A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger (40 page)

And that's when I knew that my life was not, and would never be, perfect. But it was pretty damn good.

Writing a novel is a wonderful challenge. As is backpacking around South America.

Doing both of these things at the same time, however, is downright foolish and it is therefore a testament to all of the brilliant people in my life that I was able to pull it off and not go mad. So thank you, first of all, to everyone I met during my travels, fellow itinerants and locals alike, for the craic, the stories and the space when I was being writerly. Thanks in particular to the many people who helped me when I was ill, especially Hannah Coffin, Amy Phillips and the folk at the Secret Garden hostels in Cotopaxi and Quito. Thanks also to my handsome man, George, for understanding that I had to go off and write some of this book on my own … and for being such a brilliant travel buddy when we were on the road together. The same to Tania and Bert.

Thank you to Chris Parkin for emailing me that newspaper article. I hope you'll agree that it was worth a little more than a blog. Thank you too to Rory McClenaghan for help with my questions on ghostwriting!

Thanks to Cressida Toro for her invaluable help with the world of Pharmaceutical Comms and to Ellie Tinto for getting me started. Thank you to Doctors Alpesh Kothari and Michael Rayment for help with broken legs – if there are still mistakes they are definitely my fault!
Thank you to Jennie Green and the Great Leap Forward girls for their Edinburgh help and hospitality.

Thank you to my lovely family for being so cool about my travels – and for all the support around my new writing career. And to my friends, for their excitement and willingness to push my book on anyone who'd listen.

THANK YOU to my agent, Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates, who is simply the best agent in the world. Sorry that you got Spanish-speaking hostel owners every time you tried to call me.

Another large thank you to my editor Celine Kelly for absolutely everything, especially for helping me to really believe in this book. And to the excellent folk at Penguin with whom I've worked with over the last year – Liz Smith, Francesca Russell, Anna Durkacz to name but a few. Your enthusiasm and determination to get me out there has helped me so much. Thank you also to Ania Corless, Tine Nielson and Stella Giatrakou at David Higham for getting me published in so many languages and to Harriet Evans and Laura West for the other bits.

I am well lucky, me.

I was pretty horrified by my reflection in the mirror. I looked like a shrivelled grey boggle. ‘Arggh,' I said helplessly, at my reflection.

‘Arggh,' said the alien in the mirror.

I had spent most of the day in the wardrobe with my old teddy bear. His name was Carrot. We'd hidden in there because tomorrow my life was going to change significantly and I was terrified.

I wasn't normally a victim of intense fear. By and large my life had been quite free of drama and I'd gone to some effort to keep it that way. But on the rare occasions when I faced danger beyond my control I would crawl into my wardrobe, shut the door and emerge only when I felt safe again.

I wasn't looking for Narnia in there. In fact, I'd have been furious if some jolly man with a furry bottom and cloven hoofs had turned up. I was there for the solitude, the silence and the safety. And Carrot.

Normally, those four solid wooden walls did the trick. I'd stew in there, hot and helpless, until eventually I managed to boil myself down to some sort of equilibrium. Steadier and saner, I would crawl out again, ready to face the world.

That had not happened today. I had stewed for hours on end, hot fear singeing my face and burning painfully down my back, but calm hadn't come. I'd eventually had to drag myself out, half mad, half shaking.
Not even my wardrobe can help me
, I thought hysterically, staring at my boggly reflection.
This is an emergency!

It was an emergency. Tomorrow I was starting a postgraduate diploma in opera at the Royal College of Music, alongside ten of the world's most talented young singers. Even though I was not a performer of any kind. Let alone an opera singer, with a wardrobe full of satin gowns and a family who owned a large country estate in Gloucestershire with butlers and horses. I was a quiet girl from a council estate in the Midlands, who hated attention. Did you hear me?
I was not an opera singer.

I stood still as my insides, like some amateur microbrewery, contracted and pressed against each other. ‘Arggh,' I whispered again. It was a helpless, mewling sort of sound.

I stared palely in the direction of the kitchen and wondered if food would help. Food normally helped. Maybe a little gentle bingeing?

Slowly, woodenly, I shuffled out of my bedroom and over to the fridge, rolling up my sleeves.

But Fate was against me. As I served up my Wiltshire pork belly fifty minutes later, making a pathetic attempt at a jolly whistle, an unexpected visitor – a man – was making his way towards my front door. And this man had nothing to do with tomorrow and the singing: this man would change my life
today.

Sunday night was M&S Meal Deal Night; something I normally relished. According to Barry from Barry Island, it was inevitable that a peasant like me was so fond of meal deals. The combination of maximum food at minimum price was designed for ‘my sort'.

