I tried not to catch Cynthia’s eye during this, partly because I still couldn’t believe this was our rebellious Emma, who’d once refused to shop in supermarkets for an entire year until they started charging for plastic bags. But also because I missed having this with someone, passing words back and forth like dishes, barely listening to what you were saying. Reminding someone to buy milk. All that.
Ian, like many men, required you to make a whole performance of admiring his food whenever he cooked. You had to look at it, smell it, guess what spices he might have used, and only then were you allowed to dig in. Dan and I had given up cooking when things got bad. We were on first-name terms with the Papa John’s delivery man—I’d even given him a Christmas card, to my shame.
‘So,’ said Emma, as soon as she’d finished wiping her plate with naan. ‘It’s Rach’s first night with us alone.’
‘Not really,’ Ian pointed out. ‘She hadn’t brought him out with her for at least the past year.’
‘He was always so busy with work,’ I said defensively. ‘I brought him. Sometimes.’
Things that suck about divorce, number thirty-four: finding out that none of your friends or family really liked your spouse in the first place; they just didn’t say so at the time when you could actually have done something about it. We’d all been at university together, so my friends had had a good ten years to get to know Dan. It was sad to think he was going to slip out of their lives too, without a backward glance.
‘It’s her first night properly alone,’ Emma repeated.
‘Do you have to keep saying “alone”?’ I was still working on my third curry helping and most likely only seconds from an Ian pun about passing out in a korma. Unlike those pale tragic women in books, misery made me eat everything in sight.
Cynthia rubbed my arm. ‘You’re not alone, darling. You’re independent and fabulous.’
Easy for her to say when she was going home to Richy Rich and their mansion with a cleaner and once-a-month gardener.
‘Anyway.’ Emma was doing her ‘could the class come to attention’ voice. ‘Rach, I know you’re feeling a bit wobbly at present.’
‘You could say that,’ I mumbled through curry. ‘Is anyone eating that?’
Ian passed over more naan. ‘Your naan,’ he said. ‘Geddit? Like your mum.’
‘Could you listen, please?’ Emma was waiting. ‘I think what you need is a project. All the books say the first few months post-split are the hardest.’
‘You read books about it?’
‘Of course. I wanted to support you.’
‘It’s a bit worrying seeing a book called Steps Through Divorce beside the bed,’ Ian said, chewing.
‘You have to be married to get divorced,’ Emma said, with a slight edge in her voice, which made me hurriedly swallow my curry.
‘So you’ve got a project for me?’
‘Better.’ She smiled triumphantly and pulled out a small notebook. ‘I’ve got a project plan.’
We all groaned. Cynthia said, ‘Not again, Em. I thought we’d talked about this scrapbooking issue.’
‘It’s nothing! Just some glue-gunning, and a bit of découpage and sketching … you know.’
‘Don’t make us do another intervention. Remember my wedding invites.’
I winced. ‘I thought we’d agreed, we do not talk about the wedding invites.’
Emma was huffing. ‘I don’t see what the fuss was about. They looked lovely. Everyone said.’
Cynthia ticked it off on her fingers. ‘They cost five hundred pounds in materials! I could have got them at the Queen’s stationer for that! They put indelible pink stains on everyone’s hands!’
‘Hand-dyed paper! It was a lovely touch.’
‘Touch was exactly what they couldn’t do.’
Ian met my eyes, pleading, as he gathered up our plates. ‘Can I see the plan?’ I said. I was the peacemaker in the group, which meant, like many peacekeepers, I was often riddled with metaphorical crossfire bullets. ‘Thank you, Em. It’s pretty.’
Emma was an excellent primary school teacher. She was authoritative, briskly kind, organised and on top of this a dab hand at cutting and gluing things. Unfortunately, she couldn’t curtail this, and so was prone to a vice you might call ‘scrapbooking gone mad’. Every page was decorated in sparkly gold pen, with glued-in photos and drawings. ‘So what’s the—’
‘Well,’ she jumped in, ‘I read in this book that the best way through a big life change is to have a list. A to-do list.’
That didn’t sound so bad. Lists were my comfort zone—I’d had interventions about this too. I turned the leaf. Page one said—do stand-up comedy. It was accompanied by a picture of me rather drunk, in a party hat, in the middle of saying something that was clearly very important. I looked up at them. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a bucket list,’ said Cynthia gently. ‘Except you’re not dying, of course. Sort of an embracing-life list. All the things you said you wanted to do for years, then never did because you were living in the suburbs with Dan.’
‘I never said I wanted to—what’s this—eat something weird? Ew, is that a snail in the picture?’
‘We sort of … extrapolated for some of them.’
‘You extrapolated that I wanted to … sleep with a stranger? Nice abs on that dude though.’ I tilted the book for a better look at the picture.
‘You could do both of those last ones together,’ called Ian from the kitchen. ‘I mean, if you slept with a stranger, you probably would eat something weird. Two birds, one stone, etc.’
‘Go away, Ian,’ said Emma and Cynthia in unison.
I was leafing through the lovely rough handmade paper pages, with their crazy gold-penned instructions. ‘Guys, what is this about? I didn’t say I wanted to … do yoga properly. What?’
Emma leaned across the table to me earnestly. ‘Rach. What’s happened is you’ve had a disastropiphany.’
‘A what?’
‘A terrible thing has happened to you, but you can use it to make changes in your life, and generally become much happier.’
‘Like in Eat Pray Love,’ Cynthia chipped in.
There was a problem with that—no one was going to pay me to go round the world shagging Javier Bardem and eating ice cream. Julia Roberts would definitely not play me in the film of this. Maybe Kathy Burke. There was no way I could pull off prayer beads as a look. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You must really think I’ve messed things up.’
In the silence that followed Ian pushed a large vegetable through the kitchen door. ‘What do you think, eh? It’s what Prince was singing about. “Little Red Courgette”? Eh? Eh?’
‘Courgettes are green,’ said Emma stonily. ‘And get on with the dessert, will you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ In the kitchen we could hear him singing over the noise of the blender. ‘She made some raspberry puree … the kind you find in a fruit and veg store …’ Emma rolled her eyes affectionately. At least I hoped it was affectionately.
She lowered her voice. ‘To be honest, Rach, when you and Dan split up, it made me think—is this all there is, working all day and every evening, falling asleep in front of box sets, saving for a deposit on an even smaller flat somewhere further out?’ There was a silence from the kitchen. She went on.