ADULTS
Emma Jane Unsworth

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Emma Jane Unsworth 2020

Cover photograph © DEEPOL / PlainPicture

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ © Paul Simon

Emma Jane Unsworth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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

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

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

Source ISBN: 9780008334598

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2020 ISBN: 9780008334611

Version: 2019-11-27

Dedication

To my mum, Lorraine.

Sail on, silvergirl

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Soho Square

A Few Months Earlier: Hello, World!

Art Said

I Walk

They Say

In the Wings

They Say

I Post

They Say

A Womb of One’s Own

Therapy Session #1 (Dramatic Monologue)

Like of Duty

Picture the Scene

I Said

The Patatas Bravas

Kelly had Said

Sober Sexts

Ablutions

My Bathroom Said

Tipping Point

My Mother Said

I Was Eighteen

Art Said

Someone Says

A Really Bad Sign

Mia Says

I Walk

Knockknock

One-Liners

I Say

The Outrage

Baby Elephant

Art Said

My Mother Says

How I Met Kelly

Art Said

Art Said

What Lasts?

Bad Stand-Up

Ghostess with the Mostest

I Woke Up Like This

The Mind Creates the Abyss

I Adored

Art Said

You

Terms of Endearment

If

Art’s Mother Said

Full Desperate

Miserable Pho

Breathing for One

Popular Problems

On the Bus

Tabs

Granma Said

All My Circus, All My Monkeys

Burnout

Therapy Session #2

App Idea

Look No Hands

Hi Hi Hi

Back at Home

Exhibits A and B

Good Famous People

My Mother

Still

Life

We’d Gone

‘Funny’

Outgrown

Art Said

Bodies of Work

Kelly Said

Fake News

Google Me

Social Caterpillar

Really Tho

Deals with Strangers

News Item

Nicolette Says

Half an Hour Later

Ass Fizz

That Night

It Happened to Happen

#Frotheh

My Mother Says

The Heart Crosses It

Manchild

Who Ya Gonna Call

Naked Ambition

Soho Square

Chief Emotions

She Says

Kelly Says

Genuine Question

Life Drawing

Relax

We Lie

Silent-Ish Night

Thanks

About the Author

Also by Emma Jane Unsworth

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
SOHO SQUARE

I sit and wait for her, my feet swinging under the bench. She’ll come soon, and she’ll know where.

Adrenaline. I squeeze my own arms. Tap my toes. God, I hate waiting. Is that what I’ve been doing all these years? Waiting, for her? Maybe all those therapists were right. Maybe therapy isn’t just a bad stand-up show you don’t have the balls to take on the road.

I look around, at the other people chatting and posing and repositioning themselves, whiling away this cold Friday. It’s a few weeks before Christmas and the city is all lit up. People are smiling too much, drinking too much, wanting too much, wearing too much tinsel. Nothing points to the ephemeral nature of life quite like tinsel.

I look towards the north gate of the square and it’s then that I see her. Dishevelled, pulling on her coat. She scans the benches, spots me and freezes. I wave. She tilts her head to one side and bats her eyes, as though appealing to some ancient understanding between us; as though this has all been a scripted episode, some kind of brilliant shared joke. I stare at her emotionlessly. I am not playing. She stares back. It’s checkmate with the old queen.

She starts to walk over. I almost don’t recognise her with her clothes on. Which is a strange thing to say about your mother.

A FEW MONTHS EARLIER
HELLO, WORLD!

It is 10.05 a.m. and I am queuing at the breakfast counter of my co-working space in east London. The weather outside is autumnal but muggy and I have over-layered. I am damp at my armpits and wondering whether to nip out and buy a fresh T-shirt at lunch. I made dhal for dinner last night from a budget vegetarian cookbook I picked up in a charity shop, and let me tell you, it was astonishing. I am creating a social media post about a croissant that I am pretty sure will define me as a human.

I stare at my phone. I am happy enough with the photo. I have applied the Clarendon filter to accentuate the photo’s ridges and depths, making the light bits lighter and the darker bits darker. I added a white frame for art. The picture looks – as much as pastry can – transcendental. However, the text is proving troublesome. I’ve tweaked it so many times that I can’t work out whether it makes sense any more. This often happens. I ponder the words so long, thinking how they might be received, wondering if they could be better, that they lose all their original momentum. I get stage fright. The rest of the world has fallen away around this small square of existence. It’s like that bit in Alien 3 where Ripley says to the alien: You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else. I used to think it was about motherhood. Now I know it’s about social media.

I stare at the screen.

PASTRIES, WOO! #PASTRIES

Is this the absolute best depiction of my present experience?

I cross out the WOO, and the comma.

PASTRIES! #PASTRIES

I stare at it again. I try and recall the original inspiration; to be guided by that. It’s the least I can do. I interrogate myself. That’s what the mid-thirties should be about, after all: constant self-interrogation. Acquiring the courage to change what you can, and the therapist to accept what you can’t. What is it I really want to say about pastries? How do pastries truly make me feel? Why is it important right now that I share this?

I delete the exclamation mark and stare at the remaining two words. They are the same word. The only difference is that one is hashtagged. Do they mean the same, or something different? Is there added value in the repetition? Is it worth leaving one un-hashtagged, so that the original sentiment exists, unfettered by digital accoutrements? It’s so important to get all this right. I want people to know instantly, at a glance, that this post is about pastries in their purest form. This is Platonic Pastry.

I delete the hashtag so that the post simply says:

PASTRIES.

Full stop or no full stop? A full stop always looks decisive and commanding, but it can also look more cool and casual if you just leave the sentence hanging there, like, Oh I’m so busy in my dazzling life I don’t even have time to punctuate. The squalid truth is I over-punctuate when I’m stressed/excited. I can go four exclamation marks on a good/bad day. Exclamation marks are the people-pleaser’s punctuation of choice. It makes us seem eager and pliable. Excited to talk to you! You!!!! I always notice other people’s punctuation. When someone sends me a message with no exclamation marks or kisses, I respect them. I also think: are they depressed? Did I do something to offend them?

Sometimes, I see people using whole rows of emojis, and I just want to hold them.

PASTRIES

Perfect.

Yes, I think that probably says it all.

Hm.

Is it enough, though, really?

Oh god. I just. Don’t. Know.

‘Can I help you?’

I look up in fright. It is my turn at the counter.

‘Uh …’

I look at the croissants on the rough stone plinth. I see now that there is a problem. I’m pretty sure – and I am very observant – that one of them is from yesterday. It looks stiffer than the rest, the way it’s hunched at the front, like it’s all uptight. It is a decidedly different texture and colour to the rest. I don’t know whether this suggests age, or some kind of bacterial contamination, or what. How did I miss this? I know that I am definitely going to get that croissant if I ask for a croissant.

I am paralysed. I do not know what to do. I do not feel able to ask for a specific croissant, although I certainly feel I deserve one. I do a quick calculation. There are eight croissants there and the defective one is on my side rather than the server’s, so really it’s unlikely I’ll get lumped with it. I exhale. I decide to go for it. I need this experience, to fulfil my … planned experience.

I speak. ‘One croissant, please.’

The server nods, but then for some reason known only to herself, goes to take the CROISSANT OF CALAMITY from the front. I shout: ‘Oh, hey! Excuse me! Could I please not have that croissant?’

I say it with fear and also with absolute rectitude.

The server’s tongs twitch. She says, slowly: ‘They’re … all the same.’

I say: ‘Could I just have one from the back please? Thank you!’

Everyone is looking at me.

She speaks slower still, as though I am an idiot. ‘But … they are all the same.’

‘That one is a slightly different hue, I believe,’ I say, quieter.

She peers at the croissants. The person behind me in the queue comes forward for a look, too. The barista abandons the Gaggia and comes over. The cashier. They all look, and then they all stare at me.

‘It was a preference really,’ I whisper. ‘Please, just put any croissant in a bag.’

She puts the croissant in a paper bag. It hits the bottom with a ding. I press my card on the reader and will it to bleep. Bleep for Chrissakes, bleep fucking fuckbud fucker.

It bleeps. I pelt.

I run into the Ladies, sling the croissant in the bin and have a short cry. It’s fine, though. People cry in WerkHaus all the time. They have these little soundproofed booths near reception for private calls, but mostly people just use them for crying in.

When I’m done crying I take a piss. As I wipe, I check for blood, as always.

I look at my phone.

PASTRIES

The sentiment remains the same, even if the truth has turned out differently. And it’s the sentiment that counts.

PASTRIES

In a way, it’s perfect. Factual. But I’m still not 100 per cent. I recall something Suzy Brambles once said in her ‘Incontrovertible Gram Tips’. She said: ‘Go with your first draft.’

I change the words back to:

PASTRIES, WOO! #PASTRIES

Right. I feel almost ready to go on this. As a final check, I text Kelly.

Kelly is my oldest friend and most trusted social media editor.

Pls will you check one thing for me before I post

No no I said no more of this

Please

No, you’re driving me mad with this daily bombardment

It’s not every day!