Barry never hesitated to share his views on my eating habits. Or indeed anything, really, and the reason I allowed him to insult me with such impunity was his Welsh accent. I so deeply loved it, was so completely entranced by everything he said, that I had somehow lost the instinct to defend myself.

‘Sally, you're a greedy pig,' he'd tell me matter-of-factly. ‘You look nice now but you're headin' towards chronic obesity, Chicken.' He'd smile sadly, then return to his grilled goldfish or whatever stupid morsel was on his plate. I would return to my half-price-but-full-fat lasagne, muttering amiably that he was a Welsh devil and deserved to get hugely fat when he retired from ballet.

As was customary for Meal Deal Night, Barry had declined to eat his half of the spread so I was sitting alone at the table surrounded by food. It looked splendid: pork belly, rosemary potatoes and some funny-sounding little thing called Berrymisu for dessert.

Yet the sight of it did nothing for me. I felt sicker than ever.

Barry was trying out a new dance belt in his bedroom. He had a lot of trouble with dance belts, for the same reason that I had trouble with G-strings. Neither of us liked anything synthetic wedged up our private parts.

‘Barry?' I called pointlessly, in the direction of his bedroom door, through which Shakira was pumping. Perhaps if he came and sat with me I'd be able to stomach at least one mouthful.

I had never known fear like this. Even after the catastrophic things that had happened in New York last year I had still been
myself
, Sally Howlett. Calm, short of stature, wide of bottom. Reliable, measured, articulate. Now I was a wobbly ball of highly explosive gas.

‘Barry?' I tried again. The flat was shaking slightly, which meant that he was performing flamboyant Amazonian dance movements in front of his mirror to ‘Hips Don't Lie'. He went wild for Shakira and was often caught shaking a billowing Latino mane that he didn't possess.

‘BARREEEEEEEE!'

Barry was not coming. I needed to do something, fast.

The iPad that my (very rich) friend Bea had impulse-bought for me last autumn – along with a Fendi handbag and a rare Robert Piguet perfume, all designed to cheer me up after the New York trip of doom – was on the work surface. I grabbed it and started hammering out an email, my useless fingers landing on all of the wrong keys. The big ugly diamanté ring on my right hand, which I hadn't quite brought myself to remove since getting back from New York, made my typing still worse.

fOina, please come home. I need you here funnyface, I;m fecking
TERRIFIED ARGHHH! I really muiss you, Freckle. Please come back soon. I so hate you not being here. Tomorrow is all your fault anyway. You and your ‘seize the day' nonsense! I love you, please come back.xxxxxxxzzx

I pressed send and then reread the email, imagining my cousin Fiona reading it. When Fiona wasn't being manic, she had such a beautiful smile; the sort of smile that would be described in the opening pages of an epic Russian novel from the nineteenth century.

I missed Fiona terribly. We'd grown up as sisters, not cousins. Played horses together, written love letters to boys together, compared our first pubes. When I moved from Stourbridge to London, Fiona had been my housemate for seven (mostly) lovely years. But after last year's drama she'd refused to leave New York and had yet to change her mind even though I had begged her repeatedly to come home. (Barry, less optimistic about the chances of her returning, had moved into her room about nine months ago. I'd swapped my pale, freckly, difficult cousin for a pale, freckly rude little shit from Barry Island. Although, for all his appalling comments, I loved him madly.)

Momentarily, I allowed a Fiona-pain to glow somewhere in my chest, then pinched it down, returning my attention to the inbox in case she happened to be online. And reply instantly.

She didn't.

In the absence of her or Barry, I toyed with the idea of calling Bea for support. Bea was down in Glyndebourne, having finally left the Royal Opera House after ten years at the helm of the makeup and wigs department. Now she was attaching curly beards and prosthetic noses to opera singers in a dappled Sussex country estate and was evidently very busy: we'd spoken for all of ten minutes since their season opened five months ago in May.

I called her now, just in case. She didn't answer.

I even pondered the idea of calling home, but felt agitated and angry just thinking about my parents. Mum and Dad were stunned and clearly appalled that I was starting this course; they'd doubtless encourage me to pull out if they detected uncertainty. ‘Do you really think you belong in that world?' Mum had asked. ‘With
those
sorts of people? All posh and snobby?'

Of course I didn't.

But I still resented her asking.

Someone knocked on the front door.

I looked round at my empty kitchen, taken by surprise. Someone must have got into my apartment building and up to my front door – which, these days, was quite a feat since a forgotten bunch of forgotten Occupy London people had helped themselves to an empty flat on the fifth floor, and Mustafa the security man had taken up residence.

I jumped up from the table, forgetting that I was wearing pyjamas with pigs on them, and threw open the front door with my best smile in case it was God, there to help.

