STAUNCH
Eleanor Wood

Copyright

HQ

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1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Eleanor Wood 2020

Eleanor Wood 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.

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: 9780008325688

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008325701

Version: 2020-01-31

Dedication

For Pansy, Rose and Thistle

Epigraph

‘But, you see, in dealing with me, the relatives didn’t know that they were dealing with a staunch character – and, I tell you, if there’s anything worse than a staunch woman …

S-T-A-U-N-C-H: there’s nothing worse, I’m telling you.’

Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale,

Grey Gardens

staunch

adjective

1. very loyal and committed in attitude synonyms: stalwart, loyal, faithful, trusty, committed, devoted, dedicated, dependable, reliable, steady, constant, hard-working, vigorous, stable, firm, steadfast, redoubtable, resolute, unswerving, unwavering, unhesitating, unfaltering

“a staunch supporter of the cause”

2. of strong or firm construction

“these staunch walls could withstand attack by cannon”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Present Day

January 2013

April 2003

December 2014

January 2015

January 2015

Present Day

March 2017

June 2017

Present Day

December 1947

December 2016

Present Day

Present Day

December 1947

Present Day

December 1947

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

January 1948

Present Day

November 2017

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

April 1948

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

October 1948

Present Day

November 1948

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

October 1951

Present Day

Present Day

Present Day

August 2017

Present Day

Present Day

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Present Day

‘Well, cheers, girls. We made it! Here’s to the Go-ers.’

The four of us clink glasses. My cocktail tastes of pure alcohol and sugar, it’s called a ‘Go-go Goa’ and it’s made with fenny, the local moonshine that – I think – comes from cashew nuts. We arrived in the early hours of the morning and this is our first early afternoon cocktail.

I’m on the beach, on the first day of a girls’ holiday. I’m wearing shorts and a bikini top, and successfully managing to skip cold and grey January back home. The sea is there, right in front of me – not only a picture-perfect sparkling bright blue, but warm and inviting. I’ve already been straight in for a swim. The sand is warm under our feet and the sun on our faces is heavenly. We are jetlagged and slightly frazzled after a long journey, but the excitement is palpable.

There are dogs and cows wandering around the beach and ladies in saris trying to sell us things on every corner. We are in India.

Specifically, we are in a beach shack strewn with fairy lights and residual Christmas decorations, sitting on picnic chairs. A sort of Indian-style mariachi duo wearing matching Hawaiian shirts and cowboy hats are playing in the beach shack we are sitting outside. I shit you not, they are doing a jaunty cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. However, that’s not actually the most surreal thing about this girls’ holiday.

‘Rosie, do you think there’s enough gin in this?’ my grandmother asks her older sister, my auntie Rose. ‘It’s so disappointing when you can’t taste the gin properly. It’s really not on.’

Nan and Rose are both wearing brightly coloured sarongs that look incongruous against their white hair, sensible sandals and Rose’s walking stick.

‘I think it’s that local gin, Dot. It’s just not the same. I’d ask for an extra measure if I were you,’ Rose agrees. ‘It’s not very cold, either.’

‘But we mustn’t have ice, Rose!’ Nan cries. ‘Don’t forget, Ells’ – she looks at me sternly – ‘don’t ever have ice in your drink here.’

‘I won’t.’ I take a gigantic slug of my Go-go Goa.

My auntie Ann and I exchange a glance. Ann is Nan and Rose’s younger half-sister, so she’s a youngster at seventy-two. She looks sophisticated with it, with her dark bob and sleek black swimsuit.

It’s my first day of a ‘girls’ holiday’ where I am the youngest by an average of forty-six years.

While it may be somewhat unusual at my age to be on holiday with three old ladies, I guess the idea of going on an exotic holiday to ‘find myself’ and ‘discover my family history’ is less so. In fact, I fear it may be pretty basic.

As I sit on the beach with a cocktail in my hand, I find myself thinking about how I got here. It’s not exactly that I want to escape from my life – not any more. At this point, I think it’s just that I need a break. A lot has happened and I’ve just been trying to get through it. Now I need to recalibrate.

I’m not sure where to start. I try to think back to my rock-bottom moment and, depressingly, more than one springs to mind. In the tradition of my own generation, I make a list – ticking them off in my mind like a BuzzFeed article.

You won’t believe how this girl wrecked her life (#3 will blow your mind)!

 Stepmum dying/stepdad leaving – family falling apart, subsequent psychotic break; both parents now on third marriage.

 Breaking up with K after twelve years – breaking up a whole life, a whole fucking universe – for reasons that may have been … misguided?

 Immediate new boyfriend, me insisting ‘it’s not a rebound!’ even after everyone had stopped listening, another traumatic break-up, more rebounds.

 Going into therapy after dating a potentially violent, certainly threatening, narcissist (the most pertinent point of which should be noted: I did not break up with him – he ghosted me).

Of course, it was a combination of all of these things. One long rock-bottom moment over the course of a few years.

I turned thirty feeling smugly ahead of the curve, with a long-term boyfriend, a charming flat by the sea, a lovely job, and a potential promising book deal on the horizon. I’d given up smoking; I baked a lot of cakes. But I also still went to Glastonbury every year and wore great eyeliner. My boyfriend was in a band and I wore vintage dresses and went shopping in markets on a Saturday for records and ironic knick-knacks. I was the kind of cool, sorted thirty-year-old that teenage-me would have dreamed of being. I don’t know if I’m romanticizing in retrospect – it’s easy to do, after all – but I know I was happy. I really liked my life, my friends, my family. Especially my family.

Since then, there’s been death and divorce. There has been total and utter heartbreak that I wasn’t sure I’d survive. If it were possible for grief to kill you, I would be dead. I smoke again. I can’t remember the last time I made a cake, there’s nobody to impress and I’d only eat the lot myself, so what’s the point?

I was made redundant from my ideal job, then very unceremoniously sacked from the next one, for shagging my boss’ ex-husband. I now have to commute from Brighton to London every day to try to keep a roof over my head. I live in a place I cannot afford and I’m in debt from having to buy out my ex in order to keep it. I don’t sleep at night because I worry about the damp kitchen floor that I can’t afford to have fixed. When people come over, I have to ask them not to stand by the back door in case they fall through the gaps in the rotten floorboards. To be fair, I also don’t sleep at night because of Stupid Things I Said in 2004 (not to mention Clever Things I Should Have Said in 2009), so it’s a fairly crowded field.

I’ve had a string of sort-of relationships that have seemed promising and then gone nowhere. Each time, with every month I get older, it chips away just a little bit more at my poor battle-scarred heart. I haven’t had a dramatic break-up again – thank God, I genuinely don’t think I could take it – but I haven’t been in love for over two years now. I don’t think the musician in LA who I met via Instagram and do sexy FaceTiming with really counts. Love was something I used to take for granted, and I don’t have that luxury any more. Instead it’s been a series of small-to-medium disappointments that have made me feel terrible about myself.

The crisis is over, but I don’t feel better. I’m not completely in pieces any more, as I was a few years ago. I’m in therapy, which is helping a lot; there hasn’t been a major drama in ages. But I’m tired. There is some pleasure in my life – mostly when I’m drinking wine with my mum or with my clever, funny girlfriends and laughing at the sad state of it all. However, there is a sense of deep, lasting joy that I feel is lacking – no children, work feeling less fulfilling, no meaningful love. I am the favourite person of nobody. Sounds self-pitying, but it’s also true.

In fact, it’s now that things have settled down and supposedly ‘got better’ that I’ve started feeling worst of all. When you’re in the deep dark woods, fighting off wolves all over the place, you don’t have room to think about what’s happening. It’s only after they’ve receded and you are, technically, safe that the silence seems suddenly deafening. I was left standing in the middle of the woods, as the sun came up and the wolves were a distant howling memory, going ‘what the fuck just happened to me?’. Suddenly I had far too much space to think.