Mate, it’s most days

Please I’m having the worst day already!!!! I was just served a defective pastry

No

I beg of you

I am not endorsing this behaviour

What behaviour???

This lunacy. I don’t think it’s healthy. Or authentic

Authentic???

You said that we ‘grew up together’ in a post the other day. We were 22 when we met

It made a better story! Anyway we almost did, in that we both grew up in the North!

WTF

Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition

DOUBLE WTF

Well we inevitably put a filter on ourselves, don’t we? Even as honest people moving through society

Stop intellectualising your problem. Life is not a lookalike competition

Just sent you the post, pls review and feed back

FFS

She’ll read it. I know she will. She doesn’t do much while she’s waiting for her receptionist shift to start – other than watching blackhead-removal videos, which I think somehow give her a sense of universal equilibrium being restored.

She replies after a few seconds:

It’s fine. Really don’t know what you were concerned about

Thank you x

I bestow a kiss! I hope she really feels that ‘thank you’. My politeness-verging-on-grace. Then after a few seconds I send:

I hope you took time to really consider it and didn’t just rush off an answer?

She doesn’t reply.

She does that sometimes, Kelly. Shuts down. She did a much bigger version when I was getting together with my ex, Art – back in those heady days of hard wooing – and I asked her to check the things I was sending him. Sometimes you just need a second opinion, you know? What are friends for?

Kelly’s from the North, too. She’s Yorkshire. The white rose to my red. She’s an angel in my lifetime but she has started to publicly undermine me and to be honest it’s starting to grate. Example: last week I posted a photo of a leaf-covered bench in the park with the words:

Autumn, you’ve always been my favourite

and she commented:

Do you think liking autumn makes you a more complex person?

A few days later I posted a charming vista of a field and she wrote,

Mate, there’s nothing in this picture

It’s not the kind of thing you expect from a beloved friend. BUT – if you had to ask me who knew me best, who loved me best, who I loved best – well, I do know what the answer would be. Kelly thrills me, it’s as simple as that. She thrills me. We might have drifted apart a bit of late, but we have the kind of friendship that can weather emotional distance. It’s very easy-come, easy-go. Like an open marriage.

Kelly has a son, Sonny. I’ve known them twelve years, although technically I met Sonny first. He’s fourteen now. Kelly got pregnant with her university ex, whom she told me she swiftly outgrew. He now has a baby with another woman and is a proper truck-blocking activist. He and Kelly once stayed up a tree for six weeks, while she was pregnant, and I think it was during that time she realised the relationship was really over. It’s going to be a make-or-break holiday when you’re crapping in a carrier bag and arguing about who has more snacks left because there’s no electronic entertainment. Kelly still has a star tattoo on her wrist from when she used to be an anarchist. (She never turned down a cheeseboard, though. I think you often find that with anarchists – they still like the small comforts.)

The last time I saw Sonny, a couple of months ago, I told him to stop looking at girls with long fake nails on Instagram because they were emulating porn stars. He said I was nail-shaming them. He told me his friend pressed the wrong button on a vending machine in America and got the morning-after pill instead of a drink, so what did I have to teach him? People are depressed about the totalitarian state we’re heading towards – a world where our internet use will be restricted to viewing the shiny, ham-like faces of our unelected leaders – but at least it will save the kids from porn. Every cloud.

I’ve told Kelly that we have to respect social media more than the younger generations because we’re not digital natives. We were raised in print. This shift has been a major cultural and psychological upheaval in our lifetimes. We didn’t get email until we were at university. The internet can throw some curveballs. I once ordered a bureau off eBay and when it arrived it was a miniature one, for a doll’s house. I thought it was a bargain at £1.99. Plus, we weren’t brought up natural broadcasters. We’ve had to catch up, and too quickly. I remember that move towards daily (hourly; constant) documentation. Years ago a friend drove me mad on a hike, stopping to take photos all the time for her Facebook. I was very frustrated, as I wanted to keep walking. It was like being in a constantly stalling car. Now, I’d be the one scrambling to the nearest cliff face for a signal.

Speaking of which.

It’s time to bite the bullet. I add a last-minute impulse hashtag. Really going now!

#shameabouttheservice

I post the picture. The waiting begins. It’s like that conundrum of the tree falling in the empty forest. Does it make a sound if there’s no one there? If you put something on social media and no one likes it, do you even exist? I have calculated that with my number of followers I can measure a successful post on the basis of approximately ten likes per minute. Still, there’s no formula for it – I’ve tried everything. One time I even arranged a day trip to Heptonstall to photograph Sylvia Plath’s grave (literary, tragic, it ticked so many boxes!) and so many people lit their little hearts for it that it was worth the £100 train fare. I used to do things for their own sake, but now grammability is a defining factor.

We’re almost at a minute and no—

Yes! There’s one! And two! And three and four! Thank you. Now we’ve broken the seal, it all gets sexy. Someone comments, ‘Yumstrels.’ I dabble with the notion of liking the comment. It’s a commitment, liking comments, because once you start you really have to follow it through and like all of them. Really it’s best not to start, plus it looks less obsessive, less like you’re monitoring things. I just left this here and walked away! What, you think I have nothing better to do with my day than refresh this inanity?

I’m waiting for any likes, but really I’m waiting for the women I currently admire online. It’s been moving this way for a few years and recently it calcified. I want the women to want me more. I wait for a name that means something. I wait for a sign. There are certain people whose attention I am keen to attract. Margot Ripkin. Buzzface Cruise. Wintering Marianne. Suzy Brambles. Suzy Brambles more than the rest, perhaps, because she just started following me back (two days ago! I’ve been following her for years), so it feels as though we are now connected. As we should be. Entwined, you might say.

Suzy Brambles. Oh, Suzy Brambles, with your hostile bob and black Citroën DS and kickboxing lessons and almond eyes and lips like you’ve been sucking on a frozen Zeppelin. What’s not to like? And I like. I like and like and like. The first post that ensnared me was a charred corncob on a beach barbecue, with the caption: The adventure is already inside you. I was pretty lost on the adventure front at the time, so that corncob spoke to me on many levels. This morning, Suzy Brambles has been kicking up leaves in Dulwich. She is such a playful thing! I have watched the video five times already. Suzy Brambles only posts in black and white. This is because she has real integrity. I watch the video of her in the park again. Each time I watch it, I find something new to admire in her choice of composition, angle and filter.

I look at the time. It is almost 11 a.m. How did that—

ART SAID

‘That thing is the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you look at at night.’

We were in bed. It was a week or so before we broke up. I was looking at my phone while we were having sex. I see now how that might have been interpreted as rude – some might even say offensive. He put his hands on my shoulders and said: ‘Stop.’

I stopped.

He said: ‘Jenny, somehow I just don’t feel like I have your full attention.’

‘You do!’

‘I don’t. Even when you’re here it’s like you’re not here. It’s like half your head is somewhere else.’

It was. Half my head was in Copenhagen, where Suzy Brambles was having a splendid time. The earthenware in one particular eaterie was ‘lickable’.

Art said: ‘I feel as though this constant interfacing has become a wall between us.’

I almost said: But does sex require one’s full attention? Eating doesn’t, after all – and that is arguably as important as sex.

I looked back at my phone. I smiled at Suzy smiling.

Art pulled himself out from under my legs, sat on the side of the bed and whipped off the condom. He rubbed his face. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We have a problem.’

I finished my comment, a simple, single red heart emoji – the classic choice; just … enough – clicked the phone to sleep and looked at him. Art said: ‘You are on that thing when we eat, you are on it when we watch TV, you are on it when we go for a walk, and now you are on it when we are having sex.’

‘It was a slow bit!’

‘It was sex, Jenny. Not a film.’

I looked at him and tried a cute: ‘Sometimes it’s as good as the movies, though.’

‘Mmmmmmmm.’

It was a long sound, that mmmm. Like a door buzzer, or a hornet trapped in a jar. I watched the sunlight on the wall flicker. Summer was almost over. First thing in the morning and last thing at night. There was a time – even in my life – when that slot would have been reserved for a lover.

Art said: ‘Are you in love with someone on the internet?’

‘No!’ I said. Which was almost not a lie.

He said: ‘I’ve noticed a direct correlation between you growing more distant from me and closer to your phone.’

He said: ‘It’s like I can’t get to you when you’re there. Your eyes are all wide and you’re plugged in like a happy little robot.’

He said: ‘Except you’re not happy.’

‘How do you know I’m not happy?’

‘Because you’re never satisfied.’

I took his penis in my hand. ‘Maybe that’s just me.’

I WALK

back into the main office. It’s all creative types in here – advertising and media, mostly. There’s a lot of lino. A lot of dachshunds. Lots of plants that are real-imitating-plastic. You see men with visible pocket watches high-fiving over MacBook Airs and you worry about what this means for evolution.

