The a to Z of Girlfriends

by Natasha West

  But that was real relationships, she supposed. Whatever fairy-tale she’d been living in was being slowly strangled. The best she could possibly hope for was not to end up as bitter and miserable and angry as her parents.

  And then came Izzy’s birthday.

  Twenty-Six

  Izzy opened the front door to the flat. That weird smell hit as ever. She was going to have to call the landlord again. He kept coming ‘round and saying he couldn’t smell it, but he was a damn liar. How could you miss that stench?

  Izzy took off her coat and threw it on the hook. She had twenty minutes before she and Mackenzie had to go back out again to make their restaurant reservation. Izzy would rather have sacked it off, given the choice. But Mackenzie had asked weeks ago what she wanted to do for her birthday and ‘Nothing’ was apparently not an acceptable answer, so in the end she’d buckled to dinner out.

  ‘You in?’ she called down the hall as she slipped her shoes off. ‘The day I’ve had.’

  Mackenzie stuck her head out of the living room. ‘Hi? You ready to celebrate, birthday girl?’

  ‘Sure’ Izzy said without enthusiasm. She was exhausted. Mark had her drive fifty round trip miles that day to speak to a pensioner about his memories of the Second World War. He hadn’t even been drafted. He’d stayed at home because of a respiratory thing. So it was an hour of ration books and ‘I didn’t see a banana ‘til I was thirty.’

  ‘Great. Maybe we could do gifts before we go out?’ Mackenzie asked.

  ‘Nah, we’ll do it after. We need to get going’ Izzy dismissed.

  ‘Seriously?’ Mackenzie said. ‘A load of stuff came in the post today, don’t you wanna see?’

  ‘No’ Izzy said flatly. She wasn’t in the mood to be told what to do on her birthday. Surely that was the point of them, that you got to do what you liked. But it never quite turned out that way, did it? It was like any other occasion, it became about pleasing other people. ‘Just leave it. No one ever gets me anything I want anyway.’ Izzy heard herself. Her brain asked her gently, ‘What the hell has happened to you that you can’t even get excited about a gift?’ But that was a question for another day.

  ‘Look, there’s something I think you’ll want to see’ Mackenzie said, glancing over her shoulder to the living room.

  ‘What do you care? I opened your ones’ Izzy complained. She knew what was happening right now was rather dangerous. If she wasn’t careful, the evening would be ruined before it started.

  ‘Look, can you just come in’ Mackenzie bristled.

  It was about then that Izzy gave up. She was too tired not to fight with Mackenzie. It took so much bloody energy and today, on her birthday, she didn’t have it, couldn’t find it. ‘Christ, give me a break, would you? I’m not some dog that jumps to attention when you snap your fingers’ Izzy complained.

  Mackenzie stepped out into the hall. ‘Izzy, don’t.’

  Izzy raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t what? Make a decision about what happens on my special day?’

  ‘Izzy, for god’s sakes!’ Mackenzie said quickly, shutting the door behind her. ‘Can you not be a dick right now?’ she said quietly.

  Izzy’s blood roiled, and anger she’d been sitting on for months washed right up to the surface. ‘Wow. Brilliant. Calling me a dick on my birthday? That’s top notch girlfriending, Mackenzie. Congratulations, really.’

  ‘Iz-’

  ‘You know what? Sod it. I don’t want to do anything tonight. I think I’m just going to get a hotel for the night.’

  Mackenzie was shocked. ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t be around you right now or I’ll say something I’ll regret.’

  ‘It might be too late for that’ Mackenzie said, closing her eyes slowly.

  Simon suddenly popped his head through the living room door. ‘Hi’ he said.

  Izzy screamed. ‘What the… Simon?’

  Simon turned back to the living room door and called through. ‘OK, guys. I think we should probably all just leave now.’

  Izzy watched in horror as about fifteen people trooped out of the living room sheepishly. Beyond them, she could see the party set up in the living room. Mackenzie had thrown her a surprise party and everyone she cared about had heard her biting her girlfriend’s head off. People from work, Gabby and other friends, her parents, all looking at a loss. Her mother gave her a terrible look of sympathy. But her brother’s face was the worst. He looked so disappointed in her. ‘Happy birthday’ he said as he walked out the front door.

  Izzy ventured into the living room as the last of the guests for her party left. She heard the door click shut as she took in the balloons, food, banners.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ she asked as Mackenzie sloped back in.

  ‘What was I thinking?’ Mackenzie said as she removed a banner that read ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY IZZY!’ ‘I was thinking I wanted to do something special for your birthday. What a bitch, right?’

  Izzy wasn’t having that. ‘If you wanted to do something nice, you would have listened when I asked for a low-key birthday.’

  ‘People always say they don’t want anyone to do anything for their birthdays. No one ever really means it.’

  ‘I meant it’ Izzy told her. ‘And if you ever really listened, you would have known that I don’t like parties. I never have.’