Now I’m here, on this crazy Indian beach – with wild dogs wandering around and cheesy dance music playing from the brightly decorated beach shacks, which all serve curry and lurid cocktails – I realize I’m happy to have a break from real life. My so-called strong independent life, where I live alone and go out a lot and have great friends. For some time now, I’ve felt like I am in the world very lightly – like I could disappear at any moment. I feel untethered, which should be exciting and freeing – but it’s not. I pretend I’m fine, but I’m not. Something – maybe more than one thing, I don’t even know – is missing.

If I’m honest, the silence is deafening. It’s everywhere. It’s in my kitchen while I scroll listlessly through Tinder, swiping left without really even looking, and drinking a bottle of red wine by myself without noticing until I realize that staggering to bed is harder than I thought. It’s on the train in the morning, with the silent commuters who never make eye contact, while I pretend to sleep or sometimes cry silently without being sure why behind my sunglasses. It’s definitely in bed at night, where I’m still not used to being alone, even after so long; I keep trying to learn to love it, to sleep starfished just because I can, but it doesn’t work. I still sleep motionless, scrunched on one mean sliver of my luxurious king-size mattress. It’s in my noisy workplace, where everyone wears headphones. It’s even in the pub after work, where I go most evenings with a grumpy, reticent university lecturer who is not my boyfriend and who I’m not even sure likes me very much. Since arriving in India approximately six hours ago, I’ve already texted him repeatedly and not heard anything back. He’s the latest in a line that is long-ish and getting longer.

I’ve lost sight of what constitutes a rock-bottom moment. Strolling into the reception of a Travelodge in my underwear to ask if they had a corkscrew because ‘I thought it would be funny’ (oh, and I was on a lot of cocaine at the time) was probably not my finest moment. But it wasn’t rock-bottom. Standing outside the closed door of my own spare room, quietly asking ‘Would you like a peppermint tea, maybe?’ – because the man in there ‘needed to be alone’, because he was feeling ‘aggressive’ towards me – was scary. Still not rock-bottom. Falling over drunk in front of everyone at my dear friend Emma’s wedding wasn’t great. Crying on late-night trains on the way home has just become normal, to be honest. It’s all been very kind of rock-not-quite-bottom.

Sitting here on the beach, it seems far enough away to give it a bit of thought now. Here in the sunshine with my nan and my aunties, with a long holiday stretching out before me, I feel like this might be a chance to finally get some perspective on it all.

So, if I had to pick one, like the one record you get to save on Desert Island Discs, I guess I do know the moment when it all began to fall apart.

January 2013

It is a freezing Monday morning and I have a dread feeling in my stomach. It follows me like a shadow or one of those horrible ‘hangxiety’ hangovers when you’re not sure where your phone is, but you have a half-drunk bottle of wine in your handbag and eyeliner on your chin.

It won’t go away and I have no idea why. I had a quiet weekend. I did some writing and I hung out with my boyfriend K. We went record shopping. I made a shepherd’s pie. He went out to band practice and I pottered about in our flat. When he got home we watched a rubbish horror film. We have been together for approximately a decade. We like the same things. We have a shorthand.

The only unusual thing is that I haven’t spoken to my mum and/or stepdad. I usually talk to at least one of them every day, sometimes multiple times. I tried to ring the house over the weekend, but there was no answer.

In the morning, I try to call again. The line rings and rings and rings. Only when I have pretty much given up does my mother answer. She sounds terrible.

‘Mum, are you OK?’

‘Not really. I’ve got this stupid flu and Stepdad’s had to go to California for work. I’m a bit miffed about it, actually.’

I don’t know why, it just doesn’t sound quite right. I have never heard her use the word miffed before. It doesn’t sound like something she would say. And Stepdad does go to California for work a lot, but it sounds a bit odd at such short notice, over a weekend.

I hang up the phone feeling like I’ve had a conversation with a cyborg that sounds a bit like a bunged-up version of my mother. My heroic mother who, it will turn out, didn’t want to ruin an important day for me.

I’m not going to work at my day job today because my agent and I are going to see editors who are interested in a novel I have written. We have been working towards this for a long time. She’s also taking me out for lunch, which is extra exciting, mostly because I really like saying things like ‘Oh, sorry, I can’t on Monday, my agent is taking me out for lunch’.

It’s a big week, in fact. K and I are moving on Friday – from the tiny top-floor flat that we call ‘The Garret’ into an actual house. It has a spare bedroom and a garden. This is less for reasons of sensible grown-up-ness, more due to our still-idealistic dreams of the artistic bohemian life. We will have space for K to have a music studio and for me to write. That tiny terraced house will probably have a blue plaque outside it one day. We will be exactly like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also totally the opposite of them. Life will be dreamy. We might get a dog. Or at least a cat.

So, I put on a vintage dress and head into London and smile my way through the day of meetings. Afterwards, I have planned to go out for dinner in Soho with my friend Alice, who is great fun. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

With promises from editors that they’ll be in touch, I say goodbye to my agent and walk towards Soho. I have time to kill so I try to call my stepdad. There is no answer, which is somehow unsurprising. What is surprising is that I get a UK ringtone. Not the weird long beeping-instead-of-ringing I’d hear if he were in California. Not only that, his work voicemail – which he maintains scrupulously with his whereabouts at all times – does not mention anything about being away.

I immediately call my mother. No answer. I keep calling until she picks up, which she does eventually. She sounds even worse than she did earlier.

‘Mum, what’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘But … but I don’t want to.’

That’s when the bottom drops out of my stomach. Or world. I don’t even know.

‘Please, Mum. It’s OK. Just tell me.’

‘Are you sitting down? Where are you?’

‘Yes, I’m sitting down. I’m about to meet my friend Alice.’

I’m walking up and down Brewer Street and I can’t feel my legs.

‘I’m only telling you if you promise not to come here. I don’t want you to worry about me.’

‘OK …’

‘Stepdad’s left. He’s met someone else.’

She went to Waitrose on Saturday morning and life was still normal. She got home an hour later and he had packed up half the house into the back of his car. She was still standing in the hallway when he drove off and life as we knew it was over.

Stepdad has brought me up since the age of eleven. He and my mum have been together for over twenty years. Their wedding was in the top-five happiest days of my life, maybe even top-three. He taught me to drive. He helped me with my maths homework. He introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock films, and to doomy Eighties goth music like Joy Division and The Cure. He is my skiing and cycling partner and basically my favourite person to hang out with. He always refers to me as his daughter and we would both fight anyone who dared to question the logistics of this.

My mum is beautiful and wonderful, the most fun and generous person I know. She and I are very close but if anything, sometimes we are too similar; he is the buffer that makes our family work. If my mum is the person I love the most in the world, he is the one I idolise. He and I are best friends, always have been; my mum would jokingly accuse us of ganging up on her, and I secretly enjoyed it.

It’s not like I needed a dad when he came along – I have a dad and he’s lovely. But my stepdad and I had a relationship outside of that – he was always a reliable and loving parent to me, but also we had loads in common and just got on really well. I suppose because he was slightly outside of being my actual parent, I found him easier to talk to and he came along at an age when I really needed that.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ my mum says. ‘I’m hoping he’ll change his mind and I won’t have to tell anyone. It’ll be fine. I’m glad you’re with your friend, you need someone to look after you.’

Have I mentioned my mum is a fucking hero? I’m still repeatedly telling her I love her when she hangs up the phone. I keep saying it, even after the line has gone dead.

I walk to Café Boheme very slowly, like my bones are made of glass. I’m early but I don’t know where else to go. I don’t cry, I don’t react. I feel nothing. I guess the pins and needles numbness might be what they call ‘shock’ but who knows or actually cares?

I need a fucking drink. I get a cosy table for two and ask the handsome French waiter for a massive glass of white wine. I then sit there for an hour and don’t touch it. I sit very, very still and stare at the wall for an hour, while that full massive glass of wine gathers condensation in front of me.

Alice walks in wearing a faux fur coat, enormous heels and bright, bright lipstick. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

‘Ells!’

She hugs me into a cloud of fake fur and I could collapse into her arms but I do not. It occurs to me this might be the last normal night I can have for a long time, maybe forever. I don’t want to make this real.

