Chapter Eight
(Okay, so it’s not all bad.)
Another thing that’s smaller: my new flat.
Yes, I finally had enough of the Westlife boys taunting me every night with their deep, soulful gazes, and the sometimes-blissful disorientation caused by Amina’s twin bed wore off too, so I figured it was time to go.
Being the saints they are, the Iqbals would have housed me for as long as I wanted, but I’m thirty—I can’t live with parents, even if they’re not mine.
So to the internet I went, in a desperate attempt to find the stranger in Liverpool least likely to a) eat food clearly labeled “Abby,” b) arrange their toenail clippings in geometric patterns on the kitchen counter, and/or c) murder me.
Yes, I know, I have exacting demands of housemates.
But finding this person proved to be a bit of a challenge, especially because the final thing that’s considerably smaller on this side of the pond?
My salary. In fact, Charlotte literally laughed out loud when I told her what the Sox had been paying me.
It was shocking for a number of reasons, mostly because I didn’t think amusement was an emotion in her arsenal—though I suppose it was more like schadenfreude.
I’ve landed in a cramped but cozy two-bedroom furnished flat on the edge of the city with a girl called Fiona—or, as it sounds when she says it, “Fee-oh-ner.” She works in marketing for a chain of supermarkets and she’s nice enough.
Most importantly, we’re more than a week in and there have been absolutely zero toenail-related incidents or homicides, so it’s pretty great on that front.
Fiona’s major downside is that she has a serious boyfriend, Oliver, who is at the flat All.
The. Time. He’s fine, and I wouldn’t be bothered by his constant presence under normal circumstances, but seeing as I am still only weeks out of the most traumatic breakup of my life, it’s hard to have their love shoved in my face at all hours of the night and day, especially as I’m still actively reminding myself that I am no longer one-half of a couple.
But what am I going to do, say something about it?
Amina, being the absolute legend she is, has driven me to Ikea today because two weeks of sleeping on the bedroom’s impossibly thin mattress has done atrocious things to my spine, and two weeks of emails responding to the news of the canceled wedding has done atrocious things to my mental health.
I’m so grateful to have her here; it sounds so stupid, but I didn’t realize just how lonely I would be when moving to a place where I knew almost no one.
Even if I had come to England under happier circumstances, rather than fleeing the scene of the crime of my relationship, I’m not sure I would have fully reckoned with the emotional toll of being alone in a foreign country.
It’s one thing to have a few Saturday nights at home when you can’t be bothered to make plans; it’s quite another to have a few Saturday nights at home because you have no one to make plans with—especially after six years of having a default plus-one.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the “MOVE SOUL” column of Erica’s List for ideas on how to remedy this, and though I’m not yet desperate enough to go to a local open-mic night, some of the boxes are looking more and more tempting.
After a quick lunch of Swedish meatballs in the Ikea cafeteria, Amina and I ride the escalator up to the showroom floor. “So how are you finding the job?” she asks.
“Really good, to be honest. It’s been such a welcome distraction from, you know, the tire fire that is my life. Everyone is so nice, just really friendly and helpful and all that good stuff.” I pause. “Well, everyone except for the Mersey coach. He’s nice, but a bit intimidating.”
“It’s Torsten Vogler, yeah?”
“Yeah. Big, taciturn German dude. Doesn’t smile a whole lot. Phil—that’s one of my coworkers—Phil and I had to do an interview with him, just stupid questions for the Twitter feed, and I almost shit myself.”
“Tell me more about this Phil character. Do we have a rebound situation on our hands?”
I loop my arm through hers. “Oh, Amina. Never change.”
She laughs and steers us toward a display living room, fingering some curtains as she goes. “I know you’re probably not even thinking about it given that Captain von Fuckface is still visible in the rearview mirror. But it never hurts to periodically scan the horizon.”
“Phil is great, but I don’t think it’s going to be like that. Work husband, not real husband.”
“So he’s a fuggo?”
“No, he’s actually pretty cute. I don’t know, I just don’t get the vibes.” I shrug.
“The vibes? Total nonsense, love. We’ll never find you a husband if we’re only chasing vibes.”
