Chapter three
When I first met Ashley Donaldson, she was recovering from a soul-destroying break-up almost as mortifying as mine.
Serendipitously, the same week as Fraser and I parted ways, Ashley’s boyfriend up and left her for his friend from the cycling club, Duhan.
Our mutual friend, Lydia, introduced us: I urgently needed somewhere to live, Ashley urgently needed someone to help her with Jake’s half of the rent.
We both urgently needed someone who wouldn’t tilt their head in fake concern and ask dumb questions like, ‘Wow, didn’t you have any idea? ’
For the next few weeks, we sat in silence eating giant bags of crisps and watching the longest box sets we could find to make the time pass.
Occasionally one of us would let out a sudden sob, and the other would open another bag of crisps and pass them over.
As soon as we could get out of Ashley and Jake’s lease, we moved into a different, bigger place which was when I adopted Tomsk, and we’d been there ever since.
Ash and I didn’t have a lot in common other than our broken hearts but we got on well, probably because we didn’t have a friendship to corrode under the strain of sharing a bathroom.
She was a project manager for a construction company, so we were both used to discussing money, which made sharing a flat so much easier – we had a house account for bills, and a cleaner once a week, and we never argued.
She was cool about Tomsk sleeping on the sofa, and I was cool about her taking up the harp during lockdown.
If our landlord hadn’t been selling off his rental portfolio to move abroad, we’d probably have carried on living in the flat indefinitely.
I’d never known Ash shy away from an awkward conversation. So it was rather unsettling to see her biting her lip like this now. I wondered if it was Jake. Maybe he’d got back in touch. Maybe Duhan had cycled off with someone else.
I closed my laptop. ‘What’s happened?’
Ashley took a deep breath. ‘I had a call from Zara at the estate agent’s about the new house this morning. There’s a problem with the rental agreement. We can’t take the dog.’
‘What?’ I hadn’t been expecting that. ‘But we signed a waiver specifically saying we could. I got him a reference – from the groomer!’
I’d had to take Tomsk, who didn’t enjoy being bathed at the best of times, to a groomer for two months, purely to secure the reference. We’d all suffered in the cause of finding a new home.
She nodded. ‘I know.’
‘So, how?’ I spread my hands in disbelief.
‘They mixed up the details,’ she said flatly. ‘The landlord has several properties, but our one is no pets. We should never even have been shown it.’
‘What?’ My brain initially refused to accept the idea. I could feel it bouncing off, even as I tried to process what she’d said. ‘But we’ve signed the contract. It’s a legally binding document.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Zara printed off the wrong contract. She’s phoned the landlord, apparently, to see if he could be persuaded to change his mind.’ She shook her head. ‘He won’t even discuss it. We’re not moving at the weekend.’
‘OK. But if one of his properties does accept pets, why can’t we have that one instead?’
‘Already let to someone else.’
‘So what are we meant to do?’ My disappointment started to sharpen with panic. ‘The movers are coming on Friday to take our stuff! Bryan’s buyers are literally arriving on Monday. We have to be out of here.’
‘Zara’s trying to find other places, but she says we need to explore other options ourselves. I mean, we know how little there is out there. For renters with dogs.’
The knot of anxiety tightened in my stomach as Tomsk wandered back in, and lay down by my feet, clearly aware something was up. His trusting sigh only made me feel worse. ‘So? What are we meant to do?’ I repeated.
Ashley’s eyes shifted microscopically to the side, and I had a sudden, cold feeling there was more to come.
‘Surely the lettings agency is obliged to find us somewhere else?’ I protested. ‘It’s Zara’s error. We’ve incurred costs! I’ve redirected the post to the new place! And set up broadband!’
She let out a deep sigh. ‘Look, this isn’t how I wanted to talk about it, but sometimes things happen for a reason, don’t they?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Beth. I’m going to be straight with you.
’ Ashley took another breath, and looked me right in the face.
‘I honestly think Fate brought us together to get us both through the bad times. I’d have never have worked out what I need in a relationship if I’d moved in with Lydia – she’d have talked me into giving Jake another try, whereas you were so honest in a way only a total stranger could be, and that’s exactly what I needed. ’
Total stranger. I opened my mouth, then closed it again, hurt.
We’d been sharing for so long, I’d almost forgotten what a pragmatic arrangement it had been at the start.
