Love Is a Thief

by Claire Garber

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, getting pinker by the second. ‘But the thing is, after several weeks, months, years, that 0.005 change has left you miles and miles and miles off course, if you can even remember where you wanted to go in the first place. And if you do remember, the about-turn needed to get back to where you were originally going is so enormous it could be detrimental to your relationship with your passenger, who is now well and truly a part of the ship’s crew. So I’ve been thinking, it might be helpful to set up some kind of drop-in centre or Love-Stolen Dreams Academy, somewhere where young women could check in with their compass, if you will, at various different stages in their lives. I was thinking ages 16, 18 and 25, to make sure they are really connected to who they are and what they love doing, make sure that’s being translated into their choices at college, university and professionally—a nationwide mentoring programme, I suppose. Because if the need to have someone on your boat is a biological one, stronger than the need for self-actualisation, but both are necessary for happiness, then a mentoring programme might help us stay connected to ourselves, which would keep us connected to happiness, which …’ I was petering out into more of a mutter. ‘Well, it’s a silly analogy, I know that, I just thought, well, there must be a better way …’

  ‘Kate, that’s an amazing idea, really. It’s amazing, all of you, I mean, all of it, it’s amazing. And traditionally girls do outperform boys until their late teens so if you started guiding them at 16 and continued to do so until their mid-twenties you’d be on hand during what appears to be the stage where they get knocked off track.’ I knew none of the above but nodded as if I’d reached the same conclusion. ‘You know, I think you should speak to someone at the Department for Education. They are really open to new initiatives for kids and young adults.’

  ‘The Department for Education?’ I guffawed. ‘Peter, I write for a trashy magazine and hang out in basement champagne bars under the guise of legitimate research. I’m not governmental material. Who would I even speak to? What would I say? How do you know they are open to new ideas? And is it possible for me to ask more questions in one sentence?’

  Peter handed me a glass of champagne before taking a deep breath and beginning,

  ‘I went to school with the current Education Secretary. He’s a very nice man. He’s not above hearing the views of other people. If you think you’ve identified a weakness in the current education or pastoral care system you should flag it up. It’s your duty as a British citizen. I can help you if you like. And, yes, you probably could have asked more questions in one sentence, and have done in the past, although any more and I do find it hard to remember and respond to them sequentially, but I would try, so feel free to bombard me. I’m a Gemini, so there’s enough of us to cope.’

  Great, he saw the horoscope tab. I gulped down my champagne hoping the bubbles would fill the gapping crater of embarrassment. Peter watched me, slowly sipping on his own.

  ‘Kate …’ he said, leaning in towards me. ‘If I’m honest, I really really didn’t know what to expect meeting you again after all this time.’ He looked deep into my eyes. ‘But you are just like you, just like you were, a grown-up version of Kate but with laughter lines.’

  ‘There are no lines!’

  ‘There are a few lines, Kate,’ he said, gently running his fingers along my forehead to the apparent laughter lines around my eyes. ‘I like them.’

  I realised I was holding my breath and found myself leaning ever so slightly in towards him. ‘Kate, I actually have to go,’ he said, jumping off his stool, reclaiming the exact distance between us that I’d encroached upon. Which made me wonder if Peter and I were fridge magnets, because every time I moved so much as an inch closer to him he was always repelled back the other way. ‘But if you’re free later on maybe we could meet for dinner, talk through your idea for a school’s programme?’ Or my idea for an electronic pulse that negates the opposing forces of magnets. ‘Or we could talk about our sun signs?’ Embarrassing. ‘Your choice, unless you have another important writing commitment in a different champagne bar?’

  ‘Actually I can’t tonight. Leah wants me to go and learn about my inner child with her. Apparently it’s whiny and incomplete and it’s trying to talk to me but I won’t listen.’

  I started to blush. I mean who has to say no to a dinner date with Peter Parker in order to communicate with one’s inner child? Me, that’s who. I was going to kill Leah. I had been on more of her Love-Stolen Dream than anyone else and she was still banging on about past life regression then guilt-tripping me into going on stupid courses with her.