I work for an online magazine, The Foof, and it is as awful as it sounds. My editor, Mia, is fucking terrifying – stupidly; admirably? – socially fearless. I think this is her seventh or eighth start-up. Art called her a ‘delectable oaf’ (not to her face). I’m anxious to please her because I’m an approval junkie and have a teacher–pupil dynamic with people in positions of authority. You should see me getting a smear test – it’s like I’m trying to sell them my super-clean vagina. I thought I’d offended Mia on Friday when I told her UV uplighters for teeth were imbecilic, unaware that she was wearing one (I thought she was slurring on her anti-depressants) – but then she liked one of my pictures on Sunday and I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew everything was okay. Saturday was fraught – I spent a lot of it questioning my whole life and worth. Even though I don’t respect Mia, I fear her and professionally that’s ultimately a good thing because it means I want to impress her, so I give my work my all. I’m only really effective around people I want to impress. Otherwise, my energy deadens. I’d churn out dross if I actually felt comfortable around my boss. Vague social terror: that’s my motivation.

The Foof has a permanent office here, in the loosest sense. There’s a sign – FOOF TOWERS – in fluffy pink letters across the back wall. The sign could be taken down at any given moment. So could the wall.

I make my way across the main space to my desk. I don’t come in every day so I share with Gemma, who writes the horoscopes and product reviews and is so cheerful I want to punch her. (Sorry, I don’t want you thinking that just because I work in the media I’m a fucking idiot.)

I sit down and start to compose an email, which is what I do after any unsatisfactory social interaction.

DRAFTS

Subject: That Croissant

Dear Breakfast Maven, Queen of the Granola,

You know and I know that croissant was prehistoric. It was yesterday’s batch, that’s why you were trying to palm it off on me. I deserve a fresh croissant, do I not, for my £3.50? In America, that kind of hesitation within the service industry would be unthinkable. JUST GIVE ME THE CROISSANT I WANT NEXT TIME, FOR THE LOVE OF COMMON DECENCY.

Kind regards,

Jenny McLaine

The Foof (columnist)

THEY SAY

it is crucial to incorporate mindfulness into your daily routine. I like to get on it every few hours, just to be sure. After I’ve written the email, I take a deep breath and count to ten in Hindi. I even have an app to remind me to take time out regularly. It shouts TAKE A BREAK, BABY! in an Austin Powers voice (I chose the voice from six options). It’s a little obnoxious, but it’s good to know something cares.

I check le status of mon croissant. Thirty-five likes. Dear sweet Christ alive. You’ve got to be kidding. The thirties are disastrous numbers, they really are.

As I’m studying the post, I realise that I have automatically tagged WerkHaus and, while I am displeased with the morning’s events, I do not want anyone losing their job on my account. I’ve seen An Inspector Calls – several times – with my mother. I know how much people in the service industry can take things to heart. My life is a perfect war zone of potential consequences.

I go into Edit Post and de-tag the location. Too late! Someone from WerkHaus – Joel from The Little Green Bento Den – has commented:

Was it the hench one with the underbite? She’s a right Orc

Fucking Joel. I consider what to do. I don’t want Suzy Brambles or any other notables thinking I am endorsing this bile. I also don’t want to get into an argument with Joel that could last several hours and get my blood up. I’ve sacrificed entire emotional half-days before now to online altercations. And I’ve got a column to write. Digital is not at odds with the flesh, as some might argue; this all has a very physical effect on me.

I type back at Joel:

Putting the miso in misogynist as ever, I see

There. That, I think, is smart and final. No coming back from that. Now we can all relax.

I stare at my comment.

Oh god. No it’s not smart at all. It’s over-handled and ham-fisted, like all my comments. Do you even get miso in a bento box? Fuck my life.

I delete the comment and Joel’s comment and just as I’m regretting deleting Joel’s comment (it looks cowardly, to delete without comment, and he’s the kind of fucker who’ll notice and comment again) – I put my head in my hands.

‘MORNING, WOKERS!’

I look up. Mia is standing over me. She’s wearing a blindingly white dress with a giant turtleneck obscuring the bottom half of her face. She looks like a Victorian who just got back from space. Mia’s Boston terrier, Simone, is by her feet. Simone once shat my initials perfectly on the office floor. You can call me paranoid, but there was no denying it was a definite ‘J’ and an ‘M’. Another victory for meaning. My point is: you know someone judges you when their dog judges you. No language skills, but what a critic! Etc.

‘How’s my fave ginger whinger?’ says Mia, in a voice that cuts right through my face and straight into my being. She is holding a turmeric-coloured drink and a twisted copy of Vogue.

‘I really hate it when you call me that.’

‘Don’t be a hater, bébé. Buzz on the chans is there’s a new personal drone that doubles as a clutch bag. When you’re out you just fling it in the air and it captures your night from above from all angles.’

I really think I could shoot Mia, possibly in the face, if her opinion of me wasn’t so important to me.

‘I don’t need an aerial reminder of how appalling my night was,’ says Vivienne, the features editor. Vivienne is six foot and wiry, with thick veins ribbing her arm muscles. She looks like the kind of woman who’s spent a lot of time smoking on Spanish beaches. I am certain she has killed. I don’t think I’ve once seen her smile and she isn’t on any social media – which only adds to her menace, and her valour. Vivienne and Mia are friends from fashion college. Anyone can see Mia’s always been the one with money and ambition and Vivienne is the cerebral sponger. Vivienne doesn’t give zero fucks; she gives minus fucks. Every time I am near her I want to whisper: Teach me how to eat an artichoke, Vivienne.

‘Are you completely sectionable, Viv?’ says Mia. ‘That’s the teenage-girl angle. Pictures from above make everyone look like a teenage girl. If you partook in popular culture I wouldn’t have to tell you this.’

‘I do not partake,’ says Vivienne. ‘I am a puppetmaster.’

‘Well, I’ve ordered a sample clutch drone,’ says Mia, ‘which I shall be trying out, in the name of investigative journalism.’

Vivienne says: ‘Speaking of which, I’m going to patronise that new Israeli near Kings Cross at lunch. I may not be back for a few days.’

‘Jenny!’ says Mia, as though she has just remembered my name. ‘How was your weekend?’

‘Busy! A few drinks, a private view, you know.’

‘Yes, I saw your picture.’

‘Oh, did you? Great, thanks,’ I gush.

‘Are you not going to ask me what I got up to?’

‘What did you get up to?’

She scrutinises my face. ‘I went … for a meal … which I know you know, because you liked other pictures around the same time mine went up, so why didn’t you like mine?’

Vivienne adjusts her neck. She knows the score. She keeps the score.

‘I must have … missed it? You know how sometimes it randomly reorders things.’

‘Hmm.’

The truth is, I like every fifth or sixth thing Mia posts – not always because I like them, but to sort of say hi and remind her of my existence. I don’t want to look rabid. I thought I was managing my affection well. Evidently not.

‘And how is Art?’ Mia asks.

‘He’s fine! Busy.’

She clasps her hands. This again.

Suffice to say that Art has a lot of hangers-on. A lot of women of a certain age. I know that’s unfeminist to say, but it’s a phenomenon that brings out the worst in me. At exhibitions, launches, shows … He’s the sexy, shaven-headed photographer. The hot thug. I can see it in their eyes: he’s a welcome, regular escape from their non-pussy-licking husbands.

‘Can he make drinks on Friday?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Not even one?’

‘One drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll ask.’

‘Do that.’

‘I will.’

‘Appreciated.’

‘So,’ Mia continues. ‘What’s the column this week?’

‘Co-habitation with women versus co-habitation with men. A nostalgia piece, in part, about my uni days.’

‘Juicy anecdotes, searing insight, rounded off with everywoman wisdom?’

‘Check, check, check!’

She hesitates.

‘Just, keep it on the hi-fi, rather than the low-fi.’

‘Spice it up,’ says Vivienne. ‘S’boring. You’re like someone in a Sunday supplement moaning about their shoes.’

Mia says: ‘Now, now. But yes, Jenny, it’s true. We’re all bored stiff with your vulnerability. Save it for your therapist. We need bold voices, not weak cries for help. We want ferocity. Strength. A roar from the lady jungle, not a whimper. This is the frontline of feminism. We have work to do. Remember the name of your column: INTENSE MODERN WOMAN.’

‘I mean, it’s an oxymoron though, isn’t it, having a column in a feminist magazine.’

Mia stares at me. ‘Do you mean a column as in an erection? Are we still doing phallus chat? COME ON. Brand too strong for some punk-ass bear to stop this wave. Make it gain traction.’

I swallow. ‘I understand, Mia.’

I do not.

She starts to walk away and turns back to say: ‘The headline of this conversation is: don’t hold back. Explode everything about what living with other women is really like. Put a grenade up the arse of that female utopia.’

‘Got it.’

Simone follows Mia, giving me a hefty side-eye.

Vivienne walks to the kitchenette zone and starts wrenching at the coffee machine. ‘Why are you chewing your fingers?’ she asks me. ‘Anxiety?’

‘No, it’s because I think I’m fucking delicious.’

I check my likes once more (forty-two, I should really kill myself) and start to write.

I stop typing every two minutes or so and let my thumb and thoughts zip round in a fast, looping flight. This, this, this, this. Back to work for a few sentences. Back round again. This, this, this. My head teems.

