Love Is a Thief

by Claire Garber

  ‘Daddy snores.’

  ‘Yes, he does, Henry. Another delightful facet of my marriage: sleepless snore-filled nights.’

  ‘Snore-filled rice pudding!’ he squealed.

  ‘No, that’s not as good. You’d peaked with love-stolen ice creams, and we can probably fit in one love-stolen ice cream before Mummy’s reflexology course.’

  ‘Kate …’ Jane said, stifling laughter. ‘Please don’t tell me you still can’t swallow tablets.’ She pointed to the unopened box of painkillers in my hand and they all turned to look and started giggling. They always do this. They laugh at me as if they are in some tablet-swallowing club, as if it’s ridiculous that I might find it difficult, the bastards. Well, it is difficult, and dangerous, and I cursed Peter for drawing attention to an abnormality I’ve spent years waiting for them to finally forget. I looked down at the tablets in my hand, filled with a strange sense of adolescent shame, only to realise why Jane had been reminded of my strange but completely understandable affliction. Peter had remembered to buy me soluble painkillers. Peter had remembered I couldn’t swallow.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men

  Wanted old Humpty together again.

  people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw LSD

  While we were no closer to understanding why the True Love readers sometimes missed out on things when they fell in love, Bob (Fat Camp’s life coach) thought it would be a good idea if we taught women how to make space in their weekly diaries in order to start achieving some of their goals. So we decided to organise a time-management workshop and host it in central London. When tickets for the event went on sale we didn’t think to put an upper limit on the number available. We were even considering holding the event at True Love. But over 3,000 tickets were sold in the first two hours so we ended up hiring the O2 Arena and asking Bob to do five different sessions. I had been listening to him speak at the first of these lectures (‘Supercharge Your Life and Your Productivity to Achieve Great Change and Ultimate Happiness—Take Back Your Love-Stolen Dreams. Do It—Do It Now!’) when I had a call from Federico.

  ‘Everything has gone tits up in the office, Kat-kins. Jenny Sullivan is refusing to write anything for the magazine. She’s telling everyone that LSD is bad news. She thinks it’s messing with our heads. She thinks it’s screwing with our vision of the world. She thinks, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, she thinks we should all stop doing it! Chad’s called an afternoon Early Morning Unfocused Focus Meeting. You need to get here, now!’

  the boardroom | true love

  ‘This has run its course, Chad. We have written this to death, Chad. I am not putting my name to another feature that says love is shit, Chad.’ Jenny was sitting at the point of the glass heart, Chad on his special chair; the rest of the office were squished wherever they could comfortably fit. They’d been stuck in the boardroom for hours, Chad and Jenny at loggerheads … whatever that means.

  ‘Jenny, you are brilliant. I know it. You know it. Everyone in this twatting room knows it. But you don’t know shit about the market. OK. It’s not finished. This hasn’t even twatting begun. We’ve never had so many readers write in. The post office has had to hire another twatting van to get the post to us. The marketing department is having to hot desk in the stairwell because I need their twatting office to store all the post. We’ve got the BB-twatting-C calling us every five minutes to find out what our next edition’s going to be about.’

  ‘Chad, the BBC calls everyone, Chad. They’ve had me on speed dial since 1994.’

  There was a murmur across the room and Jenny went pale as she realised she may have given away a hint of her true age. Mark from Marketing was desperately trying to do the maths in his head. The murmurs and discontent continued.

  Across the other side of the room I noticed Federico furiously blinking as if sending me a message by Morse code. He gestured for me to get up and do something. My chair creaked loudly as I nervously stood up.

  ‘Jenny,’ I muttered into my hair, standing as if I were an enormous jacket on a tiny coat hanger. ‘Jenny, don’t you think it’s important that—’

  ‘Kate, I can’t hear you, Kate. Chad, I can’t hear her, Chad.’

  ‘Speak the twat up.’

