Very Nearly Normal

by Hannah Sunderland

  ‘Do you know the painting?’ he asked.

  ‘I do now,’ I replied. ‘I love it.’

  ‘That’s Elizabeth Siddal in that painting too—’ Caleb abruptly turned and pointed to another image ‘—only this time the painter is Millais.’ The painting showed the same woman, younger and less pained, lying back in a lake surrounded by flowers, her dress dragging her under to her death. He pointed to another and another and I began to notice something about them.

  I stood and looked behind me to a painting of a woman with smouldering orange hair that she combed as she looked wistfully into a mirror in her hand. She was stunning, in a white smock dress that fell gracefully from her shoulder. In the frame beside her was a woman playing the harp, her red hair falling down into the strings as angels perched above her head. Each work was bordered in an ornate frame that only added to the majesty of the paintings; each one special and in pride of place and redheads, almost all of them. Something about them made me feel empowered, like I’d finally found my people, except my people happened to be nothing but century-old paint and canvas.

  I looked at image after image and all the women looked the same: red hair, round hips.

  ‘You know, the Pre-Raphaelites painted women like you because they thought that that was what true beauty looked like.’ I slowly turned around to face him. ‘I’m inclined to agree.’

  I hated flattery; it made me feel uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the way he was looking at me did. We looked at each other for far too long and at one point it seemed as if he was about to move in to kiss me, but thought better of it.

  ‘Sorry.’ He looked away, embarrassed, and ran his hand through his dark curls.

  Breathe.

  You can do this.

  I took his hand and waited for him to look back up.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘where are we going next?’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  What is it called when you grieve for someone who isn’t dead, just gone away or nothing like you thought they were?

  I suppose the name doesn’t matter, the feeling is still the same no matter what you call it.

  My grief for the Theo I had made myself believe existed had softened over the month of his absence, the razor-sharp edges had ground themselves down over the weeks since I’d seen him last. The corners still prodded me every few hours or so, but they were blunt now and hurt much less.

  That portion of my life seemed like a dream to me now, so far removed from what my life had been before and what it was now, that it seemed impossible that any of it had happened, like it had all been a story.

  It was helpful to look at it like that, like a hurt I’d felt whilst reading a book or watching a beloved character die on screen; that way it wasn’t as real and it made seeing Caleb a whole lot easier.

  Caleb took me to a restaurant where they served food on wooden boards and drinks in old jars. The place was beautiful, with vines made from repurposed plastic bottles running over the walls and tables with mosaic pictures on the surfaces.

  He ordered a butternut squash and goat’s cheese pie – at which point I learned that he was a vegetarian – and I had the chicken. It felt slightly insensitive to eat a piece of dead bird in front of him, but I’d be damned if I was going to pay that much to eat butternut squash.

  The atmosphere was pleasant, the food tasted amazing, Caleb looked handsome and we were sharing easy conversation, but the only thing I could think about was the candle that sat on the table between us.

  Even though he wasn’t here, Theo still managed to ruin the evening, or rather the memories of him did. Why couldn’t I stop remembering the time we’d had our non-date and I’d lost my shit over the candle? Why couldn’t I focus on what Caleb was saying and enjoy the way he looked at me without feeling like I was in some way being unfaithful? Why wouldn’t Theodore ‘Fucking’ Morgan just leave me alone?

  I abruptly excused myself and went to the bathroom, locking the cubicle door and standing with my back against it as I looked down at my phone. I pulled up the image of us on the mountain again and felt the tears come to my eyes once more. I couldn’t believe how happy I had been in that moment and I still felt the remnants of that happiness trying to bloom in my chest. But the happiness of that picture was cracked now, just like the screen that it sat behind.