This is how I think:

I am doing what I should be doing: writing. Oh that’s quite good. I can do a good sentence when I put my mind to it – no wait, it’s terrible, why am I so terrible? Am I so terrible because of that time I kissed my male friend even though I was in a relationship because I have no way of separating platonic heterosexual friendship from groundwork for a sexual encounter? Oh, there’s something about politics! I should know more about politics. I will like it so that people think I know about politics. Or am I so terrible because I once tweeted a line of my own poetry after I’d been up all night and someone replied: Pull your head out your ass once in a while, and it was the brother of someone I once dated. No I am terrible because someone once commented on a column – apropos of nothing – YOU HAVE NO INTEGRITY. I am obsessed with whoever wrote that. How dare they be so right about me. It was the top comment, too, so it lives forever as the first thing you see beneath the piece – I can’t believe it can’t be removed on legal grounds. Ugh, this woman with the self-care haikus is awful. Her podcast is no. 2 in the charts. I should do a podcast. But what would my podcast be about? Maybe politics. Maybe politics for people who know nothing about politics. Like me. I am A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE. I just need to find the time. I don’t know how people find the time to do podcasts. I can’t even find the time to finish this senten—

My phone pings with a message. I pounce on it.

It’s one of my lodgers. Sid.

Hey have you seen the half avocado that was in the fridge? x

She sends me daily micro-aggressions like this.

I reply:

Yes I ate it for breakfast, thought it would be okay as you ate half my sourdough last week x

That wasn’t me, that was Jonah, as you know I am gluten free x

He was staying in your room for the night tho x

He is his own person, why am I accountable for his actions? x

Fine, I’ll buy you another avocado. A whole one x

Not much good to me right now is it? Not to worry! Thank you, I do appreciate you replacing it x

I keep telling myself this lodger situation is only for a while, but I don’t know how I’ll ever afford to live in that house on my own. I just probably need to work harder, somehow. I should be a slashy. Journalist/podcaster/politician. How hard can it be to be a politician anyway? They’re all floundering and resigning these days. I can flounder and resign! Especially for cash. I’ll give it some thought when I get some time. I have three lodgers at the moment: Sid, Frances and Moon. They’re all in their early twenties, which makes me feel great. Usually, when I get in, they’re colonising the lounge. The other day when I got in they’d been at an all-day festival at Victoria Park. Swathed across the sofa, bleached and feathered, they looked like a gang of crooked fairies. The evil fairies that kill babies. Those kind of fairies.

Mia comes over. She has a print-out of my column in her hand.

‘Well it’s not going to start the revolution,’ she says. ‘But it might light a few torches in some under-educated backwaters. Now, do you have any candid photos of these days?’

‘I’m sure I can root something out,’ I say.

‘Excellent. Keep it halal.’

I look at my nearest desk-neighbour, confused. My desk-neighbour whispers: ‘She’s trying to make it a thing. Like kosher.’

I nod at Mia. She gives me an empty fist bump and walks away.

I pull out my laptop and start to go through my scanned old photos, but I end up looking at photos of me and Art. I stall over a photo of my mother and Art in a bar. They have their arms around each other. I recall how my mother burst in that night – in stilettos – and shouted (she always shouts, to be fair – no no: she projects): ‘Get me a seat, would you? MY BALLS ARE KILLING ME.’ Everyone in the bar looked – which was what she wanted, of course. Art thought she was the most. Showboats, both of ’em.

‘Your wit’s hers,’ Art said, more than once.

However, one likes to think the apple fell a little further from the wit tree, rolled a good way across the field of wit, coming to rest at the foot of Wit Mountain.

Anyway – she was so nice to him that night. Too nice. She’d never been nice to anyone I’d introduced her to before. But she was all over Art from the get-go. When he went to the Gents, I said: ‘You seem … very eager to please him. Not like you.’

After all, she’d said it countless times: Darling, who needs a man when you have a detached house, a personal trainer and a Teasmade?

‘What do you mean, it’s not like me?’ She did innocent eyes.

I did cynical ones. ‘You’ve always been rude to my boyfriends.’

‘I like his energy. It complements yours. And mine.’

I sat back. ‘Are you making a play for him? Because if you are, this situation is veering horribly close to cliché.’

‘Pahaha! Making a play – what a notion.’

‘Because you actually described yourself earlier as a “gymslip mum”. You actually used those words.’

‘It’s as simple as this: I think he’s good for you.’

‘I’m good as I am. I don’t need anyone to make me better.’

‘I know that. But I also know—’

‘What?’

‘How it gets, sometimes.’

In my head I thought she might mean ‘lonely’, but I didn’t want to push it, and anyway Art was coming back. And how could she be lonely, this woman who professed to be constantly harangued and harassed by the voices of spirits, which invaded her thoughts like rampant toddlers, or so she said. I once asked her: How do you switch off? She winked and raised her gin glass to me.

She put her hand on my arm. ‘But you must comb through his teenage years with him. Don’t let him be evasive. Don’t let his own … toxic experiences stop him … experiencing things with you.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t need relationship advice from someone who hasn’t had a relationship since the nineties.’

‘Well what do you call this?’

‘What?’ I said, confused.

She batted her hand back and forth between us.

‘Me and you? Hah! I mean a proper relationship. A romantic relationship.’

‘Romantic. God help you.’

But she did have a few relationships, years ago – relationships in which she invested enough to be jealous. Are you sitting comfortably? I’ll begin anyway.

A long time ago, back in the days when love was still analogue, my mother knew a man named Roger. Roger the Theatre Producer, to give him his full title. And you really must, with men like that, or there’s simply no point to them. Like most of my mother’s men, Roger was married and lived in London, but he travelled a lot. The first night he stayed I came downstairs feigning a headache, a thirst, I was feverish (with curiosity). I was thirteen.

She was in the kitchen fixing something long and cool. He was short and hot.

He started at the sight of me, white-gowned in the doorway. Oh, hello! You must be Jenny.

I nodded and went to sit at the end of the sofa, beside the coiled cobra lamp that was my mother’s most beloved possession. I smiled at Roger expectantly. I had things to learn. I liked the way his arms looked in his short-sleeved shirt. I was at an age when I still trusted muscles.

How old are you? I asked.

Forty.

Wow. So vastly, impossibly ancient. He looked smart and rich and like he’d been around all the blocks. I hadn’t even been around our block. I tucked my feet up and sat, knees making a rhombus – greeting him, and all exciting men, everywhere!

I heard the glasses she was holding tinkle. I didn’t turn. I sat there, eyes on Roger’s eyes, waiting, counting. Two seconds, three. What time is it, Mrs Wolf? Her hands clamped onto my shoulders. She hauled me out to the hall.

You’re too old to sit like that.

She wanted me to cry. I wanted to cheer. I suppose because I felt like we were finally on the edge of something real. She wasn’t protecting me with her anger – not like when I ran near the road or went missing in shops. There was fear in her eyes along with the anger, I could see that, but there was also a third emotion – one she wasn’t comfortable with, but one she couldn’t suppress. Aha! Ahaha! Oh, the pitiless epiphanies of the child confronting the threshold guardian. She was my end-of-level boss, the obstacle between me and some higher plane; some outside; and I would defeat her eventually, and she knew it. Those spurts of golden growth – they come like sailors, giving everything, taking everything.

And then one day, Roger stopped coming.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘It ran its course,’ my mother said. ‘As all relationships with men should.’

I looked in her eyes for the lie. She stared back, like she always did, with her eyes folded. I’d looked into her eyes so many times, in real life and in photographs, trying to do a sort of past-life regression on myself. And what of my mother’s childhood?

The McLaine Sisters were four redheaded sisters, my mother being the eldest by three years. Even my grandparents saw their children as a novelty – they made them sing together in competitions on holiday in Rhyll, Blackpool, and other such seaside towns. My mother said they lined up in a row on stage, like the von Trapps. They wore black jodhpurs and white blouses and grey waistcoats, like four little horsewomen. (‘Not my first rodeo,’ my mother says, every time she’s about to go on stage.) They usually won, but when they didn’t it rather ruined the holiday. My mother still throws out a tune when she has a drink in her. She’s what you might call a loose karaoke cannon.

What does your mother do? the kids asked at school.

She’s an actress, I said.

She did still her vocal exercises every night. She rewatched her appearances in obscure soaps (Under the Doctor) and low-rent biopics (Shelly’s Shame). She had a bedroom that was more of a boudoir. When my friends came round she tried to correct their pronunciation and gave them instructions on voice projection and vocal preparation – Breathe deeply from your lower lungs, imagine a rubber ring around your waist and try to push the ring outwards as you breathe in. Shoulders down, breathe in through your nose, out through your nose and mouth. Bend your knees – not THAT much, you look like you’re on the toilet … Relax! RELAX!

We had hot holidays. A 20-inch TV. I swanned around school in my Clarks Magic Steps with the hidden key in the heel. I used to drive with her on the ring road, to and from the satellite towns where she performed: Sale, Altrincham, Eccles, Weaste. Me, riding shotgun, solemn as a priestess. I used to saunter into those clubs and pubs, those half-done places that smelled of stale beer and freshly sawn wood. I saw the staff and punters nudging each other. There, look, it’s her. The Daughter. The One.

