Something Like Happy

by Eva Woods

  “Wax, duh. We better finish it, or you’ll have one bald strip.”

  “I hate you,” Annie muttered. There was more to come. Her feet were buffed into submission, her nails clipped, her fingernails filed.

  Polly kept shaking her head. “How did you let them get so bad? Didn’t you see them every time you looked down at your keyboard?”

  Annie wanted to say that it was easy to ignore things. You just closed your eyes, or looked at something else, and you told yourself it didn’t matter in the scheme of things if your nails were bitten and your cuticles red and ragged. But she couldn’t speak because her face was smeared in a plaster-like mask and she could hardly breathe for fear of cracking. Annie could feel her body fizzing with alarm, as bits of it that had rested in peaceful neglect for years were suddenly attacked, deforested, buffed and moisturized. “It’s not about beauty,” Polly lectured. “There’s hundreds of different ways to look amazing. It’s just about caring for yourself. If your hair is all greasy and your hands are sore and cracked, how can you feel good?”

  Annie was having her eyebrows tweezed when the door went. Oh, no. Costas. She’d hoped he’d stay out tonight. He was wearing his work T-shirt and smelled of coffee, but his smile was wide. “Polly!”

  “Hello, you.” Polly and he exchanged kisses. “I’m making over your lovely flatmate.”

  Costas clapped his hands. “My sisters, they do this, too. I used to paint their hands!”

  Another ten minutes, and Annie was staring at the ceiling in deep shame, while Polly painted her nails a sparkling gold shade, and Costas did her feet in silver. Her practically teenage flatmate kneeling between her ankles was not something she’d ever hoped for. Buster sat watching attentively, head cocked to the side. She said, “Are we nearly done? Only, Grey’s is on at ten, and—”

  “We’re not remotely done,” Polly chided. “There’s still hair, makeup and clothes. Let me ask you something, Costas—what do you think Annie should wear?”

  “Big skirts,” he said immediately. “She is a—what do you say?—curvy lady, so she needs the...you know.” He flared his hands out from his hips. “Big skirts. And tight here.” He cupped his hands in front of his skinny sculpted chest.

  “Brilliant!” Polly nodded, sending splodges of varnish up Annie’s fingers. “Like a prom dress. That’s a great idea. And then I think something like a pencil skirt and blouse, big heels, you know.”

  “Not the black slack-pants,” Costas said darkly, as if he and Polly had already discussed this.

  Annie thought this was a bit rich from someone who wore T-shirts so tight you could see what he’d had for breakfast (protein shakes, mostly). “I can hear you,” she said crossly.

  Polly ignored her, jumping up. “Annie, don’t move for five minutes. We’re going to dress you up.”

  A red silk skirt, with a frilly petticoat underneath. A tight short-sleeved sweater, like something from the fifties. “Lean on me.” Polly shoved a red patent stiletto onto Annie’s foot. “Now the other.” They were high, much higher than anything Annie would ever wear, and she teetered alarmingly in them.

  “I can’t walk in these! How am I meant to get past that bog around Lewisham Station?”

  “Annieeee—you don’t walk in an outfit like that. You get a taxi, and glide regally up to the door of the restaurant.”

  “Can’t afford taxis. Never go to restaurants.” Not anymore, anyway.

  Polly rolled her eyes. “It’s for a special occasion. Something worth dressing up for, making a fuss. You know?”

  Annie couldn’t think when she’d ever had an occasion like that. Even on their wedding day Mike said they might as well just drive their own car to the registry office. The house was costing every penny they had and it didn’t make sense to pay extra. “Well, I can’t wear this to the office. They’d laugh me out of there.”

  “’Course not. That’s why we have options. Costas!”

  Costas, who was wearing a little pillbox hat with a face veil, began to produce outfits on hangers. “Casual day out.” This was knee boots, a suede mini, leggings and a black jumper with a scoop neck. “Show off your bosoms, Annie!” Another flourish, another outfit. “Date night.” (“Some chance,” muttered Annie.) This, a printed red tea dress with frilled sleeves, which Annie had to admit was lovely, to be worn with a leather biker jacket. “Make it more tougher,” he explained. “Like grrr, motorbike chick.” Annie had never had anyone describe her as a motorbike chick. “Day at the races.” A floral dress with wide straps, a stiff A-line skirt and nipped-in waist, in shades of yellow and pink. “Big hat also. Heels.”

