Chapter 3
Locked in my bathroom stall, I do something that on some level I know is pointless and emotionally reckless, but I do it anyway.
I search Fran’s name in my WhatsApp to check when she and Max first started dating, to find evidence that their decision to move in is ridiculous.
What, how long can it have been? Eight months tops? !
I scroll back through the mentions of her name in my thread with Max—there aren’t many; I don’t ask about her often—and with a horrible, lurching sensation, I see the date. The first time I heard her name was two years ago.
Two years. No. It can’t be. Did they really meet two years ago? How can it have been two whole years?!
On paper, I have to recognize that does sound like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to know someone before agreeing to cohabit.
That’s nearly as long as Max and I were together.
This shock discovery is almost worse than finding out they’re moving in.
I stand up abruptly, knocking my knees against the wall.
I don’t want to be here. I need to go home.
I stumble out of the loo, the taste of sick fresh in my mouth.
I try to maintain composure as I walk past the line of people waiting for the toilet I’ve been hogging, but my ankle wobbles and I totter on my heels.
I am but a sad, weak-ankled clown, and they my nightmarish audience of shame.
How am I going to do this? You can’t leave your own party without everybody noticing, thus drawing attention to yourself and inviting unwanted questions.
It’s not like Dami and Angie don’t know I’m in love with Max—everybody does, except Max—it’s just one of those things we don’t talk about.
We used to, before Phil was on the scene and before Ang moved in with Jacob.
But now that they’re in real relationships, with an actual wedding on the horizon, nobody wants to hear about how I’m still pining after the boyfriend I broke up with five years ago.
I move stealthily past my table of friends, where it looks like The Folder actually has been put away. For once I’m disappointed. It would have been a good distraction.
I can hear them talking about Dami’s ridiculous workload.
“Yeah, wow,” Dami is saying, “it’s never-ending. And we’ve just got a new intern, so it’s that thing where asking her to do something takes longer than just doing it myself—”
“Babe,” Phil cuts across her. “You just gotta throw her in the deep end. Trial by fire.”
“But there are so many things that—”
“How is she ever gonna learn?” he interjects again.
My blood boils. I don’t entirely disagree with what he’s saying; Dami is nearly incapable of delegating.
Partly because she’s so polite she ends up offering to do everything for everyone else.
But must Phil always interrupt her? Must he always boss her around?
Must he always project?! The sound of his voice makes my eardrums bleed.
At least when Phil’s talking it’s easier for me to get past them unnoticed.
I scan the room, checking for Max. I don’t know what I’d say if he asked what was wrong. I’m relieved to see he’s engaged in one of his heated arguments with Angie. Thank God. That will keep him preoccupied.
“Yeah, not everyone’s going to get it . . . ,” he’s saying.
“What is there to get?!” she shrieks.
“Look, it’s OK, Angie. Art can be challenging . . .”
“Max, there is nothing challenging about an eight-foot photo of an anus.”
I slip past them into the coatroom, where I bump into someone blocking the rack.
It’s Angie’s boyfriend, Jacob. Talking to Sara’s friend Something-or-Other whose name I can never remember.
They look at me like I’m intruding. It feels like I’ve just walked into a bedroom, not a public area for hanging outerwear garments.
“Errr . . . sorry,” I say, pointing behind Something-or-Other’s head. “Can I just . . .”
“Oh, sure.” She steps out of the way.
I rummage for my coat in silence. I feel the pressure mounting. They want me to find it and leave so they can get back to their unsavory-but-just-about-socially-acceptable flirtation.
Eventually I find my coat and hurry past them, mumbling a goodbye. I’m too drunk and sad to think too deeply about Angie’s boyfriend being holed up in a space the size of a broom cupboard with someone else. Tonight, I’ve only got space for my own mess.
I escape without anyone seeing my red-rimmed panda eyes and find my Uber, where I manage to keep the tears at bay.
There’s something too bleak about crying in the back seat of an Uber and either having to explain your life story to the driver or have them awkwardly pretend not to hear you.
I text Mum, saying, sorry, felt ill and had to go home.
When I get home I run to my bedroom and throw myself onto the bed. I let my mind return to events I’ve gone over more times in my head than Dami’s gone over her future wedding. My breakup with Max.
Max and I met on my first shift at Scintilla.
It’s small, dark, underground, and prides itself on making fine cocktails, so God knows how I—or, for that matter, Sara—got a job there.
It was my first job out of uni. He’d been working there a couple of months and was instantly amused by my inability to do even the most basic of tasks, like successfully cutting lemons.
He helped me practice the recipes outside of hours and, when people sent my inadequate cocktails back, would redo them for me.
I’d probably have been fired without him.
Within a week we were having sex. Within a month we were exclusive.