‘How did your book meetings go?’

‘Great. Brilliant. I think someone might actually buy my book! We should hear soon …’

‘Well, that definitely calls for champagne!’

We have a lovely evening. We eat French food and flirt with the waiter and chat about boys. We smoke cigarettes sitting out on the pavement like we are actually in Paris (and not just a French restaurant), snuggled together arm-in-arm against the cold, blankets over our knees. We drink two bottles of champagne, joyously.

As soon as I leave and Alice goes out of sight, my bones stiffen up with sadness. I’m not sure this night is real but I suspect it might be. I sit on the train home and stare dead ahead at the seat in front of me.

I drag myself home, up the flights of stairs to our third-floor garret, which is already half packed up for the big move on Friday. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed that K is out. Mostly relieved, I suppose.

I don’t switch on the lights. That would make it real. I don’t take off my coat. That would make it real. I sit down on the nasty rental flat carpet in our mostly empty bedroom. I call Stepdad. He answers this time.

‘Ells … Hang on, the reception here is terrible. I’ll call you back from a landline.’

The reception where is terrible? I don’t even know where he is. My phone starts ringing and the screen flashes up ‘number withheld’ and the sight of that makes me truly wish I were dead.

He made me mixtapes and took me to Camden Market for the first time. We would have horror film marathons just the two of us because my mum and my sister didn’t like them. When I was older we would get drunk together and smoke cigars and do air drums to Aerosmith. He’s not my real dad. If he’s not married to my mum then what are we to each other?

That’s when, for the first time, it really hits me. I start crying. I won’t stop for about four months.

This should be an important, deep conversation – but nobody is talking. We are both crying so hard that neither of us can speak. We stay like that on the phone for, if not hours, what feels like it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says eventually. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ I reply, even though I have no idea what that means.

‘I love you,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

As he hangs up the phone and I wonder where he even is, I’m not sure if it will be.

K gets home at 2 a.m. to find me hunched in a corner in the dark, like the girl from The Ring. I still have my coat and my winter boots on. I refuse to go to bed, so we both lie down on the sitting room floor until it begins to get light.

At 6 a.m., the universe delivers another unexpected fuck-you. My dad calls me to tell me that my grandpa (‘Parpie’) has died. Despite K asking me not to, I get up and go to work, because what the fuck else am I supposed to do?

April 2003

When I first met K, I was twenty-two. I was low-level bulimic and used to cut myself. I also took quite a lot of drugs and didn’t think any of these things were particularly unusual, because everyone I knew did at least some of them too. I lived in a shared house where we saw a ghost, and a boy we didn’t know once pissed on the sofa. I went out clubbing wearing 1970s evening dresses and I spent every Sunday so hungover I wanted to kill myself.

You don’t need me to go into detail about these years, as you can read similar stories in numerous ‘my lost twenties’ memoirs. You know the drill. However, I will say that my lost years were much worse than any of these, guaranteed. Those books always depress me because the writers’ rock-bottom moments always sounds exactly like a normal Tuesday night for me in the early Noughties.

Anyway, amid all the sad shagging, cocaine and throwing up – when I was twenty-two, my cool older friend Lauren asked me to be in a band. I couldn’t play anything but I looked like I should be in a band, which was apparently good enough. She said her boyfriend Richie could teach me to play bass. Easy.

One Saturday afternoon, we drove to an obscure music shop in High Wycombe, where Richie knew someone who could ‘get us a good deal’ on a bass guitar. That turned out to be K, who looked like the lovechild of Keith Moon and Kurt Cobain in a brown cardigan – he had a mop of black hair, vast green eyes, incredible cheekbones and a slight air of oddness about him that I instantly liked. We got chatting about music and he told me about his band. He sold me a Fender Squier jazz bass, sunburst finish, and I gave him my number.

I chose him in the same way that I had chosen most of my boyfriends up to this point: because he looked cool and was in a band. Thus far, this strategy had not worked out particularly well. I had been dumped a lot by boys who just wanted to ‘focus on their music’, or ‘not be tied down’. I’d had a lot of casual on-and-off things with guys who had thought I was ‘really cool’, while I had been secretly hoping they might fall in love with me and maybe want to marry me. Spoiler alert: they never, ever did. I had never met a boyfriend’s parents or been on a romantic minibreak.

Amazingly, with K, things turned out differently. He called me the next day and asked me if I wanted to go out on a proper date. He took me for a picnic by the river. It turned out that he had been to art college and wanted to illustrate children’s books. He loved Sherlock Holmes and French films and obscure Japanese cartoons I had never heard of. He wasn’t quite as cool as I thought; he was much, much nicer.

He was twenty-seven and he lived in a house by himself. He cooked me pasta and didn’t like drugs. He was slightly disapproving of my friends. I gradually stopped going out so much. I gave up smoking. He made me realize that some of the things I thought were normal were not.

We went on holiday to Devon together and the following year we moved to Brighton. He was the first boyfriend I had ever loved who loved me. He told me he didn’t ever want to get married and I said that was fine. At last, I had something that was real. I could let go of the misguided dream of wanting to marry cool unattainable boys. This was a great compromise. We could forget convention and have a life together that suited us.

We had interesting people round for dinner, and London friends coming to visit all the time. A graffiti artist friend once slept on our sofa for a year. I helped K write lyrics for his band, and he painted a portrait of me in a hotel room in Paris that my mum still has on the wall in her house. I sat at the kitchen table every night in our top-floor Brighton flat, and for the first time I wrote a whole novel.

We went on holidays with my parents. K played music and did a lot of painting and set up a pop-up art gallery – way before these things were known as ‘pop-ups’ – back when having a friend with an empty shop in the centre of Brighton you could use was a normal occurrence.

When Amy Winehouse was at her skinniest and most drug-addled, and for some reason in those days we all thought it was OK to gawp, Stepdad once said to me, ‘Imagine, if you hadn’t met K, that would be you. Only without the talent.’ How we all laughed.

Then ten years later – on that freezing cold Monday in January – the world I thought I knew fell apart and K had to watch me regress before his eyes.

Turns out, it’s acceptable(ish) to be a total fuck-up when you’re twenty-two. At thirty-two, it’s quite embarrassing. Especially when it’s about something as prosaic as a parental divorce. I’d already been through one once, at the age of eleven, and handled it with a lot more grace as a child than I managed to do as an adult. The acute humiliation of this knowledge did not help.

I didn’t know that stilted phone conversation on the floor of my rental flat would be the last conversation we would ever have. Stepdad never spoke to any of us again. He very quickly began to communicate solely through solicitors’ letters. That was when I wrote him an email saying I didn’t want to speak to him again, not that he’d tried particularly hard. When he told me that he loved me and it would be OK, I had no idea I would never hear his voice ever again. I might have tried to say more if I’d known that.

The only way I could get through this was by telling myself he had been kidnapped and someone – possibly Liam Neeson or Jason Statham – was holding a gun to his head and making him do these things against his will.

It’s hard to explain how much I loved Stepdad and how much it fucked me up to lose him. There is something profoundly unsettling about having the rug ripped out from under your feet just as you think you’re living like a real adult and you’ve got everything under control for the first time in your life. I was so proud of myself for how far I’d come from that sad, bulimic, chain-smoking, falling-drunk-off-the-table twenty-two-year-old. Turns out she’d been waiting in the wings the whole time, through all those grown-up minibreaks on the Eurostar and trips to Ikea and all the other things I wrongly thought made me a functional adult.

But mostly, I was just unbearably sad because I loved him so much. My heart was broken in a way that it could never have been by a mere boyfriend. It was the worst break-up imaginable. It taught me that I’d been wrong during those years of painstakingly building up my self-esteem. You can’t trust anyone. People will leave you and they will disappear. Love is not unconditional. You will not be enough. Ever. The person who I thought loved me the most, literally, disappeared.

