2
I woke up the next morning feeling as if I’d gone nine rounds in the ring and lost, badly. My throat ached from crying, and my eyes had swollen to slits. Christopher was already showered and dressed when my eyes fluttered open, and he leaned down and kissed the top of my head. ‘Maybe you should call in sick today,’ he said, taking in my puffy face and the black circles underneath my eyes.
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got a meeting at half ten.’
‘Better get up then. It’s nearly eight, sleepyhead. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Maybe we could go for a little post-birthday drink?’
I attempted a smile. ‘That would be nice.’
He paused in the doorway and opened his mouth as if about to say something, but instead he just shook his head and blew me a kiss. ‘Have a good day, love.’
I heard the door shut behind him, and pulled myself out of bed with a groan.
I showered and shaved my legs and washed my hair, and then applied various creams and unguents to my face before daring to look in the mirror. Here’s a truth that should be universally acknowledged: eye creams that promise to ‘de-puff’ and skin creams that promise to ‘brighten’ summarily fail to de-puff or brighten anything following a two-hour cry-fest. It’s just a physical impossibility. I would look like hell for the rest of the day, and there was nothing on this earth that could stop it. Not even in Space NK.
I pulled on my coat, slung the little leather J.Crew bag I’d splurged on last month, and the supplementary canvas tote bag that actually held most of my belongings over my shoulder, and headed for the Tube. Christopher had bought the flat in Dartmouth Park just after the 2008 crash, thanks to a combination of squirreled-away savings and what his parents had described as ‘early inheritance’. It was a ground-floor two-bed, with high ceilings, crown moulding, and a little rectangle of green out the back. Every once in a while, after too much red wine, we’d look up the value of the flat and fantasize about selling up and moving to Lisbon or Barcelona, but we both knew it wasn’t going to happen. Christopher loved the flat and loved London, and I loved him. I’d known the choice I was making when I boarded the plane with my work transfer papers three years ago. My mother’s face flashed in front of me, and I pushed it out of my mind. I couldn’t think about that. Not now.
It was a crisp spring morning, blue-skied and gentle-breezed, too beautiful for my current state of mind. I wanted low gray clouds and persistent drizzle, maybe even a hailstorm. But, as usual, the English weather refused to cooperate.
I joined the huddled masses at Tufnell Park Tube and let three packed trains pass before hurling myself onto the fourth. Despite the fact we were pressed together, nose to shoulder, like a pack of breadsticks, the compartment was silent apart from the occasional sneeze and muttered chorus of bless-yous. I pulled out a paperback and tried to lift it past my waist, but a man in a tan overcoat kept pressing his back against my arm, pinning it to my side, and I eventually gave up and just closed my eyes.
I replayed the previous night’s conversation as the train rocked between stations. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. He hadn’t said never, right? Then again, he hadn’t said some day.
I knew he loved me. I knew that that should be enough. It was 2017, for God’s sake. Marriage was a dying tradition! The divorce rates were sky high! The wedding industry was a sham! I should embrace the fact that he was essentially freeing me from the shackles of a patriarchal institution. Why couldn’t I just be happy that we were together? Why did I need a piece of paper to prove it?
I shook my head, jostling the arm of the woman holding onto the pole next to me. I don’t know why I needed it, but I did. I didn’t care about a big white wedding – I’d never been one to stage Barbie and Ken nuptials as a child, preferring instead to enact elaborate kidnapping plots – but I did care about the piece of paper. I thought Christopher had known that. I thought he’d been on the same page.
My throat ached and I felt the tears start to build behind my eyes. Maybe he just doesn’t love me enough. Maybe I bore him. I thought of the distracted way he half-listened to my stories sometimes, the long pauses in conversation over pints at the pub, the way his gaze would sometimes drift to a point slightly to the left of my head. I blinked rapidly to try to fight it off, but it was too late. A tear fell from my eye and sploshed on the arm of the man in the tan overcoat. A darkened circle appeared on the material. After that, it was like a tap had been turned on. I tried to reach up and brush them away but I couldn’t extract my arms from the crush of the crowd.
‘The next station is … Camden Town.’
A few people got off, but even more pushed on. The man in the tan overcoat’s arm was now dotted with wet splashes. I willed him not to look down. Maybe I should get off, I reasoned. Maybe I should go and sit on one of those iron benches on the platform and put my head in my hands until I got myself together. But then someone might ask me if I was okay, and there was no way I would be able to respond without losing my shit completely.
The stations whizzed by. The man in the tan overcoat got out at Euston, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The compartment had emptied slightly, enough for me to wipe the mascara from under my eyes and apply a futile swipe of lip balm. People were staring at me, I could feel it.
I changed to the Victoria Line at Kings Cross and let it whisk me to Green Park. I could have stayed on until Victoria – our offices are in a cold gray building a few blocks from the station – but most days I preferred to walk through the park.
The fresh air cleared my head a little, and I arrived at work feeling more human than I had all morning. I showed my security pass to the guard at reception and weaved my way through the labyrinthine halls to my cubicle.
I work at an insurance company. I can’t say it was the exact profession I’d planned for myself – ‘I want to be a claims adjuster!’ said no thirteen-year-old, ever – but Number 9 on my list was a good, steady job with a good, steady salary, and that had been the logo on the banner for Jameson Hardwick Insurers at the college job fair. Literally: ‘Jameson Hardwick Insurers: A Good, Steady Career Path’. Not a particularly catchy motto, but it had appealed to me. It promised security and stability, the two things I craved the most. The nice people manning the booth had asked if I’d like to take a quick aptitude test – ‘Sure!’ I’d said brightly, sweating profusely in the polyester pantsuit I’d bought from The Express – and I’d aced it. They’d offered me a job straight out of graduation with full benefits, and a salary that was more than double the national average.
