Break-Up Club

by Lorelei Mathias

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re not so much going out with Lawrence as you are childminding him?’

  Holly returned the uneaten chip to the plate. ‘Sod off. He’s not that bad.’

  ‘She’s got a point!’ Bella chimed, back from the Cotswolds. ‘I mean… can you ever imagine having children with him? When he’s so much like a child himself?’

  Holly bit her tongue, striving to suppress all references to pots and kettles.

  Olivia looked alarmed. ‘Christ, ick, guys! Not the C word!’

  ‘Yeah, since when are we having children?’ Holly said.

  ‘You still want them one day, don’t you?’ Harry said, turning back from the mute television briefly.

  ‘I don’t know – maybe. Anyway… Lawrence makes me laugh. Surely that counts for a lot? And surely I should just be living for now, shouldn’t I?’ She stared at them with hopeful eyes through the silence. Her eyelid started twitching again.

  Everyone was silent, while Holly sat hoping at least one person would defend her boyfriend. That at least one of them would stop the death-knell from sounding. ANYONE???

  The silence dragged on.

  ‘So just to clarify. If Lawrence isn’t who I want to spend my life with, and isn’t who I might imagine having children with if I even want children that is… then that means being with him is a form of time-wasting?’

  ‘There it is!’ shouted Harry.

  ‘This conversation is a form of time-wasting,’ Olivia said, drinking the last of her orange juice and lemonade with a discrete slurp. ‘I think you need to face it – the end is in the post,’ Olivia said. Bella smiled sympathetically. ‘But not just yet – maybe it’s just second-class rather than first.’

  ‘When did we get to a Royal Mail convention? Give it a rest guys. Just ’cause you’re trying to get me to join your stupid club.’

  ‘For the last time, there is no club!’

  ‘Here’s a question,’ Harry began, ‘if you were with Lawrence aged twenty-one, would you still be sticking with him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think that a big part of why you’ve stayed with him this long despite his, er, flaws is that you’re scared you might not meet anyone else that could be lifer material. And then you’ll wish you’d held onto him,’ he said, taking out an electric cigarette.

  Holly opened her mouth to say, ‘Harry, smoking again, really? After three years of being on the wagon?’ but she stopped herself, remembering he had a reason.

  ‘I think you’ve nailed it there, Harry,’ Bella began. ‘There’s such a difference between meeting someone in your early twenties compared with your late twenties. There was no pressure back then! These days, the kinds of thoughts in my head aren’t “what shall we go as for fancy dress?”, they’re “I like the way he just fixed that wonky restaurant table with an old newspaper – he’ll be good around the house when it comes to D.I.Y!”, or “Oh, he’s letting me pay the bill, that means one day I’ll have to be the one with the well-paid job and good maternity benefits!”’ Bella reached the end of her monologue, now a few shades pinker.

  ‘Of course, you can see that’s TOTALLY INSANE, can’t you?’ Harry said.

  ‘Of course,’ Bella lied.

  ‘Listen,’ Olivia began, ‘I’ve been working on a theory about all this, after consulting various people, and I think I’m ready to test it on you. It goes like this: all relationships can be classified according to the following “sentences”. They’re either a three-monther, a six-monther, three years, five years… or…’

  ‘Or what?’ Holly asked.

  ‘A life sentence.’

  Everyone nodded slowly.

  ‘Wow,’ Harry said. ‘That’s bang on. And there’s no irony in the word “sentence” either.’

  ‘I know. So Ross and I, we were just a five year-er, gone long. That’s why it needed to end. And by the same token,’ Olivia turned to face Holly, ‘you and Lawrence, you’re a five year-er; you’ve lived out your sentence. I don’t think you have it in you to become lifers.’

  Holly gulped, but said nothing. Everyone stared.

  Eventually Harry spoke up. ‘How did you leave it with Lawrence in the end?’

  ‘Well. We agreed to “take some space” for a few weeks, while he’s away at his film festival. That way, we can both give it some proper thought, and make an informed decision.’

