Which isn’t to say that Auntie Joyce was altogether cut off from the world. Oh, no, she engaged herself fully with the community and was an active member of her church. When she arrived at Mum and Dad’s that lunchtime, she was carrying a knitting bag, and from the second she sat down until the moment she left, excluding the fifteen minutes it took for her to eat lunch, her fingers never stopped moving. Click, click, clickety-click.
She explained that she was making small knitted figures for the church’s Christmas fair. Christmas was still a good six months off, but she had promised to make three hundred of the things. She was working on number seventeen that afternoon, having started her epic task only the previous evening.
While Dad and Mum prepared their sumptuous buffet, I was charged with keeping Joyce well supplied with gin and tonic. She asked me how I was getting on with that “lovely boyfriend” of mine. I told her that “lovely boyfriend” had dumped me without warning and was now shagging a Brazilian upholsterer. Okay, I didn’t use the word “shagging.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “That is a pity. Shagging a Brazilian …”
My mouth dropped open. Auntie Joyce’s vocabulary had expanded. Perhaps it’s true what they say about the onset of senility being marked by a loss of social grace and inhibition.
“I just can’t keep my mind off it,” I said. “I’ve been trying to block him out of my head but he keeps creeping back in. With the pneumatic Miss Well-Sprung close behind.”
“Is that her name?” asked Auntie Joyce.
“It’s the name of her company.”
“Funny,” said Auntie Joyce.
“Not really. It’s driving me totally nuts.”
“What you need to do is keep occupied. Why do you think I’ve taken on all this knitting?”
“For the children?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s to keep my mind off him.”
Auntie Joyce’s angelic face was suddenly twisted with annoyance.
“Him?”
There was a “him.” It was the first I’d heard of it. “Frank Farmer.”
“The church caretaker?” She’d talked about him before.
“The very same. The smooth-talking, self-centered shyster. Getting me and Emily Barclay to cook for him, both of us thinking that we had something serious going on … and all the time he’s thinking that just because we’re both in our eighties, we’re going to be grateful to share the attentions of some jumped-up seventy-two-year-old. Absolute bastard.”
My mouth dropped open in shock again.
“I had no idea!”
“That I was seeing someone?”
I nodded.
“Well, a lady likes to keep some things close to her chest. But it’s all over now.” She clicked through three more stitches. “When I found out what was going on, I called Emily and I told her we had to do something. She agreed and we came up with a plan. We had a showdown. Me, Emily, and Frank. I thought we were going to tell him that we were both done with him, but then she said, ‘You have to choose between us, Frank,’ and he bloody well chose her!”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“That was not what we’d agreed. I can’t tell you how hurt I was.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’m not sure which is worse, losing Frank or being betrayed by my fellow woman. Where is the sisterhood in that! And so this is how I keep my mind off it. With all this bloody knitting. Because God knows I would not be doing it otherwise. I’ll never be able to go down to the senior citizens’ club again.”
Her pain was clear. I wasn’t sure what to say. “You can’t give up the club,” I said.
“I’ve got to. I’ve got my pride.”
“You know what, Auntie Joyce,” I said then, “I think that you’re the lucky one, not Emily. I don’t know what she was thinking. Why on earth would you want a man who you knew had cheated on you?” Though even as I said it I knew that, had Miss Well-Sprung and I stood in front of Michael, and he’d chosen me, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to the fact that he thought it was perfectly acceptable to sleep with both of us at the same time. I would have done a lap of victory around Clapham Common and gotten straight back to the business of prostrating myself before his worthless arse.
Still, for a matter of seconds I was able to step out of myself and give some sensible advice. I laid my hands on Auntie Joyce’s, quieting that click-clicking for a while, and said, “He wasn’t worth it. You deserve so much better.”
“And so do you, my dear,” she said. “So do you.”
It was sweet and, at the same time, profoundly depressing. Here we were, sharing a universal girlie moment, and yet how awful to think that at eighty-three years old, Auntie Joyce was still falling for the same old schtick, still breaking her heart and losing a friend over a man who wasn’t worthy of carrying her knitting bag. I uttered a little prayer: Please, God, let me have it figured out before I reach retirement age.
Still, I did come away from that afternoon with some new wisdom. Auntie Joyce was right about one thing: I needed to keep my brain occupied with a task that so fully absorbed me, there was no room for ruminations about Michael. I needed to experience what psychologists refer to as “flow.” At work, there were moments when I had to concentrate hard enough to shut anything else out, but when I was left to my own devices it was hopeless. I certainly wasn’t getting any sense of flow from my lonely evenings spent reading endless threads of woe on breakup websites or from obsessively clicking through the pictures on Michael’s Facebook page. Perhaps knitting was the ideal task. I hadn’t picked up a set of knitting needles for years. Before I left the house, I asked Auntie Joyce to show me the basic stitches again.
“But what will I knit?” I asked her.
Auntie Joyce gestured toward her enormous knitting bag. “I’ve got two hundred and eighty-three to go. Why don’t you take the pink wool and these needles and make some little people dressed as angels or the Virgin Mary? They’re very easy. You just have to knit one big tube for the body and the head, and four smaller tubes to make the arms and legs.”