It turned out that I loved it, too. I know that everyone thinks that working in insurance must be boring – I can’t tell you how many people fake-snooze or make loud snoring noises when I tell them what I do – but it’s actually pretty interesting. No, seriously, it is. All day long, I get to read little stories about people’s lives and decide whether or not they’re true. Did the chip shop really burn down due to a grease fire, or did the owner’s brother-in-law have it in for him? Did the woman really suffer from third-degree burns because the coffee lid was faulty, or was she looking for an easy pay-out? Did the neighbor’s tree really fall on that man’s car because of an act of God, or was he trying to get him back for sleeping with his wife? See? Interesting, right? It’s like being a private detective without the need to wear a trench coat, chain smoke or talk out of the corner of my mouth.
‘Here she is!’ I arrived at my desk to find my cubemate, Ben, standing arms akimbo, hands on his skinny jeans-wearing hips. ‘It’s the BIRTHDAY GIRL!’
‘Shhh!’ I said, eyes darting around. ‘Someone might hear you! Anyway, it was yesterday, so you’re too late.’
‘Ah, that’s what you think. But I wasn’t in the office yesterday, which means I get a bonus celebration day.’
‘What kind of rule is that?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t question the birthday rules or you won’t get any cake.’
My ears perked up. ‘There’s cake?’
‘Not just any cake.’ He reached under his desk and pulled out a small lurid-green cardboard box, which he presented to me with a flourish. ‘This is the motherload.’
I leaned in to take a closer look at the box in his hands. The top of the box was covered in cellophane, and inside lay a cake in the shape of a caterpillar. ‘The caterpillar cake!’ I’d told Ben during one of the long, meandering chats that seem to emanate from cube-sharing that I’d always wanted a Tesco caterpillar cake. Something about its stubby little face really tugged at my heartstrings. And now here it was, staring up at me with its edible little eyes. I shook my head. ‘I genuinely can’t believe you remembered.’
‘I couldn’t let the occasion pass without celebrating it properly. It’s unthinkable that you’ve been in this country for three whole years and have yet to sample the delights of the Tesco caterpillar.’
I lifted the top off the box, and Ben produced a plastic knife. ‘I feel bad cutting him,’ I said.
‘Actually, caterpillars lack nociceptors, so aren’t actually capable of feeling pain.’ I raised an eyebrow and he shrugged. ‘I watched a lot of David Attenborough as a kid.’
I hesitated for a minute, and then plunged the knife into the back of the caterpillar’s neck. Its little face flopped forward in a single slab, for ever severed from its body. This thought proved too much for me in my delicate state, and I felt the knot re-form in the base of my throat.
Ben took one look at me and slid our cube door closed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, handing me a frosting-smudged napkin. ‘I know you said you weren’t a birthday person, but I thought you’d be pleased about the cake.’
‘I am!’ I wailed. ‘It’s great! I’m great!’
‘You don’t look so great to me, if you don’t mind me saying.’ He studied my face closely. ‘In fact, you look like shit.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ I said, wiping mascara and frosting around my face.
‘Come on, let’s sit you down.’ He pushed me gently into my office chair, and I rolled backwards to the edge of my desk. ‘Now tell Uncle Ben what’s the matter.’
I pulled a face at him. ‘Uncle Ben? Gross.’
‘Call me whatever you want, then. Just tell me what’s happening.’
‘It’s Christopher,’ I said, breath coming in stuttered bursts. ‘He’s— he’s—’
‘He not shagging someone else, is he?’ I took that moment to burst into tears, which Ben took as an affirmation. ‘He is, isn’t he! What an absolute cock-end. I knew it from the minute I saw him, with his stupid slick hair.’
‘What’s wrong with his hair?’ I squeaked.
‘I don’t know – it’s all shiny, or whatever. Cock!’ He reached across the cube and handed me another tissue. ‘Don’t you worry about him. He’s an arsehole and you’re better off without him. Arsehole.’
I managed to shake my head. ‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘He’s not cheating on me.’
Ben looked oddly disappointed. ‘He’s not?’
‘No. It’s just – I thought he was going to propose last night, and then he didn’t, and then we got into a big fight, and then— and then—’ A fresh flood of tears exploded out of me. Where had I been storing all these tears, anyway? How did I have so much saline stashed inside my skull?
‘Ah, I see,’ Ben said, nodding sagely. ‘You women. Always looking to pin us down.’
I looked at him through a swollen gimlet eye. Ben was twenty-five, and his dating history, to my understanding, consisted of three years spent in unrequited love for a woman called Amanda at university, and the occasional drunken house party hook-up. ‘Some people want to settle down,’ I said, sniffing defensively.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Look, if a bloke doesn’t want to get married, he doesn’t want to get married. You should tell him to fuck off and then go out and sow your wild oats. I’ve got a couple of mates who are into older women – I could set you up!’
The older woman comment smarted more than I’d like to admit. God, imagine dating again. Surrounded by twenty-five-year-old idiots like Ben, who would think of me as some kind of cougar – if I was lucky. I tossed the crumpled napkin in the trash and leaned down to switch on my computer. ‘Thanks but no thanks.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He pointed to the slab of caterpillar face resting on the table. ‘You going to eat that?’ I shook my head and watched as he took an enormous bite. ‘Look, the last thing I’ll say on the matter is this: you’re gorgeous, and any man would be lucky to have you. If Christopher can’t get that through his shiny head, you’re better off without him.’
I felt the tears threatening again and jumped up from my seat. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I said, and I grabbed my bag and ran to the ladies’ room.