You Had Me At Hello

Caroline says nothing more, pats me on the shoulder and gets into the driver’s seat. I take a deep rattling breath and walk round to the passenger side.

This is it. I’m leaving. And there was nothing to mark it. Not so much as a significant look passed between Rhys and I. Maybe this is how it always is. It feels like something more formal should be required: an official handshake, a splitting up ceremony, a certificate. As Rhys said, is this all it’s worth, after thirteen years?

12

Caroline eventually breaks the waterlogged silence in the front of the Audi.

‘I was wrong about buying straight away. Maybe Mindy is right and this … interlude is exactly what you need.’

‘Thanks. I thought you were saying Mindy’s judgement is dubious?’

‘Not always.’

I know they’ll have discussed me, worried about me, and there’s a question that I can’t put off asking any longer.

‘Do you all think I’m making a massive mistake?’

There’s a tense pause.

‘There isn’t an “all”…’

‘Oh, God.’ I put a hand over my face. ‘Three different types of disapproval.’

‘It’s not disapproval, you’re thirty-one. It’s not for us or anyone else to say what’s right for you. I suppose I was surprised you didn’t mention any problems before, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t want to talk behind Rhys’s back. I wasn’t sure how I felt, truth be told. I was being carried along by the wedding planning and then he was being a shit about it and it came tumbling out and there it was.’

‘It wasn’t worth giving him a shape-up-or-ship-out? You never put your foot down enough, in my opinion, and it might’ve led to … laziness.’

‘I did try suggesting a counsellor or whatever. He wasn’t interested.’

‘I doubt he wanted to lose you. He’s stubborn …’

‘You can’t ask someone not to be who they are. That’s where we were.’

‘Couldn’t you … if you’d …’

‘Caro, please. I can’t do this now. I will do soon, over wine, for hours. We can thrash the whole thing out until you’re sick of hearing about it. But not now.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.’

Hmm. Not sure when this ‘soon’ will arrive. I possibly want to wait until 2064 when she can put a data stick in her ear and download the information straight into her frontal cortex.

Then on reckless impulse I add: ‘Oh, I saw Ben.’

‘Ben? Ben from uni? Where? I thought you weren’t going to look him up? How was he?’

I’m grateful that Caroline can only fix her eyes on me momentarily before she has to return them to the road.

‘Uh, the library. I decided I wanted to learn Italian as part of the New Me, and there he was. We had a coffee. Seems well. Married.’

Caroline snorts. ‘Hah! Well he was bound to be. Anyone as attractive and house-trainable as that gets snapped up mid-twenties, latest.’

‘Anyone decent’s married by now?’

Caroline realises what she’s said and grimaces. ‘No! I mean, men like him are. There are more good women than men, so supply and demand dictates his sort are long gone off the market.’

‘Doesn’t bode well for my prospects in finding someone then.’

Caroline is crunching the gears, and looks like an Egyptian terracotta head I once saw in the British Museum. ‘I didn’t mean … oh, you know …’

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I agree with you. Ben was always going to be married, and maybe choices post-thirty aren’t great. The divorces are going to start soon, I’ll pick someone up on their second lap.’

Caroline gives me a laugh that’s more grateful than amused. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘Mindy and Ivor are still single, and they’re normal and nice. Well, fairly normal.’

‘Exactly!’

I’m not feeling half as casual as I’m trying to sound, for both our sakes. Starting again. From the beginning. With someone who doesn’t know the million important and incidental things about me, who isn’t fluent in the long-term couple language that I’ve taken for granted for so long with Rhys. How will anyone ever know as much about me again, and vice versa? Will I find anyone who wants to learn it? I imagine a York Notes revision style aid on Rachel Woodford. Or a Wikipedia page, lots of claims from Rhys followed by [citation needed].

And is this a brutal truth, everyone good has gone? As if soul mates are one big early-bird-gets-the-worm January sale. Buy the wrong thing, have to return it, and you’re left with the stuff no one else wanted. This is the kind of thinking I’d scoff at from my mum, yet I was always scoffing from the security of a relationship. I feel a lot less sure of my ‘Don’t be so Stepford’ stance now I’ve got to test the truth of the hypothesis.

