She pictured the scene of her boyfriend sitting on the other train, staring with intent at the stopwatch on his phone. Lawrence’s diehard competitiveness was one of the things that most riled her about him. Or was it loved? Who knew, she wondered as she pulled her black beret out of her bag and folded it into a makeshift travel pillow. She wedged it beneath the cushion of her thick brown hair, and rested her head against it. She listened to the voice reading out the names of the stops and closed her eyes. She began replaying the imaginary scene of the actress in the sound booth. She’d had that slightly clipped, RP accent, evocative of another era. Perhaps she’d done the recording many years ago, dressed in forties get-up, her hair in victory rolls? She couldn’t help smiling, until a bleak thought occurred. The recording sounded so dated that there was a strong chance the owner of the voice was no longer alive. In which case, these slightly tetchy TFL announcements could be the only echo of her that remained in this world? Her legacy. Holly struggled to think what she’d be remembered for, were she to shuffle off this mortal coil right now. An insalubrious flat-share, a dysfunctional relationship, and an intellectually emaciated TV show about a regional discotheque. Ball bags, Holly thought, looking upwards with pleading eyes and hoping it wasn’t too late for her to make a proper contribution to the world.
Half an hour later, the train reached Tufnell Park. Holly rubbed her eyes and breathed a quiet sigh of relief to be north of the river again, and closer to home. Leaving the platform, she found herself jumping the stairs two at a time. She cleared the Oyster machines and ran through the ticket hall, where she could see that – bugger it – Lawrence was standing beside a lamp post on the street. She could tell by the position of his thumbs and the rapid movement of his eyes that he was playing Candy Crush on his phone. As she walked towards her man, she began playing a favourite game of her own, imagining it was the first time she’d ever seen him. She pretended to check him out, to assess if she still wanted to jump the bones of this stranger before her. She surveyed the optimum amount of stubble across his face and the dark brown hair that was perennially in the just-got-out-of-bed style. She studied his tall build – athletic without even trying – and his weathered Che Guevara T-shirt. She smiled. Yep, he definitely still had it. Despite being annoying in a multitude of ways, Lawrence Edward Hill could still turn her stomach to mush.
‘See?’ Lawrence said without looking up, his voice drunk with ‘I told you so’.
‘All right, well done.’
He stared at her expectantly.
‘Yes, you were right.’
He smiled. ‘So, since I won, maybe you can get the wine for dinner?’
‘You’re all charm,’ Holly said, poking him in the ribs, then beginning to walk up the road.
‘But not just yet…’ he said, tugging at her arm. He bent down to kiss her and they smooched under a street lamp like teenagers.
‘Hey,’ Holly said, breaking away. ‘Don’t laugh, but, if for instance I should, you know, die in some sort of freak accident tomorrow – what would you remember most about me? My eyes? My voice?’
Lawrence’s thick brown eyebrows crinkled towards each other. ‘Well, since you ask, your laugh. I think it’s the most beautiful sound ever. But what is this? Have you gone wonky with motion-sickness again?’
‘I just got a bit hypnotized by that Tube announcer’s voice, hearing it over and over. I didn’t have a book to read, so for some reason I went off on one, and started overthinking things.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ he said, before smiling, ‘although, you did have a much longer journey than me.’
‘Ha ha, very funny,’ Holly said, as they walked hand in hand towards Boozenest – the 24-hour convenience store she lived above with her two flatmates.
‘But just imagine, what if you actually knew her? What if you were her boyfriend and she’d up and left you one day? Would it be really painful hearing her voice every time you travelled? Or – what if she did these recordings years ago, and now she’s six feet under?’
Holly crouched on the pavement and began opening bags at random. Lawrence bent down to assist her in The Great Key Hunt. ‘Well, if that were true, it’d be a bit like she’s been accidentally immortalised by Transport for London.’
‘Exactly! I mean, imagine if she’d left behind a widower. Do you think the poor guy would ride the Northern line, just to hear her voice again, as a way of being with her again in some way? Or maybe he’d always avoid it, as it would be too painful?’
‘The Northern line is always painful,’ Lawrence said as his fingers pulled out something sharp and metal. ‘Et voilà!’
