Chapter 1
First week of summer term
Like most humans who are very good at making other people happy, Olivia Greenwood is beginning to realize that she is thoroughly miserable.
Not dramatically miserable, in any way that could be seen or noticed or commented on and made a fuss of, but quietly miserable, in a polite manner that won’t make anyone else uncomfortable.
Not making anyone else uncomfortable is the key, really.
To do that would only make her anxious as well as miserable, and that is a combination Olivia strives to avoid at all costs, like Negronis on an empty stomach.
Today, as Olivia rises to the sound of her children fighting to the death over the last bagel in the house, she decides she won’t do this any more.
‘I’m not doing this any more,’ she says, sitting up straight in bed.
‘Today is the day that everything changes!’ As ever, she is talking to herself.
The conversations she has in her head are some of the punchiest, pithiest and – most fundamentally – improbable she ever takes part in.
If in her mind she is Shiv from Succession, in reality she is more like Cousin Greg.
Her husband Nick is asleep, or is pretending to be.
What’s the difference, really, given that as a couple, their interactions have almost entirely dwindled to ‘hmm’, ‘Is that right?’, and ‘Is it OK if I go to CrossFit?’, the latter coming exclusively from him and particularly common on days when they already have plans she has reminded him about weeks in advance – plans such as his mother’s birthday, or a six-hour drive to the greyest, windiest parts of the country for some of the Easter holidays.
‘How was I supposed to know that we were going to Cornwall?’ he had actually protested, when they all woke last Saturday morning, bags packed, and Nick had cheerily announced he was off to do a competition that involved rowing the length of the Nile over a weekend, in teams of three, on a stationary machine positioned nowhere more exotic than an industrial estate near Haywards Heath.
‘Because I told you we were,’ replied Olivia, standing in the hallway, incredulous. ‘Because it’s been in our diary for four months.’
‘I didn’t know we had a diary,’ snapped Nick.
He stood at the top of the stairs, dressed in his workout gear, looking like a Sainsbury’s version of one of those middle-aged ex-SAS soldiers turned TV presenters.
There was once a time when they had worked out together, every sit-up and squat and sprint on the treadmill a sexy step towards being naked and alone in bed later on.
But now it seemed to Olivia that Nick worked out to get away from her.
‘It’s one of those old-fashioned diaries that tends to exist entirely in your own head.
What happens is people you are exceptionally close to, your wife for example, tell you some important information about plans, and then you store that information in your brain for future reference.
’ These days she felt more like his assistant than his wife.
‘There’s no need to be passive-aggressive,’ countered her husband, heading back towards their bedroom to change out of his Special Forces cosplay outfit.
The horrendous traffic on the journey home yesterday had tipped her over into being aggressive-aggressive, with Nick missing two exits in a row while Olivia tried to catch Jack’s car-induced sickness in an empty crisp packet.
She clutches wildly around the bed for her glasses and discovers that they have somehow ended up under her pillow.
She places them on her face, notices that after a night of being crushed under the weight of her head they are now really lopsided as opposed to just vaguely lopsided, grabs her phone from the bedside table and then swings her legs on to the floor.
While she pees, she continues the never-ending conversation she has with herself about how, as a woman born in 1980, she is still playing out the same dull gender dynamics that destroyed her own parents’ marriage and led to her dad living in her garden shed, and her sister camping on the sofa bed in the living room two nights a week, as a sort of part-time nanny/children’s entertainer/live-in therapist.
Olivia would like to describe the small structure in the garden next to the dead flower bed as an annexe, but she knows deep down that not even the most deluded estate agent in the world would try to get away with this characterization, nor Nick’s insistence on describing the tiny shower room she sits in now as an en suite.
For a start, it’s off the landing, accessible not just to her and Nick but any one of the increasing number of family members staying with them.
And secondly, the lock is broken, meaning it provides about as much privacy as the concourse at Euston station during the morning rush hour.
Olivia hates that Nick still hasn’t got round to fixing the lock in the non-suite, but not as much as she hates the thought of being seen as a nag, so she has taken to pulling the overflowing washing basket in front of the door as a way of maintaining some dignity as she showers.
