Love Is A Thief

‘I’m not on Facebook,’ Peter offered, quite randomly, before reaching over and gently taking his jacket from my hands.

‘Well, of course you’re not on Facebook, Peter, or I would have found yo …’ My voice petered out as I revealed myself to be a bit of a creepy Internet stalker. Peter had stared at me blankly. I’d stared back. He’d practically trebled in attractiveness since the last time I’d seen him. I was fifty shades of grey in comparison to him and I’m not referring to the literary equivalent of soft porn. I’m referring to the drab colourless mist that doesn’t even feature on a rainbow. Peter Parker was a bloody great rainbow and I was the grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud in the distance. Switzerland must be the aesthetic equivalent of Lourdes.

‘Would anyone like a herbal tea?’ Grandma had asked. ‘I’ve got some lovely fresh mint we could use.’

‘Grandma!’ I yelled, for the second time that evening, before storming off towards the front door with such force I looked as if I were wading through imaginary syrup or performing dramatic high-elbowed mime.

‘I’d love a mint tea,’ Peter had said as I yanked open the front door. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had fresh mint,’ he said with flat-toned enthusiasm as the door had slammed shut behind me, narrowly missing Federico, who’d pelted after me like an abandoned child.

I’d stood on the doorstep for several minutes, shaking from a mixture of shock and anger, while Peter, my oldest, bestest, long-time, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth friend, and Grandma, my primary carer in the world, sipped on fresh mint tea inside, both of them acting as if it were perfectly normal for him to have reappeared after all these years, which would be fine and excusable if they were script writing for Dallas. And why would Grandma allow me to bump into Peter Parker for the first time in 15 years wearing Primark? Why? Why!

Anyway I am completely unbothered by the whole thing. If they don’t think I deserve a proper explanation for the disappearance-reappearance I will never again ask for one. I will surreptitiously gather clues, draw wild conclusions, make generalisations then spring them on them at a later stage, probably while pissed. But I will never ask for the facts. Facts are dull. And on the plus side, as I have decided to look for the silver lining of every cloud (or at least my own grimacing, unwelcome rain cloud) I did get to test out my backwards roll, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Traditionally it has always been my weakest basic gym move and Mrs Franklin, my seventh-grade teacher, once said to me,

‘Kate Winters! You get back down on that gym mat and you practise that backwards roll. You never know when you are going to have to backwards roll yourself out of a dangerous situation!’

And I think that day in Pepperpots proved to us all that Mrs Franklin was bloody well right.

the sport-related meeting with peter parker

I walked into the boardroom to find Federico standing on top of the heart-shaped table in a ninja position doing wrist-flicking impersonations of Spiderman.

‘So there’s no connection at all?’ Federico asked before making a whoosh noise and shooting another invisible web across the room towards Peter Parker. Peter didn’t respond. He just stood behind Chad’s special heart-shaped chair, cross-armed, stern-faced, handsome. ‘Because you really do have the same highly burdened energy, yes you do, a man with a past, a man with a hidden secret, a man who can scale walls and—’

‘Please don’t do this,’ Peter said, without moving a single muscle on his face.

‘Well, who needs to be a superhero when you already look like a ruddy great Gucci model is what I say!’ Federico said, jumping off the table doing one last mid-air wrist flick that made Peter flinch. ‘So, Kat-kins, do you have your notes ready, because our Fat Camp auditionees are due any second. Not that they are auditioning to be fat,’ he said to Peter. ‘Not at all—they are fat, Peter. We are working with genuinely miserable members of the public who are overweight. Although aren’t we all these days? What with all those hidden calories. You need a PhD in label-reading to get through life a size zero. It’s like playing hide-and-seek every time so much as a morsel passes my lips. “Is there a calorie?” I say to myself. And then normally I eat it anyway.’ His phone started ringing. ‘I have to take this. Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Federico.’ He shoved me out of the way only to stand three feet away and shout loudly into his teeny-tiny phone. I looked from Federico to Peter, who seemed to be standing at the furthest point away from me on the other side of the room.