Holly smiled, took the keys from him and began unlocking the door, just as her phoned beeped with a message.
‘Shut the front door!’ she said, stopping on the stairs to re-read the text.
‘I just did,’ Lawrence replied, shooting her a puzzled look before noticing her mouth drop open. ‘Oh. What’s up?’
‘It’s Olivia. No wonder she wanted to come over for dinner all of a sudden. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend. I can’t believe it. She and Ross were an institution at university.’
‘How awful. Who’s Olivia?’
‘You know Olivia. From Uni. Wow, I really thought they were in it for the long haul,’ she mused as they stood up and began to hike up the stairs.
‘Hello?!’ Holly shouted over a booming Ella Fitzgerald song as they reached the internal front door and she pushed it open. They headed up more stairs, past a tapestry of Blu-Tacked posters of film and music icons. On first moving in to 249a Fortess Road, Holly’s long-term flatmate Bella, had been outvoted on the motion to only display pictures in frames from now on ‘We’re not students anymore’, Holly and her other flatmate Daniel had pointed out. But slowly, as if by osmosis, new Blu-Tacked posters had begun appearing every few months.
Holly wandered into the lounge and through the kitchen, looking towards the small roof-terrace where Bella was smoking. Seeing her flatmate, she thought again how fine the line was between fancy dress and Bella’s style preferences. A slave to vintage, Bella was dressed head to toe in fifties housewife chic, from the red and white polka-dot apron pinching in at her waist, to the Routemaster-red lips and heels.
‘We have wine!’ declared a triumphant Holly, opening the bottle and popping it onto the kitchen table to let it breathe. Then she bent down to the speakers, turned down the insanely loud Ella, and headed outside, kissing Bella on the cheek. She stood on the terrace and took in the staggering view of North London trees and rooftops, remembering again why they’d chosen to live at the top of so many flights of stairs.
‘Sorry, it took forever to get here from zone twenty. We’ve left you to do all the dinner. Can we help now?’
‘Oh, crap!’ Bella stubbed out her cigarette and headed back into the kitchen where some pots were just starting to bubble over. Next to the hob there was a cavalcade of crumbs, empty tofu packaging, stray lentils and shards of purple sprouting broccoli. Bella began stirring the lentils with one hand while applying mascara with the other, using the kitchen window as a mirror.
‘No, it’s all under control. Just open some wine. Who’s this friend of yours that’s coming over again?’
‘Olivia. We were in halls together at university. She’s down in London this weekend,’ Holly said, attempting to fold napkins in a way that didn’t look entirely eighties. ‘She stayed up in Manchester after graduation, which is why we don’t see that much of each other. That, and she’s been mummified in a relationship for the last seven years. But apparently they’ve just broken up, so…’ Holly looked at Bella to make sure she was paying attention, ‘…so she’s probably going to be a little fragile right now,’ she warned just as the doorbell rang.
‘Liv!’ she squealed into the intercom. ‘Hey love. Come on up.’
Some moments later, Olivia Mahoney appeared under the curved archway next to the kitchen. Unlike Holly and Lawrence, who had both emerged from the stairs l
ooking like they’d just been traversing the Pennines, Olivia was barely out of breath.
‘Hello!’ she sang, with a smile that made everyone stop what they were doing. Olivia had always been disarmingly stylish, but today she appeared to have actually been curated by Dolce & Gabbana themselves – if her freshly straightened mahogany hair and immaculate shift dress that perfectly highlighted her curves – were anything to go by. In short, this was not the look of a recent refugee from Dumped Ville, Tennessee.
‘Holly! It’s been so long! Oh my days, you look so healthy!’ she said, going in for a hug.
‘Thanks,’ Holly smiled, wondering mid-hug whether to take this as a compliment, or some sort of backhanded suggestion of weight gain.
‘I’m so sorry to hear about you and Ross,’ Holly lamented as she squeezed her tight, ‘how are you coping?’
‘Oh! I’m fine, really,’ Olivia said, disentangling herself, ‘actually, I’m sort of loving all this free time I’ve got now. And it’s given me a great excuse to move back to London. Didsbury is lovely and all, but it can be a bit provincial.’
