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Since that night, we’ve both stuck around. It’s not that she’s a good friend per se, it’s that we’ve become a firm fixture in each other’s lives. First we created memories and then memories created a history and with that came the foundations of a friendship. Solid but low maintenance.
I wish I had her brains. I think she even surprises herself with her razor-sharp intelligence at times. She’s a pro-choice, pro-women ball-buster, blazing the path, charging ahead so that the less confident ones, like me, can trot along behind. She’s the one who will convince you that just one more tequila shot won’t kill you, knowing that she’ll also be there to hold your hair back when you’re hanging over the toilet bowl slowly coming to the realisation that it might. For the record: she can hold her drink, I can’t. She is also the friend who will read every text he ever sent you and piece together the scenario like the Robin to your Batman, sharing the burden so you feel like less of a sociopath. She can spot a liar from forty paces, she’ll defend you but never judges, and beneath the attractive exterior she is actually pretty tough – a lot tougher than me – and life is a little less scary knowing she is on my side.
Sean is a different kettle of fish: a jester in a cashmere cardigan. A New Yorker living in London who I’d met at a farmer’s market while embarking on a celebrity-endorsed, high-intensity juice detox. We decided that we would go for sober dinners together and talk about sensible topics like our careers and world affairs. The detox lasted one month, our friendship somewhat longer. On the inside, half an inch beneath the funny, confident exterior, lies a quiet determination, an unyielding passion which leads him to still be in the design studio at eleven thirty, long after his team have gone home. He won’t think twice about spending a month’s rent on a jumper and will somehow convince you to do the same. He is the friend who will sit and listen to your problems without so much as mentioning his own: there’s a resilient enamel that coats a sensitive soul, a soul you have to keep your eye on because deep down you know he isn’t keeping an eye on himself. For years he dated Paul, a man almost twice his age, who would do spontaneously romantic things, like arrange a weekend for two in Europe for a birthday celebration. I remember these fine details, as I was the one roped into hiking up Regent Street looking for a pair of brown-leather ankle boots specifically for the occasion.
‘I never thought I’d be jealous of my best friend, his older lover and a pair of gloriously soft ankle boots,’ I said, pressing my hand firmly inside one. Far from the perfect audience, I watched him walk up and down the carpeted floor of Russell and Bromley one Saturday afternoon as he looked at me for encouragement.
‘Just take them,’ I said, in desperation, perched on the seats designated for customers to try on the shop’s wares, ‘and then you can take me for a cocktail.’
There’s one memory that will last beyond the drunken nights, the cinema trips, the endless stream of gossiping phone calls – the time I got a different kind of phone call one cold, rainy night in November. It was 2.30 a.m. and I was fast asleep when my phone rang loudly on the bedside table. Seeing it was Sean I assumed he’d been partying and had locked himself out again and needed a place to stay. I almost ignored it.
‘What do you want, Sean?’ I snapped. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
There was a silence. I could hear talking in the background as my eyes slowly opened and I came to my senses.
‘Sean, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’
‘It’s Paul,’ I heard, quietly but clearly. ‘He’s been in an accident. I’m at the hospital.’
Thirty minutes later I walked down the long, squeaky corridor that seemed endless and sterile. I turned into the waiting room and saw Sean seated wearing a pale blue jumper and jeans. The sort of outfit you put on in a hurry, I thought to myself. I crouched down and put my arm on his back. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.
He lifted his head, his face reddened and swollen from the tears. ‘He was driving back from work and a lorry clipped the wheel arch. You know how fast he drives.’
I sat there and held him until sunrise.
Paul’s funeral was on a sunny Tuesday morning. It was a small affair, there were no hymns and two readings, and it was over by midday.
