The Thirty List

‘I’m a graphic designer really, but I used to also be a sort of freelance cartoonist. I do caricatures of people, for weddings and birthdays and that, and sometimes a bit for magazines.’ As I said it, I realised this sounded like the world’s flakiest career, like ‘vajazzalist’, or ‘toenail consultant’. I also realised the room was an absolute tip.

‘I’m not finished unpacking,’ I said hurriedly. I was not tidy. I liked to pretend it was something to do with my artistic temperament, but really I was just a slob and quite forgetful. I’d put down bits of toast and then wonder what happened to them and make some more. It used to drive Dan crazy. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? When you start out, when you’re in love, it seems as if these things could never matter, as if they’re just crumbs in the bed of your love. Then as time goes by, all you can feel is the crumbs. They’re itchy. They keep you awake. I suppose all those little crumbs become a big loaf in the end, rising between you, keeping you apart.

That wasn’t the best metaphor I’d ever come up with. Moving on …

Once I was up, showered in my lovely en suite, and had pushed some of the mess into the fitted cupboards, I stuck on Destiny’s Child’s ‘Survivor’ on a loop, looking for inspiration, and sat on the bed with a notebook to make a list. A list for the rest of my life.

I liked lists. They were my way of trying to put some order on the desperate mess of my life. In fact, I even had a list of my favourite lists, ones I’d been keeping for years:

I opened my notebook—a pretty one with a pink silk cover, my lists deserved the best—and chewed on my pen.

I’d thought my life was going to be all Volvos and trips to Sainsbury’s, dogs and mortgages and maybe babies in a few years. My friend from yoga suggested I think positively about all the things I could achieve now I was ‘on a different life path’—Buddhists are always saying things like this. For example, I’d always wanted to try lots of hobbies. Languages, maybe. Kick-boxing. That looked like fun and would come in handy with all the awful men I’d probably have to date now I was single. Oh God. Dating.

The thought was so depressing I crawled back under the covers, in my jeans and jumper, and lay there panicking about being alone forever.

After a while of this, the phone rang. It was Emma. ‘Hello! Are you lying in bed panicking about being alone forever?’

‘No. Well, yes, but least I got dressed.’

‘Good girl. Now, can you come over tonight? Cynthia has promised she’ll leave work by seven, and Ian will cook.’

‘Will you help me with my list?’

‘Which list is this?’

‘The list of what to do with the rest of my life.’

‘Of course. I love a good list.’ It was true. It was one of the main reasons we were friends.

I agreed to come over and settled down for a good long worry about life.

I must practise some conversation topics for tonight, I thought. House prices might be a good one.

Chapter Five

Emma and Ian lived in Acton, clinging on to the very edge of London under the flight path of whooshing aeroplanes. The flat smelled of curry and oil—Ian was seriously into bikes, both motor and road, and when you went for a wee it was quite normal to see bits of inner tubes in the bath. Emma opened the door in what looked like pyjamas.

For a moment I was confused. ‘Did I get the wrong day?’ I’d like to say this had never happened before, but …

‘No.’ Emma looked puzzled, taking my bottle of cornershop wine, the £4.99 sticker clearly visible. ‘Oh, you mean the onesie. Isn’t it cool? Come out here, Snugglepuss.’

Ian appeared with a pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. He too had donned a onesie shaped like a dog, with little ears on the hood. Emma’s was purple with stars on. ‘Aren’t they great?’ She beamed. ‘They’re so cosy, you wouldn’t believe. We’ve saved a fortune on our heating bills.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said weakly. Onesies? Did everyone except me get the memo about this trend? I remembered when Emma was famed for streaking our graduation ceremony in a protest at the uni’s continued stocking of Nestlé-made Kit Kats. Her boobs had been on the front of the local paper—it was pixelated out, but you could tell it was her by the Danger Mouse pants. Now it was all onesies and pukey pet names.

In the background, an episode of University Challenge was playing, which they were watching so they could keep score on the whiteboard they used every week. On one side it said ‘overprivileged students’ and on the other ‘Emsie and Ian’. They were also hosting me to death. ‘Drink?’ asked Ian, going back to the kitchen. ‘Beer? Wine? Vodka? Meths?’

‘Or water first?’ Emma frowned at the TV screen and shouted: ‘Swim bladder!’

