by Lucy Vine
I shrug his hand off and take a step back. That’s more than I can listen to right now.
‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ I bark. ‘I don’t need to hear any of it. I’ve just had this shit from Sophie, and you think you need to inform me I’m a terrible person too? OK, well I get it, thank you so very much for letting me know. You want me to tell people how I really feel? I feel like you should fuck off, Thomas, and stop trying to help me. I get enough of that from everyone else.’
I start walking again. Big, angry strides, but he’s with me, matching each step.
‘Fine, I won’t help you,’ he says quietly.
‘Great. Please don’t.’
‘No problem. No more help from me. Next time you’re walking into the road without looking I’ll just let you get hit by a car and die, shall I?’
I turn around to snap at him again, and he pulls me off the road and out of the path of a Peugeot, beeping furiously as it speeds past. I breathe hard, watching it go, and then turn to look at Thomas. We stand there staring at each other for a few seconds and I know I should say thank you and that I’m sorry and that I know he’s just trying to look out for me.
But I can’t.
My mouth opens and shuts and I turn and walk away. He doesn’t follow me.
I go to the very far end carriage of the train and hide from Thomas in a corner seat. If he tries to look for me, he doesn’t find me, and I sit in silence, trying not to hate everyone, trying not to punch the seats. Trying not to cry.
I think about what Sophie said. And about what Thomas said.
I think about the dozen or so dates I’ve had recently. Several really terrible but mostly pretty much fine. A couple of them were even actually quite nice. Why didn’t I give any of them another chance? Why did I immediately give all those perfectly decent men the brush off?
I think about my great date with Nathan that ended so badly. I think about that text I got from him that said,
I don’t think we’re really compatible.
And then I think about the second text he sent me fifteen minutes later, that read,
Fuck, I’m so sorry I sent that. I’m so sorry I behaved like that at the end.
And then the text after that, explaining how he lashed out because he thought I was rejecting him. That he’d had his heart badly broken not so long ago, and that Tinder had been a rough ride of emotions. And that he was so sorry he reacted like a spoilt brat just because he thought I wasn’t interested. He said that he really wanted to see me again.
I think about how genuine and heartfelt the message seemed, and how much I understood his childish reaction to the whole situation. I’ve been there, and I totally get it.
And I wonder why I didn’t even reply.
And then I think about Tim, and how I treated him at the end.
11
11.02 p.m. Friday, 29 March
Location: A tiny – but very overgrown – public garden near my old house, with a small pond. It’s closed for the night when I turn up, but it’s only got a little gate, so I climb over, feeling like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill (whoopsidaisies). This is where Mum and I used to meet up for lunch when she was nearby – she loved it – and I needed to feel close to her for a few minutes tonight.
My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer around mid-April – on my birthday actually – and she died just after Christmas. So she kind of ruined all my favourite annual celebrations. But I guess that’s not her fault. She tried really hard to hold on, and she said sorry about the whole thing a lot.
It’s always seemed weird to me when people talk about battling cancer. I heard that so much over those next few months – Your mum is a fighter, Ellie. She’s not going to let this beat her, Ellie – but there was nothing Mum could really do. She had the operation and the chemo, and the cancer spread to her bones anyway. There was nothing else to be done. She didn’t have any other weapons. It didn’t matter how hard she wanted to ‘fight’ the ‘battle’, because cancer didn’t give her any options.
But I suppose we just say things, don’t we? We say anything that might make us feel like we have some kind of control over our own lives. It’s a way to pretend like you have a tiny bit of say in whether you get to live or die, isn’t it? When the truth is, with something like cancer, you’re actually just a helpless random victim being torn apart from the inside. It takes everything away from you, your independence, your spirit and, often, your life. And it doesn’t care what that means. So I understand why we talk about fighting. But sitting on the sidelines, I couldn’t even pretend I was doing that much. I just had to hold my mum’s hand, tell her I loved her a lot, and watch it happen.