  ‘So what about tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow I have True Love’s annual office cocktail party. Chad is going to be there making sure we all attend. I’d invite you but I can assure you it’s not fun. People get drunk, really drunk, and they fornicate. People would try touching you.’ I was concerned the drunk handsy lady would be me.

  ‘OK, so no dinner, no fornicating and no drunk-touching, but come and meet me Friday. I’m taking your Fat Campers for a run around Hyde Park. Come and join us. It will make you feel as good as a KitKat, Kitkat.’

  ‘Peter, please stop calling me that.’

  ‘So I’ll see you Friday?’ he said, kissing me on the cheek then dashing off before I could say no. I watched him disappear into the art deco wood-panelled elevator as another exquisitely attractive man arrived in Menswear. I immediately recognised him as Jenny Sullivan’s Ken Doll husband and he headed straight for my favourite section, Men’s Shoes.

  I’m not sure if it was the shame of the recent dance class, or because I probably should have been working in the office, but I ducked out of sight and hid. Ken Doll glided into Men’s Shoes and was already bending over trying on his first pair when I spotted her. She came up behind him and wrapped her slender arms around his muscular waist. He turned around, bent down and kissed her. It was one of those breathy, slow-motion kisses that make you stop and stare in the street, the man with one arm around the woman’s lower back, the other gently in her hair, the couple unaware of anyone else in the surrounding area. It had been a really long time since I had been kissed like that and my heart emitted a little cooing noise as it remembered the kiss of Gabriel. And it seemed as if Jenny Sullivan hadn’t been kissed like that either, because the woman Ken Doll was kissing was 100% not her.

  floating restaurant | pepperpots

  ‘faith is believing something you know ain’t true’ (mark twain)

  ‘Oh … my … mother … fluffing … God!’ We were at Pepperpots’ legendary and liquor-heavy Wednesday evening Happy Hour and I’d just told Federico about Jenny Sullivan’s husband trying on ‘new shoes’. All I could see were the whites of his bulbous eyes as he processed the information. He looked as if he were doing complicated algebra in his head. ‘This is huge, Kat-kins! This is mammoth! This is a walrus at the end of the dinosaur era when the only surviving creatures were small and birdlike. This sticks out, Katkins. It’s incongruous. That’s what incongruous means. It means a ruddy great dinosaur stood with a bunch of small birds. And what are the politics when you see someone cheat? What is the correct response if that person is not an official friend? Do you shut up? Is that what you do? Do you fess up? Do you up and leave?’ He got up from his chair walked around it, then sat back down. ‘You know, I’d heard rumours about him.’ Federico was shaking his head. ‘There had been mutterings like butterflies fluttering but I just thought it was jealous gossiping.’ He crossed his legs, then his arms, then placed his index finger on his chin.

  ‘Why would Jenny Sullivan’s husband even think to cheat?’ I asked, hoping Federico might better understand the inner workings of the penis-obsessed male mind. ‘What could be better than being with Jenny Sullivan? There is no greener grass; there is concrete, and roadworks and urban scrubland.’

  ‘Perfect isn’t sexy, Kat-kins,’ Federico said, shaking his head. ‘It’s annoying. No one wants their imperfections highlighted by the perfection of the
ir perfect plus one. Would you want to wake up every morning, turn and see some godlike perfect boyfriend lying next to you only to think, “I’m a bit average in comparison”? No, you would not.’ I would. ‘Perfection makes us behave badly. It reminds us of our imperfections so we act up like the flawed, imperfect beings they’ve reminded us that we are. She spends her entire life telling us how perfect she is so he has to become imperfect. It’s a universal law.’

  ‘Whatever happened to taking responsibility for ourselves? Treating others as we wished to be treated? Turning the other cheek?’ Actually I’m not sure that last one’s relevant, unless it’s a bottom cheek, which seems wholly inappropriate under the circumstances. ‘And what about poor Jenny? Does she even know?’