A few circuits of the apartment building to find a parking space demonstrates why it’s as well Rhys has kept our car.

‘I’ll stay here so I don’t get a clamping,’ Caroline says. ‘If I see a warden I’ll go round the block, so don’t panic I’ve legged it with your towels.’

I discover how unfit I am as I run from car to flat door, and Caroline manages not to get ticketed the whole time.

When I take the last of it, she says: ‘So I’d stay but I’d have thought you want to show your mum round, now she’s here?’

‘Uh? My mum’s not here.’

‘She’s there.’

Caroline gestures over my shoulder. My mum is counting out coins from her big snap-clasp purse into the upturned hat of a man with a dog on a string, her black Windsmoor shawl coat billowing like Professor Snape’s cape. She’s always immaculately turned out and a ringer for Anne Bancroft, circa The Graduate. I think she wonders how she gave birth to someone inches shorter, and many degrees swearier and scabbier in her habits, though she might want to look to my dad for at least part of the answer.

‘Oh, bloody hell …’

Caroline smiles and climbs back into the car, waving farewell to my mum.

‘Hello darling! Was that Caroline? Delightful girl. Still has the metabolism of a greyhound, I see. Some have all the luck, eh?’

‘Hi Mum. Uhm. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m off to Samantha’s make-up rehearsal thingy at John Lewis, with Barbara. You can come if you like?’

‘Come to the wedding make-over of a family friend I haven’t seen for fifteen years, while thinking about how I’m not getting married and making it completely awkward for them?’

‘Oh, nonsense. They’d love to see you.’

‘I’d have been useless enough company when I was getting married. And I seem to remember Sam’s a “squee!” type girl.’

‘“Squee” girl?’

‘Squee wee! Fun-a-roonie dot com! Let’s go get scrummy cupcakes and have proper giggles.’

My mum leans in to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Come on, no one likes a bitter lemon. Show me your new digs.’

We take the stairs instead of the lift, me walking with the heavy tread of someone on their way to the electric chair, not the kind of lifestyle flat that has a pink fridge. I pull the key out of my pocket and let us in. It smells strange in here, as in, not like home. I stare balefully at the mini-mountain of my crap that’s blotting the manicured landscape.

‘Goodness me, very gaudy, isn’t it. Like the 1960s have been sick.’

‘Thanks Mum! I like it actually.’

‘Hmm, well as long as you do, that’s the main thing. I can see that it’s different.’

Different is usually an innocuous word, but it’s one of my mum’s most damning verdicts.

She unhooks her handbag from her shoulder and sits down next to me. I know exactly what’s coming. She clears her throat. Here it comes …

‘Now. You and Rhys. I understand you’re going through a crisis—’

‘Mum! I’m not going through it, like a squall of bad weather on the road to still getting married. We’ve broken up.’

‘If you’d allow me to speak, as someone who’s been married forty years …’

I pick sullenly at a seam on the sofa.

‘… Marriage is difficult. You do get on each other’s nerves. It’s relentless. It’s very, very tough and quite honestly, even in the good times, you do wish they’d go boil their head, most days.’

‘I’m not too bothered about missing out on it then!’

‘What I’m saying is, what you’re feeling – it’s perfectly normal.’

‘If relationships are only ever what we had, I’d rather be on my own.’

Pause.

‘You could be throwing away your only chance to have children, have you thought of that?’

My mum: not a loss to the world of motivational speaking.

‘Amazingly enough I had factored it in, but, thanks …’

‘I simply want you to be very sure you’re making the right decision, that’s all. You and Rhys have been together an awfully long time.’

‘That’s why I’m sure.’ Pause. ‘It’d mean a lot to me if you took me seriously and accepted I know my own mind about who I do and don’t want to marry, Mum. This is hard enough as it is.’

‘Well. If you’re absolutely sure.’

‘I am.’ And of course as I say it, I realise I’m not absolutely sure. I’m as sure as I assume you need to be, given I’ve never broken off an engagement before and have nothing to compare this to.

My mum stands up.

‘Your dad and I will be round soon. Let us know if we need to bring any odds and sods you’re short of.’

