Love, and Other Things to Live For Page 5

  Outside the tube station I walked over to the man I vaguely recognised from the picture. He was taller than I had imagined with dusty blond hair in a perfectly coiffed style.

  ‘Harry?’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Jess.’ He offered his hand for me to shake before quickly changing his mind and kissing my cheek. ‘Firstly, may I say you look beautiful and secondly, thank you for showing up.’

  I smiled at him. Still no words but at least the pounding in my chest had ceased.

  He had booked the table for eight thirty and together we strolled to the restaurant nestled just around the corner. Harry looked back as we walked against the evening sun and as we approached the corner of the pavement I noticed him do it again.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine. I’m just looking for my ex-wife. I’ve got a restraining order but you can’t be too careful.’

  I looked behind us as we crossed the road.

  ‘Jess, I’m kidding,’ he said, as I hit his arm and began to smile. ‘You looked so bloody nervous coming out of the tube, I thought I’d better do something to lighten the mood.’

  It had worked. He was funny, and despite my nerves he had made me laugh all the way to the glass doorway of the restaurant where we were hit with low hung lights and the smell of incense. We were seated at a table next to the open window where he gazed at me with expectant eyes to start the conversation.

  ‘Great to be here,’ I said, with all I could muster.

  ‘Great to be here too,’ he said.

  In the midst of a silence that would have made a funeral seem energetic, I did what every girl in my position would do: I escaped to the toilets.

  I caught sight of myself as I stood reapplying my lipstick in the bathroom mirror. I was being difficult; perhaps it was even an act of sabotage so that things wouldn’t work out. So that I wouldn’t have to be brave and try something new. Harry was attractive, funny and from what I could tell, incredibly easy-going. But as I sat on the toilet, tallying up the laughs, I realised my newly surfaced pessimism was an altogether more difficult mountain to conquer. This wasn’t about him at all. The problem was definitely me.

  ‘You were ages,’ Harry said as I returned to the table.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Thought you’d fallen in.’ His eyes perused the wine list with a cheeky smile. ‘So are you a big eater, because this menu’s pretty pricey? I mean, I’m okay to just nibble on an edamame, if you are?’

  ‘Well, I just saw on my way back from the bathroom that the couple opposite us left a hefty amount of rice behind so maybe…’

  ‘What an excellent idea,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll distract, you pilfer.’

  I laughed as the waiter arrived to take our order.

  ‘I was a bit nervous before tonight but, this is not so bad, is it?’ Harry said, reaching for my hand over the table.

  ‘Nope,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s not too bad at all.’

  Give it a chance, Jess, I said to myself as Harry ordered his food from the waiter. Just give it a chance.

  The car pulled up outside my door just short of eleven thirty. Although neither of us knew at this point if there would be a second date, he was brave and made the first move to kiss me. I turned away, a knee-jerk reaction that I later slightly regretted. In an awkward moment that felt like a strange end to an otherwise perfect evening, I gave him a small wave and closed the door behind me. It was a typical survival tactic. One I had to unlearn. Fast. As I opened the door of my flat, I slid out of my punishing shoes and immediately saw Amber on the sofa, seated with a box of tissues on her knee, surrounded by the used ones.

  ‘A builder on the bus gave me his cold this morning,’ she shouted. ‘He was breathing all over me – first I could smell his morning breath and now I feel like I’ve trekked through the Himalayas.’

  I picked up the tissues and carried them over to the kitchen.

  ‘Well, let’s not pass it to everyone, shall we?’ I shouted, dumping them into our silver pedal bin before heading over to the sink to wash my hands. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’

  I poured us both some tea and sat next to her on the sofa.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, deflecting any questions about how the evening had ended, but as I watched her flick through the channels before deciding on a nature documentary, I smiled.

  ‘It was actually really nice,’ I said. ‘I was a complete moron about the whole thing, though.’

  ‘Of course you were,’ Amber said, without looking away from the screen. ‘He’ll grow to love that though.’

  I smiled and sipped my tea. Not there yet but definitely trying.

  ‘You’ve got to see him again!’ Sean bellowed at me down the phone the next morning. I was on my way to buy a new portfolio for my photographs and had decided to pass by the organic coffee shop for a morning boost. As I attempted to juggle my phone, my coffee and my handbag, I leaned against a post box to regain my grip on things.

  ‘He wasn’t as I expected, that’s all. He was actually really funny,’ I said.

  ‘Look, this is not my first rodeo… as you know,’ Sean said.

  I nodded. ‘Nope.’

  ‘And it’s not yours, either, so save me the innocent princess convo and tell me what you really thought. Would you sleep with him?’

  ‘I don’t know… probably?’

  ‘And was he clean, well-mannered… wasn’t a psycho?’

  ‘Yes. All of those things.’

  ‘Then just promise me you’ll give it another go.’

  ‘Okay, I will,’ I said, biting my bottom lip nervously. I relented, ‘I promise.’

  ‘Jess, I’m being serious. You’ve got to move on now.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  I rested my phone down on the post box considering the weight of what I’d just promised him, all the while knowing it was a promise I owed to myself too.

