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‘Go on then,’ Bella said, holding an old-fashioned fountain pen up to Holly’s face.
Holly stared at the pen, watching it go in and out of focus, her eyes thick with tears. Everyone was staring. It was not unlike being back on the school playground. She was half expecting a football to come and thwack her round the head. She looked down at the epic list of rules and wondered how it had all come to this. What was next? Laminated membership cards? A ten per cent loyalty discount at Thornton’s?
‘Yeah, Folly, sign,’ Olivia said. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Please don’t call me Folly. Lawrence calls me that.’
‘Called you that,’ Olivia corrected.
‘C’mon Holly. Let’s face it now, the only way is up!’ Bella sang while doing a move that wouldn’t have been out of place on Top of the Pops circa 1990.
Maybe they had a point. Holly wiped her green eyes for the tenth time that day and reviewed the evidence. She had only slept three nights out of the last twelve. Currently, her top three activities were: binge-drinking, insomnia and unabashed howling on public transport. And, these days, the face that stared back at her in the mirror was none other than the bastard sister of Freddy Kruger.
Olivia held out a plate of baklava. Holly recoiled, feeling a bunch of moths practising the high jump in her belly.
‘Christ no. Nothing against Harringay’s finest delicacy, I’m just not really doing food at the moment.’
No one commented, but it was obvious what they were all thinking. Things must be bad if Braithwaite was off her food.
Oh no you don’t, she thought as her eyes welled up again – the tear jar is full today.
Bella put her arm around her. ‘Let it out, Hol. That’s what we’re here for.’
‘But that’s all I’ve done today. Cry. Blow my nose. Watch American teen dramas. And repeat on a loop. I have no brain cells left, and the most overworked tear ducts in all of North London.’
‘Sweetie, you’re supposed to indulge it at first,’ Bella said.
‘Yeah. That’s the point,’ Olivia said, holding out the tray of baklava. ‘Here, get your strength up.’
Holly tried a tiny morsel.
‘It’s really just a formality at this stage,’ Olivia said, sounding a little too much like she did in her day job. ‘In the eyes of BUC law, you and Harry are already members. You both joined by default when you did a Synchronized Dump.’
Holly winced at the ridiculous slogan and scanned the room for any trace of irony. She looked across at her best friend from childhood, Harry, who had signed only moments before. The wry smile on his freckly face said that yes, he appreciated how ludicrous this all was, but the alternative was too bleak to comprehend. Going it alone. Venturing into the Valley of Unrelenting Doom in a seat for one. No, that was too horrendous a thing to imagine. Much better to travel on a bicycle built for two; or in this case, four.
Holly wiped her nose and took a deep breath. ‘All right. Gimme.’
Bella did a small handclap, then passed her the pen.
Even though this was all madness, there was still a part of her that felt like she was betraying Lawrence. Somehow signing on a dotted line made it all seem more final. Counting to three in her head, Holly signed her name in funeral black, next to the other squiggles.
‘And then there were four,’ Bella said.
Everyone cheered and clinked glasses. Holly pretended to look pleased and dedicated to the cause. Pretended she wasn’t thinking about Lawrence for the fourteenth time that minute.
She handed the document to Olivia, who returned it to its A4 plastic sleeve, the matter of New Joiners now dealt with. ‘We can always add to The Rules, as we see fit,’ she said, stretching up to place them high on a shelf as though they were the Dead Sea scrolls. ‘I think we’re done here, don’t you? Unless anyone’s got any AOB?’
Bella, Harry, and then Holly shook their heads.
‘So then, let’s go out and celebrate your inauguration!’ Olivia smiled.
As they descended the stairs in the flat, Holly felt her eyes well up again and finally she gave into the tears. She let them fall in time with her walk, leaving little droplets on every second stair. Before long, there were so many lines of black eye make-up down her cheeks that, as she shut the front door behind her and stepped out onto the street, she had the distinct look of a Jackson Pollock No.7.
Of course, none of them had imagined they’d ever need a thing so absurd as a Break-up Club. None of them had imagined they’d be spending the fag-end of their twenties slumped together in a living room in Harringay, knocking back cheap wine and baklava to a soundtrack of The Cure. Least of all Holly, who had always been such a committed Marxist. Not of the hammer and sickle variety, but the one Groucho
Marx gave to the world when he vowed never to belong to any club that would have him as a member. The kind that has since led to neurotic girls everywhere (Holly among them) running for the hills whenever anyone shows too much interest. Which was why out of all four of them, she was the last to see this coming. But then, there are some things in this world – your first grey hair, an on-time Northern line train, a pig flu epidemic – that you just never see coming.