Tim was the only one who seemed to understand how I felt. He was the only person who seemed to get all of that helplessness that comes with a loved one being ill. His dad died when he was just a teenager – cancer a-fucking-gain – so he’d seen the same pain passing across the face of those people you always thought were invincible.
We’d been together a few years by that point, after meeting at a Christmas party when I was twenty-four. At the time, I was temping at an ad agency for eleven pounds an hour (nice, right?), answering phones and trying to make it as an artist (eyeroll) in my spare time. He was a colleague’s brother, who’d crashed our festive work do at the local Green Man pub. It was a familial connection I didn’t discover until after I’d drunkenly explained to him in which order my colleagues were the biggest cunts. His brother was the seventh biggest cunt, out of a possible thirty-two.
He agreed.
Tim thought I was so funny. The funniest person he’d ever met, he kept saying that night – and most nights after – and I deeply appreciated that he didn’t say funniest ‘girl’. We talked about Antiques Roadshow, and what nerds we were at school. I told him about being jealous of how badly behaved my rock star sister was – and that time the headmaster still talks about, when she held a student strike in the science block during third period. Tim told me more stories about his brother’s cuntery and we agreed that maybe he should be upgraded to number six on the list. We kissed that night, and he asked to see me again, which I thought was dead romantic considering he’d seen me get off with two other guys as well during the course of the evening (What? I was drunk and it was Christmas, get off my case, GRANDMA GLADYS).
For our first date, a few days later, we went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park and spent eight hundred pounds (approx.) on rides and sweets. After one particularly upside-down-y ride, I had to sit down, dry-heaving for a few minutes, while my stomach settled. He sat with me on the muddy, wet grass, rubbing my back and feeding me sips from his tiny, four-pound bottle of Evian until I felt better. I remember standing back up, looking up at him, and wondering if it was the nausea making me feel dizzy, or just how totally beautiful I thought he was. We went back to his house that night, and I didn’t ever really leave. We moved in together officially after six months and I thought that was that. Of course, everyone loved him. Mum and Dad would nudge each other when we visited, and talked about saving for the wedding. Sophie loved how kind he was, and told me he looked like a young Ed Miliband. He’s her secret crush, so it was a compliment. And even Jen couldn’t find too much to criticise about him. Except when she said he looked like Ed Miliband and it wasn’t a compliment and she didn’t say a younger version.
And so we started saving for our own place, our own mortgage. It was a project Tim was much better at than me. He was working as a marketing consultant and I was still temping and struggling to be an artist. But he got it, and always encouraged me to keep going with the art. He told me his boring job made it all the more important that I should ‘follow my dream’ (he was really cheesy, but it was cute). He said one of us had to do something cool with our careers. He bought me paint and canvas when I couldn’t even afford my half of the rent. He was great. Eventually, though, I got my job as illustrator at The Hales, and with a regular income, we finally somehow managed to get a deposit together. We spent mo
nths looking for the right place to buy – the place that would be our home, where we could get a dog and talk about hosting BBQs for our neighbours and then avoid eye contact with them whenever we actually saw them. It was so exciting and brilliant. We settled on this lovely flat in a Victorian terrace in south London – zone five – which ticked all our boxes. It was the dream. It was in a long chain, but we were willing to wait for it.
We argued a lot, but it was fun, silly stuff like who was going to do the washing up, or how much of my mess was too much mess. And over his habit of leaving Post-it notes everywhere with to-do lists on them. I would hide them from him and leave him a ransom Post-it note with clues, which sounds cute but it always ended up with him screaming that my ‘clues’ were impossible. And then he would leave me a Post-it note on my pillow saying sorry, and we would have angry sex, and then I’d remember I hid his Post-it notes in the bed and they were now soiled. OK, that only happened once. But yeah.
It was stupid and complicated and lovely, and it really worked. He accepted me for who I am and made me feel like who I am was OK.
