Chapter 7
ALICE
No. No. No.
I re-read the email in my sent box where I have not only pitched the idea of an article about Michael and Alice’s lost love story but also promised that this could be made into a regular column.
I look at the email through splayed fingers across my face as I count my excessive use of exclamation marks (a quick scan counts fourteen!).
Oh God. My stomach bottoms out as I re-read the actual text again: ‘This will be a fresh and genital love story!’ I enthusiastically signed off by saying ‘we can touch ass later!!!’ I groan and rest my head on the table.
That’s it. If I thought my career was over before, this is definitely that last nail in the coffin.
Giuditta will never want to work with me again after this.
I lift my head and with a shaking finger, move the cursor to my inbox. I close one of my eyes and click.
It’s empty.
Shit.
* * *
‘What exactly about setting the ashes of my career alight is funny?’ I ask Josie the next afternoon, as I place another box to be ‘sold on eBay’ on top of the solid oak desk. Just like the rest of my furniture, it’s too big for the small space that I’d planned on making my office.
I’ve just got back from taking Georgia shopping.
She’s growing up so quickly, asking if she could have a coffee instead of the milkshake she used to prefer.
I tried to get her to open up about hearing the girls talking about her, but she’d stayed quiet.
In the end I’d just swerved the conversation to me and Spence.
‘You had other friends though, right?’ she’d asked, stirring her coffee.
‘Yeah, but sometimes all you need is one. One friend who will stick with you through thick and thin. Who likes you despite, and often, because you’re not perfect. That’s what real friendship is.’
‘Like Ruby?’
‘Yes. Just like Ruby.’
She’d snorted quietly.
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking that Dad said the same thing about you. You annoy him all the time.’
‘Well, there you go. And he’s still my friend.’
‘And you’re his, even though he can be a right grump sometimes.’
‘Exactly.’
It wasn’t much, but I’m hoping something about that will stick with her when she goes back to school.
Josie’s leaning against the white wall, loose beige trousers and white linen shirt hanging gracefully from her frame. Sweat blooms under the arms of my green top and stained jeans. She grins at her phone. ‘And don’t you bloody dare put it on TikTok!’ I add, reaching for her.
‘Hey!’ she says as I try to snatch the phone from her hands, but she turns it around so that I can see it’s a message to Spencer telling him about the email.
‘I wouldn’t put your personal life on social media… Not unless you give me your permission?’ she asks, fluttering her eyelashes.
‘Absolutely not.’ I waft the collar of my too-thick top trying to cool my body. I really need to tackle the suitcases still standing at the bottom of my bed. I reach over and unlock the window, letting in some air. My elbow catches the edge of one of the boxes to my right.
‘Shit.’ The contents spill out onto the grey carpet that still smells of carpet showrooms and plastic.
I reach for the journal amongst the books and toiletries that have landed across the box-room floor.
Photos of me and Ryan in Italy last year stare up.
I’m grinning at the camera like the fool I am.
My whole body sinks onto the floor, the grey of the carpet matching my pallor.
‘Why didn’t I guess?’ I ask Josie, my voice cracking as I stare at the photo.
‘That he was a complete douche?’ She sits down next to me, folding her legs neatly.
I wipe my nose. ‘He’s not a douche. Not really.’ I meet her green eyes. ‘He was everything. We had everything.’
My finger gently slides across the ticket for an opera we’d seen on a whim to get the full Italian experience, despite neither of us liking opera.
We’d narrated quietly through the whole thing, both of us making each other laugh behind our hands with our translations.
We’d walked back to the hotel, tipsy on Chianti, singing all of the directions operatically.
I’d loved journaling our life together. Each page has dates and days written in calligraphy and Insta-worthy embellishments, dried flowers, scraps of pretty paper behind the Polaroid photos from the camera he’d bought me for Christmas.
‘He thought his career was more important than you. So he is most certainly a douche.’
I lean my head against her shoulder, reaching for my jewellery box.
I take a deep breath and open it. Each pair of earrings, each bracelet, has its own memory: a Sunday picnic, a meeting where we pitched another killer idea, a brooch I’d picked out from a flea market…
the bracelet with charms from birthdays and Christmases long gone, but not forgotten.
The last three years of my life is in this box.
I rifle through the contents, Josie quiet as I excavate through my past. I move things around again, panic pulling my face closer to the contents.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, sensing the shift.
‘My engagement ring. It’s missing.’
‘You sure?’
I sit up more urgently. ‘Yes, I put it in here…’ I run my finger along the velvet lining, my fingers hitting the bottom of the crease. I upend the box, the contents scattering. ‘It’s missing.’
Josie picks up the box and does another sweep.
‘Do you think he kept it?’ she asks.
‘Why would he…?’ My voice trails off. I feel like my body has been sliced in two.
‘It was his grandmother’s,’ I say with understanding. Of course he took it back.
I picture him handing it to me. It wasn’t a grand proposal.
There wasn’t an audience. We weren’t in Paris or on a gondola.
He wasn’t a cliché. We had been writing.