  “I’ve never been to the races in my life,” complained Annie. “What am I meant to wear for normal days? Work? Hospital?”

  “Wear this red dress tomorrow,” Polly ordered. “With the jacket, too. And boots if you have them—no higher than midcalf. Hair up in a big ponytail. Red lipstick. I’ll show you how.”

  Annie’s hair was set with big rollers. She felt like bits of her were being pulled off, changed and put back on again, like washing a dirty pair of curtains. But what was the point if you were exactly the same inside?

  After some time, Costas looked as his retro Casio watch. “Time to go out!” It was half past nine.

  “Oh, to be young again.” Polly sighed. “I used to love going to G.A.Y. on a Sunday night. Have fun, darling.”

  “I can wear this hat?”

  “Please. It looks fab. And you’re wasted in that coffee place—you really know about clothes.”

  He shrugged. “Is just until I get something more. Bye, Polly, bye, Annie. Biker chick! Grrr.” He got down on the floor to kiss Buster between his dark eyes. “Bye-bye, cutie. Do not worry, Papa will be back to take you for wee-wee in the morning.”

  Annie really hoped he wouldn’t get too attached to the dog. “I guess we should clear this up.” She started scooping up armfuls of clothes, distracted by the flashing gold of her nails. “Where did you get all this stuff, anyway? It’s not yours, surely.” Polly was much slimmer than Annie and about a foot taller.

  “I have a stylist friend, Sandy. She has entire rooms of clothes—it’s ah-maz-ing. She says you can keep what you like. She gets sent loads of things from companies in the hope one of her celeb clients will get papped wearing them.”

  “Thanks.” Not that Annie was planning to wear any of it. It was fun to play dress-up, but she wasn’t about to succumb to the cliché of a makeover changing your life.

  Polly was sitting down, as if she’d suddenly run out of energy. “So. Now I have you by yourself, are you going to tell me what all that was about Friday?”

  Annie froze, a floppy straw hat in her hands. “Um, what?”

  “That guy you were running away from.”

  Annie’s hands constricted on the brim of the hat. “I wasn’t running away.”

  Polly paused. “Annie. It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. But don’t lie, okay? Is it something to do with why you live here, and why you share with Costas?”

  “I live here because I can’t afford to buy, and I can’t manage the rent on my own and I can’t get anywhere better.”

  Polly examined her own nails, painted every color of the rainbow. “There’s a lot of can’t in that sentence, Betty Buzzkill.”

  Annie flung the hat down on the suitcase with perhaps unnecessary force. “Look. My life wasn’t always like this, okay? I’m just...having a bad spell. I used to like clothes. I used to get dressed up when I went out—jeans and a nice top and heels and my hair done—and I used to buy decorating mags and bake cakes and stencil my own furniture. All of that. I did own a place once—an actually nice place, that I loved—but that was with Mike.”

  “And Mike is?”

  Annie sighed. She hated this bit. Hated the way people looked at her after they heard the stor
y. “He was my husband.”

  “You’re divorced! Chic. Or did he die horribly? Oh, God, I’m sorry if he died horribly.”

  “No, he’s perfectly fine, as far as I know, and still living in our house with Jane.”

  “Mike and Jane, sounds like a kids’ book. And Jane is...?”

  “She was my best friend. Since we were five.” Annie-and-Jane. Primary school, secondary school, visits to Jane at uni, interrailing around Spain, Annie’s maid of honor. Until the day Mike came home and said, Annie, I have to tell you something. She’d only grasped snatches of that conversation; she’d been so in shock. Fallen in love...didn’t mean to...never meant to hurt you...

  “Ah, I get it.” Polly beamed. “The guy at the hospital was Mike?”

  “Yup.”

  “What was he doing there? Is he sick?”