Last but not least is Marlowe: graceful swan, mother earth incarnate, encyclopaedia of heaven-sent advice from the sane and grown-up world. She is perfect and I am a mess. We’d met as teenagers – two cocky, know-it-all dreamers, whose backsides were about to be spanked by life right into next Tuesday. While I’d continued this behaviour well beyond its sell-by date, she’d been forced to grow up far quicker than the rest of us. Marlowe is a class act who is seemingly unshakable navigating obstacles that would leave others screaming into their pillow. There’s an apologetic air about her, as with those who have spent their life subject to the jealousy of their peers. It’s as if they need to make it up to those around them for not being clumsy, or slightly chubby or keeping a coat on when they’ve spilled soup down their jumper. Or for being born into success, for that matter. Marlowe is constantly under the watch of her parents who seem to guide the trajectory of her life from the conservatory of their conservative city townhouse. Her dad was a famous journalist and now deep into writing his memoirs, and her mum was an English socialite, whose glamour and impeccable sense of style has been retained well into her sixties.
Marlowe was always going to succeed in whichever field she chose to pursue so you can imagine our surprise when things took a turn for the unexpected, a few years ago, one summer afternoon in July. It was the hottest day of the year and London had quite literally come to a standstill. The smell of Hendrick’s gin filled the air, and for the first time in a long while a drought had threatened to take hold across Britain.
We’d been invited to one of her parents’ infamous barbecues. They owned a townhouse in West London and for one afternoon a year it became home to the who’s who of the slightly elder, more intellectual social scene. At that time, we used these occasions as an opportunity to stock up on free booze before going to a club later that night, but this time things unfolded rather differently. I arrived late, as usual, and expected Marlowe to be in the garden barefoot in jeans amidst a sea of Panama hats and beige summer suits, but this time she was nowhere to be seen. I made my way through the bodies cluttering the house, loud in idle chitchat, and arrived at the bottom of the stairs where I pulled out my phone to text her. As I began to type, I looked up towards the top of the dark staircase to see her seated in a crisp white T-shirt and denim skirt, a distinct shine on her bare shins gleaming through the shadows.
‘Jess, up here,’ she said, signalling me into the bathroom.
I followed her across the marble tiled floor and there it was, lying on the sink, lodged sideways between the hot and cold taps, the end of the future as we knew it and a building block of a dilemma for Marlowe. A pregnancy test that read positive.
‘Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Is it yours?’
‘Of course it’s mine,’ she snapped, grabbing it to shake it.
‘I don’t think shaking it is going to help, Mars.’
She sat down gently on the bathroom floor and drew her legs towards her. I took hold of the test to double-check its result and took a deep breath to replace the ones I’d since lost. She looked up at me with glassy eyes.
‘What am I going to do?’ she said.
And what do you say to the perfect girl, the girl who irons her underwear, who wears white and doesn’t spill, the girl now pregnant and crying. I didn’t say anything. Instead I just sat down on the cold floor tiles next to her.
‘I can’t have a baby, Jess. I’m twenty-three years old,’ she whispered.
I noticed her hands were trembling, her chipped orange nail polish rubbing against her two front teeth. Girls like Marlowe weren’t supposed to get pregnant. She was supposed to spend her days practising law, not the alphabet. I squeezed her warm hand that was still damp from tears. At that point there was a knock at the door, one of the other partygoers, oblivious and persistent, who clearly needed use of the bathroom.
‘Just a minute, please,’ I shouted politely.
There was a brief pause before they knocked again.
‘In a fucking minute!’ Marlowe shouted through her tears.
Together we sat side by side on the cold, tiled floor, knowing that in just one afternoon, everything had changed.
In the modern world, there are many options open to women in the wake of an unplanned pregnancy but for Marlowe it seemed the most preferable answer would be marriage. The carefully arranged wedding was six months later and after much debate, they had promised as a family that she would have the baby first and start her career later. But as with most things in life, it didn’t really work out that way. Now George was travelling all over the world while Marlowe stays at home. That little blue line we had once gathered around with baited breath is now called Elsa.
Before Marlowe’s parents had led her down the road of commitment and common decency, she was a permanent fixture on our nights out. She drank like a trooper, never danced but always turned up in an eclectic mix of designer and vintage clothes, accompanied by a desperate claim that she had purchased them all in the sale. We still see her, usually for relationship or career advice or when we need a sensible opinion and a healthy meal. And despite her newfound love of the quiet life she still comes out to the big celebrations: birthdays, new jobs, new hairstyles. To put it bluntly, Marlowe is the moral lighthouse in our slightly less sophisticated world. When she announced she was getting married I cried tears of joy, Amber cried tears of sadness and Sean began sketching her wedding dress.
