‘As if,’ Federico said, trying on one of the fur coats. ‘It would be God’s child if she was.’
‘I was looking for painkillers,’ I said, looking up at Grandma. She looked from me to the box of letters on the floor.
‘Well, that doesn’t look like the medicine box, does it?’ Grandma said, grabbing up the box and then the letter from Leah’s hand. ‘And, darling, you know better than to read other people’s letters. I thought I had brought you up better than that.’
‘Grandma?’
‘Now where are these painkillers?’ She started rummaging through the cupboards, pulling out a big box, opening it up on the ground next to me. ‘Painkillers, painkillers,’ she muttered as she picked through the contents of the box.
‘Grandma …?’ I felt nervous to even ask the question. ‘Have you been in contact with Peter Parker the entire time he’s been away?’
Federico gasped. Leah looked as if she was holding her breath. Delaware swayed and tripped backwards into the Chanel suits. Grandma stopped very still, staring into the box of drugs.
‘Grandma, how could you not say something? Why wouldn’t you say something? You saw me! You saw how upset I was when he left! He just vanished, without a word, my best friend, he totally disappeared, and you were in touch with him the whole time?’
The oncoming migraine was beginning to thump against my skull like an attention-seeking child. Grandma took two tablets out of a box and placed them in the palm of my hand, gently closing her hands around my own. The tablets weren’t soluble.
‘Kate,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t think this is the moment for us to talk about this. In fact, I don’t think I can have this conversation with you. It’s not my place to. So, get yourself a glass of water to take those tablets, no one ever thought clearly with a headache, and then I think it’s time everyone left. I’m sorry, Leah. I know you were looking forward to healing us but I am suddenly very tired. We’ll have to do it another time.’ She left us in her wardrobe; Delaware amongst the suits; Federico, Leah and I just staring at each other.
‘Kat-kins,’ whispered Federico. ‘Literally … what the mother fluff just happened? That was intense, wasn’t it? Did anyone else feel that? That was episode-ending, in a dramatic way, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m thinking, why does no one give a peanut butter sandwich that Beatrice is still asleep in a pasta ready meal for one?’
the golden swan—federico cagassi—41 years old
I guess I couldn’t avoid doing this forever. So, my name is Federico Cagassi and love has taken away my career progression. You know, I know, we all know that I should be at a more senior level at True Love. I should be Editor. I should be Chad. But as I want to work with Chad, not without him, I have chosen to work under him. So that is what I have given up for love, yes it is, yes it is, yes it is.
Firstly I want to state for the record that it’s not all bad. I think of True Love as my baby. I spend almost all my waking hours working on it. I still get shivers every time I walk past a shop window and see our newest edition on the shelf, or someone reading it on the tube, or the day our server went down because we had so many hits on the Love-Stolen Dreams website. So in many ways I haven’t given up anything at all, except perhaps a job title and a bit of extra money, a lot of extra money actually, and invites to parties—Chad gets all the invites to parties. And he gets the freebies. I get some: the ones he doesn’t want. Just last month I walked into my apartment and for a second I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in the gift section of Harrods, there were so many presents in there. But Chad always gets first pick, first dibs, at the invites and at the freebies. I didn’t get a look in when the new iPad arrived, no, I did not.
The thing is, Kat-kins, if I did something about this, if I applied to work somewhere else, I’m not sure I’d see that much of Chad. I don’t know if we’d continue to spend time together. And I am not ready to find that out. I want to avoid that reality because my heart is fragile like a butterfly made of gold leaf. I am a golden butterfly of fragility. And so I remain sub-editor and beat my golden wings every day unnoticed, an ugly duckling who is in fact a swan but is standing behind an aggressive and large goose who gobbles up all the Haribo from the children who come to visit us at the park where we float in the pond of life. I am a golden swan. A golden swan who is still a sub-editor. Love has halted the self-actualisation of Federico Cagassi. And Love is mother-fluffing powerful.
