Jas had told Marisa that she went to one of two extremes with men she liked.
‘Either you’re the baddest bitch, who doesn’t give a single fuck,’ Jas said, ‘or you lose yourself completely in the idea of them.’
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Marisa had protested. They’d been getting their nails done in her local salon at the time. It was called Tip 2 Toe and was staffed by sombre-faced Thai women who spoke to each otherbut never to the customers. Marisa was having a pedicure. Jas was getting sparkly purple gel on her fingernails, each one filed to a claw-like point.
‘What about Matt?’ Jas said, recalling Marisa’s most recent fling, with a singer-songwriter who never seemed either to sing or to write. ‘You lost your shit over him.’
‘That was a special case.’
Matt had been extremely, unavoidably handsome. He was prone to sending Marisa lyrically composed texts and links to songs he had heard which reminded him of her. She had been smitten and only later had she thought to question the fact that ‘smitten’ came from the verb ‘to smote’, something more often associated with angry deities meting out dramatic lightning bolts of punishment and which, when she Googled the etymology, actually meant ‘to smear or blemish’ and wasn’t romantic at all.
For the first couple of weeks, this devotion had been ardently reciprocated, and then Matt had disappeared for several days, causing her spirals of anxiety. She kept calling him and WhatsApping and there would be no reply and the messages would be left unread until, finally, after a whole week of silence, he had texted her with ‘Watcha doin?’ She had been so happy to hear from him that the previous torturous bout of sadness and self-doubt was entirely forgotten, and they began the whole cycle over again. This lasted for five months, until Matt fell out of her life without a single word of goodbye and promptly blocked her from his phone.
‘WhataboutMatt?’ she said as the nail technician rubbed her feet with a rectangular file.
‘You were never yourself around him. You let him walk all over you.’
‘No I didn’t.’
But when she thinks back, now, Marisa realises Jas was right. She had misinterpreted his unpredictability as passion, mistaking her anxiety for the butterflies you were meant to get at the beginning of love. And so she kept trying different tactics to keep his interest. If she could just need him a little bit less, Marisa would think, if she couldstop issuing demands or ultimatums when he wouldn’t listen to all the other ways she had attempted to express her desires, if she could just cut off this part of herself and then this one and then that one, so that she would barely be any trouble at all,thenshe would be rewarded. Then she would be worthy of his undivided attention.
‘Whatever,’ Jas had said, holding out one hand to examine the purple glitter at the end of each finger and twisting it so that the varnish caught the light. ‘Matt was a fuckwit anyway. All I’m saying is you need to be stronger in yourself. You don’t need to pretend to be someone else to get a dude. You could try to be yourself.’
Yeah right, Marisa felt like saying. Being herself was the last thing she wanted.
She says yes to taking in a lodger and she tells herself it will alleviate pressure on Jake and that, as a result, he will be more present for her. The lodger, he tells her, will stay in the spare room in the attic extension which has its own en-suite. The wifi works up there, so there’s no need for a TV because most people tend to watch on their laptops, don’t they? He suggests getting a microwave and a kettle and a mini-fridge so that the lodger can be relatively self-sufficient. Marisa goes along with all of it.
And then Kate is there. Kate who, at thirty-six, is older than Marisa. She has a job in the publicity department of a film company. She is quietly spoken with a lively, sharp face and brown hair with an unruly fringe falling to just below her eyebrows so that the first time they meet to assess her suitability, Marisa notices that Kate keeps blowing it out of her eyes. She is petite and bony, with flat breasts, and wears denim dungarees and T-shirts that Marisa can’t help but feel are inappropriate for a woman of her age. Still, she is relieved that Kate wouldn’t physically appeal to Jake, who has always made it clear his type is blonde with curved and dimpled flesh and light eyes and honeyed skin that goes freckled in sunlight. Marisa, in fact. Plus, Kate has an office to go to, which means that she will be out of the house during the day and Marisa can work in peace.