And finally to me, a girl who loves Mexican food and bowling and low-budget horror films, gently flying solo into the abyss: no brothers, no sisters, two parents who years ago deemed it better to carry on life apart, on separate continents in separate time zones with separate hearts. Perhaps I’m only now realising as I stand here, not quite young and not quite old, that their situation might not have been an easy one. That a family doesn’t necessarily work better together.
I’ve learned that after a while, it can get pretty tricky to always make the right decisions, to do what everyone else expects of you and to make people happy. We discard the days, the weeks, the months, the years on the journey towards the destination as somewhat unimportant compared to the magical days of a future where we aim to one day be. But they will suddenly merge together and we will realise that this day, this week, this month, this year, these little, insignificant things culminate to form our lives, all joined together, like a map of the stars but instead right here on earth: a thousand lives crisscrossing, at times colliding. But the secret is not to avoid the collision. If the horizon blurs and the plans fade, just think of the places travelled, the things seen and the strangers now known as friends: it all happened because you once made what you had thought to have been a mistake.
Chapter Two – The Art of Intent (#ulink_e69acf72-8886-5593-adcd-f2d9b500f073)
Cause…
Battle commenced one windy Friday morning last September. There was something in the air that day; I felt restless, almost as if suddenly, and without warning, my life wasn’t enough any more, any sense of pride or ambition had vanished. My mind ached like a lead weight. This wasn’t me. That was the only thing at this point that I actually knew to be true. The historical swirls of self-doubt that continually crept in weren’t going to win this time. Not that morning. Not today.
I was at the beginning of a food shop at the supermarket across town and, as I walked briskly through the automatic doors, I stopped for a moment to look up at the final leaves on the trees, clinging on with the same sense of stubbornness. I had decided in a combined haze of high spirit and spirits to push aside the idea of law and pursue my dream of becoming a photographer. It had me taken two years at law school to arrive at that decision and the leap hadn’t felt quite as wonderful as I had imagined. The disapproval of my father, moored somewhere off the South of France with his latest girlfriend, was evident. A short conversation resulted in us both hanging up the phone, which was surprising, as I thought he might relate given he felt the exact same sense of inadequacy about family life. Naturally, I had come to the conclusion that from that point on, I was on my own.
As I dragged the bags of shopping up the steps to our flat, I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me. The big supermarket was quite the commitment in terms of travel but a worthy respite from the express shop around the corner which, although convenient, was half the size and half the value. They even had a car park with trolley bays. I noticed this and despite not having a car was reasonably impressed. These days, I had time on my hands to appreciate such details. I pulled open the door and struggled inside, my fingers throbbing from the weight of the tinned goods. There was a note from Amber on the kitchen counter that read: ‘Please buy milk.’ I picked up the five-pound note and slid it into my jacket pocket.
After unpacking the contents of my bags into the fridge and cupboards I noticed the grey clouds heaving above me through the kitchen window. It couldn’t rain now, I thought. My day hadn’t been productive enough to be shut indoors. Quickly I pulled on my leggings and trainers and set off into the light downpour, determined to complete a run, determined to succeed at something that day. But in a few short minutes the light shower turned torrential. I stood at the very wet news-stand to shelter from the downpour under a sky of protective blue tarpaulin. I could feel the sting of a re-opened blister niggling the heel of my foot. I crouched down precariously to slide my foot out of my trainer, briefly easing the pain. A man in a large cream mac with a money belt attached to his waist began to pay me particular attention. He had caught me lingering. It was obvious I wasn’t his usual customer. I picked up a magazine that looked fairly respectable and pretended to read it as water dripped through the plastic sheeting.
‘It’s not a library,’ he said, restacking his stock. ‘You want to read it, you buy it first.’
I nodded subserviently and retrieved the five-pound note from my jacket pocket.