‘So this is where you work?’ he said, looking around the room. ‘A writer at True Love magazine; saving us from the destructive influences of love …’ His jaw flexed. ‘How ironic.’

I didn’t think it was particularly ironic, but perhaps the lack of irony was in fact the ironic part?

‘Well, I’m not sure I’m saving anyone just yet, except myself, from being thrown from a top-floor window.’ I chuckled, but Peter didn’t laugh. He just watched me, like a statue, or an overly judgemental Greek god. ‘Thank you for doing this,’ I said, nodding my head like a talk-show host. ‘Grandma said you’d be the right person to talk to. “Peter knows sport,” she said to me.’ I said that last bit in a strange high-pitched imitation of Grandma. ‘And she said you were married. “Peter got married,” she said.’ Same strange voice. ‘Although actually she said, “his divorce,” then I said, “Peter got married?” and then—’

‘I was there, Kate.’

‘Yes, you were,’ I said with yet more head-nodding. ‘You were totally there, for that, for that moment …’ I sighed. He watched me. The silence between us was long and heavy and made me want to tear out my own eyes. Peter knew damn well I’d eventually have to fill it. I counted as far as fourteen pink elephants before.

‘I didn’t get married!’ was volunteered into the dead, noiseless space that was eating me from the inside. ‘I thought I was going to—there were plans for that,’ I said, stretching myself out as if I thought I was at the bloody gym. ‘Yep. It was a serious relationship,’ I said, doing a lunge. ‘It was a serious marriage plan.’ I moved on to a triceps stretch. ‘But here I am anyway, not married but writing about love every single day, which I definitely prefer.’ Three short boxing jabs. ‘But you, Peter, you must be an expert in loving—I mean in the emotion, not the sexual act. I don’t know how you are with the sex. I’ve always assumed probably great on the odd occasion that I’ve thought about it, which is certainly not all the time, maybe once in my teenage years, and then last week when I was watching Twilight—’ Oh, my God. ‘What I meant to say is that you must be an expert in relationships, having been married. I’m sure that you were lovely both as a husband and as a love-maker. Well done you,’ I said, shaking my fist in the air, then sighing heavily and looking at my shoes. Why, oh, why was I so excruciatingly odd?

Peter walked across the room until he was in front of me. I was expecting him to perform a quick sidestep and make a dash for the nearest exit but he didn’t. He just leant down and gave me a little kiss on my right cheek.

‘It’s nice to see you again, Kate,’ he said, studying my face for a few moments. He was about to speak again when Federico snapped his phone shut and spun on the spot, espresso in hand.

‘Well, look at you two! Childhood friends back together again, in London, big grown-up adults in the city. Who’d have thought it?’ He took a little sip from his tiny espresso cup.

‘Well, certainly not me,’ Peter said to Federico. ‘The last time I saw Kate she was obsessed with living somewhere in the Amazon and teaching pygmies to Moonwalk.’

Federico clasped his hands together in delight.

‘Well, last time I saw Peter he was 15 years old and suffering a bout of embarrassing and uncontrollable erections in Geography lessons.’ I chuckled. ‘People change.’ Federico spat his coffee across the glass heart. Peter looked horrified.

‘I told you that in confidence, Kate, as you well know, but you are obviously in one of your argumentative moods and trying to evoke some kind of emotional response, which won’t work.’

‘So back to Fat Camp’, Federico said, studying the potential candidates’ headshots that were stuck all over the walls of the heart-shaped room.

‘And every adolescent boy suffers from ill-timed erections,’ Peter continued. ‘It’s a normal and healthy part of growing up.’

‘Like abandoning your best friend?’

‘OK, this really doesn’t feel like it’s about Fat Camp.’ Federico giggled nervously.

‘I went to school somewhere else, Kate. That’s all. Can you honestly say you are still in touch with every single person we knew as kids?’ I was still in touch with exactly none of them.

‘I wasn’t just someone from school, Peter!’ Or perhaps I was, because Peter had gone horribly silent and glaring at me, jaw clenched.