‘Liv,’ Holly said, ‘this is the lovely Bella, one of my flatmates. We met when we temped together at a bleak call-centre after uni.’
Bella took Liv’s hand and shuddered. ‘Oh God, don’t remind me! “Good afternoon, may I speak with the named home-owner?”’ she said in her best admin nasal. ‘“Are you entirely happy with your current broadband provider?” Aaaahh! Kill me now!’ she yelled, curtailing her skit at the sight of Olivia’s muddled expression.
Meanwhile Lawrence had wandered in. Apparently in some kind of hunger trance, he walked towards the fridge, opened it and leaned in to study the contents.
‘And this is Lawrence,’ Holly said, sounding apologetic. ‘We’ll be eating soon, Lawrence.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ Lawrence said, shutting the fridge and turning to face Olivia. ‘Sorry to hear about your break-up and all.’
‘Oh, thanks, but as I was just saying to Hol, I’m fine about it, really. We’d definitely reached the end of the line,’ she said, blinking while running through a word-perfect speech about all the benefits of being single – and how her newfound free time meant she could now take up all the things she’d secretly been craving. Just as she was immersed in the virtues of learning your way round the stock market, Bella inserted a glass of wine into her hands a little too forcefully.
‘So Liv, tell me to shut up if you’d rather not go there, but what happened?’ Holly said. ‘Last I remember, you and Ross were really happy?’
Olivia inspected her nails. Sensing a girl chat brewing, Lawrence grabbed his bag of tobacco and retreated to the terrace.
Olivia sighed. ‘All right. I’ll talk about it – for five minutes, max – then we’ll move on to something more interesting!’ She took a large sip of wine. ‘So, as you may recall, Ross is something of a computer boffin. Sorry, was,’ she added a beat later, remembering with a jolt he belonged to her past tense now.
‘Geeks can be hot though,’ Bella said, ‘what did he do for a living?’
Olivia smirked. ‘If you really want to know, he was a “Backend Developer”.’
Bella snorted. ‘That’s never a real job title.’
‘I’m afraid it is. I think it means he does coding for websites. But don’t quote me.’
A mobile phone on the table began to flash and vibrate, and Olivia’s skin tone turned a few pantones lighter.
‘Is it he?’ Bella asked, leaning forwards. She picked up the mobile and examined the flashing photo. Then she looked at Olivia and grinned. ‘Wait, that’s your Ross?’
Olivia nodded.
‘Well, he can backend develop me, anytime…’
‘Bella!’ screeched Holly, elbowing her in the ribs.
Olivia gave a knowing smile. ‘He’s all yours,’ she said, retrieving the phone and cancelling the call. She put it back into her bag and for a nanosecond looked wistful.
‘You’re not going to talk to him?’ Holly asked.
Olivia shook her head; her eyes belying more grief than she perhaps wanted them to. ‘No. When it’s over, it’s over,’ she said as the phone made a loud beep from within her bag. ‘Stick a fork in it, I say.’
‘You’re not even going to see what that is? He’s probably left a voicemail?’ Holly said.
‘Nah.’
No surprises there, Holly reasoned, remembering how at university they’d always joked that Olivia must have been having a cheeky manicure the day God was dishing out the batches of needy female hormones. Which went some way to explaining why the last time Holly had seen her, Olivia had declared herself in the midst of a ‘friendship audit’. Although Holly had been spared this time around, Olivia’s plan had been to prune away anyone peripheral, Facebook or otherwise, that she hadn’t seen in a year. One by one, she had called up each unsuspecting friend for a fond farewell, in the hope that streamlining her social life would have a Zenifying effect. Now that Olivia was newly single, Holly couldn’t help wondering whether she might be regretting the mass cull.
‘So you were telling us what happened?’ Bella said.
Olivia rolled her eyes like a child being told she had to eat her peas before any pudding. ‘All right then. Just quickly. So, as you know, he was a bit of a computer nerd – which was sexy in the beginning. You know, he had a proper geek-chic thing going on. But then he went freelance, set up his own company, and it all changed. He started working from home a lot more, sleeping in and working late. Then one day he just stopped getting dressed at all – he’d just sit around festering, in these rancid jogging bottoms. Until eventually, you couldn’t tell where the pyjamas ended and the tracksuits began.’