‘Bread? Crisps? This will be ready soon. Potassium chlorate!’

I felt it should be me in the onesie, with them as my helicopter parents. ‘Beer, please. Who else is coming?’

‘I asked Ros, but of course she never leaves her own postcode. The dissolution of the monasteries! She says she’d love to see you soon and lend an ear though.’

Get all the juicy details, more like, while revelling in her own two kids and semi in Hendon. I was becoming very bitter with all the solicitous, coupled-up friends who wanted to mother me. ‘Any sign of Cynth?’

‘Isiser? No, it’s not the eighties.’ Ian laughed to himself. ‘Henry the Fifth! Oh, come on, that was an easy one.’

Emma rolled her eyes. ‘Snugs, that was dreadful, even by your standards. She said she’d leave at seven. Burkina Faso!’

‘Reckon she’ll come?’ Often she didn’t leave work at all, just stayed up all night and sent out to La Perla in the morning for clean knickers. This was called ‘living the dream’, apparently.

However, I’d barely eaten my way through five hundred poppadoms when she turned up, dispensing kisses and clinking carrier bags. ‘Hello, darling.’ Immediately, I felt bad that I had brought only one bottle. But then, I was broke and she could afford to chuck away La Perla knickers, so perhaps everything was relative. I was sure there was a Bible story just like this, except without the undies—Jesus being strictly an M&S guy, I feel.

‘They let you out for good behaviour?’ In the kitchen I could see Cynthia saying hi to Ian.

‘Bad behaviour. Apparently, it’s worth more by the hour. Mmm, smells yummy. I think the last time I cooked we still thought fringes looked good.’

‘Taste.’ He held up a spoon for her to try and she closed her eyes for a second.

‘The Kelvin scale!’ shouted Emma.

‘Mmm. I can really taste the … whatever random ingredient you used that we’re supposed to be able to detect.’

‘Galangal.’

‘Yep. I can definitely taste that, whatever it is.’

‘Björn Borg!’ shouted Ian. ‘God, this lot are really thick this week.’

‘Is it nearly done, Snugs? Fermat’s Last Theorem!’ called Emma.

‘Just about. Honeybunch, don’t use those plates. They don’t match.’

‘We don’t own four that match, Snugs. You broke one last week doing air guitar to “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. The Appalachians!’

‘Oh yeah. They’ve got some on sale at Sainsbury’s. Should I pick some up?’

‘OK, and get some more cleaning wipes. We’re out. Samuel Pepys!’

I tried not to catch Cynthia’s eye during this, partly because I still couldn’t believe this was our rebellious Emma, who’d once refused to shop in supermarkets for an entire year until they started charging for plastic bags. But also because I missed having this with someone, passing words back and forth like dishes, barely listening to what you were saying. Reminding someone to buy milk. All that.

Ian, like many men, required you to make a whole performance of admiring his food whenever he cooked. You had to look at it, smell it, guess what spices he might have used, and only then were you allowed to dig in. Dan and I had given up cooking when things got bad. We were on first-name terms with the Papa John’s delivery man—I’d even given him a Christmas card, to my shame.

‘So,’ said Emma, as soon as she’d finished wiping her plate with naan. ‘It’s Rach’s first night with us alone.’

‘Not really,’ Ian pointed out. ‘She hadn’t brought him out with her for at least the past year.’

‘He was always so busy with work,’ I said defensively. ‘I brought him. Sometimes.’

Things that suck about divorce, number thirty-four: finding out that none of your friends or family really liked your spouse in the first place; they just didn’t say so at the time when you could actually have done something about it. We’d all been at university together, so my friends had had a good ten years to get to know Dan. It was sad to think he was going to slip out of their lives too, without a backward glance.

‘It’s her first night properly alone,’ Emma repeated.

‘Do you have to keep saying “alone”?’ I was still working on my third curry helping and most likely only seconds from an Ian pun about passing out in a korma. Unlike those pale tragic women in books, misery made me eat everything in sight.

Cynthia rubbed my arm. ‘You’re not alone, darling. You’re independent and fabulous.’

Easy for her to say when she was going home to Richy Rich and their mansion with a cleaner and once-a-month gardener.

‘Anyway.’ Emma was doing her ‘could the class come to attention’ voice. ‘Rach, I know you’re feeling a bit wobbly at present.’