‘OK, thanks.’ Suddenly my throat has furred up and I give her a tight squeeze, inhaling her familiar scent of YSL Rive Gauche in place of Rupa’s flat’s olfactory newness.

With my mum’s departure, relief though it is, I feel almost as bereft as I did when waving my parents off from the halls of residence car park. I need a massive cup of tea, one that requires two handles on the mug in order to lift it. With a tot of Maker’s Mark in it.

I stare out of the huge window and suddenly the vastness doesn’t seem glamorous, but precarious. I imagine how tiny I’d look from the other side of the glass. A little scared sad insignificant figure peering down over the Manchester rooftops.

For a lurching moment, I’m so homesick I almost shout out loud: I want to go home. But home and Rhys are indivisible.

13

In late afternoon, when I’ve filled dead air with impersonal radio, a weird additional sound echoes round the room and I realise it’s the doorbell. I unlatch the chain and swing the door open to see an explosion of pink and white flowers and a pair of legging-clad legs beneath them.

‘Happy Moving-In Day!’ Mindy shouts.

‘Hello, wow, lilies. That talk. That’s lovely of you.’

Mindy pushes her way through the door, Ivor trailing behind, hands in pockets. He leans in and gives me a peck on the cheek. I can tell from his reluctant demeanour that Mindy’s given him a ‘Congratulate Her On Making A Good Choice’ lecture on the way here. He holds out a Marks & Spencer bag.

‘From me, but not chosen by me, I hasten to add,’ Ivor says. ‘I did not touch cloth, as they say.’

I peer inside. Pyjamas. Really nice ones, in cream silk.

‘You’re not going to cry are you?’ Ivor says. ‘The receipt’s in there.’

‘I’m not going to cry,’ I say, tearing up a bit. ‘Thank you.’

As Mindy turns this way and that, looking for the right surface to put the flowers, she leaves a massive sweep of ochre pollen on the pristine, wedding cake wall.

‘They’re from Ivor too,’ she adds, finding her pitch and marching over to the coffee table, more pollen from the trembling flowers shaking a fine, fire-coloured powder in her wake.

I discreetly put a hand over my mouth, surveying the mess.

‘You’re welcome!’ Mindy sing-songs, turning round and seeing me, taking it as being agog at the gift.

Ivor has followed my line of sight. He adds under his breath: ‘Let’s say they’re from you. I’ll clean up, shall I?’

‘What do you think, Ivor?’ Mindy calls, doing a gameshow-girl twirl to indicate she means the flat.

‘I think it looks like a female American Psycho’s lair. Patrick Batewoman.’ He rinses a chamois under the tap, which is on one of those bendy arms you usually see in industrial kitchens. ‘In a good way.’

As Mindy potters around in vermilion ankle boots, taking it all in for a second time, Ivor gingerly dabs at the damage. He turns to me and nods, to say it’s coming off, and gestures for me to join Mindy.

‘Drink?’ I ask, wondering as I say it where my kettle is and what I’m going to do for milk.

‘I can’t stay actually, I’ve got a date,’ Mindy says.

‘Bo … Robert?’ I ask.

‘Bobby Trendy’s been given his cards,’ Ivor interjects, breaking off from his cleaning up.

Robert was always head-to-toe in All Saints with bicycle chains hanging out of his back pocket and got the nickname ‘Bobby Trendy’ from Ivor. Unfortunately, once uttered, it was hard to un-stick it from your mind.

‘Yeah, he sacked my family dinner off for a paintballing thing with his brother-in-law.’ Mindy waves her hand. ‘Enough was enough. There should be a TripAdvisor on dates, so you can give feedback. Nice view. Bad service. Book waaaay in advance.’

‘Small portions,’ Ivor coughs into his fist.

‘Who’s this one from, Guardian Soulmates?’ I say.

‘My Single Friend.’

‘Is that the one where a friend recommends you?’

‘Yeah. I posed as a man and sold myself as a low-maintenance mamacita who “works as hard as she plays”.’

I make an ‘oh dear’ face.

‘It only means solvent, not a clinger, potential for sex,’ Mindy adds. Ivor grimaces.

‘Yes, I know,’ I say. ‘Isn’t someone else supposed to do it?’

‘How could anyone else describe me better than I can describe myself?’