And so that night at the restaurant, I watched her carefully with Art. The way she straightened his napkin for him, pleased on a helpless level, and it was like seeing her smooth the tie of someone who’d never existed. She was relieved. She didn’t have to worry I was going to be left stranded. I’d met a man, a socially mobile, upward man, and she, for all her old feminist foot-bones, could relax on account of the fact I had safely – finally (that shelf was getting dusty!) – entered some version of adulthood.

INT. YOUNG JENNY’S BEDROOM

Night. A single bed with a rainbow-patterned duvet cover. A rug. A full bookshelf. A bedside lamp on. Everything small and infused with hope. Jenny is in bed. Carmen is pacing the room, reading from a book.

CARMEN (over-emphasising): Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be OUTRAGEOUS. Go the WHOLE HOG. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s UNBELIEVABLE.

Jenny picks at a patch of loose paint on the wall. Carmen stops reading.

CARMEN: Right, that’s it.

JENNY: What?

CARMEN: You’re not listening!

JENNY: I am!

CARMEN: Do you know how much people pay to come and see me these days?

JENNY: A million pounds.

CARMEN: Seven fifty with booking fee.

JENNY: Wow.

CARMEN: Look. I’ve worked a long day after a long night and I’m off to work again as soon as Aunty Bev gets here and I’m trying to make precious time for my daughter and she could not care less.

JENNY: I was listening.

CARMEN: You weren’t! You couldn’t give a monkey’s. Here I am, giving it my all. TO THE WALL.

JENNY [quietly]: You’re overdoing it.

CARMEN: What did you say?

JENNY: Again.

CARMEN [huffing]: It’s drama, darling. It requires voices.

JENNY: It’s Roald Dahl.

Carmen throws down the book and storms out of the room.

Jenny sighs, rolls over, switches her lamp off and goes to sleep.

IN THE WINGS

We were at the Mind Body Spirit show at the Birmingham NEC. I stood behind the partition wall, watching her doing her thing on stage – plucking people from the audience and giving them messages from beyond. I was drinking a cup of lemonade. She was grandstanding. She was majestic.

She says she’ll see you for the dancing, pet, can you accept that?

She said you were there by her side the whole time, and your love let her know she could go. Can you accept that, my love? You can. Thank you. Bless you …

When she’d finished, the applause was deafening. The crowd demanded an encore. At one point she looked to the side and winked at me and I got a thrill so electrifying it made me judder. I blew bubbles into my lemonade. Lemonade spilled over the rim of my cup, onto the grey top of the temporary stage block. The stage manager told me off and sent someone for a cloth, but I didn’t care, I was too busy watching my mother, in mid-flow, bowing and smiling and saying thank you, soaking it all up. I wanted to capture that sight of her, preserve it forever, that scene. I remember thinking that sentence to myself: You are mine, all mine.

When she got off stage, we walked around the festival together. It was a goblin market. We stopped at a stall called ‘The Horned Goddess’ selling dream-catchers, angel cards and gemstones. It stank of joss sticks. My mother was wearing her full regalia. A child jumped away from her. ‘Mummy, that lady’s scaring me!’

My mother affected a look of horror. ‘I’m not a lady!’

We stopped by a small gypsy caravan. MADAME AURACLE: AURA READINGS AND MORE it said on the side.

‘Do you want your aura reading?’ my mother asked.

‘If it’s all right I’d rather have a jacket potato with coleslaw,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘After this.’

In the caravan there was a photo studio of sorts set up in the lounge: a Polaroid camera on a tripod. A sectioned-off area under a curtain.

The madame was sitting on a tasselled stool. She was as wide as she was high, and dripping in turquoise. ‘I am Madame Auracle,’ she said.

I sat in the electric chair, awaiting my execution. The assistant was wearing a baggy olive-green T-shirt. She instructed me to place my hands on the metal plates either side of the chair. I obeyed her because she looked like Christina Ricci, and I would have done anything for Christina Ricci. She stood in front of me with the camera. ‘Smile!’ I obliged.

A few seconds later, the photo chugged out of the camera. I peered at the picture. I looked startled and stern, like a constipated headmistress in an Adidas T-shirt who had farted a rainbow.

‘Now for the reading.’ Madame Auracle took the photo in her hand and raised her eyebrows. ‘Lots of red … You are an enthusiastic and energetic individual, forever on the lookout for new adventures. You are quick to anger and can lose your temper over the smallest thing. You are generous with your time and energy when called upon for help. You are easily bored.’

‘She won’t even sit still to watch a film,’ my mother said.

Madame Auracle continued. ‘And so now we come to the other side of your personality – we have lots of yellow here. The yellow part of your aura represents the highly critical part of you. But those who have high standards, that exacting voice inside that is so harsh on the world and others, that same voice is even harsher when it turns on you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ my mother said, ‘definitely. She has VERY high standards.’

I nodded.

‘And if you were easier on yourself, then you might find it easier to allow others to love you for who you are.’

‘Too true,’ my mother said.

Madame Auracle nodded sagely. ‘Your main fault is that you can be overly analytical. And this creates a fear that makes you unable to communicate openly and freely.’

I said, ‘Sounds like a lot of people I know, to be honest.’

Madame coughed. ‘That concludes the reading. Most auras stretch three feet around the physical body; however, if you’re a trauma survivor your aura stretches fifty feet around you – which means people around you on the bus will be sitting in it. Your mother will be sitting in it. We’ll all be sitting in it, right now. Your aura mess. I can clean it up for you for an extra £5.99.’

I shook my head.

‘You should have a quick clean,’ my mother said.

‘I’m not traumatised.’

THEY SAY

you should never look at the comments. That to go ‘below the line’ is to open the portal to death and damnation. BTL = the Gateway to Hell. I say, that kind of self-control is one for the healthy of mind and heart. Meanwhile, you’ll find me shrieking and wallowing in the lake of digital hellfire with all the worst people on the internet. Waving, drowning, backstroke, who knows what I’m doing – but I’m not for being saved. Come on in! The water’s … excruciating.

My column goes up around 4 p.m., for bored souls on the homeward commute. In that way, you could say it’s asking for trouble. I sit at my desk and refresh the comments over and over. Nice, nice, nice, nice – my brain trips over these like they’re just air, like they’re nothing, like they’re fuck you what are you trying to do be my friend? – then – Ah!

A mean one.

I read it over and over, savouring it.

OVERPRIVILEGED VANITY PUFF PIECE – DOUBT MUCH OF THIS IS ACTUALLY TRUE

I feel the words like holy fire. I am vanquished, but also victorious. They are right! This person understands me completely! (Maybe they’re the secret love of my life??) I knew I was heinous and here is the proof! Let me burn! Let the flaming be righteous! I deserve it. I deserve it all. Moar!

Three times you mention your weight in one article. Seek help.

MOARRRRRR.

I hope you die

Oooh! Old school. Satisfying on a basic level.

Another, somewhat on theme:

Maybe you should start writing something more appropriate like obituaries

I ponder this. I do like thinking about death, so it’s not a terrible idea. I think about my own death approximately once a day. I don’t think about the actual moment of dying; I think about my own autopsy. Or I think about the person, or people, who’ll discover my body. I hope they will be beautiful, and weep tenderly. I think beautiful people weeping tenderly over your dead body is one of the very loveliest thoughts a human can have.

A little way down the thread, I see a comment from Sid. She has written:

How could you do this?? Do I get financial recompense for this exposure of details from my private life? Great piece tho babe! X

I panic. What if Mia sees the comment and deduces that I am no longer living with Art and in actual fact living with AT LEAST ONE WOMAN? My palms sweat. Could I go over to the tech woman and ask her to delete the comment? Or would that make things too obvious? I should have access to my own comments, surely! I’m wide open here. It’s not right.

I call the lift, but when it arrives there are a few people in there, so I smile politely and walk away because the last thing I want is a conversation. As soon as I am on the stairs I am on my phone again.

I sit on the Tube, scrolling – harried, fraught and febrile.

Nicolette is waiting for me outside the Yoga Shed, sucking on her vape. Nicolette looks like a Russian supermodel: rail-thin with puce-tipped hair. She always smells of applemint. She is a new friend, even though I swore off those when I hit thirty-five. We met at a fancy dress party a few months ago – a friend-of-a-friend’s thirtieth. The theme was 1988. I went as Garfield and Nicolette was Jessica Rabbit. My costume was sweltering and I’d just had a Brazilian so was doing neat, dry, rasping farts. I was timing them admirably with the music. I saw a woman who looked like she was concentrating, too. What secrets did she have in her pants? I moved towards her in stages, casual, doing a humble smile when she caught my eye. I stood next to her and it was like slotting into a puzzle I’d been trying to finish for a while. I asked her how she knew the birthday boy and she said: Oh, I’m just staying here taking coke until I despise myself sufficiently to leave. I knew then that this was a person I could really learn from. Not least because the times I have taken drugs I’ve immediately lost my cool. I have no discretion. I get too agitated. One time when I was with a group of people in a pub awaiting a delivery of pills, when the man with the baggie arrived, I shouted ‘PILL!’ across the pub, instead of his name, Chris. Like I said, super cool. You all want to go to Ibiza with me.

