Page 20 of Five Things I Love About You

‘That’s exactly what Kirstie just said but you’ll both still have each other, and anyway, I’m not flying to the moon,’ I say, pulling away gently.

‘Is she still here?’ She looks around hopefully.

‘No, she had to dash off. But she came to say goodbye at least, even if she still doesn’t approve of what I’m doing.’

‘Course she did. She loves you. We both do.’ She bustles past me towards the house. ‘Anyway, what else do you need help with? Is there anything else to put in the car?’

‘Just these last couple of boxes,’ I say, indicating the two small cardboard boxes stacked beside the front door.

‘Right, come on then.’ She lifts the top one and carries it to my car, and I take the other and follow her dutifully. Once we’ve squeezed them into the back seat of my tatty old Ford Focus she leans against the car door and turns to look at the house.

‘It’s going to be so weird walking past here every day and knowing someone else is living in it,’ she says.

I shake my head. ‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ I admit. In an ideal world I would have left the house empty until I was ready to come home. But the stark fact is, even though I’ve lined up some cover work in a state secondary school in Newcastle, I need the rent to cover the mortgage payments.

Sophie puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ll make sure they look after the place, don’t worry,’ she says.

‘Thanks, Soph.’

We stand like that, just staring at my home for another couple of minutes. Then without saying anything else, we both know it’s time for me to go.

Sophie gives me one last squeeze, then I watch as she walks down the road towards her own house a couple of streets away. She turns one last time before disappearing round the corner, gives a wave, and then she’s gone.

I check the house over one last time – the family who are renting it are arriving first thing tomorrow so I’ve left a few of the small upstairs windows open to stop it getting too stuffy, and a bottle of wine and a note on the kitchen table. But then I can’t bear to be there any longer, so I scoop up my handbag, lock the door behind me and climb into the car.

North London traffic is as bad as always, and it takes me half an hour to crawl round the last section of the North Circular before finally being released onto the M1, ready to head north. It’s warm inside the car, the air full of fumes and humidity, and I’m glad when I finally pick up some speed and feel the air rush through the open window, cooling my damp skin. The temperature has risen, and it’s already over 15°C outside, warm for April.

I switch on the radio and let the DJ’s voice wash over me as I focus on the road ahead. The tarmac flashes by beneath my wheels and the clock ticks on as I pass road signs indicating name places that are familiar to me at first – Edgware, Bricket Wood, Watford, St Albans… then on to Dunstable, Milton Keynes, Northampton. Past the Watford Gap services, on past Rugby and Kettering, the names feeling more remote now, and I try not to think about how far away I’m soon going to be from home.

Finally, desperate for a wee, I pull into Tibshelf services. There’s still a long way to go, but from here on in it feels different, heading into the north where the vowels are broader and flatter, the landscape lusher, greener, the people friendlier. At least, that’s what they tell me. I’m a London girl through and through, and although I’ve visited the north – weekends in the Lake District with the kids, a long weekend in Edinburgh with Nick – it’s always been somewhere distant, unfamiliar to me. A place where other people live.

But now I’ll be living there too.

I buy myself a large Costa latte, a smoked salmon sandwich and a family-sized packet of Maltesers, then climb back into the car. Motorway driving has always bored me. When Nick and I were married and the kids were young, he did all the driving, and I spent long journeys with my feet up on the dashboard, reading or sleeping or playing silly I-spy games with Zara and Joe. Since it’s been just me, I’ve tended to take the train for journeys longer than an hour, and filled the time with reading, listening to podcasts, or sending emails. Driving has always felt like a colossal waste of time.

But I hadn’t wanted to leave the car at home, so here I am.

I switch on an audiobook and try to focus on the story, a fast-paced thriller about a woman receiving threatening letters, but even that can’t hold my attention and my mind keeps wandering, so I switch if off again.

Then the thoughts begin to crowd in: the doubts and hopes and worries and dreams and expectations, all of them jostling and clamouring for attention.

At the front of my mind is the terrifying fact that I’ve just thrown my whole life up in the air for a pipe dream; the hope that forcing something to happen in my life rather than sitting around waiting for it to happen might bring me the joy that’s been missing for so long. Plus, of course, there’s the fact that I’m also planning to search for a man that doesn’t know I exist, who I know almost nothing about, and who may not even live in Newcastle. But it’s an adventure, isn’t it?

At least, that’s how I’m framing it. A couple of weeks ago, I finally contacted my ex, Nick, to tell him what I was planning to do. Not that I needed to – what I did was none of his business and hadn’t been for more than twelve years, and vice versa. But we’re friends, of sorts, as well as co-parents, and it felt weird to just leave London for an undetermined amount of time and not let him know. So I’d summoned the courage and sent him a text, asking if I could pop round.

‘Come for dinner,’ he’d replied. ‘Josie would love to see you too.’

My heart sunk. We got on reasonably well, but I would never not find it weird to see my ex-husband with another woman. And even though Josie was perfectly lovely and they had two children, Emmy, who was seven, and four-year-old Frank, I still preferred to deal in text messages or short phone calls. But of course I said yes.

My first thought when I arrived was that Josie looked tired. When they’d met three years after Nick and I split up, Josie’s mere presence made me feel insecure. She’s a decade younger than me and looked it. But these days, with two young children to look after and a full-time job in marketing, she looked, quite frankly, completely frazzled and – well, quite a lot older. I tried not to feel smug as I wafted in, my hair curled and my make-up expertly applied, to find her with bags under her eyes and her hair scraped back in a scruffy ponytail.

She greeted me with a perfunctory hug, and Nick did the same. As we sat down at the table with our bowls of pasta he looked at me with concern.

‘So, what’s up, Mazza?’ He could never call anything by its proper name, and Mazza was the name that had stuck since our second date (even the kids were Za-za and Jo-jo. Why couldn’t he leave anything alone?).

I chewed my mouthful of linguine slowly, trying to work out what to say. I couldn’t tell him the truth, of course, he really would think I’d lost it.

‘I’m going away for a while,’ I said, washing my mouthful down with a swig of wine.

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