‘Why join a site where that’s the point then?’

Mindy shrugs. ‘Men trust tips from other men. Recommendations from other women are like, “bubbly, great social life” and they think, ho hum, hooched-up woofer.’

‘Narcissism and deception, the classic inceptors of healthy relationships,’ Ivor says, dropping down on the sofa next to us.

‘Anyway. I’ve kind of over-fished on Guardian Soul Destroyers. Waiting for stocks to replenish. This one’s twenty-three.’ Mindy chews her lip. ‘And he likes grime. The music, you know, not dirt. God knows what we’re going to talk about.’

‘Well, him, if your previous experiences are anything to go by,’ I say, and Ivor laughs.

‘But his profile picture – young John Cusack,’ Mindy sighs.

Ivor gives me a look. I return it. Neither of us say anything. Mindy has a theory of compatibility and none of us have ever been able to persuade her out of it. She says instant physical attraction is a pre-requisite for any successful relationship – it’s either identifiably there, or not, from the start. Thus she’s only ever bothered with boys who she thinks are good-looking, reasoning she needs to find a handsome man with whom she has other things in common. No amount of contradictory examples or criticism about being shallow has ever moved Mindy an inch on this. Of course, it means she’s dated a procession of vain Prince Charmings with the souls of frogs.

I check my watch.

‘When is this date? Are you going for high tea?’

‘It’s not until eight but I’ve got to get ready. I’m going to get some pure oxygen and have my eyebrows threaded.’

‘You know how it works. Mindy goes into pre-production, like an over-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Development hell,’ Ivor says.

‘Obviously, I should just change my t-shirt and pour a bottle of Lynx Caveman all over myself,’ Mindy snaps back, standing up.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Ivor says, mildly, ‘Lynx is for men.’

Mindy shakes her head at Ivor and gives me a hug. ‘Start planning the party. Who knows, if this goes well, I might bring Jake.’

‘Jake,’ Ivor scoffs. ‘He’s even got a name that dates him as post-1985.’

‘Says Ivor.’

‘My name’s never been in fashion so it can’t go out. It only dates me as post ninth century, dear.’

‘Whevs! Bye, Rach.’

‘Good luck with the Relic Hunter!’ Ivor shouts, as I show her out.

Mindy turns in the doorway and gives him two fingers.

‘Do you think,’ I drop down on the sofa and squeeze an oyster coloured cushion to my body, then feel the shop-fresh plump starchy newness of it and realise these cushions aren’t for squeezing and put it back, ‘Mindy will ever revise this ruthless policy of looks first, personality a distant second, compatibility irrelevant?’

‘Probably not.’

We shake our heads.

‘What’re your plans? Want me to stay?’ Ivor asks, and I wonder why today feels like a series of polite rejections. ‘Or go?’

‘Erm,’ I say, trying to work out what he wants me to say. I feel as if a strange stigma is clinging to me. I have some insight into how the newly bereaved crave people who don’t walk on eggshells around them.

‘I was going to make use of Katya being away for the weekend and have a Grand Theft Auto marathon and eat vacuum-packed pork products,’ he continues. ‘You’re welcome to join me.’

‘Hah, no, thanks, I’m fine. Enjoy killing all those hookers.’

I see Ivor out and tell myself sternly that I’m very lucky to have supportive friends, and being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you. None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being on your own again. Rhys and I had separate interests. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Yet the empty quiet of the flat stretches like an island around me, and the city an ocean beyond that.

I do some more unpacking until the discovery of the old framed photo from university starts me crying, and the intensity of the urge to call Rhys and say I’ve changed my mind is like Class A withdrawal. I sit scrolling up and down to his name in my mobile phone address book. I wouldn’t have to say anything desperate: all I’d be doing is checking in on him. I stop. However he’s getting through today, I need to let him get on with it. I’ve put myself beyond being able to help him, on this. I imagine him alone in that bed tonight and think: I’m lucky. I get a fresh start in new surroundings. He has the site of our old life, minus me.