‘Wow, that’s so strange,’ Holly said. ‘He was Mr Charisma at uni.’
‘I know,’ Olivia’s eyes moistened as she threw back the rest of her glass of wine. Then like Olivia Twist, she held out the empty receptacle in front of Holly, who immediately filled it up.
‘I remember,’ chimed in Holly, ‘he was that guy in Fresher’s week. The one every girl wanted to… you know, and every guy wanted to be.’
‘But it’s easy to be nostalgic about Old Ross – before he killed his personality off with a lethal concoction of daytime TV and JavaScript.’
‘So what did you do? How did it end?’ Bella tipped her head to one side, her empathy palpable.
‘Fairly predictable stuff. Me saying I thought he’d let himself go, that I just didn’t love him anymore, and we’d grown apart, blah blah… Him saying, “Shit, Olivia, I’m sorry. I wish I could just press Control Z.”’
‘No way,’ Holly said, while Bella’s brow furrowed.
‘That’s Apple Z, for the benefit of Mac Monks. As in, to undo?’ she added, and Bella’s brow un-furrowed. ‘Yes. So then I said, “Ross. I think we both know, it’s a case of Control Alt Delete now.”’
‘Well,’ Holly began, ‘it sounds like you’ve done the right thing. It must feel like such a massive shock to your system though, after seven years.’
‘It’s been brewing for a long time – it’s a relief to have finally done it.’
‘So where are you going to live now?’ Holly asked. ‘Do you want to come and stay with us?’
‘Oh thanks, but I’m staying with my parents in Hampstead for a bit; just while I get myself sorted with a new job down here. But chances are, I’ll only be allowed a week in the show home before I’ll have to be out again!’ Olivia smiled, then covered her ears as the incredibly loud smoke alarm began to go off.
Bella leapt up. ‘That’s dinner!’ She poked her head in the oven. At the sight of smoke she began turning off all the knobs and dials. Holly began prodding at the smoke alarm with a broom to make it stop. This was all done with complete composure, as though it was an everyday ritual.
‘So, everyone, dinner’s kind of a buffet type thing. Just pile on,’ Bella said, as she handed out partially-chipped plates to everyone.
‘Looks amazing, thanks,’ H
olly said, spooning some of the blackened food onto her plate and assessing it for carcinogens. ‘Is Daniel not eating with us?’ said Holly.
‘No, he’s got a night shift at the hospital again, poor bastard,’ Bella said.
‘Ah, shame,’ Holly said, secretly thinking it might have been handy to have a member of the medical profession on standby, but then feeling guilty for being so mean and having done nothing to help prepare dinner. She watched Lawrence digest a whole mouthful before taking one of her own.
Olivia picked up a fork full of food, but then opened her mouth to carry on speaking: ‘But anyway, a friend of mine is just about to put his gorgeous flat in Dalston on the market, so if Ross can buy me out of our flat in Didsbury in time, I’ll be able to nab that and move straight in!’
Bella’s eyes widened. ‘Dalston? As in, East London?’
To Bella, East London was a hallowed kind of a place. Legend had it, it was where all the hot men in London were being kept. Bella had stumbled across it one day while navigating a Walk of Shame through an unknown neighbourhood somewhere North of Bethnal Green. Quite by accident, she’d found herself in a quaint little strip called Broadway Market. It was all fancy deli stalls, fit-as-fuck buskers, and dashing men with oversized spectacles on fixed-gear bikes. Ever since then, there was sometimes talk in hushed tones of ‘going East’, as if it was some kind of promised wonderland. Bella would bring up the notion of warehouse parties in Dalston once in a while, but the thought of venturing somewhere new always lost out to the easy walk home from the local.
‘Anyway, Liv,’ Holly said, feeling the need to change the subject, ‘if I can say so, you seem to be doing very well considering.’
‘You really are,’ Bella said, ‘I mean, if it was me, I’d be needing round-the-clock care to help me do basic things like getting dressed and swallowing solids.’
Break-Up Club Page 2
