Author photo © Scott Kershaw

LOUISE LEVERETT graduated from Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London on a full scholarship before moving to study at the Lee Strasberg Institute of Film in New York. Since establishing her own business ‘Rock the Tribes’ she is now working on a collection of writings that will eventually be turned into adaptions for screen.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Louise Leverett 2019

Louise Leverett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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

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

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008237042

for mum, dad

and alex…

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One – The Curse of a Burning Flame

Chapter Two – The Art of Intent

SUMMER

Chapter Three – How to Get Lost in Reality

Chapter Four – Virtual Insanity

Chapter Five – Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy (Or, in human speak – ‘To die of a broken heart’)

Chapter Six – Cheap as Chips

AUTUMN

Chapter Seven – Oh, Starry, Starry Night

Chapter Eight – There Once Was a Girl Who Swallowed a Lie, Perhaps She’ll Die

Chapter Nine – Goodnight, Head/Good Morning, Heart

Chapter Ten – Doing the Wrong Things to the Right People

Chapter Eleven – You, Me… Oui

Chapter Twelve – So Human

Chapter Thirteen – It’s a Girl Thing

WINTER

Chapter Fourteen – Trying to Catch Water: Part One

Trying to Catch Water: Part Two

Chapter Fifteen – And a Partridge in a Pear Tree

Chapter Sixteen – Going Against the Tide

Chapter Seventeen – Rah, Rah, Relationship

Chapter Eighteen – A New Chapter

Chapter Nineteen – The Deep Blue Sea

SPRING

Chapter Twenty – The Magical Hour

Chapter Twenty-One – Once Upon a Time…

Chapter Twenty-Two – Pushing Through Purgatory

Chapter Twenty-Three – Seeds of Change

Chapter Twenty-Four – Seek Happy Nights to Happy Days

Chapter Twenty-Five – Rainbows

Chapter Twenty-Six – Human Nature

Chapter Twenty-Seven – Love, and Other Things to Live For

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Chapter One – The Curse of a Burning Flame

I awoke to the sound of a clock.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

Opening my eyes to the beginnings of a new day.

I don’t smoke, barely drink, have never experienced casual sex and so this was the tasting menu of new discoveries. I had decided to dip my toe in the final waters of youth as an almost goodbye to my carefree years, complete with late nights and a series of events that had caused my heart to pound and my head to spin. What began with a plethora of shots and inappropriate dancing with a man I barely knew but had worked with my friend, so not a total stranger; perhaps emotionally but certainly not geographically, had now ended with the realisation that the answer to my predicament did not lie at the bottom of a bottle. I had persuaded myself I would see him again, clinging onto the slim thread that last night meant something. But it didn’t. And to be totally honest, lashing out at the world as redemption for a broken heart just wasn’t as fun as I had imagined it would be.

I was getting over someone. Charlie. Perhaps not going the right way about it but trying all the same. And although my appearance suggested I was carefree, inside I was hurting. Slowly seeping through the cracks of my show, my life, was the added complication of a career low. On a whim that was no longer whimsical, I had left university and a path to study law, exchanging it for the butterflies-in-your-tummy notion that you should chase what sets your heart on fire. I’d lit the match only for it to fizzle into charcoal once the reality hit that photography jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by. My dreams had been dowsed cold by stress and financial burden. And now, adding the salt to my wounds, having made the somewhat optimistic decision to move in with a man I’d just met and barely knew, I was back in my old bedroom and back in the flat I’d shared for years with my best friend, Amber. Despite many a raised eyebrow, I’d ridden the wave of infatuation all the way to the shores of his flat overlooking the Thames and now I’d slunk back, just three months later, humiliated and alone.

As I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for my head to stop spinning, sipping on a glass of stagnant water filled with stale, iridescent bubbles, images from the previous night cascaded through my mind. There was wine, spirits, more wine… more spirits… and dancing. Lots of dancing. Crazy moves, big moves, bold moves, total abandonment of body, mind and self-control. Dancing with friends, dancing alone, dancing with the man now lying next to me. I slowly massaged my brow in a belated attempt to melt the thought away.

Looking over at him, the semi-stranger sleeping beside me, I slowly shuffled my way out of the bed and across the corridor to the bathroom. I glanced in the mirror at my reflection: tousled hair with last night’s make-up, a squiggly smear of mascara underlining each eye like a spelling mistake. If this was being young and free it certainly wasn’t as enjoyable as my friends had suggested. It was all their fault, obviously.

I crouched above the strange, cold toilet pan, the back of my thighs skimming the bowl, my mouth stinging as if stripped by a razor blade. I wasn’t about to play the blame game. It was all my own choice, a mess that I had gotten myself into in a moment of panic – a searing fear that I might be getting left behind. But falling behind whom? Myself? As I spun the empty cardboard toilet roll hoping to magic a stream of paper, it seemed as if I’d forgotten to learn the rules to a game that I was now, apparently, an expert at playing.

It was late December, and waking up was beginning to hurt. I made my way across the pavement, halfway between streetlights and sunlight, and turned onto the street that was familiar. I started the day carrying make-up in my handbag, using a public toilet as my vanity: a wanderer, a nomad in between places. And that’s exactly where I was, in between places.

I longed for my early twenties: the days of the invincible and raw misconception of youth. It was all fun and games back then. If you don’t invest fully then no one gets hurt. But unfortunately, my recent experience with one particular man – the only man, in fact – had become a harsh lesson that I was wrong. We’d met, feelings were felt and it was now over. I’d been hurt.

In my mind the cause of these relationship problems is that men and women don’t understand one another; that, as the well-known book says, we literally are on different planets when it comes to matters of the heart and relationships. Of course, what transpired, in human form, was a cosmic connection that no amount of textbook knowledge could account for. My friend Sean assures me that when it comes to the formidable topic of that four-letter word beginning with ‘l’ ending with ‘e’, both on the outskirts of ‘o’ and ‘v’, there is no distinct correlation between the sexes. It’s just quite hard, for all of us.

We live in the digital age of a steady stream of information right there on our computer screens, influencing our relationship to commerce, the food we eat and now, even our love lives. We can flick through the online catalogue of human faces, swiping left or right depending whether we like what we see, in exactly the same way our grandmothers picked out a cut of meat at the butcher’s. It’s safe, sterile even, but not quite real. Before we’ve even met them we know a person’s age, occupation, habits, likes, dislikes – basically all the information our ancestors would have found out across a table in the romantic haze of candlelight and that second bottle of wine. We look to our ancestors with a smug confidence that we know better. We live safe in the knowledge that while the notches on the bedpost rack up, no one ever has to get bored with each other.

But through the bright lights and heavy laughter of a fun night out, a little voice of truth inside knew this wasn’t for me. I couldn’t even handle a man not texting me back, never mind flicking past my face amidst the scores of other women, ten or even twenty at a time. In this twenty-first-century world, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I have remained tied to the notion of monogamy, or old-fashioned love, as it’s now known. A stagnant belief that I should probably keep to myself, not exactly like the love we see in the movies but in my heart of hearts, not far off either. I bet Tom Hanks didn’t have to ask Meg Ryan if she was still seeing other people as they made their way down from the top of the Empire State Building.

For both sexes, it’s certainly been a transition. Although every generation will say they were witness to an epic change in cultural climate – the Thirties’ prohibition, the world war of the Forties, the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies – I still maintain that the biggest change, both in the cultural and social climate, was the dawn of the digital age. The invention of the Internet brought along with it a speed of living beyond anybody’s imagination. We have the ability to remain in touch with lost friends, lost colleagues… even past loves. But I can’t help but think that there are some people who were just meant to be left behind.

As we look around amidst the sea of fast culture, our minds and hearts are expected to keep up with an ever-changing, ever-evolving landscape. Fast love turns to fast disappointment – a speedy turnover in a global economy piling pressure on those struggling to keep up. Me being one of them. We’ve lost the element of fear that drives us to do the unimaginable, the senseless. We must focus on those spectacular and rare moments when our hearts overrule our heads and swiping a screen is revealed to be just that, a perfunctory movement completely separate from the glimmer of excitement that the sound of a voice brings or the way the heart beats when a certain person is near.

Instead, we keep ourselves at a distance through computer screens, safe inside the trenches, afraid to advance towards enemy lines. But within this battle of dating warfare it is sometimes hard to work out who the real winners even are. It certainly wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t now.

And where else do we set this tale of the digital age but in the vast, diverse, empowering city of London. She is the modern-day metropolis inhabiting a wilderness of magic, mystery and intrigue. To me, London is the only permanent fixture within the landscape of movement, bright lights and imagination, a heady mix of corporate business and artistic dreaming: an odyssey of restaurants, bars and nightlife and people… oh so many people, all collectively inhabiting as a bottleneck of strangers, roommates, bedmates and friends. It is the man-made land where the lonely find company and the unemployed find jobs amidst part-time renters and full-time problems.

And it isn’t so bad: except the overcrowding, the pollution and the house prices because here, anything is possible, and as much as I wanted to stay under the duvet and come out once the storm had passed, I knew that I had no other option but to set sail. I had a career to find, a love to forget and a future to behold.

So as I stand on the precipice of a year so unpredicted, I’m going to ask a small question to the universe and see what I get offered back: why do I feel so unshakeably restless and what will inevitably be enough? And if, as I anticipate, the road gets a little bumpy, my armour will come in the form of my friends. The collection of people whom you choose to ride the wave with: the truth-tellers, the heart-menders, my people to live for.

I met Amber at an after-hours course on corporate law. I was failing my second term quite badly by then and had embarked on some extra-curricular activity in a desperate attempt to boost both my grades and my passion for the subject. Amongst the rows and rows of twenty-year-olds in suits, Amber sat perched on a stool diligently scribbling into a hot pink notebook. She smiled and waved me over.

‘Weren’t you here last week?’ she said. ‘Bit dry, wasn’t it…’

‘A bit,’ I said, looking around at the huddles of people talking confidently about shareholder’s rights.

‘I’ve got a party later – correction – I’m working at a party later, it’s this launch for a cosmetics line. They’re going to use my face as a guinea pig. Fancy it?’

She asked me in a way that left me feeling as if I had no option.

‘There’s a free bar?’

And that wasn’t a question.

‘Sure, sounds good,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Great. I’ll see you outside at nine.’

I learned on the way to the party that her name was Amber. She was funny and sharply clever – the type of clever that scared you into not talking, knowing you’d only come off worse in a discussion. Since she couldn’t afford law school, she’d been forced to undertake night school as a sideline to her modelling – a part-time arrangement that wasn’t going to be forever, she said.

I followed her black ponytail through the crowds and soon found myself sandwiched between the trays of complimentary champagne and a group of shoppers eagerly awaiting the tutorial. I watched Amber, seated on a high stool, her long black hair swept clean off her face, as the make-up artist demonstrated contouring for the less attractive people who believed they needed far more make-up than she did. To my surprise they actually looked interested. I still didn’t know who she was, but I’d been able to find a seat next to a real palm tree, shipped in specially for the launch, and I was already three glasses down of the free champers. Gradually, our eyes kept meeting in the midst of face priming and bronzer application and a shared look of disdain proved instantly that we could be friends.

‘Where in God’s name did I put my phone?’ she yelled once the crowds had dispersed, demonstrating the feistiness that she would inevitably need to become a lawyer. As we both began lifting coats and scarfs she emptied out her handbag onto the counter, sorting through the contents, with strips of white tissue paper still clipped in her hair.

‘I think it’s next to your coat.’ I nodded as I downed the rest of my champagne.

‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling it free. ‘I’m supposed to be at another night class but skipped it to be here. Do you think that’s bad? They offered me fifty quid an hour so I couldn’t say no, really.’

She smiled at me, a smile so full and disarming that it is rarely seen between two women – especially in a big city.

‘What are you studying?’ I asked, looking at her large black leather bag, bulging with a ring binder and textbooks.

