by Lia Louis
WhatsApp from Rosie Kalwar:
This is exactly how it happened, isn’t it? This (or so I hear) is how the French ask people to go steady with them.
WhatsApp from Rosie Kalwar:
Yep. I said “go steady.” Whaddya gonna do?
WhatsApp from Rosie Kalwar:
PS: I hope everything went perfectly!
WhatsApp from Rosie Kalwar:
PPS: Are you shagging now?
I hold my phone high above my face, swollen, gritty eyes squinting at the screen’s bright light. Rosie has sent a photo with her four messages, and despite myself and everything I’m feeling, I laugh. In the photo, Rosie stands on the clinical white tiles of the hotel’s kitchen floor, hands to her mouth in mock-shock, and Fox is in front of her, long suit-trousered legs bent on one knee, holding out a croissant the way someone would proffer an engagement ring. Ironically, it’s sort of close. Lucas proposed to Marie over breakfast in bed, apparently. “With a ring, across about seventeen pastries,” he’d laughed.
I lock my phone. I can’t bring myself to respond yet. I’ll do it tomorrow or explain when I see them on Tuesday when I’m back at work. I’d have made some sense of it by then, found the meaning. Because everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it? Even if at first it all seems hopeless, or wrong, or bloody disastrous. This is the headway I have made in three hours, since leaving the restaurant and trying desperately to claw myself out of the quicksand I feel I’m standing in: There is a reason for this. I just can’t see it yet.
The car journey to Lucas’s parents’ house from the restaurant seemed to take longer than usual, and Lucas had chatted breezily the whole way as I nodded and made all the right noises, the familiar leafy fields and teeny, cobbled French villages whisking by the window. He’d walked with me, from the driveway of his parents’ ivy-blanketed house, through the side gate, and down to the bottom of their vast, neat garden, to the farmhouse door of the guest cottage. I’d unlocked it quickly, racing against the tears I’d worked my arse off to keep dammed during the car journey, the key Amanda, Lucas’s mum, has always handed to me in a white A5 envelope on arrival as if I’m the guest at a country B&B, clammy in my hand. He wanted to come in. I could tell as I stood in the doorway, facing him—the way his hands were in his pockets, his shoulders rigid, one foot on the doorstep, looking past me into the little kitchenette. Lucas was expecting to come inside with me, like he usually does. To throw himself on the bed, to kick off his shoes, to flick through the TV channels, listening, as I put on my pajamas in the bathroom and update him on quirky customers at work, the door pushed to, but not shut. Instead I thanked him for dinner, apologized for cutting it short, and waffled about migraines again.
“Well, rest up, Em,” he’d said. “And call me if you need me, yeah? I’m only in the house, upstairs. I can be like room service.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I mean it,” he’d said, then he leaned forward and put his warm cheek to mine. “Happy last-day-of-being-twenty-nine to us. Been waiting years to wake up as thirty-year-olds who know exactly what we’re doing with our lives, haven’t we?”
“Sure have,” I’d said with a wide smile, then I closed the door, turned my back to it, and burst into hot, silent tears in the empty darkness. That’s all I’ve been doing. Crying. It’s what I’m doing now, wrapped in this thick, feather duvet, my cheeks stinging, eyes swollen, a lap of crumbs from the scrunched, crumbling tissue I’ve been swiping under my nose for the last few hours.
Best woman. Best woman. What even is a best woman? Best men, sure. Maids of honor, of course. But a best woman? A “no-brainer” Lucas had called it in the red-cheeked, slightly disjointed lead-up to the question. “Because nobody—seriously, not a soul, knows me like you do, Emmie. It could be no one else.” Ugh. I was so poised. So sure—so much so I bloody rehearsed my reply.
“We’re getting married, Em.” He’d beamed as he spoke. “Marie and I. And I’d… love for you to be my best woman. More than anything. You. Standing up there. With me. What do you say?” You. Standing up there. With me. I shudder so hard now, my teeth chatter, and I pull the duvet over my head. Vomiting. Uncontrollable sobbing. Swollen features. And now shivering. Nobody warns you about this in love songs, do they? Dr. Hook didn’t sing about this. There are no NHS web pages for heartbreak like there are for whitlows and UTIs, but there should be.
