Chapter 3
But I can’t forget it. Not the next morning when I wake up at Karina’s after sleeping on the sofa under a pile of fluffy blankets, not when we go to Allan’s, the café at the end of her road with questionable clientele but the best bacon butties and strong coffee, not when I come home and reluctantly make a start on the list of errands that have piled up over the last half term, and not when I’m sitting on the couch that evening with and my phone in my hand, scrolling through my text chats with some of the men I’ve been out with this last year and wincing.
On Monday morning, I wake up way earlier than I should for the first day of the half term holidays.
I’d intended to spend as much time as possible in bed this week to store up my energy for the cold, dark early mornings of the next half term, but I’m too excited to fall back to sleep.
I’m onto something, I know it. Setting each other up with our best exes is the perfect antidote to the bad dates, the wrong men we’ve all been attracting recently.
I’m too restless to stay in bed. I get up to make a coffee and sit at the window in the lounge, looking out at the dank weather and the people hurrying to work below my window.
I love this spot, the wide windowsill I’ve covered in cushions and fur throws, and the shelf I’ve put next to it, filled with my favourite books.
The rest of this flat is functional, and even after fifteen months of living here doesn’t feel like home, but I bought it for this one feature, so I can pretend to be the relaxed, beautiful woman on the advert for herbal tea that was on TV years ago.
My ambition was and still is to be just like her.
A woman so content she doesn’t give a shit about anything but her lovely drink and her lovely window seat.
Bud, the ginger cat I rescued as a kitten, who Mr Galanis, my elderly neighbour, spends more time looking after than I do, pads over and settles on my knee.
We both enjoy the perverse pleasure of witnessing the stragglers rushing to get to work on time, their shoulders bunched up with stress while we’re all cosy up here.
I get up to make another coffee and grab my phone to check if it’s time yet to ring Karina and Teddy. I’m surprised to see there’s already a missed call from Elliot, my teaching best friend, who should right now be climbing mountains in the Lake District with his brother.
‘Good morning,’ I say chirpily when he picks up after the second ring. ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear from you today.’
He responds with a long, anguished groan. ‘I’m in hell. Actual hell.’
I smother a laugh at what is clearly a very hungover voice. I can hear strong wind in the background and imagine him high up on a craggy peak in a cagoule, his black hair flying around his face. ‘I take it whisky and walking don’t mix that well after all, then?’
‘Don’t. I can’t even think about the W word right now.’
‘Walking?’
‘Very much the other. There’s something not right about Sam.
We were out late yesterday, and he was still up at half six this morning, pulling me out of bed and talking about catching the best light on the hills.
That’s why I’m ringing you. I need to live through you for a few minutes.
Please tell me you’re in bed and aren’t planning on leaving all day except to get snacks. ’
‘That’s the plan,’ I lie for his sake.
‘And you’re probably not even going to bother getting dressed and are going to work your way through a full season of some American murder show.’
‘Hmmm hmm. And I imagine there’ll be chocolate involved and a few naps along the way.’
He groans again. ‘What I wouldn’t do to trade places with you right now.’
‘Oh, Elliot. I would never trade this.’
‘I don’t blame you. Think of me when you’re a few episodes in and are gorging on your second Yorkie of the day, won’t you?’
‘I can’t make you any promises.’
‘I understand,’ he says solemnly. ‘Best get back to it, then. Sam is glaring at me for stopping and oh brilliant, it’s just started to rain.’
I can’t help laughing. ‘Enjoy. Send me a picture when you get a chance.’
I hang up and make my way to the kitchen, smiling as I imagine Elliot trying to catch up with Sam.
A few minutes later, I get a text and open it to find a selfie of Elliot in heavy rain wearing a bright red cagoule with the hood up, wet hair swept across his forehead. The entire backdrop, from the sky to the lake in the distance, is entirely dark grey.
Wish you were here (and I was where you are instead), Elliot.
His name on my screen has me smiling again, the sign off he’s not stopped using for over a year now, like we’re corresponding with letters, and I’d be utterly clueless whose words I was reading otherwise. Like he hasn’t just sent me a selfie of his face.
The morning I started my job as a keen and freshly qualified teacher last September I discovered I’d been buddied up with Newbury High’s most talented English teacher, Elliot.
He promised to do what he could to make my first year as easy as possible and to make sure I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy the trial by fire that is being a newbie teacher to over a hundred merciless teenagers.
He kept to his word, making it his mission to talk me down from my plans to quit on almost a weekly basis and to point out the funny side of my numerous teaching disasters.
Along the way, we actually became friends.
Second coffee down, I decide I’m probably safe to start a group call with Teddy and Karina.
‘What are you guys doing for lunch today?’ I ask.
‘Same as always,’ Teddy replies. ‘Tesco sandwich in my car between viewings.’
I grimace at the reality of Teddy’s job.
When she stopped working as a para-legal and announced she was starting a new career as an estate agent after watching the first season of Selling Sunset, it seemed like she’d found the perfect profession.
She already had the glamourous vibes and natural persuasiveness, she’d even got Karina and me to join her in getting an intertwined design of our initials tattooed on our ankles the year we all turned eighteen.