‘I want to work in e-commerce,’ she said, pulling out a hair tie and wrapping it around her wrist. ‘It’s retail, essentially, but covering trade laws. Apparently in five years we’ll only be buying online and since I won’t be able to model forever I thought I might need a Plan B before my face sags. Do you smoke?’

I shook my head.

‘Shame. I like your bag,’ she said, referring to my pink rucksack, spinning the conversation on its head.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I like your shoes.’

Since that night, we’ve both stuck around. It’s not that she’s a good friend per se, it’s that we’ve become a firm fixture in each other’s lives. First we created memories and then memories created a history and with that came the foundations of a friendship. Solid but low maintenance.

I wish I had her brains. I think she even surprises herself with her razor-sharp intelligence at times. She’s a pro-choice, pro-women ball-buster, blazing the path, charging ahead so that the less confident ones, like me, can trot along behind. She’s the one who will convince you that just one more tequila shot won’t kill you, knowing that she’ll also be there to hold your hair back when you’re hanging over the toilet bowl slowly coming to the realisation that it might. For the record: she can hold her drink, I can’t. She is also the friend who will read every text he ever sent you and piece together the scenario like the Robin to your Batman, sharing the burden so you feel like less of a sociopath. She can spot a liar from forty paces, she’ll defend you but never judges, and beneath the attractive exterior she is actually pretty tough – a lot tougher than me – and life is a little less scary knowing she is on my side.

Sean is a different kettle of fish: a jester in a cashmere cardigan. A New Yorker living in London who I’d met at a farmer’s market while embarking on a celebrity-endorsed, high-intensity juice detox. We decided that we would go for sober dinners together and talk about sensible topics like our careers and world affairs. The detox lasted one month, our friendship somewhat longer. On the inside, half an inch beneath the funny, confident exterior, lies a quiet determination, an unyielding passion which leads him to still be in the design studio at eleven thirty, long after his team have gone home. He won’t think twice about spending a month’s rent on a jumper and will somehow convince you to do the same. He is the friend who will sit and listen to your problems without so much as mentioning his own: there’s a resilient enamel that coats a sensitive soul, a soul you have to keep your eye on because deep down you know he isn’t keeping an eye on himself. For years he dated Paul, a man almost twice his age, who would do spontaneously romantic things, like arrange a weekend for two in Europe for a birthday celebration. I remember these fine details, as I was the one roped into hiking up Regent Street looking for a pair of brown-leather ankle boots specifically for the occasion.

‘I never thought I’d be jealous of my best friend, his older lover and a pair of gloriously soft ankle boots,’ I said, pressing my hand firmly inside one. Far from the perfect audience, I watched him walk up and down the carpeted floor of Russell and Bromley one Saturday afternoon as he looked at me for encouragement.

‘Just take them,’ I said, in desperation, perched on the seats designated for customers to try on the shop’s wares, ‘and then you can take me for a cocktail.’

There’s one memory that will last beyond the drunken nights, the cinema trips, the endless stream of gossiping phone calls – the time I got a different kind of phone call one cold, rainy night in November. It was 2.30 a.m. and I was fast asleep when my phone rang loudly on the bedside table. Seeing it was Sean I assumed he’d been partying and had locked himself out again and needed a place to stay. I almost ignored it.

‘What do you want, Sean?’ I snapped. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

There was a silence. I could hear talking in the background as my eyes slowly opened and I came to my senses.

‘Sean, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’

‘It’s Paul,’ I heard, quietly but clearly. ‘He’s been in an accident. I’m at the hospital.’

Thirty minutes later I walked down the long, squeaky corridor that seemed endless and sterile. I turned into the waiting room and saw Sean seated wearing a pale blue jumper and jeans. The sort of outfit you put on in a hurry, I thought to myself. I crouched down and put my arm on his back. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.

He lifted his head, his face reddened and swollen from the tears. ‘He was driving back from work and a lorry clipped the wheel arch. You know how fast he drives.’

I sat there and held him until sunrise.

Paul’s funeral was on a sunny Tuesday morning. It was a small affair, there were no hymns and two readings, and it was over by midday.

Last but not least is Marlowe: graceful swan, mother earth incarnate, encyclopaedia of heaven-sent advice from the sane and grown-up world. She is perfect and I am a mess. We’d met as teenagers – two cocky, know-it-all dreamers, whose backsides were about to be spanked by life right into next Tuesday. While I’d continued this behaviour well beyond its sell-by date, she’d been forced to grow up far quicker than the rest of us. Marlowe is a class act who is seemingly unshakable navigating obstacles that would leave others screaming into their pillow. There’s an apologetic air about her, as with those who have spent their life subject to the jealousy of their peers. It’s as if they need to make it up to those around them for not being clumsy, or slightly chubby or keeping a coat on when they’ve spilled soup down their jumper. Or for being born into success, for that matter. Marlowe is constantly under the watch of her parents who seem to guide the trajectory of her life from the conservatory of their conservative city townhouse. Her dad was a famous journalist and now deep into writing his memoirs, and her mum was an English socialite, whose glamour and impeccable sense of style has been retained well into her sixties.

Marlowe was always going to succeed in whichever field she chose to pursue so you can imagine our surprise when things took a turn for the unexpected, a few years ago, one summer afternoon in July. It was the hottest day of the year and London had quite literally come to a standstill. The smell of Hendrick’s gin filled the air, and for the first time in a long while a drought had threatened to take hold across Britain.

We’d been invited to one of her parents’ infamous barbecues. They owned a townhouse in West London and for one afternoon a year it became home to the who’s who of the slightly elder, more intellectual social scene. At that time, we used these occasions as an opportunity to stock up on free booze before going to a club later that night, but this time things unfolded rather differently. I arrived late, as usual, and expected Marlowe to be in the garden barefoot in jeans amidst a sea of Panama hats and beige summer suits, but this time she was nowhere to be seen. I made my way through the bodies cluttering the house, loud in idle chitchat, and arrived at the bottom of the stairs where I pulled out my phone to text her. As I began to type, I looked up towards the top of the dark staircase to see her seated in a crisp white T-shirt and denim skirt, a distinct shine on her bare shins gleaming through the shadows.

‘Jess, up here,’ she said, signalling me into the bathroom.

I followed her across the marble tiled floor and there it was, lying on the sink, lodged sideways between the hot and cold taps, the end of the future as we knew it and a building block of a dilemma for Marlowe. A pregnancy test that read positive.

‘Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Is it yours?’

‘Of course it’s mine,’ she snapped, grabbing it to shake it.

‘I don’t think shaking it is going to help, Mars.’

She sat down gently on the bathroom floor and drew her legs towards her. I took hold of the test to double-check its result and took a deep breath to replace the ones I’d since lost. She looked up at me with glassy eyes.

‘What am I going to do?’ she said.

And what do you say to the perfect girl, the girl who irons her underwear, who wears white and doesn’t spill, the girl now pregnant and crying. I didn’t say anything. Instead I just sat down on the cold floor tiles next to her.

‘I can’t have a baby, Jess. I’m twenty-three years old,’ she whispered.

I noticed her hands were trembling, her chipped orange nail polish rubbing against her two front teeth. Girls like Marlowe weren’t supposed to get pregnant. She was supposed to spend her days practising law, not the alphabet. I squeezed her warm hand that was still damp from tears. At that point there was a knock at the door, one of the other partygoers, oblivious and persistent, who clearly needed use of the bathroom.

‘Just a minute, please,’ I shouted politely.

There was a brief pause before they knocked again.

‘In a fucking minute!’ Marlowe shouted through her tears.

Together we sat side by side on the cold, tiled floor, knowing that in just one afternoon, everything had changed.

In the modern world, there are many options open to women in the wake of an unplanned pregnancy but for Marlowe it seemed the most preferable answer would be marriage. The carefully arranged wedding was six months later and after much debate, they had promised as a family that she would have the baby first and start her career later. But as with most things in life, it didn’t really work out that way. Now George was travelling all over the world while Marlowe stays at home. That little blue line we had once gathered around with baited breath is now called Elsa.

Before Marlowe’s parents had led her down the road of commitment and common decency, she was a permanent fixture on our nights out. She drank like a trooper, never danced but always turned up in an eclectic mix of designer and vintage clothes, accompanied by a desperate claim that she had purchased them all in the sale. We still see her, usually for relationship or career advice or when we need a sensible opinion and a healthy meal. And despite her newfound love of the quiet life she still comes out to the big celebrations: birthdays, new jobs, new hairstyles. To put it bluntly, Marlowe is the moral lighthouse in our slightly less sophisticated world. When she announced she was getting married I cried tears of joy, Amber cried tears of sadness and Sean began sketching her wedding dress.

And finally to me, a girl who loves Mexican food and bowling and low-budget horror films, gently flying solo into the abyss: no brothers, no sisters, two parents who years ago deemed it better to carry on life apart, on separate continents in separate time zones with separate hearts. Perhaps I’m only now realising as I stand here, not quite young and not quite old, that their situation might not have been an easy one. That a family doesn’t necessarily work better together.

I’ve learned that after a while, it can get pretty tricky to always make the right decisions, to do what everyone else expects of you and to make people happy. We discard the days, the weeks, the months, the years on the journey towards the destination as somewhat unimportant compared to the magical days of a future where we aim to one day be. But they will suddenly merge together and we will realise that this day, this week, this month, this year, these little, insignificant things culminate to form our lives, all joined together, like a map of the stars but instead right here on earth: a thousand lives crisscrossing, at times colliding. But the secret is not to avoid the collision. If the horizon blurs and the plans fade, just think of the places travelled, the things seen and the strangers now known as friends: it all happened because you once made what you had thought to have been a mistake.

Chapter Two – The Art of Intent

Cause…

Battle commenced one windy Friday morning last September. There was something in the air that day; I felt restless, almost as if suddenly, and without warning, my life wasn’t enough any more, any sense of pride or ambition had vanished. My mind ached like a lead weight. This wasn’t me. That was the only thing at this point that I actually knew to be true. The historical swirls of self-doubt that continually crept in weren’t going to win this time. Not that morning. Not today.

I was at the beginning of a food shop at the supermarket across town and, as I walked briskly through the automatic doors, I stopped for a moment to look up at the final leaves on the trees, clinging on with the same sense of stubbornness. I had decided in a combined haze of high spirit and spirits to push aside the idea of law and pursue my dream of becoming a photographer. It had me taken two years at law school to arrive at that decision and the leap hadn’t felt quite as wonderful as I had imagined. The disapproval of my father, moored somewhere off the South of France with his latest girlfriend, was evident. A short conversation resulted in us both hanging up the phone, which was surprising, as I thought he might relate given he felt the exact same sense of inadequacy about family life. Naturally, I had come to the conclusion that from that point on, I was on my own.

As I dragged the bags of shopping up the steps to our flat, I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me. The big supermarket was quite the commitment in terms of travel but a worthy respite from the express shop around the corner which, although convenient, was half the size and half the value. They even had a car park with trolley bays. I noticed this and despite not having a car was reasonably impressed. These days, I had time on my hands to appreciate such details. I pulled open the door and struggled inside, my fingers throbbing from the weight of the tinned goods. There was a note from Amber on the kitchen counter that read: ‘Please buy milk.’ I picked up the five-pound note and slid it into my jacket pocket.

After unpacking the contents of my bags into the fridge and cupboards I noticed the grey clouds heaving above me through the kitchen window. It couldn’t rain now, I thought. My day hadn’t been productive enough to be shut indoors. Quickly I pulled on my leggings and trainers and set off into the light downpour, determined to complete a run, determined to succeed at something that day. But in a few short minutes the light shower turned torrential. I stood at the very wet news-stand to shelter from the downpour under a sky of protective blue tarpaulin. I could feel the sting of a re-opened blister niggling the heel of my foot. I crouched down precariously to slide my foot out of my trainer, briefly easing the pain. A man in a large cream mac with a money belt attached to his waist began to pay me particular attention. He had caught me lingering. It was obvious I wasn’t his usual customer. I picked up a magazine that looked fairly respectable and pretended to read it as water dripped through the plastic sheeting.

