Oscar’s mouth drops. ‘Yes!’
‘Or, a jumper with a secret pouch that you can hide your dinner in when it tastes disgusting.’
‘Or a time machine!’ Oscar finishes.
Jamie looks as if he’s in the presence of genius. ‘A classic.’
‘Well, I’m sure you’re very busy,’ I say, gesturing to the gate.
‘Actually, I’m ahead of schedule. I whizzed round to try and finish early because I’m going to see Florence and the Machine tonight.’
‘Oh, that’s strange. I’ve been listening to their new album.’
‘Isn’t it great? You didn’t fancy the concert then?’
‘No. I mean, I would have liked to but… the thing is… I tried to log on when they went on sale. But then… no.’
But I quickly realise that there is no need to flounder for an explanation. As Oscar giggles with delight, Jamie is already moonwalking in the direction of his van.
Chapter 12
I can’t deny feeling a shiver of satisfaction at Lucy’s approving reaction when she clicks through Guy’s Instagram feed. ‘He’s hot, I’ll give him that. I don’t believe he’s got a body like that from only doing yoga though. It hasn’t had that effect on all the ladies in pink leotards at our gym.’
‘He does cross fit as well,’ I tell her. ‘But yoga is his thing.’
‘He’s very… positive, isn’t he?’ She says the word as if it has a slightly odd taste in her mouth. ‘Has he sent any nudes?’
I tut. ‘No.’
‘Only asking. I’m not slagging off the positivity guru stuff, either, by the way. I do love an optimist, even if some of it is a bit cheesy.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I object.
‘Oh look, I approve wholeheartedly of him. The very fact that you’ve found someone who gets your blood pumping is fantastic. I’ll even push the boat out and let him off for making the statement: “If you can face your fear and dance in the rain then today has been a good day”.’ She snorts. ‘He’s no Plato, is he?’
‘Oh, don’t slag him off.’
She straightens her face. ‘I’m not! Honestly, he’s a complete catch.’
I decide to go and make some tea. I head to the kitchen while she idly picks up a copy of English Garden, discarding it after glancing through two or three pages.
‘What happened about the New York advertising executive?’ I ask.
‘I’ve got bigger fish to fry these days.’
She reveals a tale of woe about how she went to see Hamilton for the second time with Pooja from work and bumped into her ex-boyfriend Mark, with his new wife Suki. Who is pretty, friendly and smart – a combination, it seems, that has made Lucy rather miserable.
‘But you’re pretty, friendly and smart,’ I protest. ‘Plus, you dumped him, remember.’
‘I know,’ she sighs. ‘I was so depressed I re-joined Match.com.’
‘You said it was full of losers.’
‘Yes, including me.’ I bring the tea and come and sit down next to her. ‘So has he asked you out yet, this Guy?’
‘A few times.’
‘How are you going to get around that one?’
‘That’s the million-dollar question.’
She takes a sip of her tea. ‘Are you not tempted to just get him over here? I mean, it’s a thought, isn’t it? As long as you’re reasonably confident he’s not an axe murderer, there’s not a great deal you’ve got to lose. I know it’s not the usual venue for a first date, but needs must.’
This has already occurred to me. Of course it has. But I have been prevented from acting by the sheer pointlessness of it: the issue of what happens after the first date. Part of me thinks I should take a leaf out of Lucy’s book and not worry about the consequences. But she and I are hard-wired differently. We always have been.
She reaches over and rubs my back. ‘Must be shit being an agoraphobic sometimes.’
I sigh. ‘It’s certainly starting to feel a little inconvenient.’
* * *
The first panic attack I recall in vivid detail was in Disneyland Paris. The happiest place on earth. I was twelve and at the time felt as though it had come out of the blue, though of course these things never do. Something had been festering inside my brain for years, like a cluster of benign cells waiting to grow into something solid and malignant.
I’d dreamed about going to Disneyland for ages. Most children do, of course, but I’d harboured an obsession with a variety of princesses – The Little Mermaid primarily – long after the age when children are supposed to have moved on to something more grown up. The journey there passed without incident. A seven-hour drive. Obligatory roadworks on the motorway. ‘It’s A Small World’ on a loop on the CD player as Lucy yelled, ‘Again! Again!’
