Olive

by Emma Gannon

  I’m seeing Bea, Isla, and Cec tonight. Maybe I’ll take a few boxes of freebies from the office for them; they always seem to love free beauty bits and bobs. I can’t wait to see them. I feel like a shell of my usual self. I guess I haven’t fully processed the breakup yet. I need some perspective from my mates.

  Suddenly my eyes fill with tears. I’d given myself a good talking-to in the mirror this morning. I’ve done my crying; enough’s enough. But clearly the well’s not empty just yet. I take myself off to the best place to have a shameless cry: the .dot toilets. They are the newest and fanciest part of the whole office. I take a box of tissues with me and try to cry quietly on the seat of the loo. Twenty minutes later, there’s a tap on the glazed glass door.

  “Ol? Ol . . . it’s Colin.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Colin—not now.”

  “Sorry, love, it’s just . . . your tea is cold, and Gill has said she needs you for a meeting.”

  “Oh crap.” I look at my phone. Yes, it’s 10 a.m. already, time for our weekly features meeting.

  “Can I come in?”

  “How do you know I’m not doing a poo?” Colin and I have this type of oversharing relationship. We’ve become quite close friends over the years; he often plays a role in cheering me up or lightening the mood, and I have been there to listen to his terrible dates with awful men.

  He laughs gently. “Oh, babe, I could hear you crying from outside.”

  “Okay,” I sniff. I let Colin in, and he wraps me up in a big hug.

  “Are you okay? Is it Gill? Is she being horrible?”

  “No . . . no. It’s . . . me and Jacob. We have . . . well, I have . . . ended things,” I sniff.

  “Oh no. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Is it . . . okay?”

  “No, not really.” I wipe my nose. “I mean, I just can’t stop crying. I’ve been coming in these loos for a sob every day since it happened—can’t believe no one’s noticed yet.”

  “Do you wanna talk about it?”

  “Maybe soon. Not feeling up to it right now.”

  “I get it. Don’t worry. Shall I tell Gill you’ve got something else on? I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “Actually, that would be great, yes, please. Thank you. I just need a bit more time in here, getting myself together.”

  “Of course.” Colin squeezes my hand and gives a sympathetic smile.

  Grief can knock you sideways. I miss Jacob so much. I feel almost sick at how much I could do with a hug from him right now. I’m constantly trying to fight back tears. I can’t imagine anyone ever loving me in the same way. Or seeing me naked, for that matter.

  After another thirty minutes, sobbing and squeezing out tears, I look in the bathroom mirror and blot away at my face with toilet paper, removing any signs of dampness. Then I apply more kohl liner around my eyes. Since the breakup I’ve felt so worried that we’ve made the wrong choice by ending it. I guess this is being human: we can never be 100 percent sure about any decision we make.

  Jacob moved out “officially” only recently, after living in his brother Sam’s spare room for a month. The idea was that we’d try living apart at first as some sort of “break.” But it sounded a lot like a breakup from the start. It’s been the shittiest time of my entire life. I am stewing in it, sitting in the negativity and depression like a big squishy chair that I can’t get out of. Every meal I cook reminds me of him. Everything on TV. Even replacing the toilet paper roll or making the bed in the morning. Everything. I wish I could just delete everything and start again, like picking a brand-new player in a video game.

  I leg it out of the office at 5:30 on the dot, itching to get to tonight’s dinner. I desperately need to feel the safety net of my best pals, who will allow me to rant and shout and cry and snot bubble. That’ll make me feel better. They have always stood up for me. Once, back in the day when you could still smoke inside, they all tapped ash on my ex-boyfriend Billy’s head on the dance floor. He was a horrible, verbally abusive arsehole. All the ash just piled up in his hair while he danced. I bet it stank for days.

