Love Is a Thief

by Claire Garber

  ‘That’s very true,’ I said, thinking about Gabriel, and Peter Parker.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, that is true,’ Federico said, mouth full of Quality Street. Somehow he had managed to get into the back seat of the car.

  ‘And then you wonder,’ she said, turning to face us, ‘how it was that you went so long without seeing it.’

  ‘I agree, Mary, I do, I do, they just reveal themselves from nowhere,’ Federico said, gently squeezing Mary’s shoulder. ‘Chad does it all the time, yes, he does, and mostly it makes me weep. Did Len reveal something to you, Mary?’

  ‘He revealed his whole self!’ she squeaked, turning round even further so that she could speak directly to Federico. I was pretty sure I could see what looked like a giant love bite on her neck. ‘He couldn’t stop himself!’ she said, wide-eyed, to a wide-eyed Federico. ‘He just went, sort of wild.’ She was gently touching the love bite on her neck. ‘At first he was angry. He said he couldn’t believe I would keep secrets from him. He said I had betrayed him by going behind his back—’

  ‘Which is sort of true, isn’t it?’ muttered Federico before I could smack him over the head.

  ‘Len said that he didn’t know me. I wasn’t the woman he’d married. But then, then his curiosity got the better of him, and he wanted to know how I’d fixed it. So I started to explain. And the more I talked, about oil and nuts and bolts and screwdrivers, the more, well, excited he became.’

  Oh, God. Mary was about to share a sex story with us. I started humming and stared at a fixed point ahead.

  ‘The next thing I know I am bent over the bonnet and Len, oh, my Len, he was magnificent.’ Federico was clapping his hands and jumping up and down in his seat. ‘We have never ever had sex like it!’

  I hummed louder but the nausea was taking hold. I couldn’t listen to stories of Len bending Mary over a Ford Capri in their twilight years.

  ‘We’ve done it everywhere,’ she continued. ‘Everywhere,’ she confirmed. ‘I feel like Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks’. And now I had visual images of Mary and Len watching 9½ Weeks.

  ‘He was just so masterful.’

  ‘He looks like he could be masterful,’ encouraged Federico.

  ‘And every time I mentioned part of a petrol engine—’

  ‘I can imagine, Mary, yes I can, yes I can, you magical queen of the mechanical world.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, Kate,’ Mary said, putting her hand on my forehead. ‘You don’t look at all well. You are very pale, my dear, and very clammy. Are you going to be sick, my love?’

  ‘Don’t do it near me! Don’t do it near ME!’ Federico screamed, covering his eyes and holding his nose.

  ‘I just need a bit of fresh air,’ I said, running from the garage and promptly throwing up in the neighbour’s hedgerow. It was over before it had started, like my dance career, but I stayed sitting in the cool night air, breathing it in, trying to calm myself down, because something had just malfunctioned in my brain. Mary’s sex story had made me think about something else, something that caused a shortness of breath followed by a panic-filled urge to get outside, launch myself into a hedgerow and vomit. It was the thought that Peter Parker had, that very same day, had a similar wanton sexual experience with some woman in his flat: passionate, sweat-producing, hair-ruffling sex. There was a woman somewhere in London who got to be that intimately close with my Peter Parker. And that thought, that made my stomach hurt in a painful, vomit-producing way. But what I didn’t understand is why I even cared.

  Had I accidentally got emotionally attached to Peter Parker since his reappearance in my life? Was he filling a void that I should be filling myself? Had he become some kind of great-smelling, man-sized-handsome-well-groomed comfort blanket? And if so I needed to work out how to break these invisible bonds. I needed to once again stand on my own two feet. I needed to search Google for ‘invisible bonds’ and find out exactly how it was I could break them, so I could get back to my pirate quest and stop chucking up in people’s begonias. Actually it wasn’t a begonia. It was just a hedge. I’ve just never used that word in a sentence before. Begonia.

  an interval

  a short message from my beloved bikini waxer

  I am Hindu OK. I am from India. Yes, London is my home. Yes, I love it here. Yes, I will never leave. But India is my home. My husband is Indian. I am Indian. My children are Indian. And when we marry. We marry! I will be with my husband until my dying day. He is going to be there whether I like it or not. And he is my best friend. But, Kate, do you think for a second that I am wanting sex with him after 18 years of marriage? I am not. He is. I am not.