She’d drawn it, of course, and the tattooist did such a bad job of transferring her swirly pattern onto our skin that it looked like we’d scrawled it on ourselves with biro.
Aesthetic aside, I always love when it’s on display in the summer and I catch glances of it throughout the day, my little reminder of the three of us.
Celebrating sales with champagne and earning enough commission to fund the lavish lifestyle she craved seemed like only a matter of time, but the job she landed, the job she was sold, turned out to be more Selling Shitholes.
But after giving up such a stable job, Teddy was never going to admit defeat to this new career.
It had to work out. There was no room to disappoint the parents who’d always put pressure on their daughter to enter a ‘respectable’ profession and stick to it for life, and especially not her two older, extremely successful solicitor brothers who were waiting for her to slip up so they could deliver a massive told-you-so.
She’s kept on going and I marvel at her optimism that she can turn her job around and make it into something she wants.
‘I can’t think about lunch. I’ve not even had breakfast yet,’ Karina says.
‘Well, I’ve got something I need to talk to you about. Do you reckon you can both come into town and meet me at The Koffee Pot for twelve?’
‘Sure,’ Karina answers.
‘If I make it out of my last viewing of the morning, which is at a house I’m fairly sure is being used a crack den, I’ll be there,’ says Teddy.
‘How many men do you reckon you’ve been out with?’ I ask them when the waitress has taken our order for coffee and paninis.
‘What, my whole life?’ Teddy asks.
‘Yeah, how many?’
She tries to work it out, but gives in a few seconds later, like the sum is too hard.
‘I don’t know. A lot.’
‘Karina?’
‘Let me think. I probably go out with six or seven men a year, on average, and I’ve been dating pretty much constantly since I was sixteen, so that’s … Jesus.’
‘Exactly. I’ve got to forty-eight,’ I tell them.
‘And I’m sure I’m missing a few. Between us there’s an unthinkable number of men we’ve been out with.
In my case, I’d rather permanently remove most of them from my consciousness, but in that huge pile of exes there’s got to be some that are half decent.
Remember what we were talking about on Saturday night, about the idea of dating each other’s good exes?
I think we should seriously consider it. ’
‘Not this old chestnut again,’ Teddy says, smiling at me.
‘Yes, this again,’ I press on. ‘The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve become convinced it’s a brilliant idea.
We’ve been spending all this time meeting strangers, hoping that we’ll get lucky, when between us we’ve got a collection of men who we’ve already checked out.
There’s no one I would trust more to be a good judge of character than the two of you.
There must be some men you’ve dated, Teddy, who it hasn’t worked out with but who could be great for either me or Karina. ’
Teddy thinks about it for all of three seconds before shaking her head.
‘See, I’m not sure there are.’
‘Yes, there are,’ Karina jumps in to contradict her. ‘How about Finlay?’
I beam at her in gratitude for getting on board. ‘Yes! Finlay was great,’ I agree. ‘You always told us how much he made you laugh.’
‘He did. He was hilarious, right until the moment I found him in bed with his flatmate.’
‘Oh yeah. Definitely not Finlay,’ Karina says.
‘I mean I guess there’s Adam, if you want him. He was very …’ Teddy searches for the right word. ‘Mature.’
Karina barks out a laugh. ‘Adam? The guy you brought to Lizzie’s birthday meal? The one who spent half an hour on his phone calculating how much he owed and paid in cash? I can still remember him rolling coins down the table at me.’
‘Maybe not Adam either,’ Teddy says. ‘Although there is something to be said about being with someone so frugal. He always said he’d have the last laugh when he was sitting in his static caravan in Wales at sixty, and the rest of us were still slaving away.’
‘OK, maybe we need a bit more time to think about who we can set each other up with,’ I concede, ‘but it’s still a great idea, and most importantly, it will be fun and will save me from losing my willpower and going back online. I swear I can’t do it anymore.’
Teddy puts her hand on top of mine in sympathy.
‘I suppose it wouldn’t be too bad if you were to set me up with one of your exes, Kar,’ she says. ‘I always did like the sound of the one who wrote poems for you.’
‘Ah, Eddie,’ Karina says, wistfully. ‘Yeah, Eddie was great. You can’t help but be impressed with a man who can rhyme “red-hot lover” with “will be a great mother”. Shame he had that weird stale-popcorn smell about him after he was in the rain.’
I smother a laugh. ‘OK, the good ones might not be exactly springing to mind right now, but among the Eddies and the Finlays and the Adams, there are definitely people we’ve dated who we’ve found to be nice and normal, even if they aren’t right for us.
Before you arrived at Kar’s on Saturday, Teddy, we were saying there should be a test that men have to take to find out what they are really like before you date them.
Well, this is it. There’s no better test to find out what someone is really like than having your best friend date them before you do.
So, what do you say? How about an ex-swap? ’
Teddy and Karina turn to look at each other, and I catch the almost imperceptible nods they exchange.
‘Is that a yes? Are you in?’
‘We’re in,’ Teddy says, and I let out a squeal before throwing my arms around them both.