The Reinvention of Martha Ross

by Charlene Allcott

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I want to run back to the flat.’ Alexander did a decent job of packing my stuff but failed to include any knickers. Also, I want to see him. I’m not entirely confident about why this is. We have practicalities to discuss; I have questions I deserve answers to; but also I need to see him, because seeing him every day is natural. Not doing so feels like suddenly deciding not to brush your teeth – odd, rebellious, but also a bit gross. My marriage with Alexander had started to feel like a slowly shrinking box but now I was beginning to wonder if freedom was overrated. Spending the night with Rupert made me think that perhaps one shit husband is worth a sea of unattached morons.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ says Leanne. ‘I’m sorry I let it get out of hand. We should talk things through.’

  ‘You didn’t let it get out of hand; that was Cara.’

  Leanne laughs and then stops and nods her head.

  ‘Actually, Cara and I had a chat and we thought we could go to the spa at the Queens Hotel after work tomorrow.’ I’m both excited and perturbed by the idea of Leanne and Cara interacting without me as a buffer. I had considered them as the friend equivalent of two violently reactive chemicals, only able to coexist with me present to neutralize them. ‘You should have a little chill-out and some self-care,’ says Leanne. ‘If your mum can’t have Moses, I’ll get James to stay in with the kids.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘that would be nice.’ Although I’m not sure it will be nice – self-care to Leanne means spending loads of money and I find it really hard to relax in spas; I never know when and where I should be naked.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow then. I hope it goes OK with Alexander.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I say, because I’m hoping the universe will hear me.

  I walk to the flat slowly. The roads feel unfamiliar although I know it’s me and not the streets that have changed. I’m surprised that I have to take a few fortifying breaths before I knock on the door, an alien act in itself. As I hear footsteps approaching, I curse myself for not putting on some make-up before coming over but then I think it might be better this way, for him to see me looking broken and drained. If men are visual creatures, perhaps Alexander needs to set eyes on my despair to comprehend it. It’s not Alexander that answers the door, however; it’s Poppy. Poppy with her low-waisted dark denim skinnies and then metres and metres of taut white skin before the hem of her cropped T-shirt. Poppy is Alexander’s part-time PA and even though she knows who I am she looks confused to see me standing there.

  ‘Is Alexander in?’ I say. She doesn’t speak so I walk past her and into the kitchen where Alexander is standing at the counter preparing two mugs of coffee.

  ‘Martha,’ he says when he sees me, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘This is my home,’ I say.

  ‘I mean, why didn’t you say you were coming?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  Alexander takes a sip of coffee and rage floods through me. How can he be casually concerned with topping up his caffeine consumption when this is the first time we have laid eyes on each other since our break-up?

  ‘I’m not really in a head space to talk about stuff,’ says Alexander.

  ‘What’s stuff?’ I ask. ‘Our marriage? Our child? Little stuff like that?’ Alexander folds his arms and appraises me.

  ‘You look tired,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say with forced lightness. ‘I won’t lie, I’ve had better weeks.’

  Alexander makes a noise crossed between a scoff and a laugh. ‘Can I remind you that you sacked me off,’ he says.

  ‘But you didn’t have to take it so well.’ At this point I notice Poppy hovering just outside my eyeline, all twelve pounds of her. She’s like the world’s most ineffectual bouncer. I turn to tell her to fuck off out of my flat and crawl back to her grubby little house-share and drink cheap rosé with her disillusioned twenty-something friends, when I notice her feet. On Poppy’s feet is a pair of beige fluffy slippers – my slippers. I turn back to Alexander.

  ‘Are you even gonna ask about your son?’ I demand.

  ‘Your mum’s been texting me,’ he says. Fucking treacherous bitch.

  ‘And what about us? Did you not even want to ask why?!’

  ‘I know why,’ says Alexander, ‘because I suck at being married, we suck at being married. You’re clearly not happy.’ I take a step towards him; he flinches as if I’m going to strike him and I stop.

  ‘You never even tried to make me happy,’ I say, but the last syllable gets caught up in a burped sob.