She washes the ruins of her body, trying to remember when Nick last looked at it.
When will her life resemble the kind she is served up all the time on her Instagram ‘For You’ page?
Reels featuring perfect light-filled houses with pastel-coloured kitchen units and tastefully chosen knick-knacks that look like art as opposed to clutter entrance her.
Today, perhaps?
Yes, today is surely the day, the one where everything is going to change.
For almost two decades now she has been waiting for this moment, since she began at The Morning fresh from the exams, judgement and paralysing perfectionism of her journalism degree.
It was all she knew. It was all any woman her age knew.
But today, all the hard work, all the graft, all the patronizing from mediocre men with half her talent and triple her entitlement, is finally going to pay off.
After years of being the journalistic equivalent of a nodding dog – of course I will bash out 1,200 words on the latest craze sweeping Hollywood that promises to remove five inches from your waist and a decade from your face – she is going to be given her first column.
Today, she will become OLIVIA GREENWOOD with a strapline that reads FRANK, FEARLESS, FUNNY.
Probably. Most likely. This is almost certainly the ‘exciting news’ that the editor wants to discuss with her after conference. It has to be, right?
Right?
Just to be sure, Olivia decides she must reanalyse the email that Stephen sent two days ago and make sure there isn’t anything she might have missed in her previous 5,942 readings of it. It was a fairly nuanced message, after all.
Liv. Need to see you after conference on Friday, have some exciting news. S
Back in their bedroom, Olivia finds Nick fumbling with himself under the covers.
He freezes as he hears the door, pretends first that he is asleep then a split second later that he is stirring from a deep slumber – though unfortunately not the one that has become a metaphor for their fourteen-year marriage.
‘Morning,’ he says, with all the embarrassed innocence of a schoolboy who has just been caught wanking by his mother.
She has become his mother.
Or, even worse, her own mother.
She decides not to dwell on that right now, as the man she once thought of as the great love of her life continues in his attempt to play the innocent, wiping sleep theatrically from his eyes and stretching his arms above his head in an exaggerated yawn before picking up his phone from the bedside table and checking his email.
For whose benefit this performance is she isn’t sure.
She does know he doesn’t put as much energy into attempting to seduce her as he does pretending he’s OK with their non-existent sex life.
Strangely, it is in these moments – where he seems as terrified of being seen for his real self as she does – that she feels closest to him nowadays.
It’s something they still seem to have in common, after all this time.
‘Morning!’ she beams, trying to ignore the ruckus that continues downstairs.
She is OLIVIA GREENWOOD: FRANK, FEARLESS, FUNNY, not Olivia Greenwood: cross, cranky, cantankerous.
She breezes over to her wardrobe, or at least she likes to imagine that she breezes over to her wardrobe, which she also likes to imagine is a walk-in, filled with colour-coordinated, neatly catalogued outfits that could be pulled out at any moment to form a capsule collection she could easily throw into a chic limited-edition carry-on when she is called at a moment’s notice to spend a couple of nights in New York for work.
In reality, her job had last taken her to Swansea on an assignment about an assistance guinea pig, and even that had seen her in and out in a day, a stain of milky white guinea pig urine on her jeans accompanying her all the way back on the train.
‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’ she shouts, as she trips over a yoga block, a remnant of her half-arsed attempts at Bikram before breakfast from eight months ago.
It had not made her a better person or even stretched out her creaky hips all that much, just added more useless tat to a house already crammed full of it.
‘You know, strength training is especially important for women as they enter perimenopause,’ Nick says, grinning as he finally gets out of bed. ‘Maybe you should think of doing one of the Olympic Weightlifting classes they have at CrossFit at the weekend.’
‘I stubbed my toe, it’s fine,’ says Olivia, poking around in her cornea as she swaps her wonky glasses for her contact lenses. ‘Also, who would transport the kids around to their varied and rich social lives if we were both fannying about with a load of dumb-bells every Saturday morning?’