  Chapter Five – Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy

  (Or, in human speak – ‘To die of a broken heart’)

  Dave the plumber was lying down on our kitchen floor as I hovered over him clutching his spanner. The tenants in the flat below had heard a loud dripping and after a rather tense phone call with our landlord we had agreed to get things checked out. To be honest, I knew that something was wrong when the water didn’t drain in the sink, but like everything I’d ignored it and pretended things were fine. Things were not fine. As I leaned against the open fridge, tapping my flip flop against the floor, Dave looked at me.

  ‘It’s a hot one,’ he said, wiping his brow with his work cloth. ‘Apparently it’s going to be the hottest summer on record – hasn’t felt this hot in years.’

  Dave was right. It was an uncomfortable, muggy heat that left you feeling drowsy and inexplicably tired. Despite my promises, I still hadn’t phoned Harry. And to my shame I’d ignored two voicemails and several text messages from him.

  ‘All done here,’ Dave said, making an involuntary noise as he got to his feet. ‘All fixed.’

  If only everything were so simple, I thought, as I reached for the cash in my purse. As I watched Dave pack away his tools I reached for my phone and unlocked the screen. To be honest, the stumbling block wasn’t the memory of Charlie, let alone Harry. It was a feeling. I craved the euphoria of the past nine months: a strange addiction I’d garnered to feeling helpless. At the time my pain was special and now I was left in the numb void of normality. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy: the emotional equivalent of being smacked to the floor. And I am not talking about actual death, either; more of the kind of situation where you have loved somebody so deeply, in a world that is so perfect and happy, but then somehow, somewhere along the way things just, unravelled. For the lucky ones, this separation is mutual: you have both decided that things would be for the better if you went your separate ways. For the not-so-lucky ones the decision could have been made by only one of you. While one person is confidently beginning a li
fe without you, the other is left in emotional limbo. But the real mystery lies within feelings: where do they all go once the battlefield has emptied? Just imagine sitting, on a Saturday night, across a table from someone you may find attractive but don’t fancy, who is generally amusing but can’t make you laugh out loud, someone who is not in any way a bad idea but in short, isn’t them? Nature tells us that we have to keep evolving, keep edging forward and this act of survival is something we must repeatedly force ourselves to do.

  Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, in medical terms, means to die of a broken heart. After heartache, you are free to remain in the empty space, reflecting on what went wrong or trying to pinpoint when the disintegration started and, most importantly, if there was anything you could’ve done differently to alter the outcome.

  The truth is, there probably wasn’t. If he wants to leave, he will leave. If she wants to leave, she will leave. And although you could wait for them to have a change of heart, the collateral damage you do to yourself in the meantime can prove instantly catastrophic. So instead of turning the magnifying glass on yourself, picking apart the very essence of your own being, try turning the focus to science and the biological reasoning behind the pain.

  At such times it can feel as if the head and the heart are operating on different playing fields. Emotionally, we are swinging between moments of clarity and optimism. You even manage to convince yourself, even for a second, that this could actually be for the best.

  The brain works on a much more pragmatic level. There are actual scientific names for the areas of your brain that are responsible for what you are feeling, be it memory, anger, arousal or unhappiness. The brain invests in feelings at a certain level both chemically and intellectually and it is this investment, a chemical reaction that attaches you to a person and their smell, their pheromones, their person. It is this attachment that makes detaching so very, very hard. Your brain has become chemically acclimatized to the other person being there, which is why we sometimes feel the pendulum effect swinging between one emotion and another. Your body is literally counter-balancing the way you are feeling in the hope that it can shift your levels back to normality. In human speak: trust your body and trust your instincts. It is only trying to heal.

  When you first break up it usually precedes weeks if not months of arguments, snapping at one another, picking faults that aren’t always there and generally creating space between you both. And out of nowhere there will come a day when the arguments cease, when the quiet creeps in and you have no plausible reason to contact each other: no messages, no texts, no phone calls. Whether you talk the ear off a friend or sit together in silence, sometimes we cannot take the burden alone. I talked about it to death, to the absolute maximum that my friends could handle. They were my touchstone, my rock in the waves. They were my only sunrise.

  As I stood at the kitchen sink pretending to inspect Dave’s repair job while not really knowing what I was checking, a small, lime green parakeet flew in and rested on the windowsill. ‘Little bugger!’ Dave muttered as he made his way out of the flat. I had never seen a bird that colour in this part of London before. They usually stick to the leafy suburbs of Richmond or Kew Gardens, places where people pay large sums of rent to see birds like that: a half mix between watery green and yellow. As I stared at the red tip of his dark green beak he looked right back at me. Almost through me.

  Growing up I was in the top grade, highest in the class and proud recipient of the ‘most likely to achieve great things’ award. A tongue-in-cheek certificate was given to me on my last day of school that was now moist with damp at the bottom of my keepsake box. Looking around at the eggshell paint crumbling from the plastered walls of our kitchen, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony.