‘It’s not a library,’ he said, restacking his stock. ‘You want to read it, you buy it first.’

I nodded subserviently and retrieved the five-pound note from my jacket pocket.

As I walked home with my unwanted copy of Business Life magazine I flicked through it briefly. On the cover was a successful, dark-haired businessman named as one of the top five financiers who’d brought back the economy from the brink of disaster. He worked at Giles and Morgan. I rolled my eyes. They were the company to whom I’d submitted a series of photographs for consideration six months ago and heard nothing since. Amber’s friend Nick, who worked there as an account manager, had advised me to corner the financial sector and supply lifestyle images in return for a serious amount of cash. His words. By now the rain had ceased to a faint drizzle and I had succumbed to using the magazine as a shield on the short run home.

‘Come on,’ Amber bellowed into her phone. ‘Don’t be such a boring bastard.’

She wanted to go out for drinks that night but the truth was I was in hiding. I couldn’t face another bad date, another bad restaurant, I just wanted to focus all my energy on creating my future, not further blurring my present.

‘Would it help if I told you that we’re meeting Nick and it might be another chance to talk about your photographs?’

It was a predictable effort from her but it worked just the same.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll meet you there at eight.’

I looked down at myself in the hallway, in my comfortable bra and pants. I pulled the elastic with my index finger and readjusted my pant line. Maybe she was right – maybe I was getting boring.

The bar was in the City, which was a strange choice for Amber, but I knew her well and could tell from the start that this place was far out enough to a) pick up new men and b) hide from the old ones. Despite the unfamiliar setting, the situation wasn’t exactly new. The bar was heaving and full of the type of young professionals I’d spent two years at university trying to avoid. I’d already lost Amber. Anyone who has ever been out with Amber has lost her, but as with most beautiful friendships between young women, I knew she wouldn’t leave the bar without me. I had one quick look around and by chance saw Nick talking to Brian, a man who I had desperately wanted to meet to quiz about photographing an ad campaign for Giles and Morgan. I walked over, briefly finishing my glass of white wine, before licking my teeth for remnants of lipstick. I had told myself that one act of self-doubt equates to at least one act of bravery.

‘Hi, Nick,’ I shouted, pretending to only sort of recognise him. After all, I wasn’t sure if he remembered me. He did and waved me over to the small crowd of men in suits.

‘Great to see you, Jess!’ he said. ‘Of course you know James…’

I did know James, he was the deputy head of marketing at Giles and Morgan and the second person on my wish list to meet. I followed my eyes around the group, giving a quick ‘hello’ to everyone, suddenly becoming incredibly aware of myself.

‘Well, I don’t want to gatecrash a party and I’ve lost Amber so…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ James insisted. ‘Stay. I’m sure she’ll pass us at some point.’

‘I’ll go and find her,’ Nick said, finishing his pint, ‘she’s probably giving some man a hard time on the terrace.’

I was frozen, my feet pinned to the floor, desperate to mention my photography and at the same time terrified of mentioning my photography. And that’s when I noticed the tall figure standing next to me. As I tried to pinpoint why he looked familiar it dawned on me: he was the face on the front of Business Life magazine. The man deemed a ‘saviour’, a fact I’d later learned by actually reading the article. It had been a particularly slow afternoon and once on the comfort of the sofa I’d been entranced into reading it cover to cover. I examined his face, his green eyes and his dark hair. Just enough stubble to be attractive, but still groomed enough to know he cared. I quickly looked away. If I’d learned one thing from my mother it was not to commit to the man who should be a fling, to stop lust in its tracks and rise above the chemistry towards something more sensible. More concrete.

As everyone continued with their own conversations I had somehow found myself drawn into this god of finance and Brian’s conversation about inflation and shareprices. I nodded intermittently with the rest of the group, playing piggy in the middle with people’s opinions about the economy. I could sense Charlie (I had since clocked his name) and the proximity of our bodies getting slightly closer. I could feel that sense you sometimes get when someone is watching you and you daren’t look at them in case they’re looking. Well, I finally looked and he was too. I smiled a nervous smile, thinking he would do the normal thing and look away, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned over and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘You don’t have a drink,’ he whispered directly into my ear. ‘We can’t have that, can we?’

As he motioned to the bartender I noticed that he had his initials embossed on his cardholder, a surefire hint in my own judgement that he was a vain, slightly arrogant City boy, but no, he wasn’t that easy to dismiss. He was nice, actually.

‘Going to need some help getting through this,’ he said with an awkward smile. He handed me a bottle of champagne and two glasses, an indulgence I had previously thought was usually reserved for special occasions and New Year’s Eve but for him, apparently, just a regular Friday night.

I looked up at him and into his eyes as they stared across the room. His face, with ‘bad idea’ written all over it. I felt like the secondary school newcomer eye-flirting with the popular sixth-former. This wasn’t me. I knew he probably used this line on every single girl he met but I also knew that at this point, I didn’t care. As he stepped closer I stayed composed. I knew we shouldn’t. I knew that girls who slept with guys on a first meeting rarely saw them again. But did I even want to? I felt his hand skim the small of my back. I could have protested but I didn’t. I didn’t.

I felt him bite down hard on my bottom lip in the back of the taxi as we came to an abrupt halt outside his building. A harsh handbrake manoeuvre made by the taxi driver so we’d get the hell out of his car and continue this elsewhere. We stumbled out onto the pavement and as we reached the bottom of the glass-fronted building I knew that beyond this point was no man’s land. If I wanted to back out, now would be the time to speak up.

As he slammed me into the wall of the lift I momentarily forgot who we were. I could feel his heart beating – or was that mine? I was trying to be sensible. I was the girl trying to get back on her feet, the feet that were now wrapped around his waist as he lifted me into the air. I could smell the remnants of aftershave on his neck, his forehead balmy and sweaty as I kissed it. We didn’t make it to his apartment. Instead we gave in to ourselves and fell together in an entwined heap on the carpeted floor of the corridor. And even if it was just for tonight, he was mine. As he pulled me to my feet and led me to his doorway I picked up my underwear and forgave myself. Start again tomorrow. Like sampling an indulgent chocolate cake in the midst of a diet plan, just start again tomorrow.

Six hours later, the sun had risen, and I lay in his bed wide-awake. Carefully and calmly, I made a slight gesture to move: beating him to the punch, avoiding the vacuous apologies from both of us, of a busy day ahead filled with lots of things to do.

‘Don’t go,’ he said, smiling as he pulled me back into his warm body.

‘I need to…’

‘What?’ He smiled. ‘What do you need to do that’s so important?’

‘I need to phone someone,’ I said.

‘Who?’ he quizzed with his eyes still closed, the curly tuffs of dark hair on his chest rising and falling as he spoke.

‘My… dentist,’ I said, beginning to smile.

He wrapped his arms around me, cocooning me in the smell of the night before. By now, the sun was streaming across the bed and we were drenched in it. It wasn’t love. It was two people not wanting love, which somehow seemed even more perfect.

Effect…

Present day. Using clues from the past to plot a strategy for the future. It was a balmy afternoon and as I looked out onto the rainy London street, I could feel the dryness in my eyes from my tears that morning. A dull, fuzzy headache served as a mental reminder of the sharp pain I felt inside, deep within the concave cavity that had once carried my heart. I noticed people on the pavement below unaffectedly going about their day – doing their best to ignore the torrent of water around them. The British are quite fearless when it comes to rain; things just seem to carry on as normal. I looked at my watch. Still no sign of the van but I could now feel the vibration of my phone in my back pocket and assumed that it was the removal men offering an explanation.

It was Amber. I let it ring out. I waited for the ping. I could handle a message, but I wasn’t yet prepared for a conversation. The text read:

Dinner with Sean and me?? We are DYING to see you

On this busy street, on this particular afternoon, I was waiting for a transit van to drop my things off at the flat I was moving back into with Amber after a brief spell of living in heaven with Charlie. They were supposed to be here at 4.30 p.m. and as there was still no sign at 6 p.m, I decided to put the phone back into my jeans pocket and hopped my way up the stairs to our flat. I looked around at my new yet familiar home. The home I had shared with Amber and had to move out of, in, shall we say, a rather immediate manner: full of smiles, giggles and promises. Instead of once being our girls’ world that we used as a hideaway from the rest of the universe, it was now the flat I had once left to move in with him. The one I had left in the hope of building a life with someone I now felt I no longer knew.

I opened my phone, still at that stage of expecting to see a text from him, for which I hated myself, and instead texted Amber:

Yes, definitely! Can’t wait – I’ll meet you there.

My thoughts were basically that if I filled the text with enough hearts and dancing girl emojis I would perhaps deflect the scent of how devastated I was to be moving back here. I walked into my empty room that was once filled with all the objects of my life and sat down on the edge of the bed, the bare beige walls almost consuming me. The fact that nobody else had moved in yet showed just how quick the decision was made to leave – and how even more quickly it was made to return. It was all too quick. I had it coming to me.

After two cups of tea and a sort through my piles of mail I plucked up the courage to start opening a few boxes that I had managed to squeeze into the back of the taxi: just work things, thank God, it seemed that all the sentimental stuff was still in the van. I pulled out a large, leather portfolio of black and white photographs, the ones I’d taken in the second year of my law degree and had been so excited to put together and hawk across the city. I laid out my portfolio and fingered the plastic covering. It was bubbly now and the dog-eared corners were ageing… nothing at all like I remembered. Along with forgetting who I was for a short time, it seemed I had also forgotten what I wanted to be.

This would be my priority now: my only option of survival. I reminded myself about the one golden nugget that I’d learned since all this had unravelled: something that nobody had told me at the start. There will be sacrifices. I call it spinning plates. It’s a balancing act that usually consists of the metaphorical weighing scales whereby your love life succeeds and your career goes down the pan, or your career booms while your love life’s shot to shit. Or in my case right now, both, crumbling in my hands at the exact same moment. I smiled at the irony.

And wasn’t it funny that the moment when I knew I had to end it was the exact moment I’d never wanted to stay more.

As I poured a glass of water and pulled myself up to sit on the kitchen worktop – an annoying trait which Charlie didn’t mind but Amber always hated – I could see one good thing about being on my own: I could finally do as I pleased. Prove to myself that I could. Prove to my parents that they were wrong. The continual back and forth motion with Charlie – the euphoric highs and desperate lows – were now over. It was time to create space for myself and for the new, to give myself the opportunity to get it all wrong. Fuck things up to the nth degree. Barefooted and barefaced amongst the boxes, I was willing to risk all that was certain in my life for the very possibility of wanting something more.

The restaurant was heaving. I’d strangely missed the noise, the crowded bar, the way you had to navigate through the masses just to meet your friends, to breathe. As soon as I caught sight of them I felt relieved.

‘Sit yourself down, Jessica Rabbit,’ Sean said with a warm smile. ‘I mean, I knew it wouldn’t last long but three months? Jesus, Jess, I’ve got cheese in my fridge that I’ve had longer.’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding dutifully. ‘Get it all off your chest now, will you? And we were actually together for nine months,’ I declared proudly as I walked around the oblong table to kiss Amber. ‘And what do you mean you didn’t think it would last long?’

Amber pulled me in and looked me straight in the eye.

‘You did the right thing, bubs,’ she said boldly.

I knew she was right but the pain in my stomach was still fighting the concept – it made a deep, heavy lurch as I sat down at the table, causing me to wince.

‘Seriously, though, are you okay?’ Sean quizzed.

‘I need to find a job. And quick,’ I replied.

‘Our rent’s due on Thursday,’ Amber remarked, before hesitating. Her voice shrinking to a gradual fade as she saw my expression.

‘She only moved out three months ago, I think she can remember when your rent’s due,’ Sean said, rolling his eyes.