pink wee pod | true love
‘It’s always about you. It’s like it’s your birthday every single day of the year and everyone is like, “OK, I will put my super-important personal stuff on hold because it’s Kate’s birthday. We can’t focus on our quest, on our questions, because she has so many of her own and she is so fragile and broken and sad and it’s her birthday so we are just going to have to bloody well wait.” And we do wait. We do. But the birthday goes on and on and on like some kind of endless Jewish shiva where everyone is just dying inside, desperate for a change in fabric colour, and a change of scene, and to hang out anywhere that doesn’t have a body-filled coffin in the front room. Well, I can’t wait, Kat-kins! I can’t mother-fluffing wait. I need your time and I need your focus. It’s just a few days of interviews and then you can go and chase down your call-rejecting Peter Parker and find out why he can in fact be Anne-bloody-Frank, just not for you, for your glamorous gran. So are you ready? Then let’s go, because we are already 40 minutes late.’
I should have seen it coming. Federico had started to lose the plot when we began researching the male perspective on love-stolen dreams. We’d received a lot of letters from distressed boyfriends asking for help. I caught Federico smuggling them out of the office to read at home. This was further compounded by research I’d been doing into divorce rates, because it seemed that the petitioner in over 93% of divorce cases was the wife—93%—that’s almost all of them. And of this 93% almost none were contested by the husbands. If men were so unhappy they didn’t want to fight to save their relationships it seemed important for us to understand why. So that’s exactly what we decided to do.
the boardroom | true love
The men in the boardroom were younger than I’d been expecting. Many of them in their twenties, some in their thirties, one forty-year-old, and Mark from Marketing, who was hovering by the snack corner eating a blood orange. Two in particular were the most vocal. They were dressed in expensive-looking sports brands, with heavy-duty accessories, and looked as if they probably owned a record label with a Crib on MTV. JC spoke on behalf of his forlorn-looking friend Bo, who sat nodding his head to music that I just couldn’t hear.
‘His girlfriend is hot, man,’ JC told me. ‘She is hot!’
‘Yeah, she is hot,’ confirmed Bo.
‘Do you remember how she used to cuss you down when you were chasing after her?’ he said, jabbing Bo’s arm.
‘She used to cuss me down.’
‘You were all like, “Hey, honey, you is so fly, I gotta be wiv you” and she used to cuss you down. She was so funny, man! She had it, you know. She had it. And she was funny.’
‘Yeah, she was funny,’ agreed Bo.
‘But she is not funny now, man.’
‘She is so not funny now.’
‘Now she hangs around you like a prop, like an accessory. She’s all bovvered about what you want and what you like. I’m not bovvered about you and you is my best mate.’
‘I’m not bovvered about you either.’ They high-fived in a complicated male way.
‘I bet if you said to her you like women to wear gold, she’d wear gold. Or if you said you want a cake, she’d go bake you a cake.’
‘She did bake me a cake! For my birthday!’
‘Did she?’ JC was surprised. ‘Was it good?’
‘Yeah, it was all right. It was a cake. But she said I didn’t look like I was really enjoying it. So she got in a mood and we had a fight.’
‘You see, man! You see!’ JC was talking to me now.
‘She wasn’t like that before. She was funny before. And hot. Well hot.’
‘All right, man, I get it, you can stop going on about how hot my girlfriend is.’
‘Was hot. I said was hot. Now it don’t matter what she looks like cos all I can see is that moody face every time I turn up to take you out. And those doe eyes every time she looks at you.’
‘She didn’t look at me wiv doe eyes after the cake.’
‘I can’t believe you didn’t save me a piece, man.’ JC turned away from his friend. ‘I love cake.’
‘I promise you, if you’d eaten this moody cake and seen those moody eyes you would not be lovin’ cake.’
‘So we need your help,’ JC said to me, ‘because it’s not just his girl who is like this. They are all like this. I had one too. Had being the operative word. So you need to like distract them or give them something else to focus on or give them a handbook on how not to be miserable. Because I am not the answer. And he,’ he said, pointing to Bo, ‘he is not the answer. We are just blokes, not characters in a film or in one of dem books she reads.’
