Miss You (43 page)

‘I’m not talking about university,’ said Doll. ‘I’m talking about living in London like we always planned . . .’

‘London’s expensive, Doll. The sort of job I’d be able to get wouldn’t even cover the rent.’

‘That’s where I come in.’

‘I’m not taking money from you,’ I said immediately.

Doll was very generous, but she was over the top. The charm bracelet she bought Hope for her eighteenth was gold and must have cost a fortune, and it went straight into a drawer just like the
one we’d bought all those years before on the Ponte Vecchio, never to be looked at again.

‘I’m not offering to give you money – I have a business proposition,’ Doll said. ‘I’ve bought this property in West London, a little shop with a flat
upstairs. It’s all taking off up there now, what with the Euro in crisis and capital flying out of Europe. London’s thought of as a safe haven, and then there’s all the oligarchs.
If I don’t get in now, I never will.’

It was amazing how Doll had taught herself about business and economics if you’d seen her GCSE results.

‘There’s no way, with the baby coming, I’ll be able to oversee things up there as well—’

‘I don’t know anything about nails,’ I interrupted, because you shouldn’t work for friends, everyone says that, and I wasn’t going to risk losing her as a friend
again.

‘But you do have transferable skills,’ Doll continued, unfazed. ‘You know about taking on staff, health-and-safety, managing rotas, all that HR stuff. And you’re clever,
so it wouldn’t take you more than an afternoon to learn about the ordering and the health regs.’

I opened my mouth to contradict her, then realized she was giving me exactly the sort of pep talk I was always giving middle-aged women who wanted to come back to work after having kids but had
lost their confidence and couldn’t believe anyone would want to employ them.

‘I need someone I can trust, because there’s a lot riding on this. And I know you won’t fuck up.’

‘Just like I haven’t fucked up anything else in my life?’ I said despondently.

Now Doll looked impatient. I felt a bit like a candidate on
The Apprentice
about to get a dressing-down. Maria Newbury didn’t tolerate whingeing, so if I wanted this opportunity I
was going to have to pull myself together and grab it, best friend or not.

‘Where is this shop?’ I asked.

‘So, here’s the thing,’ said Doll. ‘It’s on the Portobello Road.’

I was worried that Doll was overreaching in a recession, but the way she put it was: having your nails done is like buying a caramel latte. When you don’t have a lot of cash to spare,
you’ll cut back on spa days and restaurant meals, but you still deserve a little bit of a treat.

Mum used to say that if you do something with a happy heart it will bring you joy. And who wouldn’t be happy stepping out each morning into Portobello Road, popping into
a Portuguese cafe for a cappuccino and an almond croissant? Before I became manager of The Dolls House, Portobello, I’d never once painted my nails, let alone had anyone else to do it for me.
Like the running, it’s surprising how quickly you get addicted. If you’d have told me once that I’d ever express a desire for turquoise toenails to match the colour of a new
swimsuit, I’d have bet my life against it. Now I saw potential new nail designs everywhere I looked: the pink pompom flowers of a cherry blossom against the azure sky went down well with our
Japanese customers; a silver-and-black Art Deco pattern echoed the mirrored interior of the Wolseley, where a lot of our businesswomen clients had breakfast meetings; a single tiny gold-leaf star
on midnight blue was very popular at Christmas. Ours was the first nail parlour to reproduce the London 2012 logo, until we received a warning about copyright infringement.

It was me who noticed that the only other shops that seemed to be thriving in the midst of austerity were tattoo parlours. I’d never dare to have a tattoo myself and thought there must be
others like me, so I managed to source some beautiful temporary tattoos made of organic vegetable dyes, which looked cool, didn’t hurt and stayed on your skin for a few showers if you
didn’t go at them too vigorously with a loofah. Doll was delighted that I was ‘adding value’ to the business.

I joined a writing class at the City Lit. Not fiction. I’d had enough of fiction with Leo. This was called Life Writing and it attracted a flotsam and jetsam of oddballs, like me,
who’d come to a watershed in their lives.

Sarah had been married to a very rich guy who traded her in for a younger model, literally, because she had been a model too, and she was still thin and walked with her legs crossing over each
step, but anxiety had etched itself in lines on her once-smooth face.