  Alexander rubs the bridge of his nose before saying, ‘No one can make someone else happy, Martha.’ I want to believe he believes this. It feels a little less traumatic to think that he saw our break-up as a hurtling train that even James Bond and all the X-Men couldn’t stop. And then I see Alexander gaze over my shoulder. I follow his eyes to Poppy’s reddening face and I can take it no longer. I fall to my knees and grab her right foot. After a couple of mortifying seconds, I am holding a slipper. Poppy removes the other one and hands it to me. I stand and clutch them to my chest.

  ‘These are my slippers,’ I say.

  ‘I … I’m sorry, I just found them. Alex said it was cool.’

  ‘Alexander,’ I whisper, and then more loudly I say, ‘I’m gonna go.’ I can buy knickers.

  7

  LEANNE CALLS ME ten seconds into my lunch break the next day. She skips the verbal canapés and gets to the meat.

  ‘I’ve booked us in the spa for half six and I’m getting you a pedicure – no arguments. I called Ivy and told her we wanted to treat you, so she’s picking up Moses.’ Leanne has always been the only person able to tame my mother. I drank too much cheap vodka at our end of school prom and Leanne got me home and somehow managed to convince Mum I had eaten undercooked chicken; after that I started calling her The Ivy Whisperer.

  ‘I haven’t brought my swimming costume,’ I say. Leanne makes an odd little noise – half sigh, half groan. Even when she’s trying to do something nice for me I manage to make things difficult.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘you’ll be given a robe. See you there.’

  Fifteen minutes before the end of my shift, Bob corners me and tells me to induct a new member of staff. I’ve already tidied up and packed my bag and I’m reading an article Tashi left on my desk, about the benefits of meditation (weight loss!). Bob can clearly sense my resistance and reminds me that it’s part of my job description. I have to show some bloke Jake how to log on to the system. Jake may be an intelligent fellow but, if so, he has chosen this day to keep it deeply hidden. I have to show him the set-up half a dozen times before he makes any indication he has retained even the slightest crumb of knowledge. Thirty minutes after the end of my shift, I lose patience and tell him he seems to have everything under control. Jake thanks me effusively before putting his headset on backwards.

  Bob doesn’t react to my words when I tell him I’m leaving. He’s staring at his phone, biting his lip in concentration. I take a few steps closer. On his screen is a video of a well-endowed woman on a Space Hopper. ‘Bob,’ I say sharply. He slips his phone into his pocket.

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ he says. Bob doesn’t do thank yous – he even said that in a team meeting once – so his gratitude makes me suspicious.

  ‘I don’t remember it saying in my job description that I have to induct new staff,’ I say.

  Bob inspects the cuticles of his left hand. ‘Yeah, it does at the end. You know, “any other tasks your manager assigns you”.’ I want to tell Bob exactly where he can shove his job description. The feeling gives me a thrill; I could do it. I could tell Bob exactly what I think of his job and his tan and never return. I could leave now and never say the words ‘putting you through now …’ again, but I haven’t had much luck with endings recently, so I don’t.

  When I find them at the Queens Hotel, Leanne and Cara are the best part of the way through a bottle of prosecco.


  ‘We would have waited …’ says Leanne.

  ‘But we didn’t want to,’ finishes Cara. I pour wine into the empty glass waiting for me and Leanne lifts hers in a toast.

  ‘To our beautiful, brave friend,’ she says. I drink deeply; the alcohol immediately loosens my muscles. ‘How did it go?’ asks Leanne. I shrug and drink again. Cara stretches out on the white sofa and appraises me squarely.

  ‘Leanne tells me you had a crap shag.’ I cough into my glass and look behind me. The spa is ridiculously chic and very quiet, not the sort of place you should say ‘shag’, unless discussing home decor. There’s a woman folding towels but if she noticed Cara’s lack of discretion she hasn’t let on. Cara doesn’t wait for me to confirm or deny. ‘We need to get you drilled again – a bad lay will have you going back to A-hole.’