I reached out to sip my water, my hand paused on the glass, as a thought I had buried caught up with me.

‘Is it really as bad as it looks?’ Amber said, placing her hand on my wrist.

‘Well, let me fill you in, shall I?’ I pushed the water aside and exchanged it for wine. ‘I’ve left my boyfriend’s home…’

‘Ex-boyfriend,’ Sean muttered.

‘Ex-boyfriend,’ I quipped. ‘Half my possessions are on my bedroom floor while the other half are under house arrest in a transit on the other side of Westminster that has the word “penis” written on the side in dirt. So in answer to your question, things have definitely been better.’

‘He’s such a dick,’ Sean spat.

‘He’s not, though,’ I said, sipping my wine again. ‘Things just didn’t work out.’

I reached for the bread basket, realising I hadn’t eaten at all that day.

As I buttered a piece of fluffy white baguette I felt a hand on the back of my chair.

‘Jess – fancy seeing you here, how is everything? How’s Charlie?’

A bomb of silence dropped on the table.

It was Sasha, the PR hound who lived two floors beneath him. She obviously didn’t have anything better to do than keep track of the comings and goings of the building.

‘Oh, I’m fine, he’s fine, I think. Well, I don’t know actually because we’re not together anymore – we split up about a week ago.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, giving me the same vacant look that I’d seen several times over the past seven days. ‘Well, sometimes these things just don’t work out. He’s pretty handsome, though. That’s got to be tough.’

I nodded in agreement, to both parts, with a small smile that indicated that it was her cue to leave. I wanted to vomit as the overpowering smell of her perfume lingered in the air. I remembered the sweet, distinct floral smell from the building’s lift.

‘She’s definitely going to drop by his place tonight as a “shoulder to cry on”,’ Sean said, watching her leave. ‘She couldn’t get out of here quick enough! I could actually see her smirking – who does that?’

‘Well, good luck to her,’ I said, mustering a fake smile. ‘Maybe she can handle him better than I could.’

‘Maybe she’s got that condition,’ Amber said drily. ‘I saw a documentary about it: when somebody delivers some bad news, they can’t help smiling.’

‘Or maybe she’s just a cow,’ I said, bluntly.

‘So, just to clarify,’ Sean said, ‘are we allowed to say his name?’

‘Yeah, why not?’ I replied.

‘Because she just did and you look like you’d been shot.’

‘I’m okay, really!’ I protested. ‘It’s all for the best. Please can we just talk about something else?’

‘I won’t even mention his name,’ Sean said, running his forefinger across his lips.

‘And don’t remind me how attractive he is either,’ I said, searching for the emergency cigarette I’d borrowed from the doorman on the way in. ‘All anyone’s been saying to me is how attractive he was. It’s pathetic,’ I muttered.

‘He was,’ Sean said as Amber shot him a look of outrage. ‘I’m sorry. But he absolutely was.’

After we’d eaten, I could still feel the remnants of the food stinging the roof of my mouth.

‘So what else have I missed?’ I said, looking at Sean to change the conversation.

‘Amber’s in love. A bit,’ he said coyly.

‘Oh please,’ she said, as cool as ever. ‘Today’s idea of love is closing your Tinder account.’

‘And have you?’ Sean said, raising an eyebrow.

‘Course not,’ she replied. ‘But I definitely go on a lot less.’

I stared at her until she gave me more answers.

‘His name is Patrick,’ she said.

‘Patrick,’ Sean repeated drily. ‘He’s definitely over fifty.’

I laughed.

‘He is, yes!’ She downed the remainder of her martini defensively and tried to get a waiter’s attention for the bill. Sean and I glanced at each other like two schoolgirls banished to the front of the bus. She was too cool to be drinking with us and as a result was forced to hang around with the fifty plus Patricks of the world.

‘Is he retired?’ Sean asked.

‘No, you fucker!’ Amber cried. ‘And that’s it! I’m done! No more questions!’

The next morning Amber shuffled into my room in her dressing gown balancing two cups of tea. As I blinked through last night’s make-up, for a brief moment I had forgotten where I was. The room looked bigger without my stuff in it. She sat down on the end of my bed as I noticed a small damp patch right above the window frame.

‘We have damp,’ I said, gesturing to the wall.

‘I know,’ she nodded, lying down next to me. ‘I’ve missed coming and getting into bed with you of a morning. I even had to buy my own shampoo, and razors…’

‘I knew you used my shampoo.’

‘I knew you knew,’ she said, leaning her head against the rickety wooden headboard. ‘I know it’s hard, Jess, but it’s for the best. You can’t be with a man like that. You’re too… nice.’

‘I hate that word,’ I said, reaching for my tea.

‘He was part of a scene that’s just not for you – believe me, I’ve been there.’

‘It’s knackering, you know, pretending to be someone you’re not all the time.’ I looked down into the rim of my mug and could see the faint brown mark from all the drinks that had gone before it. I ran my fingernail over it in a faint attempt to remove the stain.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to think about your own life. And now you can do whatever it is that you want to do… like shag that gym instructor you always fancied.’

‘But I don’t want to,’ I said, quietly.

‘Yet,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to yet.’

As she left the room I knew I had no choice but to trust her. Trust her optimism. Trust that she knew what she was talking about. I pulled a box towards me and began to pull the clothes out. I stopped at a dress I had bought for a job interview. It was creased. I carried on pulling out endless streams of coats, jackets, tops, shorts – any mundane action to stop me from thinking. I reached right to the bottom of the damp box and that’s when I felt it. A black jumper that had accidently been packed up in the frenzy. It belonged to him. I ran my fingers down the leather elbow pads and across a loose thread in the sleeve. A small fault within a ream of beautiful fabric, just like our relationship. In our short time together, he had created the loose threads and I had begun to pull them and before we knew it all we had was a tangled ball of wool. Using the black hair tie from around my wrist I pulled my hair up and pushed it loosely away from my face.

‘Don’t think,’ I said to myself out loud. ‘Just fold your clothes.’

SUMMER

Chapter Three – How to Get Lost in Reality

It was hot – the kind of heat that London isn’t prepared for – when train tracks melt and people begin bulk-buying ice at the supermarket. Grassy public parks become a carpet for Prosecco bottles, factor twenty-five and supermarket plastic-bag picnic hampers. During the light evenings, a sense of heady weightlessness fills the air. Problems disperse and are exchanged for gin and tonics, despite the fact that city girls become forced to unleash their pale legs, hidden for ten months of the year beneath 100-denier tights. These heated times are unusual in Britain and must be relished during every single hour. Summers are precious to us; they’re unpredictable but always ever so fleeting.

By summer I had weathered the storm and woken up on the last day of the last week of the last month of the last year that I was ever going to feel so shitty about myself again. Up to that point the feeling of emptiness was indescribable but a weekend spent hiding under a duvet, my computer conveniently open on his social media, had led to an intervention from a higher power.

According to my friends I was spiralling and I needed to get back to the real world: a distraction from the dull ache that had resided in my chest every day since Charlie and I had split. I wanted to scream, open a window and shout loudly into the world, a vast release or a call to the gods to do something, something bigger than me; bigger than us. Instead I brushed my teeth and made my first steps back to reality; the joyous purgatory between a dream and a slap in the face.

Since my break-up from Charlie, I had tried a number of tactics when it came to trying to give myself a reboot. First, I’d sampled staying in; reverting to the familiar by putting myself under house arrest and refusing to leave unless the house literally caught fire around me. I had stocked up on food, wine, toilet paper and bin liners. I’d tried box sets, starting the novel I’d always wanted to write, and spring cleaning my entire wardrobe by first piling the contents of my wardrobe high onto my bed, followed shortly by a deep sense of regret midway through. In the end, I just threw away half my possessions. All in all, it had been good for feng shui, bad for home economics.

And, of course, I’d tried going out. What’s more fun than dressing up and dancing to music playing so loud that it drowns out your own thoughts and engulfs you in a different sound – the sound of fun and guilt-free solitude, Amber had asked me. True, there’s nothing quite like feeling the beat of your own heart, moving freely in a dimly lit room full of strangers, bodies in unison with the distant odour of sweet sweat lingering in the air. I’d tried more sedate nights, too – restaurants with old friends, not in one of our regular haunts, somewhere new, with no memories or sentimentality attached. Here, we indulged in two of the most delectable things human beings can do together: gossip and eat. And still, I missed him.

But it wasn’t until I’d divulged in an evening of speed dating, a collective group of people given three minutes to sell themselves without appearing desperate, that I even considered the idea of a rebound. Not always the answer, I admit, but a strong case can be made for forcing myself to see how life could be a little different. Perhaps not with the person I thought I would be with, perhaps not even someone I would want anything to develop with beyond this one event, but nevertheless, a surefire way to thrust myself, quite literally, out there into a new beginning and leave the pain of the past behind me. And I’m not just talking about sex, I’m talking about something a little scarier: chemistry. An addictive feeling that can exist with or without being naked. A bond between two people that can unfortunately neither be forced or faked. But in order to see it, I had to test myself. Give someone else a chance. Everything starts from somewhere and how would I know if I didn’t at least try. In this instance, however, I did run the risk of rebounding with the wrong person. A person who made me miss the person I was hiding from even more than before. It’s a risk – a toss up between getting too attached to something that’s meant only to be fleeting, or if things do permeate, commit to something different from where you thought you once would be. A new chance, but in my book a risk worth taking if the alternative lies within the safety of the past.

In order to move on, sometimes you need to get moving. Having lived in a busy city, it may be time to escape to a leafy suburb complete with riverside walks and the need for waterproof clothing. The main importance of this activity is getting away from what I’ve been used to, playing opposites enabling my mind to wander into another energy setting. There is nothing more reassuring to me than seeing the sun set above a skyline I’m not used to, knowing that when the sun rises, hopefully, new possibilities will arise too. Parks also offer enough escapism to imagine, just for a second, that I am in the countryside: another world where trees, fresh air and open space collide. Looking around, I can see the beneficiaries firsthand, couples strolling hand in hand, joggers, readers and dog walkers. There is no better feeling than when the warm sun beams down on your face as you walk down a rickety path through the giant trees.

But it’s always a comfort to know that an immeasurable sea of people inhabit the earth at precisely the same time as me. The people of my zeitgeist, comrades and fellow friends at arms. I mentioned the need to move forward, but of course this is not truly possible without the honest reverberation of human connection: or my friends. Those rare friends who sacrifice their precious time to sit and listen to the repeat realisation over and over again as if it’s their first time of hearing it; all seeking a common destination of happiness as we pass the ball of encouragement back and forth between us. Under such honest tuition, there is no need to self-monitor. Advice comes in waves, and we may listen. This familiar buffer against the self-harm we often do to ourselves is the only outside eye we have. I take pleasure in carefully observing the fellow wildlife of others, comparing myself to what we deem is the norm. And when I feel the void, I know that I can always rely on the guidance of others in the bourgeoisie of our social climate. They wouldn’t dare let me date if I’m not ready to move on, or let me befriend a new person who isn’t exactly a support. They love me. They care. I should listen.

And so on to the next day: if only I could see that day that I’m imagining. Something I can see beyond how many miles, across how many oceans, aboard how many planes. Revisiting that landmark of the day that tipped the balance. The day that forced all toleration to crumble, the day a choice for something new took hold and the rewards of change had come to fruition. No longer do you have to test the boundaries of what your heart can take but instead you can be happy. Emerging from the flood, a slightly better, more water-resistant version of a person, to have the ability to travel through life again this time, returning slightly less scathed. I listened to the beat, to the sound of my heart, a drum-like pounding saying: use this, use today.

Chapter Four – Virtual Insanity

Checklist for Modern Romance:

• An electronic device for downloading free text messaging services. Cultivating digital friendships often involves a lot of backwards and forwards so free messaging is somewhat vital.

• As important as the ability to download digital dating platforms is the step of deleting them when the time comes for monogamous romance.