  “I don’t know.” There was another possibility for why he was there, but it was so awful Annie didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Sorry, it must have been crap, but I do love a good misery story. Your husband left you for your best friend! Does it get better? Meaning worse, of course. They got married?”

  In response, Annie fumbled her phone from her pocket. She scrolled through Facebook until she pulled up a picture of a smiling blonde woman holding a pink cocktail on holiday. The bridge of her nose also pink—she never wore enough sunscreen, and Annie always used to nag her about it.

  Polly peered at the phone. “Jane Hebden. It was his name? You didn’t change back to Annie Clarke?”

  “No.” Annie wasn’t sure why. Thinking she’d lost enough, maybe. Some kind of spite, not wanting to erase every trace of their marriage. Jane had taken everything else.

  “And you’re still Facebook friends with them both? So you can look at pictures of them and torture yourself?”

  “Um, yeah.” It was pretty much Annie’s main hobby, stalking them online.

  “Well.” Polly stood up, which seemed to cost her some effort. “I’ll hand it to you, Annie, that is quite the catalog of misery. Anything else? You better not have cancer, too, I warn you. That’s my thing. You better not be trying to beat me in the ‘world’s most tragic story’ competition.”

  For a moment Annie thought about telling her all of it—the blood on Mike’s pajamas, the blue lights of the ambulance filling her living room, the sound of her own screams, coming from somewhere deep inside her—but she couldn’t. She didn’t think she could bear to say it out loud. “Just the crap job and flat and the divorce and the senile mother.”

  “Good.” Polly stooped, helping her pick up the clothes, the chiffons and lace and silk and leathers. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we, Annie Hebden? I’m dying, you probably wish you were dying.”

  “I did, quite a bit actually.”

  “Don’t blame you. That’s an almighty crapstorm. Question is...what are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s too late for me—I can try to enjoy my last hundred-or-so days, but I can’t have any more. You’ve still got your whole life. What are you going to do with it? Remember, it’s not about counting the days—it’s about making the days count.”

  Annie said nothing. That was a question too terrifying for her. Her rage and pain had given shape to her life, the way a pearl forms around grit in the oyster shell. When she was no longer Annie, wife of Mike and mother of Jacob, she was Annie, who hated Jane and Mike. Who’d been hard done by. Who was angry, and unforgiving. What would she be without those things? If she let go of them?

  “Big questions,” said Polly. “What do you say for now we just watch TV and have a cup of tea?”

  “I’d love that,” Annie said gratefully.

  “But tomorrow, Annie Hebden-Clarke, you will wear the red dress, and put on this lipstick the way I showed you, and do your hair nicely and you will do something positive toward changing all this. Agreed?”

  Annie nodded. It was easier just to go along with it; she’d learned that now. “Let me wash this makeup off and I’ll make us some tea.”

  Polly looked exhausted, despite her cheerful tone of voice. Her eyes were sunk into green shadows that had nothing to do with makeup. “Okay. I might just close my eyes for a sec.”

  In the bathroom, Annie hunted about for makeup remover. It was so long since she’d worn anything more than a slick of lip balm. She found it, then paused as she noticed something else in the cupboard. A little box of blister tablets, the name Maureen Clarke on the front. Sleeping tablets, prescribed for her mother when her symptoms first started, which Annie had hidden because she’d taken five one day, forgetting each time. Annie had a memory from then—everything lost, her husband and best friend living together in her house. The police coming around. Ma’am, I’m afraid we’ve found your mother. Walking in the street in her nightie, no idea who or where she was. Annie had stood in this bathroom and looked at those pills. Run her fingers over the little pouches in the silver foil, and imagined popping them out, and swallowing them, one after the other. Going to sleep, and not waking up from the crushing wall of pain that seemed to have fallen on her. She hadn’t, of course—her mother needed her—but still, she hadn’t thrown them away. She touched the box now, gently, then shut the door on it again.