I got very thin. I started smoking again. I got a huge tattoo and told myself it would stop me from cutting myself, a habit so old it was almost forgotten, but somehow crept back in, under the American Apparel thigh-high socks I started insisting on wearing to bed every night. Quite embarrassing in someone over thirty, really. I lived in fear of K or anybody else finding out. I hid razorblades in strange places. I took two scalding hot baths a day with the doors locked.

I cried constantly. Walking down the street, at work, in bed every night. I didn’t want to be touched because I would fall to pieces. I didn’t want anyone to be kind to me.

I became obsessed with fake tan, a product I had only ever sneered at previously. My skin turned darker and darker, as it collected in my clavicles and between my fingers like nicotine stains. I think I just wanted to be in a different skin.

I stopped sleeping altogether. I was so manic, I kept having what I thought were brilliant ideas, which made no sense. I started writing a ‘brilliant’ new novel, and then when I read it back, it barely even contained real words.

Stranger and stranger superstitions started to take up more and more of my day. I once nearly choked in the house by myself, as I had taken to walking around with a piece of rose quartz in my mouth at all times. Just carrying it with me wasn’t enough.

I started seeing cats everywhere I went, convinced it was ‘a sign’. I started a spreadsheet of every cat I saw, with columns entitled ‘location/colour/character/what they were trying to tell me’. The spreadsheet went so far as to include such entries as ‘Thought I saw a cat under a seat on the train. Followed it. There was no cat’.

A couple of months passed and things did not get better. To the outside world, it didn’t look so bad. I managed to go to work and even to see friends occasionally, but I was just trying to get through the days. Nobody realized quite how bad it was, but I had a force field around me that made other people nervous.

My sister and my nan seemed to get over the shock relatively quickly, but my mum and I did not. My mum kept telling me she was ‘fine’ but was very evidently not fine. I did the same thing back. Every time my phone rang, I braced myself for the news that my mother had committed suicide. I could not see a way that she or I would get out of this alive.

This was perhaps more understandable for my mum than for me. But I just couldn’t get over it. Everything was ruined. Life felt not only futile but fucking impossible. I just couldn’t seem to function like a normal human being. I could not stop crying. But I had K, which seemed to make people think I must be fine. He would look after me, just like he always had.

We started sleeping further apart. We stopped talking. Neither of us was capable of it. K tried to call Stepdad to tell him he thought I was going to kill myself. Stepdad didn’t answer and never called him back.

I went to the doctor and received a letter saying I would be put on a waiting list for psychiatric assessment. A few weeks later I went for the assessment and received another letter saying I would be treated as priority and then nothing happened.

When it became apparent that Stepdad was not going to come back or start behaving like a decent human any time soon, my mum and I went to Hatton Garden to sell her jewellery, then went and spent some of our pirate spoils on a decadent lunch. The guy in the dodgy pawn shop liked us, gave us an extra £50 note from the wedge in his breast pocket, to buy a bottle of champagne on him. If nothing else, we always do our best to make bad times glamorous.

I am not as pragmatic as my mother, even though I could do with the money. My prize possession was a Swiss Army watch that Stepdad gave me, that used to be his. I used to wear it every day, with inordinate pride. Either selling it or throwing it away seemed wrong, somehow. For weeks I kept it in my desk drawer at work, as I didn’t want it in the house.

One morning, after drinking a lot of coffee, I had a flash of inspiration. I pissed on it and posted it to him in a Jiffy bag (to his work address, I still don’t know where he lives) that developed a film of condensation on the inside before I’d even sealed it up. I guess it was the combination of fury, betrayal and shame that made this seem like a perfectly rational course of action. I told people about this calmly, like it was quite a normal thing to do.

Just over six months after Stepdad left, in July, we were supposed to be going on holiday. It had been booked in advance as a family occasion, to celebrate Stepdad’s birthday and my mum’s and his wedding anniversary. It was non-refundable, so we decided to go anyway. It was a very strange week.

My mum would say she was ‘going for a walk’ (aka disappearing down the beach to cry like her heart was broken, which was logical because it was), and everyone else would politely pretend not to notice, while I followed her even though she didn’t want me to. So she and I ended up going for long walks every day, holding hands, in near silence. I couldn’t tell her things like ‘it’s going to be OK’ because that would be a lie, so mostly I just said ‘yeah, I know, me too’. I’m not sure it helped.

My mum and I drank a litre of cheap white wine with our lunch each day and then kept going. K couldn’t deal with it and took to bed for two days, refusing to talk to any of us. My poor sister and her boyfriend were left to try to jolly things up. I guess I shouldn’t blame K – it was stressful for everyone – but I couldn’t help thinking this wasn’t exactly helpful of him.

K and I had already nearly broken up, only a year earlier. Another terrible crisis point – my stepmum Sue had died, suddenly, at the age of fifty-one. Like Stepdad, she had been in my life since I was eleven and had a huge hand in bringing me up. She was the most full-of-life woman I can picture, and she left behind two sons – both much younger than me – whom she adored fiercely. She shouldn’t have died, that’s all I can still think about it.

At Sue’s funeral, I said ‘I want to have a baby’, the first time I had ever really had this thought, let alone spoken it out loud. It did not go away.

K did not react to this as I’d hoped. He simply refused to discuss it. This was not what we had agreed; as he saw it, I was reneging on our deal, which was to be non-conformist and not care about such things. I was letting the side down. He was furious with me. I was so sad and so shocked, I agreed to shut up and hope it would go away.

I can see what I was trying to do, although neither of us could at the time. I’d had a tricky, unsettled childhood but then things had calmed down – four parents, new stepbrothers on my dad’s side, the classic Dad’s-every-other-weekend routine. My life had hinged on that stability for so long that I thought I could count on it. Now I had lost so much of that, no wonder I was desperate for change, to make a brand new life for us that looked different, instead of hanging around in the ruins.

After we came back from our disastrous holiday, more months went by and I began to resemble a normal human again. I became less frail. I stopped dyeing myself orange. I slept better at night and sometimes I could go a day without crying. After a while, it looked to the naked eye like the crisis had passed. K seemed mostly relieved that we’d got through it without him having to talk about it.

So, we’d made it through. Life was a bit worse and we were a bit different, but we seemed to have come out the other side together. Sort of.

Things began to look brighter when I started pouring my energy into writing. This was how I would save myself, I decided. Once I got going, the words flooded out of me with an unstoppable intensity.

I wrote a whole novel in six weeks straight, barely sleeping, not wanting to do anything else. Running away from my own life. I wrote it mostly in bed, just to stay warm – the new house had turned into a disaster.

It was freezing cold, damp and full of woodlice, and it turned out that all the floors were rotten. Everything was falling apart around us.

So, while my life was quietly in ruins, I escaped from it all by writing a sweet romantic comedy for teenagers. And – after years of trying, with various small degrees of success – somehow it ended up being the best thing I had ever written. Suddenly life got exciting again. My agent texted me while I was at work to tell me a big publisher wanted to buy the book I had written.

I immediately rang K and my mum to tell them the news. Even as I was saying it, it didn’t feel real. My mum cried with joy for me, and K took me out for cocktails that night to celebrate.

It was exactly then that all of the stress started coming out in weird physical ways. The next morning (now that I supposedly had everything I had ever wanted in my whole life) I woke up with such intense pins and needles down my right-hand side, I could barely use that side of my body. I had to call a cab to take me to work, as I couldn’t manage the twenty-minute walk. I had recently started a new job for a small healthcare publisher, so I struggled through the day trying to make sure nobody noticed. This was supposed to be the best time of my life! Yes, I was so excited! No, I couldn’t believe it either!

I began to have multiple ocular migraines every day, so severe and constant that I stopped driving, out of pure fear. I haven’t driven since and now I’ve forgotten how. More weird symptoms seemed to develop every day. I started throwing up for no reason, having to spend hours hiding in the loo at work because I was incapable of functioning like a normal human in public. Just like when I used to be bulimic, how retro!

I took to spending my evenings lying in a darkened room, unable to move. I became convinced I was probably dying. I was sent for blood tests and MRIs, and nobody could find anything wrong with me. I concluded that I was definitely dying.