‘I tell you, man, if she heard us saying this stuff to this lady she would cuss me down.’ Bo looked worried. I was worried too. Since when had I become a lady not a girl?
‘No, she wouldn’t, my man, no, she wouldn’t. That is the point. She wouldn’t cuss you down—she’d just cry. So you have to speak to his girlfriend,’ he said, turning back to me.
‘And if you could also help my wife I would very much appreciate it,’ said Mark from Marketing, whose presence I’d assumed was work-related. ‘Because she is angry with me almost all the time.’ The boys were manically pointing at Mark but looking at me. ‘Mostly she is annoyed because I am not responding in the correct way to the things she is doing. Apparently she is doing all these things for me and I am not giving the appropriate level of enthusiasm or the correct facial expressions. So she spends a large percentage of her time annoyed and frustrated, and occasionally crying.’
‘They is always crying!’ said Bo.
‘And it seems I am responsible for all these emotions, all this unhappiness. When we met I was responsible for making her feel happy and content. Now I do the opposite. Apparently I am very disappointing and annoying. And I’m not entirely sure what has happened but apparently it’s my fault so I would like to try and fix it. Although it seems to me that she was much happier before she met me so maybe it would be better if we were apart.’
‘Well, his girlfriend was definitely happier before him,’ said JC.
‘Yeah, she was.’
‘She was happy and she was funny.’
‘And she used to see her mates more,’ said Bo. ‘I’d ask her out and she’d say, “No, thanks, I’m with my mates.” But now, now she waits to know what I’m doing before she makes her plans. And then, if I don’t know what I am doing, and to be honest wiv you I am not a big planner, she gets annoyed because it means she can’t make a decision about what she is doing. And she’s a planner.’
‘It’s warped, man. It’s totally warped,’ said JC.
‘My wife does the same,’ confirmed Mark. ‘She almost always has a diary or day planner in her hand and is constantly asking me to commit to something or other. Sometimes I think she’s trying to trip me up so she can get more annoyed thus proving what a total and utter waste of space I am. Just yesterday I had to confirm a dinner eighteen months in advance. Eighteen months in advance! I think we all know how that is going to end.’
‘She needs to Jack and Gill,’ said JC.
‘She really does,’ confirmed Mark.
‘So you gotta help us, lady,’ said Bo, ‘because my girl, she is so fly. She is so the woman. She is the woman. I want her to be my woman. But right now she is this other woman. And I don’t really like this other woman. I want my girlfriend back,’ he pleaded.
‘I’d really like my wife back too—’ Mark nodded ‘—because right now the lady that works in Tesco’s is more excited to see me every week than my wife is. And it feels somewhat pathetic going to the supermarket to receive a warm smile and some nice conversation.’
‘You see!’ Federico said, turning to me. ‘It’s a bloody big mess is what it is. So what the custard creams are we going to do about it?’ He drummed his fingers on the heart-shaped table and waited, along with the rest of the room, for my response. So I pretended to hear someone call my name, then ran into the yellow wee pod and hid.
Because we’d never once considered how women were actually conducting themselves in relationships. Could Mark’s wife really be that angry with him? Or was she really angry with herself? And if the girl in Tesco was consistently more pleased to see him than his wife, who’s to say that at some point that shop assistant wouldn’t become more than just a friend? There were hundreds of American studies claiming that infidelity occurred in nearly half of all failed marriages. And almost all of these studies agreed on one thing: that infidelity was not the primary reason for the divorce. It came about as a reaction to problems within the marriage. These could be anything from resentment, to boredom, to the above-mentioned anger. Maybe these feelings were because the women felt they had given too much, put in too much, unbalanced their own lives for their relationship. Was love the problem or was it that we were unable to multitask?