PART ONE (#ulink_9a2b7335-31c3-5f74-9c8d-91c8fe21ab9a)
(Two months earlier)
‘Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist.
Keep fighting. Keep loving.’
(‘Pure Evil’ Street Art, East London)
1. Tunnel Vision (#ulink_c2b04d99-49e7-507d-9098-dc454c7d0cee)
I love him; I love him not.
I love him… Holly decided, tearing off the virtual petals and staring across at the handsome man with the brown curls and big blue eyes… the one who’d first rocked her tiny world five years ago.
Yes, I one hundred per cent definitely love you, Lawrence Hill. Holly put the imaginary pile of ‘love him not’ petals to one side and stared at his silly face with fondness.
‘Stand clear of the doors. Mind the gap,’ came a brusque female voice, puncturing the moment.
‘Wow. She’s in a grump today.’
Lawrence smiled from across the carriage. ‘You realise it’s just a recording? She’s not real?’
‘She probably was, once…’ Holly mused, a scene unfurling in her mind of a glamorous actress in a Soho sound booth, trying out different tones – from jovial to breezy, to downright matronly.
‘Fair,’ Lawrence said, staring at the Tube map like it was some kind of exciting code to be cracked. ‘But in other news, we need to get off in a minute.’ He grabbed his denim jacket off the floor.
Holly pressed pause on the sound session and looked up at the map. ‘No we don’t.’
‘Yes. Ours is the next stop,’ he said with the over-focused determination of Rain Man.
‘But we’re nowhere near Tufnell Park.’ She gave Lawrence a knowing smile, her left dimple popping out as she did.
‘Ah, but my dear Folly, that is a simplistic way of looking at things.’
‘Why’s that then?’ She moved into the proverbial brace position.
Adopting an old-fashioned BBC accent, Lawrence went on, ‘We should alight at Stockwell and change to the Victoria line.’
Holly’s brow furrowed. ‘Or, surely we just get the Northern line all the way to Tufnell Park?’
Lawrence smiled knowingly and shook his head. He began picking at the dilapidated shell-top of his left trainer. He pulled at the rubber flaps until they were dislodged, at which point he looked up.
‘Of course,’ his eyes widening with his trademark blend of smugness and childish excitement, ‘that is what London Transport’s Flawed Journey Planner would have you believe. However, I might remind you that there are a limited number of secret shortcuts and portals on the underground network, which only the truly seasoned Londoner is privy to.’
‘Wow. You have literally never been sexier.’
He grinned with pride. Lawrence, for all his charms, suffered from a rare yet socially debilitating condition known as Tube Tourette’s. Having grown up in the Midlands, Holly was distinctly less interested in Tube trivia than Lawrence. His fascination for it was so all-consuming, she firmly believed that under his skin were not veins or arteries, but a full replica of the London Underground map (first designed by underground electrical draughtsman Harry Beck in 1933, he’d hurry to tell you, too).
‘The Northern line boasts two such changes,’ he went on. ‘One at Stockwell, and another at Euston. While they might appear pointless at first, these two changes will actually shave off a substantial section of your journey time. Not to mention the fact that the Northern line is heinously unreliable, frequently beset by the twin evils of signal failure and engineering works.’ Holly let out a small sigh. Being an avid book-reader (a fact she loved about Lawrence), he had a habit of talking as if he was choking on a thesaurus (a fact she loved less so). There was a time when this had charmed her. Now it just niggled at her sanity.
‘Lawrence you douche, just give it to me in English.’
‘We’ll cut out loads of time if we change lines here. FACT.’
‘I have seventeen bags with me after staying at yours. I don’t fancy changing trains and schlepping all this about.’
There comes a moment in most long-term relationships when you realise your identity has irreversibly eroded. You might have been a relatively normal individual once, breezing in and out of buildings, nothing but a shoulder bag about your person. But five years into a relationship in a big city, and you’re The Bag Lady of the Northern Line – lugging around so much in the way of work clothes, unwashed gym wear and toiletries that you practically need your own carriage. Holly had recently begun duplicating all her worldly goods for North and South London. She’d had to call time on the doppelganger cosmetics project shortly after shelling out for the second set of GHD hair straighteners. Still, anything to avoid actually moving in with Lawrence.
