘Thanks. But I really can’t. Look at me, I’m not fit for anything right now.’

Patrick looked at me helplessly, like a gadget that he didn’t know how to fix. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

I blew my nose. ‘You’ve let me live here. That’s a massive thing. I know I’m not much fun, moping around listening to Magic FM, songs for saddos, eating all the biscuits …’

‘I’ve got an idea.’ He leapt up. ‘You sit here a minute.’ He went into the living room and I heard him scrabbling around. ‘Have you seen my iPad?’

‘It’s on the dock there.’

‘Great. Now wait a second.’ I heard more fiddling. ‘Oh, what’s wrong with this bloody thing? “Device cannot sync at this time”. What does that even mean?’

I sniffed. ‘You know, they said that about the Titanic too and look how that turned out.’

‘Hey, that’s good! See, you are funny. OK, it’s working. Wait there a minute.’

I waited in the kitchen. My eyes felt red and sore and I was starting to be embarrassed about weeping in front of him.

‘Hey, Rachel, what video is this?’ Patrick was standing in the doorway. He wore a black polo-neck jumper, and on top of his head was a pale-coloured swimming cap, making him look bald if you squinted. Music began to play from the dock. He opened his eyes up really wide and started to sing along. ‘It’s been some-thing hours and I don’t know how many dayyyys … since you took your love awa-a-ay.’

It was the video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, which I’d been playing on a loop since I moved in. I smiled. ‘All right, I take your point.’

‘I’d just like to know though, what doctor is this she’s been going to? She’s already said she goes out all night and sleeps all day, and he’s advising “girl, you better have fun no matter what you do”? Fun is the last thing she needs. I’d like to know who this doctor is, so I can have him struck off.’

‘Yes, yes, very good. I’ll write it down for my comedy routine.’

‘OK, well, how about this? Up the tempo a bit.’

He fiddled with the dock, then took off the swimming cap, fluffed up his hair and pouted, dancing around by himself. ‘What are the words again? Something about working in a cocktail bar? Duh-duh duh-duh baby! Duh-duh duh-duh wo-oh-oh-oooh!’

‘Actually, we prefer the term “mixologist” these days. “Waitress” is kind of demeaning. I’m waiting on a callback about a part in EastEnders anyway.’

The swimming cap had left a red line around his forehead. ‘Are you cheered up at all?’

I thought about it. ‘A little bit.’

‘Good!’

‘Will you put the swimming hat on again though?’

‘I knew it. Latex—works every time with the laydeez.’

‘This explains a lot to me about why you’re single.’

‘Ha ha. So listen, will you think about the stand-up comedy? It must be on the list for a reason, and it’s a good place to start.’

I heard myself say, ‘I’ll do it if you do.’

Chapter Eight

‘Now, I’m recently single, so if you have any nice available friends … or brothers … or dads … granddads … I’m not too fussy. Seen all that stuff about Fifty Shades of Grey, eh? The trouble is, they don’t make erotica for bookish ladies like me. My idea fantasy would be this—I’m a librarian. A man comes in wearing braces and glasses. Hey, got a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel? Which version? The one her damn husband didn’t butcher, of course. Then we roll around in the stacks discussing gender politics.’

I crossed all that out with a big X and wrote a little note to myself: THIS IS RUBBISH.

‘So, I’m recently single and I listen to a lot of Sad, I mean, Magic FM. You know in the song “Nothing Compares 2 U”? How great is Sinead O’Connor’s doctor, advising her to have fun no matter what she does? All mine ever says is, “Really, are you sure it’s just two to three units a week?” and “Come back in a week if it’s still itching.” Although I can’t help wondering if in her emotional state Sinead is confusing “doctor” with “low-rate pimp”.’ That was better. Maybe I could do a whole riff on how when you have a break-up you spend all your time listening to maudlin pop songs, and overanalysing the lyrics of them.

I think it was the promise of Patrick on stage that had made me say yes to the comedy. His uptight English manner making jokes and performing—I couldn’t picture it. So now I was neurotically writing down ‘comedy’. What was funny? I was getting divorced and effectively homeless and had no money—hilarious stuff! I’d have my own sitcom by the weekend.

Things that suck about divorce, number one hundred and forty-eight: there’s no one who knows you better than you know yourself, to tell you when, actually, you really can’t do something and should just stay at home and watch TV.

Patrick, with his annoying Type A personality, had already booked us into a weekend course by tapping two buttons on his iPad. He was as bad as Cynthia for actually making things happen. By lunchtime, all I had was a page of crossed-out phrases like ‘loose women—tight women, more like’ and stupid lists like ‘things you leave behind when you move out of your house after divorce (KT Tunstall CD, lemon juicer)’. I decided to go downstairs for lunch. All my cartoon work was sitting undone, it was past Doctors time and I hadn’t even started on any of the moving admin I still had to do (change address, file for divorce, buy laundry basket).