Lorcan was a motorbike courier who was trying to reconstruct his memory after suffering severe head injuries in a near-fatal road accident. We were very different people but we got comfortable
quite quickly because of trusting each other with a lot of personal information.

And then an Australian set designer called Gayle turned up. When she read out a funny piece about her fascination with her ex-lover’s growth of designer stubble, I knew we’d be
friends. She’d had a six-year affair with her former boss in Melbourne. Apparently he’d suffered from ‘existential despair’ just like Leo. ‘Mid-life crisis,’
Gayle called it.

She and I often went for a drink or a movie together after class, and on Sundays in the summer, queued for the Proms or the free gigs in Hyde Park. It was nice having a female friend my own age
to do things with. Being a teaching assistant and at Waitrose, I’d always ended up with middle-aged female friends, apart from Doll, and Doll had never done culture.

‘Your creativity’s finally been unleashed,’ said Shaun when he and Kev came over for a holiday.

They stayed at a boutique hotel in Fitzrovia and I met up with them most evenings, feeling quite sophisticated because I now knew which restaurants were in vogue and which were the must-see
plays. We did the touristy things too, like tea at Fortnum & Mason, and cocktails in the American Bar at the Savoy, even though the prices were ridiculous if you allowed yourself to think about
how many mojitos you could get from a bottle of Havana Club, a net of limes and a packet of fresh mint from Waitrose.

‘How
are
you?’ Shaun asked the day we spent alone together, when Kev went down to visit Dad and Hope.

We were at the David Hockney exhibition in the Royal Academy. I loved that exhibition so much I went back five times. Most of the paintings were of trees, and even though I’ve seen trees
all my life, those paintings changed the way I look at them. Some of Hockney’s colours are so bright they seem almost crude and artificial, but when you really look at new leaves with spring
sunshine on them, or red twigs in a winter hedgerow, you see they are that vivid. For me, that exhibition literally made the world more colourful.

We were in a room with giant canvases showing the same coppice in the four different seasons.

‘I’m happy,’ I told him. ‘And I’ve decided that I’m going to have the surgery. There’s a process you have to go through, with counselling to see if
you’re ready psychologically, then consultations with the surgeon, so it may take a year or more . . .’

Shaun nodded. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was a good idea or not.

‘Even when you get a date, it’s not fixed because they’ll postpone you if someone needs it more urgently,’ I continued. ‘But I am on the pathway now and I’m
feeling very positive about it.’

We moved on into a room full of paintings of white hawthorn blossom.

‘Before, it always felt like I would be giving up on life if I had everything removed, but now it feels as if I’m embracing life.’ I paused. ‘And you won’t believe
this, but I’ve decided to get reconstruction too. At first I thought, that’s just not me, but then I thought, why not? They offer it free. It’s not like silicone implants because
they take tissue from your thighs or tummy so that it ages with you . . .’

‘Doesn’t look like there’s much to take,’ Shaun said, looking at my newly toned legs.

I managed a grin. ‘I’ve always wanted smaller breasts.’

Shaun smiled at me. He did approve, I thought. And actually, it didn’t matter whether he did or he didn’t, because I knew it was right for me.

We went for a walk in Green Park afterwards. Sunshine was filtering through the big shady trees making random dots of bright white light on the tarmac that danced as the branches swayed in the
breeze.

‘Seems like you’re in a good place,’ Shaun said.

‘Being in a good place,’ was one of those phrases that Doll used a lot too.

Yes
, I always felt like saying.
I’m in London!

‘And is there a new man in your life?’ Shaun asked.

‘No,’ I said.

Everyone else seemed to know how to have a relationship – Doll, Dad, even Hope, for God’s sake! – but I didn’t.

Gayle was a serial Internet dater. She was signed up with Match.com and eHarmony and all the rest of them, and she was always telling me I should give it a go, but, to be honest, the string of
funny stories she told about her encounters put me off. Sometimes I even suspected she was going on the dates simply to write about them.