As I walked home with my unwanted copy of Business Life magazine I flicked through it briefly. On the cover was a successful, dark-haired businessman named as one of the top five financiers who’d brought back the economy from the brink of disaster. He worked at Giles and Morgan. I rolled my eyes. They were the company to whom I’d submitted a series of photographs for consideration six months ago and heard nothing since. Amber’s friend Nick, who worked there as an account manager, had advised me to corner the financial sector and supply lifestyle images in return for a serious amount of cash. His words. By now the rain had ceased to a faint drizzle and I had succumbed to using the magazine as a shield on the short run home.
‘Come on,’ Amber bellowed into her phone. ‘Don’t be such a boring bastard.’
She wanted to go out for drinks that night but the truth was I was in hiding. I couldn’t face another bad date, another bad restaurant, I just wanted to focus all my energy on creating my future, not further blurring my present.
‘Would it help if I told you that we’re meeting Nick and it might be another chance to talk about your photographs?’
It was a predictable effort from her but it worked just the same.
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll meet you there at eight.’
I looked down at myself in the hallway, in my comfortable bra and pants. I pulled the elastic with my index finger and readjusted my pant line. Maybe she was right – maybe I was getting boring.
The bar was in the City, which was a strange choice for Amber, but I knew her well and could tell from the start that this place was far out enough to a) pick up new men and b) hide from the old ones. Despite the unfamiliar setting, the situation wasn’t exactly new. The bar was heaving and full of the type of young professionals I’d spent two years at university trying to avoid. I’d already lost Amber. Anyone who has ever been out with Amber has lost her, but as with most beautiful friendships between young women, I knew she wouldn’t leave the bar without me. I had one quick look around and by chance saw Nick talking to Brian, a man who I had desperately wanted to meet to quiz about photographing an ad campaign for Giles and Morgan. I walked over, briefly finishing my glass of white wine, before licking my teeth for remnants of lipstick. I had told myself that one act of self-doubt equates to at least one act of bravery.
‘Hi, Nick,’ I shouted, pretending to only sort of recognise him. After all, I wasn’t sure if he remembered me. He did and waved me over to the small crowd of men in suits.
‘Great to see you, Jess!’ he said. ‘Of course you know James…’
I did know James, he was the deputy head of marketing at Giles and Morgan and the second person on my wish list to meet. I followed my eyes around the group, giving a quick ‘hello’ to everyone, suddenly becoming incredibly aware of myself.
‘Well, I don’t want to gatecrash a party and I’ve lost Amber so…’
‘Don’t be silly,’ James insisted. ‘Stay. I’m sure she’ll pass us at some point.’
‘I’ll go and find her,’ Nick said, finishing his pint, ‘she’s probably giving some man a hard time on the terrace.’
I was frozen, my feet pinned to the floor, desperate to mention my photography and at the same time terrified of mentioning my photography. And that’s when I noticed the tall figure standing next to me. As I tried to pinpoint why he looked familiar it dawned on me: he was the face on the front of Business Life magazine. The man deemed a ‘saviour’, a fact I’d later learned by actually reading the article. It had been a particularly slow afternoon and once on the comfort of the sofa I’d been entranced into reading it cover to cover. I examined his face, his green eyes and his dark hair. Just enough stubble to be attractive, but still groomed enough to know he cared. I quickly looked away. If I’d learned one thing from my mother it was not to commit to the man who should be a fling, to stop lust in its tracks and rise above the chemistry towards something more sensible. More concrete.
As everyone continued with their own conversations I had somehow found myself drawn into this god of finance and Brian’s conversation about inflation and shareprices. I nodded intermittently with the rest of the group, playing piggy in the middle with people’s opinions about the economy. I could sense Charlie (I had since clocked his name) and the proximity of our bodies getting slightly closer. I could feel that sense you sometimes get when someone is watching you and you daren’t look at them in case they’re looking. Well, I finally looked and he was too. I smiled a nervous smile, thinking he would do the normal thing and look away, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned over and put his hand on my shoulder.
‘You don’t have a drink,’ he whispered directly into my ear. ‘We can’t have that, can we?’
As he motioned to the bartender I noticed that he had his initials embossed on his cardholder, a surefire hint in my own judgement that he was a vain, slightly arrogant City boy, but no, he wasn’t that easy to dismiss. He was nice, actually.