I laugh along and pretend she’s right, because the alternative is bringing up Lachlan and attempting to explain what I felt that first day he walked into my office.
Not that I’m in love with Lachlan, but there are definitely vibes.
Even I’m not deluded enough to miss those.
And if I could find those vibes in someone who was single and not an internationally recognizable footballer, I’d be living the dream.
“Anyway, what’s new with you?” I ask. “How’s Faizan?”
“He’s good, yeah. Really good,” Amina says, but her voice gets all high and reedy at the end.
“Is everything okay?”
She’s definitely being shifty. She can’t quite look me in the eyes, and no one is actually this interested in the FR?TORP coffee table, no matter how affordable it is. She brushes some nonexistent Swedish dust off of it and shrugs. “No, everything’s great. Honestly.”
I tug her down onto a sofa, which, it must be said, is far more comfortable than it looks, and just stare at her.
As nature abhors a vacuum, so does Amina detest a long silence.
I first learned this when we chatted on AOL as teenagers and if I left even just to go to the bathroom or get a drink, I’d return to about a hundred messages.
Sure enough, she’s soon squirming. “Okay, okay. God, you know I hate it when you do that. Everything is fine, truly. It’s lovely, in fact.
And it’s early days so we’re not really telling people, and I know it’s a tricky time for you so I didn’t want to rub salt in the wound or anything, but, well… I’m pregnant.”
The squeal I let out is loud enough to disrupt a nearby couple arguing over a lampshade. They look at us and back slowly away, but I don’t care. I bend over to hug Amina—another thing she hates—and offer effusive congratulations.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“How could I be making fun of you?” My voice is muffled in the soft cotton of her T-shirt. “You’d have to have normal human reactions to things for me to make fun of them.”
“Don’t expect me to start now. This thing is a parasite. Yes, I’m glad it’s growing inside of me, but it’s already an enormous pain in my arse.” She’s trying to look annoyed, but I can tell there’s a little pocket of excitement and pride trapped right under the surface.
I relinquish my grip on her and laugh.
“Seriously, though. Are you okay?” A look of concern slides into her eyes, one that I’ve become all too familiar with in the weeks since Steven left.
I’ve gotten it from Josh and Erica, my parents, my brothers, even my five-year-old niece.
I bristle at the pity looming behind everyone’s sad smiles; it’s an automatic reaction at this point, no matter how well intentioned they are.
“Am I okay because my dear friend is pregnant? Yes, I am okay. I am more than okay. This is wonderful news.”
“No, I just mean…I know you and Steven were excited to start trying, before the Great Betrayal—”
I hold up a hand to cut her off, but my phone does it better, as it starts buzzing violently in my bag. I fish it out and see it’s an unknown U.K. number. “Sorry, I should get this. It might be work.”
The number might be unknown, but the voice on the other end of the line isn’t. “You seem like a person who knows things about art,” says Lachlan by way of hello.
A little flutter that starts in my stomach quickly spreads to my face and I smile into the phone. He’s calling me—that must mean we’re actually friends! “Oh, sure. I apprenticed under Van Gogh back in the day. The nonstop absinthe was great, but the wages were shit.”
“All the greats have to suffer for their art, Macca. But anyway, I’m with an atrociously aggro dealer named Javier, trying to buy something for my bedroom, and I could use some of that expertise. Come cast your discerning eye over the selection?”
“I’d love to, but I’m busy.”
“Right, busy staring at the wall waiting for me to ring you. And now the moment has arrived.”
I bite my thumbnail and smile wider. “That’s what I was doing all morning, yes, but now I’m at Ikea.”
“Ikea? Fascinating. Tell me, what is it like to be poor?”
“Oh, you can fuck right off.”
He laughs. “Fine. I’ll let you get back to flat-pack paradise, but you owe me at least seven to ten strongly held opinions on the modern masters.”
“You got it, boss,” I say. “It’ll be on your desk Monday morning.”
“Toodle pip, Macca.”
He hangs up but I keep the phone pressed to my cheek for a second because I see the look Amina is giving me and I’m not sure how to handle it.