‘I think this is what insanity feels like,’ Dad sighed as Mum chuckled and we approached passport control at the Channel Tunnel. He wound down the window and handed the family’s documents to the official in the booth, a man with a bowl haircut and eyes as grey as the cold sea. There was a malevolence in those eyes, I could see it instantly. I shifted in my seat and tried to ignore his gaze, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck prickle as he said: ‘Look up, please.’
He asked questions in a tone that felt accusatory and suspicious. A tone I was sure had irritated Mum, even though afterwards she pasted on a smile and cheerfully slotted the passports into her bag. She reached back and rubbed my leg reassuringly. ‘Nothing to worry about, Ellie. So, who’s ready to go and see Ariel?’
The moment I stepped into the Magic Kingdom, my travel sickness, which was what we all decided was making me feel queasy, disappeared. The sun was shining on Main Street and the laughter of children was carried by the breeze, mingling with the scent of candyfloss and sun cream.
We started with Aladdin’s flying carpets then went on Peter Pan’s ride. I was a little old for them probably, but Lucy was only two and I didn’t mind. We met Mickey and Goofy and Dad and I went on Splash Mountain. But it was as we stood in a queue waiting to meet the princesses that I felt the first bristles of something sinister. There were three kids behind us – two girls, one boy, all much younger than me. The boy didn’t want to be there and was pulling and complaining, flicking at his sister’s ear, annoying everyone around him.
‘Will you just stop with the whingeing?’ his mother pleaded. ‘Have you any idea how much it cost us to come here?’ She grabbed his hand and yanked him towards her. He started crying. I felt my blood chill. She was going to hurt him. I knew it. Tears pricked in my eyes.
‘Nearly there,’ Mum smiled, squeezing my hand. ‘All okay, darling?’
I nodded. Concern appeared in the wrinkles of her brow. ‘Are you sure? Ellie, you’re covered in goosebumps. Are you cold? Do you want to borrow my jumper?’
It must have been 27 degrees, but I shook my head. ‘I’m all right. How long will we be in the queue?’
As we moved along, the boy continued to play up, until eventually his mother threw in the towel. She abandoned their place in the line and herded all three wailing, shrieking children in the direction of the toilets. I couldn’t shake off the thought of what was going to happen to the boy.
When we reached the front, Lucy toddled to Sleeping Beauty and threw her arms around her. I skulked next to them. I tried to act normal, but felt the opposite, overwhelmed by a force I couldn’t explain, hypersensitive to everything around me. The noise and sunlight were amplified. My breathing felt hard, as if I was labouring to draw air into my lungs, and could never fully expel it. I had a sudden and intense feeling of threat. I gazed at Sleeping Beauty’s lipstick which, up close, was as thick as tallow, fatty and gleaming.
What’s your name? Are you having a magical time? Smile for the picture!
Mum lowered her camera.
‘Er… thank you,’ she said to Sleeping Beauty, taking my hand as I scurried away.
‘It’s all right, Ellie,’ Mum said softly, not entirely knowing what she was rea
ssuring me about.
‘I just feel sick,’ I explained, though that didn’t begin to describe the pounding of my heart and the nausea in my throat.
‘Perhaps it was Splash Mountain that made your tummy go funny?’ she suggested.
‘Yes. That was it,’ I replied, though I already knew it was nothing to do with a ride.
Chapter 13
My mum’s study is in the attic, in an oak-beamed room packed with orderly clutter: tightly stacked bookshelves, piles of sun-faded foolscap folders and biros that stand in brass pots on squares of ethnic-looking tapestry.
‘Are you busy?’ I ask, as I reach the top of the stairs and find her tapping away at her computer.
‘Oh, hi,’ she says, saving her work. ‘I’m sure I can spare a minute.’
I sit on the rocking chair next to her desk and wonder how to broach this. ‘Has Lucy been in touch?’