‘Going to need some help getting through this,’ he said with an awkward smile. He handed me a bottle of champagne and two glasses, an indulgence I had previously thought was usually reserved for special occasions and New Year’s Eve but for him, apparently, just a regular Friday night.
I looked up at him and into his eyes as they stared across the room. His face, with ‘bad idea’ written all over it. I felt like the secondary school newcomer eye-flirting with the popular sixth-former. This wasn’t me. I knew he probably used this line on every single girl he met but I also knew that at this point, I didn’t care. As he stepped closer I stayed composed. I knew we shouldn’t. I knew that girls who slept with guys on a first meeting rarely saw them again. But did I even want to? I felt his hand skim the small of my back. I could have protested but I didn’t. I didn’t.
I felt him bite down hard on my bottom lip in the back of the taxi as we came to an abrupt halt outside his building. A harsh handbrake manoeuvre made by the taxi driver so we’d get the hell out of his car and continue this elsewhere. We stumbled out onto the pavement and as we reached the bottom of the glass-fronted building I knew that beyond this point was no man’s land. If I wanted to back out, now would be the time to speak up.
As he slammed me into the wall of the lift I momentarily forgot who we were. I could feel his heart beating – or was that mine? I was trying to be sensible. I was the girl trying to get back on her feet, the feet that were now wrapped around his waist as he lifted me into the air. I could smell the remnants of aftershave on his neck, his forehead balmy and sweaty as I kissed it. We didn’t make it to his apartment. Instead we gave in to ourselves and fell together in an entwined heap on the carpeted floor of the corridor. And even if it was just for tonight, he was mine. As he pulled me to my feet and led me to his doorway I picked up my underwear and forgave myself. Start again tomorrow. Like sampling an indulgent chocolate cake in the midst of a diet plan, just start again tomorrow.
Six hours later, the sun had risen, and I lay in his bed wide-awake. Carefully and calmly, I made a slight gesture to move: beating him to the punch, avoiding the vacuous apologies from both of us, of a busy day ahead filled with lots of things to do.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, smiling as he pulled me back into his warm body.
‘I need to…’
‘What?’ He smiled. ‘What do you need to do that’s so important?’
‘I need to phone someone,’ I said.
‘Who?’ he quizzed with his eyes still closed, the curly tuffs of dark hair on his chest rising and falling as he spoke.
‘My… dentist,’ I said, beginning to smile.
He wrapped his arms around me, cocooning me in the smell of the night before. By now, the sun was streaming across the bed and we were drenched in it. It wasn’t love. It was two people not wanting love, which somehow seemed even more perfect.
Effect…
Present day. Using clues from the past to plot a strategy for the future. It was a balmy afternoon and as I looked out onto the rainy London street, I could feel the dryness in my eyes from my tears that morning. A dull, fuzzy headache served as a mental reminder of the sharp pain I felt inside, deep within the concave cavity that had once carried my heart. I noticed people on the pavement below unaffectedly going about their day – doing their best to ignore the torrent of water around them. The British are quite fearless when it comes to rain; things just seem to carry on as normal. I looked at my watch. Still no sign of the van but I could now feel the vibration of my phone in my back pocket and assumed that it was the removal men offering an explanation.
It was Amber. I let it ring out. I waited for the ping. I could handle a message, but I wasn’t yet prepared for a conversation. The text read:
Dinner with Sean and me?? We are DYING to see you
On this busy street, on this particular afternoon, I was waiting for a transit van to drop my things off at the flat I was moving back into with Amber after a brief spell of living in heaven with Charlie. They were supposed to be here at 4.30 p.m. and as there was still no sign at 6 p.m, I decided to put the phone back into my jeans pocket and hopped my way up the stairs to our flat. I looked around at my new yet familiar home. The home I had shared with Amber and had to move out of, in, shall we say, a rather immediate manner: full of smiles, giggles and promises. Instead of once being our girls’ world that we used as a hideaway from the rest of the universe, it was now the flat I had once left to move in with him. The one I had left in the hope of building a life with someone I now felt I no longer knew.