  I cleared my throat and started again.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s important that we help women remember all the things they stopped doing when they fell in love; help them go out there and take back what love stole; help them have a bit more faith that they don’t have to compromise or put their dreams on hold because love shows up? We should be able to be who we want to be whether we are in love, or we are out of love, or—’

  ‘Kate, please stop talking, Kate,’ Jenny said, standing from a creak-free chair. ‘I agree with and promote the empowerment of women, Kate. I do. I think True Love should be at the forefront of this movement. I want every woman to reach her full potential, Kate. It’s my life goal. It is not something you invented the day you turned 30. But what I do object to, Kate, is you. It’s obvious that you are doing this because love hasn’t shown up for you. You are like a love repellent; a force field; a magnetic destabiliser to relationships and emotions; on some ridiculous crusade to make the rest of us miserable. But what you don’t realise, Kate, because you are consumed with your own loneliness, is that some of us are happy, Kate. Some of us have fallen in love. Some of us have not been rejected. Some of us have normal relationships that are positive and empowering and life-changing.’ Right on cue Jenny’s Ken Doll husband walked through the double doors into Reception. He was carrying a huge bunch of roses, looking as if he had just flown in from the pages of a Twilight novel but without the vamp teeth and overly pink lips. He waved at her through the glass wall. ‘I can speak for myself and my husband—’ she beamed at him and waved back ‘—when I say that I have resolutely not given up anything for love. My world is complete. I am happy. You are trying to undermine love to make yourself feel better. It is cheap. It is pathetic. It stinks of desperation and sometimes I think you would be more at home working on a reality TV show or one of those daytime talk shows where everyone swears at each other before throwing furniture. I can write you a reference if you like.’ She stood statuesque, glaring at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for my response. Chad was nervously looking the other way, gnawing through a red apple and repeatedly glancing at his watch. All the writers in the room were avoiding my gaze. I felt like the skin-peeling leper woman from BenHur. Everyone wishing I would go the f*** away, back to my leper cave, to flake and peel out of sight of the rest of the world. Federico mouthed across the room, ‘Don’t be a Human Fountain.’

  ‘You know what, Jenny,’ I said, looking out to Reception, where Jenny’s gorgeous husband sat waiting patiently for his wife, ‘I think you are probably right.’ There was a dramatic gasp across the boardroom. Chad swung round in his chair to face me. He clicked his fingers at his assistant, Loosie. ‘I think I am trying to make myself feel better. Maybe I am searching for meaning where there is none. Because I met my One True Love and it didn’t work out. I couldn’t find a way to make it work. I failed. And at the end of it I was left with nothing. I was bare-naked. Everything had been stripped away from me. So yes, I am a bit of a sad loser. I am a bit desperate. I am trying to make myself feel better. Because I have only ever been in love once. I have only ever looked into a man’s eyes once and known I want to create a child with him. I have only ever shared a home with one man. He was it. So my heart is broken, Jenny, broken to shit. And it doesn’t seem to want to put itself back together again. And there is no space in it for anyone other than him. There is no space in it at all. So all I have is this, you’re right. All I have is this idea, this list of other people’s dreams, this list of things that might bring other people happiness, to break up the mind-numbing, endless feeling of pain. Because when I think about not spending my life with him
, I can’t breathe. This helps me breathe, Jenny. This job, this idea, this is my life raft. It’s all that is keeping me afloat. Because I truly believe that if I had been more personally fulfilled, if I had been more connected to myself and my own personal ambitions, then the loss of him wouldn’t have felt so much like I was dying. So yes, Jenny, this is 100% about me and the end of my relationship. You got me, you sussed me out, you exposed me. Well done you.’

  The room was totally silent.

  Then Federico started a slow clap.

  Clap … Clap … Cl—

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Federico. There is no need to twatting clap.’ Chad chomped down on his red apple, spraying half of it across the heart-shaped table. ‘Loosie, my genius little assistant, did you get all that?’

  ‘Yes, Chad,’ Loosie said, furiously scribbling notes.