Her brow crinkles. ‘No. Why?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing bad. Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve… look, this might sound strange but…’
‘Go on,’ she says.
‘I’ve met someone.’
There is a moment before she answers when she tries to reconcile this information with my current personal circumstances. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Online,’ I say.
‘Oh. I see,’ she replies, obviously trying to work out what she thinks of this.
‘He lives locally. His name’s Guy and he’s a yoga teacher. We got chatting a lot and kind of became friends.’ Heat begins to blotch on the skin under my ears. ‘Maybe more than friends.’
She sits back and clasps her hands together, clearly startled by this news, but pleased too – at least, I think so. ‘So I wondered if you’d mind if I asked him to come over one night?’
‘Of course not, Ellie,’ she says, her face lighting up. ‘You don’t need our permission for that. Your father might want to hang around to check him out, of course – but I’ll make sure he makes himself scarce.’
‘Thank you, Mum.’ Though I’m happy about her reaction, I want to end this embarrassing conversation as soon as possible.
I look up at the wall behind her, where there’s a framed map and a couple of Victorian botanical paintings. ‘I’m surprised you’ve never put up any photos from your days abroad,’ I say, nodding at it.
‘Perhaps I should,’ she says idly. ‘I always thought it a bit odd to have pictures of myself up, but there are absolutely tons of them somewhere in those drawers.’
‘Really? I thought people in the eighties and nineties hardly took any pictures, at least not compared with my social media-obsessed generation. You didn’t have smart phones back then…’
‘No, but in my case, I almost always travelled with a news photographer. They’re not exactly holiday snaps though, I assure you.’
She’s right, they’re not.
There was one in particular that I recall seeing, and being upset by, when I was younger. It was taken during the Bosnian war, in Sarajevo – a place I knew nothing about, beyond the fact that I certainly didn’t want my mum there. The image showed her standing in a hotel bedroom, surrounded by shrapnel and lumps of shattered breezeblock. I found out when I asked her about it, years later, that a heavy night of bombardment had led to a direct hit on the very room where she’d slept for the preceding five nights. She’d only escaped because she’d been reading in the bath, wrapped in a sleeping blanket as protection. The thought made me weak with anxiety.
‘What are you working on at the moment?’ I ask.
‘I wanted to mention that to you, actually,’ she says, tentatively. ‘Do you remember I said I was meeting the Observer’s features editor? They’ve asked me if I’ll do a piece about Romania, to see how things have changed since the revolution in 1989. It would mean me travelling to Ias¸i for a few days.’
I am aware that most of the locations my mother visited three decades ago are different places today, including Romania. She doesn’t need to reassure me that things have changed there, that she’ll be safe – I know all that, technically. But my brain doesn’t always work like this. There are times when it doesn’t succumb to logic of any kind.
‘Is that all right, Ellie?’ she asks.
‘Of course,’ I mumble, as my tongue suddenly feels too dry to swallow.
* * *
Preparing for my first date in three years is a large-scale undertaking. My legs haven’t been hair-free since Christmas and even then it was only because Lucy bought me a wet and dry epilator, insisting unconvincingly that it wasn’t a hint. Tonight, I emerge from the bath with pink, throbbing limbs and no area of my body that hasn’t been plucked, waxed, exfoliated, or moisturised. Not that I am presuming I’ll have sex, of course. I’m probably not ready to take that step, even if my libido has reawakened like a roaring dragon.
I’ve never felt quite like this before and can’t decide whether the cause can solely be attributed to abstinence. Guy is so different from the men I’ve been with in the past. With the exception of a fling with a Mancunian called Dave who went on to forge a successful career in musical theatre, all my previous boyfriends were deeply strait-laced – the sons of opticians or conveyancing lawyers, now pursuing similar careers themselves. They pop up on Instagram occasionally, sharing baby scans and, once a year, pictures from Glastonbury, as if to prove how far they are from middle age, whatever the Laithwaite’s subscription and enthusiasm for cycling gear suggests. More than anything, there is something magnetic about the sheer newness of Guy.
