Chapter Six Dolly #2
This is true, or at least, partly. Pip, Ayesha and Josie all stuck around for about a year.
Either they called it off or I did. The usual break-up reasons in your mid-twenties – someone moves away, someone wants to get married sooner, you have an irreconcilable difference over what constitutes fidelity.
They were heartbreaks, at one time, but now they’re a soft-focus memory, an old picture tucked between pages.
Then there were the more casual affairs, one-night stands or several-night stands.
Sometimes several nights spaced out over the course of many years.
In a small city like Liverpool, you end up picking up with the same girls over and over.
Even the one dyke bar in Manchester yielded some repeat hits.
But with balancing work, looking after Mum and my uterus throwing increasingly uglier tantrums, sex hasn’t exactly been on my mind.
And who needs romance when you’ve got lesbians on TikTok who rescue cats for a living and who are conveniently across an ocean so you can’t dream too deeply about them?
A parasocial crush you keep to yourself is underrated.
Okay, I heard it. I need a life.
I turn the attention back on Carys. ‘No luck for you either?’
‘No, not really.’ She gathers David into her lap. ‘Just a high school boyfriend that lasted too long, and not much luck getting a third date since. Do you have any advice?’
‘About what?’
‘About… picking the right one, I guess?’
‘If I had any insight into that, I’m not sure I’d be on Wedded Bliss,’ I deflect, because really I’m not sure I know much about love first hand.
I’ve been agony aunt to various group chats over the years, but if you stop replying, people stop adding you, make a new chat, move on.
It feels like I’m out of the game on friendship as much as romance.
‘True. You’d be blissfully wedded,’ Carys quips. Her hands knead at David in a way that, were he a real live animal, I’d be concerned for his health.
‘What’s worrying you? Pat the Vet seems like he’s a sound lad.’
It takes her a minute to speak. ‘Just thinking about the person fitting into your life, which feels like a bizarre thing to consider for a first date, but I love my job on the city farm. How many other city farms are there in the country? What if the person I like doesn’t live in London? Patrick is in Yorkshire, I think.’
I might be rusty, but I’m not entirely convinced this is actually what she is thinking about. ‘I mean, you could go work on a country farm.’
‘They just call those farms,’ she says a little sarcastically, and then claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry, that was rude.’
I burst out laughing. ‘No, please! I enjoyed that. A little glimpse of bitchy Carys.’
She groans. ‘My evil side. You can’t really be rude on the farm, so I have to lock her away in the attic of my mind.’
‘Careful, Jane Eyre. She might burn the house down.’
‘It was Rochester who locked her away,’ Carys corrects me with the teacherly manner of a librarian who can’t resist a fact-check.
I shrug. ‘I’ve never been particularly interested in the men in those stories.’
Not that I’ve had much time for reading either, but Jane Eyre was my GCSE English set text and burned into my mind.
She should have just gone upstairs, freed Bertha, and they could have run off together.
That would have been a way better book. ‘So you’re worrying about how he will fit into your life? ’
‘Or me into his. I don’t know. I think I’m too deep in my head.’ She looks up at me. ‘You said Warren was the only good one today. What was so bad about the others?’
‘Well, for a start, Warren didn’t ask leading questions about my weight.’
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why some guy asked me how many times a day I went to the gym? I just thought he’d got a good deal.’ She shivers with disgust and flips open her notebook to a page that has DANIEL written on it, with a gigantic X underneath.
‘Ha, snap.’ I show her my own expletive-filled summary.
‘Imagine not respecting the sanctity of the experiment,’ she sighs, lying back on her bed covers.
I mirror her, wishing I had something to hold. ‘That’s one way to put it. I don’t know, the other four weren’t all bad. Just not someone I’d take home to my mum.’
She rolls onto her side to face me, David squashed against her cheek. ‘Tell me about her.’
I instinctively glance up at the corner of the room, even though I know there’s no cameras filming us in here (in theory). I wonder how long it’ll take me to lose that particular habit, or the sense I’m being watched at all times – the price I’m paying for possible stability.
Still, I want to trust her, and even though I have the mild horn for her now, Carys could be a good friend. I like the little weirdo.
Just to be safe, I flick off the overhead light, swapping it for the lamp on the bedside table. It feels safer somehow to be low-lit.