I opened my phone, still at that stage of expecting to see a text from him, for which I hated myself, and instead texted Amber:
Yes, definitely! Can’t wait – I’ll meet you there.
My thoughts were basically that if I filled the text with enough hearts and dancing girl emojis I would perhaps deflect the scent of how devastated I was to be moving back here. I walked into my empty room that was once filled with all the objects of my life and sat down on the edge of the bed, the bare beige walls almost consuming me. The fact that nobody else had moved in yet showed just how quick the decision was made to leave – and how even more quickly it was made to return. It was all too quick. I had it coming to me.
After two cups of tea and a sort through my piles of mail I plucked up the courage to start opening a few boxes that I had managed to squeeze into the back of the taxi: just work things, thank God, it seemed that all the sentimental stuff was still in the van. I pulled out a large, leather portfolio of black and white photographs, the ones I’d taken in the second year of my law degree and had been so excited to put together and hawk across the city. I laid out my portfolio and fingered the plastic covering. It was bubbly now and the dog-eared corners were ageing… nothing at all like I remembered. Along with forgetting who I was for a short time, it seemed I had also forgotten what I wanted to be.
This would be my priority now: my only option of survival. I reminded myself about the one golden nugget that I’d learned since all this had unravelled: something that nobody had told me at the start. There will be sacrifices. I call it spinning plates. It’s a balancing act that usually consists of the metaphorical weighing scales whereby your love life succeeds and your career goes down the pan, or your career booms while your love life’s shot to shit. Or in my case right now, both, crumbling in my hands at the exact same moment. I smiled at the irony.
And wasn’t it funny that the moment when I knew I had to end it was the exact moment I’d never wanted to stay more.
As I poured a glass of water and pulled myself up to sit on the kitchen worktop – an annoying trait which Charlie didn’t mind but Amber always hated – I could see one good thing about being on my own: I could finally do as I pleased. Prove to myself that I could. Prove to my parents that they were wrong. The continual back and forth motion with Charlie – the euphoric highs and desperate lows – were now over. It was time to create space for myself and for the new, to give myself the opportunity to get it all wrong. Fuck things up to the nth degree. Barefooted and barefaced amongst the boxes, I was willing to risk all that was certain in my life for the very possibility of wanting something more.
The restaurant was heaving. I’d strangely missed the noise, the crowded bar, the way you had to navigate through the masses just to meet your friends, to breathe. As soon as I caught sight of them I felt relieved.
‘Sit yourself down, Jessica Rabbit,’ Sean said with a warm smile. ‘I mean, I knew it wouldn’t last long but three months? Jesus, Jess, I’ve got cheese in my fridge that I’ve had longer.’
‘Yes,’ I said, nodding dutifully. ‘Get it all off your chest now, will you? And we were actually together for nine months,’ I declared proudly as I walked around the oblong table to kiss Amber. ‘And what do you mean you didn’t think it would last long?’
Amber pulled me in and looked me straight in the eye.
‘You did the right thing, bubs,’ she said boldly.
I knew she was right but the pain in my stomach was still fighting the concept – it made a deep, heavy lurch as I sat down at the table, causing me to wince.
‘Seriously, though, are you okay?’ Sean quizzed.
‘I need to find a job. And quick,’ I replied.
‘Our rent’s due on Thursday,’ Amber remarked, before hesitating. Her voice shrinking to a gradual fade as she saw my expression.
‘She only moved out three months ago, I think she can remember when your rent’s due,’ Sean said, rolling his eyes.
I reached out to sip my water, my hand paused on the glass, as a thought I had buried caught up with me.
‘Is it really as bad as it looks?’ Amber said, placing her hand on my wrist.
‘Well, let me fill you in, shall I?’ I pushed the water aside and exchanged it for wine. ‘I’ve left my boyfriend’s home…’
‘Ex-boyfriend,’ Sean muttered.
‘Ex-boyfriend,’ I quipped. ‘Half my possessions are on my bedroom floor while the other half are under house arrest in a transit on the other side of Westminster that has the word “penis” written on the side in dirt. So in answer to your question, things have definitely been better.’