‘Well, this feels lovely and awkward, doesn’t it? Like tattoo removal, and those days when we all pretend we didn’t just hear Chad fart in the middle of one of his focus meeting speeches. Although I would just like to say,’ Federico continued in a whisper, ‘the erection thing, well, I concur. Mine was up and down like a car-park barrier for the best part of three years. I’m sure there are parts of my body that were oxygen starved as a result. I still can’t feel my little toe,’ he said, looking at his feet.

‘Kate, I am here because your grandma asked me to help you. Not to justify educational choices made as a teenager.’

‘It happened again when I was living in Miami,’ Federico continued. ‘Well, honestly, no one wears a stitch of clothing over there and there are some exquisitely attractive Mexicans flaunting themselves on the beach.’

‘Kate, I had actually been looking forward to seeing you today. But I had completely forgotten your inability to let things go. And you always have to have the last word.’

Federico clamped his hand over my mouth.

‘Kat-kins, we have asked Peter here because we want his help with Fat Camp, which is something you care about, is it not? Peter very kindly agreed to help. Which is a nice starting point for this, and a preferable one to Peter’s penile function, which, while I admit I am interested, probably not in this current context. So, Kat-kins, do you want Peter’s help or not?’

Peter and I stared at each other.

‘Kate, would you like my help or not?’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first of the Fat Camp auditionees nervously waiting in our reception.

‘Yes … please.’

‘Then I’ll help.’

‘Well, isn’t that nice? Kat-kins asked Peter nicely; Peter said yes. It’s like an adult game of Simon Says but with obesity problems and two adults with mild to severe anger issues.’

I turned away from both of them and pretended to type something on my phone. If we were playing an adult game of Simon Says then a small part of my brain I had absolutely no control over had gone back to thinking about Peter Parker’s penis, and I hated that part.

‘I have to go,’ Peter said, heading for the door, ‘but I have a good idea of what you need. Everything will be here by tomorrow.’ He marched off through Reception, the entire office watching with inappropriate levels of lust, everyone except Mark from Marketing who shot an imaginary web at him as he passed the photocopier.

The very next day two men from FedEx arrived at the office. They had hundreds of parcels from Peter Parker. He’d sent fitness packs for our Fat Campers, motivational books, motivational CDs, handwritten lists of personal trainers, therapists, Women Only gyms, central London park runs, and suggested a fitness timetable. He sent over pedometers, booked sessions at running centres for the women to be fitted with proper running shoes and booked a session at Rigby & Peller for the women to be fitted with proper sports bras. From that moment on until the end of universal time Federico Cagassi was in actual love with Peter Parker—the boy who never smiles.

the story of assumption

A boy met a girl and a girl met a boy, they looked into each other’s eyes and they fell in love.

But the girl was from a different land, across a great sea, a land where people loved teapots, umbrellas and rain.

The heart of the boy and the heart of the girl ached when they were apart.

So the girl packed her bags and crossed the great sea, travelling high up into the mountains where the boy lived with many frogs and a selection of friendly snails.

She knocked on his door. He asked her inside. They looked into each other’s eyes and they knew they were in love.

Over time the girl became lonely. All her friends and family—the teapots and umbrellas—were all far away. The boy grew sad. He blamed himself for taking the girl away from her beloved afternoon tea paraphernalia. The feelings of blame became feelings of guilt. The boy withdrew from the girl, assuming she regretted her choice.

The girl didn’t understand why he no longer held her gaze, assuming he’d stopped loving her.

Their seeds of assumption grew like ivy; every day they assumed a little more based on the assumptions of the previous day.

One day the girl found herself packing to leave, packing to return to the land of rain and crumpets. Her eyes filled with tears, not love, her heart in pieces on the floor of lost dreams. She did not know what was left in the boy’s eyes because he no longer came home, too fearful was he of what he would see if he looked at her.

The boy lives in the mountains. The girl lives in the rain.

He assumes she’s happy now. She assumes the same.

money & the dream crusher—leah—31 years old

OK, so I am probably not the best person to ask because I hate my ex-husband, he is the devil incarnate, but if you want to know what I gave up for love I would say Every Single Part of My Very Self. For example, my ex’s bog-standard response if I wanted to pursue any of my own personal interests, ambitions or dreams was, and I quote,

‘How dare you spend that money on yourself? You are so selfish. We are supposed to be a family.’