‘So, yeah,’ I begin slowly. ‘It’s just been me and her for pretty much my whole life. She was a nurse for a long time, so she’s very good at medical advice – which the whole bloody cul-de-sac knows.’
Carys giggles, and I wonder, sourly, if she’s thinking about that in her future life with Patrick, the whole neighbourhood bringing their mangy cats or depressed goldfish to their door.
This is enough to make me wuss out from telling her the whole truth about my mum. ‘What about your family?’
‘Oh well, my mum and dad have been together since they were teenagers.’
‘Wow, congrats to them.’
‘Yeah. It’s impressive.’
‘But, I imagine, a lot of pressure on you to find your person,’ I half ask, half suggest, putting several pieces together at once. ‘Do you have siblings?’
‘Two. They’re not married but they’ve had more success in dating than me.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, they’ve had recent relationships that last months.’
‘Maybe you’re just better at weeding out the wasters than they are.’
She makes a little noise that I take to be somewhere between a yes and a no.
I’m not sure I really want to get back onto Patrick and how nice that’s going to be when my hormones are acting up – aka the time I’m most likely to burst into tears – so I change tactics completely.
‘How did you get into being a farmer then?’
‘I’m more of an educator.’
‘You’re not educating the cows, surely? Wow, this farm is incredible.’
She stifles her snort-laugh on the back of David’s head. ‘No, silly. I teach the kids, show them what cows look like. You know one of the kids thought a cow would look snake-shaped? I was worried he was going to have a conniption when I showed him the real thing.’
‘Generation alpha are not okay,’ I sigh.
‘Oh, they’ll be alright. Eventually. I’m sure we were bizarre as children too.’
‘That’s true. I wanted to be a mortician.’
Carys sits up suddenly. ‘Sorry, what?’ She sounds less horrified and more excited than most people are when I drop this neat bit of lore.
‘My mum watched a lot of Six Feet Under.’
‘And that show somehow made you want to be a mortician?’
I shrug. ‘It sounded cool. Like, you’re helping people in a very tough time, and creating a ceremony that the person would have wanted. I guess it’s technical and arty, in the same way food is,’ I explain. ‘Wait, that doesn’t sound very good, does it?’
‘As long as you’re not eating people,’ she says with a fake shiver. ‘No one needs prion disease.’
‘I feel like that might be horrors territory, so please do not explain what that means.’
She giggles in a way that suggests it might be, very much, the horrors. ‘I understand what you mean, though. It’s about nourishing, caring, providing a service that makes people happy, right?’
The feeling of being seen is a warm light in my heart.
‘Yes. That’s most of it. And I really miss that part.
I trained in a really busy kitchen. When I transitioned to creating recipes and food content for social media, which was much more convenient, I missed the immediate feedback of seeing someone enjoy my food.
The comments are nice, though people are always doing mad substitutions.
Plus the chefs were as likely to say ‘good job’ as throw a spatula at the wall, so I can’t be too rose-tinted glasses about it. ’
‘I’d love for you to cook for me,’ she says, not really knowing how much that means to me.
God, this crush is getting out of control.
‘Come on then, what did you want to be then? A vet?’ I kick myself for saying this.
‘No, everyone always thinks that. I wanted to be something way more specific.’
‘Go on, I love specific.’
‘Okay, well,’ she begins, and I see her fingers pitter-patter across David’s fur like she’s playing the piano, making music of her story.
‘Watching nature documentaries was really my thing when I was small.’ She pauses for a second.
‘I didn’t have the best time in school, but I found a lot of comfort in them.
I’d watch all kinds, though I always went back to David Attenborough. I’m monogamous, I guess.’
I laugh. ‘Maybe you should be marrying him?’
‘Oh no,’ she says, suddenly serious. ‘I could never live up to his wife Jane, though I think he’d be a very kind husband, which is all I want.
Anyway! One day when I was off school, I saw a documentary about how roads cut across natural migration pathways for animals, which is a huge problem.
It’s the same problem for badgers in the UK as it is for orangutans on palm oil plantations.
It made me so sad for them, but hopeful that we could fix things, now that we understand what we did wrong.
There’s always possibility for change, to make things right. ’
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone like her before. When she looks at me, it’s like looking at stardust personified, because she glows with passion. Imagine being a person who could make her glow as much as talking about animals does.