  And I tell you this, Kate. I speak to a lot of women. My clients here, they are my friends. Like you are now my friend, they have also become my friends. We have a special bond. It’s true eh? How can we not have a special bond? And I ask my clients, I say to them, ‘Am I normal? Do you feel like this too?’ and they say the same. They want to have sex with their tennis coach, or their yoga teacher or the man who delivers their groceries, but they are not lying at home thinking about having sex with their husbands. Kate, we’ve been with them for more than a decade. I am telling you, as a woman, as your friend, for other women, go out there and enjoy your life now.

  Love is so wonderful. My husband is so wonderful. But if I could go in a dark alley and have a fondle of the man who teaches my Pilates class, Kate, I really would. Go enjoy yourself, Kate. Touch everyone! No man is worth how sad you are currently feeling. Get back out there!

  frog princes and frog princesses

  It had been over a week since Mary and Len’s; a week since Peter’s apartment; a week since the discovery of certain invisible bonds; but nothing had been severed and Google had provided zero results. So I decided to head to Grandma’s to ask her advice. She’d been pestering me all week to visit. She had a new idea for LSD and had called my office every day telling me how, done right, it would dramatically improve my quality of life. Whatever it was I was going to embrace it and participate in her new obsession in the hope she could release me from my own.

  grandma’s villa | pepperpots

  I arrived at Grandma’s villa to find Grandma, Delaware and Beatrice all rather pissed.

  ‘Darling, we are bored,’ Grandma began from the head of the large wooden dining table. They had been on the Margaritas all day and looked unusually dishevelled.

  ‘That’s what you’ve been calling me about every day this week? You want to tell me you are bored?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’ She poured me a drink and dragged me onto the seat next to her; a glassy-eyed Delaware sat on my other side. ‘Kate, darling, when you get …. older—’ Grandma hated the word ‘—some things in life become less frequent. You are less noticed by the opposite sex. The hours spent with girlfriends giggling about your latest love interest, a first kiss, what he meant when he said he thought you were different, those hours no longer exist. Those experiences no longer exist.’ I couldn’t imagine Grandma ever giggling over a man and the meaning of a sentence he uttered other than to critique its grammatical content. ‘The excitement of first love or first lust is gone for us.’ They all over-zealously nodded along. ‘Obviously on a practical level there are ways of ensuring one is still sexually satisfied—’ There was a smash of glasses from the kitchen and Pepperpots’ Vietnamese pool boy—who my grandma had an unusually close relationship with—popped his head around the corner.

  ‘Sorry, ladies,’ he said, pronouncing the s’s as if they were th’s. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘I think, darl, what your grandmamma is trying to say,’ Delaware said, taking my hand, ‘is that you are not too old.’ They all looked at me, wide-eyed, Beatrice swaying heavily from side to side. ‘Now I know, sweetie, that your heart is so broken right now, darl. I’ve been there.’ She was breathy, like Sue Ellen in Dallas. ‘I’ve really been there. But sometimes you have to move on even before you are ready to move on. You have to get back in that ring and you have to throw that first punch even if you d
on’t think you’ve got the strength or the desire.’

  ‘I read a book recently—’ we were back on Grandma ‘—about devaluation. Actually the book was on global economics, not one you need to read cover to cover but one that is applicable in this instance. You need to devalue your experience with Gabriel. You need to devalue what he is and was to you. He needs to become one of a number of men and experiences in your lifetime. And there are two ways we are going to achieve this. One is by making a list of all the things you loved about Gabriel and all the things you like about other people. You might love Federico’s fashion and creativity, or the way George Clooney swoons, or Peter Parker, there must be something you love about Peter Parker?’ I had a flashback to the last door-slamming time that I’d seen him. ‘You might even love Chad’s unwavering self-belief. Put all these qualities on that list and make a description of your perfect man with all his perfect qualities. And you will immediately see that Gabriel only forms a small part of that list, a very low percentage. And that is how we start to devalue him and what he brings to the table. He doesn’t bring everything to the table. He never did.’