  More than anything I just wanted to stop missing him, to reroute the love I’d been left with to Caleb and let him fill the void that Theo hadn’t wanted to. But he was still with me, haunting me like a ghost. Would this be my life now? Would I spend my life looking for another Theo, never finding him and letting guys like Caleb slip away because they weren’t him? I brushed a tear from my cheek as I pressed delete. The question coming up in bold over the image: Are you sure you want to delete this? Was I sure? Did I want to be rid of the only photographic evidence of the time we’d spent together? I pressed No. I couldn’t let it go just yet, I couldn’t let him go.

  The bathroom door opened and the sound of words being sobbed into a phone filled the otherwise empty room.

  ‘I told you this would happen, Soph. I told you that this date was a bad idea,’ the girl cried. Muffled sounds came from the earpiece and then the crying girl replied. ‘He didn’t even bother to turn up.’

  The muffled voice came again for a minute before she said, ‘I’ll be home soon.’ She hung up and at that moment I opened my cubicle door. The girl stood directly outside, her face streaked with tears, her red lipstick smeared down onto her chin. She looked from the phone in my hand, the image of Theo still emblazoned on the screen, to the tears that I hadn’t bothered to wipe from my cheeks. Her face crumpled and, before I knew what was happening, she walked into the cubicle and hugged me, continuing to sob into my shoulder.

  We stayed like that until another woman walked in, looked at us with distress and then moved on to the next cubicle. The girl pulled away, sniffed loudly, gave me a sad smile and then walked out of the door.

  The next day I went back to the Art Gallery on my lunch break and bought a poster of the Rossetti painting before taking it back and Blu-tacking it to the wall beside my/Arthur’s bed. I sat on the edge of the mattress and looked up into the closed eyes of the painted woman. Caleb was right: she did look like me a little, and she was beautiful. So, why did I think so little of myself?

  I turned my head to the mirror on the opposite wall and looked at my reflection. The weight I’d lost over the past month had returned to me like an old friend, but somehow, I didn’t seem to care as much as I had before. And something in my face had changed. I seemed to look slightly older, not in the sense of wrinkles and lines but in the darkening of my green eyes and the way I held myself as if without me noticing, a button had been pushed and I now found myself in the midst of an adulthood that I’d been hiding from for years.

  I stood up and looked at my whole self in the reflection. I peeled off my baggy jumper and looked at the shape of me that sat beneath a thin vest. I looked at the wideness and the curvature of my hips and the lack of tautness of my stomach. I looked at the slight dimple in the centre of my chin that I’d always disliked and the pale skin dappled with freckles that shone, almost luminescent, in the late morning light. My hair was longer than it had ever been and sat over my shoulder in a river of russet.

  I looked up at the painted woman on the wall, the one I considered beautiful, and then back at myself, the one I’d always found wanting, and I saw little difference. Did I hate how I looked simply because the body I saw belonged to me? Or did I hate my body because, deep down, I knew that I hated the angry, jealous person I had become inside?

  It was hard to remember a time when I didn’t feel inadequate in some way to the people around me. I never felt funny enough, witty enough. I never felt like I looked as good as them and I never fitted in as neatly. I never liked what everyone else liked and I didn’t know how they did it, mingling without feeling like they were Martians trying to learn about humanity by forced interaction.


  I considered my reflection and, in that instant, I had a sort of epiphany. I’d been hiding myself beneath baggy jumpers and shirts for years because I was embarrassed about what other people would see when they looked at me. But who cared what anyone else saw? If someone wanted to find flaws in me, then they would find them anyway, but I didn’t need to search for flaws within myself. I walked over to the wardrobe and pulled out a top that I’d been afraid to wear because of the way it clung to my body and showed the shape of me, but this time as I slid it on and smoothed it down over my skin, it felt like nothing had ever fitted me so well.

  Footsteps approached and a moment later someone knocked on the front door.

  Amy was standing there when I reached the door, her forehead beaded with sweat but her smile still intact.

  ‘Effie, there’s someone waiting for you down in the shop.’

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked, suddenly becoming unsteady.