The night we met, Nicolette instantly started following me on everything, even Pinterest. She didn’t slide into my DMs; she galloped. Talk about chutzpah. ‘Reply All’ should really be an adjective, and Nicolette is very Reply All. I’d had a few drinks and liked her energy so I didn’t even do the wait-an-hour-to-look-casual thing (the equivalent of waiting three days after a date before you contact them): I went Full Fast Follow Back. I wanted her to see how fast I could love her, too. She was mine and I was hers and we both sensed it. We’ve had to talk, though, about the way we heat up and cool off on each other’s needs when we’ve been in physical proximity, because sometimes it does get intense, like we’re trying to bridge some sort of divide we didn’t feel when we were actually together.

Nicolette used to write for lefty rags but now she writes interior-design features mostly. I guess it’s true: we all get more right wing as we age. Over the past few months, our friendship has worked its way past desperate cordiality to a place of real assault. She’s wearing an antique wedding dress festooned with lace, teamed with tracksuit bottoms and leather boots. It’s a look that screams Sporty Loyal Cossack. We hug. ‘You look crackerjack.’

‘I was unsure when I left the house, but you know when you want positive affirmation on the things you’re wearing? Go to the old girls.’

‘Define old?’

‘Sixty or seventy yah. If I get a wink or a nod off an old girl on the street, I know I’m doing it right. And I got about six on the way here, so.’

Nicolette lines up the angles of her face with the outside of the building. ‘Come in,’ she says, beckoning me towards her without moving. ‘Come in with me.’

‘I’m not looking so hot.’

‘Black and white makes it all all right.’

I stand next to her and smile, lips no teeth because that’s how I feel. I look at Nicolette’s fingertips gripping the phone – her grown-out gel manicure is pleasantly prostitute-y. She takes the shot and posts it. I wonder whether to do one too, but my hesitation – as always – costs me momentum. Nicolette and I have discussed social media – being, as it is, a major obsession within both our lives. We have categorised users, ourselves included: likers, non-likers (stealth users), tactical likers, and the Truly Sound of Mind. I am more honest with Nicolette than I am with anyone else, even Kelly – which is strange for someone I have known a relatively short amount of time. I suppose it’s a different kind of honest. I just let my mouth run. In my lighter moments, it is because I adore her. In my darker, it is because I know that I have nothing to lose by her disapproval.

‘Gimme a mo,’ Nicolette says. She dabs at her phone.

My own phone pings. I look at it. Kelly.

Hey, can you chat?

Nicolette looks up from her phone. ‘Did you cut your hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean that literally, babe. Did YOU cut your hair?’

‘Actually, I did. But then I got it professionally tweaked.’

‘Are you having a breakdown?’

‘No! I don’t think so.’

‘It’s not a criticism. Maybe psycho is the way to go. I almost rugby tackled a charity hijacker to the ground earlier. Do you know what he said to me? Mate, you just dropped your smile. I wanted to end him. More than I wanted to end cancer.’

‘You should have. I hate those harassers. I hate the way they try and teach you how to be a good human. The guilt trip of it, you know? Like they’re responsible for the fabric of society.’

‘Yah. I don’t have time for it, either. I’ve not stopped since 5 a.m. I ate a sandwich on the toilet at work, to save time. Then I remembered that was how Elvis died.’

‘We’d better go in.’

‘I suppose.’

In the studio, we take our positions on our mats.

‘Be non-judgmental with your breathing,’ Natalie the yoga teacher says.

I try to not judge my breath. Hey, breath, just do your thing. Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on stabilising the water in my inner bowl. Natalie said to think of my pelvis as a bowl full of water and to keep my tailbone tucked in and my pelvic floor engaged to keep the water steady. I knew Natalie was a good person the first time I walked into her class. She’s small and nervy, which I find reassuring in a yoga context. It lets you know she’s been through it – spiritually, I mean. She says my Warrior Two is really coming on and I could be as fierce as the goddess Durga if I put my mind to it, so whenever I’m standing anywhere I try and be mindful of my inner water. I am aware I sometimes look a bit odd at the bus stop.

The inner water would be a lot easier to manage without the memories that invade as soon as I take my eye off the present. A door opens in my mind, and in they surge: a procession of people who don’t like me; people I have wronged in some way, Banquo after bastard Banquo – that friend I kissed, that woman who shouted at me on the cycle path, the YOU HAVE NO INTEGRITY man (who in my mind looks like my old French teacher, who I had a crush on). Another spasm at the thought of a meeting with three PRs the other day where I used the word ‘groovy’. Which all takes me back to the croissant, its pathetic tally, my fundamental unlikeability—

‘Move your arms in time with your breathing, Jenny,’ says Natalie.

‘I am.’

‘You’re breathing that fast?’

At the end of the class Natalie asks us to imagine we are trees, rooted into the ground down our backs, but all I can think of is The Human Centipede, which makes me feel hurlsome. That film cannot be unseen. Once I start thinking about it, it’s like there’s literally a rod up my arse. Or a Rod up my arse, depending on who the scientist might have abducted.

‘Concentrate on your breath, Jenny,’ Natalie says. ‘There is nothing but your breath.’ Is she giving me more advice than anyone else in the class? Surely I’m not the worst in the class. Dear sweet Christ, just when your day can’t get any worse. I breathe in and out and try and listen, but it sounds like a ventilator in a hospital, like someone being kept alive, possibly against their will. It’s not a tranquil thought. I’m not sure I’ve ever been good at being tranquil though, in all honesty. I’ve never seen a hammock and thought, that looks relaxing. I just think, that’s going to tip up, with me in it. Kelly bought me a session in a sensory-deprivation pod for my birthday last year and I got out after five minutes. It was so dark in there! The woman giving me the induction told me there was a button on one side for the lights and an alarm on the other side in case I got into trouble. But once the lights were off and I was floating, I couldn’t tell whether I’d spun right round and so I didn’t know which button was the lights and which was the alarm, so I didn’t press anything out of fear. She also told me I’d know my hour session was up because five minutes before the end, a ‘small wave’ would ripple through the tank, emerging from the top of the pod, behind my head. Well, I was on tenterhooks anticipating that small wave. How small is a small wave? Would it flip me over? I got out after five minutes because the tension was so unbearable. I told Kelly it was great, and I really fucking hope she doesn’t buy me another.

After class, Nicolette and I walk together to the end of the street. We pass a skinny woman walking her Italian greyhound.

‘You know that thing about looking like your dog?’ I say to Nicolette. ‘Do you think it could work the other way around? So you get a dog you want to look like and you become as one, shape-wise? Or is it that you’re attracted to things that look like you, in a cloning sort of way?’

‘I don’t think anyone would want to look like an actual dog, would they?’

‘I wouldn’t mind the physique of a Staffie. I might try it. I might get one. Maybe it makes you morph like any relationship, except physically not psychologically.’

My phone pings. Kelly again.

Hey – did you get my last message? Could do with a chat x

I’m thinking of what to reply and start scrolling before I know it and then Nicolette says bye and I put my phone back in my pocket and try to find my bank card and what was I doing? And how is it already dark? I zip up my jacket and hurry on. The street is littered with leaves, like the remains of a parade I’ve missed.

I POST

a video of my feet going through the leaves.

No sooner has it gone up than Nicolette likes it and comments with a line of hearts.

I message her:

You are doing that thing we told each other to be aware of and promised to tell each other about

What thing?

After we’ve seen each other in real life, remember? You don’t need to prove our closeness to anyone else on there or the ongoing elevation of your feelings towards me. No cord has been cut. Same way if we haven’t seen each other or spoken for a while you don’t have to NOT like anything I put on there to make me notice you like you’re withholding affection from a lover

I am not doing that! I felt those hearts

Nicolette I know a real line of hearts and you know a fake line of hearts and that was a fake line of hearts

Okay

As soon as I’ve finished messaging, I go and see what Suzy Brambles has been up to. Not much. Which is rather remiss of her, I think.

I catch the Overground to Dalston Kingsland, and from there walk to Stoke Newington. I like the walk down Kingsland Road, past the meat market and cocktail parlours. Old locals sip bitter outside the last few traditional boozers. Unhinged newspapers scud across the street into coffee cups and cigarette ends.

When I get to the house I open the front door and shuffle in past the day’s pizza leaflets and taxi cards. This hallway is getting darker, and it’s not just the year; it’s the clutter. It used to feel spacious in here. Just after I moved in, Kelly came round and ran down the hall in her boots shouting: Is this your house? Is THIS your HOUSE? I said it was, for now. We have a plan, you see, Kelly and I. A plan that has withstood years, relationships, jobs, everything. We envisage spending our dotage together as an elderly couple in a manor house somewhere on the moors. ‘The Commune’, we call it. When we’re in the Commune … we say:

We’ll drink martinis at 9 a.m.