And he’d pushed it along the desk. I hadn’t noticed it at first; I was engrossed, researching true-crime podcasts.
Ryan’s argument was that it was verging on voyeurism and I was trying to prove it was simply curiosity that gripped listeners.
We’d thrown out counter-arguments while we wrote – people are inherently good from me, people are born savages and it’s only social constructs that stop us following our inner desires from him.
He didn’t really believe it, but it made for tantalising clickbait.
It turned out to be one of our hard hitters; the online comments had run into the hundreds of thousands.
When I’d looked up, he’d been writing too. ‘What’s this?’ I picked it up.
‘It’s yours.’ He’d stopped typing. I’d looked up, the small laughter lines around his eyes deepening. ‘I want to do this. With you. For the rest of my life. I can’t imagine life being any better than this. Right now.’
I’d picked it up and slipped it on my finger. Then we’d carried on writing, both of us with ridiculous grins on our faces until we’d hit our word count. He’d walked around to me, took my hand in his, kissed where the ring fit almost perfectly. ‘I take it that’s a yes?’
Josie had been furious at the lack of effort; she had her own engagement all worked out in advance. A string quartet, and I think there was a mention of doves and possibly Michael Bublé singing in the background. The real one, not a recording. But I’d just said that it was perfect. And it was.
‘He’d said he couldn’t imagine his life being any better than writing with me in our house on a rainy Thursday afternoon.
That when he walked into a room, the only person he wanted to see was me.
’ And honestly, that’s how it always felt.
No matter how big a party, no matter how busy a meeting, our eyes would find each other’s right from the very first day we met.
‘Not any more, it seems.’ I don’t say out loud that I still scan the passengers on a train, the customers in a supermarket and expect to see him cocking a smile at me.
‘Twat,’ Josie says, biting down on the edge of the word. I lean into her, letting the memories fall away, but they reform, another woman wearing the ring that sat on my finger for two years. Another face he looks for in the crowd.
A thought lands. I sit up. Urgent. ‘Wait…’ I get up and rush from the room.
‘Al, where are you going?!’
I hurry down the stairs and into the lounge where my crime scene still decorates the wall. I pull the letter off the wall and scan the words. Josie appears, taking in the manic state of me. I hand over the letter. ‘He found a ring!’
‘What?’
‘A ring! Look!’ I run my finger under his words. First thing I should mention is I have your ring; you must have dropped it.
‘Al… this doesn’t mean that…’ She looks to the wall, to me, to the letter, eyebrows drawing in.
She pauses then hits me with a concerned smile.
‘I’m losing my marbles, aren’t I?’
‘Noooo…’ she says, shaking her head slowly. ‘But I think you’ve had a shock and…’
She walks over to the sofa, sits down and taps the space next to her. I join her, still clutching the letter in my hands like it has the answers to my future. ‘Why don’t you take some time off, eh?’
I swallow hard, scanning his words. ‘I can’t.’
She takes my hand, holding it firmly in hers. ‘You can. You need to recharge, reset.’
‘I am resetting,’ I say, holding the letter tightly. ‘I need something to focus on, and this is it.’ Josie pulls at her ear and takes a deep breath.
My shoulders drop. I fold the letter and lean back and close my eyes with a groan. ‘And after that email, and zero response…’ I lean my head back and close my eyes.
‘I don’t think you’re losing it,’ Josie says, ‘but I think you’ve just had a major life U-turn and I know that this all seems like it could be the answer. And I know you find taking time off hard…’
‘I don’t find it hard.’
She raises an eyebrow at me. ‘Mate, you wrote four essays during the summer holidays before you even started college.’
‘OK, fair point. But I can’t just sit around waiting for a job to fall in my lap. I need some income. My savings will only last another month or so. This story is my best shot.’
‘What you need is a spa day. And I just happen to have free tickets for two treatments and an afternoon tea with a bottle of Prosecco included. Let me see if I can book us in, eh?’
‘Don’t you have work?’
She tucks her red hair behind her ear. ‘This is work.’
I hesitate, look to the wall, the frail and yet heavy weight of Michael’s words.
‘You promise there’ll be Prosecco and a foot rub?’
‘Well, it’ll probs be cheap cava, but yes to the foot rubs.’
‘And you promise not to post pictures of my feet?’ She’s shaking her head, already swiping her phone screen ‘There’s nothing wrong with your feet.’
‘My second toe is almost twice the length of the others.’
‘If your second toe dominates, it means that you will always prosper and life will give you answers when you’re ready to hear them.’
I snort. ‘It does not!’
She flashes a white smile then holds up her screen. ‘Done. Go and get changed. Those muscles aren’t going to unlock by themselves.’
My phone starts to ring, but I ignore it.
I know it’ll be Mum and the last thing I need right now is a visit to my parent’s house where I’ll hear about my perfect sister and her perfect kids and have to listen to all the excuses that’ll be put in place to ignore the fact that my brother is a total fuckwit, not to mention the ‘have you heard from Ryan? Do you have a new job?’ questions.
‘Give me five minutes.’