Page 2 of Love Letters on Hazel Lane

She wouldn’t feel so bad if: a) she still shared a flat with Gemma in the city centre, but Gemma had moved to Watford two months ago with her partner’s job; and b) the man she’d recently started referring to as her boyfriend – albeit only in her head – hadn’t texted, cancelling their date that evening with only a couple of hours’ notice; and c) – yes there was a c) now she came to think of it – if she hadn’t overheard Leona bitching about her earlier in the small office kitchen.

She picked up her phone and looked at Dan’s message again.

Sorry. Can’t make tonight after all.

It was over two weeks since she’d seen him.

He’d been perfect too. Attractive. Confident. (Jo felt she needed someone confident to make up for her own shortfall in that area.) Outgoing. (Ditto.) And quirky too with his spiky hair and flamboyant shirts.

Quirky. Now there was a good word – 22 points even before you counted any bonuses like triple letter or double word scores.

Meeting Dan had been a bit of a result. She’d been anxious about dating again, after all she’d been through – deep down, she didn’t believe she was worthy of finding love – and even more anxious about joining a dating app. She found it so hard to trust anyone. No, more than that; she found it hard to trust her own judgement. But nor did she want to be alone for her entire life and how else were you meant to meet anyone these days? Especially if you weren’t particularly extroverted. She wasn’t the sort of woman who’d initiate a conversation with a man in the chiller aisle at Tesco, and as for chatting up someone in a bar… well, that was never going to happen.

So Jo had joined the dating app, and, anxious often to the point of nausea, had gone on a series of first dates, mostly terrible, wondering how on earth you were meant to be able to tell what someone was really like underneath the façade. She didn’t want to end up with another Si.

But then she’d met Dan and he’d been confident and kind, and had quickly asked her for a second date and Jo had thought her luck was in.

She sighed.

Three dates and she’d started thinking of him as her boyfriend. Was she mad?

‘Should I call him?’ she said to Mona.

The Mona Lisa was one of three enormous canvases, grand masters butchered to reflect modern times, that dominated the office walls. Mona was depicted staring at an iPhone, whilst the figure from Munch’s The Scream was watching a thriller on an enormous wide-screen TV and the hand of God from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam stretched out to touch not Adam but an iPad. According to David, the paintings reflected the fact that Pop! Productions made content that could be watched anywhere at any time by anyone on any device. Not strictly true, Jo always thought. Their programmes were probably banned in North Korea and places like that, and her mum’s old Nokia could only make phone calls and send texts. But she didn’t point this out. Nobody liked a… what was the word? Pedant.

Pedant. A paltry 9 points.

‘What do you reckon? Call him again? Or leave it?’

Mona stared at her phone.

‘Okay, I’ll take that as a no,’ Jo said.

She’d already left one rambling monologue on Dan’s answerphone asking when she could see him and yes, she knew she shouldn’t have, and no, he hadn’t rung back.

The thing was, Dan wasn’t just the man she was dating; he was her entire social life. Now Gemma had moved away and her colleagues had stopped inviting her out – thanks to Leona, Jo suspected – her social calendar was decidedly empty. There was no-one she could call for a drink and she’d no plans for Saturday or Sunday either.

‘You’ll soon make new friends,’ Gemma had said when she’d told Jo about her imminent move. ‘You need to find your tribe.’

But making friends seemed to get harder the older Jo got, and let’s face it, she’d never found it easy. At school, she’d been one of those children who preferred lessons to playtime. Socially awkward, one teacher had called it. Another had repeatedly asked her if she was being bullied.

Was it bullying? No-one was beating her up or stealing her lunch money. It was just a bit of name-calling. ‘Sticks and stones,’ her granny used to say. ‘Sticks and stones.’

Words will never hurt me.

Although that just wasn’t true. Not in Jo’s experience. Words did hurt. Jo felt that hurt deep in every cell of her body, just as much, she thought, as if she had been beaten up. Wounds from a physical beating healed over time, but emotional scars didn’t. They accumulated, one on top of another. The words her classmates had used echoed around her mind for years to come, taunting her throughout her teenage years, shaping her beliefs about herself, destroying what little self-confidence she had.

Ugly.

Fat.

Pathetic.

‘You’re such a swot,’ said freckle-faced Sally Grainger at playtime one day after Jo had come top in the spelling test yet again.

‘Your face is scabby,’ said Stuart Bell, frowning at a nasty patch of childhood eczema on Jo’s face.

‘You’re not invited,’ said Melissa Dean, pointedly handing out birthday party invitations to every other girl in the class.