  Leanne laughs in a manner that I know is forced. I keep drinking to stop myself from telling the girls how accurate Cara’s assessment is. I can see now that going back to Alexander isn’t an option. Even if we tried, it couldn’t be a return. It would be a relaunch and a lifelong race away from the shadow of our failure.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to have sex again for a very long time,’ I say. Cara puts her glass down so heavily for a second I fear it will break.

  ‘This is what I mean,’ she says. She seems genuinely cross. ‘You can’t let one dickhead and his little dick send you into hibernation.’

  ‘It wasn’t actually little,’ I say. I gaze up to the ceiling as I pull together a hazy image of a naked Rupert. ‘It was average-sized, I guess.’

  ‘Little dick is a state of mind,’ says Cara as she taps the side of her head knowingly.

  ‘Martha’s got to do what she wants to do,’ says Leanne. She says this to Cara but she’s smiling at me, a weak sympathetic smile, the kind you would give to a dog wearing a cone. Cara dismisses this with a rueful shake of her head.

  ‘She’s gotta do what she needs to do. My aunt Nina did that whole waiting-for-the-right-time shit. Died a couple of years ago with a cooch full of cobwebs.’

  Leanne’s dog smile collapses and she reaches out to pat Cara on the hand. ‘I’m sorry about your aunt,’ she says.

  ‘S’all right,’ says Cara. ‘She was a bitch. Probably because she needed to get laid.’

  Leanne’s eyes narrow. ‘It’s not all about sex,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, but it is,’ says Cara. ‘All of it – film, music, the fact that we’re here to have our toenails painted primary colours. Everything is about sex.’

  Alexander and I haven’t had sex in one hundred and nineteen days. I know this because when I realized it had been two weeks I made a note in my diary. I thought that when we did the deed I could tell him the number and it would surprise him, perhaps shame him a little. I guess I can stop counting.

  ‘Get on Linger,’ continues Cara. I think of my match and am about to say something but she continues, ‘Everyone’s on there for sex, even if they pretend otherwise. That’s why I advertised your wares in your profile name.’ And like that another man has let me down, before I’ve even met him – a record. His messages seemed completely sincere and the realization that he could have other motives makes me feel exposed and I start to blush. I’m so focused on my own embarrassment that I miss the debate that has sparked between Cara and Leanne.

  ‘He’s great. He barely speaks English,’ says Cara, ‘so he couldn’t upset her.’

  ‘Sorry, who?’ I ask. Leanne readjusts her robe; its thick folds drown her slim frame and for a second she looks incredibly young. When she speaks, however, it’s clear she’s a woman, one who knows her own mind and apparently mine.

  ‘Cara has kindly offered to set you up with a personal trainer named Igor, but I was just saying that, if you’re going to date, you should start as you mean to go on. In fact, I was telling James about your … uhm … encounter and he reminded me there’s this guy he works with. He’s called Tom. I met him at the summer barbecue and he’s kinda cute. He’s very polite. I think you could do with someone who will treat you like a lady.’

  I wonder why Leanne has to share every last detail of every last thing with James? Someone needs to tell her he’s her husband, not her journal. I’m unsurprised she has a solution to a problem I was yet to voice. Whenever I call her to say something’s gone wrong, I can hear a shiver of pleasure in her voice. I’m a good friend to her in that regard, always flooding my kitchen or trying to work out how to get a new passport within forty-eight hours. When we were teenagers and I found myself distraught because I had completely forgotten about the existence of an exam she would arrive with sweets and flashcards and drag me through it. The thing is, I always slightly resented her for it; sometimes I just wanted to be her friend and not her renovation project. It didn’t occur to me that I could resolve this by simply saying no.

  ‘I don’t know …’ I say.

  ‘Of course, it’s up to you,’ says Leanne.

  ‘Yeah, but cobwebs,’ says Cara sagely.

  A woman in a white tunic approaches us.

  ‘Martha?’ she asks. I raise my hand. ‘Are you ready?’ I finish my drink before standing up.

  ‘Yes I am,’ I say.