  The truth was I failed my second year of law school. A fact I had been unable to tell my classmates, let alone my parents. The bright, ambitious star pupil had failed at her first attempt to truly succeed. In fact the only person I had ever told was Charlie. It was a moment of honesty in one of those late-night conversations, caught between the sheets, somewhere between night-time and morning. He turned to me, in that nonchalant way he saved to placate serious moments, and explained that perhaps it was just a case of the wrong dream. After two years of feeling like an underachiever, lying to everybody in my life, he had pushed me forward and funnily enough, almost back into the person I thought I could be.

  With him, days turned into weeks, weeks to months and that was that. Before we even knew ourselves, we became an ‘us’. He owned a tall, glass-fronted apartment overlooking the Thames, a bachelor pad complete with hi-tech gadgets that I didn’t dare touch. Men in finance tend to be bad for reputation but fantastic for consumerism. In those days the fancy life had swallowed me up and I was foolish enough to think that I deserved it all.

  ‘Look,’ he said, turning to me one night over dinner. ‘You’re here near enough all week anyway – why not just move in and then you never have to leave?’

  I looked at him as I ate my jacket potato, slightly dubious about his proposal.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, putting down my fork. ‘What will Amber say? We just renewed the contract on our flat.’

  ‘I’ll pay it,’ he said without flinching. ‘Just be here for me.’

  And in a move that would make Emily Pankhurst turn in her grave, amongst the grated cheddar cheese and baked beans, I agreed.

  It’s embarrassing to admit that you’ve been hurt. It’s not a shame as such, like bankruptcy or the time Amber accidently sent me a naked selfie, but more of a signal to others that you’re not that capable after all. That some things, when left in your hands, do fail.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and closed my eyes, my pupils making spectacular light shows in the dark. I pictured that night, a few weeks ago, when everything had gotten too much. Charlie had been up all night at the office closing a deal that had netted the company a fair amount of money and had decided to celebrate by staying behind for a drink. But with Charlie this was only ever where it started. Months of jovial rumours about strippers, cocaine and office lock-ins combined with promises that, of course, none of it involved him, had built up to me standing alone in his kitchen with no clue as to where he was – the harsh sound of the buzzer stabbed me awake, I walked to open the front door and there he stood at the door swaying, for the third time that week.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked, noticing he was dripping wet. His shirt was unbuttoned and I could see the water shine off his stomach.

  ‘I’ve just been out with the guys from work. Don’t start,’ he snapped defensively. From experience I knew that an argument in these conditions was pointless. I turned off the light and made my way back to bed, my sleep disturbed by the sounds of dry heaving coming from the bathroom.

  The next morning I continued my day as usual. I began making myself some breakfast in the kitchen – some fruit, yoghurt and a very large cup of coffee – when I heard a bang coming from the bedroom. I had expected him to crawl in, unkempt, dry-mouthed but instead he was dressed for work, freshly showered and smelling of aftershave. A sight that was surprisingly more worrying than the night before.

  ‘Just so you know,’ I said as he sat down at the breakfast bar, ‘I’m not one of those girls that will fill your role of nagging wife.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, without looking at me.

  ‘You clearly want someone to be at home waiting for you while you go out and do god knows what with god knows who. But that’s not me…’

  ‘Give it a rest, Jess,’ he said, opening his newspaper.

  I slammed my favourite coffee cup into the sink, making us both jump as the handle snapped off, shooting a shard of cream pottery into the air. I looked over at him as he stood up and left, the door slamming behind him. And knew that would be it until the early hours of the next morning. A repetitive dance we both did, until one of us grew brave enough to stop it. I started to pick up the broken ceramic from the sink, trying not to cut m
y fingers through the murky water.

  I suppose the worse part was that I never knew for sure. I couldn’t prove my instincts. Instead, I carried my fears like heavy weights. A weight that became unbearable in the end.

  The parakeet was still sitting on the window frame. I slowly and carefully reached for my camera that was nestled beside the microwave. In two clicks I had managed to capture him: alone, far from his familiar surroundings and desperate to spread his wings and fly away.

  I know how you feel, little one, I said out loud. I know exactly how you feel.

  Chapter Six – Cheap as Chips

  I stared at my bank statement in disbelief. I knew things would be dire but the digits in front of me sent shockwaves through my soul. The figure typed in bold at the bottom highlighted the grand total I was worth. And it wasn’t much.

  I grabbed my keys and bankcard and briskly walked across the road to the ATM inside the local newsagent’s. I needed a second opinion. I’d even had the audacity to wear a Jean-Paul Gaultier black blazer for my excursion, one of the many gifts from Charlie, a perfect fit in terms of cut but less so in terms of reflecting my means.

  I stood in the queue, fourth in line behind two builders, an old lady and a teenage boy, who was probably more flush with cash than I was. As my fate was delivered, my fears were confirmed: I was four pounds short of zero. I had proved it was actually possible to be worth less than nothing. As I put the magazine I was holding back onto the rack, I realised I needed a financial intervention. And I had an idea. I dragged myself home, lost in a sea of commuters: a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

  The sound of loud vibrations was coming from my phone on the kitchen table. I had six missed calls from Amber and a voicemail. I dialled to listen: ‘Jess, I’ve just had a call from our landlord to say our rent payment has bounced. I said there must have been some mistake. Please can you sort it as I’m stuck at work?’ I put the phone back down on the table and typed out a brief message: