The Bucket List to Mend a Broken Heart

by Anna Bell

  ‘Right then, Abi, let’s get this show on the road,’ he says.

  Giles gives me a double thumbs up in support as he heads back up the stairs and I nervously pull off my Uggs.

  ‘Jump up onto the trampoline and I’ll snap a few test shots to make sure I’m happy with the light.’

  He makes it sound so easy. I can feel beads of sweat start to spread over my forehead and my heart is beating ten to the dozen.

  ‘Are you sure this is safe?’ I ask as I rest my hands on the edge. ‘I mean, doesn’t it usually have netting round it to keep you in?’

  ‘Yeah, but we can’t use that as it would mess up the green screen and it would be in front of my lens. But you’ll be fine, we’ve had no problems all day and there are crash mats if you get too carried away with the bouncing.’

  No chance of that.

  My legs are wobbling like jelly, but the fear that I’ll be ridiculed by my work colleagues for not being able to bounce on a trampoline is currently greater than my fear of heights.

  I climb up with as much grace as a beached whale and find myself on all fours, too scared to stand up.

  ‘Right then, get up so I can test the light.’

  I turn round and face Seb and see that Rick is standing right beside him. He gives me a broad grin and I know from experience that there’s no way I can get out of this. If I told him the truth he’d take it upon himself to try and cure me of my fear of heights. He’d probably try to push me off the roof of our building for a base jump, or abseiling, or something equally ridiculous and adrenaline fuelled.

  I slowly rise to my feet, telling myself that if little kids can bounce on a trampoline, then so can I.

  ‘Perfect, that’s great. Looks like we’re good to go,’ shouts Seb from over near his laptop. ‘Any time you’re ready.’

  I catch sight of Rick who’s staring at me intently and, worried that he’ll guess my secret, I start to bounce. Amazingly I feel myself starting to lift off the floor of the trampoline. Maybe only an inch or two, but I’m actually doing it.

  My leg muscles are stiff from my recent inactivity and my muffin top is wobbling over the top of my jeans.

  ‘Try and put your arms up like you’re punching the air,’ says Rick, demonstrating on the ground and causing me to stumble. ‘You look like you’re bracing yourself for a fall.’

  That’s exactly what I’m doing.

  I give it another couple of bounces, but the more I try to coordinate my arms and legs, the more my face contorts in a way that must make me look like I’m constipated.

  ‘Try and think of something that makes you happy,’ suggests Seb.

  I immediately think of Joseph tucked up in my bed the week before he dumped me. He’d pulled naked me into a snuggly cuddle, smoothed down my long, straggly bed hair and then traced patterns with his fingers down my arms. I don’t think I’d ever been as content and happy as I was then. Which is why it was so baffling when, a week later, he broke up with me, causing my heart to shatter into smithereens.

  The smile drops off my face and I can feel the tears prickling behind my eyes. I can’t cry at work, and I especially can’t cry in front of my boss when my every move is being caught on camera.

  ‘That’s it, that’s great bouncing,’ says Rick.

  I dread to think what I must look like. Thank heavens I put on my baggy cowl-neck jumper. I’d put it on this morning to hide the extra pounds that had found their way onto my waistline during my hibernation, but hopefully now it’s hiding my chest too. Without prior warning of the trampoline I hadn’t secured my boobs into an appropriate sports bra, and they’re bounding about all over the place.

  ‘OK,’ shouts Seb. ‘You can stop now.’

  I’m so relieved that my ordeal is over and that I’ve survived that I don’t give any thought to stopping. I simply straighten my legs as I come down from a bounce and I can feel myself tumble forward with the impact. I’m hurtling perilously close to the edge and I’m sure I’m about to fall flat on my face.

  ‘Whoa, there,’ says Rick, jumping up onto the crash mat and holding his hands out to stop me.

  He manages to break my fall and stops me before I land on top of him. God, that could have been embarrassing. I could have found myself lying on top of my boss, instead of him having stopped me by grabbing hold of my boobs.

  Oh, crap, my boss’s hands are on my boobs.