WHEN TO SEEK MEDICAL HELP:
When you have cried so much that your eyes become so small and bulbous, they disappear into your face.
When tears persist so much that your voice morphs into that of Barry White.
When signs of insanity are demonstrated, i.e., gracefully accepting being a best woman to the person who caused the above symptoms.
On the other side of the duvet, the air-conditioning unit rumbles on the wall like a boiling kettle, the sticky summer heat wave shut outside. My musty room back at home in Fishers Way is a tiny furnace in comparison. So hot that the second the temperature tips past the seventy-three-degree mark, I go to bed convinced that by morning I’ll be found shriveled by my landlady, like a raisin in a nightie. No risk of that happening here, staying with the Moreaus, though. So I suppose there is always that. Even in the darkest of times, it is always important to focus, if you can, on the positives. No matter how small. No matter how few.
I pull back the duvet and sit up in bed, pressing the heel of my hand to my forehead, which, ironically, is beginning to throb with the beginnings of a real headache, and click on the bedside lamp. I calculated on the ferry over, and counting on my fingers, that I have spent thirteen of my birthdays here—our birthdays—in the Moreaus’ back garden. My first was when Lucas and I turned seventeen. The ninth of June 2005. It was the first time I had ever stayed here, and only our second ever face-to-face meeting, but Lucas’s parents treated me like a family member who’d visited a thousand times before. “Lucas speaks only of you,” Jean had said as he’d shown me around the guest cottage, and then he’d brought his shoulders to his ears and smiled, almost defeatedly, as if to say, “And if you’re important to my son, you’re important to us.” That weekend, Lucas’s parents bought us a birthday cake each and took us to dinner at Le Rivage—newly opened at the time, smelling of fresh paint and freshly sawed wood. It was one of the first restaurants I’d ever been in, although I was way too embarrassed to admit it to them. The next day, Lucas and I went with his older brother, Eliot, and a group of their friends to a gig, and although I definitely didn’t dance, not once, it was one of the best nights I’d ever had. Not because it was fun. But because of how they all saw me. As one of them. As a regular seventeen-year-old, world at her feet. Not “that girl from Fortescue Lane.” Just Emmie Blue, cocktail in hand, out for a good time before she finally escaped school and started college. And tomorrow, on our fourteenth birthday together, we will be thirty. Thirty years old. The age I’ve kept my eye on over the years, like a prize in the distance, like a safe haven, a warm light in the dark on the horizon. Because everyone is settled at thirty, aren’t they? You’re an adult at thirty—fully fledged—and everyone knows who they are. Or at least, everyone knows exactly where they are going, even if they haven’t quite made it there yet.
I stretch over to the side of the bed now and pull my suitcase onto the bed. I unzip it. Everything is still folded neatly inside from when I packed it last night, excitement fizzing in my stomach, imagining exactly what would happen after he asked me. After Balloon Girl looked across that table, on the beach that brought them together, and said yes to Balloon Boy, fourteen years later.
I take out the black gift box nestled in among my clothes and remove the lid.
“So, hang about, this was New Year’s Eve? As in New Year’s just gone?” Rosie had asked last week. It’s how we’ve learned about each other over the last two years, Rosie and I. Condensed histories, anecdotes, worries, hopes, and memories in tiny, thirty-minute digestible capsules on our lunch breaks.
“Yeah, he’d had
a shit night and got in at just past midnight, French time, and I was already at home in my room, watching Jools Holland, so we FaceTimed. From our beds.”
Rosie had stared, wide-eyed, smiling. “So hot. And you said one of your resolutions was to meet someone?”
“Fall in love,” I’d said, and she’d fluttered her eyelashes and said, “Tell me what Lucas said again.”
“He called me bold,” I’d said, laughing. “Said, fuck, Em, that’s bold. And then he was sort of falling asleep, ’cause he’d had like a million whiskey sours, but he said—he said that had I ever stopped to think about why we were so hopeless when it came to love. Because he had a theory. It was us. We were probably always meant to be together.”