  ‘They didn’t say,’ she replied. ‘You look really nice.’ I followed her down into the shop, which was busy, no wonder Amy was sweating.

  ‘Over there by the window.’ She pointed and I followed her finger.

  I don’t know why I had expected it to be Theo. Blind hope, I guess. But the person I saw was not the blond I was looking for.

  ‘Kate?’ I walked over to her, my brow furrowed. ‘What are you doing here? Aren’t you meant to be in Toronto?’

  Some dark and vicious part of me slightly enjoyed the way that her hair lay in an inartistically messy braid over her shoulder and the way that dark circles ringed her eyes. She was wearing a faux-fur jacket that was slightly matted in places where she’d leaned on things. Her make-up had been applied sparingly and with little skill, her foundation sitting in messy blobs and there were patches that she’d missed altogether.

  ‘Things didn’t work out so well for me in Canada,’ she replied, her voice quiet. She stepped forward and sniffed; she’d been crying. ‘Can we go somewhere and talk?’

  I looked around at the queue of customers, ten people deep and growing. ‘We’re pretty busy here. I don’t know if I’ll have time,’ I said bluntly.

  Kate’s face fell, her eyes growing wetter as she looked down at the floor. I sighed at the annoying twist of guilt in my stomach. I clenched my jaw to stop myself from saying anything, but the words came out all the same. ‘I’ll work through the last half of my lunch break now and take the rest when the shop is quieter. If you want to wait, then we can go somewhere and talk.’

  She looked up and nodded. ‘I’ll wait here,’ she said, sitting down on the sofa next to the sleeping husband of a shopper. She looked so lost sitting there with both hands clasping the bag in her lap and I hated myself for feeling sorry for her.

  Once the queue was cleared and the shop emptied, I apologised to Amy and left with Kate. I’d make it up to her by giving her an extra fifteen-minute break and letting her take a power nap upstairs.

  Kate and I walked in silence to the nearest café where I ordered a latte for myself and Kate ordered a cappuccino. I crossed my legs and rested my hands on my knee, looking over at her with unyielding eyes that waited for her to speak. She shifted uncomfortably in the chair and slipped off her jacket before turning to me. She seemed to be finding it difficult to meet my eye.

  ‘You look good, Eff, have you lost weight?’ she asked.

  I rolled my eyes. She couldn’t win me over with flattery.

  ‘Why did you come, Kate?’ I asked in a calm voice. ‘I haven’t heard a peep from you in over a month.’

  ‘I wanted to apologise.’ She sat forward and placed her hands on the table. I noticed that something was missing from her hand. ‘I’ve been a shitty friend to you and not just recently either. I’ve treated you like crap and tossed you aside for people I thought were better than you, but they weren’t better than you and I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where’s your wedding ring, Kate?’ I asked, my voice still cold.

  She looked down at her hands and clasped them together, hiding her bare-naked ring finger. The waitress brought our drinks and I nodded a thank you her way before turning back to Kate.

  ‘You’re the one who brought me here to talk, so talk,’ I said as I sipped at the warm foam.

  She tore the tops from three tubes of demerara sugar and tipped them into her coffee before speaking. ‘Toronto was a bust,’ she said, finally. ‘We didn’t get the deal and it was partly my fault. I won’t bore you with the details but it went badly.’ She stressed the last word and shivered as if reliving it. ‘I was asked to fly home and I was too ashamed to tell anyone. My plan was to come home, forbid Callum from saying anything about me being back and to just live in hiding for a while. After that I could just reappear and pretend I’d only just got back and people wouldn’t know that I’d failed.’ She sipped frantically and sighed once the caffeine and sugar were safely inside her body. ‘I got a taxi from the airport and got home at around lunchtime. I knew Callum would be out at work and so I decided to go to bed and cry it out for an hour or two, but when I got there, I found that the bed was already occupied.’

  It didn’t surprise me; Callum had always been a twat.