  His hands are well and truly cupping my 36DDs and they’re the only thing stopping me from falling on him. I try and push myself backwards, but I’m so off-kilter that all I’m doing is pushing closer to him and giving him more of a feel.

  Why isn’t he moving his hands?

  It’s like he hasn’t noticed where they are. I know he’s probably relieved that I didn’t end up on top of him, squashing him with the extra weight I’m carrying, but surely he can sense what he’s holding? He’s gripping me so tight that I feel like I’m wearing one of Madonna’s conical bras.

  ‘You all right?’ he says. ‘That was quite a stop.’

  ‘Um, yeah, I’d be better if perhaps . . .’

  Perhaps you took your mitts of my tits, I want to scream, but I can’t quite bring myself to say that to my boss.

  ‘. . . If perhaps, I was, you know . . . a bit more upright.’

  Rick looks down at his hands and his eyes almost pop out in horror.

  ‘Argh!’ He pushes me backwards with such force that I land on my bum with a bit of a bounce.

  His hands are still outstretched in a cupping motion and he seems to be as scarred as I am by what’s just happened.

  ‘Thanks for stopping me,’ I mutter, mortified. I slide off the trampoline, desperate to get onto solid ground and away from Rick.

  ‘No problem,’ he stutters, before finally putting his hands down and scurrying back upstairs, too embarrassed to make eye contact.

  Once my feet have adjusted to being back on terra firma, I walk over to join Seb, who’s studying his laptop, having missed the whole boob-grabbing incident.

  ‘They’re not too bad,’ he says.

  I squint at the thumbnails and recoil in horror.

  ‘But they’re not good,’ I reply.

  I can’t believe that’s me on the screen. I barely recognise myself. I’ve got huge black circles under my eyes, and my dark-brown, elbow-length hair looks matted and messy as it flies out behind me. I look like I’ve been electrocuted. The black jumper and jeans that I wore in order to cover up the post-break-up pounds are more frumpy than flattering. All in all, I look like I’ve pulled an all-nighter at a Goth convention.

  ‘It’s not as good as last year’s photo,’ says Seb diplomatically. ‘But it’s not the worst I’ve seen today.’

  I look back at the thumbnails, hoping to see at least one good one, but they all look like I’m auditioning for a part in a zombie movie.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do something equally as fun next year,’ says Seb.

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ I say sarcastically.

  He smiles at me and goes over to talk to Pat, the office manager, his next victim. Despite the fact that she turned sixty last year, she shows no sign of fear like I did. Instead she slips off her glasses and shoes, and willingly climbs on board. I watch her do her test bounces as she soars delicately in the air.

  I’m so going to win the worst photo this year.

  I slip my boots back on and walk slowly back to my desk. I’m not in the mood to do any more work, so instead I turn off my computer. It is Friday, and almost knocking off time.

  ‘How did your photos go?’ asks Fran, who sits in the cubicle opposite me, as I walk past her desk. I was hoping to sneak off without attracting any attention.

  ‘They could have gone better. How were yours?’

  ‘They were OK,’ she says, standing up and picking up her coffee cup. ‘All the better for not being on that bloody trampoline.’

  ‘How did you get out of that?’

  Was that even an option?
>
  ‘Well,’ she says, leaning into me, ‘I might have told Seb a little white lie.’

  ‘Right . . .’ I say, hoping I can learn how to get out of next year’s stunt.

  ‘I told him that I was a couple of months pregnant.’

  ‘You what?’ I say, thinking I must have misheard her.

  ‘I told Seb that I was expecting and that it wasn’t advisable for me to bounce.’ She shrugs her shoulders as if it’s perfectly normal to make up a fake baby at work.

  ‘And don’t you think he might tell Rick?’

  ‘I told him not to as I’m waiting for the three-month mark before I announce it, and of course I’ll tell him next time that it was a false positive on the test or that I miscarried.’

  I gasp, as if she’s jinxing her future babies.

  ‘All I knew, when I saw Linz bounding around like an over-excited monkey, was that I wasn’t going to go down that route. Do you know she wasn’t even wearing a bra and she still went on it?’ She shakes her head in disgust.