  I’m sweating slightly on the Tube on the way to our usual dinner place, Jono’s, a family-run Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell. We stumbled across it one drunken night years ago at university, and it quickly became our go-to. We always have the same table, a big corner booth looking onto the street. The atmosphere is warm, busy, and friendly. We love Jono, the owner, who is always there with a massive smile on his face. He knows us so well now after a decade of the same orders: spaghetti alle vongole (Bea), risotto ai gamberi (Cecily), gnocchi (Isla), and capricciosa pizza (me). We have had countless heart-to-hearts inside, plus countless arguments, countless tears, and laughing fits. There are so many trendy new hipster restaurants opening all the time in London, but Jono’s will always have our heart. If I’m ever late I know the girls will have ordered my drink (a glass of Fatalone, large), and it will be waiting for me when I get there. The others are never late. Compared to my friends, I guess I do feel a bit . . . behind. I think it’s a metaphor for my life.

  I rush through the streets of Holborn, panting a bit and stomping past slow tourists who mindlessly dawdle along with no sense of direction. I try not to get run over by an angry cab driver with a cigar hanging out of his mouth who very nearly turns my entire left leg into a squashed pancake. Then a bus goes past me very slowly, wafting toxic fumes up my nose and splashing through a giant puddle, which sprays dirty water onto my Converse. “Arseholes!” I shout. Then, an old woman goes over my foot with her wheelie suitcase, leaving a line of dirt on my shoe.

  As I approach the familiar doorway to Jono’s, I realize my heart is pounding slightly and my skin prickling—that old underlying anxiety flaring up. It hits me that I haven’t seen the girls in a while, and it feels weird. I breathe in through my nose, and out through my mouth a few times. Everyone has just seemed slightly less available, a creeping sense of busyness and life admin and to-do lists, of time being squeezed.

  When I arrive, something immediately feels off. Jono is pouring some tap water into their glasses. Bea and Isla look like someone’s died. Has someone died?

  “Hi guys,” I say, panting and whipping off my coat. “Only fifteen minutes late this time; I’m getting better! Sorry. Everything okay?”

  “Hey, Ol . . .” They all give me big smiles, saying how lovely it is to see me as I go around the table kissing them. I can’t help but notice how tired they all look.

  “Everything’s fine. It’s just . . . we’re not quite on top form tonight, Ol,” Isla says.

  “What’s up?” I ask, putting my coat over the back of my chair and sitting down.

  “Well . . .” Bea takes in a deep breath. “Cec is obviously about to give birth any day now, I’m absolutely knackered from being up all night with a vomiting child, and Isla has really bad cramps . . . we’re not a fun bunch, I’m afraid!”

  Cec is in the loo right now. She is weeing every five minutes, apparently.

  Isla has suffered with severe cramps and endometriosis issues all her life. Bea has three wild kids who are always plagued with something. This latest ailment sounded like the actual bubonic plague. And Cec, to be fair, is about to pop.

  “Okay,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment. “That’s fine! Sorry to hear the kids are still poorly, Bea. Shall we have a quick bite then, and maybe just one quick drink?”

  “Well,” Bea looks awkwardly at the others. “We’d actually just decided that maybe we should give this one a miss and head home. Sorry, Ol.” Jono sheepishly puts the bill on the table: £3.00 for some olives, £0.00 for the tap water.

  I try to hide it, but I feel winded. “Oh, that’s a shame.”

  “I know, but,” Bea’s phone lights up, “there’s some drama going on at home, and I really have to leave. We’re all pooped.” I look around the
table at their forced smiles.

  “My doctor has told me to rest,” Isla says.

  “Poor you, of course,” I say, squeezing her hand.

  Cec walks slowly over to us from the direction of the toilets, and Jono shouts, “Bella mamma!” at her as he waves his hands towards her ginormous bump.

  “Hey, Ol,” Cec kisses me on the cheek, bending awkwardly.

  “We’ve told Ol that we’re gonna give tonight a miss,” Bea says.

  I know I should be understanding, but we haven’t seen each other properly for ages, and I really needed some advice and support from my best friends.

  “I’m so sorry, babe, I will make it up to you,” Cec says. “Chris is driving over to pick me up right now, bless him. I’m not feeling great. Does anyone need a lift my way?” She plants another kiss on my cheek and puts her cardigan on.

  I hope Cec’s husband, Chris, doesn’t come into the restaurant. He makes my skin crawl.

