Chapter 2
Ash
She can’t believe she’s here, doing this, finally, against all the odds.
From the back of her people carrier taxi with the blacked-out windows and a pleasantly silent driver, speeding along the motorway towards an impending three-month Spring Fling with Life (working title), Ashley Jane Davies feels that she can take her first deep breath of the day.
The year. The past ten years. This is happening.
She’s in Lisbon. And she’s going to … enjoy it?
Question mark needed. Seriously. She’s beyond nervous.
Ash stares out the window and thinks about her day with disdain.
She’d allowed three hours to check in and pass security at Bristol airport, and thank god she had: the lines for both were maddeningly long, full of screaming kids who wailed as frustratedly as she’d felt, and then after they’d boarded there was a delay until take-off.
It’s one thing to be delayed when you can walk around the terminal but to be squashed up against the window next to a couple sickeningly in love and quite obviously on their first trip away together – the hand holding, the giggles, the way they did a crossword on his phone and told each other, great job, baby!
every time the other guessed the answer right, it was disgusting.
Ash had wanted to warn the young girl, who must have been about twenty-five, her boyfriend a few years older: Be careful!
He might steal your best baby-making years and then leave you high and dry, taking your hopes and dreams with him!
Don’t count on him! You can only count on yourself!
Freeze your eggs now, whilst you can, or you’ll end up like me: man-free, child-free, and with not a hope in hell of the future you want!
Of course, if the girl had been anything like Ash was, thirteen years and two failed long-term relationships ago, she’d simply smile, ask to switch seats, and later refer to the crazy lady on the plane, I don’t think she was well, bless her. Deranged, really.
After ninety minutes on the runway they’d had turbulence when they were finally in the air, and then there was one passport control desk open for a whole plane-full of people, so Ash’s taxi driver had thought she wasn’t coming and left the parking lot.
She’d had to send a strongly worded email to the booking company via the dodgy airport Wi-Fi and as she waited for him to come back around, she tried to figure out what smelt so bad, like bin juice mixed with hairspray.
As she lifted her travel bag into the taxi – once it had finally arrived – she realised the smell was her.
She can’t wait to check into her place and shower the travel journey off herself.
She just wants her stuff, her creams and gels and picture frames and books.
The stuff she was clever enough to send ahead, everything that will help keep her feeling like herself.
Well. Not that feeling herself is really the aim of her Spring Fling with Life.
She’s supposed to be trying something else – a different personality – on for size.
Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
Well, if Ash is ever going to actually find somebody, the gamble is: what if she tries it somewhere new?
And acts like a less insane, less desperate version of herself to boot?
She needs to try. Lord knows, she must try.
Not that she’s going to Lisbon on the pull, of course.
She’s going because her boss, Willow, who is also her best friend, has made her take a sabbatical, because she never does anything and it’s leeching the life from her and she’s becoming a bummer to be around.
Side-note: Willow isn’t known for mincing her words.
Ash is in Lisbon staring down the barrel of a three-month-long adventure armed with a manufactured explore-and-try-everything mentality and a fixed smile, knowing full well that even if you don’t feel excited, sometimes you have to make your choices and fake it till you make it.
Life not turned out like you’d planned? All three sisters married and rearing ten (ten!) kids between them?
Parents celebrating forty-five years of marriage (forty-five!), yet you’re somehow deeply repulsive and unlovable and cannot find anyone to even commit to a second date?
Got a high-paying job at a company you’ve been at from the ground up, yet literally cannot spend even half the money you make because you have nowhere to go and nobody to go there with anyway?
Not-so-secretly concerned that life is actually one big con and everyone got the instruction manual but you?
Well then, step right up with your battered second-hand copy of Eat, Pray, Love and let’s see what (*spins globe to randomly pick a new locale*) Portugal has to disappoint you!
No, she scolds herself. Not disappoint. The rest of my life could be waiting for me here. I just need to stay positive.