  ‘If I was you, darl, I would also cut out some photographs of different men, maybe there are some actors or singers you think are beautiful, we could get some pictures from a magazine and stick them on this list too.’

  ‘Great idea!’ Grandma shook her fist in the air with excitement. ‘Great idea! A list with pictures, a list showing you that Gabriel is one of a number of beautiful men, with limited qualities and abilities.’

  ‘Next, darl, you need to physically move on.’

  ‘Like move countries?’ I was confused. ‘Because I have already moved, twice if you think about it, once to France and then once back from France. I don’t really want to move again, not just yet.’

  ‘No, we mean that you need to start seeing other people.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I don’t want to. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the enthusiasm. I can’t. I don’t want to. I won’t. No.’ The response felt more reflex than conscious.

  ‘We thought you might say that, didn’t we?’ Grandma said to Delaware. ‘So we are going to take baby steps. What we would like, and, yes, this is a formal Love-Stolen Dreams request before you try and wriggle out of it, is that from now on, every time you go out and do something related to your Love-Stolen Dreams column you can’t come back until you have kissed someone there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not in the French way, darl, unless you want to. Just kiss someone, on the lips, or the cheek if you prefer, a quick peck, that’s all. I bet the last kiss that had meaning for you was a kiss with Gabriel, wasn’t it, darl?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said, blushing bright red, touching my cheek where Peter Parker had kissed me in Hyde Park. Delaware looked at me suspiciously. Grandma took over.

  ‘Well, if you kiss someone on the lips every day or week or two weeks it will devalue kissing in general, normalise it, and you are increasing your odds because the more frogs you kiss, the more likely you are to meet a prince and in the interim you are entertaining us with the kinds of experiences and conversations we are no longer privy to.’

  ‘I don’t want to find a prince and I don’t think me looking for one is in any way complementary to my current objectives. In fact it feels contrary to what I am telling everyone else to do.’

  ‘Darling, your objectives were to help people realise their potential within or without a relationship. You were never anti-relationships. And you might meet someone one day and when you do all these experiences will help you stay connected to yourself. So we think it’s valid if you kiss as many people as possible. Now we would also like where possible if you took photos of everyone you kiss and we will stick the photos on here.’ She pressed a button and a screen dropped down from the ceiling with a world map on it. There was an A4-sized headshot of me in the middle (11 years old, train-track braces).

  ‘Seriously, Grandma? That was the only photo you could find?’

  ‘This is going to be our record of your Love-Stolen Dreams kissing journey,’ she said enthusiastically.

  ‘That is just classic, yes, it is, yes, it is.’ Federico wandered into the kitchen followed by Leah, who was bellowing into her iPhone. ‘Well, hello, campers!’ he said with jazz hands. ‘And that photo really is Cadbury’s Dairy Milk in that it is never going to get old and it is never going to stop making me feel good, no, it is not.’ He grabbed a jug of Margaritas and started topping up all their glasses. ‘So, Lady Bears, Leah asked me to bring her here because she is going to teach us how to crystal heal and I am cherry bakewell excited about it.’ Leah was still talking on her phone.

  ‘No, no, he can’t stay up later than 8 p.m. No, he can’t. Since when did an under-5 become the more knowledgeable in the parent-child relationship?’ She rolled her eyes at us. ‘Well, of course he’d say I feed him ice cream before bed. He says a lot of things. Last week he told me he created a spaceship and flew it into the ear of Grandpa Jim, but I didn’t call Science Weekly and schedule an interview for them with our spaceship-building son. I told Henry he was a clever boy, then I made him finish his mashed potatoes.’ She held her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘It’s my ex’s turn to have Henry,’ before wandering off into the lounge. ‘No, no, he can’t watch that film, no, no, I have never let him do that before—’

  ‘Who wants more Margaritas, Lady Bears?’ Federico said, pouring the last of the jug into Beatrice’s glass before we all realised that she was in fact asleep head first in a plate of cold pasta.

