The Woman Who Wanted More

by Vicky Zimmerman

  ‘No, Nick. I’m not. I’ll get the coach . . .’ She hesitates, rapidly calculating her next move. He obviously needs some space, some time. She’ll find waiting intolerable. What’s the longest she could bear?

  She’s scared to say what she’s about to but it’s her only hope. ‘Nick – you’ve got till the end of September to get yourself unconfused. Either we move forward completely together from then on, or we’re done. And in the meantime, I need you to leave me alone. I’ve got some thinking to do myself.’

  His smile falters. ‘What – not speak to each other at all for almost two months?’

  ‘Yes. I mean no. No speaking. I mean: correct – we shall not speak.’

  ‘Can’t we just carry on like we were before?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure we can’t do that – no.’

  He nods slowly. ‘OK. If that’s what you really want.’

  Of course it’s not, none of this is!

  He reaches in to kiss her on the lips. She stands still, her eyes wide open.

  He walks away and she sways, as if buffeted by a strong, cold wind.

  *

  On the coach back to London she calls Bailey. Bailey will be sitting in her immaculate white kitchen, dressed in cool, wheat-coloured linen, sipping Evian. Calm, clear-headed Bailey will explain to Kate exactly what just happened and she’ll make everything better.

  Bailey is actually dressed in running shorts and an old T-shirt, standing in her garden flirting with her hot young gardener. Her phone is on her kitchen counter and eventually goes to voicemail.

  Kate calls her friend Cara instead, desperate for reassurance that things will resolve themselves favourably very soon. Cara gives long odds on that happening. What does Cara know? She dumps a guy if he can’t maintain a six-pack; Kate should never seek her advice.

  She could call Pete, get a male perspective, but he’ll be in pre-wedding mode. She doesn’t want to bother him, so she calls her neighbour Emma, who’s loved Nick ever since he fixed her laptop. Emma agrees with Cara, and rather than risk running through her entire A-Z of friends only to hear the same negative prognosis, she turns to the girl next to her who has clearly been listening in – who wouldn’t? – while pretending to flick through Grazia.

  ‘Sorry, but he sounds like a twat,’ says the girl.

  ‘I appreciate why you’d think that, but if you met him you’d like him, everybody does. He’s just in his own head a lot, self-absorbed. For example, last year he forgot my birthday . . .’

  The girl’s jaw drops.

  ‘No! But he forgot his own birthday too! He’s not on the spectrum necessarily but he lives in this bubble of work and computer games. He’s not great at emotions, true, but he’s not a player. I mean he plays computer games, yes, but you know what I mean . . .’

  The girl looks at Kate as if Kate is mad.

  ‘He’s an amazing cook, he makes me wonderful food all the time . . .’

  The girl shrugs. ‘Can’t you cook?’

  ‘Yeah I can . . . But . . .’

  ‘Then so what? He doesn’t sound like he’s worth it.’

  But he is, thinks Kate. You just don’t know him like I know him.

  *

  As if life couldn’t get any worse, Kate now has to apologise to Melanie, who’ll no doubt blow a Schadenfreude fuse. All Kate wants to do is crawl into bed, so it’s disturbing to discover, on returning to her flat, that her bags have disappeared from her room, and that her recently crammed bookshelves are now home to a collection of framed photos of complete strangers.

  Melanie’s obviously told a friend she can stay while Kate’s been away, but surely she should have left before now? Kate opens the wardrobe. What? There are more than ten pairs of jeans, a dozen dresses . . .

  Melanie picks up on the third ring. ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Whose stuff is in my room?’

  ‘How was your romantic break, Kate?’

  ‘Melanie, who’s been sleeping in my room?’

  ‘Calm down, Goldilocks, that’s Steph’s.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My squash partner. She’s taken the room. Actually, the timing couldn’t have been better – she had mice at her old place in Tulse Hill.’

  Squash? Mice? Tulse Hill? What do these random words mean? ‘But that’s my room.’

  ‘You’re moving in with Nick.’

  ‘That’s in limbo, but I’ve paid rent till mid-August. You’ll have to tell Steph to buy some mousetraps.’

  ‘She’s signed a tenancy agreement starting the first of August, it’s a legally binding document.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll buy her the mousetraps, the ethical ones.’

