by Joy Richards
The Chain
Joy Richards
Copyright © 2021 Joy Richards
The right of Joy Richards to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-913942-26-7
Contents
Love Women’s Contemporary Fiction?
1. Paul
2. Florence
3. Claire
4. Alex
5. Paul
6. John
7. Michael
8. Sarah
9. Holly
10. Florence
11. Claire
12. Alex
13. Paul
14. John
15. Michael
16. Esther
17. Sarah
18. Paul
19. Florence
20. Florence
21. Claire
22. Claire
23. Alex and Sarah
A note from the publisher
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To Richard, Lily and Jack.
1
Paul
Alice had wanted the wedding to be in Saint Lucia. There is a luxury resort on the west side of the island where you can walk down stone steps to two sandy beaches, connected by a narrow path through the jungle. She wanted to get married with her toes in the crystal-clear water, her hair and loose-fitting white linen dress blowing in the sweet breeze. Paul had wanted the reception in a marquee, in his parents’ back garden in Kent. They could get married in the Saxon village church, then walk through the cobbled streets to his mum and dad’s Arts-and-Crafts grade II-listed house and dance the night away in the garden. The second option being tens of thousands of pounds cheaper, and Paul being very emotionally attached to the idea, they ended up choosing Kent. They could always go to Saint Lucia for the honeymoon, she said back when they made their final decision. Except, of course, they ended up choosing Italy instead: in the summer, the only season for a proper English garden wedding, Saint Lucia on high alert for hurricanes.
That, in a nutshell, was the problem, Paul thought as he went through his weekly clean-up of the apartment. She wanted adventure, he wanted stability. At night, before going to bed, he would browse house prices on his phone while she looked at last-minute flight deals for Indonesia she never ended up booking. Of course it was obvious now, with the advantage of hindsight, that the relationship was never going to work. Irreconcilable differences, as he’d written in the wedding insurance form. Code for, she’s packed up her things overnight and has dumped me by Facebook message on her way to the airport. On the way to Australia. Facebook message, not even a proper WhatsApp. She’d terminated her phone contract before leaving, so her only way of communicating with him was through Facebook on her laptop. For some reason, that was what had made him most angry. Not the fact she’d left him two months before their wedding, or the fact that this had been premeditated enough for her to look for a job in Melbourne, get hired and sort out all of her visa paperwork before she’d even started packing. It was the Facebook message.
Paul forced himself to take a deep breath. He was scrubbing his toilet, kneeling down in the small wedge of space between the shower cubicle and the door. He pushed his round glasses up the bridge of his nose, swiping his curly hair away from his damp forehead. Even now, two years later, he could start shaking when he thought of his anger. Hours of therapy later, he knew how to identify a wave of rage and stop it before it took his breath away. He still didn’t like it, but he was becoming more and more able to think of other things and disrupt his destructive train of thought. This bathroom, for example. A joke, barely more than a closet, with cheap, pinkish lino covering the floor and mouldy paint on the ceiling. It had to be said, the bathroom went with the rest of his unbelievably shit apartment. A one-bedroom coffin, over a chicken shop that filled it with the overwhelming stench of grease during the day and an alien, deeply disturbing neon light. A nightmare flat, the first one he looked at, something he got in a hurry, never planning to spend more than a few nights there. He would spend most of his time at Alice’s nice flat in Angel, but needed somewhere to go back to after nights out with his friends, and when Alice was on a night shift. He had not envisaged that he would spend two years living here full-time, going through a breakdown and spending more time “at home” than he ever had in his life. Ironic, considering how much he disliked his “home”.
Why not move, was the first question anyone who stepped in asked. His parents, driving him back to London after a particularly bad couple of weeks when he’d retreated to the safety of his childhood bedroom. His remaining friends, who’d stuck by him through a rough couple of years and kept calling, inviting themselves over for a twenty-minute tea break to check on him. The handful of women he’d found on Bumble, all of whom seemed so nice, he felt genuinely awful using them to mop up his own pain. They did not seem to mind that he was using them, they probably also had their own thing going on. Before letting anyone into his meticulously clean but otherwise truly horrible and very soulless space, he prefaced it with a series of jokes, making sure his guests knew the flat was no reflection of him as a person. No art on the wall, stained furniture, something growing on the ceiling. Not what he thought his home would look like the year he turned thirty.