A kind neurologist poked me with needles, and told me to come off the Pill immediately. I was put on it when I was seventeen because I had a burst ovarian cyst, and the Pill reduces the risk of recurrence. I don’t think anybody ever asked me if I suffered from migraines, which I always have. The neurologist was appalled that I was on the Pill at all – let alone that I had solidly been on it for fifteen years. She said my stroke risk, what with the migraines and the smoking – oh, and the family history of strokes – was probably through the roof.

I came off the Pill and immediately felt better. When I told K this, he gave me a funny look I had never seen before and asked me if I didn’t think this was ‘a bit too convenient’. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what he meant at first. Then it turned into a horrible argument.

‘It’s not exactly a surprise.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve been together over ten years. This is what happens to everyone in the end, isn’t it? Girls pretend they’re cool and they want the same things as you, then next thing you know they’ve trapped you into getting married and having offspring and you have to pretend to be happy about it or everyone thinks it’s you who’s the bastard.’

I asked him if he really felt like we were on opposing sides now, and he said he wasn’t sure. That was the beginning of the end.

We limped on, sadly and undramatically, for a few months. We went on holiday to Hydra, a tiny island where Leonard Cohen used to live and wrote many of his most famous songs – and was therefore my dream destination. I sat on our lovely roof terrace, drinking wine, while K slept a lot. I went for a lot of long walks by myself. We were polite to each other. We both did our best and it wasn’t quite good enough.

Then – almost inevitably, something had to happen – I met a man through work: a funny and handsome journalist. While I had a boyfriend at home who was barely speaking to me, I started saying I was going out with ‘colleagues’ and instead going to grown-up jazz nights with The Journalist, where we would drink red wine and talk about how our partners ‘didn’t understand us’.

I convinced myself it was OK, because we hadn’t actually slept together. But I’m not that naive – I know hanging around in bars and bitching about how useless your boyfriend is … well, it’s not cool. In fact, it is not only uncool, but incredibly dangerous.

The ending finally happened on a perfectly normal weeknight. K and I went round to our neighbours’ house for dinner. They had recently had twins; we all drank wine and ate takeaway fish and chips while the babies slept – one of them on me, while I happily ate my dinner one-handed. If I were allowed to be honest, I would admit this is actually what I would like my own life to look like. As far as I was concerned, it was a lovely evening.

We got home and closed the front door. I was still taking off my coat when I realized that K was just standing there and staring at me.

‘This isn’t going to work,’ he said. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? All of that. I would rather fucking hang myself. We’re going to have to break up.’

I burst into tears and said yes, I agreed. He burst into tears and said he didn’t really mean it. It was too late. It was the end.

Well, except it wasn’t. Because we were grown-ups who co-owned a house and a lot of shared furniture. We still had to go on a trip to New York for my sister’s thirtieth birthday, which was like slow torture. Then we had to live in the house together for four months while we argued over what to do with it. Eventually I borrowed money to buy him out.

My family – what remained of it – were devastated. Our friends had to awkwardly pick sides. It was like getting divorced without the legitimacy of having been married. We had built a whole life together, but saying ‘my boyfriend and I are breaking up’ sounded so teenage and inconsequential.

When K and I broke up, I felt desperate for more. More forward motion in life. More passion. More excitement. Something finally happening, not just hanging around waiting for everyone to die or disappear in the end.

I spend the next five years of my life wondering how the fuck I ended up with so much less.

December 2014

While K is finally moving out, I can’t bear to be around for it. So I escape to New York with my mum.

My mum and I are soulmates, very close and scarily similar. If you look at old pictures of us at the same ages, sometimes it’s hard to tell which of us it is. It freaks us both out. Now I’m an adult, we are more like naughty sisters who drink wine and have kitchen discos together.

She travels to New York a lot for work and has a lot of friends in the city. We decide this would be the ideal place for a change of scene, and spend money that neither of us can afford on the trip. We get so drunk and overexcited on the flight out that a stewardess has to ask us to be quiet. We are also asked whether there has been a death in the family when we both weep loudly while watching Beaches.

Unfortunately, just as we arrive, so does a major snowstorm. It’s a freakish cold snap even for the freezing New York winter. There are weather warnings in place and people are advised not to go outdoors.

Of course, my mum and I decide to ignore this advice. We are on holiday, after all! We get wrapped up and go out for a walk in Central Park. It’s so cold, the ice rink is closed. There is not another human to be seen. It’s apocalyptic.

It’s so foggy we have to hold hands to keep together, and before long of course we realize that we are horribly lost. It’s funny at first, but then we realize we can’t feel our faces and become convinced that this is how we are going to die. When the snow thaws, they will find us and, worst of all, they will say how stupid we were to have ignored all those weather warnings.

When we eventually find our way out of the park, there are no cabs because everyone is indoors, so we have to walk sixteen blocks back to our hotel. When we arrive back there, the concierge brings us brandy and blankets.

After that, we decide not to go outdoors again. We do not leave the hotel for the rest of our holiday, not once. It’s strangely relaxing. We order room service. We sit up in our twin beds like Bert and Ernie, and watch TV. We take it in turns to have long hot baths. I go up to the hotel gym and run for hours on the treadmill, looking out of the panoramic windows at nothing but falling snow. We go down to the bar for cocktails and then go straight back up to bed. We soon feel happily institutionalized, like we have always been there and might never leave.

The thing we enjoy the most, and do more than once, is to both get into my bed and watch Grey Gardens on my laptop.

My mum and I have long been obsessive fans of the film Grey Gardens, but on this trip, our love for it reaches new heights. Watching it together here feels very fitting. It’s a strange 1970s documentary about an aristocratic but eccentric and broke mother and daughter, ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’, who live together in their dilapidated mansion, Grey Gardens, with a lot of cats and a few raccoons.

They love each other fiercely but they bicker a lot. They wear threadbare old fur coats and diamond necklaces while singing show tunes and drinking cocktails out of jam jars. They are magnificent.

We put on lipstick and headscarves with our hotel bathrobes, crack open the overpriced minibar wine and watch it again and again. We quote it at each other a lot and take to addressing each other in exaggerated New England aristo-lady accents.

‘Could you simply be a darling and pass me the wine please, Little Edie?’

‘Of course, Mother darling. I do like your headscarf.’

‘Why, thank you. It was given to me by my cousin Jackie Kennedy. I’m simply mad about it!’

Not long after we get back, I get a tattoo on my wrist that reads ‘staunch’. This comes from my favourite scene in Grey Gardens, in which Little Edie rants about the various relatives who have underestimated her, before realizing that she is, in fact, ‘a staunch woman’ and therefore not to be messed with. ‘And let me tell you, there is nothing worse than a staunch woman’ – because ‘they don’t weaken, no matter what’.

My secret long-held dream is for my mum, my nan and I to one day live together in Grey Gardens-style drunken squalor, bickering and singing and drinking cocktails in bed out of old jam jars.

I am trying very hard to be staunch. My mum is staunch. She has been through a lot and always done it with a tremendous amount of style. We are both trying our best.

January 2015

And then I get home to an empty house and suddenly I am living entirely on my own for the first time in my life. I am extremely aware that I have gone from being ahead of the curve to way behind it. A story like this should really involve a hedonistic and secretly oh-so traumatic blur of drinking, drugs and shagging in my twenties, followed by a revelation and meeting a ‘nice’ man to settle down with in my early thirties. That’s the correct narrative, right?

Except somehow I am now thirty-four and everything has gone wrong. In the interim, most of my close friends have ‘settled down’ (terrible phrase; if I ever ‘settle down’ please fucking shoot me). They are now in the place I was at during my early twenties – excited about making Sunday roasts for gangs of cool friends, talking about paint colours and the best place to buy a green velvet sofa as seen on everybody’s Instagram, whereas I am now the only single one. And they’re doing it more proficiently than I did, because they all seem to be planning weddings and talking about maybe coming off the Pill.

