Chapter 16
I return to Max’s place with my tail between my legs.
The prospect of looking for a new job looms over me with more dread than when I thought I was going to fall down a manhole or be taken out by a flying champagne cork.
I can’t bear to return to that place of giving job applications everything I had and never cutting it.
It doesn’t help that I went for a walk to clear my head and ended up passing Spellbound Sue, waving a crystal skull around some bewildered-looking man’s head in circular motions.
Even she has a job. Somehow, we live in a world where Spellbound Sue is more employable than I am. Life simply isn’t fair.
I sit on Max’s sofa, pull out his laptop, and open Google. I take a breath.
What do I type?
What job do I even want to do?
A flash of foreboding flies through my chest as I stare at the screen. This. This is what I’ve been avoiding for so long. I feel so validated. Confronting not knowing what I want to do is every bit as awful as I thought it would be. Why do I still not know what I want to do? Do I even have a soul?
Maybe I did belong at We Work, You Win.
I’m distracted by a gentle thud in the other room.
For a moment, I’m relieved. An intruder is definitely more pressing than sorting out my career.
No one could blame me for procrastinating finding a job if I was being attacked by a burglar.
I might even be able to put it off for another six months while I deal with the trauma of the incident.
Especially if they have a knife or something.
I could say sorry to Mum for making fun of her elaborate alarm system and she could lock me in the house until I recovered.
Then I remember to actually panic. Fuck. There’s someone in the house.
A second later Leila emerges.
“Bloody hell,” I say. “You scared me!”
“Really?” She yawns. Her hair is all mussed up from resting on Max’s bed. Clearly she’s made herself at home. “You don’t look very afraid. You’re lazing on the couch.”
“I was about to grab a chair or something,” I grumble.
I wasn’t.
“Interesting,” Leila comments. “You don’t seem to have fight or flight responses.”
“Why are you still here?!” I demand, ignoring her observation. “Taking a nap in my house?”
“It’s not your house.” Leila frowns.
“Oh, you know what I mean.” I close the laptop and put it on the table. God, she’s annoying. But on some level, I am pleased that she ignored my request to leave and is still here.
She sits down in the armchair across from me and hugs her knees to her chest. “I don’t have anywhere to go,” she admits. For once, she doesn’t sound like she’s reading the news. Vulnerability has cracked its way into her voice and her posture.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh. What about your . . . parents?”
I avoid mentioning Dad directly.
“I was living with my girlfriend,” she says.
She seems a bit young to have been living with a girlfriend.
I’m nearly thirty and the thought of moving in with someone still gives me the feeling you get before going down a tunnel slide.
It’s dark and scary and fuck knows what you’re going to find in there or whether you’ll make it out the other side.
“And you’re not anymore?” I ask.
“Obviously.”
“But can’t you go back to your parents’? You must have been there to get my letter?”
“I wasn’t staying there, just visiting. Mum wasn’t happy about me moving. Apparently I was too young.” She puts air quotation marks around her words. “I don’t want to prove her right.”
Well, you kind of have, I think, but I don’t say it.
Then I think, why not say it? She’s been free with her opinions about my life.
But she looks so defeated I don’t have the heart.
I watch her hugging her knees to her chest, sitting in some stranger’s living room with nowhere else to go, and it dawns on me that her self-assurance is just bluster.
This nineteen-year-old doesn’t have the answers to everything any more than I do.
She’s just immature enough to believe that she does.
Suddenly, having her here doesn’t feel as overwhelming as it did this morning. Even if she was fathered by my absent father. Having a father clearly doesn’t mean she’s got the magic key to life either.
“So can I stay?” she asks.
“Yeah, all right.” I smile.
She smiles back at me. “Did you do all the things you needed to do today?”
“Uhhhhh . . .”
“I take it no?”
“Well, I tried to get my job back. It didn’t go well.”
“Wait.” Leila sits up in the armchair. “The job you hate? Why would you want it back?!”
I shrug. “Needs must.”
“But there are a million other jobs out there. You finally quit. If you went back you probably would have stayed for another five years!”
“That’s not . . .” I don’t finish my sentence.
She’s right. It made no sense to go running back to a job I only just worked up the confidence to leave.
But it doesn’t make any sense that she’s hiding out here instead of telling her parents she split up with her girlfriend, when she’s going to have to tell them eventually.
People do things that don’t seem to make sense all the time.
“I think . . . I think when moving forward doesn’t work out for me, I go backward.
” I’m only just beginning to see this about myself.
The only reason I even took the job at We Work, You Win was the crushing disappointment of missing out on jobs that I actually wanted and didn’t get, and I’d interned at WWYW, so I knew the commute and where to get good coffee from. “It’s instinct.”
Leila nods. “It’s the wrong instinct. Driven by fear.”
I burst out laughing. Leila’s a little like Angie in how she doesn’t mince her words, but with less awareness; she’s not trying to be catty, she’s just saying what she thinks.
My heart tugs thinking of Angie. I wonder what she’s doing.
Maybe she’s working out with clients at the gym, planning for the wellness center, texting Dami, cooking some kind of healthy meal at home for Jacob. I long to hear about her day.
“So is that what Max is?” Leila asks.
“Huh?” I say, still half thinking about Angie.
“Moving backward because moving forward didn’t work out? I mean, he’s an ex-boyfriend, right?”
“Oh . . . no,” I say. “No. Very different situation.”