  ‘You were a hundred per cent clear you’d be gone early. Mate, you can keep your bags in the cupboard for another week, if that helps . . .’

  Kate hangs up and stares at the bedroom ceiling. She must have done something pretty appalling in a former life to deserve this. There is a high-pitched ringing in her head only interrupted when her phone starts to ring.

  Nick? Is it Nick? Please let it be Nick! It is not, and the name on the screen makes her heart sink.

  ‘Aaah, you’re back! Was it wonderful?’

  Kate struggles to blow out the panic in her chest. ‘Could you possibly pick me up from the flat please? No, not Nick’s flat, mine. No . . . nope . . . I just need your spare room very temporarily. No, I’m fine – but I don’t want to discuss the details and I definitely do not want any of your therapy bullshit, Mum, please, I mean it.’

  On reflection, the way this day is turning out, Kate reckons that once upon a time she must have been Genghis Khan.

  Chapter Six

  COMING BACK TO LIVE at Rita’s at her age? This really wasn’t part of Kate’s plan. Not that Kate’s ever had much of a ‘plan’, but certainly tonight she’d rather been hoping to make Nick chicken fajitas, to celebrate the start of their new life together.

  Rita’s flat is perfectly nice, a two-bedroom in Heathview, a 1930s block in leafy Highgate, but Rita bought it twenty years ago, just after Kate’s father died and Kate can’t help but associate it with that awful time. Kate had just started an English degree at Manchester. She’d come home that Christmas. Her father was diagnosed on 3 January. By Easter he was dead. Pancreatic cancer had turned him from her much-loved, jovial dad to a barely recognisable skeleton in a few grim months. Kate had been so traumatised by his suffering, all she could focus on was doing what he’d asked in his last lucid days: ‘Look after your mother’.

  Kate had planned to return to university but by the time she’d helped Rita sell the house, buy the flat, decorate it, and then advised her on her new glamorous wardrobe and therapeutic courses, more than a year had passed and Kate felt like she’d somehow messed up her own life, pretty much that same glum ache of failure she’s feeling right now.

  ‘If you’re not going back to university you need a job,’ Rita had said at the time. ‘Why not consider a holistic career? There are so many people who need compassion and help, and the hourly rates are lucrative.’ Over the last two decades, Rita has become increasingly insufferable with each therapeutic qualification. Kate misses her wise, gentle dad every day.

  Now, Rita drives into her parking bay at Heathview and pulls up the handbrake with a huff. ‘Muteness doesn’t suit you.’

  Kate swallows and nods. If she opens her mouth she’ll cry and she’s already bored of crying.

  Rita readjusts her rear-view mirror to admire her reflection. She runs a manicured finger over her sleek brown bob and the collection of silver bangles on her wrist tinkle their approval. The noise makes Kate’s head hurt.

  Kate steps out of the car and slowly, as if sleepwalking, starts to drag her bags from the boot.

  ‘Darling,’ says Rita, coming to stand beside her. ‘I’d love to help, but . . .’ Rita gestures vaguely at her groin.

  Kate squints at her mother’s get-up – standard Rita: white jeans, a sleeveless hot-pink sil
k blouse and vertiginous scarlet heels which expose far too much tanned toe-cleavage for a pensioner. ‘You could just take off that slutty footwear and help me?’

  ‘It’s not the shoes, it’s my adductors. Cole and I are doing a lot of lower-body work at the moment.’

  Kate drags the bag into the block, Rita scurrying behind her, then sees the sign on the lift door and lets go of the bag handle.

  ‘Oh. Shit,’ says Rita, pouting indignantly. ‘They’re waiting for a part. Not till next Wednesday, apparently, unacceptable of course, but what can you do?’

  What Kate does do is press the heel of her palms into her cheekbones and let out a low groan.

  ‘Darling,’ says Rita, pulling her close, ‘don’t take everything quite to heart so.’

  But it is my heart, thinks Kate, and it literally hurts.

  ‘There are blessings in our pain,’ says Rita with a serene smile.

  I will pay for a Travelodge or sleep in your car, so help me God, thinks Kate, struggling to free herself from Rita’s embrace.

  Rita turns to the lift, then back to Kate’s soft body, which seems to have collapsed in on itself like a prematurely removed soufflé.