  ‘Him and Eloise have been sleeping together for over a year behind my back.’ Tears coated her eyes, making them shine like glass. ‘They even did it at my party – that’s why I couldn’t find either of them for so long.’

  ‘Eloise “Fucking” Kempshore?’ I said, a little too loudly, causing a woman to frown and shield the ears of the young boy beside her. ‘And Callum?’ Kate nodded and wiped her eyes.

  ‘I should have listened to you, Effie, back in year eleven when we had that huge argument and you told me that Eloise was the devil.’

  ‘“Spawn of Satan” I believe were my actual words,’ I replied, remembering the moment well.

  ‘You told me that she was a user. You told me that Callum was no good and all I did was ditch you, for them! You were right about everything.’

  I didn’t tell her that I knew I’d been right. I’d known it when I said it and I’d continued to know it all the way up until now.

  ‘Are you getting a divorce?’ I asked.

  ‘I filed this morning.’

  ‘So, where are you living?’

  ‘I moved back in with Mum and Dad. The apartment was never mine, nor was anything in it. Callum was the one with the money to afford a place like that, not me.’

  Was this really happening? Had I wished this into existence?

  I’d been so jealous of her, of her apartment, of her wedding, of her life, and now she was telling me that what she’d had was never hers in the first place. She had not been the perfect wife that everyone had believed her to be; she had been a very good actress though.

  ‘I’m sorry, that must have been awful for you,’ I said with little emotion. ‘And while we’re in the habit of apologising, I think it only right that I say that I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have gone off on one like I did at your party.’ It almost killed me to say it, but this was a new leaf, the start of a new Effie. A new Effie who apologised for things, even if it gave her acid reflux to do so.

  ‘Effie.’ She leaned forward and took my hand. ‘It’s already forgiven. I didn’t invite you, my oldest friend, to my wedding because I was playing at being someone I wasn’t. I didn’t want you there because you are nothing like those people; you know exactly who you are and don’t care what anyone else thinks.’

  I looked a question her way. Was that really how she saw me?

  ‘I do care about what people think of me, more than anything. Or at least I used to,’ I said.

  We sat, looking at each other over the table, her hand in mine, and for the first time in over a decade, we saw each other as we truly were.

  ‘I’m sorry, Effie. Will you forgive me?’ she asked, her brow rumpled as she waited for my answer.

  I looked at Kate and remembered all the years I’d spent quietly hating her, of the betrayal I had felt at her hands an
d my first thought was, no, I can’t forgive you. But then I thought back to the list and the last remaining missions. I remembered the time Kate had left me waiting at the cinema for an hour before I’d called and found out she’d ditched me for Eloise or when I’d caught glandular fever and she hadn’t even texted to see how I was. I felt the anger swell in my stomach and felt it dissipate as I opened my mouth and said, ‘Yes, I forgive you.’

  10. Stop holding grudges.

  Why had I felt the need to hang on to them for so long? My grudges with Kate, my mother and now Theo. I was terrible at letting things go, but as I finally let go of my grudge with Kate, I felt a weight lift. We had a new understanding of each other and even though I would never forget the betrayal she’d made me feel, I didn’t hate her anymore.

  She smiled widely, her dead eyes coming alive for a moment or two.

  We drank our coffees and talked, the anger slipping away with every word. For once we weren’t trying to one-up each other or throw in a spiteful dig. We just talked, like regular people. Dare I say it? We spoke like adults.

  ‘Are you still with that guy you brought to the party?’ she asked, and I almost broke our new détente and threw my coffee at her. He hadn’t crossed my mind in almost twenty straight minutes.

  ‘No,’ I replied, looking down into the small pool of coffee sitting in the bottom of my cup. ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He didn’t give me much of an explanation, but I’m pretty sure something is going on with him and his ex.’ I looked down at my nails. My cuticles looked dry and ragged.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked, sensing me holding back.