I had a lot of fledgling relationships that didn’t work out because the dating app scene is a nightmare, sure, but I was always in love with Max deep down.
She nods and says wistfully, “I think I’ll always be in love with Polly.”
I have the impulse to laugh. To tell her that’s not true.
That she’ll definitely get over it and meet someone else.
This declaration of undying love sounds so ridiculous coming out of a teenager’s mouth.
But it didn’t happen for me, did it? Guiltily, I think that I’m the least qualified big sister to give advice ever.
“Shall we get drunk and order shit tons of Chinese food?” I say instead.
“It’s four o’clock,” she comments, to which I shrug.
“I like your style,” she says.
Suddenly, I could not be happier for her company. Her obvious loneliness speaks to my own and I’m grateful she’s here. I’m filled with the urge to connect with her, to get to know her and forget about everything else.
Two hours later Max’s booze cupboard has been almost entirely raided. We have been laughing and swapping stories, and I believe “bonding,” all the while carefully avoiding the mention of our mutual life-giver.
“The gin! The gin is gone!” cries Leila. She’s hanging upside down off the armchair, with her legs over the side. She’s peering into the bottle.
“AH!” she shouts. “I got gin in my eye!”
“So the gin wasn’t gone,” I comment.
“Now it’s gone.” She clutches her eye.
We both laugh hysterically. In that moment Leila pouring volatile flammable liquid into her eye is the funniest thing I have ever seen.
“So do you stay here a lot?” asks Leila, after we’ve calmed down. She flails her arm wildly, gesturing to the room.
“Noooooooo,” I say. “No no no no nooooooo sir.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. Why not?! Why NOT? I wondered the same thing when I got here, but it had never crossed my mind before. “It’s just easier to meet in Central, I guess.”
“Is it Max’s girlfriend? Would she mind?” Leila’s face is turning red and her features are indistinguishable from this angle. She looks like a squishy, bloated toad.
“I don’t know,” I say again.
“You don’t know much,” Leila says.
“Nope.” I knock the side of my head with my knuckles. “Empty.”
“What’s she like? Can I see her?”
I nod and open Instagram, typing Fran’s name in the search bar. I don’t usually stalk Fran. It never occurs to me. She never occurs to me. I know she exists in theory but more as, like, a fence between me and Max that stops me coming too close, not as a person.
Leila pushes herself up from the floor and takes my phone. “She looks nice.”
This is a stab in my vulnerable, drunken stomach.
“What are you saying? That I’m NOT nice?!”
“Whhhhhhoooooooaaa.” Leila raises her arms defensively.
“How does one even look nice? How can you tell?!” I yell. “It’s not a physical feature. That’s like saying, oh, she looks . . . conscientious. Oh, she looks impulsive . . . Oh, she looks parsimonious.”
“Parsimonious?” Leila wrinkles her nose.
“It means frugal. I’m not going to show you if you say stupid things.
” I snatch the phone back. I start scrolling through Fran’s profile myself.
There’s a picture of her grinning in a field, petting a goat.
There’s an action shot of her playing football with a group of children.
There’s a snap of her out for drinks for her coworker’s birthday . . .
Fine. She does look nice. I bet Fran would get a card when she left her company. Her colleagues probably adore her.
Leila moves to sit next to me, peering at the screen. “You can totally tell.”
“Ugh!” I wail. “I don’t enrich the lives of any children or goats!”
I throw my phone away. Leila catches it deftly. She looks at it for a second as I sit stewing. I’m in a foul mood now. Where can I get hold of a goat to stroke?
“Er, Becky . . .”
“What?!”
“The heart on this one is red.”
“Huh?”
She points at a picture of Fran standing on some bridge in front of a river and a beautiful sunset. The little heart underneath it is red. The picture is from three years ago.
“Did you like it on purpose?”
Nooooooooooooooo.
“What?!” I jump up and peer closer. “No!!! Did I do that just now?”
“I don’t know.” Leila shrugs. “Do you usually like her pictures?”
“No!” I say. “I don’t.”
“OK, don’t panic.”
“LEILA!” I panic.
“There’s a chance you liked it three years ago.”
“Maybe.” I start sweating. “It’s impossible to remember!”
“Think, Becky, think. Cast your mind back to three minutes ago. Did the little white heart come up? The one that comes up when you click?”
“I don’t know,” I wail. “I’m too drunk. I don’t know!”
Leila leans away from me and observes me like you might a wild animal. “Maybe she won’t get a notification. Sometimes I don’t get a notification every time someone likes something.”
“I can’t pin all my hopes on that!” I cry. I click on the picture again to unlike it. “Will that help?” I ask desperately. “Will that make a notification less likely?”
“Er, I don’t know,” says Leila. “But I did just think of a way we could check.”
“HOW???” I could kiss her. “DO IT!”
“We could have looked in your recently liked posts to see if it’s there. But you’ve unliked it now, so that won’t work.”
“LEILA!!!” I howl.
“Look, it’s OK . . . ,” Leila soothes.
I close my eyes, awaiting her comforting words of wisdom.
“If you did like it, she’ll probably just think you’re a bit sad.”
I open my eyes and turn to her slowly. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Before Leila can respond, we hear the sound of keys in the door.
“Is that Max?” Leila whispers.
“No . . . no. He only left this morning. He would have told me if he was coming back.”
“Oh.” Leila glances at Fran’s profile in my hand. “Oh. You might want to close that.”
“Yes, thanks, oh sage one,” I hiss at Leila, putting my phone away.