And when my brilliant mum got diagnosed with cancer out of nowhere after some routine tests, he was so kind and patient with me. He didn’t say anything when I cried all night, and he didn’t say anything when I didn’t cry at all. He made me eat things that weren’t just Mars Bars, but also bought me Mars Bars whenever I needed them. He stayed up with me when I couldn’t sleep and he slept beside me in the daytime when I passed out with exhaustion. He took care of the house purchase, and didn’t mind when I was too distracted to celebrate with him when it eventually went through. He took time off work to come with us for chemo appointments, and he understood when I told him to leave, so I could help my mum go to the loo. He looked after me when I couldn’t look after myself.
I started cheating on him about three months after the diagnosis. I think he knew. But he didn’t say anything. He just got needier and more intense. Which made me pull away even more.
I can’t justify it. I don’t know what made me do it. I just wanted to get away and have fun and not be around him. He reminded me too much of what was happening in my life, and I didn’t want that. I wanted men who didn’t look at me with sadness or pity. I needed to be around people who just wanted to fuck me, not someone who kept suggesting I have another Berocca to counteract the Mars Bar diet. I wanted the one night stands and the uncomplicated tongues in my ear. I hated myself for it, Sophie hated me for it, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t know how to stop and I didn’t listen to her when she told me I was destroying my relationship, because I didn’t want to stop. And the more I did it, the more I knew I’d ruined things with Tim anyway, so why should I stop? And then my mum died the day after Boxing Day and everything in me went numb.
Things came to a brutal head at her funeral. It was a freezing cold day in early January, the church was ugly, and the priest kept saying that my mum was nice.
‘She was a very nice woman,’ he said again and again, making eye contact with me from the pulpit.
Nice. Nice.
He had no idea if she was a nice woman. He never met her. I couldn’t understand why we were having her funeral there – Mum wasn’t religious, she said it was ‘laughable nonsense’, ranting about how ridiculous the whole concept was, even as she put on a coat for her weekly visit to Psychic Sharon.
Nice. Nice.
Surely funerals must be so boring for priests? Saying the same things over and over, about people you don’t know, and pretending you feel so sad. Your neck must get permanent damage doing so much sympathy head tilt. So wouldn’t you at least make it more interesting by coming up with jazzier adjectives for these dead people you didn’t know? Something better than ‘nice’? What about ‘genial’, or ‘nifty’? I think my mum was pretty nifty.
Nice. Nice. Nice.
I remember wondering, as we sat there in the cold, ugly church, listening to this stranger talk about my mum, if I could pull up thesaurus.com on my phone. But then Tim gave my hand a squeeze and I decided to focus all my fury on him instead. God, I prayed, let me escape this man that I hate so much for no reason.
And an hour later, back at my dad’s house for the wake with sandwiches and French Fancies, I told Tim it was over.
‘What?’ He looked so shocked.
‘I know this isn’t the time,’ I said, the cold in my voice matching the cold of the church. ‘But I don’t think this is working any more, I think we should break up.’
I remember him shaking his head, like maybe he’d misheard, or like he wanted to shake my words out of his brain, out of his ear. I remember him putting down the two drinks he’d just been to fetch – one was meant to be for me – and I remember thinking it’s so weird that people drink alcohol at funerals. I always think of getting drunk as a celebration. Although as Psychic Sharon and Aunt Susie kept telling me that day, spilling prosecco all the while – ‘Today is a celebration of your mum’s life.’
Personally, I couldn’t really see how a dank church and cucumber sandwiches – that Jen pretended she made even though they were still in their M&S tray – was in any way a celebration of my mum. Or even representative of anything she was or anything she loved. If that day was really about my mum, we would have hosted the whole thing at a Britney Spears’ concert. She loved Britney so much. Right from day one. Right from ‘Baby One More Time’ in ’98. She talked about getting a white pet snake for a whole year in 2001, and in 2007 she set up a ‘Save Britney’ fund. Aunt Susie and her even went to see Britney in Vegas just before Mum got sick. She didn’t stop talking about it for months afterwards, and they wore their Britney Bitch T-shirts everywhere they went – even to her work as office manager at a local playgroup. They didn’t like the T-shirt – they made her put a jumper on over it.