Patrick was at the kitchen table, his drawing board sitting unused beside him. He’d decided to ‘work from home’ that day—i.e. sit about obsessing about jokes. He was staring at a piece of paper and muttering to himself. I recognised a fellow comedy casualty. ‘Struggling?’

‘Is it just me, or is nothing funny any more? Literally nothing?’

‘I doubt I would even laugh at a video of a cat running into a wall right now. That’s how bad things are.’

‘Why are we doing this, Rachel?’

I spooned Darjeeling into the tea infuser. ‘Because if you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

He seemed to find this cheering. ‘That’s good. And I can’t go back, can I? Neither can you. But do we actually have to go so far forward? I mean, we’ll be on stage. The last time I did that I was nineteen and rocking out with my band, The Corduroy Underground, at my university summer ball. We were awful.’

‘What did you play?’

‘Bass. I sang too. It was sort of my band.’

‘Do you play now?’

‘Oh, no. Michelle made me put the guitars in the attic. They were cluttering up the place, she said, and Alex might fall over them.’

I thought about this as my tea brewed—I believe that was why it was invented, in fact. To let your thoughts infuse slowly as the leaves did. ‘Patrick? Have you thought any more about doing your own list? They say divorce is the time to do things—you know, experiment. Take back all the parts of yourself you put away for the person you were with.’ As I said it, I imagined bits of him locked in an attic—music, a sense of fun maybe, his laugh, which I hadn’t heard since I moved in. ‘So what would be on yours? You said extreme sports before.’

‘Oh, I don’t have time for a list.’

‘You’ve got time to watch all five series of Breaking Bad,’ I pointed out.

‘Hmm. You have a point.’

‘Go on, write it down. It’ll free you for comedy at least. Get the brain moving, that sort of thing. Tell me one thing you wish you’d done in the past five years.’

‘Get drunk,’ he said right away. ‘That sounds bad, I know. I just used to really enjoy going to the pub, chatting about nothing, getting into stupid rows about who was the best Batman, that sort of thing. Since Alex I’ve been too scared, in case he needs me.’

‘Couldn’t someone babysit?’

‘I don’t know who I’d trust.’ I wondered why he was so reluctant to leave Alex with anyone—had he and Michelle just been really overprotective? ‘I’ll think of a way, I promise. No divorced person should have to do it without the aid of alcohol.’

‘Glad to have you in my corner.’

‘What else?’

‘Skydiving is a definite. I’ve always wanted to try it.’

‘OK. We have getting drunk and skydiving. Maybe not at the same time. More?’

He was on a roll now. ‘I’d like to go to a festival. Michelle never would—she hates camping, and she’s not much of a music fan.’

‘A festival is on my list, so you can’t have it, but you could certainly go. Alex could go to that,’ I said, scribbling it down.

‘Hmm, yes, he probably could. Max too.’ I was getting another mental image—the little dog at Glastonbury, watching a field full of posh hippies dance about with no clothes on.

Patrick’s suggestions were coming fast now. He also wanted to buy a really nice car, take Alex overseas for the first time, learn to fillet fish—I know, of all the things you can do in the world he wanted to handle fish innards; I guess the gut wants what the gut wants—take up climbing and enter Max in a dog show. These were getting more outlandish now. I could more easily imagine Max skydiving than obeying dog commands.

‘You should put that you want to play in a band again,’ I said. ‘That was the first thing you mentioned, remember?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve sort of lost touch with most of my mates. Been so busy with work and Alex, you know.’

‘True friends don’t mind if you don’t see them for a while.’

‘I’d be rubbish now. I haven’t played in years.’

‘You think I was any good at dancing? The idea is to be slightly terrified at all times.’ I rapped the list with my knuckles. ‘If I can offer my opinion as a professional listmaker, these are too safe.’

‘Skydiving? Climbing?’

‘Yeah, but you’re not scared of those, are you? I mean, no more than a normal person who isn’t mad. You don’t mind heights?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then it’s too safe. So what’s your idea of hell? Like the most terrifying thing you could do of an evening? Nothing with sharks though, please,’ I said quickly.

‘Why not?’

‘I am really, really afraid of sharks.’

‘You know they only cause about ten deaths worldwide per year? More people die from bee stings. Are you afraid of bees?’

‘Bees don’t come up from underneath you and bite you in half.’

‘Or lightning, that’s pretty dangerous. Are you scared of that?’

‘Again, not likely to chomp me.’

‘Tigers? They can be pretty chompy.’