‘I appreciate you doing this for us,’ Jake says to Marisa that evening. ‘Truly.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ she says. He has decided to do the cooking for once, and has made an elaborate dish involving duck and cherries. It is too rich for her, the sauce too sticky, but she oohs and aahs and tells him it’s amazing, and later, when they go to bed, she is confident they have made the right decision.
Sometimes Marisa gets the fanciful notion that Kate has visited the house before, in a past life. She makes herself at home without any self-consciousness. She puts her toothbrush right there in the master bathroom, on the shelf next to theirs, ignoring the perfectly good basin upstairs. She places a mug in the kitchen cupboard, its insides stained mushroom brown and with a stencilled picture of a black horse on the front, accompanied by the phrase ‘Dark Horse’ in block sans serif capitals. She leaves her running trainers by the front door: ‘Mind you don’t trip over them,’ she says to Marisa, sliding them against the skirting board every morning and trailing clods of dried earth across the doormat.
She possesses an assurance Marisa has always yearned for but can never quite understand. She tells herself this is a good thing. It means they can co-exist efficiently without having to become friends. They can keep their relationship professional and distant and practical and then she and Jake will have saved up enough money not to have to house a lodger any more, and they can get on with their life. It is temporary, she keeps reminding herself. It will be over soon.
The weeks pass. Marisa makes good progress on her commissions. Prince Moses has been dispatched. She’s immersed in a new project for a set of twin girls called Petra and Serena. The parents have asked her to paint a fairytale with a feminist moral, so she has decided to make the twins into feisty princesses who dress up as boys to prove that girls can rule the kingdom just as well as their male counterparts. She is calling it ‘The Girls Who Run the World’, with a nod to Beyoncé, and she is enjoying story-boarding the adventure. Her favourite panel depicts the twins wearing plaid shirts and straw hats, chewing on matchsticks as they pretend to be a couple of farm boys. Their curly blonde hair is tied up tightly at the nape of their necks.
‘Do you think they’ll know who we are?’ one says to the other, a nervous expression on her six-year-old face.
‘We’re Peter and Stephen, silly,’ the other replies.
As she sketches out the panels, Marisa thinks briefly of her own sister, of all the things she missed out on growing up, all the companionship she would have loved. She remembers feeling so lonely. It is partly why she wants so desperately to have a baby with Jake now. When you are a mother you are never truly alone.
She works steadily for a couple of hours, and then the stiffness in her back forces her to stand up and crick her neck, twisting it this way and that. Yesterday, she saw a sign in the window of the local newsagent advertising a 10 a.m. prenatal yoga class and she decides, spontaneously, to go along.
Marisa read somewhere that it’s good for women trying to conceive to be around expectant mothers. Apparently the hormones rub off on you, or your body responds to the pregnancy pheromones, or something like that anyway – she isn’t sure of the science.
She changes into tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt, slipping her feet into flip-flops and tying back her hair. She slings her yoga mat over her shoulder and leaves the house, shutting the door behind her. Kate hasn’t left for work yet, so she doesn’t double-lock.
The studio is high-ceilinged with a parquet floor, recently converted from a disused chapel. Some of the windows are still patterned with stained-glass diamonds and to Marisa there seems to be a faint smell of incense in the air. Her mother always took her to church for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. It was the one time of year they went, and Marisa loved it because she was allowed to stay up so much later than usual. She liked the singing and the feeling of togetherness and afterwards, the vicar would offer her a tin of Quality Street and invite her to pick a chocolate and she would always winkle out the silvery green triangle which tasted of hazelnut and something her mother called ‘praline’.
‘Is it your first time here?’ the instructor asks Marisa as she unrolls her mat in the front row.
‘Yes.’
‘Lovely.’ The instructor is a tall woman with a deep tan and a tattoo of Roman numerals all the way up her left forearm. She wears star-printed leggings and a tank top with ‘Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.’ written on the front. ‘And how far along are you? Just so I know for the modifications.’
