I stumble blindly up from my chair. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ I say to her, holding the door open, my voice sounding strangled and choked. She gives me a sympathetic, knowing glance on her way out. I slam the door shut for the third time this morning. I need to get out of here!
But my options are limited. I can either leave through the door and face the fifteen or so shiny young faces that are still waiting on the other side of it, or I can climb down through the tiny twelve-inch-square window in my office, adopt my father’s way of dealing with confrontation – i.e., avoiding it like the plague.
My friend Tyra walks in as I stand there, hands tangled in my hair. She stares at me aghast. Tyra was invited to my wedding, so she doesn’t need to ask, Oh no, what happened? She quickly closes the door shut behind her.
‘Rilla—’ she says. ‘You look terrible. Your hair, your skin, your shirt is buttoned all wrong and’ – she looks down at my feet – ‘you’re wearing mismatched socks!’
I look at her, panic clear on my face. ‘I shouldn’t have come today—’
She walks over to me and places her hands on my shoulders. ‘Rilla. For crying out loud, get yourself together! Who cares what anyone thinks?’ She quickly buttons my shirt right, pats my hair, and squeezes my cheeks to get some colour back into them.
I collapse on my chair and lift my head to stare up at the ceiling. ‘I never want to see anyone again.’
Tyra perches herself on my desk and swings her legs, stylish in her orange jumpsuit and platform sandals. She is watching me, her caramel skin beautifully offset by an emerald scarf and enormous silver hoops.
‘Rilla, what’s going on?’
‘With what?’
‘You know what. All of it!’
I shrug defensively. ‘I couldn’t go through with it, okay? Why is everyone staring at me like I’ve lost a limb? I made a mistake getting engaged in the first place.’
She nods slowly. ‘Well, I could have told you that.’
I look at her sharply. This is the first time since I left Simon at the altar that anyone has expressed this opinion. Everyone else in my life is convinced that I’m a terrible person, that I hurt Simon and I ruined my life. I narrow my eyes at her. I want to ask her what the hell she’s talking about but, characteristically, her rapid-fire brain is already moving on to the next thing. She’s looking at my computer screen where she can see the notes I’ve made for my MA thesis.
‘Any progress?’ she asks, trying to read what I’ve written.
Federico was wrong about what he said to my family. I have not been thrown out of my MA, I’ve only been given a warning. I need to produce more work, have more to show for the last three years. I’m doing an MA in philosophy, writing a thesis on multicultural perspectives on love. I want to know, I genuinely want to understand how some people are so good at love and others aren’t. Yet the more I study it, the less I seem to know.
I shake my head. ‘Nope, no progress.’
She inclines her head to study me. ‘You’re good at this stuff. I don’t get it. What’s stopping you from writing something, anything? You can do it in your sleep.’
I cluck impatiently. ‘And act like I know about love?’
She raises a stylish shoulder. It was Tyra, my best friend during the three years of my undergraduate degree, who convinced me to apply for a scholarship to do an MA at Goldsmiths. She’s writing an MA thesis on sex in black feminist literature. Soon she’ll be moving on to a PhD. She’s nearly done and I don’t even have a clue where I’m headed.
‘Do it, finish it. What’s stopping you?’ she asks.
This is a really good question. I have pages and pages of notes, hundreds of pages. Yet, I am no closer to finding a thesis topic.
The years of my degree, a BA in English Literature, weren’t easy. I was haunted by a recurrent unease with my life, maybe even with being in my own skin. I felt restless and unsure with just about everything. But I was able to focus on one thing – the degree itself. On the books we read and the papers we wrote. Once I completed my degree, though, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I felt like I had no anchor, that even the relative grounding that my degree had given me had been stripped away from me. What were my skills? What was I good at? What did I want to do? I’d never been in love with any job I’d had over the years – teaching chocolate-making workshops, selling vintage clothes, working in a pub. So when the scholarship was offered to me, I had said yes. It felt like a lifeline.
‘I can’t write anything at all. I feel like I’m pretending I know things that … I’ve never known.’
‘Why does everything need to be perfect? This is the problem with you. Either something is perfect, or it’s total shit.’ Tyra raises an eyebrow.
I shake my head. ‘That’s not true.’
‘It so is. Take your MA, for instance. It could be about, say, Jane Austen’s perspective on love. That would do. But no, the woman has to find out everything on love that’s ever been written anywhere in the world. Compartmentalize, Rilla. Write the thesis. It doesn’t have to be perfect!’
‘Maybe.’
She’s looking at me now, not saying anything.
I frown, determined to give her the silent treatment, but then I give up. ‘Fine, just tell me. What did I do wrong with Simon?’
She widens her eyes, looks about the room, seemingly looking for an answer to my question. ‘You got engaged three months after you met. You were getting married three months after that. I mean, duh, you don’t need to look far for what went wrong! Anyway, look, what’s the big deal? We all make mistakes. Love and marriage and all that, it’s not for everyone. I mean, look at me!’
‘Love and marriage and all that,’ I repeat stupidly.
‘Come out with me Friday. We’ll pick up some blokes, go on, say yes!’
This is Tyra’s answer to any problem. I don’t say anything. She jumps off the desk, gives me a kiss and knocks on my forehead with a bony knuckle. She waves her fingers, mouths Friday and disappears out of the door, leaving me staring blankly at my computer screen.
I should appreciate everything she just said. Tyra is the one person who doesn’t believe I’m the worst person in the world after what I did to Simon. Yet, the voice in my head is saying: It’s Tyra, she’s supportive, she cares, but she also tends to wash her hands of sticky situations, to fix things and move on quickly. She likes to think she knows what people should be doing with their lives. Come to think of it, not so unlike my GIF. A minute after she leaves, she sends me a text message and I expect it will reiterate what she has already said to me. But it doesn’t. It says, Prof on prowl. She means Professor Grundy, my supervisor. If Professor Grundy finds me in university today, she will not let me go without an interrogation, an interrogation that will make my undergraduates’ sad questions seem like a birthday party. In fact, it would be safe to say that her cross-examination wouldn’t be out of place in a prison camp.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, then stand up, picking up my bag and my coat. I feel exhausted, weary to the bone. Some people are just not cut out for love. This seems to be the consensus today. And I’m really not sure they’re wrong.
When Simon and I first met it wasn’t at all romantic. We met at the police station, that was the scene