I suddenly feel very old and very out of step with other people of my age. Most of them have never had a relationship as long as mine with K, and don’t understand what it’s like to have been through a break-up that huge. People say ‘well, at least you didn’t have kids’ as if that must make it really easy. Frankly, I wish more than anything that I had a baby to show for it, at least. When my mum was my age, she had a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old – the comparison is so depressing.

I feel battle-scarred and ancient, but my life is less ‘grown-up’ and more unsettled than it has ever been. If I were younger, I guess I’d spend this time going out every night and having one-night stands, but that’s not really an option at this point. I work long hours in my new day job for a science publisher (having been sacked from the last one, due to The Journalist unfortunately being my boss’s ex-husband), and I now have a long commute, so I leave the house every morning before 7 a.m. and get home after 7 p.m. In the evenings, I either eat a vast trough of pasta for dinner and go straight to bed, or I sit at my kitchen table listening to music and scrolling through Tinder while smoking roll-ups and drinking a whole bottle of red wine by myself.

I love hanging out with my girlfriends, but by our age that usually means drinking wine around somebody’s kitchen table, which is great but means I am unlikely ever to meet anybody new. They all seem so much more content with life than I am.

It’s my job to be the cheerful one who doesn’t give a fuck; if I can’t live up to that, I’m not sure who to be. I try to talk to one friend about how I’m feeling – old, exhausted, insecure, pointlessly angry about all that wasted time, pretty much hopeless – and I guess it makes her feel uncomfortable, because she shuts it down pretty quickly by saying this is ‘not very feminist’ of me.

Once or twice a week, I go out for lunch or drinks with The Lecturer. The Lecturer is a confusing presence in my life. We met through distant friends, on one of those random Thursday evenings when going to someone’s birthday drinks seems marginally better than getting on the train home.

On first sight, I was not remotely interested in him. He wasn’t my type and I imagined we had nothing whatsoever in common. I assumed he must be boring, despite his too-long Nineties grunge hair – which I strongly suspected might be more by accident than design. He seemed utterly unenthused and bitched about everyone all evening, so I wasn’t expecting it when he looked me up on Facebook late that same night. I only replied because I was a bit bored and drunk on the way home.

He claims to hate all humans and have no social skills, yet he takes to sending me long emails (which admittedly make me laugh) and texting me most days. I bother to reply about a third of the time, and yet still he perseveres. Eventually, I end up hanging out with him because I have nothing much else to do. The university where he works is around the corner from my office, so maybe he’s just bored too.

He takes me out for pink cocktails on a rooftop bar, and I turn up with dirty hair and a hangover. I have a surprising amount of fun and agree to go for drinks again. ‘Soon’, at his insistence.

On our nights out together we stay out drinking and talking for so long that I sometimes miss the last train home and have to stay the night with other friends because The Lecturer won’t let me come back to his flat with him. We sneak out for lunches together in the pub and have such a nice time we agree to meet again in the same pub three hours later.

I become increasingly intrigued by him, with his corduroy jackets and his air of ennui. Sometimes I gaze at him and think, actually, maybe he is a bit like Ted Hughes or Heathcliff.

I’m dating all sorts of other unsuitable people, but nothing seems to stick. I’m not sure how I feel about The Lecturer, but I grudgingly have to admit that he is clever and interesting, and his texts always cheer me up. He becomes a constant backdrop. I start measuring my Tinder matches by whether they are as smart and funny as The Lecturer. It begins to dawn on me that most of them don’t get me in the way that he does, so I start hanging out with him in the pub more and more.

Besides, it beats drinking by myself at the kitchen table, which I also seem to spend more and more of my time doing. While I sink a bottle of red wine and chain-smoke, sometimes I dance around to Patti Smith and feel free and feminist and vindicated, and sometimes I listen to Joni Mitchell and cry my eyes out.

My most pressing concerns, as evidenced by my late-night Google search history:

coolest tattoo shop east london

cheap botox clinic

basic north korea politics explanation

best instagram filter

how old is cole sprouse

full moon cleanse for crystal dildo

health risks smoking over 30

smear test eroded cervix

mexican kitchen tiles

This seems to sum up the strange hinterland I find myself inhabiting. The constant low-level feeling that I’m running out of time causes me to make strange, panicked decisions. I know I’m looking for something but I’m not sure what it is, so I keep trying to make everything into that thing.

Unsuitable guys from Tinder. Internet stalking and unsolicited Instagram messages to boys I dated when I was twenty-one. The Lecturer. I keep hoping I can magically turn them into it, the thing that I am looking for. But I can’t.

January 2015

I feel very alone. On paper, I have so many friends, this is almost embarrassing to admit. But I don’t feel like I have many people I can talk to these days. Nobody gets it, so I just say I’m fine. I guess this blatant lying alienates people, because old friends seem a bit annoyed with me and new friends all think I’m someone I’m not, which makes me feel even lonelier.

There’s not really anywhere else to turn. Although I am close to both of my parents, they have never been the types to make their children the centre of the universe, which mostly I’m pretty sure has been good for us. They simply don’t have the time; they’ve got their own dramas. Having been recently bereaved and deserted, respectively, both of them are soon embroiled in various dating sagas and have more than enough going on in their own lives.

I’m the eldest, and I can’t dump my own stress onto my little sister. That’s not how the world is supposed to work (although my ‘little’ sister Katy has in fact always been The Sensible One). She was less close with both of my stepparents than I was and, conversely, she is thriving. It’s the one uncomplicatedly good thing happening in our family. She suddenly gets serious and moves in with her boyfriend, whom she has known since we were at school and we all adore. She doesn’t need me bringing her down.

And so, maybe surprisingly, the person I end up talking to the most about everything that’s going on in my life is my grandmother.

My nan and I have always been close. My parents both worked and she lived nearby, so every day my sister and I would go to her house after school. She would make us cheese on toast while we did our homework and watched Neighbours, until my mum came and picked us up to go home for dinner. At the time, I sometimes used to be a bit embarrassed and resentful that I had to be different from the other girls at school, who all got collected by their mums in sporty hatchbacks, but now of course I only remember it as very cosy and idyllic.

So I’m lucky to have always had that sort of close, everyday relationship with a grandparent, and I know I’m extremely lucky at my age still to have a living grandmother (I even had a great-grandmother until I was twenty-one). Since I’ve grown up and left home, she and I have always seen a lot of each other and spoken on the phone most days.

When I find myself living alone for the first time, I speak to her more and more. This is often because, being retired and also living alone, she is the one most likely to answer the phone.

She is warm and generous and patient with me, like a grandmother off the telly, but she is also sometimes very tactless, which makes me love her all the more and reminds me she’s just a person like me, not a wise elder-woman of the tribe at all times.

‘This must be especially hard for you,’ she said after my stepdad left, ‘because you really thought he loved you the most and that turned out not to be true.’

She’s also funny, always entertaining and unfailingly, inspirationally, optimistic. She also often tells me ‘not to worry about things so much’ and ‘look for the silver lining’ and banal shit like that, which would annoy me massively if not for the fact that she has lived a lot longer than I have, so I should probably just shut up and listen. Failing all else, she often bursts into ‘inspirational’ song: ‘Smile, though your heart is breaking …’, ‘You are my sunshine …’. That sort of thing.

She is sympathetic to my current situation, but she is also taken aback, mostly by the level of time and effort I put into feeling all these feelings. She didn’t have time for that sort of thing when she was my age. She was too busy working a full-time job, maintaining a flat, bringing up two children as a single mother, helping to look after her parents and siblings, carrying groceries home on the bus and not having enough money to buy a new skirt.

My grandmother is definitely staunch. I currently fear I am not. I am certainly not country strong; I am city weak. Compared to my grandmother, or my mother, at my age – I feel like a baby. A pathetic baby who smokes and drinks too much.

My nan, however, is unequivocally staunch. She’s a woman who’s had a lot of reason to feel sorry for herself in her life, but she never, ever does. Also she calls hairspray ‘lacquer’ and blusher ‘rouge’, like a true Edie would. Also like the Edies, she is what you might call ‘a character’.