  ‘So in other words, you’re on a break? I’ve told you once and I’ll tell you again, Holly… breaks are a sham,’ Olivia said, her words a small kitchen-knife through Holly’s heart.

  Bella put an arm around her by way of comfort.

  ‘Cheers, Liv. Did you have a VOICE OF DOOM pill for breakfast? Besides, it’s just a mini-break! A semicolon, rather than a full stop?’

  ‘She does have a point, hon,’ Bella said, nodding sagely. ‘In my experience, breaks are only ever a dress rehearsal for the main performance.’

  ‘But you’re all forgetting one thing. Breaking up with someone is TERRIFYING.’

  Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not going to sugar-coat it, Braithwaite. You either dump him or stay with him. Break-ups are absolutes. Not hotel buffets where you can put a little bit on your plate to see if you like it first.’

  Holly gulped. The last time she’d gone to a hotel buffet, she’d had a self-control malfunction and ended up with three sky-high platefuls, and the waitress had had to move her to a bigger table. She flushed with horror. ‘Well, let’s just see how this next month goes, shall we…?’

  ‘I mean really. When has a break ever led to happiness? Can anyone show me a happy couple that got through a break, for the better!?’

  The question hung in the air like a bad smell that no one knew how to get rid of. Worse than the stench in Holly’s room post-chundering.

  7. Break-up and Smell the Coffee

  He is the one; he’s not the one…

  A few weeks later, Holly was sat in her windowless office counting virtual daisy petals. After several rounds of this, being no closer to a decision, she tried to get back to cutting down the latest episode.

  Today she was doing a marvellous job of being ruthless – Jeremy would be proud! She’d managed to cut a few frames here, another nip and a tuck there – soon she wouldn’t be far off the magic forty-three minutes!

  But then she got to the next scene and realised it no longer made sense without the bits she’d just cut; now the pay-off had no set-up. She scrolled back and slowly put the frames in again. She looked at the clock, saw that she’d just lost forty minutes to indecision, and sighed.

  Choosing between shots was hard enough for Holly at the best of times. But now her relationship was on a life-support-machine, possibly breathing its last – all previous decision-making abilities had been forcibly removed by an impenetrable fog of vagueness, leaving her with all the editorial conviction of a piece of wet lettuce. No, only one thing could help her now. Shopping. Holly leapt up, stuck a note on her door saying ‘back soon’, and fled up the corridor.

  Soon she was face to face with her good friend the stationery cupboard. She looked from side to side. Moments later, she was rifling through supplies. She filled her arms with notebooks, file dividers and shiny new highlighters. She wasn’t proud, but this sort of thing gave her unbridled joy. It had all the perks of shopping, only it didn’t cost a thing, there were no queues and no charity muggers! But best of all, you had none of the horror of seeing your bubble-wrapped cellulite in the over-lit mirror. Yes. Performing a stationery raid was basically retail therapy, without the heart attack at the end of the month. Westfield, Bluewater, they had nothing on Room G.E.13.

  As Holly was midway through foraging for felt-tip pens, she remembered that Lawrence would probably need some more layout pads so he could keep up his storyboarding practice. In her own small way, she liked to help him build up his career by kitting him out with as much free stationery as he needed. Yes. She would give them to him when he was back from Paris. What a good almost-girl
friend I am, she thought, filling her arms with more art and craft paraphernalia than a whole season of Blue Peter.

  Cradling her bounty, she walked smack bang into her boss Jeremy, who gave her a look that said, Am I not paying you enough?

  ‘Oh… Hi Jeremy. Did you have a chance to read that proposal I left on your desk yet?’ she said, hoping to distract him from her lever-arched-kleptomania.

  He shot her a look of tepid interest, which she took as her cue to go on.

  ‘No? Well hopefully you’ll like this, as it’s much more “Reality” based. It’s a documentary called “Is This Seat Taken?” We find real-life couples who met in amazingly serendipitous ways, and interview them for a really uplifting film. I did some research on the weekend; turns out there are tons of amazing real-life chance meetings. From a couple who met while staring through an estate agents window, to a couple who married at the age of 22 only to discover they’d been born side by side in the same hospital bed! Isn’t that mental! Then there’s my boyfriend and I who met because someone next to us did a really smelly—’

  ‘Can I just stop you there, Holly?’