After a fitful night’s sleep, I take delivery of a supermarket shop that is heavy on rustic-looking vegetarian pies and artisan fare; items I don’t intend to claim outright I made myself, but I won’t object if he leaps to that conclusion. I then spend the morning in the garden while Mum and Dad disappear clutching maps and rucksacks for a day of walking, followed by supper in one of their favourite pubs, an old, eccentric place with low beams, peat fires and a barmaid who calls customers ‘my love’.
Guy arrives at 12.30pm, bang on time – and just as I am instructing Alexa to ‘Play 6 Music’. I’d thought that would be cool to have on in the background, but she replies with, ‘Playing Sex Music from Spotify,’ which sends me scrambling for the off switch before I let him in.
I’m left flustered, though I would have been anyway, without the shenanigans over the playlist. But then he’s here, on my doorstep, and just the sight of him makes my heart feel as though it is about to spill over. He is a mosaic of tiny details that his online pictures were incapable of capturing. Pale flecks in the irises of his eyes. A forehead burnished from sunshine. He’s not as tall as I’d imagined, but he’s taller than me, with a torso so lean there can’t be a single extraneous ounce of fat. He is, quite simply, beautiful.
‘You must be EnglishCountryGardenista,’ he says, as his face breaks into a smile that goes straight to my knees.
‘I am!’ I reply giddily. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you.’
I offer him a hand to shake, but instead he leans in to kiss me on the cheek. The bristles of his beard brush my skin, and I breathe in a scent that’s peppery and mossy and just divine. He brushes raindrops off his shoulders and steps inside. Gertie bounds over and I grab her to lift her up as her tail thrashes manically.
‘Sorry… she gets excited and jumps up when people first arrive, but she’ll calm down in a minute.’ I take her into the kitchen as her backside wiggles. ‘Would you like a drink? Tea or coffee maybe?’
I grab a doggy treat and lower Gertie to the floor, feeding it to her as a distraction before she trots away in the direction of my bedroom.
‘I hate to be a bad influence, but I brought this.’ He lifts up a bottle of Riesling.
‘Now you’re talking,’ I say, as I take the bottle from him and look for a corkscrew.
‘So this is where you live…’ He glances around before taking a seat on the sofa. ‘It’s lovely, Ellie. Is it some kind of outbuilding?’
‘I… well, yes.
It’s small but it suits what I do to be here. The garden is so pretty that it’s ideal for my Instagram page. It works well for all of us.’
I pour the two glasses and join him on the sofa, leaving an intimate but unpresumptuous space between us. I hand him his drink and he clinks my wine glass. I have to hold it with two hands to stop my fingers from trembling as I bring it to my mouth.
‘So, what – the garden’s yours as opposed to the people who live in the main house?’
‘No, it belongs to them… I’m technically, well, kind of a lodger. I thought it’d be temporary when I moved in, but everyone’s happy like this – including me as it means I can work on the garden.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Who lives in the main house then?’
A heartbeat passes in which I consider lying. But I just can’t. ‘My… parents.’
‘Oh. Right,’ he says politely. He takes a moment to digest this information, before saying, ‘Everyone seems to be trying to get on the housing ladder at the moment, don’t they?’
I decide not to correct his assumption, as his gaze settles on me. ‘You look different from in your photos,’ he says.
‘Do I?’ I ask, feeling a shot of heat in my neck.
‘Yeah.’ He takes a sip of wine and I watch the movement of his hands as he lowers the glass. Then he smiles the sexiest smile I’ve seen in my life and adds: ‘Better.’
We get through two glasses of white before lunch and it is clear even without the benefit of the alcohol that he is not fazed by any of this. Well, of course he isn’t, I tell myself. He probably goes on dates all the time, the way people do. My own nerves, on the other hand, do not settle at any point.
I know this is only to be expected, but there is one moment when I actually begin to wish it was all over so that I can just bask in the memories. I worry about saying something stupid, without the benefit of those seconds I have when messaging, precious time in which to draft and redraft my typed responses until they are just right. Now, any old thing is liable to spill out of my mouth.
The World at My Feet Page 6