She’s got her eyebrows up about as far as they can go, and I can tell that all her visions of Phil and me walking down the aisle have been supplanted by a new fantasy.
I preempt her, because the thing is, I’m dying to talk about Lachlan. The happiness from even that sixty-second phone call is vibrating through my body. “Oh, just say it.”
“Do all your coworkers make you blush like a little schoolgirl?”
Fuck, just hearing that makes me blush even deeper. Damn my overactive capillaries! “He’s not exactly a coworker.”
Her big, brown eyes go wide as she figures it out, and she grips my wrist, a set of bracelets clattering together with the movement. “Was that a player? Oh my God, who?”
“Lachlan Ramsay?” I offer tentatively. Sheepish doesn’t begin to cover it—I can actually feel my shoulders go up in a pitiful display of self-consciousness.
“Lachlan Ramsay?” She googles a picture of him and shoves her phone in my face.
“This Jude Law–looking motherfucker just rang you and made you laugh like that? Tell me everything. Immediately.” Now she’s shaking my arms up and down, and my phone flies out of my grasp and lands on the affordable, resilient (washable!) cushions of the VRETSTORP.
“Ah, Jude Law, yeah, I guess I can kind of see that. But, like, young Jude Law, when he had hair and did rom-coms. Sidebar, why did he stop doing those? He was so good in The Holiday.”
“Abigail Middle-Name McIntyre, do not try to distract me with sidebars. Are you hooking up with a footballer?”
“No!” I shout, again loud enough to scare off yet another couple trapped in the special hell that is the Ikea living room section. “God, no. Absolutely not. My heart is far too mangled to even contemplate someone new. And anyway, he’s married.”
“Funny you should mention that.” She fishes a magazine out of her bag; it’s LOOK!
, one of the cheap tabloids obsessed with footballers and their WAGs.
She flips through a few pages then drops it in my lap with the flair of a lawyer making a dramatic closing argument.
I look (LOOK!) down to see several grainy pictures underneath a bold headline: ADIOS AMOR?
Lachlan Ramsay’s WAG spends holiday in private beach club in Mallorca cozying up to his ex-teammate after Scot returns to Liverpool—without her.
It’s hard to sort out the reaction this provokes in me.
Empathy for Lachlan if it’s true, because being cheated on is hard enough without having it splashed across the papers.
Satisfaction at understanding the Claire puzzle a little bit more.
But also a healthy amount of skepticism: Am I really supposed to buy what this rag is selling?
What’s next, I start listening to podcasts about Bigfoot?
When I don’t respond, Amina prods me with the magazine. “So? Thoughts?”
“The only thing I take from this is that their headline writer must be paid by the letter.”
“Come on, she’s totally having an affair.”
“Amina, how can you read this trash? This is a vaguely woman-shaped person next to a vaguely man-shaped person on a vaguely balcony-shaped structure. I mean, where were these photos taken from, space? And even if it is her, they’re just standing there. Oooh, call the divorce lawyers.”
“All I’m saying is you might have an opening.”
“And all I’m saying is you’re deranged.”
She laughs and puts the magazine away. “Fair enough. I’ll let you just be friends—for now. But I do need all the details.”
“And I need pillows, so can we focus on that? Also, we were talking about you before Lachlan and the blur-who-might-be-Claire so rudely interrupted. I want to know everything about the baby.”
She waves her hand. “Whatever, it’s a fetus, it’s doing typical fetus things. We’re closing in on twelve weeks, we’re due in January, we don’t know the sex. Your news is way more exciting.”
“I promise I’ll tell you everything if you help me buy sheets.”
“Sheets you’re going to shag Lachlan Ramsay in,” she says under her breath.
I slap her arm. “Say that again and I’ll throw you a baby shower.”
Amina stares at me like I’ve pulled a gun on her. “You wouldn’t.”
“Cucumber sandwiches and everything.”
“Okay, I take it back. You’re not going to shag Lachlan Ramsay.”
“Thank you.”
I drag her up off the couch, link her arm in mine, and wind us to the bedroom section, dodging her increasingly lewd questions as best I can and trying desperately to keep the resulting images out of my mind.