Urgh. Why does anyone think stay positive works as good advice for anyone in a downward spiral? Like oh, thanks, Trisha, I hadn’t thought of that! Silly me! I should just stay positive! I misread the briefing. I’m such a doo-doo head. Yes. I’ll be positive instead. Thanks!
If only being happy were that simple.
‘Hello?’ Ash says into the intercom outside of CoLab, her home for the next three months. ‘This is Ashley Davies? I’ve just arrived.’
The taxi had pulled up right outside, winding its way through a steady stream of people spilling out onto the cobblestoned streets for early evening drinks.
Stomach of butterflies and nervous lump in her throat notwithstanding, Ash has to admit it is all a bit bloody magical.
With the sun low in the sky the air seems to glow with potential, burnished amber light leaking through the gaps in the quaint buildings, colours an expensive Farrow & Ball palette of Ammonite and Skimming Stone and Wimborne White warmed by deep terracotta and Dutch Orange rays.
Laughter tinkles in gleeful echoes, couples walking hand in hand, a few young families with kids on shoulders and fingers laced around buggy handles, everyone suspiciously beautiful as fact, not opinion.
It’s a movie scene so evocatively stirring that Ash doesn’t feel worthy of it – is she really going to try and slip into this life, a life of octopus salad and Albarino out at the pavement cafés, all broderie anglaise slip dresses and make-up-free make-up? It’s laughable. She is laughable.
‘I’ll buzz you in,’ a voice replies through the intercom, followed by the sound of a lock releasing.
Right as Ash makes to push through the huge entryway door, a motorbike revs its engine as it passes, startling her so deeply she screams – full on, back-of-the-throat screeches.
It whizzes past her perilously close, two people on the back, one of whom turns around at her, shouts and throws up a hand crossly as if it’s Ash in the wrong. She thought they were going to mug her!
She looks down at her white knuckles clutching The Row half-moon leather handbag on her shoulder, a gift to herself when her youngest sister got engaged.
‘Fuck me,’ she mutters, looking back up, shaking, watching them zigzag to the end of the lane and whoosh away around the corner.
That would be just Ash’s luck, to be in Lisbon for less than three minutes before being robbed, or hospitalised, or both.
She’s heard awful stories about British families in Spanish hospitals going unfed, because the culture there expects family to come visit daily and feed you.
If she was a patient in Lisbon, and if the rules are the same, what if she was left to perish on her own?
UNKNOWN brITISH WOMAN TO BE BURIED IN PAUPER’S GRAVE AFTER NOBODY COMES TO CLAIM HER, the headlines will say.
Focus, she wills herself. Stop catastrophising. You’re fine. She pushes on the door, but it doesn’t budge. It’s locked still. Or has it re-locked? Oh god, they’re going to think she’s an idiot if she rings the bell again.
‘Hi,’ she says, forcing a smile when she buzzes up once more, so she sounds more confident than she feels.
‘Me again, sorry. The door has locked again? Can you release it?’ It’s not until she hears the clicking sound, moving swiftly to catch it this time (she can’t have it lock on her twice!), that she realises she hasn’t said please.
Ash is aware that in times of high stress it can be her manners that are the first thing to go.
She doesn’t do it on purpose. It just takes so much energy to quiet her brain and get out the strictly necessary words that any superfluous ones can get lost. She’ll be sure to sprinkle extra p’s and q’s once she’s in.
This will be home for the next twelve weeks, after all.
She wants them to like her. She wants everyone to like her.
Ash slips inside and takes her carry-on suitcase and handbag up the flight of marble stairs immediately through the door, making a conscious effort not to be annoyed that this is something she has to do herself.
Still, this isn’t a five-star hotel (by design!
She’s here to meet people, after all) and what does she do all that Pilates for if not to be strong enough to schlep her own bags at the end of a murderously long day?
It’s fine! It’s fine. She stumbles over the last step, clattering into the reception area – a sleek, modern set-up at odds with the history of the building – where at the far end a woman with a brunette crop scowls, sighs, and motions her over to the glass desk with an impatient hand wave.
‘Ashley?’ the woman asks, impervious to Ash’s pasted-on grin and hearty hello.