  ‘More Margarita!’ yelled Grandma, before zigzagging her way to the kitchen. Federico copied her. Delaware stayed in her seat next to me.

  ‘Sweetie, humour us. Do you think you could do that? Make us smile. Let us have a little glimpse back to the past. You never know, you might just enjoy it. And I really think this will help you move on in ways you can’t even imagine or appreciate just yet. I truly believe this is the best way to sever the invisible bonds that can keep us connected to another person. So please trust me because we are trying to set you free.’

  request | kiss a frog every time I come to a pond

  Grandma’s newest request had made me feel dizzy, dizzier than the earlier Margaritas. I didn’t like the idea of kissing a bunch of low-life punks every time I went out to take back some Love-Stolen Dreams. Captain Hook didn’t have to snog every dirty crim he ever met. He was the captain of his own ship; the master of his own destiny; he would have made Love walk the plank then held his pistol in the air yelling, ‘ooohh ahhhh,’ before feasting on red wine and giant chicken legs. No, this whole kissing idea was a real headache for me, an actual headache, so with a migraine beginning to caress my left temple (as opposed to me caressing everyone I ever did meet) I disappeared to find some painkillers before my enforced session of crystal healing.

  grandma’s walk-in wardrobe

  Grandma has never compromised on closet space. Her walkin wardrobe offers me comfort on a level not even a KitKat can compete with. It is cavernous and never-ending like the wardrobe that takes you to Narnia. Familiar items of clothing hang from the rails that line the walls: vintage fur coats; hundreds of boxes of shoes; delicious Chanel suits; beautiful pieces of jewellery displayed in silk-lined cabinets. There are also items from my past. Grandma has carefully packed away my christening outfit; pictures I painted her; misshapen clay pots I made at playschool. Grandma still used them. One for buttons, one for foreign currency, one was filled with odd pieces of ribbon. There was a tatty friendship bracelet I’d given her aged seven; the hospital wristband from my birth. There is even a small piece of fabric that I’d sewn her initials onto. And somewhere, somewhere in this delightful walk-in wardrobe was an impressive medicine box that very much blurred the boundaries of current British medical legislation.

  I was on my sixth unsuccessful box when I discovered them. Not the Asian pain medication I sought, but a box filled with letters; hundreds of neatly packed letters, batch
es of them tied in ribbon. Some were incredibly old, some more recent, with stamps and watermarks from all around the world, all with the same handwriting, all of them addressed to Grandma but not to our house, to a PO Box address I didn’t recognise. I’d never seen any of these letters before. I pulled out a handful and noticed the handwriting; slanting slightly to the right; angular and precise. I chose a letter with a postmark from 10 years ago and carefully opened it.

  Dear Josephine,

  I am settling in well in Paris, thank you. There is an amazing research facility attached to the university, and the apartment is wonderful. In fact everything has been impressive so far, with the exception of my French. No amount of lessons could have prepared me for the speed everyone speaks. Most of the Parisians are rude and switch immediately into perfect English. Occasionally they are patient. In the café where I have breakfast every morning the waiters allow me the time and good grace to try to order in French. I’ve seen them laugh a few times but in general they try to help. And there is an amazing teacher at college who speaks French with me for a few hours every Wednesday, it’s part of a language exchange programme. It’s strange because, although they are not the same age at all, there is something about the teacher that reminds me a little bit of Kate, which has made me feel slightly homesick. How is she?

  Who was this person? Why were they asking about me? I flipped to the last page of the letter.

  I’ll send you the dates when I am next free to meet. I hope all is well there.

  Love, Peter Parker

  ‘Ah! It’s like your childhood all over again!’ Grandma beamed as everyone trudged into Grandma’s room to find me. ‘She used to spend hours playing in my wardrobe as a child, didn’t you, darling?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Leah said, grabbing the letter out of my hand. ‘And why are you so pale? Are you going to throw up again? Federico said you did the same thing at Mary’s. Are you pregnant?’