I nodded.
‘Interesting,’ she said as she picked at a clump of mascara in the corner of her eye. ‘Last I heard, the love of her life was the woman who makes smoothies atErewhon in Silver Lake. Which reminds me, do not go to Erewhon in Silver Lake. It’s overpriced and awful and full of terrible people paying too much money for terrible things in hope of seeing a terrible celebrity.’
‘What kind of terrible celebrity?’
‘Justin Bieber goes there.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to tell you about Ren because he’s your neighbour,’ I suggested, scribbling the words ‘go to Erewhon in Silver Lake’ into my notebook. ‘We bumped into him this morning and I can confirm she has a mega crush on that man.’
‘Well, you can see why,’ Suze admitted. ‘The shine went off it for me when he started banging around in his tool shed at the crack of dawn every weekend.’
‘And what time are we calling the crack of dawn?’
‘No one should be banging and hammering until after midday,’ she muttered darkly. Suzanne never had been a fan of an early morning. Or mornings in general. ‘Ugh, I’ve got to go, my boss is on the other line.’ She rolled her head backwards as if looking to the wispy clouds above for help. ‘I’ll talk to you later. And watch what you’re doing with Bel. I don’t want to have to find a new trainer or move house because you were trying to “help” her.’
‘Understood,’ I replied. ‘Now piss off and talk to your boss.’
‘Love you too.’ She blew kisses into the screen before wrinkling her nose at the big red box behind me. ‘And you’d better not get Cheez-It dust all over my furniture.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised the blank screen as she ended the call.
Wiping the Cheeze-It dust off her furniture, I rolled forward, cracking my spine as I touched my toes with my phone then rolled back, soaking up the sun. Gran would have loved it here, she always was a sun worshipper. The first sign of anything over eighteen degrees and she was in the back garden, bottle of factor four Malibu tanning oil on one side and a Mills & Boon romance on the other. The hours I’d spent trying to upgrade her sunscreen to at least factor fifteen. What a waste of breath. Margaret Chapman had died as she lived; extremely well-tanned. It was a funny thing, grief. Nothing about it made sense. Suzanne dealt with hers by refusing to stand still. Two weeks after the funeral she moved from London to New York. Six months after that she went to Sydney, with pitstops in Hong Kong and Dubai before she finally settled in LA a year ago. My sister had never needed anyone to anchor her the way I did, people seemed to weigh her down. Without Gran, even three years later, I was still adrift, bumping from one side of the harbour to the other and always threatening to make a break for the open sea.
I needed a distraction, I thought, pushing away the heavy thoughts and reaching for my notebook and pen, writing ‘Things I Know About Ren’ across the top of the page in my very special, borderline illegible handwriting.
Number one, his name is Ren.
Not a very inspiring start.
Number two, he lives in LA, next door to Suzanne.
Number three, he likes birds.Reallylikes birds.
What else? He was funny and relatively polite and claimed not to be a pervert. He was an alleged vegan. He was the most beautiful, most devastatingly handsome man I had ever set eyes on in my entire life. Which felta bit long-winded so instead I jotted down the word ‘fit’ and underlined it seven times to get the point across. But how to speak to his heart? I let the notebook rest in my lap and closed my eyes. What would I say to Ren if I were trying to make him mine?
Once upon a time, I was famous for my love poems. Admittedly my fame was limited to two fairly small and very specific circles – the Year Ten girls at South Border Comprehensive school and later, the greetings card community, but still. My first job at the card company was to come up with poems for the Valentine’s line and I nailed the assignment first time, ate it up without even trying. It didn’t even feel like bragging, I knew my poems were epic. Probably because I’d been waiting to fall in love ever since I read my first romance novel at the tender age of ten, when I stole my grandmother’s copy ofThe Doctor Needs a Wifeand secretly read it under the covers at bedtime. Until a tall, dark, handsome man appeared in my life to whisk me off my feet, I poured all my feelings into my work.
And then I met Thomas. He was tall, dark and handsome, exactly what I’d been dreaming of. He was also clever and quick-witted, he always had Gran in stitches. He worked at an accounting firm in Nottingham and we used to joke that we were complete opposites; I was good with words, he was good with numbers and our children would be geniuses. He used to talk about our children a lot in the early days.
Overnight, it felt as if someone had given me a whole new world of words I needed to describe feelings I’d never experienced before, a special, secret edition of the Oxford English Dictionary reserved for people who weretruly in love. Reading about romance was one thing but living it was another. I could have written ten epic poems a day when we first met. The way the world sparkled at the edges when he held my hand and melted away completely when he stopped in the middle of the street to kiss me. Nothing felt like a cliché because it was all real: thunderbolts, violins, fireworks, I felt it all.
When things went wrong, I lost all the words. Not just the new words but the old ones too. How could I write from the heart when mine was broken? Now I delegated the Valentine’s cards to someone else on my team and kept myself busy with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and Bring Your Pet To Work Day. Much easier to write heart-warming sentiments about a theoretical dog than a theoretical lover when you knew for a fact that love didn’t exist.
Not for me anyway.
But, high on pancakes and coffee, I’d made a promise to Bel, so I opened my eyes and stared hard at my notebook. I was going to have to try.
And it could be good for me, I reasoned as I dug back into the Cheez-It box, a way to balance out my karma and get her back on my side. Because, yes, I had admittedly tried to break up one couple but now I was attempting to bring another two people together. In the greater scheme of things, I was practically a saint.
‘Go ahead and call me Cupid,’ I said, wiping my orange hands on Suzanne’s white sunlounger and turning over a fresh page.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Is it me or are we driving awfully close to the edge of the cliff?’
‘It’s you.’ Bel tore around another hairpin bend, the back end of my sister’s giant car spinning out behind us. ‘Trust me, I’ve driven a car this size around these roads a million times. Once, anyway. You have to be confident, accidents only happen when you’re too anxious.’
‘I am almost positive that is not true.’