  ‘How slutty,’ I say, thinking that it’s slightly ironic that Fran finds the lack of bra the disturbing part of this conversation. ‘Right, I’ve got to run.’

  ‘OK, have a nice weekend!’

  ‘You too,’ I say, waving as I practically run out the back fire escape. I don’t want to see that trampoline ever again.

  The fresh air hits me and my thoughts turn to the photos I’ve just seen. I knew the last few weeks had been hard on me mentally, but I didn’t realise they’d left such a physical mark too.

  I walk home briskly, cursing Joseph and his ‘I don’t think we want the same things from life’ speech that ended our lovely romance. Before that I was a normal, sane human being. One that could get up in the morning without being reduced to tears at the sight of a box of cornflakes that bore his fingerprints.

  It’s been four weeks and I don’t seem to be getting over him at all. In fact, absence truly has made the heart grow fonder and I feel like I miss him more and more each day.

  I hurry back home, desperate to hide away and mope. I practically run up the steps to the entrance of my block of flats. Usually I’d take a moment to look out at the view of the tree-lined common and the seafront beyond it, but not today. Instead I want to reach the sanctuary of my flat as quickly as I can.

  I unlock my front door, and I’m immediately hit by the smell. It’s a musty combination of stale wine and Chinese food.

  I walk into the living room and it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. It looks like a teenager’s been left at home alone for the first time. My open-plan living room is littered with takeaway cartons, wine bottles and half-eaten bags of crisps. It’s hard to tell where the kitchen area ends and the lounge starts.

  I hover in the doorway, wrinkling my nose. How have I been living like this?

  It’s not just that my flat’s in a mess, I think, as I catch sight of my reflection in the full-length mirror in the hallway – I am too. I turn to study myself.

  The bright lights of the photo shoot might have amplified the puffy, panda eyes, but they’re definitely visible. I rake my hand through the knotty hair that’s hanging limply down my back. I puff my cheeks out and prod the bags under my eyes, but it doesn’t change anything. All I see when I look in the mirror is the woman that Joseph dumped.

  I’ve desperately wanted him to see the error of his ways and come back to me, but what on earth would he think of me and the flat if he did?

  I suddenly know what I’ve got to do.

  I walk over to the kitchen and grab a pair of scissors out of the knife rack. I scoop my hair up and hold it as if I’m putting it into a loose ponytail.

  Positioning myself back in front of the mirror, I take a deep breath before taking the scissors up to my hair and snipping. I wince slightly as the blades squeak as they cut through, but it only lasts a second and then I’m left clutching nine inches of my hair.

  It’s as if I’ve suddenly realised that I’ve got to take control of this post-break-up existence. I’ve already got one pretty major obstacle in the way of Joseph and me getting back together – him – so I don’t need anything else.

  I look back down at the hair in my hand and laugh. It’s probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done, but somehow it seems like the sanest decision I’ve made in weeks.

  Chapter Two

  Four weeks exactly since I was dumped and twenty-two hours since I hacked off my hair.

  Waking up to my new hairdo this morning was a bit of a shock. I’ve had long hair my whole life, or at least I would have done if my sister Jill hadn’t got bored of her Dolls World Styling Head and chopped my hair instead. But aside from that unwanted pixie cut when I was six, my hair has always hung like a shiny mane far down my back and sometimes skimming my bum. So when I sleepily went to scrape it back, I wasn’t expecting that I’d have to hunt around for it.

  I can just about make a ponytail out of my new hair, which is marginally better than the scarecrow look I have when it’s down.

  It might have been symbolic – cutting away the dead ends of my hair as if cutting away the dead ends of my life – but I hadn’t really thought through the consequences for my appearance.

  Thank goodness it’s Saturday and I’ve got time to get it sorted.

  I manage to nab my hairdresser’s last available appointment, and luckily for me it’s a freezing March day, so I can legitimately tuck my scrappy bob under a beanie.

  ‘Abi!’ says Carly, my hairdresser, as she walks across the floor. ‘You’re not due another cut already, are you?’