  ‘I love that girl.’ Chad pointed at Loosie. She beamed at him and I saw Federico clutch the Nespresso machine for support. ‘Fastest shorthand in the city of London. You can’t imagine some of the conversations that girl has captured for me with that scrawly mess of hers. She even won some twatting shorthand competition. They gave her vouchers for Harvey-twatting-Nics of all places. As if anyone shops at Harvey Nics. Even the pensioners that live round the corner from Harvey Nics get on the twatting bus and go to Selfridges. Right, people, you all have a job to do. Loosie, type up Kate’s little confessional, in first person, obviously. Let’s tell our readers why Kate really came up with the idea of Love-Stolen Dreams. Let’s reveal who Pirate Kate really is. And we need a photo of her looking really desperate—’

  ‘Well, there’s that one from the office party—’ Federico blurted out before clamping his own hand over his mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed across the room.

  ‘Perfect! This is going to be huge! The rest of you writers, you know the routine: I want two articles from each of you and I want them by tomorrow. Jenny, if you don’t want to write for this edition then don’t. We’ve got enough material without you. OK, that’s it, people. Get the twat out of this office and on with some twatting work!’ he said, marching out the room as the rest of the office turned like an intimidating flash mob to glare at me.

  ‘So, Kat-kins.’ Federico put his arm around me. ‘Pirate Kate. Wow! You have finally got the better of Jenny Sullivan, haven’t you, with your very own feature? A named writer for True Love magazine. Yeah!’ he said, shaking his fist in the air. ‘Even if technically someone else is actually writing the article on your behalf. And we will fabricate large portions of your personal history. And Photoshop your picture because you are a little bit too skinny for people to relate to right now, yes, you are. Skinny people are supposed to be happy, and you are very much the exception to that rule. You make misery your full-time occupation. And if we are stood in Honesty Corner, which we are,’ he said, pointing to the floor, ‘your preoccupation is to the detriment of your work and your dress sense. Ah—’ he hugged me ‘—good talks, Kat-kins, good talks.’ He patted me on the head, yelling as he left the boardroom. ‘Will someone please find that f-ing awful photo of Kate at the office party, where she looks like she’s been in a prisoner-of-war camp? Yes, darling, yes, in that dress. In fact that dress probably needs a feature writing about it—it could tell us firsthand about the First World War. It’s a historical oracle made of cotton and polyester. The history of our very society is woven into that man-made fabric. It’s a relic. An actual relic. In fact, can someone call the National History Museum as well? Can we get them in to take a look at it?’

  nature vs nurture and the human need to mate

  liberty’s | london

  In order to avoid True Love’s tabloid-esque recreation of my own shambolic love life I decided to work in Liberty’s, the luxury department store in London and my favourite place to hide out. Liberty’s was designed in 1875 and is supposed to make you feel as if you’re in your own home. It has large wooden staircases, lots of little rooms, some of them with fireplaces or armchairs; every space filled with something exquisite, luxury, painfully expensive. On the lower ground floor they have a Champagne Bar and a heavenly place called Menswear, and Menswear is filled with beautiful clothes for men, beautiful shoes for men, beautiful accessories for men and lots and lots of beautiful men. I often go to the Champagne Bar, laptop in hand, to work while watching handsome male models as they hold jumpers up against their muscular torsos, or slip on a new jacket, or bend over to try on a new shoe.

  Today however I wanted to spend my time researching the idea of Nature vs Nurture in relation to Love-Stolen Dreams. Because I kept meeting women who lost focus as their lives progressed, this loss of focus more often than not going hand in hand with being in a relationship. I certainly gave up stuff, mostly myself, and all my boundaries; in fact it was as if I held an impromptu garage sale giving away every important part of myself in exchange for a cuddle, or a kiss or a little bit of French love. And Mary gave up learning about something by choice, as did Beatrice, and Delaware missed out, and Leah, and Jane, and thousands of our readers.