‘You could say that,’ I mumbled through curry. ‘Is anyone eating that?’

Ian passed over more naan. ‘Your naan,’ he said. ‘Geddit? Like your mum.’

‘Could you listen, please?’ Emma was waiting. ‘I think what you need is a project. All the books say the first few months post-split are the hardest.’

‘You read books about it?’

‘Of course. I wanted to support you.’

‘It’s a bit worrying seeing a book called Steps Through Divorce beside the bed,’ Ian said, chewing.

‘You have to be married to get divorced,’ Emma said, with a slight edge in her voice, which made me hurriedly swallow my curry.

‘So you’ve got a project for me?’

‘Better.’ She smiled triumphantly and pulled out a small notebook. ‘I’ve got a project plan.’

We all groaned. Cynthia said, ‘Not again, Em. I thought we’d talked about this scrapbooking issue.’

‘It’s nothing! Just some glue-gunning, and a bit of découpage and sketching … you know.’

‘Don’t make us do another intervention. Remember my wedding invites.’

I winced. ‘I thought we’d agreed, we do not talk about the wedding invites.’

Emma was huffing. ‘I don’t see what the fuss was about. They looked lovely. Everyone said.’

Cynthia ticked it off on her fingers. ‘They cost five hundred pounds in materials! I could have got them at the Queen’s stationer for that! They put indelible pink stains on everyone’s hands!’

‘Hand-dyed paper! It was a lovely touch.’

‘Touch was exactly what they couldn’t do.’

Ian met my eyes, pleading, as he gathered up our plates. ‘Can I see the plan?’ I said. I was the peacemaker in the group, which meant, like many peacekeepers, I was often riddled with metaphorical crossfire bullets. ‘Thank you, Em. It’s pretty.’

Emma was an excellent primary school teacher. She was authoritative, briskly kind, organised and on top of this a dab hand at cutting and gluing things. Unfortunately, she couldn’t curtail this, and so was prone to a vice you might call ‘scrapbooking gone mad’. Every page was decorated in sparkly gold pen, with glued-in photos and drawings. ‘So what’s the—’

‘Well,’ she jumped in, ‘I read in this book that the best way through a big life change is to have a list. A to-do list.’

That didn’t sound so bad. Lists were my comfort zone—I’d had interventions about this too. I turned the leaf. Page one said—do stand-up comedy. It was accompanied by a picture of me rather drunk, in a party hat, in the middle of saying something that was clearly very important. I looked up at them. ‘What is this?’

‘It’s a bucket list,’ said Cynthia gently. ‘Except you’re not dying, of course. Sort of an embracing-life list. All the things you said you wanted to do for years, then never did because you were living in the suburbs with Dan.’

‘I never said I wanted to—what’s this—eat something weird? Ew, is that a snail in the picture?’

‘We sort of … extrapolated for some of them.’

‘You extrapolated that I wanted to … sleep with a stranger? Nice abs on that dude though.’ I tilted the book for a better look at the picture.

‘You could do both of those last ones together,’ called Ian from the kitchen. ‘I mean, if you slept with a stranger, you probably would eat something weird. Two birds, one stone, etc.’

‘Go away, Ian,’ said Emma and Cynthia in unison.

I was leafing through the lovely rough handmade paper pages, with their crazy gold-penned instructions. ‘Guys, what is this about? I didn’t say I wanted to … do yoga properly. What?’

Emma leaned across the table to me earnestly. ‘Rach. What’s happened is you’ve had a disastropiphany.’

‘A what?’

‘A terrible thing has happened to you, but you can use it to make changes in your life, and generally become much happier.’

‘Like in Eat Pray Love,’ Cynthia chipped in.

There was a problem with that—no one was going to pay me to go round the world shagging Javier Bardem and eating ice cream. Julia Roberts would definitely not play me in the film of this. Maybe Kathy Burke. There was no way I could pull off prayer beads as a look. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You must really think I’ve messed things up.’

In the silence that followed Ian pushed a large vegetable through the kitchen door. ‘What do you think, eh? It’s what Prince was singing about. “Little Red Courgette”? Eh? Eh?’

‘Courgettes are green,’ said Emma stonily. ‘And get on with the dessert, will you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ In the kitchen we could hear him singing over the noise of the blender. ‘She made some raspberry puree … the kind you find in a fruit and veg store …’ Emma rolled her eyes affectionately. At least I hoped it was affectionately.