  ‘You hate it.’

  ‘I don’t hate it as much, but the tone’s still way off. It’s far too twee for what we need. Secondly, doesn’t the whole world online date these days – why would anyone care about this archaic Brief Encounter crap?’

  ‘Well you say that but, as I put in the proposal… it’s precisely because people are changing the way they meet that these stories are so interesting. Surely now is a timely, um, time for all this? Boy meets girl is a story as old as time, but…’ Holly stopped, noticing that Jeremy had started to go red in the face, and not from embarrassment.

  ‘Another worry is that it will just depress the fuck out of lonely people. I don’t want to be responsible for a rise in suicide rates.’

  ‘No. Absolutely.’

  ‘It’s not all bad news though. I’ve had a good idea in from Pascal, which I think could be a goer. It’s not quite there yet but once he’s developed it some more, and unless you can think of anything better, we’ll be taking that to the channel.’

  Holly suppressed a gulp. ‘Oh, OK. I’ll keep thinking then, and send you something soon.’

  Holly walked up the corridor back to her office, thinking, why oh why did I leave my perfect old job, when she noticed a Diesel-clad beanpole leaning by her door in the manner of a catalogue model.

  Luke spotted her and smiled.

  ‘Hey. Just finished filming for the day, and thought I’d see how your caffeine levels were doing. If you still fancy going for that coffee?’

  Three thoughts were vying for Holly’s attention. One, she’d never actually agreed to have a coffee with him, had she? Two – Luke was looking annoyingly hot. And three – how was she going to explain the fact that she looked like she was driving the getaway car from a Ryman’s robbery?

  ‘Umgh,’ she said, feeling even more inarticulate than usual. Luke’s face puckered with confusion. ‘Sorry. That was “yes, great, come in”.’

  ‘Been to the sales?’ he asked, following her inside.

  ‘Ha ha,’ she said, piling up her ‘purchases’ onto her desk. ‘Just needed to stock up on some things.’

  ‘Never had you down as a closet klepto.’

  ‘Ha ha. No, they’re for my boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Luke looked down and began to shift about on his feet.

  Ouch. The Drop-In was never a good moment for either party. The awkward moment when you know, and they know, that there’s been an unspoken spark between you, and A MOMENT has clearly been had, but one of you has decided to call time and announce that this probably shouldn’t go any further.

  ‘Well. My sort-of-boyfriend that is,’ she back-pedalled, ‘we’re in a weird patch at the moment. Anyway. He’s a director. He uses them for storyboarding.’

  ‘OH. My. God. You saw this?’

  He was staring at Holly’s noticeboard, where a flyer from Michel Gondry’s short film The All-Seeing Eye was pinned up.

  ‘I did! It was incredible. You saw it too?’

  ‘I was on tour with a play, so I couldn’t make it unfortunately.’

  ‘It kind of reminded me of those memory games you played when you were younger… you know, “I went to the shop and I bought…” and then you have to try and remember all the items everyone bought.’

  ‘I remember that game! I was shit at it. Probably smoked too much weed as a child.’

  ‘Ha. Well, it was sort of like that, only in reverse. The idea was, you sat in this strange circular room, looking at objects being projected onto the walls around you. Each time the projections went around, the objects in the room disappeared one by one, until there was nothing left.’

  ‘Sounds intriguing.’

  Luke picked up some layout pads and moved them aside so he could sit on the desk. Holly’s eyes landed on the stuffed toy that was just under her noticeboard. It was a tiny womble holding up a little window frame, which Lawrence had bought her on her second day, when she’d complained about not having a window.

  ‘I’m sure the film must be online somewhere.’ Holly jumped onto her computer and began Googling. ‘Here… have you tried the mediatheque?

  ‘The what?’

  ‘You don’t know the mediatheque?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You commit yourself to celluloid daily and you haven’t heard of the mediatheque?’

  ‘No, already!’