She gave me the pattern, which she had made up herself. It looked pretty simple. Knit and purl, stocking stitch … nothing fancy. I could easily stitch on little facial features in black wool.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do ten.”
Easier said than done. I got started on the knitting as soon as I got home. Three hours later my fingers were red and sore and I had completed just one little woolly body in the time it would have taken Auntie Joyce to make three. The lurid pink tube, which I’d stuffed with a pair of old laddered tights, looked far from human. At least, it didn’t look like a whole human. It looked altogether more obscene—a fat little penis in 100 percent washable acrylic.
But while I wasn’t exactly thrilled with what I had managed to create so far, it had kept my mind occupied. The concentration that knitting had required of me was even greater than I imagined, and I was determined not to be defeated.
Though I had work the next day, I sat up for the rest of the night to make the arms and the legs. I attached them as Auntie Joyce’s pattern instructed. Then it was time to create the eyes, the nose, and the mouth with neat stitching.
It wasn’t until I finished that I realized there was something strangely familiar about my little woolly creation.
Oh, God! I thought. He looks like Michael!
There was something about the black wool eyes that reminded me of Michael’s lashes (overly luxuriant for a man), and the grim red line of the mouth reminded me of Michael’s mouth as he told me so proudly that he had “never made any promises” to me. My treacherous subconscious had forced me to knit my ex-boyfriend!
Ugh. I stabbed the fat woolen body with a knitting needle. “Never made any promises! Take that, you cow-lashed git.”
Stab, stab, stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab.
I stopped and slumped back on to the sofa. I was surprised at my sudden outburst of violence and slightl
y shocked. And yet …
Perhaps there was something in this crafts thing. It really was therapeutic.
And that was how I accidentally made my first voodoo doll. The children of the church would have to be one woolly angel short.
I christened him Mini-Michael and spent the next few evenings and lunch hours customizing him so that he resembled my ex even more closely. I made him a black jumper—like the cashmere sweater Michael was hardly ever seen without since his Harvey Nics makeover—by cutting off the end of a cashmere sock that had long since lost its mate and snipping two little slits for Mini-Michael’s arms. I found a scrap of brown wool in the bag that Auntie Joyce had given me and used that to make the doll’s hair, complete with a thinning patch on the crown. I made him a pair of trousers out of a piece of material from the sample book that Miss Well-Sprung had left behind, which Ellie had yet to return. That gave me a little grim satisfaction. I even made him a silver necklace to match the one that some previous hapless girlfriend had given him when she got back from a holiday in India, using a section of chain from an old broken bracelet of mine.
Mini-Michael was perfect in every way. And that was when the fun started. One evening I popped out to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk and saw, on one of those revolving displays by the till, a packet of a hundred pins, each with a different-colored head. They had almost certainly been there since the seventies. I bought them, feeling a faint flutter of excitement and embarrassment as the girl behind the counter rang them up. Though she could never have guessed the carnage I intended to inflict, could she?
I decided that this was something that had to be conducted with a degree of ceremony. I needed candles, which meant opening the fig-scented candle from Diptyque that I had been saving for some romantic interlude. It meant significant music. It meant a big glass of red wine.
This was much more fun than the voodoo sock. What a jolly evening I had, decorating Mini-Michael all over with those pins. I stuck them in his eyes. I stuck them where his ears should have been, in his arms, his legs, all over his chest and his torso. I stuck them in his feet. I stuck twelve of them in his crotch, as I shouted something along the lines of “Die! Die! Die!” And then I put the doll into a biscuit tin and buried him at the bottom of my wardrobe.
Afterward I danced around the living room to a mix of triumphant girl hits, including, of course, “I Will Survive” and my personal favorite, Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” I loved that girl. As I danced, I swigged from my glass of red wine, getting plenty of it on the cream rug, but I felt good. I felt as though I was actually taking some action to claim back my happiness.
Regardless of whether my latest spot of voodoo would really work or not, I felt a great deal better.
The following day I was to get a surprise.
The first thing I did every morning was check Michael’s status on Facebook. Unbelievably, he had yet to root out and eliminate my fake Kevin profile. That day “Feeling under the weather and working from home” was Michael’s status, updated at eight o’clock that morning. Under the weather? That meant he felt ill! Was it possible that the damage I’d inflicted on my little woolly Mini-Michael had something to do with it?
A ridiculous notion. If Martha’s voodoo sock hadn’t worked, then it was unlikely that I had managed to achieve anything with my knitting. All the same, I felt guiltily gleeful.
Later, when I logged on to Facebook again, Michael had changed his status to “Still feeling really bad. Must be man-flu!”
“Oh, ha, ha, ha,” I said. I bet he thought that man-flu comment was really funny.
I noticed that Miss Well-Sprung had added a comment beneath his status update: “Hope you feel better by tonight, my love.”
I felt my right eye twitch as I read that. So they had a date planned. I had to make sure that Michael didn’t feel better in time.
What would it take? I wondered. How embarrassing an ailment would Michael have to have before he would cancel their evening together?
