I check my watch.
‘When is this date? Are you going for high tea?’
‘It’s not until eight but I’ve got to get ready. I’m going to get some pure oxygen and have my eyebrows threaded.’
‘You know how it works. Mindy goes into pre-production, like an over-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Development hell,’ Ivor says.
‘Obviously, I should just change my t-shirt and pour a bottle of Lynx Caveman all over myself,’ Mindy snaps back, standing up.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Ivor says, mildly, ‘Lynx is for men.’
Mindy shakes her head at Ivor and gives me a hug. ‘Start planning the party. Who knows, if this goes well, I might bring Jake.’
‘Jake,’ Ivor scoffs. ‘He’s even got a name that dates him as post-1985.’
‘Says Ivor.’
‘My name’s never been in fashion so it can’t go out. It only dates me as post ninth century, dear.’
‘Whevs! Bye, Rach.’
‘Good luck with the Relic Hunter!’ Ivor shouts, as I show her out.
Mindy turns in the doorway and gives him two fingers.
‘Do you think,’ I drop down on the sofa and squeeze an oyster coloured cushion to my body, then feel the shop-fresh plump starchy newness of it and realise these cushions aren’t for squeezing and put it back, ‘Mindy will ever revise this ruthless policy of looks first, personality a distant second, compatibility irrelevant?’
‘Probably not.’
We shake our heads.
‘What’re your plans? Want me to stay?’ Ivor asks, and I wonder why today feels like a series of polite rejections. ‘Or go?’
‘Erm,’ I say, trying to work out what he wants me to say. I feel as if a strange stigma is clinging to me. I have some insight into how the newly bereaved crave people who don’t walk on eggshells around them.
‘I was going to make use of Katya being away for the weekend and have a Grand Theft Auto marathon and eat vacuum-packed pork products,’ he continues. ‘You’re welcome to join me.’
‘Hah, no, thanks, I’m fine. Enjoy killing all those hookers.’
I see Ivor out and tell myself sternly that I’m very lucky to have supportive friends, and being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you. None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being on your own again. Rhys and I had separate interests. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Yet the empty quiet of the flat stretches like an island around me, and the city an ocean beyond that.
I do some more unpacking until the discovery of the old framed photo from university starts me crying, and the intensity of the urge to call Rhys and say I’ve changed my mind is like Class A withdrawal. I sit scrolling up and down to his name in my mobile phone address book. I wouldn’t have to say anything desperate: all I’d be doing is checking in on him. I stop. However he’s getting through today, I need to let him get on with it. I’ve put myself beyond being able to help him, on this. I imagine him alone in that bed tonight and think: I’m lucky. I get a fresh start in new surroundings. He has the site of our old life, minus me.
Unbidden, my mind starts playing me a montage of our edited highlights. The first night we spent together at his old flat and me falling out of bed and onto his effects pedal, which was a baptism of fire for new love – I screamed the place down and had a bruise the size of a handprint on my back. The run to the shops to get painkillers and the breakfast he made me the next day, involving seven pans and three types of eggs. The day I met his family, when I was virtually levitating with nerves, and Rhys saying on the doorstep: ‘They’ll love you. Not because I do. Because everyone with eyes and ears does.’ The weekend in Brighton with the world’s worst car journey down, the dubious Nazi-run B&B that was nowhere near the seafront and the bistro with the horrible waiters. It could’ve been awful but instead I remember laughing like a pair of school kids for two days solid. The day we moved into our house and drank champagne out of mugs, sitting on the stairs, in a furniture-free desert of sandy carpet, arguing about whether his frightening Iggy Pop photo had too many pubes on show to be fit for the ‘reception rooms’. The scores of in-jokes and shared history and special knowledge I couldn’t imagine having with anyone ever again, not without a Tardis to whisk me back to being twenty.
What was I doing, throwing all this away? Did it all add up to say I should stay with Rhys? Was I making the biggest mistake of my life? Probably not, purely on the basis that award has already been handed out.
I tell myself, this day is as bad as it’s going to be. This is a day you have to get through. It occurs to me that it’d be easier to get through unconscious. I crawl to the huge bed, cover my face with my arms and weep myself to sleep.
As I drift off, I imagine the supermodelly Indian girl animating in her portrait, looking down, saying: ‘Well, that’s not what this flat is for.’
14
I awake to an odd noise, like a bee trapped in a tin can and something scuttling over a hard surface. I sit bolt upright in the twilight and think, Mindy better not have neglected to mention some kind of vermin infestation of B-movie proportions. As I shake off the sleep I see that the noise is coming from my vibrating mobile as it pushes itself around the nightstand. I pick it up as it’s about to clatter to the floorboards and see it’s Caroline.
‘Did you nick my towels after all?’ I mumble, sleepily.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No! Been asleep.’ I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. ‘Although that sounds an interesting idea.’
‘I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I’ve started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.’
‘Cheers!’ I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.
‘If we came round tonight and got drunk, you’d have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.’
‘Or it’d bundle all the bad things together,’ I grumble.
‘Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.’
I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa’s got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinprick bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline’s tough love is a good thing.
‘Ah, I’ll cope.’
‘Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I’ll come round tomorrow.’
After I hang up, I discover I’m not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa’s shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I’ll replace it twice over before I leave. I don’t have any tonic so it has to make a rapper’s delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn’t wanted to