• A squidgy heart for the optimism of a swipe right.

• A tin heart for the rejection of a swipe left.

• A nice photograph of yourself: nothing too fancy and nothing too casual. You need to look your best but not like you’re trying.

• Healthy food you will pretend you are eating.

• Photographs of sunsets you will pretend you are watching.

• Covers of books you will pretend to be reading.

Sean was going on a date and I had turned up for moral support, barefaced apart from a facial nose strip, and ruining the ambience of his pristine bed linen with my dark green joggers. I watched as he casually laid a crisp, white shirt, navy blue leather watch and aftershave next to my feet which were adorned in a pair of woollen bed socks, and surrounded by enough junk food to feed a family with five teenagers.

‘You’re not seriously going to eat all that, are you?’ he said, glancing over at my stockpile as I reached for the Oreos.

‘Sure am,’ I replied, biting the packet open with my teeth. As I watched him towel-dry his legs on the edge of the bed it was clear I had nowhere else to be on this first Friday night in June.

‘Who is he anyway? I don’t think I’ve heard you mention his name before.’

‘I met him online. I’ve not really spoken to him that much or at all. But judging by his online profile he’s got the body of a Greek god.’

‘Sounds terrific,’ I mused, licking the cream from the centre of my biscuit.

‘And it’s just a bit of fun, anyway,’ he said, as he disappeared into a row of hanging trousers, rooting for his shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. ‘He’s more popular than frickin’ Helen of Troy by the looks of things.’

‘What do you mean? He’s a bit of a slag?’

‘Not everyone who enjoys sex is a slag, Jess.’

I screwed up my face. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I’d offended him.

‘And it wouldn’t hurt you to get online and see what’s out there. You’ve been staying in for weeks, it’s a one-way road to…’

‘Depression?’ I said, finishing his sentence and reaching for another biscuit.

‘I was going to say obesity.’

I returned the biscuit to the packet.

‘So you don’t mind that they’re seeing other people?’ I said, propping myself up against his pillows. It was something completely new to me and I needed to know more.

‘No, why would I care?’

‘My God, I’d care. I don’t think I could date more than one man properly.’

‘No offence, sweetie, but you couldn’t date one man properly.’

I toasted my can of Diet Coke to his cocky remark as he took a step back to look at himself in the floor-length mirror, spraying five strong bursts of cologne. I closed my eyes as the smell fell over me like a blanket. I lay back down onto his pillow and could feel myself plummeting into a sugar low, the aftermath from all the snacks I had consumed. As I re-opened them I caught sight of Sean as he held up his phone and snapped a picture of his reflection.

‘Who are you sending that to?’ I asked, with one eye open.

‘No one.’

I threw him a look mixed with curiosity and a touch of envy.

‘Don’t hate the player, hate the game, right?’ he said, carefully choosing a filter for the picture before pressing send.

It was a philosophy I was still trying to understand. He turned to me as I played with the toggle on my joggers. I smiled, a deliberate film of chocolate covering my teeth.

‘Oh, that’s really pretty,’ he remarked, climbing over to lie down on the bed next to me. I made room as he flopped on his side so that our faces were almost touching.

‘If I can’t be with him then why can’t I just be with you?’ I whispered, carefully moving an errant hair from his forehead.

‘Because we’re both pricks and you deserve better.’

I placed a hand on Sean’s chest, fighting the urge to close my eyes again.

‘So you think tonight’s going to be fun?’ he said, lying back to face the ceiling.

‘Yes, I think it’s going to be good,’ I said, supportively.

He shot me a sarcastic glare.

‘Great, then!’ I continued. ‘I think it’s going to be amazing. But I wouldn’t take my word for it – I haven’t even showered today.’

We lay there next to each other as I felt his big arm wrap round me.

‘Okay, Jess, I love you but you have to leave now, he’ll be here in ten minutes…’

I dutifully packed away my biscuits and half-eaten bag of crisps, carefully dusting the crumbs off his bed as I moved. I put on my coat, tightly gripping the twisted top of the open packet of biscuits, and made my way home.

I threw my carrier bag of half-eaten food on the table in the hallway, turned on the lamp and shut the door behind me. Amber was out so I had the flat to myself. I walked into the bathroom and turned on the taps, the water thundering out in large gulps as it filled our small bathroom with steam. I sat down on the toilet seat and waited for the bath to fill.

Sean’s honesty lingered in my mind but I knew I had to do things my own way. I felt the coldness of the floor tiles beneath my bare feet. I pulled out my phone and for some indescribable reason opened a string of text messages from Charlie. I’m not sure what I was hoping to achieve but the sight of our relationship history, laid out in vertical block texts, took my breath away: the war rooms. I scrolled through the old messages that marked the end of a ceasefire: anger, spelling mistakes, accusations. I began to type a white flag but stopped myself.

After all, how do you say in a text message: I’m just not over you yet.

After my bath, I created a profile using an almost bearable picture of myself taken two years ago at Amber’s birthday party and kept all other personal information to a minimum. As I tapped my fingers on the edge of my desk, debating whether or not to use a fake name, I came to the conclusion that this would inevitably get me off on the wrong foot.

I scrolled down the selection of men’s faces and skimmed over a couple of profiles. How could I go from a man like Charlie to someone who lists ‘adventure’ as a hobby? In an act akin to pulling off a plaster, I set my profile to active and took a big gulp of the gin and tonic I’d prepared as liquid courage. I leaned back in my chair to assess the damage to my soul. At that moment a ‘ping’ sounded, nearly knocking me off my chair as a private message popped up in the bottom right-hand side of my computer screen.

It was from a man called Harry. It just read, ‘Hi.’ I hesitated. I could feel the dryness in the back of my mouth as I took another well-earned sip of gin. I typed back ‘Hi’ and clicked on his profile. He was good-looking but not intimidatingly attractive. He owned a surfboard. He played rugby at the weekend. As I delved deeper into his collection of photographs, another ping ensued. I opened up the private message that read:

Just looking at your picture in Sydney Harbour. Great view. Always wanted to go there.

The picture was taken on a holiday with my dad. A summer break designed as a father–daughter bonding exercise but resulted in him being called back to work, leaving me alone in an unknown city with nothing but my passport, my rucksack and his credit card. I ran my fingers along the computer keys and swiftly began to type a reply.

Yes, it was beautiful. A really unique experience!

I didn’t know whether the exclamation mark was a little too much to end with. That maybe I appeared a little too fresh – too excited about all of this. But then I saw him typing a reply. My blood ran cold as I wanted for the ping.

I know this seems forward but I was wondering if you’d like to get dinner or drinks tomorrow night? Nothing major. Just casual.

How long did I have until I had to reply? I thought. I wasn’t ready for this. Not an actual date where I would have to physically see another human being. I clicked back on his picture and could feel the weight of the past restraining me from replying. An image of Charlie flashed into my mind as it suddenly dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t see him again… or kiss him. I won’t have him as a wingman when I wanted a drink after work or to see a bad movie with when no one else would. And then I remembered that last night in his apartment: the very last night, the arguing, the shouting and then, tears. I pressed send. And how was I supposed to feel?

‘Morning,’ I said chirpily the next day. Marlowe had invited us round for one of her famous home-cooked brunches, a chance to pull open the glass doors and let in a bit of sunshine. I’d been let into the house by Amber, who didn’t look at me but immediately returned to the kitchen wearing an oversized grey hoodie – a familiar indication that she had a hangover.

‘Please don’t talk so loud, I feel like shit,’ Amber said, motioning me into the kitchen.

‘Well, this is great,’ Marlowe said, as she pulled the filter coffee from the stand. ‘Everyone’s hungover and I’m in the bad books with George because I didn’t tape the sports channel last night.’

‘I stayed in last night. I’m not hungover,’ I said, wrapping my arms around her waist from behind.

‘Tell him to tape his own shit,’ Sean said, downing his coffee.

Amber pulled off her hood. It was clear it had been a late night.

‘So how was the date?’ I asked, unleashing the tiger that is Marlowe and her questions regarding other people’s love lives.

‘Who was it last night!?’ she shouted.

‘It wasn’t a date,’ Sean said, rolling his eyes. ‘And seriously, Jess, if I have to watch you eat one more packet of Oreos on a Friday night I am going to fuck you myself.’

‘How rude,’ I whispered. ‘But grateful for the offer all the same.’

‘A whole packet?’ Marlowe mouthed.

I nodded.

‘So who is he, anyway?’ Amber asked.

‘I met him online.’

‘Kinky?’

‘Nah – straight up,’ he said, pouring himself another coffee.

Amber looked at him and laughed.

Their sex jokes were always shared only with each other and both myself and Marlowe were more than happy to remain in the dark.

‘Amber, I forgot to tell you,’ Marlowe said, searching the kitchen worktop for some papers, ‘George was working in Berlin last week and met a fashion buyer. I asked him for his business card for you. They’re an e-commerce start-up, supposed to be pretty cool. Thought you might be interested?’ She handed over the card. ‘Take it, it’s yours.’

‘Cheers, Mars,’ Amber said, studying the design. ‘It looks great I just… begrudge taking it into the office.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because it will get passed on and handed over for someone else to take all the credit.’

‘Happens all the time at my work too,’ Sean said with a mouthful of croissant.

‘Amber, you’re the first in and last out every day,’ I said, outraged. ‘I barely even see you these days. How can they not notice everything you’re doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, sliding the card into her jeans pocket.

‘Why don’t you start your own company?’ Marlowe said. ‘Then you might actually benefit from all those extra hours.’

‘I don’t think that’s really an option for me. Besides, it’s not really the best economic climate to start a business.’ She stood up to pour herself some orange juice. ‘Fucking government.’

‘Where is George, by the way?’ I asked.

‘Shanghai – ’til Tuesday. That reminds me, I’ve got to pick up his suits from the dry cleaners.’

‘For God’s sake, Mar…’ Amber said.

‘Leave it, Amber,’ I whispered, under my breath.

‘So, what are we going to do about Jess’s lady parts?’ Sean said, quickly changing the subject.

‘My what?!’ I shouted, half spitting out my cereal.

‘We need to get it eaten before it passes its sell by date. Which for women these days is around what… thirty-five?’

I shook my head in despair. Seven years of friendship and he still rendered me speechless.

‘I’m kidding, obviously,’ he said. ‘But seriously, think about it. Take the standards down a notch and open your mind to what’s out there.’

‘Lower the standards. Great advice,’ I said sarcastically.

At that point Elsa called for Marlowe from upstairs. ‘Coming,’ Marlowe shouted, taking one last sip of coffee.

We all watched her leave the room.

‘I’m sorry, but am I the only one who can’t believe what I’m hearing?’ Amber said, in a hushed voice. ‘What a total prick. Pisses off to Shanghai for a week and kicks off about the sports match he’s missed. Not interested in his wife – or child!!’

‘Look, he’s basically a Prince William lookalike who keeps her in designer furniture,’ Sean said.

Amber raised her eyebrow at him.

‘I’m just saying,’ he continued, ‘there’s give and take.’

‘You’re right, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side,’ I said as Amber looked at me. ‘And it isn’t necessarily worse either. It’s just… not our business.’

‘You’re right,’ Sean said. ‘It’s their marriage. And it’s not our business.’

The next night, after a two-hour debate with myself about whether or not to cancel, I put my hair in heated rollers and pulled myself together. It was drinks, maybe dinner and, as he said so himself, totally casual. I cast my eyes over my open wardrobe. If I wore my black designer dress on a first date, he would probably think I was high maintenance even though it was a sample sale purchase and cost no more than a bottle of supermarket wine. I slowly put it back on the rack and dabbed a tissue across the small hairline cuts on my legs (a regrettably bad idea to have shaved my legs standing up in the shower).