  Leanne approaches the set-up of the date with the same attitude she does most things in life – methodically, thoroughly and extremely efficiently. Phone numbers and photos are exchanged; Tom looks happy and approachable in his picture, if a little stylistically challenged. Leanne also sends me a bit of background – almost exclusively his career achievements, but she also includes the fact that he ate a whole plate of king prawns at the barbecue. A few days later, Tom sends me a sweet message asking me to dinner the next evening and after waiting a couple of hours I reply positively; then I think about cancelling approximately every six minutes. Mainly because I think that even if Poppy, eater of men and destroyer of souls, has got her claws into Alexander I shouldn’t settle for being courted by some desperado from the East Sussex council drainage department. But also because of this:

  Marthashotbod: This isn’t about sex, is it?

  Undeterred83: No, not at all. I find you fascinating. I mean I’m sure I would like to have sex with you but I’m looking for much more.

  Marthashotbod: I’m really pleased to hear that.

  Marthashotbod: BTW my friend Cara picked my username :/

  Undeterred83: I’m sure it’s fitting :) Don’t get me wrong you’re gorgeous but I already know that’s just the start.

  Marthashotbod: You do?

  Undeterred83: I know what I like and I like you.

  Marthashotbod: I like you too.

  Undeterred83: I really love talking to you. I can’t believe the timing. I want us to meet but I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. Working on a children’s project in Uganda for twelve weeks! We’ll set something up the second I’m back though?

  Marthashotbod: Of course. Your trip sounds amazing, so worthy. Do you mind if I ask if any of the kids have worms?

  Undeterred83: Ha ha! I don’t know if I’d call it worthy but I find it really inspiring. They do occasionally have parasites but we give them a treatment.

  3) Has to work for himself but not be in it to make money. He’s got to do something useful to society. He has to spend his free time doing something inspiring; not just inspiring but also worthy, e.g. deworming African orphans or similar …

  My match tells me he’s a freelance researcher and the things he examines – health, birth rate, education – they make a difference. Not in a casual, transient way but significantly and permanently. And the fact that he seems to possess so many of the qualities I need makes me believe that he can make that sort of difference to my life. I’m a romantic of sorts – I’m a fan of chocolates and love letters; my ultimate fantasy is that someone will race across a bustling city to stop me boarding a plane – but I have never believed in the concept of one great love. Even when I was mooning over Alexander for all those years, I didn’t think he could be my one and only potential soulmate. How
could it be logical, with over seven billion people in the world, that my one true love would happen to live in the same seaside town? No, I believed that there were dozens of people with whom I could build a life. Until I wrote that list.

  I do wonder if I’m descending into madness and then I ask myself if the questioning of my sanity is a sign of my lack of madness and then I wonder if that thought is in itself mad. Would it be possible that, caught in the storm of grief, I have conjured up this man? It certainly wouldn’t be beyond me to imagine a guy who represents everything I need; didn’t I do that with Alexander? I re-read the list, forcing myself to appraise the situation objectively. It’s undeniable – he’s making the grade. I send a silent prayer to the universe that this person is simply a long overdue karmic refund.

  So, I’m standing in my jeans and bra, to-ing and fro-ing between meeting Tom and slipping into my onesie and calling the whole thing off, when I decide I have to ask.

  Marthashotbod: I can’t believe I haven’t asked you your name! I assume your parents didn’t name you Undeterred83?

  Undeterred83: :) No, it’s Nathan but my friends and family sometimes call me George, because I was always asking questions when I was a kid.

  George?! Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I go on the date with Tom because I know now that there may be some truth in the concept of one true love and I will definitely need a dummy date before I meet mine, and also because there’s still a chance I’m certifiable and crazy people don’t go on dates.

  I sneak into Moses’s room to kiss him goodnight before going. He’s still awake and pulls the covers over his face when I come in. I pull them down and tuck them around his body. ‘It’s not playtime, silly,’ I whisper. He reaches out and I hold his hand. I stand in silence and after a minute I can feel his grip relax. I let his arm fall and watch him as he loses the battle to keep his eyes open.