  ‘It’s only like the best resource in all the land! It’s a massive library of films that you can use free, any time!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s in the British Film Institute; you know, on the Southbank?’

  ‘Amazing, maybe you’ll take me there sometime.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ she said, avoiding the womble’s disapproving gaze.

  Luke smiled. Holly looked down at the floor, before daring to sneak another look at him again.

  There followed an unfeasibly long silence, where they did nothing but hold each other’s gaze while the room became smaller, and the tiny creatures in her belly performed rhythmic gymnastics.

  ‘Unless your sort-of-boyfriend would object?’

  Holly looked at the clock on the wall, as though time itself would have the answer. As she opened her mouth to speak, her phone rang and she looked down to see Lawrence’s flashing jpeg.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I should just get this quickly.’

  Luke nodded and started looking round the room at things.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, unable to hide the surprise from her voice. ‘Lawry, I thought we were… Can I call you back? I’m just in a meeting…’ she said, looking apologetically at Luke.

  ‘Womble,’ Lawrence’s voice said down the phone. ‘Sorry, I know we’re not – but I just need help doing this quick email to production company reps, like you suggested. Can you help me write this draft? Listen to this… Dear Monique, I’m writing to you to—’

  ‘But you’re great at writing! You don’t need my help!’ She shook her head to Luke as if to say ‘wait, don’t go’, but he was already halfway out the door, making ‘I’ll call you’ signs with his fingers.

  She sighed. ‘All right, read the next bit…’ and she heard the door close behind her.

  *

  ‘How was your day, dear?’ a red-eyed Harry slurred later in pseudo-American drawl. He was swinging in a large hammock that was tied precariously to the railings of the roof terrace.

  ‘Marvellous, honey,’ she lied as she wandered onto the terrace, ‘but where did this come from? It’s awesome! We can pretend we’re crusty backpackers again!’ she said, pushing Harry so that he swung even faster.

  ‘Indeed! I liberated it from my flat just as I was leaving with my rucksack. Rachel and I got it in Thailand. Hope you don’t mind it monopolising the balcony.’

  ‘Course not. It makes a welcome addition to the outdoor furniture collection,’ she said, taking a seat on
a weather-beaten dining chair. ‘Just don’t swing too much and go plummeting off the balcony to your death.’

  Harry’s eyes lit up as though she’d just given him an idea.

  ‘So, I saw Rachel today.’

  ‘Shit, where?’

  ‘She’s been begging me to meet up for a drink, so she could explain.’

  Holly nodded. ‘So how was it?’

  ‘Just awful. It’s weird. I always thought I’d be all right about the odd bit of infidelity. I thought that I loved her to pieces and I’d be able to forgive her if she ever did something like that. But it turns out, I’m a right old-fashioned cretin, and she’s never going to be the girl I fell in love with!’

  ‘Mmm,’ Holly said, no idea what else to say.

  ‘Still, she wants to keep on going, and to try and put it behind us. She invited me back, so I thought I’d try and be the bigger man – give her another chance.’

  ‘In other words, have some nice break-up sex.’

  ‘Right… But when we got back there, I just couldn’t stop seeing his face, imagining them at it, replaying it like a bad porn film in my head. I just couldn’t get into it. So I ran away like an absolute tit and came to sit in my hammock.’

  ‘Poor Harold,’ she said, leaning over the hammock to give him an awkward hug.

  ‘Here. Climb aboard.’ Harry shunted along and gestured for her to join him.

  ‘What if it breaks?’

  ‘I’ll hold my stomach in so I’m lighter.’

  Holly laughed.

  ‘Let it break. It’s just a relic of my dead relationship anyway.’

  ‘Oh well, at least Jeremy blew out my documentary idea. At this rate we’d have two less contributors for it!’

  ‘Well, every cloud.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re right, I am becoming obsessed. I just so want to beat smug Pascal!’

  ‘I think you’re actually quite enjoying all this coming up with ideas malarkey.’

  ‘No, I’m just worried about how I’ll pay off my mahoosive credit card bill if my contract doesn’t get renewed.’

  ‘Come and join me.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s a double?’