On my way out the door I stopped in front of the mirror in the hallway and planted dark red lipstick across my lips that provided a hint of class and would also act as a deterrent in case he tried to kiss me: a Hadrian’s Wall of red, sealing off my mouth from Harry, in case he turned out to be a sexual predator or worse. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Good luck, I said out loud, quietly knowing that should probably be whispered to Harry more than me.

Outside the tube station I walked over to the man I vaguely recognised from the picture. He was taller than I had imagined with dusty blond hair in a perfectly coiffed style.

‘Harry?’ I said, smiling.

‘Jess.’ He offered his hand for me to shake before quickly changing his mind and kissing my cheek. ‘Firstly, may I say you look beautiful and secondly, thank you for showing up.’

I smiled at him. Still no words but at least the pounding in my chest had ceased.

He had booked the table for eight thirty and together we strolled to the restaurant nestled just around the corner. Harry looked back as we walked against the evening sun and as we approached the corner of the pavement I noticed him do it again.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it’s fine. I’m just looking for my ex-wife. I’ve got a restraining order but you can’t be too careful.’

I looked behind us as we crossed the road.

‘Jess, I’m kidding,’ he said, as I hit his arm and began to smile. ‘You looked so bloody nervous coming out of the tube, I thought I’d better do something to lighten the mood.’

It had worked. He was funny, and despite my nerves he had made me laugh all the way to the glass doorway of the restaurant where we were hit with low hung lights and the smell of incense. We were seated at a table next to the open window where he gazed at me with expectant eyes to start the conversation.

‘Great to be here,’ I said, with all I could muster.

‘Great to be here too,’ he said.

In the midst of a silence that would have made a funeral seem energetic, I did what every girl in my position would do: I escaped to the toilets.

I caught sight of myself as I stood reapplying my lipstick in the bathroom mirror. I was being difficult; perhaps it was even an act of sabotage so that things wouldn’t work out. So that I wouldn’t have to be brave and try something new. Harry was attractive, funny and from what I could tell, incredibly easy-going. But as I sat on the toilet, tallying up the laughs, I realised my newly surfaced pessimism was an altogether more difficult mountain to conquer. This wasn’t about him at all. The problem was definitely me.

‘You were ages,’ Harry said as I returned to the table.

‘Was I?’

‘Thought you’d fallen in.’ His eyes perused the wine list with a cheeky smile. ‘So are you a big eater, because this menu’s pretty pricey? I mean, I’m okay to just nibble on an edamame, if you are?’

‘Well, I just saw on my way back from the bathroom that the couple opposite us left a hefty amount of rice behind so maybe…’

‘What an excellent idea,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll distract, you pilfer.’

I laughed as the waiter arrived to take our order.

‘I was a bit nervous before tonight but, this is not so bad, is it?’ Harry said, reaching for my hand over the table.

‘Nope,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s not too bad at all.’

Give it a chance, Jess, I said to myself as Harry ordered his food from the waiter. Just give it a chance.

The car pulled up outside my door just short of eleven thirty. Although neither of us knew at this point if there would be a second date, he was brave and made the first move to kiss me. I turned away, a knee-jerk reaction that I later slightly regretted. In an awkward moment that felt like a strange end to an otherwise perfect evening, I gave him a small wave and closed the door behind me. It was a typical survival tactic. One I had to unlearn. Fast. As I opened the door of my flat, I slid out of my punishing shoes and immediately saw Amber on the sofa, seated with a box of tissues on her knee, surrounded by the used ones.

‘A builder on the bus gave me his cold this morning,’ she shouted. ‘He was breathing all over me – first I could smell his morning breath and now I feel like I’ve trekked through the Himalayas.’

I picked up the tissues and carried them over to the kitchen.

‘Well, let’s not pass it to everyone, shall we?’ I shouted, dumping them into our silver pedal bin before heading over to the sink to wash my hands. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’

I poured us both some tea and sat next to her on the sofa.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, deflecting any questions about how the evening had ended, but as I watched her flick through the channels before deciding on a nature documentary, I smiled.

‘It was actually really nice,’ I said. ‘I was a complete moron about the whole thing, though.’

‘Of course you were,’ Amber said, without looking away from the screen. ‘He’ll grow to love that though.’

I smiled and sipped my tea. Not there yet but definitely trying.

‘You’ve got to see him again!’ Sean bellowed at me down the phone the next morning. I was on my way to buy a new portfolio for my photographs and had decided to pass by the organic coffee shop for a morning boost. As I attempted to juggle my phone, my coffee and my handbag, I leaned against a post box to regain my grip on things.

‘He wasn’t as I expected, that’s all. He was actually really funny,’ I said.

‘Look, this is not my first rodeo… as you know,’ Sean said.

I nodded. ‘Nope.’

‘And it’s not yours, either, so save me the innocent princess convo and tell me what you really thought. Would you sleep with him?’

‘I don’t know… probably?’

‘And was he clean, well-mannered… wasn’t a psycho?’

‘Yes. All of those things.’

‘Then just promise me you’ll give it another go.’

‘Okay, I will,’ I said, biting my bottom lip nervously. I relented, ‘I promise.’

‘Jess, I’m being serious. You’ve got to move on now.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I am.’

I rested my phone down on the post box considering the weight of what I’d just promised him, all the while knowing it was a promise I owed to myself too.

Chapter Five – Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy

(Or, in human speak – ‘To die of a broken heart’)

Dave the plumber was lying down on our kitchen floor as I hovered over him clutching his spanner. The tenants in the flat below had heard a loud dripping and after a rather tense phone call with our landlord we had agreed to get things checked out. To be honest, I knew that something was wrong when the water didn’t drain in the sink, but like everything I’d ignored it and pretended things were fine. Things were not fine. As I leaned against the open fridge, tapping my flip flop against the floor, Dave looked at me.

‘It’s a hot one,’ he said, wiping his brow with his work cloth. ‘Apparently it’s going to be the hottest summer on record – hasn’t felt this hot in years.’

Dave was right. It was an uncomfortable, muggy heat that left you feeling drowsy and inexplicably tired. Despite my promises, I still hadn’t phoned Harry. And to my shame I’d ignored two voicemails and several text messages from him.

‘All done here,’ Dave said, making an involuntary noise as he got to his feet. ‘All fixed.’

If only everything were so simple, I thought, as I reached for the cash in my purse. As I watched Dave pack away his tools I reached for my phone and unlocked the screen. To be honest, the stumbling block wasn’t the memory of Charlie, let alone Harry. It was a feeling. I craved the euphoria of the past nine months: a strange addiction I’d garnered to feeling helpless. At the time my pain was special and now I was left in the numb void of normality. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy: the emotional equivalent of being smacked to the floor. And I am not talking about actual death, either; more of the kind of situation where you have loved somebody so deeply, in a world that is so perfect and happy, but then somehow, somewhere along the way things just, unravelled. For the lucky ones, this separation is mutual: you have both decided that things would be for the better if you went your separate ways. For the not-so-lucky ones the decision could have been made by only one of you. While one person is confidently beginning a life without you, the other is left in emotional limbo. But the real mystery lies within feelings: where do they all go once the battlefield has emptied? Just imagine sitting, on a Saturday night, across a table from someone you may find attractive but don’t fancy, who is generally amusing but can’t make you laugh out loud, someone who is not in any way a bad idea but in short, isn’t them? Nature tells us that we have to keep evolving, keep edging forward and this act of survival is something we must repeatedly force ourselves to do.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, in medical terms, means to die of a broken heart. After heartache, you are free to remain in the empty space, reflecting on what went wrong or trying to pinpoint when the disintegration started and, most importantly, if there was anything you could’ve done differently to alter the outcome.

The truth is, there probably wasn’t. If he wants to leave, he will leave. If she wants to leave, she will leave. And although you could wait for them to have a change of heart, the collateral damage you do to yourself in the meantime can prove instantly catastrophic. So instead of turning the magnifying glass on yourself, picking apart the very essence of your own being, try turning the focus to science and the biological reasoning behind the pain.

At such times it can feel as if the head and the heart are operating on different playing fields. Emotionally, we are swinging between moments of clarity and optimism. You even manage to convince yourself, even for a second, that this could actually be for the best.

The brain works on a much more pragmatic level. There are actual scientific names for the areas of your brain that are responsible for what you are feeling, be it memory, anger, arousal or unhappiness. The brain invests in feelings at a certain level both chemically and intellectually and it is this investment, a chemical reaction that attaches you to a person and their smell, their pheromones, their person. It is this attachment that makes detaching so very, very hard. Your brain has become chemically acclimatized to the other person being there, which is why we sometimes feel the pendulum effect swinging between one emotion and another. Your body is literally counter-balancing the way you are feeling in the hope that it can shift your levels back to normality. In human speak: trust your body and trust your instincts. It is only trying to heal.

When you first break up it usually precedes weeks if not months of arguments, snapping at one another, picking faults that aren’t always there and generally creating space between you both. And out of nowhere there will come a day when the arguments cease, when the quiet creeps in and you have no plausible reason to contact each other: no messages, no texts, no phone calls. Whether you talk the ear off a friend or sit together in silence, sometimes we cannot take the burden alone. I talked about it to death, to the absolute maximum that my friends could handle. They were my touchstone, my rock in the waves. They were my only sunrise.

As I stood at the kitchen sink pretending to inspect Dave’s repair job while not really knowing what I was checking, a small, lime green parakeet flew in and rested on the windowsill. ‘Little bugger!’ Dave muttered as he made his way out of the flat. I had never seen a bird that colour in this part of London before. They usually stick to the leafy suburbs of Richmond or Kew Gardens, places where people pay large sums of rent to see birds like that: a half mix between watery green and yellow. As I stared at the red tip of his dark green beak he looked right back at me. Almost through me.

Growing up I was in the top grade, highest in the class and proud recipient of the ‘most likely to achieve great things’ award. A tongue-in-cheek certificate was given to me on my last day of school that was now moist with damp at the bottom of my keepsake box. Looking around at the eggshell paint crumbling from the plastered walls of our kitchen, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony.

The truth was I failed my second year of law school. A fact I had been unable to tell my classmates, let alone my parents. The bright, ambitious star pupil had failed at her first attempt to truly succeed. In fact the only person I had ever told was Charlie. It was a moment of honesty in one of those late-night conversations, caught between the sheets, somewhere between night-time and morning. He turned to me, in that nonchalant way he saved to placate serious moments, and explained that perhaps it was just a case of the wrong dream. After two years of feeling like an underachiever, lying to everybody in my life, he had pushed me forward and funnily enough, almost back into the person I thought I could be.

With him, days turned into weeks, weeks to months and that was that. Before we even knew ourselves, we became an ‘us’. He owned a tall, glass-fronted apartment overlooking the Thames, a bachelor pad complete with hi-tech gadgets that I didn’t dare touch. Men in finance tend to be bad for reputation but fantastic for consumerism. In those days the fancy life had swallowed me up and I was foolish enough to think that I deserved it all.

‘Look,’ he said, turning to me one night over dinner. ‘You’re here near enough all week anyway – why not just move in and then you never have to leave?’

I looked at him as I ate my jacket potato, slightly dubious about his proposal.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, putting down my fork. ‘What will Amber say? We just renewed the contract on our flat.’

‘I’ll pay it,’ he said without flinching. ‘Just be here for me.’

And in a move that would make Emily Pankhurst turn in her grave, amongst the grated cheddar cheese and baked beans, I agreed.

It’s embarrassing to admit that you’ve been hurt. It’s not a shame as such, like bankruptcy or the time Amber accidently sent me a naked selfie, but more of a signal to others that you’re not that capable after all. That some things, when left in your hands, do fail.

I sat down at the kitchen table and closed my eyes, my pupils making spectacular light shows in the dark. I pictured that night, a few weeks ago, when everything had gotten too much. Charlie had been up all night at the office closing a deal that had netted the company a fair amount of money and had decided to celebrate by staying behind for a drink. But with Charlie this was only ever where it started. Months of jovial rumours about strippers, cocaine and office lock-ins combined with promises that, of course, none of it involved him, had built up to me standing alone in his kitchen with no clue as to where he was – the harsh sound of the buzzer stabbed me awake, I walked to open the front door and there he stood at the door swaying, for the third time that week.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked, noticing he was dripping wet. His shirt was unbuttoned and I could see the water shine off his stomach.