Rosie had squealed then, grabbing my wrists. “Oh god, Emmie, he’s going to ask you, you do know that, don’t you?” she’d said. “That’s why he said he can’t ask you on the phone, in case you hang up or freak out or something. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Like, totally. After all these years…”
I look at the open gift box now, in front of me on the bed. The bespoke leather sketchbook I’d bought a few weeks ago, his initials embossed on the front and on the corner of every blank page inside, didn’t feel like enough after that conversation with Rosie at work. She was right. It was beautiful—would have been. Two people who met against all odds, just when they needed each other. Same age, same birthdays, same obsession with Marmite and Footballers’ Wives. By chance, some might say, but I don’t. And I wanted to mark it with more than just a nice birthday gift. That’s when I’d decided to buy the gift box in front of me, excitedly making a list on the back of a napkin in the kitchen at work, of the important things that needed to go inside. I take an envelope out of it now, containing the first ever email Lucas sent me, when we were strangers. Subject: I found ur balloon! I take out the jar of Marmite too. Newly purchased, but a double of the first thing I ever sent Lucas (along with my French oral tape for him to listen to and check for accuracy before I handed it in to my languages teacher). I sent it because he said along with EastEnders and chip shop mushy peas, it was something he missed from home, which was London before France. That was when the mix CDs started. He’d sent the first one in exchange for the Marmite—a little thank-you that grew into something that became a ritual; a lifeline. I’d send him something from home, and in return, he’d send a mix CD, which were like little letters in themselves. Eight in total. He still owes me the ninth. It’s the final thing in the box, the first CD. And although there is a single crack across the plastic casing, the card inside curling at one of the edges, it’s still perfect. The ink of Lucas’s handwriting navy blue and unsmudged. All straight capital letters, written calmly, confidently, slowly. Not like Lucas now, his handwriting flighty and energetic, as he is, always with something bigger, better to be doing.
I can’t. I can’t hand these things over tomorrow—a history of us, of how we got here, to this moment, in objects, across the usual breakfast table on Amanda and Jean Moreau’s picture-perfect patio. So I put everything but the CD in my suitcase, and replace the gift box lid on the single, benign, friendly thing inside—the sketchbook. I put it on the bedside cabinet, ready for the morning, and snuggle down into bed.
My phone lights up with a football news notification I wish I knew how to switch off, and I check the time. 12:33 a.m. Well. There it is. I am officially thirty. I’m thirty years old, and it’s safe to say that at this precise moment, I definitely do not know where I am going.
I close my eyes, pull my knees to my tummy. I never thought this would be how I’d begin my thirtieth year. Feeling tiny. Pathetic. Insignificant. Because I know, deep down, I am made of strong stuff. Rebuilt with it, at least, the way we all are, over the years, with age and experience, skin thickening, heart softening, patched up double in the places prone to breakage. A sum of all the things that have hurt us, scared us, sheltered and delighted us.
And that’s what Lucas is to me, I suppose. Delight, yes, of course. But shelter. Safety. I rebuilt a new Emmeline—a new Emmie—after that Summer Ball, aged sixteen, painstakingly. But from that very first email, he was the one who helped me do it. Supported every decision, applauded every tiny step I took as if they were giant leaps.
Tears sting behind my eyelids now. Because I know, in that certain way you only do when your gut has taken charge, that I have to support him. I know I have to applaud this step Lucas is taking—this huge, giant leap—regardless of how much it hurts. I owe him that. That’s what a best friend does. A best woman.
I hold the CD in my hand. The final track listing the last thing I see before my eyes close and I fall asleep.
* * *
Mix CD. Vol. 1.
Dear Balloon Girl,
Track 1. Because you nailed your French oral
Track 2. Because your taste in boy bands needs desperate help
Track 3. Because your surname is Blue
Track 4. Because all you eat is fried egg and chips
Track 5. Because you will always have me
Balloon Boy
X
The Moreaus’ long, parasol-shaded patio table looks like something from House & Garden magazine, this morning. Its crisp, white tablecloth is weighed down with plates of warm golden pastries, coffeepots, bowls of ruby-red strawberries and dewy blueberries—and of course, in keeping with tradition, two birthday cakes, sitting high and proud on ceramic cake stands. One at each end. One for Lucas. One for me. Each one, like every year, with a story.
