Chapter 9 #2
I do a couple of levels of my favourite phone game, but my heart isn’t in it. It’s only fun when you have something else you should be doing.
I text Ellie and tell her that I have dinner covered and then I drive to the big Tesco three miles away and buy all the ingredients for a coq au vin and an apple crumble.
I clean the already-clean kitchen to within an inch of its life and then do the bathroom.
It’s still only twelve thirty. I have done everything I can think of to do and I have only whiled away four and a half hours.
Now that I’m out of my wallowing phase, I’m going to be desperate for Ellie and Jack to get home from school every day. I’m going to have to try very, very hard not to be needy. This is terrible.
Simon texts me as I’m reading the news on my phone while eating what feels like a very lonely lunch. He says am I around this afternoon to catch up on everything.
I am so around, I tell him. I don’t even care about sounding needy now; I am needy. I’m desperate for some actual human interaction. I didn’t even get to speak to anyone on the till in Tesco because I was ushered towards the self-checkout area.
Before dashing upstairs to put some make-up on (Simon does not approve of anyone not making the most of their God-given looks at any time, even a boring Monday afternoon, and I am not up for any kind of discussion of why I might be letting myself go following my break-up even though it’s only been ten days), I take a moment to reflect on the ridiculousness of human nature: when I had a busy life, I loved days to myself working from home, but now that I have nothing to do, being at home by myself is torture.
Maybe it wouldn’t be such torture if I weren’t trying so hard to avoid thinking about the shitness of my life.
‘Hun. I have cake and I have coffee,’ Simon says as soon as I enter the café. ‘Can I interest you in something seasonal?’
I’m not one hundred per cent sure I’m ready for cake again following my extreme overindulgence recently, but I could murder a coffee, and it’s lovely to see him.
It’s also very good (from a selfish perspective; it can’t be great for Simon’s business) to see that there’s no-one else in the café right now, so we can actually talk.
‘Tell me everything if you’re ready,’ he says, before we’ve even finished a long hug.
‘Well.’ I sit down as he starts making a gingerbread latte for me. And then I sum everything up.
Simon is a good listener and his coffee is equally fantastic, and I’m actually feeling good by the time I’ve finished my monologue. So much so that I’m ready for cake.
‘Rick is a twat,’ Simon pronounces, placing a large slice of cinnamon-cream-topped pumpkin and blackberry cake in front of me. ‘However. His loss is everyone else’s gain. Definitely yours. You’re so much better off without him. So many more fish in the sea, naming no names, cough, Marcus.’
‘No, no, no,’ I say through my first mouthful of the stunning cake.
‘Not Marcus. Not anyone. No men. I’m completely done with men.
’ I mean it. I might not be averse – in very due course – to the occasional short-term thing, but I’m very done with actual relationships.
I think they just aren’t for me. I mean, my own mother left me when I was thirteen.
What does that say about me? ‘I’m staying single. ’
‘You know I was negotiating my new lease with Marcus? No negotiations required it turns out. Even though rents have got a lot higher in the three years since I last renewed the lease, he volunteered to keep the rent at the same level.’
‘Really? Wow.’ I know for a fact – from the job I was in until recently – that rents really have increased hugely in that time. ‘That was very kind of him.’
‘Yeah. You see? A very kind man.’
‘Yep, no. I’m staying single. There is no man I want to be in a relationship with, even a generous landlord.’
‘Still something to bear in mind,’ Simon says.
I roll my eyes fondly at him.
‘You know…’ He has his head tilted to one side, thinking. ‘You really don’t seem that devastated by your break-up. Like… you seem a lot more worried overall about being homeless and jobless.’
‘They’re bigger issues,’ I point out. ‘And I’ve had ten days now to get over Rick.’
‘Do you think you’d be fully over him by now if he’d been the love of your life?’
‘No, but… Oh!’
‘Exactly,’ Simon says. ‘He wasn’t. He was just a blip.
A bad decision. Of the kind we all make.