We’ll try all the drugs we were scared of taking when we were younger, like crack and smack

We’ll Whac-a-Mole each other’s haemorrhoids

We’ll have the highest quality mattresses money can buy*

*And employ a person specifically to put duvet covers on

We’ll go out in each other’s arms, freebasing – with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill on repeat

For now, alas, me and this dark hallway must find some way to coexist.

I walk through to the lounge. Sid and Moon are in there, encrusted on the sofa, drinking Sid’s homemade probiotics.

Fuck. I forgot to buy an avocado.

Frances must be in her room. She’s the only one I can really endure for more than five seconds.

Sid has artist’s hands, scabby and ink-covered. She works as a receptionist at a recruitment agency and spends most of her time doodling. Moon works in PR and is rocking neon knitwear and an erupting beehive. They are having a conversation about intestinal flora.

‘There’s a convincing argument that we are composite organisms rather than individuals,’ says Sid. ‘I don’t know which way round I work sometimes – whether my brain leads my stomach or my stomach leads my brain. If it’s the latter, that means I am ruled by billions of bacteria.’

‘I know what you mean,’ says Moon. ‘I’ve often wondered whether I have a personality or whether everything I’ve ever said or done has been a response to eating or not eating bread.’

‘So true,’ says Sid. ‘Sometimes I think the word “gluten” sets off a chain reaction in my body. I think it’s only a matter of time before they ban the word, too. And quite right …’

‘Listen,’ I say, ‘would you guys mind tidying up in here if you get time tonight? Just, you know … the footbath and the bagel slicer.’

They stare at me. ‘I don’t suppose you remembered the avocado?’ says Sid.

I shake my head. ‘I’ll get you one tomorrow.’

‘No avo and calling me “Stephanie” in your column. It’s practically abusive. Lol!’

‘I changed your name out of respect for your privacy.’

‘And then you wrote about our personal habits.’

‘It was for other women to learn from.’

‘What’s to learn? There was no conclusion in the piece. Nothing in it was of any consequence whatsoever.’

‘The conclusion is if you honestly share then you feel less alone.’

Moon snorts into her ginger ale. ‘You said it was twenty years ago. That’s not very honest.’

‘Again, protecting you.’

‘I think talking about your friends’ bodies in public is a pretty garbage thing to do.’

‘It’s an online feminist magazine. And you’re my lodgers.’

‘Well,’ says Sid, ‘that’s put us in our place.’

My cheeks are hot. I turn and walk out of the room.

I am thirty-five, I am thirty-five, I chant as I walk to my room. I pass Frances’s door – the door to what should have been a different room altogether. I can hear her practising her latest one-woman monologue. ‘Call me, Adolf!’ she’s screaming. ‘Call me! CALL ME!’

She gets funding for this shit. It’s all a bit much.

THEY SAY

screens at bedtime are bad for your brain, but the sensation of holding a phone is, I find, therapeutic. I find the shape of it reassuring. Soothing. I press it to my chest like a bible. Every few minutes I lift it up and look to see what has changed in the world. I feel the weight of my thumb. My heart pounds. My veins thrum. I am in every way alive and progressing. My brain is lit up like the Earth from space at night.

I have a couple more likes for the croissant. I think it’s reasonable to conclude now that it wasn’t worth it. I squandered an entire morning on that. I can’t keep building these cathedrals out of crumbs.

I scroll.

A friend of mine, a semi-famous scriptwriter, has posted a picture of herself in a lift. She isn’t smiling. She looks like she’s in a perfume ad. Like she’s thinking: Look at me, don’t look at me, who are you, I don’t trust you … It is very effective and confusing. I comment:

Looking reflective

We’re real-life friends but she doesn’t follow me on here, which has always been a point of hurt. I know she seldom uses social media and she has a strict sense of how she is ‘seen’. But why don’t I fit in with however she is seen? Why am I not perfect follow material? Also, cuttingly, she follows some truly trashy vloggers, which is a real kick in the teeth. Now I’ve posted the comment I start to worry. It’s like I forget this stage of the process; like I set myself up for it. She might not reply. She hasn’t in the past. So why does that boil down to a failing on my part? I have to ask myself that, because it does. I didn’t use to have this – this innate distrust of myself. I feel like I have lost my pace. It’s like everything has been speeding up and up and up and I reached my own terminal velocity. I thought my twenties felt like rush hour, but no. My twenties were just pleasantly hectic. The thirties are the real rush hour.

She replies, three minutes later.

Miss you Mac

Well now follow me back and you wouldn’t have to, is what I want to say. Then you could see me regularly. It is within your grasp! But I don’t have the gall.

I don’t know when all this started feeling like …

Like …

I see a picture Mia has posted of her dog.

I decide to have a think about whether to like it. A like is never just a like.

My phone beeps. I look.

It’s a text.

From my mother.

I am supposed to pick 12 women who have touched my life and whom I think might participate. I think that if this group of women were ever to be in a room together there is nothing that wouldn’t be impossible. I hope I chose the right 12. May my hugs, love, gestures, and communications remind you how special you are. Please send this back to me. Make a wish before you read the quotation. That’s all you have to do. There is nothing attached. Just send this to 12 women and let me know what happens on the fourth day. Did you make your wish yet? If you don’t make a wish, it won’t come true. This is your last chance to make a wish! Quotation: ‘May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.’ Now, send this to 12 women (or more) (you can copy & paste) within the next 5 minutes. In addition, remember to send back to me. I count as one. You’ll see why xxxxxx

I instantly feel harassed. I stare at the text for a moment. As I’m staring, another text from her arrives.

How r u? xx

It doesn’t feel right that someone older than me abbreviates more than I do, but this is the way it is. She texts me approximately once a week. When I ignore her, she turns up in my dreams. The other night she was in the doorway of my room, wearing a pair of wings – fine-boned and iridescent, like a dragonfly’s. They glistened in the moonlight. When she turns up like that I have to remind myself that the visions are only my version of her – the real her is three hundred miles away.

I close my eyes and see it. That house. Mock Tudor. Mock everything. Our street was adjacent to a big-dog housing estate and the kids would come and chuck crab apples at the garage doors. I’d look down from my turret bedroom window, feeling quite the oppressed royal. Someone wrote ‘WITCH’ in chalk on the wall and my mother looked at it proudly while I burned. Thousands of years ago, witches were respected as healers, she said. They were wise women in the community.

And then we got doctors, I said.

Did we, though, she said, did we ever really ‘get’ doctors like we got witches? What I’m talking about is a gift, not a career choice.

In the garden there was a huge laburnum tree where caterpillars grew in the buds and dangled down on invisible threads in late spring. She liked bright plants. Pinks and yellows, for good energy, to ward off evil spirits. Lupins, azaleas, bleeding hearts. She dug up the pampas grass after I told her it was code for swingers. In the middle of the front lawn there was a monkey puzzle tree, its base beaded with grey stones, Japanese-style, after something she saw in a magazine. Other things: the crack-spangled patio, the planters polka-dotted with moss, the eternally unoccupied bird box. I’ve been back a handful of times. Birthdays. Christmases. Odd times off the slingshot of another failed love affair.

A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN

I lived in Stepney Green, Kentish Town, Streatham. I saved like Scrooge. I wrote for fourteen hours a day. I was in some kind of rocket mode, blazing a way, trying to escape an old atmosphere. I walked home down the worst of roads in a knitted hat, trying to look mad (un-rapeable), with my Yale key between my first two fingers. I had a contact – one, from a kindly teacher at school. I followed up on it. A trade magazine for a supermarket. It was a start. I ate a lot of sautéed vegetables. I had love affairs with men whose guitars were as badly strung as their sentences. Oh, to be fearless in terrible shoes again, oh so fearless and able to tolerate the cheapest of drinks and the cheapest of shoes. Outlet pleather and bad designs but all that time ahead, all that time, to wear terrible shoe after terrible shoe and wake up on another floorboarded, guitar-lined attic room with a leisurely hangover and all the hope in my heart. I’d leave before they woke, leaving a calligraphic note, and I’d go home and close my own door and feel joy when I saw the pictures I’d hung on my walls. The chairs I’d arranged. The carpets I’d chosen. The paint I’d painted. I started to feel what could be a kind of love of creating my own space. A love that could be nurturing and proud, as well as utterly romantic. A love that felt accessible and, if not quite democratic, then self-made. Empowering. All mine. To share with people I might have round, in varying contexts. I was romancing myself. I was also looking after myself. This was progress.

The first day of my first job, I texted my mother to tell her. She replied:

Good luck xxx

Good luck! Have you ever read a less motherly text? Good luck!

I thought about her at least once every three minutes. I scratched my scalp and sniffed it; it smelled of her. I’d come into my flat and feel her energy there, latent somehow, in a place she’d never been. I missed the North: its winds and mosses; its cool, thirsty cities. I’d look at the weather reports for Manchester and feel glad when the weather was good. I had it as a location to slide past on my weather app. My little darling, I’m glad you have clear skies tonight, I’d think. I sang ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ so loudly on the Tube once, drunk, that someone gave me a pound. I thought about our old living room, telly and lamp on; a cube of light in the vastness of space. I was an astronaut out on the arm of the mothership, umbilicus stretching, stretching, stretching.

