Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (19 page)

And so I settled into my seat on the Eurostar and planned my seduction of Jack, the start of my campaign to sort out what
had gone wrong between us, and to face up to all the issues that I had spent the first half of the year avoiding.

I suppose it’s what happens when a couple has lost the art of communication. One person thinks everything’s going to be okay.
The other thinks it’s all over. So when Jack told me that night he was going, that was when I really went to pieces.

I
’m being stalked by a big, dark cloud. It hovers just behind my left shoulder, and if I turn my head a little, I can see it
in my peripheral vision. Soot-gray and fuzzy-edged, it threatens to engulf me, like the London smogs I remember from the 1950s,
which would swoop in and swallow me up on my way to school. There’s a difference, though. Those early-morning fogs, the pea-soupers
of my childhood, made every journey an adventure. The strange, ghoul-like figures emerging eerily from the mist, wrapped up
in scarves and hats on their way to offices and factories, excited and intrigued me. Time teaches us to be fearful.

This cloud, my sooty stalker, is more menacing, mirroring my mood. At home, out on the streets, when I wake up in the middle
of the night or first thing in the morning, wherever I am, it has become my unwelcome companion. Like the nerdy kid at school,
the one you least want to be your friend but who latches on to you anyway and won’t go away, however badly you behave.

Sometimes I try to punch it away with my fist, but it won’t budge. My fist merely enters the cloud and disappears until I
pull it free. I have a constant pain in my left shoulder, as though the cloud is pressing down its weight. I rub my shoulder
all the time, but massaging myself is no substitute for Jack’s healing hands. Jack’s skill as a healer is that he knows instinctively,
within seconds of touching you, where the problem is located. His hands emit a natural heat, burning almost in its intensity,
that enters straight into the marrow of the pain. The very first time we met in Venice, I mildly twisted my ankle. He pressed
into the sensitive area with his thumb, lost in concentration, and the soreness miraculously melted away under the heat radiating
out from his own flesh.

The cloud is not the only strange new sensation in my life. My mind and body seem to have become detached from each other.
I can be in a room, talking to someone, but I have this feeling that I’m somewhere else, over in the corner, for example,
or floating up near the ceiling, watching the proceedings from a distance. My speech feels mechanistic. The words exit my
mouth as usual, but in an automatic way, like a talking scale rather than flowing from thought or feeling. When people address
me, their words, too, seem to be coming from afar, through a long tunnel. Meanwhile, my body behaves like a computer program,
primed to respond to a set of codes. I shower, dress, shop, cook, eat, walk, drive, read a newspaper, all unaware, and then
wonder how I have managed to complete tasks I have no consciousness of having engaged in. It’s almost as if there are two
of me—the one who speaks and acts and appears to the outside world as normal, and the other one, the one who watches, barely
interested, observing dispassionately, distancing me from myself. I wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. Or if this
is
my new reality.

Most troubling of all, in this strange new world I seem to inhabit, is the ever present anxiety, the little mouse nibbling
away. It has been there all year, lodged inside my solar plexus, but is more insistent now, hungrier. This hungry mouse eating
away at my insides is doing what the diet and exercise failed to do, and the pounds are falling off. I am beginning to look
gaunt.

There was a bad moment in the supermarket this morning. I was carrying one small wire basket—no need for the cart now that
it’s only me and Olly, and more accurately, only me, as Olly is finding excuses to be busy most nights. I was contemplating
a can of chickpeas. I fixed my focus on a solitary can of chickpeas and was about to reach out for it when I became unsure
it was what I wanted. I kept looking at the chickpeas in the hope that if I looked long enough, the dilemma of to buy or not
to buy would resolve itself. And then, quite suddenly, it seemed as though the chickpeas were looking back through the can
at me, transformed from inanimate objects into dozens of miniature eyeballs, jiggling, jostling, and sizing me up aggressively,
taunting me, as if to say:
Take us or leave us, what do we care? You’re nothing to us. Nothing, do you hear?

And then I couldn’t breathe. My chest was being squeezed between giant pincers, and my hand jerked awkwardly toward the can,
sending it skittering from the shelf with perhaps a dozen others. People turned to stare. I let my wire basket drop to the
ground where I stood. A glass jar shattered inside and oozed red lava, like frothing blood, through the basket’s wire mesh.
Had this happened any other day, I would have picked up what I could, apologized to everyone within earshot, and replaced
the cans carefully and neatly back on the shelf. But the floor had moved, it was receding from me at a terrifying speed, and
unless I escaped, the ground beneath my feet might disappear altogether. I raced toward the exit like a shoplifter caught
in the act of stealing, faces, bodies, shelves piled high, all a disorienting blur. Outside, I fell back against the glass
window of the store, hands to my chest, trying to catch my breath.

“Need help, missus?” I hadn’t noticed the store detective chasing me or the shoppers who had stopped to witness the rare spectacle
of a sprinting middle-aged madwoman with a plainclothed security guard hot on her tail.

“I didn’t take anything. I didn’t,” I gasped desperately.

“Don’t worry, love, I didn’t think you had. You’re not well, are you?”

My breath was finally beginning to find a more natural rhythm. “I felt so weird, I needed fresh air,” I stammered. “Really,
I’m all right, but I’ve left a hell of a mess in there.”

“That’s okay, don’t you worry now. I’ve seen you dozens of times, you’re a regular, aren’t you?”

I managed to nod.

“You sure you’re all right?”

I nodded again.