He could never see that my happiness and contentment might benefit us as a couple; that an extra qualification might further my career, increasing the amount of money I could earn for us as a family; or that me feeling more complete as a person would have a knock-on positive effect on our marriage. In fact sometimes I think my possible self-development threatened him. At the mere suggestion of me spending money, on anything, he would say,

‘Well, if you’ve got enough money to do that we could spend it on—’

And then there would always be a ‘something’ for the house, the car, his hobbies. Once I gave up a place on a Reiki course so he could buy a pet snake and a games console, both apparently for our son, neither of which our son has ever played with; the Reiki course would have qualified me to teach, providing a valuable second income for our family.

Even if we were trying to arrange something nice, like booking a family holiday, most of the things I wanted to do didn’t interest him. No matter how passionate I was about a place or country he would say no. And when you are married at some point you get tired of battling, tired of fighting, tired of trying to maintain certain boundaries. So you give in, you agree, you give up. I was married from 22 years old to 30. This is the first time in my adult life I can really identify my own wants and needs and then, with a lot of hard work and planning, start to pursue the things, the longings sitting deep in my soul that are not connected to anyone but me. I’ve never been so excited about my future.

coffee shop | spitalfields market | london

Good God! I had awakened the beast. It wasn’t just that Leah had a lot to say. It was that she wanted to say it all at once, and she wanted to say it all to me. Mostly because I am one of her best friends, but also because I had put a key in a previously unused lock and the door had exploded wide open. If we were in an American action film Nicholas Cage would have been standing by that door of love-lost dreams putting Semtex on the lock, frame and anything else in the surrounding door area. Leah was finally free.

‘So I’ve been working through my list of love-stolen dreams,’ Leah said, extracting an enormous phonebook-sized document out of her handbag. ‘And I think that I’m making good progress. I’ve completed the Reiki course, as you know, and, Henry, Henry, put that down!’ Henry, Leah’s son, had her iPhone in his mouth. ‘And I absolutely loved it, box ticked.’ She ticked an imaginary box in the air. So did Henry. ‘And I’ve got some other love-stolen dreams organised. There’s a lot to get through,’ she said, patting the gigantic document that was in fact her handwritten list of love-stolen dreams. ‘But I thought it would be nice to understand why I’d let myself get to a place where I was manically dribbling into my porridge, staring at my ex-husband across the kitchen and wanting to throw Petits Filous Frubes at his head. I mean, I wasn’t always a passive-aggressive downtrodden wife.’ She was more aggressive than passive but it wasn’t the moment. ‘So I’ve decided to do a bit of alternative research, which means that if you do that you won’t have a brownie, I told you, Henry, behave or no brownie, so you are going to have to be pretty open-minded when I tell you my idea.’

‘I am not here to judge. I am here to take back what love stole.’ This has been my mantra since the early shock of Mary’s mechanical revelations.

‘Well, it was my Reiki teacher’s idea really. She thought one way to better understand the obstacles and mistakes of this life would be to understand the obstacles and mistakes of all my previous lives. Apparently there’s this thing called past life regression and it helps a lot of people make sense of themselves and the things they do.’ Henry was presented with a brownie and dropped half of it straight down his front. ‘And it’s absolutely not something I would have done while I was married, because I couldn’t bear his disapproving face, or his voice, or the way he held his cutlery, so that qualifies as a love-stolen dream, doesn’t it? In fact it was already on my list.’ She flicked to page 17 to show me where Past Life Regression had been carefully written in blue biro.

‘If I’m honest, Leah, this is not exactly what I was expecting us to be talking about today. I’d found an equestrian centre close to your house. I was going to suggest we go horse riding together. You said you stopped riding when you got married. I think it was LSD 88?’

‘It was 87.’