She lowered her voice. ‘To be honest, Rach, when you and Dan split up, it made me think—is this all there is, working all day and every evening, falling asleep in front of box sets, saving for a deposit on an even smaller flat somewhere further out?’ There was a silence from the kitchen. She went on. ‘You’ve been so brave, Rach. You changed your life. Hardly anyone ever does. They just put up with it.’

I swallowed hard and look at Cynthia. ‘You too?’

She squirmed. ‘I’m all right, but, you know, Rich is away so much. I don’t see him at all some weeks—it’s like we have a timeshare on the house. I think what happened to you was a wake-up call, that maybe we all needed to try to have more fun.’

I pushed away the book. ‘Guys—I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate that, really I do, but I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I can’t afford this stuff. I’m living in the box room of a stranger who is possibly a serial killer.’ I was exaggerating here for effect. It was hardly a box room, and Patrick seemed nice enough, if a bit grumpy.

‘We thought of that,’ said Emma calmly. She didn’t respond to passive-aggressive guilt trips—something to do with being told fifteen times a day that small children hated her and she wasn’t their real mum. ‘I’m going to organise it all, as an outlet for my madness—I’ll be Official List Arbiter—and Cyn …’

‘I’m going to pay,’ she said. ‘No, no, not in a patronising way. I’m going to do some of the tasks too, and I need you to make sure I actually go and don’t stay in to work all night. You’re going to be my social assistant.’

I glowered at them. ‘Funny, because that sounds totally patronising.’

She sighed. ‘Rach. Do you know how many pairs of pants I had to buy last month because I slept at the office? Twelve. I don’t even go to La Perla now. I go to … Primark. I get them in packs. So you see, Rach. I need your help.’

Emma nodded solemnly. ‘Her gusset is depending on you.’

When I left that night, slightly tipsy and falling over my biker boots, I’d agreed to follow Emma and Cynthia’s ten-step plan for the post-split, pre-divorce lady of a certain age (thirty). I must have dozed off on the tube from Acton, because I woke up at Tottenham Court Road in a panic—when was my last train? Did I miss it?—then I remembered I lived here now. In the city, not the sleepy suburbs. Back at the house, I struggled to get my newly cut key in the lock and, to my embarrassment, Patrick was still up in the kitchen. He had a bottle of red wine and the paper spread out on the table, classical music on the stereo. He was wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a red jumper. I felt myself relax as I stepped in. It was warm, and it smelled like flowers and beeswax polish.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said to Patrick automatically.

He looked puzzled. ‘You can come and go as you like, Rachel. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.’

‘Oh. OK.’ I realised I’d taken my shoes off, and it made me sad suddenly, all the nights I’d had to sneak back in beside Dan, cold and tired, and pretend I hadn’t enjoyed myself. Waiting to hear the inevitable accusing voice. You’re late. I take it you had a good time. Praying he’d be asleep already. ‘First night out,’ I explained. ‘Since … you know.’

‘I don’t think I’ve been out since. Alex was so … I wanted to make sure he was OK.’ He looked up. ‘Would you like a glass of wine? I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, at least not about more than Lego or walkies.’

At the magic word ‘walkies’, a little head popped up from a basket by the door. Max was awake. ‘Woof!’

‘Not now, silly dog.’

I sat down and Patrick got me a glass, patting the dog as he did. ‘Thank you.’ I was keen to hold on to the fragile, slightly drunk air of intimacy from the evening, so I took a big swallow. ‘Can I ask—when did she go?’

‘Michelle? A month ago.’ He said the rest quickly. ‘A month and three days.’

‘Not seven hours and fifteen days?’

‘Longer than that.’

‘No, it’s a song … Never mind.’

He smiled thinly. ‘She just left. There was some big job in New York—she’s from there, you see, and before Alex she was high up in banking—and we were fighting a lot, because I’d just found out about her and Alan from next door, and that was it. Sometimes it takes forever. Sometimes it all falls apart in what feels like days. Supposedly it’s just for a few months, the job, but I don’t know what will happen with us.’

‘We were the opposite.’ I was rubbing my finger where my wedding ring used to be. ‘It feels like it was on life support for years—just dying day by day.’

‘Sounds awful.’