Well, not Miranda.’ Miranda and Rob met in their late teens and have been very happily together since.
‘Or Ellie.’ Ellie does not date full stop.
‘But all the rest of us. Normal people. We all make the occasional bad dating decision. Yours just turned into an engagement and, frankly, thank fuck he dumped you.’
‘Wow.’ I’m still grappling with the realisation that, honestly, other than the humiliation and the feeling of rejection I almost feel relieved about no longer being with Rick.
‘You’re right. It’s only been ten days and already I’m so glad not to be with him any more.
And, also, I don’t miss him in the slightest. To be fair, he was hardly ever around, because he was busy playing golf and networking.
I don’t think I was even mourning him or our relationship last week when I was wallowing.
I think I was just dealing with the humiliation and the no-home-no-job thing.
’ I stare at Simon. ‘Oh my God. You’re so right.
Thank fuck. Oh my God, what if he hadn’t dumped me?
I wouldn’t have dumped him. I don’t dump people. I’d have sleepwalked into a marriage.’
‘Well thank the Lord you didn’t,’ Simon says. ‘Also, by the way, what a dickhead. You’re an amazing woman and anyone who doesn’t love you is insane.’
‘Aww, thank you.’
‘So,’ he continues, ‘being single is not a problem for you – it’s a blessing if your non-single option is being with Rick – but it is a problem that you have no job and no home. Although you do have a home.’
‘I do. Ellie and Jack are wonderful and it’s amazing to be able to stay with them.’
‘But?’
‘Kind of lonely and purposeless during the day and I’m used to being in my own place.’
‘I have a proposition,’ Simon says. ‘I really want to set up an interior design business, spend a lot of time on it. I need someone to run the café for me. And there’s the top-floor flat.
I don’t like it being empty. I’d love you to stay in it rent-free in exchange for being there, keeping an eye on it and cleaning it. ’
Simon lives in a very gorgeous and luxurious flat above the café, and created a self-contained flat on the floor above it and tried renting it out but then decided he didn’t like sharing a front door with people he didn’t love.
‘For me, it would be the perfect solution. And I feel like it could be for you too. Obviously I’ll pay you for working in the café, but not necessarily a lot more than living wage, because I can’t really afford it.
But you’ll be living rent-free. And your gran will be happy that you do have the job I pretended you did at Miranda’s party. ’
My jaw is nearly on the floor at both the suggestion and the utter perfection of the timing of it.
Then I frown. Is it too perfect?
‘Are you just being nice?’ I ask suspiciously. ‘Do you really need someone to help in the café? And are you really keen to have someone in the flat?’
‘Hun. I am never nice for the sake of it.’ He actually looks offended I would think such a thing.
‘I mean, you know, I’ll rescue a wounded puppy as much as the next person, but I would not go so far as to have the wounded puppy on my premises twenty-four-seven.
I’d farm it out to someone who liked puppies more than me. ’
‘Am I a wounded puppy?’
‘Yeah, no, I don’t really know why I started down that route.
You are not a wounded puppy. You are my gorgeous very good friend who has just been shafted by her dickhead ex and in offering you a helping hand I will – if you accept – be doing myself an enormous favour.
Pleeeeease accept. I love the café but I want the freedom to do other stuff but I have the problem that I don’t trust most people.
’ He isn’t lying; he really doesn’t. ‘And think how much late-night fun we can have together with the amazing bonus that at the end of it we can separate off into our own flats and close our front doors on each other.’
‘You’re talking a lot of sense,’ I say slowly. I’ve realised over the past ten days that I really would like to spend a few weeks or perhaps months in Milbury while I work out my next steps in life but I do need some independence, and this does sound like the perfect solution.
‘As much free cake as you like,’ Simon says.
‘Okay, now you’re basically bribing me.’
‘As you know,’ he says, very seriously, ‘I will always bribe people if I need to.’
I tell him I’m going to think about his offer, because I don’t want to mess a good friend (or anyone) around, so need to be sure of my decision before I reply, but I have a very strong feeling that I’m going to accept.