‘OK, number 87, but it was on the list. I thought we could go hacking. That’s what people do on horses, isn’t it? They hack? Computer hackers hack too, obviously, but they do it in a more let’s bring the government to its knees kind of way, which wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of a slow trot, through woodland. But if you want to get back love-stolen dreams from the past—I mean from the past past, that’s very cool. And thorough. Adds a whole new dimension. I like.’ I totally didn’t get it. ‘Well done!’ Phew.

‘Thank God, Kate! Because I was sure you were going to say no. Federico said you wouldn’t do it—’

‘What?’

‘I said I wanted you to do a past life regression and he said you absolutely wouldn’t do it. He said, “Past life regression? Walking, talking fashion regression, more like,” then he went on about some cardigan you bought from Deptford Market last week and how he’s had a metaphorical allergic reaction to it. Short version of this story is that he said you’d say no. He thinks he knows you so well, that Federico Cagassi.’ She typed a message into her constantly beeping iPhone while Henry fell asleep face first in his brownie. And just for the record that Federico Cagassi does know me quite well. He knows me well enough to know I’d rather put hot coals on my bare-naked tippy-toes than regress myself into the past, which is why I whispered,

‘I don’t want to do a past life regression,’ into my hair before bursting into a fit of fake coughing. Which is when things got a bit awkward …

You see I’d never given much thought to what I’d be asked to do for Love-Stolen Dreams. I hadn’t set any guidelines or parameters. I just saw myself as a champion of others, dashing about, problem-solving, drinking protein shakes and facilitating the journeys of others. But jumping through the windows of time, to right love’s past-life wrongs, well, it was like Quantum bloody Leap but for real and I suspect without the help of that middle-aged man who smoked cigars and had communication devices wired up to the present.

‘Oh …’ Leah looked at me with disc-sized brown eyes. ‘Oh, sure, of course.’ She looked at the floor and started fiddling with her hands. ‘I just thought that you wanted to help women reconnect with themselves. I thought this was a selfless quest to take back what love had stolen, not you picking and choosing a few things that you really fancy doing, like learning to trot on a bloody great horse.’ She was getting a bit shouty. Henry woke up and crawled under the table. He knew the signs. ‘Remind me again of your new mantra, Kate.’

‘I’m not here to judge,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am here to take back what love stole.’

‘That’s a great mantra,’ she said, draining her coffee mug and starting to pack up her things. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to leave. She was going to leave, without getting properly mad, and I’d feel like a rubbish, disappointing friend and it would be awkward and uncomfortable but she’d never mention it again and I’d never forget. It would become like a humungous white elephant who sat between us everywhere we went, an elephant called Awkward Stan, and Awkward Stan would always be there, an accessory to our friendship for the rest of my entire elephant-infested life. Good God, she was manipulative!!!

‘It was just a little past life regression,’ she muttered as she wiped Henry’s face with a wet wipe. ‘We could have found out what love stole from us in the past to find out why it keeps stealing stuff in the present. The answers are in the past. I just know it.’

‘I thought the answers were on this list!’ I said, shaking the heavy paper document in her face. She blinked violently as I did it and I knew I’d gone too far. There’s never any need to shake paper.

‘Kate, all I want is that if you put that iPhone in your mouth one more time I will make you eat the thing, do you hear me, Henry? I will put tomato ketchup on it, put it in a burger bun and I won’t feed you another morsel until you have eaten it. Your choice, you are in control of your own destiny. So, Kate,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘A little regression? Making sense of the future by unlocking the love-stolen secrets of our past—speaking of the past, did I tell you I bumped into Peter Parker the other day? When did he get back?’

‘What do you mean you bumped into Peter Parker? Where was he? What was he doing? Did you speak to him? What was he wearing? Did he speak to you? Did he smell nice? How did he seem?’

‘He seemed fine. To be honest he spent the entire time explaining to Henry how his juice box would eventually end up as a biodegradable roof tile, which neither of us really understood, well, especially not Henry as he can’t count past five. Think about the regression, Kate,’ she said as she headed to the door, Henry under one arm, twelve bags under the other and quite a large piece of Henry’s chocolate brownie stuck to her bum, which, in retrospect, I probably should have mentioned…