As the train drew nearer to Stockwell and the first of Lawrence’s shortcuts, he shifted about in his seat.
‘OK, if you’re so bothered, why don’t you go?’ Holly said sarcastically. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
Lawrence’s big blue eyes widened. He stood up. ‘OK, here’s the plan. No really, this’ll be fun. You take the Northern line all the way. I’ll change to the Victoria line and back again. Then finally we’ll know the DEFINITIVE answer of which is quicker! This age-old debate will have been answered, once and for all!’
‘Oh, Lawrence… I was kidding. Please sit down,’ she scolded before noticing that they now had an audience the size of a small fringe venue. All they needed now was a man in a tux selling programmes and overpriced ice creams.
‘Aren’t you just a bit curious to know who’s right?’ Lawrence said. As he dispatched one of his daintier breeds of kisses onto her forehead (the ones he liked to call ‘fairy kisses’ when no one else was listening), she couldn’t stop the smile from creeping across her face.
Lawrence shot up from his seat, his eyes pogoing with excitement. The doors were opening. The old lady across the carriage seemed, from her enormous grin, to be egging them on.
‘You’re a freak,’ Holly replied by way of acquiescence. Then, reluctantly: ‘But listen, this has to be a fair test. We walk at a normal pace. No running up the escalators!’
Lawrence nodded. ‘I love you,’ he whispered, the doors beeping.
‘Love you too. Twat,’ she said as he bounced off the train and the doors began to close.
Flushed with a mixture of anxiety and humiliation, Holly Braithwaite watched as Lawrence stepped onto the platform and grinned back at her. Then she pulled into a tunnel deep beneath the River Thames, sank into the tired upholstery and leaned against the window.
She pictured the scene of her boyfriend sitting on the other train, staring with intent at the stopwatch on his phone. Lawrence’s diehard competitiveness was one of the things that most riled her about him. Or was it loved? Who knew, she wondered as she pulled her black beret out of her bag and folded it into a makeshift travel pillow. She wedged it beneath the cushion of her thick brown hair, and rested her head against it. She listened to the voice reading out the names of the stops and closed her eyes. She began replaying the imaginary scene of the actress in the sound booth. She’d had that slightly clipped, RP accent, evocative of another era. Perhaps she’d done the recording many years ago, dressed in forties get-up, her hair in victory rolls? She couldn’t help smiling, until a bleak thought occurred. The recording sounded so dated that there was a strong chance the owner of the voice was no longer alive. In which case, these slightly tetchy TFL announcements could be the only echo of her that remained in this world? Her legacy. Holly struggled to think what she’d be remembered for, were she to shuffle off this mortal coil right now. An insalubrious flat-share, a dysfunctional relationship, and an intellectually emaciated TV show about a regional discotheque. Ball bags, Holly thought, looking upwards with pleading eyes and hoping it wasn’t too late for her to make a proper contribution to the world.
Half an hour later, the train reached Tufnell Park. Holly rubbed her eyes and breathed a quiet sigh of relief to be north of the river again, and closer to home. Leaving the platform, she found herself jumping the stairs two at a time. She cleared the Oyster machines and ran through the ticket hall, where she could see that – bugger it – Lawrence was standing beside a lamp post on the street. She could tell by the position of his thumbs and the rapid movement of his eyes that he was playing Candy Crush on his phone. As she walked towards her man, she began playing a favourite game of her own, imagining it was the first time she’d ever seen him. She pretended to check him out, to assess if she still wanted to jump the bones of this stranger before her. She surveyed the optimum amount of stubble across his face and the dark brown hair that was perennially in the just-got-out-of-bed style. She studied his tall build – athletic without even trying – and his weathered Che Guevara T-shirt. She smiled. Yep, he definitely still had it. Despite being annoying in a multitude of ways, Lawrence Edward Hill could still turn her stomach to mush.
‘See?’ Lawrence said without looking up, his voice drunk with ‘I told you so’.
‘All right, well done.’
He stared at her expectantly.
‘Yes, you were right.’
He smiled. ‘So, since I won, maybe you can get the wine for dinner?’
‘You’re all charm,’ Holly said, poking him in the ribs, then beginning to walk up the road.
‘But not just yet…’ he said, tugging at her arm. He bent down to kiss her and they smooched under a street lamp like teenagers.