  ‘Kat-kins, if he’s been playing around for as long as I’ve heard rumours about him playing around then she has to know. I even heard a story that he’d shagged a Dior model on the London Eye, and that’s got glass walls, Kat-kins, glass frickin walls! Not to mention there’s no bathroom in those little capsules to clean up afterwards. Well, no wonder super-bugs are being passed all over the bloody place with viruses so strong no antibiotics can fight them off—you’ve got Jenny’s husband wandering all over the place shagging in London’s landmarks without a washroom or an anti-bacterial hand-wash in sight. He’s like a giant germ production centre. His germs are like the Coca-Cola of the bacteria world in that they are frickin everywhere transcending language, ethnicity and almost all border controls. MRSA, Kat-kins. It’s a killer, a silent deadly killer.’ He ordered another Dark & Stormy from the heavily subsidised cocktail menu while muttering to himself about dinosaurs and NHS budget cuts. And I didn’t believe for a second that Jenny Sullivan knew about her husband’s infidelity. When would burying your head in the sand be preferable to facing the truth? Jenny didn’t deserve to be cheated on, not now, not ever and certainly not because she was a little bit too perfect.

  ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ I said to Federico, who rolled his eyes then speed-dialled Chad from his ridiculously small phone. ‘We need to help her!’ I exclaimed, mostly to myself, and to a nearby bowl of peanuts, just as Grandma and Delaware joined us for what turned out to be a rambling lecture on the most inflammatory of all subject matters …

  ‘ … Because I’ve given this a lot of thought, Kate,’ Grandma continued, now on her third large glass of champagne, ‘and I think you were under the impression that you had to give up your ambition and personal goals in order for your relationship with Gabriel to work.’ Federico was violently nodding his head in agreement. ‘So you denied your vagina.’

  ‘Oooh,’ mouthed Federico, clutching his groin.

  ‘You became a half version of yourself, a half person, a herson. And what is half a woman, Kate?’

  ‘A half wo-man is merely a man, Grandma.’ I groaned.

  ‘Exactly, half a woman is merely a man. You lost the wo of your wo-man in your relationship with Gabriel. I bet his new girlfriend hasn’t given up her ambitions and personal goals in order to be with him.’ See, inflammatory.

  ‘I bet she hasn’t either,’ whispered Federico.

  ‘And that’s exactly what young Jenny’s doing as well,’ continued Grandma, rummaging through one of the twenty or so Liberty’s bags she’d arrived with. ‘She’s given up a part of herself to make her marriage work. She’s lost her wo.’

  ‘Jenny hasn’t lost her wo, Grandma,’ I snapped. ‘She embodies wo, she is wo, she’s the wo that every wo-man wants to be. She loves her job. She’s worked incredibly hard to get to where she is. She loves her husband and—’

  ‘And I bet she has worked incredibly hard to get her marriage to where it is,’ Grandma said, extracting herself from one of the Liberty’s bags. ‘Kate, darling, try and imagine the following scenario for me. Can you do that? Imagine you are a brilliant scientist—’ Federico immediately put his lensless specs on and gazed at the ceiling with his index finger on his lips ‘—and you had spent most of your life dedicated to a particular piece of research. Let’s say you are trying to find a cure for testicular cancer.’

  ‘Oh, you very much should, Kat-kins,’ pleaded Federico.

  ‘So you have been working on a cure for years and you have made brilliant progress. At times you’ve felt so close to discovering the cure that you’ve lived and breathed the work. Then one day someone walks in and says, “Your cure is never going to work. You’ve got it wrong. It won’t work.” What would you do?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t believe them, of course. I’m not going to take the word of one person after years of work. I would investigate.’

  ‘You’d investigate their claims.’

  ‘Absolutely, and then, assuming that I had proved they were wrong, I’d carry on working on a cure.’

  ‘But what if their claims looked to be true? You didn’t want them to be true but it looked like they could be; a seed of doubt had been planted. Would you just stop work?’

  ‘No! I would re-look at the problem. Re-look at all my research. I wouldn’t give up straight away; I couldn’t, after all that time, all that work, all my time. It would seem like everything I had done had been a total waste. My life’s work, a total waste.’

  ‘So apply that to marriage. Apply that response to the most significant and intimate relationship a person may experience in their lifetime. Imagine the work Jenny has put in, the commitment, the energy, the devotion. She believes in the cure. And you wonder why she doesn’t walk away just because there are mutterings about her husband. I’m not saying it’s the right decision. I’m just saying it seems obvious to me why she wouldn’t leave. She is still working towards a cure. She still 100% believes in that cure.’