  In the living room, Polly was asleep, breathing slowly, Buster cuddled up in her arms and snoring gently. One of his ears was up and the other down. Annie covered them with a blanket, and settled in, flicking the TV on to Grey’s Anatomy. If only Lewisham Hospital was full of beautiful people, like Seattle Grace. Admittedly there was handsome, stiff Dr. Quarani. And there was also Dr. Max, grouchy and disheveled, with his stubble and unironed shirts. Maybe she would wear that red dress tomorrow, after all. If she wore any more black someone might mistake her for a pedestrian crossing and walk right over her.

  DAY 22

  Flirt with someone

  “Annie?”

  Annie turned around from the coffee bar where she was buying her breakfast—a syrupy latte and a sticky bun. There was little else that could get her out of bed on a dark freezing morning. “Oh, hi, Dr. Max.” She slid the coffee over in a vain attempt to hide the bun.

  Dr. Max looked like he’d been up all night again. His blue scrubs were crumpled, and his hair was sticking up at various angles like he’d jammed his finger in a socket. All the same, the sight of him made some kind of warmth start to work its way out from her stomach, fanning to the ends of her toes and fingers and the top of her head. He frowned at her. “You look different. Did you do something?”

  Annie was wearing the red dress, as instructed, and the leather jacket, and the boots. Her hair was still silky and bouncy from Polly’s rollers, so she’d tied it into a ponytail. “Oh, I just—Polly gave me a makeover.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Honestly. That woman. Are you both twelve? What was wrong with how you looked before?”

  She hated to admit it, but she had left the house with an extra spring in her step that morning, feeling her hair bounce behind her. Costas, who was covered in glitter and getting in from clubbing as she left, had grrred at her again, which she took to be a good sign. And here was Dr. Max, looking at her properly. “It’s a dress,” he said finally. “Is that what’s different?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s new.”

  “It’s nice. I mean, a nice color. I mean...”

  Annie felt red roll over her cheeks. She risked: “Do you want a coffee? I’m just grabbing some breakfast before work.”

  “Hmm. Well, I could do with a five-minute break. I have to operate on someone’s brain in an hour and I’m so tired I might fall asleep with my hands in their cranium.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “Par for the course. It’s not a nine-to-five job, this.”

  He asked for a triple espresso, and took out a
ratty tenner, but Annie waved it away. “I’ll get this. It’s the least I can do for you, now Mum’s so much better.” Even she had commented on Annie’s new look, saying, “That’s a pretty dress, Sally, can I borrow it for the dance?” Sally was some friend from her mother’s youth, dredged up from forty years ago.

  They sat at a small greasy table the color of bad news. Dr. Max downed his espresso. “That’s good, but you know it might not last. Sami’s tests are going well so far, but there’s a limit to what the drug can do for her.”

  “I know. I’m just glad she isn’t trying to throw chairs.”

  His eyes were tired. “It can’t be easy. What about you? Are you looking after yourself? Getting enough sleep and so on?”

  “I try. It’s hard making it here every day and to work, as well, not to mention Polly’s schemes. Plus, now I have Buster keeping me awake.”

  “How is the wee man?”

  “He’s so far eaten five books, three pairs of shoes and a whole avocado. Skin and all.” Not to mention the multiple trips up and down in the lift all through the night, in a vain attempt to prevent puddles of wee on the floor.

  “He’ll need shots and that. And you can’t keep him forever, you know. Aren’t you in a flat? And who’s looking after him when you’re at work?”

  “Yeah. I know, I know. I’ve had to get a dog-walker in.” Which was an eye-watering expense that Annie hadn’t seen coming. “But it makes Polly happy.”

  He finished the coffee and frowned. Annie hid a smile: he had drips of coffee caught in his stubble. “Don’t let her bully you. I know Polly’s very fun and charming, but remember her brain is also in the process of imploding, aye? She may not always be rational.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. I think I’ve been a bit too rational for a long time, if you know what I mean.”

  He sighed. “Sadly, if I ever have a rationality lapse, people literally die.”

  “Do you ever have time off? I mean, er, is it very busy?”

  “There’s only two neurologists in post at the moment, and we can hardly keep up with the work. We don’t get paid to come in all the time, but if we don’t, as I said, people die.”