  ‘No, but I, er, needed a bit of a change.’

  She puts a silky black robe over me and I follow her over to a comfy black chair.

  My last haircut was the weekend that Joseph broke up with me. I feel foolish thinking that I’d sat in this very chair telling Carly how amazing my boyfriend was, only for him to end things with me hours later.

  She pulls off my hat and gasps.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ she shrieks. She starts pulling clumps of my hair up and letting it fall back down.

  ‘I needed a change,’ I say again, feeling a bit like a broken record.

  ‘You did this to yourself?’ she asks in disbelief.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Whilst sober?’

  ‘Yep,’ I say, embarrassed.

  She looks at my reflection in the mirror as if searching my eyes for an answer.

  ‘You broke up with your boyfriend,’ she guesses, gasping again.

  I pull my lips into my mouth and bite down on them, trying to stop the tears from falling. I can already feel my eyes glistening.

  ‘Well, don’t worry. We’re going to have you looking hotter than ever. You know, bobs are bang on-trend,’ she smiles, and as I listen to her I start to feel the need to cry ebb away. ‘I think with a little bit taken off the front here to shape it, and maybe putting a few layers in here, it’ll look really good.

  ‘I’m just gutted that I wasn’t the one to do the initial snip. I’ve wanted to change your hair for years and you’ve never let me take more than an inch off, and the one time you want something drastic done, you ruin the fun for me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, smiling.

  ‘Well, let’s get you over to the sinks and then we can get started. I’m so excited. I think you’re going to look amazing. I don’t usually advocate self-mutilation, but I think in this case it’s going to turn out just fine.’

  After what seemed like the quickest hair wash ever, thanks to the seventy-five per cent reduction in my hair, Carly gets to work. She rakes up tiny bits of hair at a time and snips away what seems to be an awful lot considering she doesn’t have much to work with. My heart is racing quicker with every cut. It isn’t until she starts to blow dry it, and I begin to see it taking shape, that I start to relax.

  By the time my bob has been masterfully flicked around my face, in a way that I’ll never be able to replicate, no matter how hard I try, I barely reco
gnise the person in the mirror.

  OK, so I can still see it’s me, thanks to the saucer-like dark circles under my eyes, but I look different. I look all right. In fact, I look pretty damn good.

  I wonder if Joseph would like it?

  No, no, no, I think, shaking my head and invoking the wrath of Carly, who almost takes a chunk out at the front of my hair. I apologise before trying to banish thoughts of Joseph from my mind. I’m not thinking about him today.

  I’m so busy trying to rid myself of thoughts of my ex that I haven’t been paying attention to the finishing touches Carly is doing.

  ‘Ta-daa,’ she says theatrically. She picks up a round mirror and holds it behind my head so that I can see the back of my hair.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I say. She’s clearly run a product through my hair that’s given it a sheen and shine that makes it look as glossy as chocolate fondue.

  ‘It really suits you. See, you should have let me do this type of cut years ago.’

  I put my hand up to it, and recoil almost immediately, too frightened that I’m going to mess it up.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s me,’ I say in a whisper.

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ says Carly. ‘Now, I hope you’re going to go somewhere good tonight to show it off?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘Well, make sure you do,’ says Carly.

  She pulls my chair back and I slowly rise to my feet and follow her over to the till, paying and thanking her profusely as I leave.

  I shove my hat into my bag – there’s no way I’m going to put that on now, even if it means my ears are going to get a little chilly.

  I have a spring in my step as I walk down Southsea High Street to meet Sian, and I find myself grinning at strangers. My mouth muscles start to ache, unused to all the smiling, but I don’t care. For the first time in weeks, I feel happy. It’s like I’ve seen a glimpse of my old self.

  I spot Sian in the distance standing outside the department store where we planned to meet. As I get closer to her I start to feel nervous and begin to doubt my radical new hairdo. What if it’s too drastic? Sure, Carly said she liked it, but can you really trust a hairdresser that you once saw with half her hair cut in a pink bob and the other side completely shaved off?