Unbidden, my mind starts playing me a montage of our edited highlights. The first night we spent together at his old flat and me falling out of bed and onto his effects pedal, which was a baptism of fire for new love – I screamed the place down and had a bruise the size of a handprint on my back. The run to the shops to get painkillers and the breakfast he made me the next day, involving seven pans and three types of eggs. The day I met his family, when I was virtually levitating with nerves, and Rhys saying on the doorstep: ‘They’ll love you. Not because I do. Because everyone with eyes and ears does.’ The weekend in Brighton with the world’s worst car journey down, the dubious Nazi-run B&B that was nowhere near the seafront and the bistro with the horrible waiters. It could’ve been awful but instead I remember laughing like a pair of school kids for two days solid. The day we moved into our house and drank champagne out of mugs, sitting on the stairs, in a furniture-free desert of sandy carpet, arguing about whether his frightening Iggy Pop photo had too many pubes on show to be fit for the ‘reception rooms’. The scores of in-jokes and shared history and special knowledge I couldn’t imagine having with anyone ever again, not without a Tardis to whisk me back to being twenty.

What was I doing, throwing all this away? Did it all add up to say I should stay with Rhys? Was I making the biggest mistake of my life? Probably not, purely on the basis that award has already been handed out.

I tell myself, this day is as bad as it’s going to be. This is a day you have to get through. It occurs to me that it’d be easier to get through unconscious. I crawl to the huge bed, cover my face with my arms and weep myself to sleep.

As I drift off, I imagine the supermodelly Indian girl animating in her portrait, looking down, saying: ‘Well, that’s not what this flat is for.’

14

I awake to an odd noise, like a bee trapped in a tin can and something scuttling over a hard surface. I sit bolt upright in the twilight and think, Mindy better not have neglected to mention some kind of vermin infestation of B-movie proportions. As I shake off the sleep I see that the noise is coming from my vibrating mobile as it pushes itself around the nightstand. I pick it up as it’s about to clatter to the floorboards and see it’s Caroline.

‘Did you nick my towels after all?’ I mumble, sleepily.

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No! Been asleep.’ I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. ‘Although that sounds an interesting idea.’

‘I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I’ve started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.’

‘Cheers!’ I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.

‘If we came round tonight and got drunk, you’d have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.’

‘Or it’d bundle all the bad things together,’ I grumble.

‘Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.’

I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa’s got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinprick bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline’s tough love is a good thing.

‘Ah, I’ll cope.’

‘Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I’ll come round tomorrow.’

After I hang up, I discover I’m not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa’s shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I’ll replace it twice over before I leave. I don’t have any tonic so it has to make a rapper’s delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn’t wanted to admit to having. It’s just, Ben hasn’t called. And I’ve started to think he’s not going to.

I shouldn’t be thinking about it. It’s positively distasteful, he’s a married man, not a potential date. Only: if he never calls, it’s going to say such an awful lot. It would be an extremely eloquent silence.

Half an hour of you was enough. In fact, it was too much, but I grinned and bore it. The past is the past and you’re the only one living in it. See you again, on the tenth anniversary of never. And by the way, that haircut makes you look like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.

In my heart of hearts, I know that’s my guilty paranoia talking, not Ben. Ben is the person who irrationally apologised for so much as mentioning his wedding when I told him about my ex-engaged status. So why is it, when I examine every exchange between us so many times, perspective collapses? I can’t help but think about the killer detail – he took my number, but he never volunteered his, did he?

He was the one saying it’d be great to go out, reassures the angel on my shoulder.

That’s the kind of thing you say to be nice during the social disentanglement process and don’t necessarily make good on, counters the devil.

Oh God, he’s never going to call and I’m going to see Ben and his Olivia of Troy examining high thread count linen in John Lewis and fall backwards over someone in a wheelchair in my haste to escape.

As the patient on TV goes into something called ‘VF’ and the crash team swing into action, I settle on a theory that suits both my fatalism and my knowledge of Ben’s character. He did mean everything he said about it being nice to get together. He asked for my number in good faith, he probably believed he’d use it. Then he thought it through, debated how to describe me to his wife. That consideration alone could make him reassess whether it was a good idea. I can imagine a few memories that might’ve helped him come to a conclusion. And at that moment, he scrolled down to my name in his phone, felt a pang of regret. Then found his resolve, hit delete, and continued with his charmed, Rachel-less life.