Those bleak days of wordless misery had faded into an uplifting story about the power of female friendship: two heartbroken losers recovering with the support of each other’s empathy, box set-and-curry nights, and, of course, dog-walking.
It made up for the fact that I barely heard from Mali, Sophie or Poppy – my actual friends – since the Fraser disaster.
But was that not how Ashley saw it? Were we not proper friends? Just flatmates?
She was still talking. ‘Leo and I . . . well, who knows where we’ll go, but he is a million times better for me than Jake. And I only know that because you’ve helped me understand what I—’
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Leo? Leo the guy you’ve seen for dinner about twice?’
Ashley raised her chin. ‘It’s been a bit more than that.’
‘Has it?’
‘Yes! Quite a lot more. I didn’t want to rub your nose in it.’
I stared at her. Rub my nose in what?
‘Anyway, forget Leo,’ she said, getting back into her speech.
‘It’s been an important part of my life, like .
. . hibernating. Wintering. I’ve worked out a lot of things about myself – as I know you have too.
’ She paused, then ripped off the plaster.
‘And I think what I need now, to keep moving forward, is my own space.’
I pressed my lips together, but inside my mind was howling. This was about Leo. But also about me.
I felt Tomsk shift his big head on to my feet, the soft heat of his breath warming my socks.
He was very subtle about offering his comfort.
I wondered if he could sense stress coming off me in waves.
It was a small payback for the nights I’d lain on the kitchen floor next to him while he whickered and whimpered in his sleep. We were both bad containers of stress.
‘And look,’ Ash continued, eager to smooth over the uncomfortable atmosphere that had sprung up, ‘you’ve moved on a lot too. You’ve grown. I mean,’ she added, quickly, ‘spiritually. Emotionally.’
Her gaze darted around the room in search of examples of my life moving on, so we could both ignore her comment about me growing. There were only packing boxes.
‘I mean, you’ve been promoted, haven’t you?’ she said, clutching at straws.
‘Not really.’
‘Well, you’ve helped so many people build their businesses with your advice!
Look, Beth, don’t take this the wrong way.
I’ve loved living with you, but this,’ she gestured around our empty sitting room, stripped of its books and ornaments, no longer the cosy nest it had been, ‘came about because of an unexpected disaster, right? Well, the contract thing is another disaster! So maybe this is the universe trying to . . .’
Ash finally ran aground on the stony shore of my silence.
‘Trying to what?’ I prompted her.
‘To make you get out there.’
‘Get out there, meaning what? Find a new boyfriend?’
‘Yes! But also literally get out there. How many times have you been into the office this year?’
‘I don’t need to go into the office. They’re fine with me working from home.’
‘That’s not the point. You need to see people, be around colleagues.’ She paused, trying a smile. ‘I mean, does your ID even work?’
I flinched. My ID was a sore point long before I’d stopped going in; there’d been many, many attempts until I’d finally got a version of myself that I could bear to have hanging round my neck on a lanyard, and I’d swerved every subsequent request to update it.
It was a reminder now of how very different I was to that Beth – the single chin, the confident smile, the blond French pleat – I wanted to be that Beth again, not this one.
And I could get her back, I knew that. I’d been on enough diets in my life to know what I had to do. I just didn’t want to face the judgemental gaze of Natasha and the others at Jacobs’ until old Beth had returned.
‘And it’s not like I don’t leave the house,’ I said defiantly. ‘I was out today.’
‘To avoid something at the office, I bet.’
‘No!’
‘Beth, you’re your own worst enemy.’
She knew me too well. That was the trouble. We’d lived together long enough to have a background feel for each other’s schedules, as well as our foibles.
I changed tack. ‘So are you moving in with Leo?’
Ash opened her mouth to deny it, then nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? You could have let me know before we started looking for a new place!
We could have saved a stack of money, for one thing.
’ I hated myself for saying this. I hated, hated, hated conflict but I felt as if I were on the edge of a cliff, scrabbling to stop myself being shunted off.
‘We’d started talking about maybe finding somewhere eventually, but this kind of sped things up, and— Ugh!
Don’t look at me like that.’ She ran a hand through her hair.
‘I’m starting to worry about you. You need to move on.
I sometimes think you believe that if you stay here, in your room, really quietly, not changing, one day you’ll wake up and it’ll be the day before you and Fraser broke up, and somehow you can stop it happening. ’
‘No . . .’