‘I’d see them in time to run away.’

‘I see. So it’s the element of surprise that frightens you?’

‘A bit. Mostly though, it’s the chomping. Now, pick something scary, that isn’t about sharks.’

‘I suppose … go on a date sometime.’ He said this last very suddenly. Almost shyly. ‘I mean, I don’t want … you know. Your number five.’

He was referring to ‘sleep with a stranger’. ‘Er, neither do I.’

‘OK. Dating does scare me, so it definitely counts, but I’d just like a bit of female company. Someone who didn’t want to talk about Thomas the Tank Engine, or whose turn it was to clean the loo, or—’

‘—whether you need to go to the garden centre to buy some trellising, or who was going to call the chimney sweep—’

‘—or the kid, when he sleeps, when he poops, whether his nursery is “pushing” him enough, or—’

‘—if it’s time to change the car and whether you should upgrade to the new Ford Focus this winter.’

He smiled. ‘I guess it’s a while since either of us flirted over cocktails.’

‘Yeah.’ As he went to make coffee, I wondered if he would ever consider me female company. Clearly not.

‘You’re still missing one,’ I said, tapping the pen. ‘That’s only nine.’

‘Who says it has to be ten?’

‘Everyone knows lists have to be in tens.’

‘What are you, some kind of list fascist?’

‘It’s just more … pleasing that way. Anything else you want to do—learn a language, hike the Grand Canyon?’

‘I’ve done that.’

‘Show-off.’

‘It was OK. Hot.’

‘So there’s no number ten?’

‘Put this down for now—number ten equals, find a number ten.’

‘All right. Though just so you know, I disapprove of this meta-list-making approach.’

‘Noted.’

‘So.’

In front of me, the darkened room could have held any number of people—hundreds, even. Part of my brain knew it contained only fifty or so, but the rest of me was trying to run away and hide behind my own back.

I smiled. Always smile, that was lesson one. Don’t seem nervous. Even if you’re afraid to open your mouth in case you’re sick all over the front row.

‘Hello!’ Always say something then wait for an answer. It engages the audience. Lesson two.

‘Hello!’ came back the lusty cry, reinforcing the impression that there really were hundreds of them. I blinked in the spotlight.

‘My name’s Rachel and …’ Oh bugger, I hadn’t done the microphone. You always had to ‘do the microphone’ first. That was actually lesson one. Somehow I found the idea of taking the mike from its holder, in front of all those people, more terrifying than anything else. I wasn’t sure my hands could remember how to perform even the simplest action.

It was a Sunday night, and we were in the back room of a pub somewhere near Camden. Alex was staying with a school friend, which Patrick was apparently OK with. This was the moment I had somehow believed would never take place, even when we’d been on the intensive course for the past two days, even when the event had started and I was waiting in line for my turn to perform.

I had gone on fifth, after Adam, Jonny, ‘Big Dave’ and Asok from our course. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said ‘Devon knows how they make it so creamy’—the West Country featured heavily in my comedy shtick.

I had been silent for maybe three seconds, but every moment felt at least ten times longer on stage. I took a deep breath and tried to remember my own name.

‘I’m Rachel, and I’m from Devon, as you can maybe tell. I recently became single after a long time.’ I paused. ‘You could have “awwed” there, but I suppose we don’t know each other that well … That’s OK. Anyway, I’m so out of the loop with London dating I feel like a foreigner. I went on a date recently and it was as if we were speaking different languages. He was very into computer games and we don’t really have these in Devon. It took us a while to figure out the iPad 2s we’d been sold were actually just really expensive Etch A Sketches.’

A laugh! Someone had laughed! I knew the gang were here, but I couldn’t see them with the lights, and Patrick was waiting his own turn backstage somewhere, so I couldn’t be sure who it was, but it was for definite a laugh! Either that or someone choking to death on the suspect beer the place served.

‘In order to help me through this trying time, I’ve been listening to a lot of music …’ I did my Sinead O’Connor stuff. There was a mixture of chuckles and groans—I could see the faces of the front row, contorted with laughter. A rocket-shot of adrenaline went up from the soles of my Converse. This was going to be OK. ‘My real favourite though is Beyoncé—I like to think of her as kind of my spirit guide. But I do find it interesting that her name is clearly the past tense of a French verb. I wonder what “to beyonce” actually means. To be totally fabulous? To look great in hot pants? To call your child a really stupid name?’

I took a deep breath. Halfway through.

‘I’m from Devon originally, but my mother is Irish. So if I miss my family when I’m in London, I can always be reminded by going on Facebook, because it’s basically a giant nosy Irish mum. All those questions:

‘Do you know this person outside Facebook? Where were you born? What do you do for work? Have you a boyfriend? Do you know these people? Did you go to the toilet before we went out? Take your coat off or you won’t feel the benefit.’ Here I adopted a sort of cod Irish/West Country accent, which sounded nothing like my actual mother. I prayed she would never find out about any of this.