As one of the few heterosexual men truly interested in interior design, the mere sight of the place was punishment. Was he punishing himself? That was a question often explored by his various counsellors, his female friends, his mother and, most importantly, himself. Probably. But what for? He’d been a good boyfriend to Alice, and a good fiancé. He’d supported her through some tough times at work, brought her home-made brownies in the middle of long shifts in the hospital. He’d invested in her friends, at the expense of his own (which made it all the more impressive that so many of them had stood by him). His only fault, he realised, was that he had not been a good listener. He’d talked about children, how soon they could have them, how excited he was about the Shared Parental Leave scheme. Alice could go back to work whenever she felt ready, and he would take the rest of the year off. He might even go part-time after they’d had a couple. Alice’s job as a doctor was likely to always pay more than his own in publishing – and he would relish the opportunity to look after the kids while they were small.
Alice, on the other hand, always seemed to talk about other things; friends who had taken a few years off their training to go work in Australia and New Zealand – amazing pay, away from the overstretched and underfunded NHS hospitals, and the possibility of travel after a few months of work. You can get to Bali in a few hours, she would say, her eyes glimmering with excitement. More and more, she dreamed about taking a year out, making some money with locum shifts at the local hospital and then taking off to go travelling for a few months. South-east Asia was her latest obsession: hopping a train through V
ietnam, north to south, and then hiking her way through Cambodia before recuperating on a white sandy beach in Thailand. In her defence, her daydreams always included Paul, tagging along for the ride. But more and more, he would sound like a backpack she would take along more than a travel companion. If he’d listened better, he would have been able to see it coming.
Paul stood up, neatly storing his bathroom cleaning spray and sponge on top of the cabinet. As he turned towards the door, he hit his shin against the basin.
“Fuck!” He stretched his arm out for balance and leaned onto the sink, getting the sleeve of his shapeless grey jumper sodden with grimy soap water. “Fuck,” he said again. This flat is killing me, he thought. I need to move.
For some reason, he had always envisaged the next step in his life consisting of moving in with someone. He and Alice were going to buy a place together after the wedding. She did not want to add to the wedding stress by looking for houses, but he couldn’t wait. He’d spent hours on his phone, connected on all the house-search apps, scouring listings for their First Home Together. Their friends thought it was a bit weird they hadn’t moved in together already, but Alice worked odd hours and they had wanted to preserve their own independent circle of friends. He had quite liked the idea of getting married and of their whole lives changing, transforming from one day to the next. While in practice they spent the majority of their evenings, nights and weekends together, moving in was going to be different. Their things would be kept in the same place. They would share things like the microwave and the vacuum, they would pool their kitchen implements and allocate closet space. And if they bought the place, they could decorate it how they pleased. At night, his face lit by the ethereal glow of his phone, he would pick out houses he liked, and imagine their shared life living there. Each house came with its own set of imaginary circumstances. He even had two he had saved on his phone, and was toying with the idea of showing Alice.
One was a semi-detached in Forest Hill, slightly falling apart but with a garden filled with apple trees that just so happened to be in bloom when the photographs were taken. It had four bedrooms, and peeling green shutters. Room for a growing family. There was a space out front to park a car: he could see a second-hand sensible vehicle propped there, waiting to take them camping or to the beach. The second option was a flat in Dulwich with a tiny roof terrace. A starter home, a cool hangout for their child-free years. They would host long boozy candlelit dinners for their (her?) friends, and get a cat. Both properties had been sold for well over a year. Paul would sometimes think of them, of the people who had ended up putting in an offer and what their lives looked like, on the set of his imaginary lives. Was there a young couple in the tiny flat? It could have just as easily been sold to a bachelor, unaware he was trampling over someone else’s dreams of marital bliss.
He did know who was in the Forest Hill house, because he had stalked it. About a year after the break-up, at the height of his struggle, Paul had taken the overground from West Croydon on a wet afternoon. He didn’t get off at Forest Hill, for some reason that seemed creepy and stalkerish. Instead, he waited for the next stop, Honor Oak Park. He then walked back along the leafy streets that were presumably once a forest until he found it. He did not have to use his deductive powers to ascertain who lived there, because they were all outside carrying in what looked like rugby kit from the car. Two parents, black, in their early forties. Two teenage boys, tall and muscular, wearing mud-soaked red shorts and jerseys, carrying their boots carefully in their hand as they crossed the threshold. The shutters had been repainted white, which looked better than the original green, and the grass in the front had been mowed, which made the house look rather smart.
His therapist had not been impressed with that story. That was not the behaviour of someone looking to move on, staring at strangers peacefully living in a house where you never even went for a viewing. Pretending to be looking for an address on the other side of the street, so you could walk past a few times and catch more details of their ordinary, happy life. Which rooms had been claimed by the boys, blue Chelsea trinkets peering from the windows. Whether or not they had knocked through the front room to make the kitchen open space.