  Mackenzie grabbed ahold of a red balloon and popped it in her hands. ‘I listen, Izzy. It’s all I ever do.’

  Where had she heard those words before? Oh right. Her parent’s awful marriage. So there it was. Her nightmare had come true. They had become Scott and Joanne Mortimer, Izzy’s template for pointless, miserable, poisonous, damaging monogamy.

  Izzy knew then that she couldn’t do this anymore. Because this was it. Rock bottom.

  ‘Mackenzie?’ she began, as two more balloons were viciously murdered. ‘I think we need to talk.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to. We just go around in circles’ Mackenzie said, popping another balloon.

  ‘I know’ Izzy answered. ‘That’s what I want to talk about. I think… I think it’s time to stop this.’

  Mackenzie, holding a sausage shaped balloon, froze before she could pop it. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m unhappy. You’re unhappy’ Izzy said miserably. ‘I think we need to stop doing this to each other.’

  Izzy was surprised to see tears spring to Mackenzie’s eyes. In the back of her mind, where the dark thoughts lurked, where she’d imagined how it might feel to call it a day, she’d pictured only relief when one of them finally said it. But Mackenzie was upset. ‘No, we can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I love you’ Mackenzie moped.

  ‘And I love you’ Izzy told her gently. And then she said something not so gentle. ‘But I don’t know how much I like you anymore.’

  ‘That’s a horrid thing to say’ Mackenzie said, shocked.

  Izzy knew she was right about that. What she was saying was horrible. But it was also the truth and Izzy could no longer ignore it. ‘Can you honestly say you like me as much as you did when we met?’

  Mackenzie frowned. ‘That’s what happens, though, isn’t it? We were in the honeymoon period.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  Mackenzie licked her lips nervously. ‘OK, no. Maybe I don’t. But-’

  ‘Do you like me at all though?’ Izzy asked.

  ‘Sometimes’ Mackenzie said quickly. ‘I like doing things with you. Like hanging out with our friends or going out to eat.’

  ‘Maybe you just like doing those things with someone’ Izzy said sadly. ‘Maybe I did too.’

  Mackenzie didn’t say anything to that. Instead, she looked at the balloon in her hands. Eventually, she dropped the balloon and it drifted to the floor. ‘We can’t give up. Don’t you remember how we were?’

  ‘That’s what’s killing me’ Izzy told her. ‘How the hell did we get here from there?’ Izzy asked miserably.

  ‘It’s the kids
thing, isn’t it?’ Mackenzie said and then desperately added, ‘I’ve changed my mind. It’s fine. I don’t want them.’

  ‘Mackenzie’ Izzy moaned. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘But that’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe to start with’ Izzy said. ‘But it’s not our only problem. You know it isn’t. We’re not right together.’

  Mackenzie sat down next to her on the sofa, deflated. ‘I know.’

  They sat there for some time in silence, amid balloons and cake. What had begun as a party was now a funeral.

  ***

  Izzy moved out a week later. She’d found another place to live, just as shitty and smaller to boot. But it was hers alone. She couldn’t bear the thought of living with anyone else after Mackenzie. Even though it felt like the right choice to leave, Izzy was miserable and lonely. She’d expected that. She was swapping one sort of misery for an easier one and that was fine.

  But then something unexpected happened. Izzy began to feel alright. Lighter. Soon after that, she remembered that she was actually entirely capable of enjoying life.

  It was shocking that she’d forgotten it. It was as though she’d had a bang on the head, suffering memory loss, forgetting to be herself. She’d been so caught up in being a pair for the first time, being one had been lost. But now she’d had another bang to the head and it all came back. She was ok alone. In fact, it was an entirely natural state of being.

  Present Day

  Twenty-Seven

  Izzy was stomping down the hallway of the hotel looking for the woman she had an appointment to marry in half an hour. She was angry, worried. She was also hoping she was wrong.

  She arrived at the door to the room she knew was empty and banged on it, just in case. She waited a moment and unsurprisingly, no one answered. Izzy decided to widen the search.

  She went straight to the carpark to look for her beloved’s car. If it was there, she was still somewhere on the grounds. If not, Izzy would get in her own car and track the woman down like a bounty hunter. In that instance, her plan was to call her mother from the car, to instruct her to send everyone home. That was one thing she couldn’t face doing herself. She didn’t see why she should have to, anyway. She wasn’t the one doing a bunk. She been scared today, obviously. Scared that her entire history was telling her that she wasn’t cut out for marriage.

  But Izzy realised now, as she stood to lose everything, that she’d wanted badly to at least try. She’d wanted the chance. Because everything that had led her here, it couldn’t be for nothing. Everything that had led her to take a chance on the heartbreak, the one that might never mend, it had to be for a reason. She had risked herself entirely for this. She’d given herself over to this love completely. Only to be made a fool of.