  ‘Come on,’ says Rita, resting one hand on Kate’s shoulder as she takes off first one heel, then the other. ‘Bring the bags in and I’ll help carry them upstairs, it’ll work my glutes.’

  *

  Kate lies on the faux-fur bedcover in Rita’s spare room feeling like she’s been in a fight. Her limbs ache and there’s a pain low in her torso. In France, the day after The Wobble, as Kate is calling it (sounds a lot less final than The Dumping), Nick had cooked a roast chicken with home-made frites. How dare he make frites when Kate couldn’t eat. She’d tried, but after two bites she’d retched. She’s never lost her appetite before, but since that moment all she’s wanted to consume are fags. At least she’ll lose weight, hidden blessings indeed.

  She stares at Rita’s bookshelf. Rita always says she’d swear Kate was adopted if they didn’t share a love of books, but Rita’s collection is worse than Nick’s algebra books: Mother Your Inner Child, Light in Life’s Darkest Corners. Kate looks at her own bags, stacked in the dimly lit corner. No point unpacking, even though, technically, she’s now homeless; this isn’t the end of the relationship – her gut absolutely screams that. She refuses to take this personally. Nick’s a textbook emotion-avoider. Really, it’s not his fault, his parents – a hyper-religious mother and a manic-depressive father, both now dead – had been entirely emotionally absent in his childhood. That’s why Nick so often retreats into his head, why he’s so comfortable spending a hundred solitary hours doing a crossword. Still, none of that stuff is Kate’s fault either, and she will not let Nick’s past dictate their future. Nick is wonderfully generous, he makes the greatest lasagne; last month they spent an entire Sunday going through old childhood photos, laughing at how geeky their kids would probably turn out. Kate’s not going to just walk away without fighting for this relationship.

  ‘Darling,’ Rita’s voice cuts through her thoughts, ‘dinner in five.’

  Kate’s phone beeps. She scrabbles desperately through her bag and her heart sinks again. Bailey is not Nick.

  Enough of this! Time to do something productive. She opens the window and lights another fag.

  *

  ‘Eat something,’ says Rita, frowning as she pushes the plate closer to Kate. Rita has assembled Kate’s childhood favourites – an M&S Chicken Kiev and two Bird’s Eye potato waffles. ‘Have a waffle, I made them specially.’

  Kate wearily cuts off a bite. It tastes acidic – probably not Rita’s fault but more a result of the residual sour nicotine flavour now coating Kate’s tongue.

  ‘So what did you do to make him dump you? You said he used the word withdraw? What exactly happened?’

  ‘I do not want to talk about it.’

  Rita pincers an olive with her nails and pops it into her mouth. ‘You’ve left things at his flat?’

  Why did Kate do that? So unnecessary – all her favourite cookbooks, her Jamie Olivers, her Nigel Slaters, her beloved Angela Hartnetts – and as a strategy it had clearly proved futile.

  ‘Let’s go and get them,’ says Rita, pushing against the table as she stands up. ‘You need a clean break, to grieve.’

  Kate gently touches her mother’s arm. ‘Mum, it’s not over. Nick is confused. At the airport it sounded like he didn’t want to break up . . .’ She trails off helplessly.

  Rita’s top lip twitches. ‘You need to take back control. Tell him he’s either in or he’s out.’

  ‘Mum, I did. I’m giving him till the end of next month to sort himself out.’

  ‘So you’ll mope around for the next eight weeks till he punches you metaphorically in the face again? Stop being a victim. You need to adopt the mindset of a beautiful, empowered woman with an abundance of men. Sofia Loren wouldn’t sit around waiting, Sofia Loren would go round and get her books back. Mind you, Sofia Loren probably wouldn’t date a man whose Christmas party trick was doing an impression of a farting robot . . .’

  ‘It was from that TV show we’d been watching! And he was tipsy. He’d just cooked the most amazing meal for us and that’s the thing you remember?’ Kate’s eyes fill with tears again as she remembers how happy she’d been, waking up on Christmas morning, knowing their day was going to be filled with fun, laughter and that feeling of togetherness she’s craved her whole life.

  ‘Do you want a yoghurt or something?’ says Rita. ‘Then we can write a list of all the things you need to fix about yourself before your fortieth.’