“I know a black cake isn’t exactly cheering.” Amanda, Lucas’s mum, smiles, adjusting the tower of croissants so they’re all in perfect Jenga-like alignment. “But all I hear about at the moment is your bloody car’s new leather interior and I thought, well, if fondant was my thing, I might make Lucas a car. You know, actually carve the car out of sponge…”
“No, no, no,” mutters Jean over his espresso, eyes over the top of his glasses. “I would not have survived the stress of living with you during such a thing, my love.”
Amanda rolls her eyes but smiles, her thin lips, as ever, painted the color of pink pearls. “But I thought, this was the next best thing. And I thought, if I do it quilted, you’ll know it isn’t just—”
“A jet-black cake,” chuckles Lucas.
“And not a representation of your soul,” I add. Amanda stops, a hand coming up to her mouth, and laughs; the laugh she does that’s a yelp before it’s a giggle, and Jean, who has only laughed a maximum of twice in his whole life, and both times accidentally, smirks from behind his tiny white espresso cup.
“Oi, it’s my birthday.” Lucas leans to nudge me. “You’ve got to be nice to the middle-aged.”
“Says you,” I say. “You greeted me this morning by calling me Moon Face.”
“Moon Face.” Amanda laughs again, a bitten strawberry between her fingers. “It was that photo of the pair of you, wasn’t it? That we took in… was it Honfleur, for your brother’s birthday? Where the flash turned you both white as corpses.”
Lucas nods. “Eliot’s twenty-first. Years ago, now.”
“And my face was just so round and so white,” I say, and Lucas laughs.
“Like I was having lunch with the actual moon in a denim jacket.”
I scowl at him, and he grins.
“I can’t believe you still call her that.” Amanda smiles, sitting down, fanning a napkin out on her lap.
Lucas laughs, “Only on special occasions.”
“Like thirtieth birthdays,” I add.
“Exactly.” Lucas nods. “Now, would you pass me that thing of jam, please, Moon Face? What? I’m making the most of being able to say it. I won’t use it again until you turn forty or get married or pregnant, or something equally as big.”
I had felt sick at the thought of walking out here this morning. The dread of opening my eyes to see the sun peeping from behind the heavy cream curtains of the bedroom, and knowing it was morning, knowing it was our birthday, was so heavy last nig
ht that it pinned me to the mattress. If I woke up here, in Le Touquet, in this bedroom, on the ninth of June, my eyes swollen, surrounded by scrunched tissues, it meant it happened. It was real. The man I love told me he wanted to spend forever with someone else and wanted me to be there, right next to him, in the spotlight, as he told the world.
Rosie’s voice swirled through my brain, as if she were on the phone, when I lay in bed first thing this morning, staring with gritty eyes at the ceiling. I hadn’t texted her back last night—as far as the real Rosie is concerned, Lucas and I are tangled up in white sheets right now, fingers laced, all sleepy smiles and morning plans. Boyfriend and girlfriend. But I knew what Rosie would say if she knew what had actually happened last night: “Arse up, Em. In that shower. Go in Mopey, Heartbroken Emmie Blue, but come out the Strong, Independent Woman you are. I mean it. Like you’re on Stars in Their Eyes, and the Moreaus are your gullible bloody audience.” And that is what I did. Hoisted myself up and showered for twenty minutes solid, washing my hair, shaving my legs, and even exfoliating using one of the glass, gold-lidded products Amanda always leaves me in the bathroom. I blow-dried, I moisturized, and even tried out contouring using a tutorial Rosie had hammered out and saved in the notes app on my phone, and then I walked down the path to the Moreaus’ picture-perfect, lush green back garden like my heart was full, and not aching. Like I was thirty years old, with everything figured out, and not lost. Not alone.
“Emmie?”
I look up to see Amanda angling the plate of pastries toward me.
“Almond, darling? I always get the almond ones for you.”
I take one. “Thanks, Amanda.” My appetite is nonexistent, my stomach in a constant churn, but if I don’t eat, not only will I feel sick, but Lucas might notice and ask if I’m all right, and I don’t want that Lucas today. Kind, hand-on-my-arm, concerned Lucas. That Lucas might tip me back into the melted puddle of tears I was last night.