When I got back from the office that night, I went straight to the wardrobe, pulled out Mini-Michael in his biscuit-tin coffin, and, using a red felt-tip pen, gave him a nasty set of spots all around the crotch. I dotted another spot on the end of his nose, just for luck. I sat up until the early hours of the morning hoping he would post an update about his condition, but I suppose even Michael would draw the line at reporting a genital rash in his status update.
Common wisdom states that time heals all wounds and that eventually everyone who ever had their heart broken starts to get over it, but at two months and a day I was nowhere near that stage.
Rather, I was entering a truly dark phase. Two weeks after I created the Mini-Michael, which I subjected to nightly torments, my usual roundup of Internet snooping on Michael’s life culminated in my typing “when will Michael die” into the Google box at the top of my browser. Even more disturbing was the number of websites that were willing to tell me exactly when it would happen. Alas, the general consensus was that he had at least another twenty-five years, even if I factored in his allergies.
I was a woman obsessed. I thought about Michael every moment of every day. Especially at night, when Michael was almost certainly in bed with Miss Well-Sprung. She was the one getting the benefit of the crisp white linen on his bed and the freshly ground coffee in his kitchen. I didn’t even have a cat to snuggle up to. I was turning into a cat woman without so much as a kitten.
One Monday morning as I took the Tube into the office, I realized that I had not spoken to a single living person since the previous Friday night.
“You could have come over to our place!” Becky protested when I told her.
“You didn’t call me.”
“You know how busy I’ve been with the wedding. The time just flies. But you should have called me. We would have been very happy to see you.”
“I can’t just keep coming over and playing gooseberry,” I moaned.
“Don’t be silly,” said Becky. “Henry and I would have been glad of the distraction.”
I gave a skeptical grunt.
“Never mind. This week is going to be much better. Think of how much fun we’re going to have on Thursday night!”
Ah, yes. Thursday night.
As I walked home from work that afternoon, the sun was still shining and it seemed that the world and his missus were out enjoying it. The birds, the bees, even the wasps were out there two by two. I was reminded of my single status at every turn. I had forgotten how bloody awful it was to be on your own in a world that had been made for pairs ever since Noah. Especially during the summer.
What is the best time of year to have your heart broken? The annals of female experience are packed with tales of chronologically thoughtless dumpings. Christmas and New Year’s seem to be favorites. I suppose it makes great sense if you’ve decided that you no longer want to be with someone to call it a day before you have to buy them a Christmas present, or before they get you something ridiculously thoughtful and expensive that ties you in for another six months.
New Year’s must be a rough time to be dumped as well. There you are, looking forward to seeing in the new year with the man of your dreams, then suddenly it’s over and you find yourself in a corner at midnight. At best, you’re fighting back the tears while you watch all the couples who did make it to January 1 together. At worst, you’re avoiding the one single bloke at the party, a geek with a cold sore, who thinks you’re there expressly for the purpose of breaking his three-year sex drought with a shag in the host’s airing cupboard.
Valentine’s Day is another baddy. There’s nothing worse than being single on Valentine’s Day. Except perhaps a card from your mother. I can see how being dumped on your birthday would scar you for life as well. Especially if it’s a big birthday, like forty. You might as well have opened a birthday card to discover it says, “Get a cat.”
Nevertheless I decided that the misery of finding yourself single on Christmas, New Year’s, or Valentine’s Day
had nothing on what I was going through. It seemed that I alone in the whole of England knew the pain of being dumped in the wedding season.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been single during the wedding season before. I had known the horror of the invitation to which your neatly calligraphed name is appended with the words every girl dreads: “plus one.” Without that elusive “plus one” by my side, I had known the horror of being seated at the “singles” table, only to find that the other guests at said table were only single because they were widowed. In the Second World War.
What Michael had plunged me into was a whole new level of horror. Prior to our breakup, just that summer alone I had accepted invitations to four weddings on behalf of us both. Admittedly, I hadn’t told him about three of them, but I had felt sure that he would be there by my side and so I had confidently added his name to my RSVPs.
Becky had threatened castration when she realized that Michael really was going to leave a gap in one of her carefully put-together tables of eight. I knew that at some point I would have to let the other brides know that Michael was intent on monkeying with their numbers.
“Don’t leave it too long,” Becky had warned me. “There is nothing, nothing on earth more distressing for a bride-to-be than last-minute changes to the guest list.”
“What? Nothing?” I’d responded. “Even the groom getting killed in a freak stag-night accident?”
“That’s not even slightly funny,” said Becky. “I can’t believe you would joke about my fiancé being dead!” She crossed her fingers and knocked on wood as though that would make things better.
I felt suitably chastised, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t secretly wish that one of the prospective brides would call me and tell me that her wedding had been canceled. Not because of a death, of course, but perhaps an outbreak of chicken pox, or a surprise pregnancy that meant she wouldn’t be able to get into her dress and had thus decided to postpone the wedding until the following year. Anything, anything at all that would save me having to explain that Michael and I had split up. I just didn’t want to have to go to all those bloody weddings on my own.
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 11