Nan has more friends than anybody else I have ever met in my entire life. My sister Katy and I are always being dragged ‘for coffee’ to meet some random friend of hers. It usually transpires that she met them on the bus. She meets everybody on the bus. Sometimes she knows them from Spanish class, or singing club, or because they’re Maureen’s friend, or you know Stella down the road whose son works for M&S, and after that I stop listening. Sometimes she knows them from church. She’s deeply religious, but somehow it’s not annoying – weirdly, I find it sort of comforting when she says ‘God bless you’ to me before she hangs up the phone every time, and tells me frequently that she prays for me, (‘and K’ as she continues to tack on for quite some time). My sister and I used to be obsessed with her friend from church who was a porn star, who became a born-again. That was fun.

When I was little, many of my favourite activities used to involve Nan (or Dorothea, or Dot, as she is more commonly known):

 Spending hours trawling through her old jewellery box, which played Isle of Capri, and telling her which pieces I would like her to leave me ‘when she died’ (mostly the charm bracelet and the opal ring, please).

 Sniffing her lipstick, which was powdery and smelled floral, like Nan lipstick always, always does.

 Stroking the loose skin on her inner arm, which would make me sleepy, and then making her sing me ‘Golden Slumbers’ again and again until I fell asleep.

 Begging her to let me light one of her very special Christmas candles, then crying hysterically when it melted.

 Being allowed to suck the lemon out of her gin and tonic.

My nan’s life has been extraordinary. She was born and brought up in India, a fourth-generation immigrant under the deeply problematic British Raj. Partition, which left over a million people dead and countless others displaced (the largest forced migration of people in history that wasn’t due to war or famine), happened when she was sixteen.

She came to the UK and trained as a nurse, worked in community health, and was a single mum in the Sixties when that was really not the done thing. She has spent her life being self-sufficient, worked really hard for everything she’s ever had, and was generally a bit of a girl-boss way before that term was ever invented.

Which is why, when I become single and find myself living alone for the first time in my adult life, she is the logical person to talk to. If I’m at home, most evenings I talk on the phone for an hour or so to my nan. We are in surprisingly similar life situations considering there is almost exactly fifty years between us.

Often I’ll call her after we’ve both listened to The Archers. I’ll have a red wine, she’ll have a sherry. Nan has a glass of sherry and some Hula Hoops (or sometimes Mini Cheddars) in a fancy bowl every evening before dinner. I still think this is impossibly chic and I have tried valiantly to do the same, only I always end up drinking the whole bottle without noticing and by then I can’t be bothered to cook so the Hula Hoops end up being my dinner and I have a dreadful hangover in the morning.

Anyway, while we chat on the phone of an evening, she’ll be half-watching Coronation Street; I will not be. We will discuss what we’re both going to have for dinner. We are often both having some permutation of eggs. She’ll tell me about her Spanish homework and singing club and who she went out for lunch with that day. I’ll tell her about writing and my friends’ love lives (‘How’s Alice getting on? What about Em and Pete?’) and complain about whoever it is I’m sleeping with and not-really going out with.

‘These men today don’t know their arse from their elbow if you ask me,’ she’ll say, in her posh nan voice.

It’s often the highlight of my day.

Present Day

I have a very, very strong feeling of ‘what the actual fuck have I done?’. I am still hungover from drinking White Russians round at Natalie’s on New Year’s Eve. It’s 5:30 a.m. It’s raining, heavily. When I get on the Gatwick Express, it’s too early even to be able to get a coffee at the station.

I tell myself I have this feeling before every big trip I’ve ever done, and in the end I’m always glad I did it. Before I spent my twenty-ninth birthday by myself at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, I cried in the cab to Heathrow, wishing I could just stay at home and watch telly instead (but of course that trip turned out to be life-affirming and wonderful). I spent the whole flight to Marrakech quietly hoping not to be murdered, and then it ended up being my favourite city in the world. I tell myself I always feel suddenly and unexpectedly anxious and weepy just before a trip, and it’s always worse when it’s a trip by myself.

This is even more daunting than a trip by myself. It’s a trip on which I will be responsible for two quite high-maintenance octogenarians, in the manner of an old-fashioned lady’s companion from a Daphne du Maurier novel or similar. Partly because they need the help with travelling, and I think partly because they feel sorry for me because my sister is getting married, I have ended up being the chosen grandchild to come with them on this momentous trip back to India.

So, for the coming weeks I’m going to be travelling around India with my grandmother, her older sister Rose and their younger half-sister Ann. It occurs to me that to have agreed to this, I may have gone more mad that I did that time I thought cats were talking to me.

We have decided on Goa, which was chosen mostly for practical rather than sentimental reasons. Nan and Rose need a comfortable resort that makes life as easy for them as possible, and this was the best we could find. They are not up for a bustling city, and where they went to school is in the mountains, now over the border in Pakistan, and Nan isn’t sure she can manage the journey this would involve.

Apparently there is some Portuguese blood on one side of the family and Ann’s grandmother may have been from Goa. While we’re there we want to have an ask-around about the name Baptiste and the connection to our family. However, Baptiste turns out to be a common name in Goa.

Although we are not going to see the places where they lived, we still feel that this is a family pilgrimage. We’re going back to the country where my grandmother and aunts were all born, so that we can eat the food, speak the language and tell family stories.

I would really like to go and see the places where they grew up and lived, but for now this is a good toe in the water for me. Nan keeps reminding me that it will be a culture shock; it has long been a trope that I may not be able to ‘cope’ with some aspects of India. Goa is the gentle option, and – for various reasons – we all need a little bit of gentleness.

Before any of that, we have an airport and a long-haul flight to get through.

I have a rucksack on my back and I’m pulling my small wheelie suitcase behind me. I’ve come dressed for long-haul travel – i.e. looking like total, utter shit. I am wearing an old baggy T-shirt that says ‘More issues than Vogue’ on it, plus several thousand layers of deeply unattractive cardigans and hoodies.

I am, as instructed, meeting my nan at the taxi drop-off area so I can carry her bags for her. We are approximately two hours earlier than we need to be, on top of a flight time that was already very bloody early, but I knew better than to try and debate about this. I am very excited about running off and skipping January in favour of a proper adventure, but I am also very tired and grumpy and I am being rained on.

My nan is escorted out of her cab by a driver with an umbrella. She is wearing pearls.

‘Darling! Everyone has issues these days, don’t they?’ she says by way of greeting as she hugs me, looking slightly disapprovingly at my T-shirt. ‘I’m so excited, aren’t you?’

Andy Warhol said you should point out your own flaws before someone else does. I like to think I’m being self-aware and ironic. But suddenly from my nan’s point of view I can see how this would look sort of … odd. Like, why would you choose to advertise that you have ‘issues’? It’s not something to be particularly proud of, or to joke about.

Fortunately, I don’t have long to contemplate this, because my nan appears to have brought three hand luggage bags (‘but one’s my handbag, darling’) and the biggest suitcase I have ever seen.

‘What have you got in here?’ I ask through gritted teeth as I wonder if we’ll have to pay excess baggage charges.

‘It’s mostly my medication,’ she tells me. ‘You know, when you get to my age, darling …’

One of the bags appears to have nothing but books and a cushion in it, but obviously I can’t argue. Well played, Nan.

We find our fellow travellers, Auntie Rose and Auntie Ann, get rained on a lot, discover that the travelator thing to get into the terminal is broken, struggle with lifts and then there’s some technical problem with checking in that results in a long queue and having to carry the bags to another check-in desk on the other side of the airport.

I realize complaining about any of this sounds spoiled, but I feel responsible for making sure this goes smoothly and everyone is OK, which is making me anxious – mostly because I’m not sure I’m capable of it.

‘Careful with that trolley, Ells,’ appears to have become the mantra.

We’re finally getting to the front of the queue when a young couple, a girl and a boy with huge backpacks, push in front of us. They’re chatting excitedly and don’t even seem to have noticed we are standing right there. I’m prepared to just let it go.