After that, Paul got the message. He uninstalled the house-search apps from his phone. He worked hard to stop thinking about other people’s lives, and start thinking about his. A few months later, he took a whole five weeks off work and went on a lone-wolf trip to Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia and, ultimately, Greece. Various friends came to join him, one for a whole week of hiking, a couple for a long weekend at the beach. He went parasailing, rented a scooter to drive through the dusty country lanes of Crete, and took a five-day intensive diving course in a tiny Croatian village. His parents caught up with him on the last leg of his trip, and they all stayed in a posh resort on a tiny island. Lying by the pool sipping a cold beer with his dad, Paul realised he hadn’t thought about Alice for a couple of days.
On his return to London, Paul started looking for a new job. He was due a promotion, but at his tiny company, opportunities were few and far between. His boss had been supportive during the whole ordeal, but his breakdown certainly hadn’t put him on the radar as a reliable prospect for more senior roles. It was time to move on. With far more ease than anticipated, he found himself at a much larger, scarier, publishing company. There were more people in his department than at the whole of his old company. His work was harder, but he enjoyed it more. There were also more people his age, and he made a few work friends. At his old company, he had been limited to friendly acquaintances, people to have lunch with but who he would never choose to spend time with outside of work. Here, he found his little tribe of like-minded people.
His university friends were close, but lived very different lives. They were getting married, settling down, one or two were even having babies. Some were talking about leaving the city for a more relaxed pace of life. With his new friends, they went to pretentious hipster wine tastings and plagued every midweek comedy open mic night in south-east London. They sat outside fancy cafes at the weekend sipping flat whites and talking about books. One of them, a tall, skinny girl with dyed red hair the colour of blood oranges, kissed him while waiting for the night bus after a late pub night. Her bus came and she ran off and, at least seemingly, she was so drunk she completely forgot all about it by the morning.
That was convenient, as Paul was not ready to date. The Bumble girls made him feel more sad than anything else, and he seemed to have become impotent in the feelings department. While physically he was still very much able, he seemed to have lost the ability to fancy women. That was not uncommon, his counsellor had said, and it would go away by itself with time and hard work. He diverted his energy towards trying to improve himself. He signed up to a gym, something he had never dreamt of doing, and within a few months had developed new and unexpected muscles. He signed himself up to various free classes, from oil painting (a disaster), to Greek for beginners (frustrating), to Thai cookery (outstanding).
In all this, his old flat seemed to be more and more inadequate for his life. It was too small to have friends over: there was only really space for two (skinny) people at the small table in the kitchen area and the bed was visible from every corner of the apartment. It was embarrassing, especially now more of his friends cared about such things as decor, either because they were artistic or just older and more able to better provide for themselves. It was very cheap, which was good, but with his new job Paul could easily afford to pay a bit more. Plus, he still had his share of the deposit for the home he was going to buy with Alice, and the insurance reimbursement for the wedding that never happened. Really, he had no excuse not to buy.
That’s where the issues started. Moving, buying, in a way acknowledged the finality of it all. Alice was not coming back. His first proper home was not to be one he shared with her. Furthermore, and perhaps worse, there was no girlfriend to replace her. He was not going to move out of his crappy apartment to move
in with a new woman, adventure beckoning. He was going to need to move out just to move back in with himself. Not a new life, but a continuation of this one. On the other hand, what other choice did he have?
2
Florence
“Fuck,” Florence said as she walked into the kitchen. “I hate this house.” Tim, age two, was oblivious to his mother’s swearing, curled up on the nursing chair in the corner glued to a tablet blasting an episode of Paw Patrol. The dog, upstairs, mercifully stopped his insistent barking. The rest of the scene looked like a “before” picture of a house transformation show. Brightly coloured plastic toys were strewn across the floor of the kitchen-diner, and two towering stacks of mail and miscellaneous papers covered the surface of the dining table. On top of the papers, the remainders of lunch: a big plate for Mummy, a small bowl for Tim, with the gnawed carcasses of three broccoli florets browning in the afternoon air. The kitchen counters were covered in various kitchen equipment that could not find room in the already overstuffed cupboards: a steamer, a blender, a bag of sandwich bread, a massive spice rack, a tower of baby bottles and plastic cups. The counters were also dirty with the splattered remains of dinner, pasta sauce congealed on the wooden countertops and little crumbs of a salad wilting in the crevices near the stove. A mess. Like the rest of the house.