  The air in my lungs reduced in volume by 60%. I could feel that nasty childlike lump in my throat, like a large piece of potato that doesn’t want to go down. My tear ducts were on Code Red. And not out of concern for Jenny. It didn’t matter how long I had watched the slow deterioration of my relationship with Gabriel, it just wouldn’t compute. It didn’t make sense to me that it wasn’t working, that he wasn’t who I thought he was, that we weren’t going to go the distance. It was like someone telling me 2+2 equalled 5 or that black was white. I did not want to accept the end. I did not want to move on. I did not want to let go, because I still believed.

  Could some of life’s most painful and protracted breakups be a result of us fighting, not for the real relationship, but because we don’t want to stop believing in the cure? Maybe the relationships we can’t get over are more about the grief of losing the precious dreams we’d created with that person, attached to that person, planned to share with that person than because of the person themselves? Maybe splitting up with Gabriel wasn’t painful because of the sadness of losing Gabriel the man. Maybe I felt consuming sadness for all the dreams I had attached to Gabriel. Maybe it was those dreams I had been fighting so hard to save, trying to resuscitate long after the relationship had so obviously died? I was crying my eyes out, thinking, ‘This can’t be the end. It can’t turn out like this. I want this so much,’ when really what I wanted was the life and dreams I had attached to him.

  ‘The thing is, darling—’ Grandma was now head first in yet another Liberty’s shopping bag ‘—by not admitting that things are as they are, by not seeing the reality of the current situation, Jenny is losing time. That is what love is stealing from her: time, her lifetime. Your grandfather would think it ridiculous the years I spent and continue to spend missing him.’

  ‘And, darl, I did the same thing,’ Delaware cooed. ‘You know that I didn’t work for years after my divorce. But I haven’t gained a single thing, either from ignoring the deterioration of the marriage when I was in it, or grieving for it for years and years after. And you can’t get that time back.’

  ‘Here it is!’ Grandma said, putting all but one of the Liberty’s bags to one side. ‘For a second I thought I’d forgotten to bring it. Here you go, darling,’ she said, passing me the bag. ‘Peter
asked me to give this to you.’

  ‘Peter did? What is it?’

  ‘As if I know, darling! I don’t go rummaging through other people’s things.’ She smiled at Delaware, who beamed back. Obviously they did go rummaging through other people’s things.

  ‘Open the card first,’ she said, expertly locating it in the bag.

  ‘OK …’ I said, looking at her suspiciously then slowly opening the card. They were all watching me on the edge of their seats. Actually Federico was practically on my lap. ‘It says, Happy Birthday. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not my birthday.’

  ‘No, there’s more, on the other side,’ Grandma said, turning the card over. She could at least pretend she hadn’t read it.

  Pirate Kate

  I’ve missed fifteen of your birthdays

  I can’t get them back, but I can buy you presents

  See you Friday, 6:30 a.m.

  Now you have no excuses.

  Peter x

  ‘What’s in the mother-fluffing bag?’ screamed Federico, waving his hands around his ears like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. I opened up the enormous Liberty’s bag to find a brand-new pair of running trainers inside, my size, obviously, and an assortment of Stella McCartney for Adidas running clothes.

  ‘Well, he’s only gone and bought her bloody Stella,’ Federico said, fanning his face with the card. Everyone around the table was beaming at me. And I was kind of beaming myself.

  an interval

  ‘What did I miss out on because love showed up? My Saturday mornings! Waking up in my own bed; making myself a cup of tea; watching Saturday Kitchen. Since meeting my boyfriend I wake up every Saturday in his flat. So that is what I gave up. Saturday solitude, laundry marathon, Saturday Kitchen and crumpet eating.’

  (Gemma, 28)

  ‘I would have accepted a promotion to work on feature films. I’m an art director but only work on adverts and TV shows because films would require me to work away from home. My relationship wouldn’t survive long distance so I never pursue jobs in film. I don’t regret my decision but certainly that is what my love affair stole.’