‘Excuse me,’ Rose says politely.

They either don’t hear her or continue to ignore her.

‘Excuse me!’ she says more loudly this time.

The boy turns around, looking slightly annoyed. The girl continues to ignore Rose’s existence.

‘You pushed in front of us,’ Rose explains to him, quite patiently. ‘We are in this queue and you pushed right in front of us.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ he says defensively, not apologising.

‘That’s the problem, you see. I’m completely invisible to you because I’m old.’

She says it with a smile, just stating a fact. The young man doesn’t say anything else, or even try to apologise – I think it’s because he’s too embarrassed. His girlfriend still hasn’t acknowledged our existence. They scuttle behind us as we go to the front. Rose winks at me.

I am extremely conscious that airports must be especially hard work when you’re in your eighties – most things are; if I’ve learned one thing from these ladies it’s that you have to be hard as nails to get old – but they get to have wheelchairs.

‘The power of mobility and invisibility, it seems,’ Rose notes sagely.

Neither Nan nor Rose is a wheelchair user in day-to-day life, but it turns out anyone can ask for ‘special assistance’ on a plane. They’ll take you from check-in to your gate and onto the plane, which otherwise involves a lot of schlepping. I feel a bit embarrassed as the young, able-bodied tagalong. However, I’m pleased to report I got over it when we were ushered through the extra-quick security queue like it was Studio 54.

We make it onto the plane with only one minor argument, and that’s the same argument my nan and I have whenever I stay at her house for the weekend.

‘Darling, nip to the shop and get a paper for me, will you?’

‘No. When you say “paper” I know what you mean. I’ll get you a Guardian if you like.’

‘The Guardian! Stop being ridiculous. Just go to the shop. I’ll give you the money.’

‘Nan, the Daily Mail is a Nazi rag. I’m not doing it.’

‘You know I only get it for the crossword. Puzzles are supposed to stave off dementia, you know. Just go to the shop for me. I so rarely ask you to do anything.’

‘Fine.’

I always – always – end up buying my nan a Daily Mail. I am always utterly baffled by this. She worked in the public sector all of her life and is evangelical about the NHS, yet she cannot bring herself ever to consider ‘leftie’ activities such as reading the Guardian or voting Labour. From what I can gather, this is purely based on a vague idea that it’s ‘a bit common’.

We make it onto the aeroplane, with me now trying to hide the Mail amid all the hand luggage. It’s bad enough to have to buy it, now I have to be seen with it, FFS. I also bought Nan a coffee, which now she doesn’t want.

‘It’s just so big. Why do coffees these days have to be so big?’

I’m not going to argue with that one. I totally agree.

Nan genuflects as we get onto the plane. Ann and Rose are in the row behind us; I find myself sitting in the middle seat, in between Nan and an Indian lady of about Nan’s age. Her name is Mrs Sharma, and I will discover later that Mrs Sharma’s daughter-in-law works in my office.

Mrs Sharma’s presence seems to spark off a sense of competition between the two old ladies on either side of me. Every time my nan and I start a conversation, Mrs Sharma asks me if I can help her use the headphones or take the lid off her yoghurt.

‘You’re a good girl. Come and see me at my flat when we arrive in Goa. Come to the gates and ask security for Mrs Sharma. They all know me.’

I nod and smile and fail to make it through more than three minutes of a film at a time without someone tapping me on the arm and asking me how long it is until we arrive and why is aeroplane coffee so bad and what is that you’re watching and how long until we arrive.

After a while Nan doesn’t like being upstaged and fortunately Mrs Sharma falls asleep, so Nan and I can gossip about her and then about all of our relatives who we saw at Christmas. I really do love my nan. She is an excellent person to gossip with.

Then we have another minor drama when the person in front of Nan has the audacity to put their seat back so they can go to sleep. I have rarely seen a woman so outraged.

‘Nan, don’t worry about it. Shall we just swap seats?’

‘No. I’m not having that. It’s not fair. I’m calling the stewardess and asking her to tell them to stop it. This is ridiculous.’

‘Nan, I know it’s annoying, but I don’t think you can –’

It’s too late. She’s already pressed the button and is making a face I know better than to argue with. An extremely nice stewardess explains that she knows it’s annoying but she can’t ask them not to. Nan and I swap seats. She remains outraged.

However, by the time we are due to land – despite our very, very long day – we are in a state of high excitement. We will be landing in India! I have never set foot in India before, and this heralds a trip of great adventure and family history and maybe even – finally – self-discovery!

We pull in to land and I brace myself for the wheels hitting the ground. Instead, the plane swoops sharply back upwards and there is a collective gasp across the cabin.

‘Is that supposed to happen?’ Nan asks, reaching into her handbag for her Valium.

Mrs Sharma clutches at my arm convulsively.

‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ I tell them both, inwardly resigning myself to imminent death. A relief, in so many ways.

While we circle Goa Airport repeatedly, an announcement kicks in.

‘Sorry about that,’ says the captain. ‘We need to make another attempt at landing as there are dogs loose on the runway.’

‘Dogs loose on the runway’? Dogs? Is this a joke? I presume this is an elaborate cover story for something that has gone horribly wrong. How can there be dogs loose on the runway?

‘Welcome to India, darling,’ my nan chuckles.

March 2017

After months and months of hanging out with The Lecturer, things had escalated. We saw each other most days; we frequently stayed up texting until 4 a.m. Sometimes we’d both press play on horror films at the same time in our respective beds, and chat throughout.

I’d grown fond of him, to the point where I now couldn’t imagine my life without him. For his part, he constantly told me I was wonderful and beautiful; he found it so hard to talk to people except for me, I knew more about him than anyone else on the face of the planet.

One night while drinking cocktails and putting the world to rights, nose-to-nose on a sofa, we finally kissed. And I suddenly felt like I never wanted to kiss anyone else again. I looked at his face and I truly wondered how I never noticed he was so fucking beautiful, back at the beginning. I have always been one for the whirlwind; I never really believed someone could grow on you. But this one sneaked up on me. I appeared to be, somehow, in love with him.

I texted him when I got home that night: We need to talk about What Happened.

He replied: Lunch tomorrow? I’ll buy you beer and a hotdog. See you in a few hours, lovely Ellie.

Despite my hangover, I woke up the next morning in a state of high excitement. It was unseasonably sunny, which I took to be an excellent omen, as I put on a 1950s sundress and lipstick. I texted Emma, who had long predicted that I would end up marrying The Lecturer.

‘OMG, I was right! It’s finally happening. Let me know how it goes – I’m going to need every detail. Fuck, he’s been after you for so long, he’s going to think it’s Christmas!!!’

The morning at work was interminable. I was incapable of getting anything done, as I kept putting on more lipstick and counting down the minutes.

We arranged to meet in our usual spot, and we walked in the sunshine along the South Bank, where we sat outside and he bought me the promised beer and hotdog.

‘So, about last night …’ I said.

‘Yes. I believe you might have some questions for me.’

‘Well, more of a statement. Lecturer, it turns out that I seem to have fallen in love with you.’

I waited for him to be delighted.

‘Oh, Ellie. I’m so sorry. I did not foresee this …’

It transpired that he was in the middle of some sort of trial separation from the long-term girlfriend I thought he’d long ago split up from. He was apparently ‘confused’ about life. He had thought our increasingly flirtatious friendship was a safe space because I would never be interested in ‘someone like him’.

‘You’re wonderful and I’m regretting this even as I’m saying it,’ he told me. ‘But I’m afraid I’m no use to you. We both know you could do far better. Besides, be honest, how long would it be before someone like you got bored with someone like me?’

‘But …’

‘No. Don’t.’

We walked back to work in silence. I texted Emma to say the grand declaration had not gone according to plan.

‘Do you need wine?’ she asked.

‘I think I just need to go home and cry.’

I did exactly that. And then I told The Lecturer I didn’t want to talk to him for a while and got straight onto Tinder, where I rushed headlong into a terrible mistake.

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