  ‘Oh Good Lord, Mum, no, please, not tonight. I’m not hungry. And I’m not forty for several months yet. And in the interim I’ll be in my room.’

  Chapter Seven

  THANK GOODNESS KATE HAS a busy job to keep her mind off the car crash her relationship has just turned into. As she approaches her office on Monday morning her jaw clenches. Her primary thought is: let me get through today without crying. Then: will Nick call today? Her next: is it too early for a fag break? These three thoughts circulate around her head as she passes through the revolving doors of Fletchers and has to stop herself spinning straight back out into the street and home again.

  Kate started working at Fletchers supermarket the Christmas after her father died. It was meant to be a temporary job on the shop floor; she’d work for six months, earn money to go travelling, then figure out what to do with her life – preferably something to do with writing or food. Instead, an opportunity had arisen in head office, and because her manager sensed she had potential he’d put her forward. Because Kate felt guilty about leaving Rita, she’d taken it. Nineteen years and three departmental moves later, she’s so institutionalised she’s rooted in place and can do her job in her sleep. Still, she likes her colleagues and the regular hours mean she can see friends and have a life outside of the office.

  As Kate heads to her desk she remembers her first date with Nick and how much she’d been dreading him asking about her job. Mercifully he’d talked all night long, though not in an obnoxious way. He’d started off talking about fractals, then moved on to Fibonacci numbers, Playfair ciphers . . . It was like listening to a fascinating lecture, but by a handsome man with twinkly green eyes who also happened to be buying her lovely red wine. He’d asked her about it on date two, though.

  ‘I’m joint deputy head of copy for in-store marketing for Fletchers Supermarket – Meals and Chilled Solutions!’

  ‘Chilled Solutions? That sounds like a terrible Groove Armada cover band. I’m not sure I know what that combination of words means.’

  Kate already knew Nick was the cleverest man she’d ever met but she humoured him nonetheless. ‘It means my boss Devron will bound up to me with this,’ she says, showing him a photo on her screen. ‘And he’ll say, “Here’s gold-standard. Gimme more of that”.’

  ‘A packet of Waitrose dill?’ said Nick in confusion.

  ‘Look at the wo
rds, Nick, look: Delicate dill. Feathery fragrant fronds of flavour. Great with gravadlax.’

  ‘What specifically am I looking at?’

  ‘You can usually get some alliteration on front of pack – rosy rhubarb, perfect pomegranate, oranges are always tricky. But three different consonants and the quadruple F? When you write a line like that it’s actually deeply satisfying, it’s like using all seven tiles in Scrabble and landing on triple word.’

  ‘Now you’re talking. And does the blurb actually make a difference? You either need dill or you don’t. Dill or no dill, right?’ He grinned.

  It’s only because she fancied him so much that she’d let the pun slide.

  ‘And that’s a full-time job?’ he said.

  ‘Two of us do it, me and a rather truculent woman called Annalex.’

  ‘Two of you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know that you, Nick Sullivan, can single-handedly put a man on the moon with the power of maths, but could you convince two warring range managers that they don’t need more labelling for Curries or Pies because a third manager needs it for his Coated Protein?’

  ‘I’m too scared to ask . . .’

  ‘Coated Protein? You should be: substandard McNuggets.’

  ‘A whole new world . . .’ said Nick, laughing as he broke into song. ‘So in fact you’re a writer?’

  ‘Yup – just like Shakespeare, but with more BOGOFs. I also write the shelf-edge stripping – that’s the stuff that sits under the chicken thighs, and even the occasional wobbler.’

  Nick’s eyes had lit up as he’d reached for her hand. ‘Oh Kate, please – tell me more about these wobblers!’

  Well, Nick has now delivered his own wobbler, and a most unwelcome one at that, thinks Kate, miserably shaking off the now tainted memory. She grabs a black coffee then sits at her desk staring into space as the coffee grows cold.

  She manages fifteen whole minutes of work before Kavita appears and asks was the holiday amazing? Kate tries to smile but her face crumples and a minute later Kavita drags her to the toast enclave for a debrief. Kate actually doesn’t want to talk about Nick, she wants to get on with her job, but Kavita insists, and actually Kavita is happily married and might have a more encouraging perspective.