As he turned to go back into the store, I allowed myself to sink slowly to the pavement, with my back to the window. Sitting
on the cool stone, knees up, elbows on knees, head in hands, bewildered, I thought:
I’m one of them now.
Hardly different, in appearance at least, from the dozens of homeless people with their begging signs and mangy dogs, the
ones I’d passed countless times and mostly ignored over the years. And yet totally different. Unlike them, I did have a proper
home to go to. What was I thinking of, sitting here on the pavement, imagining myself as one of them, as if my petty problems
could be compared to theirs? Then again, perhaps the parallel wasn’t so far-fetched. The slide from control to chaos can happen
to anyone, regardless of his or her circumstances. It seemed to be happening to me. As for sitting there, in full view of
passing shoppers, I was beyond caring if anyone I knew walked by and recognized me.
Hope Lyndhurst-Steele, glossy-magazine editor, wife, and mother turned pavement vagrant
. Quite a story to repeat at the school gates, over coffee, or round the dinner table. To the rest I’d be barely visible,
one more unfortunate bag lady to avoid tripping over.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but I noticed an old woman with a hearing aid and a stick tottering out of the supermarket.
She was having great difficulty juggling her shopping, her bag, and her cane, and her plastic wallet was jutting perilously
from her open handbag.
So that’s what’s waiting for me,
I thought. A little farther along from me, a sallow, straggly haired girl sat cross-legged with her sign on the ground in
front of her and one hand outstretched, the other clutching a fat paperback that she was reading intently. She glanced up
and over at me, blank-eyed, and returned to her book. Confused old ladies and homeless young girls. Why did they seem to be
so much closer to my new circumstances than all the bustlingly efficient middle-aged women on their way to the car park, giant
shopping carts laden with groceries and self-assurance? Why did those women, so resembling me a short while ago, seem so alien?

After what may have been five minutes or half an hour, I stiffly heaved myself up from the pavement. I dropped some coins
into the straggly girl’s outstretched hand. She looked up at me and then at her hand and then up again, nodding her thanks.
Slowly, I began to trundle home down the hill. I had become a wraith, a mere apparition, a woman of no substance. I wasn’t
even certain I existed.

“Cheer up, love, it may never happen,” shouted a laborer high up on some scaffolding on a house at the end of my road, proving
definitively that despite my uncertainty, I did indeed exist.

“Well, fuck you, mister, it already has.” That’s what I would have said if I hadn’t been a wraith. I said nothing and hung
my head yet lower. The cloud was closing in on me. I fancied I could see it without even turning my head. Oh, Jack, where
did I go wrong?

Tears were trickling down my face, and I was nearly home. I was looking sightlessly at the cracks between the paving stones
when I heard the click of heels coming toward me and felt myself assaulted by a whiff of designer scent. JLo, I registered
without looking up, and without curiosity. I recognized it from another life, the one that featured “perfume tastings,” the
life that thought that perfume tastings mattered—like the one my beauty editor organized toward the end of last year that
caused heated arguments among the staff as to which was the sexiest of six new scents out of a maximum score of ten. As JLo
whooshed up my nostrils, making me momentarily light-headed and causing me to sway unsteadily, a pair of strong arms and a
soft pillow of bosom enveloped me.

“You’re in a right state, Hope. Just look at you. What the hell . . .”

I stood, unable to move, locked in by the overwhelming fragrance, the cushiony breasts, and Vanessa’s unbidden embrace. At
that moment I wanted her to never ever let me go.

“Argue all you like, love, but you’re coming home with me. I’m going to make us both a nice cup of tea, or a strong pot of
coffee if you’d prefer, and then you’re going to start at the beginning and spill the beans. All of them.”

I didn’t put up any kind of fight as Vanessa led me over the road and round the corner to her small terraced house with its
glossy pink front door and cutouts of stars and moons and animals and birds and trees stuck to the insides of the ground-floor
windows. Having made it through the door behind her, I stood in her hallway, limp and motionless, until she removed my jacket
for me. When she’d done that and I’d failed to follow her into the kitchen, she came back to collect me and took me by the
hand.

I’d never been inside Vanessa’s home before; our encounters had mainly been restricted to the Neighborhood Watch committee,
and I’d missed the meeting when it was her turn to have it at her place. If I had happened to visit previously, I probably
would have silently sneered at her poor parody of a country-style kitchen with its sunny yellow walls, its blue wood-effect
cupboards stenciled with flowers. The floors and surfaces, strewn with plastic toys and LEGO and video cartoons and Connect
Four counters and tricycles and tiny trainers, would have confirmed what I had suspected of Vanessa’s sloppy ways. But in
my distressed state, with my defenses down, I registered through the fug inside my head the all-embracing warmth of a loving,
child-centered home. Here was a house not so different from the ones I used to visit as a child, the ones with the swirly
carpets that were so much more welcoming than my own pristine surroundings. My thoughts switched to Olly.
Maybe Olly feels about his home the way I felt about my mother’s
. But hadn’t our house, when Olly was small, been full of toys and mess? I tried to picture it but couldn’t. All I could see
was me letting myself in through the front door at seven p.m., after a long day in the office, Olly all washed and clean and
smiley in his pajamas, and his toys tidied away by the nanny.

I shook my head to jolt myself back to the present.

“Drink up, then ’fess up,” said Vanessa, placing a Thomas the Tank Engine mug filled with milky tea in front of me.

“But I don’t know where to begin. I mean, I hardly know you. I mean, I do know you, but not intimately. And I’ve been so rude
to you every time we’ve met lately. Maybe I should have this tea and go home. I’m not even sure I have the energy to talk.”

“Look, like it or not,” said Vanessa, “I’m already well up on your family business. I get to hear quite a lot about what’s
going on from my little friend. He’s been having a hard time of it lately, what with Jack walking out and you being so in
the dumps. You know what boys are like. They don’t talk to their mates, not about proper stuff. And Olly’s no different. But
he does talk to me.”