We spent the vast majority of our time drinking and spending money we didn’t have on takeaways in the middle of the night, getting to know each other’s favorite films. Max has very specific taste in cinema—David Lynch, Jordan Peele, Tarantino—and marveled at my love of all movies: the good, the bad, the downright terrible.
For a couple of years after university, our lifestyle felt exciting and tinted with a kind of destitute glamour.
We were officially “struggling in the city,” bartending alongside out-of-work actors, models, and writers—serving people with vastly more disposable income than ourselves—and enjoying feeling young and hard done by.
But two years later, the post-uni bubble was popping.
I knew I wanted to be “successful” but still had no idea what I actually wanted to do with my life, and everyone else seemed to have plans.
After a lot of internships, Dami had landed her first PR job.
Angie was getting into personal training and was already plotting how to go about one day setting up her own business combining fitness and wellness.
And then Max got his first gig as a photographer.
A small travel website wanted someone to go around Europe on the cheap, photographing “off the beaten track” destinations. It was perfect for Max, who wanted to see the world. I desperately wanted to go, but I had no money saved on a bar worker’s salary and paying extortionate rent.
We avoided the subject until just before he left but, in the cold light of day, the realization hit me that I didn’t know when I would see Max again. Six months? A year?
He was leaving. I was staying. In my mind that equaled a breakup.
I can still see his hurt face as I delivered the news. Him looking like he was about to cry but saying, “Yeah, that makes sense. Obviously. Don’t worry about it, dude.”
Don’t worry about it, dude.
And you know what? I didn’t. He went off and I didn’t think about him much at all.
He was doing his thing and I had my own thing to find.
In my head it was just inevitable that we’d go our separate ways.
I would see his pictures, doing fun things in different countries, and feel OK about it.
The right decision had been made. I accepted a job at We Work, You Win, and at that point, even though I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do, I was just enjoying the novelty of being employed somewhere that gave me paid annual leave and health insurance.
I was getting drunk with Angie and Dami, using dating apps and meeting all kinds of people.
I’d figured out I was bi and was exploring the novelty of dating women.
I was relishing the feeling of being “a grown-up.”
It was only a couple of years later, when Max came back, that I started seeing it differently. He asked if I wanted to go for a drink, and as soon as I saw him it was like nothing had changed. I was right back there: all the in-jokes, the attraction, the feelings.
At first I thought that was inevitable. If you see any ex there’s going to be something that’s still there, right? Especially if you broke up because of circumstances rather than things being wrong with the relationship.
Except, as time went on, I realized it wasn’t a case of “something” still being there.
I thought about him when I woke up. I looked forward to his messages more than anything else.
He popped into my mind when I was on a date.
I wanted to tell him every tiny thing that happened during my day.
A few months after he moved back I realized I was still in love with him.
There have been so many times since he moved back to London that I wanted to tell him I made a mistake.
But by age twenty-six he’d friend-zoned me and I wasn’t sure there was a way back.
I was terrified of him rejecting me, so I didn’t say anything.
We were both dating other people on and off and there was never a good time.
I tried to be happy to be back in his life, even as a mate, and I figured—once we had built up trust between us again—I would work up the courage to tell him how I felt one day.
Except, I never did.
He met Fran.
And now here we are.
I try watching Grey Gardens to cheer myself up, but even Big Edie and Little Edie can’t help.
I spend the rest of the night crying and clutching my old, mangy teddy bear.
When Mum comes back later that evening, I think she might walk past my door and go straight to bed in a textbook display of passive aggression, but she stops outside.
“Hello? Becky?” Her voice is muffled but I can tell she’s worried. For a moment I’m as happy to hear her as a five-year-old who’s fallen on the playground. The door opens, and even her entering without knocking doesn’t bother me like it normally would. “What happened?”
“Mum,” I sob. I don’t know what else to say.
Mum and I don’t share much personal information with each other.
I’m sure she suspects that I’m still in love with Max, although I’ve never voiced it to her.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something.
Maybe this gap between us can be breached.
Maybe if I told her more we’d be closer.
I have the overwhelming urge for her to tell me it’s going to be OK.
“Mum . . . I . . .”
Then she spots the bucket I’ve put beside my bed—just in case—and sighs.
“Honestly, Becky. How much have you had to drink?”
“Only seven cocktails,” I say.
“Only?!” She raises her eyebrows.
“It’s my birthday.” My voice sounds small and defensive. “It’s not that many.”
Mum sighs again. “Oh, Becky. When are you going to grow up?”
She disappears to her own room, probably too repulsed that she created such a hideous monster-child to look at me. Probably wondering where it all went wrong and if she should have told me Santa Claus wasn’t real sooner.
I cry some more and eventually fall asleep.