‘I’ve just been out with the guys from work. Don’t start,’ he snapped defensively. From experience I knew that an argument in these conditions was pointless. I turned off the light and made my way back to bed, my sleep disturbed by the sounds of dry heaving coming from the bathroom.

The next morning I continued my day as usual. I began making myself some breakfast in the kitchen – some fruit, yoghurt and a very large cup of coffee – when I heard a bang coming from the bedroom. I had expected him to crawl in, unkempt, dry-mouthed but instead he was dressed for work, freshly showered and smelling of aftershave. A sight that was surprisingly more worrying than the night before.

‘Just so you know,’ I said as he sat down at the breakfast bar, ‘I’m not one of those girls that will fill your role of nagging wife.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, without looking at me.

‘You clearly want someone to be at home waiting for you while you go out and do god knows what with god knows who. But that’s not me…’

‘Give it a rest, Jess,’ he said, opening his newspaper.

I slammed my favourite coffee cup into the sink, making us both jump as the handle snapped off, shooting a shard of cream pottery into the air. I looked over at him as he stood up and left, the door slamming behind him. And knew that would be it until the early hours of the next morning. A repetitive dance we both did, until one of us grew brave enough to stop it. I started to pick up the broken ceramic from the sink, trying not to cut my fingers through the murky water.

I suppose the worse part was that I never knew for sure. I couldn’t prove my instincts. Instead, I carried my fears like heavy weights. A weight that became unbearable in the end.

The parakeet was still sitting on the window frame. I slowly and carefully reached for my camera that was nestled beside the microwave. In two clicks I had managed to capture him: alone, far from his familiar surroundings and desperate to spread his wings and fly away.

I know how you feel, little one, I said out loud. I know exactly how you feel.

Chapter Six – Cheap as Chips

I stared at my bank statement in disbelief. I knew things would be dire but the digits in front of me sent shockwaves through my soul. The figure typed in bold at the bottom highlighted the grand total I was worth. And it wasn’t much.

I grabbed my keys and bankcard and briskly walked across the road to the ATM inside the local newsagent’s. I needed a second opinion. I’d even had the audacity to wear a Jean-Paul Gaultier black blazer for my excursion, one of the many gifts from Charlie, a perfect fit in terms of cut but less so in terms of reflecting my means.

I stood in the queue, fourth in line behind two builders, an old lady and a teenage boy, who was probably more flush with cash than I was. As my fate was delivered, my fears were confirmed: I was four pounds short of zero. I had proved it was actually possible to be worth less than nothing. As I put the magazine I was holding back onto the rack, I realised I needed a financial intervention. And I had an idea. I dragged myself home, lost in a sea of commuters: a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

The sound of loud vibrations was coming from my phone on the kitchen table. I had six missed calls from Amber and a voicemail. I dialled to listen: ‘Jess, I’ve just had a call from our landlord to say our rent payment has bounced. I said there must have been some mistake. Please can you sort it as I’m stuck at work?’ I put the phone back down on the table and typed out a brief message:

Yep, I’ll sort it, will pay it in cash by the end of the day

I looked again at my bank statement: I had no other choice but to sell my soul to the devil. I put the stereo on to block out my internal wailing and opened the doors to my wardrobe, pulling out two small boxes of handbags: two Fendi, one Chanel, and a couple of Marc Jacobs’ bowlers. As I ran my hands over the high-quality leather I felt like a fraud. This was the wardrobe of someone successful, someone who had her life intact, and as I was neither of these people, something had to give.

I ran a quick search through Google for second-hand designer shops. Although it was painful, I wasn’t naïve enough to ignore the fact that having a roof over my head would be far greater than any memories I was still holding onto. A small shop popped up in Islington with a purple catchphrase written in violet across the website: ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’ I shook my head in disbelief.

Twenty minutes later, I exited the tube, my hands clutching a plastic bin liner full of possessions like a prisoner on his last day serving time. A small bell rang out as I walked through the rickety shop door. The smallest woman I had ever seen, with a halo of orange hair, pulled a curtain back from behind the till.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. She reminded me of my grandma.

‘Hello,’ I replied. By now the bag was weighing heavily in my arms and the decision to actually sell off our history was weighing heavily in my heart too.

She took several minute steps over to me. ‘What’s that you have there, sweetheart? Are you looking to sell?’

I nodded and placed the plastic bag on the counter. Without a minute to spare, she had ripped it open with frail fingers that were stronger than they looked and tipped the contents over the glass worktop, meticulously sorting through them with an experienced hand.

‘Time to get rid?’ she said, fingering the stitching.

‘Something like that.’

‘From a certain gentleman?’

I nodded again, exhaling.

‘Well they’re good stuff: real quality pieces.’

‘So how much do you think?’ I said, focusing on the reason I was here. The facts. The financials.

‘Well, I can give you £500 for the Chanel, £350 apiece for the Fendis and £300 for the Marc Jacobs.’

I looked down at the bags and took a deep breath.

‘How does that sound?’ she said.

‘Sounds great,’ I replied, knowing it would cover one and a half month’s rent and a few weeks’ worth of food if I ate like a borrower.

As she counted out £1,500 in cash I began to peruse the shop.

‘This place is really lovely,’ I said, running my fingers through the silk scarves hanging down.

‘We opened in 1981. Can you believe that? I bet you weren’t even born!’ she said, stuffing the large wad of cash into an envelope.

‘My name’s Jess,’ I said, not knowing why I felt the need to introduce myself.

‘Rita,’ she smiled.

‘You know,’ I continued, ‘those bags, they were a gift from someone – I feel a bit guilty selling them. I just don’t have a choice. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a rut financially and these are all I own of any real value. Sad really, isn’t it.’

I ran my fingers over the worn leather.

‘This is literally all I was worth to him.’

She smiled. She could see my face turn red as I fought to hide my embarrassment.

‘You just did what you have to do,’ she said, simply. ‘There’ll be others…’

‘Bags or men?’ I asked, my lips creeping into a smile.

‘Both,’ she said handing me the envelope.

I pulled the rickety door behind me and gave her a short wave through the window. I looked down at the envelope poking through my bag. Unless I was willing to sell every possession I owned, it was the motivation to find a money-paying job.

I lay down on the living-room carpet, my legs stretched out behind me, surrounded by lists of all the magazines that I had sent my photography portfolio to. I decided to take matters into my own hands and try to speak to somebody about a possible placement. I could feel the butterflies of nerves in my stomach as the tone rang out. I sat there, crossed-legged, picturing the office I was calling. Picturing the person who may answer the phone. After four, possibly five rings, a stern-sounding lady picked up.

‘You’re through to Redsky magazine, how may I help you?’

‘Hi, I was wondering if you could put me through to your creative director, Laura. I sent through a portfolio of photographs for her perusal and I was wondering if it had been received?’

‘Is she expecting your call?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Then I’m afraid I can’t put that call through. Can I help you with anything else today?’

‘No…’

‘Thank you, have a lovely day. Goodbye.’

It was a ten-second phone call then the line went dead. I drew a red line through Redsky magazine. I moved on to the next one.

After several awkward exchanges with receptionists, operators and refusals to connect I had reached the last name on my list. A warm sensation rose in my stomach and I knew that it was time to take a different approach. I dialled the final number.

‘Good afternoon, Inside Style magazine.’

‘Hello, I was wondering if I could be put through to Matt, your creative director? I sent through a portfolio for his perusal and I was wondering if it had been received?’

‘Is he expecting your call?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘One moment, please…’

I could hear the line connecting, as I waited with bated breath to see if my tactic had worked.

‘Matt Baker.’ His voice was low and serious.

‘Hi, Matt, it’s Jess here. I sent through a portfolio for you to have a look at. I’m interested in a photography position and just wanted to check if you’d received it?’

‘Hi, Jess. You know it’s not exactly ideal to ring someone up in the middle of the day, unannounced.’

I nodded silently. ‘I know,’ I said out loud. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just…’

‘Listen, give me two seconds,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘I’m searching my emails, what was your full name?’

‘Jessica,’ I said, quickly, making sure as not to waste any more of his time. ‘Wood.’

‘Here we are. Okay, I’m looking at your CV… hmmmm… okay… to be honest, you have very little experience for a full-time position. I mean, you haven’t even taken a degree course at this level.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I studied law and then…’

‘My advice would be to get some formal training behind you and if I’m honest,’ he continued, ‘perhaps even a job assisting first. But in this climate, that’s pretty competitive too.’

The sound of silence at the end of the line signalled our conversation was over.

‘Well, thank you for your time,’ I said.

‘And don’t call people in the middle of the day, it’s annoying.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had no other choice.’

‘Listen Jess, I can tell you want this from the outrageous way you chose to get my attention. You’ve got balls. Maybe when you get a little further down the line, and take the steps I suggested, then send it back through. There are always projects coming up.’

‘Thanks, Matt.’

I hung up the phone and sat amidst the numbers. I needed experience to get a job and a job to gain experience. My head hurt with the confusion. Using the fabric from the arm of the sofa I pulled myself up and tidied away my paperwork.

The first to arrive for dinner was Amber. Well, she didn’t exactly arrive as just came home from work like any other evening. She made her way to the toilet while talking quietly on her phone, giving me a slight wave on the way through. Moments later Sean knocked on the door, bringing with him a full Chinese and two bottles of wine under his arm.

‘I can give you some cash for that now,’ I said, wrestling for the bottle opener that was somehow caught between a wooden spoon and a spatula at the back of the drawer.

‘How?’ he said.

‘I sold some stuff.’

‘Like what – a kidney?’

At that point Amber strolled in. ‘Looks tasty,’ she said, peeling off one of the plastic lids.

‘Who was on the phone?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no one,’ she said, pulling out four wine glasses from the cupboard.

The buzzer sounded from downstairs and I ran over to let Marlowe in.

‘Sorry, I’m late,’ she said, shaking out her umbrella and making her way up the communal stairs to our front door. ‘George’s flight got delayed so I had to stay with Elsa but he’s back now so I’m free – that rain came out of nowhere!’

She poured herself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette while sitting next to the open window. I loved how she used our flat to indulge in all the guilty pleasures that she couldn’t enjoy at home. She was perched on the windowsill like a girl guide round the back of a tree at camp.

‘So what’s happening with the job situation?’ she said, taking a drag.

‘Well, put it this way, if nothing’s come up in the next month I might have to look into selling that kidney.’

‘You could get a job in a café?’ Sean said.

‘Thanks but I’d rather kill myself.’

‘It must be cold perched up on that pedestal…’ he replied.

I looked at him blankly.

Marlowe winked at me in support from her window seat while Amber was leaning against the kitchen counter, once again glued to her phone.

‘Amber, are you okay?’ Sean said as she continued to type. ‘Back away from the phone, you’re not at work now,’ he said, prising it out of her hands.

‘Stop it!’ she shouted. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ She wrestled it free as the whole room fell silent. ‘I’m sorry, all right – I’ve just had a bad day.’

I watched as she went into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

‘Is she okay?’ Sean said. ‘What did I miss?’

‘She’ll be all right,’ Marlowe said, looking like she knew something we didn’t. ‘So tell me more about this Harry bloke.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s not much to say. He’s… nice.’

‘Ah, nice…’ Sean said. ‘That’ll get the girls queuing up.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not like that. He’s really lovely. I like him. I think.’

At that point, Amber emerged wearing a pair of oversized pyjamas, giving off the overall feel that she was slightly calmer.

Marlowe smiled at her. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she whispered, although the look on her face contradicted her.

‘Sit down,’ Sean said. ‘I’ll dish out the egg fried rice.’

