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‘It’s not disapproval, you’re thirty-one. It’s not for us or anyone else to say what’s right for you. I suppose I was surprised you didn’t mention any problems before, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t want to talk behind Rhys’s back. I wasn’t sure how I felt, truth be told. I was being carried along by the wedding planning and then he was being a shit about it and it came tumbling out and there it was.’
‘It wasn’t worth giving him a shape-up-or-ship-out? You never put your foot down enough, in my opinion, and it might’ve led to … laziness.’
‘I did try suggesting a counsellor or whatever. He wasn’t interested.’
‘I doubt he wanted to lose you. He’s stubborn …’
‘You can’t ask someone not to be who they are. That’s where we were.’
‘Couldn’t you … if you’d …’
‘Caro, please. I can’t do this now. I will do soon, over wine, for hours. We can thrash the whole thing out until you’re sick of hearing about it. But not now.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.’
Hmm. Not sure when this ‘soon’ will arrive. I possibly want to wait until 2064 when she can put a data stick in her ear and download the information straight into her frontal cortex.
Then on reckless impulse I add: ‘Oh, I saw Ben.’
‘Ben? Ben from uni? Where? I thought you weren’t going to look him up? How was he?’
I’m grateful that Caroline can only fix her eyes on me momentarily before she has to return them to the road.
‘Uh, the library. I decided I wanted to learn Italian as part of the New Me, and there he was. We had a coffee. Seems well. Married.’
Caroline snorts. ‘Hah! Well he was bound to be. Anyone as attractive and house-trainable as that gets snapped up mid-twenties, latest.’
‘Anyone decent’s married by now?’
Caroline realises what she’s said and grimaces. ‘No! I mean, men like him are. There are more good women than men, so supply and demand dictates his sort are long gone off the market.’
‘Doesn’t bode well for my prospects in finding someone then.’
Caroline is crunching the gears, and looks like an Egyptian terracotta head I once saw in the British Museum. ‘I didn’t mean … oh, you know …’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I agree with you. Ben was always going to be married, and maybe choices post-thirty aren’t great. The divorces are going to start soon, I’ll pick someone up on their second lap.’
Caroline gives me a laugh that’s more grateful than amused. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Mindy and Ivor are still single, and they’re normal and nice. Well, fairly normal.’
‘Exactly!’
I’m not feeling half as casual as I’m trying to sound, for both our sakes. Starting again. From the beginning. With someone who doesn’t know the million important and incidental things about me, who isn’t fluent in the long-term couple language that I’ve taken for granted for so long with Rhys. How will anyone ever know as much about me again, and vice versa? Will I find anyone who wants to learn it? I imagine a York Notes revision style aid on Rachel Woodford. Or a Wikipedia page, lots of claims from Rhys followed by [citation needed].
And is this a brutal truth, everyone good has gone? As if soul mates are one big early-bird-gets-the-worm January sale. Buy the wrong thing, have to return it, and you’re left with the stuff no one else wanted. This is the kind of thinking I’d scoff at from my mum, yet I was always scoffing from the security of a relationship. I feel a lot less sure of my ‘Don’t be so Stepford’ stance now I’ve got to test the truth of the hypothesis.
A few circuits of the apartment building to find a parking space demonstrates why it’s as well Rhys has kept our car.
‘I’ll stay here so I don’t get a clamping,’ Caroline says. ‘If I see a warden I’ll go round the block, so don’t panic I’ve legged it with your towels.’
I discover how unfit I am as I run from car to flat door, and Caroline manages not to get ticketed the whole time.
When I take the last of it, she says: ‘So I’d stay but I’d have thought you want to show your mum round, now she’s here?’
‘Uh? My mum’s not here.’
‘She’s there.’
Caroline gestures over my shoulder. My mum is counting out coins from her big snap-clasp purse into the upturned hat of a man with a dog on a string, her black Windsmoor shawl coat billowing like Professor Snape’s cape. She’s always immaculately turned out and a ringer for Anne Bancroft, circa The Graduate. I think she wonders how she gave birth to someone inches shorter, and many degrees swearier and scabbier in her habits, though she might want to look to my dad for at least part of the answer.
‘Oh, bloody hell …’
Caroline smiles and climbs back into the car, waving farewell to my mum.
‘Hello darling! Was that Caroline? Delightful girl. Still has the metabolism of a greyhound, I see. Some have all the luck, eh?’
‘Hi Mum. Uhm. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m off to Samantha’s make-up rehearsal thingy at John Lewis, with Barbara. You can come if you like?’
‘Come to the wedding make-over of a family friend I haven’t seen for fifteen years, while thinking about how I’m not getting married and making it completely awkward for them?’
‘Oh, nonsense. They’d love to see you.’
‘I’d have been useless enough company when I was getting married. And I seem to remember Sam’s a “squee!” type girl.’
‘“Squee” girl?’
‘Squee wee! Fun-a-roonie dot com! Let’s go get scrummy cupcakes and have proper giggles.’
My mum leans in to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Come on, no one likes a bitter lemon. Show me your new digs.’
We take the stairs instead of the lift, me walking with the heavy tread of someone on their way to the electric chair, not the kind of lifestyle flat that has a pink fridge. I pull the key out of my pocket and let us in. It smells strange in here, as in, not like home. I stare balefully at the mini-mountain of my crap that’s blotting the manicured landscape.
‘Goodness me, very gaudy, isn’t it. Like the 1960s have been sick.’
‘Thanks Mum! I like it actually.’
‘Hmm, well as long as you do, that’s the main thing. I can see that it’s different.’
Different is usually an innocuous word, but it’s one of my mum’s most damning verdicts.