THERAPY SESSION #1 (DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE)

Hi, yes, here? Okay. This is a nice office. Plain, but I suppose that’s so I focus on the task in hand, which is no mean feat! What do I think that is? Sorting out my mental state haha. I should probably do more exercise. That would probably make a big difference. I noticed you had a kayak strapped to the top of your car outside, do you like to kayak, or do you have children? [Pause] Oh, I see, well I was just making conversation, I ramble when I’m nervous, I suppose that’s music to your ears. It’s like I can’t stand silence and that’s possibly because my mother was loud at home and when there was silence it meant there was a problem. [Pause] No, I’ve never had therapy before – does it show? I hate sounding like an amateur. Do you know how long it took me to choose what to wear today? Days. Literally. I was thinking about what might make you like me the most and I settled on something plain but with a few flourishes and I’m glad because I see now that’s very much your vibe. I’m not judging you, I barely know you. I know this is meant to be a socially pure zone but I don’t believe in any space you can hurl things into without consequences – that’s just me. Everything has consequences, doesn’t it? Every act of communication is an act of translation. I should probably have done Philosophy rather than English and Communication Studies. I don’t even really know what Communication Studies is, other than a chance for the lecturer to talk about his days on the broadsheets. He’s no use for magazine contacts. [Pause] What’s my relationship like with my mother these days? Desultory. Can I say that? It’s not like she was the worst in the world. She didn’t molest me or anything like that – and sometimes I think it would have been easier if she had. If I’d had something concrete to work with, you know? [Pause] How’s it going at uni? Good. Good, I think. Apart from the Communication Studies. It was definitely the right decision to move down. It’s a great uni – and the fact they organise things like this – what do they call it? Pastoral care. Some universities might be embarrassed they’d attracted a load of loonies, but not this one – and I respect that. [Pause] Do I have a relationship with my father? No, I don’t even know his name. She’d never tell me. Which gives her clairvoyance skills some credibility, because it’s like she predicted the internet. You know if I had a name I’d have Facebooked the shit out of him. People at school used to tell me he was in prison. Aren’t children delicious? Freeloaders, that’s what my mother calls them. It’s what she called me. It was fucking work, being her daughter. I put a fucking shift in. [Pause] I sound angry? Yes, I think I am angry. So that’s the thing to work on, I suppose. The anger. That’s the thing I want gone. [Pause] No, she never heard from him, or she never told me if she did. All I know is he called one night when she was pregnant. She was in bed and she answered the phone and he didn’t speak but she knew it was him by the sound of his breath. Sinister, right? In my worst nightmares my father is a perv. You know, an old Rat-Packer. Come over here, princess, and give ol’ Daddio some sugar. I can imagine her going for a creep like that. Allow me a blowsy moment: sometimes I see things – the undersides of sycamore leaves, oily puddles in tarmac – and I’m reminded of a father I never knew. A cellular memory, perhaps. An amino acid residue. I don’t even know how memory works; I suppose no one does – it’s one of the things your lot are working on. When he called that night she was so shaken that her adrenaline surged, and she said she felt me stir, inside, awoken. I often think about that moment. My first encounter with the anxiety the world had in store. I had no protection in place. I mainlined her anxiety like alcohol. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing she ever did was leave me to go on holiday to the Bahamas one Christmas. Worst Christmas of my life. I was sixteen. I vowed I’d never let her hurt me again, and I haven’t. She sent me a postcard. I still have it. It’s what you might call a prized possession because every now and then when I feel my resolve weakening, I reread it. I didn’t take it lying down, though. I had my revenge. [Pause] How? I staged my own suicide the day she got back. You’ve never heard someone scream so much. It was magnificent. I wrote a note and left it downstairs and then I got in the bath with a razor and some fake blood. I’d say she’s probably seeing her own therapist about it but she’s quite anti-therapy. Gin is her therapy. I hope she rereads the note. It was a really fucking good note. But then, I am a lot better educated than she is. [Pause] No, that is no thanks to her. She paid for my education and then she partied all night. What kind of self-sabotaging showmanship is that? Her problem – and she has a whole catalogue of problems, believe me – but her main one is she doesn’t have any true friends. She’s a loner. And that means she has no one to set her straight. It’s not that she lowers the tone; it’s that I don’t think she realises there is a tone …

MY DEAREST DARLING JENNY,

I hardly know what to tell you – other than Roger and I are having a marvellous time and it’s not as hot as I feared, which you know is a relief for the likes of you and I who suffer with the dreaded frizz. You would not believe the beaches – I have taken lots of photos so as soon as I get back I’ll get them developed so I can show you and with any luck they won’t just be of my sausage knees or half a palm tree. I hope you are having a very merry Christmas and you found the money in your card under the tree – get yourself something nice in the sales. No one seems bothered about the millennium bug here so I really think try and keep your panic under control darling (you do worry!) although poor Roger did suffer another type of bug when we first arrived but that seems to have mostly evacuated now and certainly hasn’t put him off the lumumbas. See you in the new year – and the new millennium! I hope it will bring us both many great things. I really do feel so positive about the future and just know you’re going to make me so proud.

Take care.

Your loving mother XXXX

LIKE OF DUTY

I don’t reply to my mother. Instead, I go back for another dose of Suzy Brambles. But lo, what’s this? A new post! I devour it.

She has been out in Soho. She has imbibed too many shots. She has succumbed to a falafel kebab. Soho … So … close, and yet so far. I give it a Deep Like. You really feel likes like that. Everyone must. And then I comment:

LIVING YOUR BEST BAB LYF

With no kisses, to look nonchalant. Then I wonder whether I should have put Livin’ with an apostrophe rather than Living, to sound more youthful. Then I go through Suzy’s follows again just to check I am still there. It makes me feel strong to see myself amongst her chosen people. I know she is seeing what I’m doing, even if she doesn’t feel the need to reach out. I notice that she has started following Art, which is odd because he hardly ever posts anything, just the odd nice coffee or cool job he’s been on.

Music strikes up from the living room downstairs – which means Sid is DJing again. I did once tell her that those decks are strictly a weekend-only activity and then I felt so old I instantly relented and brought home a load of shit-maddening frenetic dance records, just to disprove my own point. It’s like when I left a bad Airbnb review – the only bad one I’ve ever left – and the host replied so viciously that I left another review on another site that was completely complimentary and over the top and I got so carried away writing it that by the end of it I was convinced I had been wrong and was actually madly in love with the place, so I booked another stay there. They declined my booking.

I send Kelly a message:

Okay I’m dying here. I can’t stand these people in my house. I’m trapped, terrified of the future and sick of pretending. Send help

Kelly doesn’t reply, which isn’t like her. I hope she’s not in some way trying to manage me. I thought we’d made an agreement to not do the passive-aggressive thing with each other. We just save that for everyone else in our lives. I look at her Instagram and like her two most recent pictures, out of duty. She is my friend, after all.

My favourite rental flat was above a furniture shop. It had a shower-head in the bath I had to trap under my foot while I soaped my armpits. When I sat on the toilet at night, silverfish scooted around my toes. One time, a cockroach made a cameo. The saving grace was a grubby little balcony, complete with two upturned buckets where I could sit with a friend and smoke. Over the road was a wicker warehouse. The first time Kelly came round I said: Don’t ask me who would want to live in a flat like this because I have no idea.

She replied: Someone who wants to assassinate a wicker salesman.

I said: Kelly, comments like that are why you are the love of my lifetime.

She said: Well, it’s not like I had much choice about you being mine.

I don’t know what she meant by that. She’s funny, Kelly, sometimes. She fights her feelings. It’s like on some level she isn’t satisfied with the way things have turned out. And I wonder whether that’s just motherhood or something else inside her.

I try and relax by looking at the page of someone I was mildly obsessed with for a while when things started getting bad, @Virginiaginia. She’s luscious, and I don’t use that word lightly. She’s a cultural commentator married to a pop scientist. I go to her Twitter. I realise I am secretly hoping she has split up with the pop scientist. I am looking for evidence of this. Why? Schadenfreude? Solidarity? I start looking through HIS photos to see if SHE has liked them, to work out whether they’re still going out. I’m fucking cracked! But I can’t stop. The compulsion is all-consuming. I require the 360 on this. I deserve the 360 on this. They have liked each other’s posts, but maybe they’d like each other’s posts MORE if they’re not together any more, in that generous, fake way exes do. It’s looking hopeful – there’s no mention of him otherwise for weeks and weeks … I click through to her blog. The most recent post is called ‘Starting Over’. Aha! V. promising! I read, ravenous. Drat, the post is about some recent foray into watercolour. Ah. So disappointing. They’re dreadful paintings, too. And prove nothing. I slide back to her Twitter. There – I find it. Ten weeks ago.

A picture of them at a barbecue.

I console myself with the fact that they could have split up within the past ten weeks.

As I lie waiting to fall asleep I listen to Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear. I wonder whether I will ever love anyone like that.

Like I love Father John Misty, I mean.

(I wonder if he’s still with his wife?)

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