One evening, when we were sitting with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc waiting to watch
L’Elisir d’Amore
relayed live to the piazza outside the Opera House in Covent Garden, she
got me to ask her questions to practise for a speed-dating event. I asked her some of the interview questions we used in HR, like, ‘How would your friends describe you in three words?’
and, ‘If you were a vegetable, what would you be?’

‘An onion?’ said Gayle.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s got lots of layers . . .’

‘But the smell lasts all day on your hands and it makes you cry,’ I pointed out.

‘OK. I’ll say a tomato.’

‘Technically, that’s a fruit.’

‘You’d be hopeless at speed dating,’ said Gayle.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘How do you envisage meeting someone?’ Gayle asked.

‘I think it’ll have to be more spontaneous,’ I replied.

What put me off about all the new ways was that it was like you were sitting with a sign over your head saying, ‘I want a boyfriend.’ I had the standard Richard-Curtis-movie type of
fantasy, where a stranger would bump into me spilling my latte and we’d look into each other’s eyes and know.

‘So, there’s this new app you should try, called Tinder,’ said Gayle. ‘It shows you photos of people in the area who are also using it. So, if you like the look of
someone, you just swipe yes, and if they swipe back, it’s a match and you can message each other. It’s a bit like when you catch someone’s eye on the Tube, you know? But
you’re doing something about it.’

She got out her iPhone and demonstrated. There were seven men in the vicinity using the app. Were some of them in this crowd, I wondered? Or even inside the Opera House? It was kind of spooky.
Gayle swiped yes to two of them. One was a match.
What U doing?
he messaged.
Watching the opera
, she tapped. He didn’t reply.

‘Saves a lot of time,’ said Gayle.

‘Have you actually met anyone?’ I asked.

‘Three guys. Two losers. The third, a pistol between the sheets. You should try it.’

‘You had sex with a stranger?’ I asked, in what Doll always called my ‘nun’s voice’, just as the crowd fell silent for the beginning of the overture.

‘What’s to lose?’ Doll asked when we met for our fortnightly business meeting.

‘My dignity?’ I said.

‘No big deal, then.’

We both sprayed crumbs across the table laughing.

We usually had our lunch in the Michelin-starred restaurant down the road, but sometimes Doll brought Elsie, my goddaughter, along with her, so we were eating baguettes in my flat while Elsie
cooked a wooden lunch with the toy kitchen I’d bought for when she visited.

‘Come on,’ said Doll. ‘Let’s sign you up before you change your mind.’

I was slightly alarmed by her vicarious enthusiasm for the project, remembering how much she nagged me to get engaged to Dave, when subconsciously she was the one who’d wanted to.

We got as far as selecting a photo from my Facebook page when Doll suddenly called a halt.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s going to swipe that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Only because you take a rotten photo,’ she said. ‘If you’re trying to look sexy, you look fed up; when the camera catches you unawares, you can look a bit mad, which
isn’t you in real life, promise. What we need is a professional head shot. It’ll be tax-deductible for publicity purposes.’

So I spent an afternoon in a photographer’s studio with a hair and make-up artist and came out with a series of sultry photos that looked nothing like me at all. Which was actually a good
thing, I thought, because if nobody swiped me, I wouldn’t take it personally.

Gayle bought me a packet of condoms, because the one thing you couldn’t do was have unprotected sex with a stranger, and a courgette from the vegetable stall in case I needed to practise
rolling it on.

‘Bloody hell!’ I said, when I saw the size of it.

‘If you were a vegetable . . .’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘What was Leo like then?’

‘More of a gherkin,’ I said wickedly, thinking how he’d hate me saying that.

However much you tell yourself that it’s just a bit of a laugh and you’re not going to worry one way or another, unreciprocated swiping isn’t a good feeling.
I only persevered because Gayle and Doll kept texting me for updates.

On Sunday morning, sitting behind my
Observer
in the cafe next door, I jumped as my phone vibrated a match. Carl. He and I shared Lorcan as a Facebook friend, which was a tiny bit
reassuring.

Thomas Hardy or David Nicholls?
he messaged, which I thought was clever because one wrote
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and the other wrote
One Day
, which has a quote from
Tess
at the front.

Both
, I messaged back.

Coffee?