  “No worries, guys. I appreciate you all dragging yourself out after work. We tried, eh?” I keep my cool and, once they leave, Jono orders me a big glass of wine on the house. Funny how Jono can pick up on my emotions, but not my own friends. But to be fair, they do have a lot on their minds.

  Despite life’s strange twists and turns, the four of us used to be glued together. We had always been there to lift each other up and out of everything: depression, breakups, redundancies, you name it. We’d never missed a date at Jono’s until recently. Jono’s was our time—except for when Isla randomly brought her online date along, who wouldn’t shut up about himself and his recent adult gap year before trying to pay for the entire meal in bitcoin. But still, on the last Thursday of every month, for over a decade, we’ve gone to the same restaurant and sat at the same table. So why were things starting to slip now? It had felt so simple when we’d first laid down the rules in our twenties, on the day we left our shared house: that no matter what happened, we would make time for each other. Many people make the mistake of kicking friendships aside for the other seemingly more important strands of life, but we all know it’s friendship that really keeps you afloat. We weren’t going to be those people who let friendships slide. Or were we?

  As I go to leave, I look over at another table and see four girls—younger versions of us—sitting, cackling, in shiny dresses, with no wrinkles, their heads rolling back, eyes sparkling, and not yet tired by life. That used to be us.

  I take my jacket from the wooden coat stand by the door, right next to our window-side table.

  “You okay?” Jono says, putting his large hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I sniff. “Sorry, Jono, for taking up your best table and not even ordering anything.” I gesture towards our empty seats.

  “It’s okay, Olive. You will always be special customers to me.”

  “We wasted a booking—sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ve come here for a long time. You girls have a long, special friendship. I’ve seen it. Hold on to each other.”

  “Thank you. I just feel like things are weird at the moment.”

  “You must move with the tides; life is full of pushes and pulls.”

  “True, Jono. True. I just need them right now.”

  “Of course you do.” He pauses dramatically. “And remember, they need you.”

  “I hope so,” I sigh.

  “Come back very soon, yes?” he says, wiping down the table and taking away the glasses.

  Instead of going home, I reroute to the bar down the road called Mizzi’s, and proceed to tell the barman—who coincidentally looks a bit like Gunther from Friends—my life story like a weirdo in a film, while slowly getting red-wine teeth. I don’t realize how much I resemble a vampire until I see my reflection in the mirror of the sticky-floored bathroom and stare with horrified fascination at my bright-purple mouth, my lips stained in the corners.

  I know how much they all have going on, but I still can’t shake the feeling that the girls have let me down. I’m bursting with the need to talk to someone about the breakup with Jacob. Stumbling out of Mizzi’s, I sit on a doorway step. I reach for my phone and try to drunkenly call Colin, but his phone is switched off. I type in Zeta’s name, but she is on a charity work trip, and I know she only has occasional access to internet cafés. I can’t bear to ring Mum and tell her yet, as she just won’t get it. I put my phone back in my bag.

  When I finally stumble home around 1:00 a.m., I have a terrible, drunken urge to text Jacob. I type out a message and instantly make a typo. A reminder of how much wine I have consumed.

  No. No. I can’t.

  Maybe I should?

  Maybe he’d want to hear from me?

  No. Olive. Stop it.

  Standing by my front door, trying to fish my keys out of my bag, I notice that Dorothy Gray’s light is still on. Dorothy is my eighty-eight-year-old neighbor. Everything else is dark, but I can see her fuzzy TV screen; it looks as if a black-and-white film is playing. I’ve met her a couple of times at the local residents’ meetup or while taking out the rubbish. She lives in a big house directly opposite my block of flats, and we have a nice old chinwag if we’re ever going inside or leaving home at the same time. Her house is ginormous, with its own driveway. She never seems to sleep or, at least, turn out her lights. I hope she’s all right. Maybe she just watches TV all night (like me). Each to their own. My curtains are not quite closed, and there is a thin stream of bright light coming from her house into my bedroom. Perhaps it should be annoying, but I feel some warmth from it. Perhaps I’m not alone.