  So if love, in all its various forms, wasn’t necessarily chicken soup for the soul perhaps there was a biological need for humans to pair off? Perhaps it was this instinct that was overriding our other instinct, that of self-preservation and self-care? Was it nature that was affecting so many of the women who had written in to True Love? And if so was there a sure-fire way we could nurture everyone back to happiness?

  I decided to start my research with Google and the Google results were overwhelming, in that they overwhelmingly suggested not only that we feel better when we engage in fulfilling relationships but also in fulfilling activities.

  Result 1 of 4,235,672—The profound human need for connectedness

  … Intimate relationships play a central role in the overall human experience … Humans have a universal want to belong and to love, which is satisfied within an intimate relationship …

  Result 2 of 4,235,672—Wikipedia-Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

  … esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these needs are not met the body gives no physical indication but the individual feels anxious and tense …

  Result 3 of 4,235,672—Human Needs

  … all humans have a need to be respected and to have self-esteem and self-respect. They need to engage in activities that give them a sense of contribution. They need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance. They need to love and be loved. In the absence of these elements, many people suffer from loneliness, social anxiety and clinical depression.

  Result 4 of 4,235,672—’What a man can be, he must be.’

  What a man can be, he must be, if he wishes to feel truly satisfied. This is a broad definition of the need for self-actualisation and relates to a person’s full potential and realising that potential, becoming everything one is capable of being otherwise one will never truly feel satisfied.

  ‘Hi!’ A voice from behind drew me back out of my laptop screen like a wormhole.

  Peter Parker appeared from nowhere and sat himself down on the stool next to mine. He looked at me with a strange level of amusement.

  ‘OK, so I can’t dance. I admit it. I have an allergic reaction to coordinated dance steps. In future I will operate within the realms of truth.’

  ‘Within the realms of possibility, Kate, and it’s possible you could be a wonderful dancer if you put your mind to it and stopped fibbing about your appearances at the Dance Olympics—which doesn’t actually exist.’ He leant across me and peered at the screen of my laptop. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ he said, reading down the list of my Google results.

  ‘I am. I’m researching,’ I said, trying to ignore the fact that his face was mere millimetres from my own and he smelt like a man-sized version of a giant chocolate bar. I found myself leaning in to sniff his neck, which he noticed, and flinched away as if I’d stung him. ‘I’m, er, I’m reading about nature versus nurture and the human need for love,’ I said, closing my laptop, prayin
g to God he hadn’t seen the other tab I’d had open—the one where I’d been reading about his horoscope and the sexual compatibility of our signs.

  ‘OK, Professor Winters, tell me about the human need for love, which I am deeply suspicious of.’

  ‘You’re suspicious of humans or you’re suspicious of love?’

  ‘I am suspicious of a human need for anything other than water and basic nutrients.’

  ‘You’re suspicious of all human needs? Across the board?’

  ‘Need is a social construct, Kate. It’s a weakness, and as such I’m suspicious of it.’

  ‘What about the human need to urinate? Does that make you suspicious? And do you think we could have said suspicious more times in the last few minutes?’

  ‘You make me suspicious, Kitkat. And yes, we probably could. Suspicious, suspicious, suspicious, suspicious, suspicious. So tell me about your suspicious work.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been wondering why so many of us get distracted from doing the things we love. Why we opt for the love of others over the love of ourselves. I wanted to know if there was a biological reason for us disconnecting from our dreams.’ Peter was frowning. ‘I have an analogy.’

  ‘Now I’m suspicious of your analogy.’

  ‘Imagine we are all given a compass at birth—’ Peter nodded ‘—and we plot a route to our chosen destination. But sooner or later we meet someone who wants to come aboard our boat—’

  ‘Is the boat we’re referring to the great vessel we call The Love Boat?’

  ‘Peter, you can call it what you like—the principles here are always the same. So imagine you meet someone who you quite like—’ we both seemed to go a little pink ‘—and that person, who you like, wants to come aboard your ship, so you make one tiny change, less than 0.005 of a degree, so they can come with you on your journey.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t make a 0.005 degree alteration for someone they liked?’