She unhooks her handbag from her shoulder and sits down next to me. I know exactly what’s coming. She clears her throat. Here it comes …
‘Now. You and Rhys. I understand you’re going through a crisis—’
‘Mum! I’m not going through it, like a squall of bad weather on the road to still getting married. We’ve broken up.’
‘If you’d allow me to speak, as someone who’s been married forty years …’
I pick sullenly at a seam on the sofa.
‘… Marriage is difficult. You do get on each other’s nerves. It’s relentless. It’s very, very tough and quite honestly, even in the good times, you do wish they’d go boil their head, most days.’
‘I’m not too bothered about missing out on it then!’
‘What I’m saying is, what you’re feeling – it’s perfectly normal.’
‘If relationships are only ever what we had, I’d rather be on my own.’
Pause.
‘You could be throwing away your only chance to have children, have you thought of that?’
My mum: not a loss to the world of motivational speaking.
‘Amazingly enough I had factored it in, but, thanks …’
‘I simply want you to be very sure you’re making the right decision, that’s all. You and Rhys have been together an awfully long time.’
‘That’s why I’m sure.’ Pause. ‘It’d mean a lot to me if you took me seriously and accepted I know my own mind about who I do and don’t want to marry, Mum. This is hard enough as it is.’
‘Well. If you’re absolutely sure.’
‘I am.’ And of course as I say it, I realise I’m not absolutely sure. I’m as sure as I assume you need to be, given I’ve never broken off an engagement before and have nothing to compare this to.
My mum stands up.
‘Your dad and I will be round soon. Let us know if we need to bring any odds and sods you’re short of.’
‘OK, thanks.’ Suddenly my throat has furred up and I give her a tight squeeze, inhaling her familiar scent of YSL Rive Gauche in place of Rupa’s flat’s olfactory newness.
With my mum’s departure, relief though it is, I feel almost as bereft as I did when waving my parents off from the halls of residence car park. I need a massive cup of tea, one that requires two handles on the mug in order to lift it. With a tot of Maker’s Mark in it.
I stare out of the huge window and suddenly the vastness doesn’t seem glamorous, but precarious. I imagine how tiny I’d look from the other side of the glass. A little scared sad insignificant figure peering down over the Manchester rooftops.
For a lurching moment, I’m so homesick I almost shout out loud: I want to go home. But home and Rhys are indivisible.
13
In late afternoon, when I’ve filled dead air with impersonal radio, a weird additional sound echoes round the room and I realise it’s the doorbell. I unlatch the chain and swing the door open to see an explosion of pink and white flowers and a pair of legging-clad legs beneath them.
‘Happy Moving-In Day!’ Mindy shouts.
‘Hello, wow, lilies. That talk. That’s lovely of you.’
Mindy pushes her way through the door, Ivor trailing behind, hands in pockets. He leans in and gives me a peck on the cheek. I can tell from his reluctant demeanour that Mindy’s given him a ‘Congratulate Her On Making A Good Choice’ lecture on the way here. He holds out a Marks & Spencer bag.
‘From me, but not chosen by me, I hasten to add,’ Ivor says. ‘I did not touch cloth, as they say.’
I peer inside. Pyjamas. Really nice ones, in cream silk.
‘You’re not going to cry are you?’ Ivor says. ‘The receipt’s in there.’
‘I’m not going to cry,’ I say, tearing up a bit. ‘Thank you.’
As Mindy turns this way and that, looking for the right surface to put the flowers, she leaves a massive sweep of ochre pollen on the pristine, wedding cake wall.
‘They’re from Ivor too,’ she adds, finding her pitch and marching over to the coffee table, more pollen from the trembling flowers shaking a fine, fire-coloured powder in her wake.
I discreetly put a hand over my mouth, surveying the mess.
‘You’re welcome!’ Mindy sing-songs, turning round and seeing me, taking it as being agog at the gift.
Ivor has followed my line of sight. He adds under his breath: ‘Let’s say they’re from you. I’ll clean up, shall I?’
‘What do you think, Ivor?’ Mindy calls, doing a gameshow-girl twirl to indicate she means the flat.
‘I think it looks like a female American Psycho’s lair. Patrick Batewoman.’ He rinses a chamois under the tap, which is on one of those bendy arms you usually see in industrial kitchens. ‘In a good way.’
As Mindy potters around in vermilion ankle boots, taking it all in for a second time, Ivor gingerly dabs at the damage. He turns to me and nods, to say it’s coming off, and gestures for me to join Mindy.
‘Drink?’ I ask, wondering as I say it where my kettle is and what I’m going to do for milk.
‘I can’t stay actually, I’ve got a date,’ Mindy says.
‘Bo … Robert?’ I ask.
‘Bobby Trendy’s been given his cards,’ Ivor interjects, breaking off from his cleaning up.
Robert was always head-to-toe in All Saints with bicycle chains hanging out of his back pocket and got the nickname ‘Bobby Trendy’ from Ivor. Unfortunately, once uttered, it was hard to un-stick it from your mind.
‘Yeah, he sacked my family dinner off for a paintballing thing with his brother-in-law.’ Mindy waves her hand. ‘Enough was enough. There should be a TripAdvisor on dates, so you can give feedback. Nice view. Bad service. Book waaaay in advance.’
‘Small portions,’ Ivor coughs into his fist.
‘Who’s this one from, Guardian Soulmates?’ I say.
‘My Single Friend.’
‘Is that the one where a friend recommends you?’
‘Yeah. I posed as a man and sold myself as a low-maintenance mamacita who “works as hard as she plays”.’
