‘I have all the time in the world to blow-dry the fringe. It’s fine.’
She looks at me with a mixture of sympathy and ‘this one is completely cracked’.
‘You may need to call someone for a takeout lunch later,’ the stylist sighs, still fingering my dark waves. ‘This colour may take a while.’
Naomi’s face is an absolute picture when I arrive home from the salon. I can see the thought traverse her mind and shape her features.Surely she’s not copying her?
‘I was actually blonde before, for years,’ I lie. ‘When I got to the salon, the stylist told me that the brown was really not working for me any more, so I just went with it.’
Naomi is motionless, unconvinced. ‘Look, if I thought I could get away with hair like that, I’d probably go for it too,’ she says eventually. ‘Change is good sometimes.’
I notice that Naomi has left out some of the baby equipment– the bottle sterilizer and the diaper genie– on the worktop. ‘It’s… time,’ she says, exhaling. ‘I’m going to bring these to Goodwill in a little while. Someone else should be able to get some use out of them.’ She trails the diaper genie with a soft finger, lost for a second in a memory.
Violet seems even less impressed than Naomi was when I send her the picture of my hair. ‘OMG, ya tragic copycat, that is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do,’ she fires back.
I look in the mirror, and while it’s safe to say that Alice Andre is not looking back at me, I weirdly seem to feel more like myself than I have in a long time.
As I’m appraising the hair colour in the mirror, more dishwatery than the wheaten goodness of Alice’s, an email arrives from Johnny with the subject header: ‘YOU REALLY DO NEED TO READ THIS ONE, ESTHER. I FUCKING MEAN IT THIS TIME’.
I press ‘open’, a niggling feeling rising that he is catching up with me.
‘I don’t know how many of my previous emails you have read, but I am just going to assume the answer is close enough to zero,’ he writes.
It’s been four months since you disappeared and while I have to believe you are well and safe or I will go insane, I am finding it hard to process that you just blew up our life like this.
I have such a heavy heart about all of this, but Esther, know that we are done. I had hoped that you would get whatever it was that was bothering you out of your system, but it’s clear that you are happy to keep me in some kind of holding pattern indefinitely. I can’t let you do that to me. And I won’t. Apart from anything, it’s a really fucking cruel thing to do.
Blinking, and trying to take in what he is saying, what he’s telling me about us, I read on. My eyes race over words, trying to find a kind one, but I’m forced to circle back over the awfulness.
Have you any idea how fucking torturous the last four months have been, Esther? The people who love you are going out of their fucking minds about you. Do you know that? Do you even care?
I am unable to pay the mortgage and bills on my own, so I am renting out our flat and I’ve moved in with Brian. He asked me if this was a temporary or more long-term thing, and it drove me crazy that I didn’t know. So I need to move on. I don’t know when you feel you will be ready to get back to your life, but I’m not waiting around any more.
I will be in touch in a while once I have spoken to a lawyer about starting divorce proceedings. I have put your belongings in the EZ Storage facility in Neasden and have paid six months upfront. After that Esther, you’re on your own. Read that bit again. You. Are. On. Your. Own.
I still love you so much, and a small part of me is wondering whether we can find a way back to each other even after all this. But right now, if only for the sake of practicality, I need to put myself first here. Before us.
I genuinely never thought I would ever say that, but here we are.
J.
I sit with the news for the afternoon, trying on for size the idea of being really, properly, irreversibly single. Do I feel OK or don’t I? I can barely pull apart my real feelings from everything else. I want to email him, stop all of this in its tracks, but a bigger part of me is bogged down, unable to will my fingers to find the reply button. One minute, I feel liberated about the prospect of a new chapter; the next, I feel like an astronaut being sent out to the vastness of space without a helmet. I push away the feeling that I put my perfectly sane and serviceable life into a woodchipper. Instead, I tell myself over and over that my life is now a blank slate, ripe with possibility and potential. It’ll be the first time in over a decade that I have been properly alone, no safety net underneath me. But of course, all going to plan, it won’t be for very long. My heart breaks a little bit for Johnny, knowing that he has suffered uncertainty for this long on my account. Equally, I know that he will find someone else who will love him with a full-throatedness that, if we are being honest about it, I just can’t. That’s the least he deserves.
I imagine telling Ted about all of this. Thinking of his eyes on mine makes my pulse slow down.
‘I mean, I am single, but until recently, I wasn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’ he will ask.
‘I just got divorced. He’s an amazing guy, but we just got together too young and we became more like buddies. Our marriage was purely platonic.’
‘I hope you will never think of me like that.’
‘Never, never, never. I could never think of you as just a friend.’
Naomi pops her head round the door just as I am picturing myself screwing the living daylights out of her brother.
‘I don’t know if it’s your thing, or if you’re working on your writing, but Alice and my step-brother have asked me to go to this… thing tonight,’ she says.