‘Yeah. But even with that, there’s only one last time, you know? Like the last time he makes you a cup of tea or you watch Mad Men.’

‘Like the start of a relationship, but in reverse.’

‘Just like that.’

We lapsed into a sad silence.

He said, ‘You had fun tonight?’ And he actually meant it. Not like Dan’s ‘I can see you had fun without me’ version of the question.

‘I did. I saw my friends, and we had a curry.’

‘What are they like?’

‘Oh, insanely bossy. One’s a lawyer, one’s a teacher, and her boyfriend’s a social worker. They sort of manage me.’

‘Can’t you manage yourself?’

‘They think not. Look.’ I fished the book out of my bag. ‘Can you believe this? They’ve actually made me a list of things I’m supposed to do to get me through the post-split slump. They’ve even already booked one—supposedly we’re doing a tango class next week.’

He peered over. Unfortunately, it had opened on the page that said ‘sleep with a stranger’. ‘Um … that one’s just a joke.’ I turned over hurriedly to ‘do stand-up comedy’.

‘Is that something you’d like to do?’

‘I don’t know. I used to rant about it, when we were at uni. How the comedians in clubs were always racist and sexist. And with my cartoons—I try to be funny with them. But I’d never have the guts to get on stage and be heckled.’

Patrick was looking thoughtful. ‘I think this is a really good idea, you know. I used to do lots of things, before I met Michelle. She was so organised, really had her life planned out, so there wasn’t time for hobbies. Then before I knew it I was married, and she was having Alex, and we were buying this place. I feel like I haven’t done anything fun for about five years.’

‘It’s lovely though. The house.’

His face softened. ‘You know I remodelled it myself? I don’t know if I said, but that’s what I do. I’m an architect. When we bought it, ivy was growing through the windows—the previous owner had been in a nursing home for years, no family to keep it up. So it was a wreck. Michelle wanted to gut it, put in beige carpets and take the walls down. But I wouldn’t. Only time I managed to stand up to her. It took months, but it was like … finding hidden treasure. Those windows—I found them by scraping off the dirt. And the garden—there were all these roses among the weeds.’ He stopped, as if realising he’d said a lot more than he meant to.

‘Well, it’s lovely,’ I repeated. ‘You should be proud.’ Silence fell again, and I racked my brains for something to say. ‘So what would be on your post-divorce list, if you had one?’

He frowned and got up to wash his glass. ‘Oh, who knows. Don’t get divorced, I suppose.’

‘It doesn’t work that way. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

‘Is that a quote?’ He dried his hands on the tea towel, then straightened it neatly over the oven door.

‘Mmm … dunno. A quote from my dad, maybe.’

‘I like it.’

‘So what kind of things did you used to do?’

He was thinking. ‘I used to be quite into extreme sports—skiing, climbing, that sort of thing.’

I was trying to suppress a shudder. ‘You can do that again. Easy.’

‘I haven’t since Alex.’

‘He could go skiing, couldn’t he? All those French kids do. I went once. I felt like I should be on a Zimmer frame.’ Dan had taken me—he was into snowboarding, or he had been before he stopped being into anything but TV and pizza. I’d fallen over on the first slope and spent the rest of the trip mainlining mulled wine while being jumped over by disdainful European tots on skis.

‘He can’t go skiing.’ Patrick was surprisingly firm.

‘Oh. OK.’ Silence fell between us again. The wine was gone, and I felt the loneliness settle on my shoulders again, like a cat that had been lurking on a wardrobe all day (bad memories). ‘You could come to some of it,’ I heard myself say. ‘When we do the dancing and the comedy and all that. Not the sleeping with strangers part … er, that’s a joke, but the rest. I mean, if you want to.’

He turned from the sink, leaning on it for a moment, and I thought how sad he looked, how tired. I wondered if I looked the same, after years of trying and failing, trying again, failing differently.

‘Maybe,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a long time since I did things like that. And there’s Alex.’

‘Does he have a regular babysitter?’

Again, Patrick looked annoyed. ‘There are a few people, but … I don’t like to leave him. It’s … Well, it’s a little complicated.’

I knew enough about dodgy emotional situations to recognise that ‘it’s complicated’ meant ‘please stop asking about that, you nosy cow’. I stood up. ‘Right, better go to bed. I’ll be working here tomorrow if you need me to do anything. Housework, that sort of thing.’