Chapter Forty-Six
I arrived back home feeling strangely depleted, second guessing myself.
Had I made the wrong decision, leaving my job?
Had I been forced into making a catastrophic, expensive mistake by my sheer irritation at Esme?
I was so lost in my thoughts as I came through the front door, I barely heard the sound of flat doors opening and feet on the upstairs landing.
‘Hey, Lizzy!’ Myra appeared, a strange expression on her face.
‘Hey.’ I smiled. ‘Is everything—’
I saw Bill’s head appear over the rail of the upper landing. ‘Liz! Surpriiiiiise!’ He let off a party popper. So did Myra. And, in a blur, I saw a figure racing down the stairs before me, leaping off the third stair and doing an impressive star jump.
‘Sara?!’ I screeched. ‘Oh my God!’
We clung onto each other, my best friend and I, in a fierce, haven’t-seen-you-in-five-years hug. When we came out of it, Sara held me back, examining me, smiling brightly. ‘Your tan’s worn off,’ she said. ‘And where the bloody hell have you been all day?’
‘At Dad’s,’ I said. ‘So has your Botox.’
‘It broke down on the aeroplane.’ She kissed me on the forehead. ‘You look rough.’
‘Is this what passes as affection, these days?’ asked Bill, quaveringly.
‘You absolutely did the right thing,’ Sara said, sitting cross-legged on my sofa as she picked up a slice of stuffed crust Margarita pizza. ‘This will be a new beginning for you. The only way is up.’
I sighed and contentedly bit into a slice.
This is what I needed: Sara’s certainty.
She’d started bossing me around from the moment she entered the flat, and I loved it.
Pebble apparently also loved it, because she had, insultingly, decided to curl up on Sara’s lap and act like the world’s most affectionate cat.
‘Also, I’d forgotten how small this place is,’ she said, looking around. ‘Lizzy, it really is time for a change.’
My studio flat was four times the size of the suitcase Sara had brought with her, and her time in sunny, spacious Australia had made her see it through the opposite of rose-tinted glasses.
‘Just tell me what to do,’ I said, ‘and I’ll do it.’
She thought about it, inspecting her gel nails, perfectly shiny and decorated with smiley faces. ‘First, we’re booking you another spray tan. Then we’re going on a trip to a spa. And we are going to brainstorm the shit out of your career.’
‘Have I ever told you I love you?’ I said.
Sara stayed for a week before travelling on to her mum in Yorkshire, and we talked ourselves hoarse.
She stayed at an Airbnb nearby, turning up every morning with fresh fruit salad for breakfast. She made me go running with her on grey London pavements, attended yoga classes alongside me (performing the perfect head stand), and bought me a new notebook, for evening discussions on work and life, so I could draw mind maps and envision my perfect new life.
We talked about her life in Australia, her love for Dex, and her latent homesickness for English tea and sarcasm.
We talked about how I could change things.
In short, we talked as though she had never left, and as if we were excitable women in our twenties, just with some added experience and a touch of world-weariness.
As promised, she oversaw yet another spray tan and a night in a bouji spa place outside London, where we got head massages and sat in a sauna until we were both glowy skinned.
By the time she left, waving at me from a train window at King’s Cross, I felt like a new me – but also, really, like the old me.
The Lizzy who had taken life by the horns, and thought anything was possible.
In the safety of our late-night discussions, I’d started processing my experience at EKArts, understanding how it had dragged me down, and how I could prevent the same thing from happening in the future.
It was far from straightforward, but somehow Sara had opened a door for me, just a crack, letting me see there was a real future for me, and that it could be bright and exciting.
As the train started to pull away, Sara raised her hands in a heart shape, and I did the same.
Then I stood, watching the train snaking its way out of the station through shafts of light.
I stayed until it was gone, then I headed out of King’s Cross, out into London in the springtime, full of life and possibility.
My joyful emptiness, the stillness of my flat, with Pebble next to me, meant I could let my own thoughts in, noting ideas, writing lists and imagining what life could be.
When Sara Zoomed me from her mum’s, I was able to say to her that my mind had cleared and I definitively knew what I did not want to do.
‘I don’t want to work for a celebrity ever again,’ I said.
‘Yay! For you,’ she said. ‘Boo! For me, because no gossip. But I get it.’
‘I don’t want to work in the art world.’
She tilted her head. ‘But you love the art world?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I love art. That’s a different thing.’
‘So, do you know where you do want to work?’
I took a deep breath, anticipating her alarmed expression. ‘A garden,’ I said.
Her eyes flickered for the briefest moment, then she smiled.