She even wore it to chemo later on.
My nice mum.
‘You’re not serious?’ Tim had said, his voice getting louder. A couple of people from Mum’s salsa class had looked over at that point, hoping for drama, sandwiches hovering inches from their faces.
‘Maybe we should go out here,’ I’d said, pulling him into Dad’s tiny hallway, and away from Psychic Sharon, who may not have a sixth sense for much, but she definitely does for arguments. But too late, she was already charging over, waving a cucumber sandwich in one hand, and ‘yoohoo-ing’ the pair of us.
‘What’s going on?’ she stage-whispered, conspiratorially, as she squeezed into the small corridor alongside us.
I said nothing and Tim looked at me, a wounded, confused expression on his face that made me hate him all the more.
‘Well?’ said Psychic Sharon, aggressively, refusing to take silence for an answer.
He cleared his throat. ‘I think Ellie’s dumping me.’
Psychic Sharon looked askance at me.
‘You’re not serious?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Tim exclaimed, bolstered by the unexpected support.
‘I . . . I need the loo,’ I said, feeling intensely claustrophobic, backing into the hallway toilet behind me and hooking the catch lock quickly before they could crowd in there too.
‘Ellie, don’t be ridiculous, come out,’ said Tim, appearing at the door crack.
Psychic Sharon remained out there and I listened to the muffled arrival of yet more nosy mourners, wanting the inside track on the gossip. Tim’s agitated voice carried through the door as he replied to the curious group forming outside the loo.
‘No, she hasn’t told me why.’ ‘No, nothing happened.’ ‘Yes, now she’s hiding in there.’
‘I’m not hiding,’ I called out loudly, from my hiding place. ‘I need a wee. Could everyone go away, please?’
Then I heard Jen’s voice, butting in. ‘She’s what? Oh my God, she’s such an embarrassment. Ellie, why are you being such a loser? Haha, “loo-ser”? Get it, everyone? Because she won’t come out of the loo?’ She laughed at her own joke again and then turned back to the door. ‘Are you doing a poo in there,
Ellie? Because you remember the flush doesn’t work properly in that one? You’ll have to pump the flush. And the bog brush is under the sink if you need it, do not leave a mess like Dad does. Why won’t you come out? Are you jealous because everyone liked my eulogy better than yours?’
‘I didn’t do a eulogy,’ I tried to say, but Psychic Sharon started howling in pain. ‘Jenny just elbowed me! Why did you elbow me? It really hurts, why would you do that? I was just trying to get past.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, stop being such a whiny little bitch,’ said Jen, hotly. ‘It was an accident. And you know it’s my mum’s funeral today? Have some consideration for how I might be feeling. I’m allowed to elbow people today of all days. God, some people.’
It’s a small hallway and Jen has very sharp elbows, it could’ve been an accident but I imagine it was not. She’d been annoyed with Psychic Sharon for weeks, saying she should’ve warned us this was going to happen – that Mum was going to die – even when I pointed out Psychic Sharon is a charlatan. Jen still hasn’t forgiven her.
Psychic Sharon continued howling and someone else sniggered and asked her why she didn’t predict it happening.
That joke did not go down well.
On the other side of the door, Jen turned her attention back to me again.
‘Have you really broken up with Tim?’ she shouted. ‘He says you have but I can never tell whether he’s joking or not. He’s got one of those ridiculous clown faces that look like he’s always telling a joke. Just like Ed Milliband. Is it a joke, Ellie? It’s not very funny if it is. Because surely you know, even with Tim’s stupid face, he’s about as good a boyfriend as you’re ever going to get? Yes, obviously he’s a bit of a wet blanket—’