Amber sat down at the table, the sleeves of her dressing gown covering her hands as she held her phone tightly.

‘It’s been a couple of weeks and we’ve been back and forth and now I just don’t know what to do,’ she said, looking to us for answers.

That was always what happened with Amber. She would tell you eventually – it just had to be on her terms.

‘About what?’ I said, leaning forwards in my chair.

‘Well, a couple of weeks ago, I was working on this new proposal for promotion. I’ve been developing a new business growth plan, completely in my own time, in the hope that one day my boss might look at it and see me in a more, I don’t know, competent light. I’d shown it to Marlowe and it was good.’

‘Really good,’ Marlowe said, now seated with us at the table.

‘Okay…’ Sean said, knowing there had to be more to the story.

‘Well, there is a woman at work, Linda. She’s senior to me and literally questions everything I do. I can’t win. But if I got the promotion I wouldn’t need to answer to her. I would just be working directly under my boss.’

‘Amber, just get the point, what happened?’ I said.

‘I mean, this promotion would be an extra £7,000 a year and it would mean that my voice actually gets heard rather than working every hour God sends on someone else’s ideas.’

‘Yeah, but what actually happened, Amber?’ Sean said.

‘I was called into my boss’ office about two weeks ago and asked what progress I was making in this quarter. I discussed my development and what I hoped to achieve. He said I was ambitious and liked to see that in an employee. He made a joke or two. I laughed. And then he talked about how we should discuss my ideas further. He got up and put his hand on the back of my chair. The other hand went on my knee. I didn’t move.’

We all sat staring at her phone, which was now in the middle of the table like a piece of evidence in a crime scene.

‘I know I shouldn’t have but I kept thinking about my position and how I didn’t want to offend him. So instead I just nodded. I could feel his eyes follow me as I left the office.’

‘But isn’t that sexual harassment?’ Sean said.

‘Not exactly,’ Marlowe said.

‘Two days later he called me into his office again and told me he was giving me the job of project manager at the new e-commerce merger.’

‘What, just like that?’ I said, in cautious belief.

‘Yeah. Just like that,’ she continued, ‘but when I got to work on Wednesday he said that the position would mean that we should spend more time together and he invited me to lunch.’

‘Just the two of you?’ Sean asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Is he married?’

Amber sat in silence.

‘Just be careful…’ Marlowe said, answering for her.

‘It’s a work thing,’ Amber replied, dismissively.

‘Is he married?’ I repeated.

‘Yes.’ Amber looked at me with wide eyes. ‘So we went to lunch and to be honest it felt great: I was being heard, he was flirting and so what if I flirted back, it was totally harmless. But late this afternoon he called me into his office again.’

‘Smooth.’ Sean laughed.

‘Go on…’ I said.

‘He told me how much he valued and appreciated me, now that he’d got to know me better and how he had come to rely on my opinion. And then he tried to kiss me.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t pull away.’

‘Amber, he’s married!’ I cried.

‘I know! But I was scared, he’s my boss and now I’m stuck in it. And I don’t know what to do.’

At that point her phone pinged.

‘You’ve got to keep him sweet,’ Sean advised. ‘Don’t piss him off. You don’t know what he might do…’

‘But don’t have sex with him either!’ I shouted.

‘It’s a tricky one,’ Sean said as he leaned over to look at the phone. ‘He’s typing…’

‘What about my business proposal? I’ve worked for weeks on it and it’s really good. I don’t want to lose the opportunity.’

‘Babes, I don’t think he cares about your business proposal,’ Sean said, drily. ‘He’s still typing.’

‘Can we just change the subject?’ she said, pulling her phone off the table.

After dinner, I stood in the kitchen by myself, clearing away the forks that we’d used to eat from the cartons.

‘The upside of eating takeaway…’ Amber said as she walked back into the kitchen. ‘No washing up!’

Marlowe had left early to relieve the babysitter and Sean needed to be up early for a gym session. We were alone: just the two of us.

‘You can’t have an affair with your boss, Amber. He’s married. What about his wife? Did you even think about her?’

‘Hold your horses,’ she said, defensively. ‘I don’t know that I am.’

‘What if you piss him off? If he rewards you with a promotion, how does he punish you? It’s your job. Seriously, take it from me, life without an actual career, at our age, well, it’s not ideal…’

‘I think you’re overreacting.’

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked to get here.’

I switched off the lights throughout the flat and went to bed, leaving Amber still texting at the kitchen table.

‘Amber,’ I said quietly. ‘Trust me, it’s not worth the heartache.’

I’d passed the piece of paper that was sellotaped in the window numerous times and wondered what loser would want to work in an off-road Italian restaurant. As it turned out, that loser was now me. After the equivalent of a car boot sale for the heart, I felt unshakeable and remembered the advert in the window, sandwiched between a children’s clothes shop and a pharmacist.

I found myself in front of a small stone building that had been transported from the Italian coast. Terracotta pots hung from the windows and a small layer of condensation gave the windows a slightly blurred feel. I made my way through the door and could immediately smell homemade soup and strong coffee. Through the customers that were gathered around the counter, I saw a large man with a tidy, jet-black beard and, assuming he was the manager, made my way over.

‘I saw the advert in the window and was wondering if I could apply for the position?’

‘Which position? Chef or waitress?’ he replied.

‘Waitress,’ I said quickly, slightly thrown at the prospect of being hired as a chef.

‘Maria, can you bring in the large case of tiramisu?’ he called towards the back of the room.

I noticed his dismissive attitude and tried to hold his attention. ‘I can bring in a CV if you’d like,’ I continued. ‘I live just around the corner…’

‘Not necessary,’ he cut me off. ‘Can you come back at midday to help with the lunchtime rush?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Ask for Guido.’

‘Who’s Guido?’

‘Me,’ he said.

I left hastily before he had time to reconsider and returned two hours later, after a quick sandwich and dressed in a white blouse and black trousers. I’d tied my hair into a high ponytail and put on some lipstick so that I felt a little perkier.

‘Hi, Jess,’ Maria, the woman I’d heard on my earlier visit, shouted from the back of the restaurant. ‘I’m Guido’s wife.’ She led me through the door reserved for staff. ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘you must enter from the side door on the left. The main door is for customers only. I don’t mind but Guido doesn’t like it.’ She held out her small delicate hand for me to hold. ‘Follow me, the steps are steep.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know,’ I said, as I looked back at the daylight disappearing as we descended the stairs.

‘Toilets are through there and you have your own locker in the side room in the basement. I’ll give you two minutes to freshen up and then see you out on the floor, okay?’ Her accent was thick and Italian.

I dutifully hung my beige trench coat in my locker, changed into my black leather loafers and washed my hands in the basin. A yellow neon light bulb shone down giving my skin a jaundiced tone. It would be a steady income. And for that I was grateful.

The following morning, my trial shift had proved successful and I was now a fully-fledged member of the team. I stood on the pavement on the dawn of my first full shift at Guido’s and pulled out my phone from my bag. There was another missed call from Harry. Another call unanswered, but this time I decided to handle things differently. I pressed redial and listened for the ringing tone. After what seemed like an eternity of doubts that perhaps he’d seen sense and found somebody new, he answered.

‘Harry,’ I said. ‘It’s Jess. How are you?’

‘Jess, I’m fine thanks. Nice to hear from you.’ His voice sounded surprised, as expected.

‘I saw that I had a missed call from you and so, I just thought I’d call to say… well, hello… and things…’

‘It’s good to hear from you, Jess. Yeah, I did ring. Quite a few times, actually.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry…’

After a brief pause, he continued. ‘So, why ring now?’

‘Well, I was thinking we could meet up again,’ I said, wincing.

‘Sure. I mean, I’ve never met a girl who cost me a week’s salary just to eat noodles. Maybe we could go to the Ritz for tea this time?’

I laughed out loud. ‘Thanks for making a joke,’ I said, smiling. ‘Is that a yes then?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That’s a yes.’

‘Listen, I’m just at work but I’ll give you a ring later to choose a good restaurant. Second thoughts…’ I hesitated, coming to the realisation that a night out with the remains of my bag money might not be the most logical idea, ‘. . . why don’t you come round to mine tonight after work and I’ll cook us a pizza or something?’

‘Sounds great,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you then.’

Nine hours later I sat in my kitchen opposite a man I’d only met once but felt as if he belonged there. And I was still in my work clothes, which I couldn’t decipher as meaning that I didn’t care, or I cared too much not to notice.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I told you about my failures at cookery, now tell me your most embarrassing story.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘As you know, I’ve played rugby since I was young…’

I nodded as he took a sip from his bottle of beer, slowly beginning the anecdote but starting to laugh already. His chuckle was contagious.

‘I was at school and playing rugby for the team. Now, this was a big game, the final of the county championships so basically the FA cup final of rugby for students. For some reason, I’d had an Indian the night before with the lads…’

I closed my eyes in anticipation. A small burst of laughter escaped my lips.

‘Eh… don’t look at me like that,’ he said, ‘go with it…’

He smiled widely at me but I couldn’t help it. I wiped my eyes, which had now filled with tears of laughter.

‘Wow, you’re a good audience,’ he said, chuckling. ‘So, anyway, it was half time and I made a quick dash to the changing rooms, as you can imagine, quite quickly.’

I put my hand over my mouth.

‘To cut a long story short, it was too late to check if there was any toilet paper: far too late. And there wasn’t.’

I screwed up my face. ‘What did you do?’

‘I took my socks off and used them,’ he laughed.

‘So what happened?’

‘I played sockless.’

Both of us burst out laughing: two loud and heavy laughs from the opposite sides of the table.

‘It was all well and good until I remembered that I still had to play the second half.’

I reached over to pull a piece of kitchen roll from the side, my face aching from the strain.

‘So, do you have any more stories for me?’ he said, pulling his chair closer. ‘Not necessarily in that… genre, of course.’

As I started to think I felt him lean into me. He kissed me.

‘Fucking wanking bastard taxi driver couldn’t find Hungerford Bridge.’

At that point I heard Amber slam the front door behind her and make her way through the hallway, shattering our rosy evening by turning the air blue.

‘Sorry, I’m late, Jess. It’s bloody pissing it down out there. Goodbye, summer.’

Christ, this is it, I thought to myself. The amount of men who could handle an angry, dripping wet Amber were few and far between.

‘Hi,’ she whispered, suddenly realizing that we weren’t alone.

‘I’m Harry, nice to meet you.’ He went over and shook her dripping wet hand, sliding the soaking umbrella off it and putting it down by the door.

‘I don’t want to interrupt, I’ll just go to my room,’ she said, quietly making an exit.

‘You don’t have to…’ I said.

‘No way!’ Harry continued. ‘Plenty of room for three. Why don’t you two go and put your PJs on and we can all get another beer and watch a film or something?’

Amber questioned me with her eyes as to whom this man was and why he was telling her what to do.

‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll nip into the lounge and find a film.’

Before sauntering off to her bedroom Amber shot me another glance from behind the door, unable to hide her wry smile.

‘I like him,’ she mouthed.

‘Me too,’ I whispered.

AUTUMN

Chapter Seven – Oh, Starry, Starry Night

I suppose the thought of autumn always appears more attractive to me than the reality of it. I’d fantasize about sheltering in shop doorways, shaking out umbrellas amidst ankle-drenching puddles and drinking freeze-dried soup stirred from a packet into a cup.

As the first nips of the season could be felt, I was still working as a waitress at Guido’s and had saved enough money to buy a new camera and tripod. My relationship with Harry had gone from semi-permanent to full time and to give an idea of where we were headed, he was staying over at our flat most weekends; the relationship wasn’t open but the bathroom door still remained closed.

Looking back, it seemed as if time had suspended itself over summer, a period of just a few weeks when nothing and everything had happened. Some memories stood out, others had faded. I didn’t know at the time that it would all catch up with me. Like a jolt or a shudder, a reckoning for the anticipation of a moment, one in particular, that changed everything…

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