‘Or else it’s always showing you pictures of people who’re just doing better at life than you. I sometimes think Facebook is like playing popular nineties board game The Game of Life, like you did when you were a kid. You get ten points for an engagement, extra if the question’s popped up Kilimanjaro while you’re in the middle of a charity trek for blind dogs. Twenty points for smug baby pics. If you’re losing at the game of Facebook, it’s even worse than losing at The Game of Life. Turns out, the friends who are super-smug now, with their holidays and babies and charity runs, are the same ones back then who’d boast about having to upgrade their plastic car so they could fit in all their little plastic peg children.’

The end of my routine had arrived suddenly, like the end of an escalator. Oh. I stopped. Smiled. ‘I’ve been Rachel Kenny, thank you very much.’

And I was done, just like that. It was over. I took my seat, hearing actual applause and chuckles. As I did, I caught sight of Patrick, who was on after Gary—the guy off the course who told lots of dodgy Rohypnol jokes. I hurried to my seat so I’d have time to sit down and tut passive-aggressively. Patrick was too busy staring at the floor, mouthing his routine, to catch my eye.

I was pretty sure where Emma was after the end of Gary’s piece, as I could hear her sighing loudly every time he made an off-colour joke about car boots, duct tape, Rohypnol cocktails and many other topics that were about as funny as a colonoscopy. It was this in itself that made me glad I’d tried it—otherwise I and every other woman in the world would spend eternity sitting in the audience listening to men tell jokes to other men about assaulting us. The world was our bad comedy show. At the very least we deserved to get in a few one-liners about penis size and tampons.

Then, thank God, Gary was off, to lacklustre applause and a clear ‘SEXIST RUBBISH’ heckle, I suspected from Emma, and Patrick was shambling on stage in his cords and curls, looking for all the world like a posh TV expert on antiques or civil war battlefields. I almost felt more nervous than I had for myself.

He ‘did’ the microphone with a quick flick and rooted himself at the front of the space. Rule number four—don’t move about the stage too much. ‘Hello, London Borough of Lambeth!’ Some laughs. ‘I’m Patrick, and I recently found myself becoming a single parent.’

Some real ‘awws’ from the audience this time. Whatever.

‘Thank you. When I want to really impress women, I pretend my wife died in a tragic threshing accident on our farm and I have to raise little Billy all alone, but there aren’t that many threshers in North London, so in reality she’s fine. Just not fine with me. Apparently, she thinks I’m not stylish enough.’ Another laugh, as he indicated his brown cords and fisherman’s jumper. ‘She says I’m the only man she knows who thinks the eighties were a genuinely good decade for fashion choice.’ He shifted slightly. ‘I’m getting used to being a single dad. I used to work in a very busy office, and now I do the school run, but you know, I’ve noticed a lot of similarities. For a start, in my office, if people don’t get want they want, they also sometimes lie on the floor and have a tantrum, or pee in the managing director’s shoes. But the CEO didn’t take it too kindly when I offered him nap time and a snack of Dairylea Cheese Slices.’

Laughing. People were laughing. I could see why. He was very natural and appealing on stage, smiling, eyes open, gesturing to people in the front row and addressing them directly. It was all going to be fine. I let out a big sigh of relief.

‘You were amazing! Hilarious! Much better than all those rubbish misogynists. In fact, who do I complain to about that?’

Cynthia bustled past a ranting Emma to hug me. ‘You were great, darling. One of the best, easily.’

‘Thank you!’

‘I just wish Rich had come … We had such fun at the tango class, but since then he’s been working non-stop.’

I wasn’t sure Rich would like it much here. Even though to me, in the grip of a serious adrenaline rush, the grotty pub looked sublime. The flat beer tasted like Dom Perignon, the sticky floor looked glorious and I had never loved my friends more, even if Cynthia had her BlackBerry glued to her hand as usual, and Emma was scowling around her and wearing a T-shirt that said ‘A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE’, and Ian was looking decidedly hangdog with jealousy.

‘You know, I think I should give it a go. This.’ He waved his arms around.

‘Comedy? Or opening a smelly pub?’

‘Comedy. Most of those guys were rubbish.’ He was just as loud as Emma. ‘I could do way better than that. I mean, you were OK, I suppose, but the others …’

‘Well, do it, then. It’s not that bad.’ I had conveniently suppressed the entire weekend of gnawing terror beforehand and the fact I hadn’t slept in two days. ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it? The rest of you are meant to do things with me?’

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