They had been seeing each other for a little over three months. The house had been smooth and easy as soon as they’d set their mind to it. She rented her little flat and it was easy to talk the landlord into letting her move out before her lease ended because he wanted to charge higher fees to someone new. It all felt to Marisa as if some benign deity had finally decided to smile on her.
‘It’s your time now,’ she imagined this kind-faced bearded man saying to her (because God, in her imagination, was always the cartoon childhood version, a version of Father Christmas but more serious and without the red clothes). ‘You deserve it.’
Jas was less convinced. She had come over to Marisa’s flat for a farewell dinner of takeaway pizza and gin and tonics with not much tonic.
‘It seems very soon,’ Jas said, sliding a slice of pizza out precariously with two hands, threads of cheese stretching like saliva strings in a giant opening jaw. ‘You barely know each other.’
Marisa, who wasn’t eating much, refilled her drink.
‘Yeah, but it turns out all those people who said it were right.’
‘Said what?’
She looked at Jas, at her short, peroxide hair, at the glare of her eyes, the slant of her arrow tattoo along one pronounced collarbone, and she felt something she’d never felt for her before. She felt pity.
‘That when you know, you just know.’
It was the sort of thing that both Marisa and Jas would have rolled their eyes at in the past. But meeting Jake had changed things for Marisa. She had realised lately that her friendship with Jas was based on shared bitterness – the resentful cynicism of the overlooked masquerading as brittle humour – and now that she had found the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, there was less common ground. She was like the Ready Brek kid in those old advertisements, the one who ate a bowl of the breakfast cereal and was lit up all day, except Marisa was glowing with love.
In the flat, Jas glanced at her sceptically but then, sensing something in Marisa’s face, she broke into a smile.
‘Girl! You’ve got it bad!’
Jas had grown up in Lewisham but she often broke into an easy American patter, as if she’d watched too much 90s TV.
Marisa downed the rest of her gin. She shook her hair back, the ends of it landing with a soft tickle on her bare shoulders. She felt the absolute rightness of this moment, of the exact movement she had chosen to execute. She felt her beauty, the power of it.
‘I suppose I do,’ Marisa said. ‘You’ll be next.’
Jas shrugged.
‘I’m not that bothered any more,’ her friend said. ‘I’ve decided I like my own company, my own space. Why invite someone in to mess it all up, you know?’
Marisa didn’t push it. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, taking the smallest slice of the pepperoni pizza and chewing slowly.
‘I just …’ Jas started, then hesitated. ‘You fall hard for people. Remember …’
‘This is different,’ Marisa snapped. She stood up too quickly, and felt dizzy, her vision pixellating. She took the remaining pizza slices still in the box and threw the whole thing decisively in the rubbish bin.
‘Hey,’ Jas protested. ‘I hadn’t finished!’
‘Whatever.’
‘I’m just looking out for you, Ris.’
Marisa turned away from her, washing her hands in the sink. Her flat was made up of one big room divided into three smaller ones so that the kitchen and lounge bled into each other. The cold water calmed her, breaking off the sprig of fury she had felt begin to blossom inside. When she turned back to face Jas, she was calmer.
‘I know.’ She put the kettle on. ‘I appreciate it.’
The evening ended earlier than it would have done in the past and Marisa realised, when she hugged Jas goodbye, that their friendship wouldn’t survive the next iteration of her life. She felt silently judged by Jas and she was uncomfortable under that level of scrutiny. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not really. It was just that things moved on. People changed. Besides, she had Jake. She had the house. She had their future children. A family and a home of her own.
In the house, the studio began to take shape. Marisa hung two framed original sketches from her first Telling Tales book. It had been written for a boy called Gabriel, and she had given him a knightly quest to complete, filled with princesses in flowing pink gowns and dragons breathing fire from inside hidden caves. She put her brushes in jam jars – there was a specific jar for each set – and on the shelves she lined up the lever arch files where she kept track of her orders and invoicing. Jake told her she should computerise everything and that he would show her how, but Marisa preferred the tangibility of paper. It was a way of proving to herself that she existed; that she left a trace.
As a child, she had always felt so ephemeral, a will-o’-the-wisp expected to contort herself like smoke to fit in wherever necessary. Shedidn’t have a single earliest memory, but rather a jumble of images of walking into rooms and her mother jumping when she realised Marisa was there.
‘I didn’t see you, darling!’ was the refrain. She was always too quiet to be noticed.
Her younger sister, by contrast, was determined to make herself heard from the off. She would cry throughout the night and Marisa got used to the sound of her mother padding across the hallway to get to the baby, rocking her back to sleep with soft tuneless songs. The next morning, Marisa and her father would sit opposite each other at the breakfast table and share conspiratorial looks as he prepared her toast, doing it badly and leaving gaping holes in the bread where the fridge-cooled butter made stubborn dents. She was always late for school, and Marisa felt cross about this, blaming her sister, this unwanted intruder with her furious, crumpled red face and balled-up baby fists. It was astonishing to her how someone so small could create so much havoc.