  Izzy reached the carpark and went straight to the space the red Honda should have occupied. It was empty. Izzy walked into the gap left by the car and she turned around in it, slowly slumping to the ground until she was sitting in her dress on the tarmac. She inhaled deeply, accepting what had happened.

  After a while, she stood. She walked over to her car and unlocked it. She got in and started the engine.

  2015:

  ‘Am I a rebound?’

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘Now’ said the yoga instructor, Kim, ‘I want you to fold your leg over the other, slip your arms up your sides, turn, touch your toes and then lean to your left.’

  Izzy turned to Gabby. ‘What?’ she muttered out of the side of her mouth. Gabby shrugged. ‘Not a sausage’ she whispered back and started bending herself like a straw. It looked nothing like what the instructor was doing but the fact she was getting it so incredibly wrong gave Izzy the fortitude to get it wrong too. She began to move her body cluelessly. She was going to stop coming to this class. It was way too hard. If there was such a thing as a remedial yoga class, that was where she should have been.

  A pair of hands appeared on her thighs. Kim was helping her. ‘OK, Izzy. Just lean this way a bit.’ Izzy wished she wouldn’t do this. Not because it made her feel like the dumbest kid in class, though it very much did. It was because Kim was a little bit too bendy and Izzy had been watching this beautiful woman with skin like a baby contort into all kinds of positions for weeks now and it was giving her a certain involuntary physical reaction. She didn’t want to be sleazing on someone who was just trying to do their job, but Kim had her hands on her actual arse right now and she was only flesh and blood.

  ‘OK, that’s it’ Kim encouraged as she slid her hands up, positioning Izzy by the waist. ‘Just point your feet straight.’ Izzy shuffled her feet, feeling Kim pushing against her bum. She began to worry she was going to make a very bad noise.

  She looked to her left and that was a mistake. Gabby was grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘Stop it’ Izzy mouthed. Gabby winked. Izzy made a mental note to kill her friend after this was over.

  ***

  ‘You’re a horn dog’ Gabby said afterwards over protein shakes. They tasted how Izzy imagined a woman’s lactations would taste if they were left out in a jar in the sun for a few hours.

  ‘I’m not. It’s just been a while since I’ve dated’ Izzy said defensively. ‘You wouldn’t remember, because I don’t think you’ve ever had a dry patch in your life, but after a while, things start happening that you can’t altogether help.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ Gabby asked. ‘Go and get laid.’ That was Gabby’s whole philosophy. Bad day? Go and get laid. Flat tire? Go and get laid. Spill your coffee? Go and get laid. She’d changed very little from university. That was what Izzy liked about her. She was consistently chaotic.

  ‘Getting laid for the sake of it isn’t my cup of tea’ Izzy told her. Ever since the Sophie incident at university, she’d taken casual sex off the menu. Even if Sophie hadn’t lost her shit, Izzy felt casual sex would take her in the opposite direction of what she really wanted. Love. And her attempt at that had gone completely off piste too, so she was a bit stuffed when you looked at it.

  ‘How long’s it been, anyway? Since, who was it? Mackenzie?’ Gabby asked.

  Izzy had to think. ‘Well, we met a bit after uni and we lasted just under two years.... And then I was working crazy hours after I finally got that producer job. And then I moved a couple of times…’ The answer, when it came, shocked her. ‘Wait… Was that really three years ago?’

  She couldn’t believe she’d been single that long. None of her exes were. Last she’d heard Mackenzie had met someone and was settled now, just like Sophie before her. She didn’t know what had become of Alicia, she’d lost track of her entirely, but she was probably married with five kids or something. Because Izzy was apparently the last stop before people found real happiness. She was everybody’s crappy backstory. Even Ben was married now, with a kid and a job as an accountant.

  ‘It’s that bloody job. You never stop working’ Gabby told her.

  That was true. Getting Mark’s job after he left had turned out to be just another twist on a very long and windy path. It was funny to think at one time it had seemed like the dream. But that role had become a stepping stone, leading to a better paid job at another station. Then a jump to a bigger local station, BMR, which was where she was now. Her eye was turned to producing the news at a national level now, the next natural step. She wondered when it would end. When would she feel done? What would be enough? But she couldn’t talk to Gabby about any of that. Gabby was a total hippy who floated through life as though it were all a big party. Izzy was just the tiniest bit envious of her sometimes. To not care? How marvellous it must be.

  ‘I’m young. I’ve got time to meet someone’ Izzy told her. But she was a little worried. She was twenty-seven. Yes, she could meet someone anytime. But what did it matter if she was a train wreck who didn’t know how to make it work?

  ‘I’ve got someone I could set you up with’ Gabby said, casually sipping her drink.

  Izzy didn’t even consider it. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Wh
y not.’

  ‘Because you’re a heterosexual.’

  Gabby squinted. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? I’m not setting you up with me, am I?’

  Izzy leaned back in her chair. ‘How many lesbians do you know?’