  “I always compare the cost of a year’s worth of diapers to how much traveling I could do instead.”

  Katie, 29

  3

  2009

  I was squatting down, in a sort of “twerk” position, my knees creaking and trembling. I hadn’t done a squat since gym class at school in the late 1990s, and it showed. “Dip” the stick delicately in your “urine stream,” I whispered back to myself, as I held the (now soggy) foldout instruction manual. Pee in a perfectly straight line? That was like a policeman asking someone to walk along a painted straight line after one too many tequilas. Like that scene in Bridesmaids with Kristen Wiig and Chris O’Dowd. It was impossible to “dip” anything neatly at this moment, mainly because I was a bag of nerves. I was terrified by the situation. The pregnancy test was tacky and flimsy, and I didn’t really trust it. It was purple and white and looked like it could easily snap in half. I was already worrying that it wouldn’t be accurate and that I’d have to go back to the store and do this whole shebang again and again. We bought two, Bea and I, in a “Buy One, Get One Free” deal. So here we were, doing it together, sitting side by side in the toilet stalls at Foyles bookshop (of all places). We always joked that our wombs were “n sync,” Justin Timberlake style, but this time we really were. I felt so anxious, hovering awkwardly over an off-white stained loo seat that wasn’t my own. I had just peed all over my hand by accident. It was warm and looked syrupy. Quite disgusting really.

  “You all right in there?” I shouted sideways to Bea. I didn’t hear anything, so I knocked on the partition.

  “Mmmm,” she replied unsurely. I could hear her heeled boots scuffling around on the tiles next to me.

  I couldn’t even bring myself to wash the pee off my hand because I had to wait for the stupid plastic gadget to show me a result. Germs were lingering everywhere, I thought, bacteria probably climbing the walls. If I were a proper grown-up, I would have antibac in my bag—but I forgot. Hurry up, hurry up. On the cubicle wall someone had scribbled, “Life is beautiful.” And someone has replied, “fuck off m8 this isn’t Tumblr” underneath. I shook the plastic stick (like a Polaroid picture?), but I wasn’t sure it was doing anything to hurry up the process. It was just flicking small specks of urine onto the floor tiles. Gross.

  “Bea?”

  “Yeah?” sh
e said impatiently.

  “Remember one line means not pregnant, and two lines means you are pregnant,” I yelled, hoping nobody else was in the toilets with us.

  “Keep your voice down, Ol. I know what the lines mean,” she said.

  I laughed. We’d done many lines together, in old, skanky party toilets. Now look at us.

  Rewind a couple of hours, and Bea and I were having lunch at Fall & Well, a little coffee shop on Denmark Street run by three hot brothers, catching up on life as we normally did on any other Hump Day Wednesday. It was our thing. We used this midweek session to sit and bitch about our jobs (and our bosses) for an hour. I was interning at a celebrity gossip magazine, and Bea was a gallery assistant. Both our bosses were similar in their contempt and behavior towards us: for some reason they wanted to make our lives hell. My boss was called Amie (a pretentious way of spelling Amy, if you ask me). Her nickname behind her back was Amie Hammer because she was as hard as nails. She wore these tasseled, heeled shoes to work, and every time she marched towards you to tell you off, you heard the tassels swishing first. It was a warning sign to get ready for a bollocking. My job was to get “scoops,” to find out if so-and-so was pregnant so we could “break” the news first. I basically sat on Perez Hilton’s website and made sure we copied (paraphrased) the hottest (or grimmest) American news stories onto our site—and I hated it. I wanted to be a writer, and this seemed like the logical first step in “getting my foot in the door,” according to all the career advisers at university. Just go for any old job, they said, as long as you can publish something! Writing horrible stories about reality TV stars really wasn’t what I had imagined for myself, even if I did seem to have a knack for it.

  “It feels like the better I perform at work, the more Amie Hammer hates me,” I sighed, drinking from my coffee cup.

  “Oh, Ol, don’t worry. It’s not you. I guess we just have to suck it up during these early years. The older women up the chain seem to have been told that the only way to ‘get ahead’ is to scream at everyone.”