‘Hey,’ Holly said, breaking away. ‘Don’t laugh, but, if for instance I should, you know, die in some sort of freak accident tomorrow – what would you remember most about me? My eyes? My voice?’
Lawrence’s thick brown eyebrows crinkled towards each other. ‘Well, since you ask, your laugh. I think it’s the most beautiful sound ever. But what is this? Have you gone wonky with motion-sickness again?’
‘I just got a bit hypnotized by that Tube announcer’s voice, hearing it over and over. I didn’t have a book to read, so for some reason I went off on one, and started overthinking things.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ he said, before smiling, ‘although, you did have a much longer journey than me.’
‘Ha ha, very funny,’ Holly said, as they walked hand in hand towards Boozenest – the 24-hour convenience store she lived above with her two flatmates.
‘But just imagine, what if you actually knew her? What if you were her boyfriend and she’d up and left you one day? Would it be really painful hearing her voice every time you travelled? Or – what if she did these recordings years ago, and now she’s six feet under?’
Holly crouched on the pavement and began opening bags at random. Lawrence bent down to assist her in The Great Key Hunt. ‘Well, if that were true, it’d be a bit like she’s been accidentally immortalised by Transport for London.’
‘Exactly! I mean, imagine if she’d left behind a widower. Do you think the poor guy would ride the Northern line, just to hear her voice again, as a way of being with her again in some way? Or maybe he’d always avoid it, as it would be too painful?’
‘The Northern line is always painful,’ Lawrence said as his fingers pulled out something sharp and metal. ‘Et voilà!’
Holly smiled, took the keys from him and began unlocking the door, just as her phoned beeped with a message.
‘Shut the front door!’ she said, stopping on the stairs to re-read the text.
‘I just did,’ Lawrence replied, shooting her a puzzled look before noticing her mouth drop open. ‘Oh. What’s up?’
‘It’s Olivia. No wonder she wanted to come over for dinner all of a sudden. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend. I can’t believe it. She and Ross were an institution at university.’
‘How awful. Who’s Olivia?’
‘You know Olivia. From Uni. Wow, I really thought they were in it for the long haul,’ she mused as they stood up and began to hike up the stairs.
‘Hello?!’ Holly shouted over a booming Ella Fitzgerald song as they reached the internal front door and she pushed it open. They headed up more stairs, past a tapestry of Blu-Tacked posters of film and music icons. On first moving in to 249a Fortess Road, Holly’s long-term flatmate Bella, had been outvoted on the motion to only display pictures in frames from now on ‘We’re not students anymore’, Holly and her other flatmate Daniel had pointed out. But slowly, as if by osmosis, new Blu-Tacked posters had begun appearing every few months.
Holly wandered into the lounge and through the kitchen, looking towards the small roof-terrace where Bella was smoking. Seeing her flatmate, she thought again how fine the line was between fancy dress and Bella’s style preferences. A slave to vintage, Bella was dressed head to toe in fifties housewife chic, from the red and white polka-dot apron pinching in at her waist, to the Routemaster-red lips and heels.
‘We have wine!’ declared a triumphant Holly, opening the bottle and popping it onto the kitchen table to let it breathe. Then she bent down to the speakers, turned down the insanely loud Ella, and headed outside, kissing Bella on the cheek. She stood on the terrace and took in the staggering view of North London trees and rooftops, remembering again why they’d chosen to live at the top of so many flights of stairs.
‘Sorry, it took forever to get here from zone twenty. We’ve left you to do all the dinner. Can we help now?’
‘Oh, crap!’ Bella stubbed out her cigarette and headed back into the kitchen where some pots were just starting to bubble over. Next to the hob there was a cavalcade of crumbs, empty tofu packaging, stray lentils and shards of purple sprouting broccoli. Bella began stirring the lentils with one hand while applying mascara with the other, using the kitchen window as a mirror.
‘No, it’s all under control. Just open some wine. Who’s this friend of yours that’s coming over again?’
‘Olivia. We were in halls together at university. She’s down in London this weekend,’ Holly said, attempting to fold napkins in a way that didn’t look entirely eighties. ‘She stayed up in Manchester after graduation, which is why we don’t see that much of each other. That, and she’s been mummified in a relationship for the last seven years. But apparently they’ve just broken up, so…’ Holly looked at Bella to make sure she was paying attention, ‘…so she’s probably going to be a little fragile right now,’ she warned just as the doorbell rang.