It seemed now more than ever that an LSD drop-in centre or a mentoring programme for young women was absolutely necessary, otherwise I had to rely on women contacting True Love, by which time it could already be too late. So I needed to pitch to the Department for Education. I wanted women to have it all. I wanted women to make a change. So I needed to get in touch with solution-providing, letter-writing, secret-keeping Peter Parker.
goldman apartments
The beginning of our doorstep ritual started the same as always: with a knock on the door of apartment 41, a long wait, and Peter looking as if he’d been doing interval training in his flat. No sooner had he opened the front door than he was trying to close it again, with me on the other side. I felt like the brace-wearing kid at college, the one no one wants to let into the party. So I decided to act accordingly, and brim with nerd-like enthusiasm, deflecting any sign of rejection with a skin so thick there was every possibility the X-Men would seek me out and try and recruit me.
‘Hi, Peter!’ I beamed. ‘I was just passing and I thought I’d drop in.’ Three tube changes, one bus, 17-minute walk.
‘Actually I’m in the middle of something, Kate,’ he said in a flat, irritated tone, ‘so you probably should have called first.’ We both knew about the eleven thousand messages I’d already left on his voicemail.
‘It wouldn’t take up a lot of your time, just a little chat.’
‘As I said, Kate, I’m in the middle of something so …’ He didn’t bother to finish the sentence, so we stood there in silence. ‘Why don’t I walk you to the lift?’ He grabbed me by the arm and marched me down the hallway. He pressed the lift-call button and stood cross-armed as we waited for it to arrive. The doors pinged open.
‘Good to see you, Kate,’ he said as he pushed me inside. The doors started closing. I hit the button to reopen them. So Peter Parker stepped inside, took my finger off the hold button and pressed G. The doors closed, with both of us inside, and we started to descend. Peter crossed his arms, huffed and remained silent. It had been a brilliant and seamless start.
‘I didn’t mean to bother you, Peter, really. I was just a bit worried because I haven’t heard from you in a while—’ he was watching the floor numbers decrease, my time evaporating ‘—and I had a few questions, about creating a proposal for the Department for Education, oh, and a box of letters I found at Grandma’s …’
‘Aren’t you off to New York soon?’ he said without looking at me.
‘Er, yeah, yes, I am actually, with Beatrice, we’re going to the Juilliard School, which is actually one of the things I wanted to tell you about, along with the letters, and the drop-in centres and a stupid idea I’d had about fertility pres
ervation and—’
‘Whose fertility preservation?’ He glared at me. ‘What’s wrong with your fertility?’
‘Well, nothing, yet, I don’t think. It’s a ticking time bomb, obviously. It’s just I’ve interviewed some women recently at True Love who were going into an egg-freezing programme and—’ Why was I talking about this? How had he managed to change the subject?
Ping. The lift told us we’d reached the ground floor. The doors slid open to reveal the stone-faced concierge. Peter Parker held the door open waiting for me to leave. I didn’t move. So he huffed angrily and the doors re-closed. The lift started going back up to the top floor.
‘Kate,’ he said, super irritated, ‘I am busy at the moment. OK. I have a lot of things I am trying to sort out. I need time to do that. And I need space. And that means I am and will continue to be less available to you. OK? Did we have some pre-arranged number of hours that we were supposed to see each other every week?’
‘No, I just, I had a few things that I thought you might be able to—’
‘I won’t be able to help.’
‘Well, that must be difficult for a man who prides himself on assisting others.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Well, normally you spend all this time helping other people, building bonfires for Grandma, Fat Camp runs at Hyde Park—you’re always involving yourself in the lives of others and none of us knows a thing about you, or where you’ve been, or what you’ve been doing, or why you’ve been writing thousands of letters to my grandma. I mean, who the bloody hell are you?’
‘This from the girl who is going to spend the rest of her life taking back what love has stolen, from other people. Talk about being disconnected from your own needs.’
Ping. The lift told us we were back on the top floor. Peter stepped out into the hallway. This time I held the door open.
‘Peter, I didn’t come here to fight with you. So can we please just go in your apartment and sit down and talk about this like adults? I have questions that I think deserve answers.’
Love Is a Thief Page 16
