Chapter One
I knew I shouldn’t have come the second I pushed open the door of the theatre and was hit by a wall of pretentious conversation and the acrid smell of semi-expensive wine. Being around other people who appeared to be having the time of their lives was extremely unhelpful when your boyfriend, the love of your life, the man you’d assumed you were going to be with forever, had broken up with you and moved out overnight. And having thus far avoided telling a single person, I was finally going to have to say the wordsCharlie and I have split upout loud for the very first time and that terrified me almost as much as the thought of being without him did. Because it made it real, didn’t it? And deep down I was still holding on to a miniscule amount of hope that he’d realise he’d made a terrible mistake and come crawling back. Not that I’d make him crawl. Pathetic as it was, at this point I reckoned I’d just throw myself into his arms with relief.
I spotted Mum and Cassie immediately, tucked away at a corner table and thankfully as far away from the throng of jolly theatregoers jostling for the bar as you could possibly get. No doubt they’d arrived about an hour early – my mum cared a lot about what other people thought of her and as a result had a pathological fear of being late in case she upset someone, even though I was pretty sure nobody noticed half the time. I fought my way throughto them, swivelling my hips to pass a group of borderline-drunk posh people talking about themselves and their impressive, creative jobs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d started name-dropping which members of the cast they’d been to drama school with as I shuffled around their lithe, designer-label-clad bodies. Clearly I was making alotof assumptions here, but it was that kind of a crowd, and I really wasn’t in the mood. If it was in any way possible to say no to my mum and sister I would have been on my sofa watching early episodes ofSelling Sunsetright about now, which I intended to do thesecondthis dismal-sounding low-budget play about addiction came to its unsatisfying end. My only hope was that it wasn’t one of those extended extravaganzas that some self-indulgent director had been too caught up in himself (I just knew it was a man) to cut. I took a few slightly watery deep breaths, desperately trying to pull myself together – if my current disposition didn’t swiftly improve, tonight was going to goverybadly.
Mum looked up at me like a startled rabbit as I approached their table.
‘Oh hello, Ava!’ she said, as though we hadn’t made plans to meet and that instead fate had brought about a chance meeting in Soho. This would have been extremely unlikely since the pair of them only ventured into London from Reading roughly once every two years.
‘Hi guys,’ I said, immediately clocking that Cassie looked very thin, although it could have been because she had on one of the chunky, oversized jumpers she insisted on wearing no matter the weather.
‘Blimey, you’re actually early to something,’ teased Cassie.
‘It has been known,’ I said, ruffling the top of her hair and scooping her into a tight hug. Did she feel more fragile than she had when I’d seen her last? Not that she ever exactly looked robust.
Mum tried to stand up to give me a hug too, swiftly realising (after a bit of clunky to-ing and fro-ing) that she was wedged into her seat by the rather large man sitting on the table behind. I bent down to give her a peck on the cheek instead.
They’d saved me a stool, guarding it with their lives (and their coats). I scooped up their matching puffer jackets and sat down, having no choice but to place them back on my knee; neither Mum nor Cassie offered to take theirs, so I guessed I was stuck with them. It wasn’t even cold out. And couldn’t they have found a cloakroom? I was now smothered in a pile of polyester and was already burning up.
‘I was just telling Cassie ... the director is the brother-in-law of one of the doctors at work,’ said Mum, clearly hoping to impress us with this very tenuous connection.
‘Oh, interesting,’ I said, fanning myself with my hand.
‘He’s been to see it and said it’s fantastic.’
‘Recommendation indeed,’ I said, thinking he could hardly slag it off if a family member was in it, could he?
Mum worked as a receptionist in a GP surgery and talked about the doctors who worked there with a combination of overfamiliarity and barely contained awe. You’d have thought, then, that she might have been pleased when at one of my senior-school parents’ evenings my chemistry teacher had suggested I had the potential to get into medical school if I got my maths grades up a bit. I remembered it like it was yesterday: despite Mum being offish with me all the way home, inside I’d been buzzing with a secret sense of achievement and the feeling that anything was possible, even if Mum quite liked me to think it wasn’t.
‘How’s Charlie?’ asked Mum. ‘He is coming to Julie’s wedding, isn’t he? Because I’ve put him down as your plus one and they’ve made all the catering arrangements now, so he’d better be.’
Fuck. My cousin, Julie, was getting married in a posh hotel in Oxfordshire in a couple of months’ time and now I was going to have to let Mum – and, even more humiliatingly, my entire extended family – know that Charlie would not be coming because he was, in fact, no longer my boyfriend.
‘About that . . .’ I said.
Cassie looked up with concern.
‘Is he refusing to come? I know he’s always banging on about hating weddings,’ she said.
She was right, he did. He thought they were a waste of money and – other than for the bride and groom – a complete misuse of everyone’s time. Saying that, there had been a few Whitfield family nuptials in the four years Charlie and I had been together, and after a bit of grumbling and moaning he’d always come with me in the end. Sometimes he’d even enjoyed himself, particularly if there was a free bar. Although I wondered now whether the invitation to Julie’s wedding, which I’d surreptitiously left out on the kitchen counter for him to begin to get his head around, had been the thing to tip him over the edge.
I took a beat, attempting to exude calmness and acceptance, even if these were pretty much the opposite of the feelings that wereactuallyswirling around inside me, which were more like anger, devastation and complete and utter hopelessness.
‘Charlie and I have split up,’ I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. Annoyingly, it was swiftly replaced by another.
‘What?’ said Mum, looking shocked. ‘When?’
‘Um, a few days ago?’ I said, keeping it vague.
It had, in fact, been eight days, but if they knew that they’d only have had a go at me for not telling them sooner, and maybe itwouldhave seemed like a bit of a red flag that I hadn’t. If I was handling the break-up as well as I was trying to pretend I was, I wouldn’t have had a problem announcing it, would I? And inkeeping with me always having to be the capable, has-it-all-together sister, I felt compelled to give the impression that I was coping perfectly well with this life-changing turn of events. Broken up with my boyfriend of nearly half a decade, the man I’d lived with until about five minutes ago? No problem whatsoever. I could handle anything life threw at me, right? Except, suddenly, I couldn’t. I was a mess inside, and part of me wished I could just admit it. Maybe Mum would be all caring and understanding like she was with Cassie, even if for as long as I could remember that had literally never been the case.
‘Well, you’re better off without him,’ said Mum. ‘Isn’t she, Cassie?’
‘Definitely,’ agreed Cassie.
I bit my lip hard.
‘It is a little bit sad, though,’ I said, noticing my voice sounded all quivery. Shit. This wasn’t how I’d wanted things to go, not at all.
