‘What are you going to say to them? You can’t arrest someone forbefriending a sibling,’ Alice says. ‘For beinga fan.’
Ted ignores her. ‘Hello… police department please. I’d like to report a criminal harassment.’
The words are mortifying to hear.
‘I promise you both,’ I enunciate to Alice as carefully as I can, though it still comes out garbled, while Ted waits on the phone, ‘if you let me walk out of here now, you will never hear a thing from me again. None of you. You have my word on that.’
Alice looks at me as though she’s in the presence of a rabid animal. Ted lobs one last look of triple-distilled disgust at me before turning away. Alice turns her back to me too, facing him as he gives the 911 operator the address.
With their backs turned, I make a run for the door. I’m sick with relief when it opens easily and I feel fresh air on my face, leaving Ted chattering down the phone behind me.
31
Evening falls around us as I make my way to Pearson Airport in a taxi. There is no amiable conversation about my new life with the driver, just shame filling the vehicle. I cannot seem to get my breathing under control. It sounds jagged. Panicked. I want to punch the ceiling of the car and hear the sounds of pounded metal. ‘Please hurry,’ I beg him, and no doubt he spends the rest of our taxi trip wondering why we are hoofing it to the airport. I stiffen every time I hear a siren. Somewhere out there, I think as I whizz past the city, other people are living lives with purpose and promise. People are in love with people who love them back. They have good friends, money, a home. They’re comfortable.
Was my old life, with its data-entry job and itsHeatmagazine lunchtimes and its Nice Guy husband, really as awful as I made it out to be? I can’t handle thinking about it properly for any amount of time.
I spend the two hours before my hastily booked flight to London in the toilet, waiting for men in uniforms to beat the door down and bring me back to Ted and Alice, and whatever they had in store for me.
The realization comes in a sickening wave.
I have somehow locked myself out of my entire life because of this trip. Its door has bolted behind me, andI’m standing here, outside, in nothing but my underwear, in the snow.
I am in no mood for conversation during the long flight. I am in a strange state of disbelief as the plane takes off, leaving the city lights of Toronto behind me. I crane my neck and keep an eye on them as we take off. They are glistening down below, the city oblivious to my leaving. I nurse the heartbreak, which has eventually downgraded from blistering to something more simmering and heavy, all the way across the Atlantic. I cannot bear to think of how blissful and optimistic I felt as I arrived the other way, looking down on to the newness of the city. The cabin crew try not to notice as I weep into my sleeve during dinner service. One of them offers me a second and third tiny bottle of vodka from the drinks cart with a sorrowful little wink, and I feel even more pathetic than ever.
The vodka and the hum of the jet conspire to make me woozy, and every so often I keep an eye on the flight tracker. London is four hours away, then three hours away, then forty-five minutes away, then somehow two minutes away. The sight of the buildings below us, which once contained the orderly pieces of my life, almost hurts my eyes.
I check myself into a budget hotel near the airport. The moment with the credit card feels like Russian roulette, the time waiting to see if the payment will go through is a genuine eternity. I collapse on to the hotel bed, hearing the deadness of the thump.
I sleep so fitfully that by evening the bedsheets have been liberated from their mattress corners. The feelings are coming in great waves, and so quickly that I can barely pull them apart: sadness, rage, confusion, guilt, relief.
By the following afternoon I am still prone on the bed, occasionally giving my armpits a sniff. I haven’t eaten in two days, and the cramps in my stomach feel like a comfort. Whatever I’ve been running from for the last while has finally shown up and is lying on top of me, breathing on to my face. I put a hand to myself and realize that I’ve just started my period. Another grim reminder of the inexorable march towards the day when I’ll find nothing up there but cobwebs and dust.
Clearly in the mood for some self-flagellation in among the underboob sniffing, I take a peek at Johnny’s Facebook page and see that he has changed his profile photo again. He is sitting on the grass, a classic summer festival picture. Off to his left, I can just about make out the form of Work Wife.
‘So that’s that then,’ I tell the hotel-room coffee-maker.
The following day, I sleep for twelve hours. When I wake in the London half-light, I can barely tell whether it’s dawn or dusk. I go to the closest corner shop and spend £20 on oversized bags of crisps, Maltesers, popcorn and sour candies. Back at the hotel, I lie on the bed and shovel fistfuls of the salty and sweet stuff into my face, reaching a sort of calm as I try to outrun the creeping nausea. Eventually, all I can do is turn my head to the side, tip myself over the edge of the bed and vomit twenty quid’s worth of junk food on to the floor. I stagger to the bathroom, grab a bathrobe and cover the entire mess, resolving to deal with it in the morning.
Naturally, I forget all about the bathrobe and the puke underneath it when I wake, starting the day with an unceremonious squelch the second I step out of bed. Fitting. It’s the sound of utter humiliation. It is enough to make me pick the phone up and delete Essie Marie’s Facebook pageon the spot. ‘We’ll miss you!’ the website tells me, asking if I’d reconsider not deleting my account and sticking around a while longer. But I cannot kill Essie Marie fast enough.
I message Johnny, short and to the point because I can handle no more than that. ‘I’m back in London. Would be good to meet.’ I’m not sure what about, or what I will even say, but this needs to happen.
He leaves my text message on ‘read’ for four hours. Is he trying to offer me a taste of what he has experienced in the last five months, or is he busy with someone else? Either way, he capitulates at the four-hour mark.
‘Our usual place,’ he replies. ‘Lunchtime tomorrow.’
Still recovering from my attempt to rip my stomach asunder with sour candies, I meet Johnny in a cafe a hundred metres from the flat we shared, which is now occupied by an Australian couple unknown to us. I walk past it, looking up at the windows that now have some sort of purple tie-dye curtains hanging in them. The Anthropologie ones that I broke my arse to buy must be in a box somewhere in Neasden. How it is that this window, which means nothing to me now, was once the centre of my whole universe?
As I meet Johnny, surrounded by the dreaded Boden mums, I expect him to look much the same as when I left him, but everything is so strikingly different. He has a beard, for starters. It’s more like excessively grown-out stubble– the sort that cool, trendy women advise their boyfriends to start growing. It looks good on him, and I wonder why he never thought of doing it before. That’s not the only way that I know he might have a girlfriend. The prickles of unfamiliarity are weird; unsettling, but like something inside me is also waking up.
Being back where I started before any of this happened somehow makes me feel exhausted.
Johnny can barely look at me. The earnestness has been bled out. His eyes are doing that thing that so many other men’s seem to do. Appraising. They are cold. There’s a weird, gruesome novelty in how he looks at me. He seems like a stranger. But it makes me only more determined to win him back.
‘Blonde ambition,’ he says. I’d completely forgotten that he has never seen me as a blonde. I can tell he doesn’t like it. I pull at the fringe, laughing lightly.
He stays silent. He has waited long enough for an explanation and doesn’t want to wait another second. He clamps his lips shut and juts out his stubbly jaw– a sign that he is waiting for me to talk.