The man standing at the door, with a strange sort of a smile on his face, did not look like God. But he was definitely familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I wondered if he was famous. He was certainly attractive enough to be famous. Impossibly handsome and stylish; the sort that had a large house in Santa Barbara and did photo shoots at sundown on his private beach.

An absolute show-stopper of a man
, I marvelled, in my momentary trance,
although not really my sort of thing
. He had long shiny hair and a blindingly smart shirt worn with crisp jeans and pointy brogues. Some luxury musky aftershave floating off his pampered, tanned skin and a big fat Rolex. I half smiled, baffled. What was a man like this doing on my doorstep? And why did he look so familiar? Had I once fitted a costume on him or something?

It was only a few seconds later, when he said, ‘Hey,' in a half-Devon, half-American accent, and I found myself thinking that it was a huge mistake for him to grow his hair long, and wondered why he'd changed his perfume, that I realized he was not a celebrity, or a singer from the Royal Opera House, but someone I knew very well.

He was also someone I'd never wanted to see again. Whom I'd worked so hard to strike from memory that he had all but ceased to exist.

The room started to bleach white and I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again he was still standing there.

‘Hey,' he repeated sheepishly. It felt like half a lifetime since I'd heard his voice. That accent. The oddest accent in history. ‘I guess this is a bit of a surprise, right?'

I tried to reply but nothing happened. I looked down at my pig pyjamas and didn't even care. The floor wobbled miles below me.

‘Sally?' he said gently. ‘Are you OK?' He watched me, patently anxious. For a few strange, flabby seconds I watched him back, still incredulous. Only his face was that of the man I'd once known. The rest of him was unrecognizable. Smart, crackly, groomed. An alien landscape.

‘Oh, man, Sally, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have just
come
. But I didn't know how else to … to … Hang on.' He started rooting around in his pockets.

It was as if I had one foot jammed on the accelerator and the other flat on the brake.

He pulled a little piece of yellow paper from his jeans pocket and his hands shook slightly as he tried to unfold it. I noticed he had a smart, starchy man-bag I'd not seen before. Then I recognized the Post-it note in his hand.

‘I wondered if this was still valid,' he said quietly, holding it out.
Varlud.
Nobody else on earth had an accent like his. A cross-bred silly joke of an accent. Once accompanied by fluffy hair and forgetfulness. Once so dear to me.

I didn't look at the Post-it because I knew what it said. ‘Go away, please,' I heard myself whisper. ‘Please can you go away and not come back.'

He smiled sympathetically. How
dare
he look at me like that? As if I were a tantruming child?

‘Go, please,' I repeated more clearly. I started to close the door as anger compacted and heaved upwards in me. How could he? How could he just march in, after he had … after he … ?

After a brief consideration, he shrugged. ‘OK. I'll go for now. But, Sal, I
can't
leave you alone. You see –'

‘GO!' I shrieked. (I shrieked? I had never shrieked in my life!) ‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! DON'T YOU DARE BOTHER ME AGAIN! EVER!' I was charged.

Super-charged. Maybe even dangerous. Although probably not.

The man pushed the door back open with one of his expensive shoes. The air between us flexed and rumbled angrily, like sheet metal.

‘Now, listen up,' he began, apparently not having heard me. ‘Sal, if you'll let me explain . . .'

Then something happened that I found very surprising. I, Sally Howlett, avoider of
anything
that resembled confrontation, spun round and grabbed my Marks & Spencer pork belly from the table. And then I spun back round, like a shot-putter, and lobbed it at the man standing at my front door. Straight at his face. I missed him, of course – I'd always been poor at hand/eye coordination – and it whistled past his ear, hitting the wall outside where it slid to the floor leaving a greasy track mark. It was accompanied by a little scream, which had apparently come from me.

The man looked round at the cooked meat on the hallway carpet, then back at me. There was a long, weighted silence.

‘I hate you,' I whispered. And I did. Violently. A great pit of fury and sadness burned in my chest. ‘I don't ever want to hear from you again.'

I slammed the front door in his face.

I stood there until I heard him move away, then I turned back to the table.

‘No way,' breathed Barry from Barry Island, in his amazing Welsh accent.

He was standing at his bedroom door, naked apart from the flesh-coloured thong. His frighteningly pale skin and freckles seemed almost Day-Glo under the kitchen light. He ran his hands through his fine strawberry-blond hair and left them on the side of his face in a dramatic, end-of-world fashion. ‘Was that who I think it was?' he whispered. ‘Dressed as a poncy get?'

I nodded, and started crying.

Barry's eyes widened. ‘Oh … my …
God
,' he said, in awed tones. He looked at me and I looked back at him. Neither of us had the faintest idea what to do.