Page 15 of The Lucky Escape

‘Y’okay?’ he asked. ‘Can I do anything?’

I shook my head, trying to focus.

When I opened my eyes again I said: ‘Breakfast time, I think. That smoothie didn’t even touch the sides.’

I stood up gingerly, depositing my cup in the recycling and pausing to take one more deep breath. I looked at Patrick. He was handsome, I realized. The faint creases on his strong face softened him, his huge height was commanding and assured. He wore a combination of blues and greens that complemented his glistening eyes. His lips were full. Kissable, even. But I honestly hadn’t been flirting. The thought of it made me feel sick. I’d never take a risk again, I was sure of it. Who would want me anyway? My fate was to die an old maid. I knew that much.

‘Until next time, I suppose,’ he said.

I couldn’t place what I thought about the notion of there being a next time. But I still replied, my smile bashful and heart skipping the tiniest of beats: ‘Yes. I’ll be here.’

On the bus home I didn’t even need music to drown out my thoughts. I just watched the world go by, an almost imperceptible smile on my face.I want to be friends with that man,I thought. I was jealous of him, in a funny way. He seemed so relaxed with himself, so content. Had I really once been like that too? Because hanging around him, I could almost believe it.

I was still in my towel after my shower as I stood on the small IKEA stepladder to reach around in the top of the wardrobe. I could just about see the turquoise box, standing on my tiptoes to grasp at the nothingness in front of it before I could lean far enough to hook my finger under the lid and drag it to the edge of the shelf. My memory box.

I sat on the bed and flicked it open. I hadn’t added anything to it for years. From the age of nine I was obsessive about recording my own history, collecting fragments of memories like a magpie: cinema ticket stubs, photos taken with my pink Polaroid camera – the one that everyone at school had. I hadn’t looked through it in ages and in an instant, I was reminded why. Sometimes it was just too painful. There was an innocence to who I was when I was younger, a hopeful way of seeing the world that made me sad about how I saw the world now.

After my last summer at Yak Yak everything changed. I came home from drama camp as full of life and energy as I ever had been, but it was that school year that shifted who I thought I was allowed to be in the world, and I never went back. I started playing by the rules, started self-monitoring how I showed up in my life so as not to ruffle any feathers. I found a photo of us all stood on the stage ofBugsy Malone, about one hundred kids, me in the front row proudly sporting a leotard and feather boa, delighted as I’ve ever been. I scanned the faces for Patrick and found him at the back, not looking to camera. In fact, in a way, it almost looked as though he was staring in my direction.

I smoothed the photo out on the bedroom floor, letting myself remember, and decided to prop it in the corner of the mirror on the vanity, next to a picture of Freddie and me in a photo booth at our cousin’s thirtieth, both in bigglasses and moustaches. Why couldn’t I be that carefree all the time? The photos on the mirror reflected the woman I wanted to be more than my actual reflection.

I was pulled out of my thoughts by Mum appearing at the doorway.

‘Jesus,’ I said, jumping out of my skin. ‘Mum. You scared me.’ I had a faraway thought about asking Adzo to suggest they think about leaving. This was too much, now. I was going to be okay. I was. They could go.

‘It’s Fernanda,’ she said, holding out her mobile. ‘I think you should take this, Annie. Come on.’

I gave her a quizzical look and took the phone from her wordlessly. Alexander’s mum was on the phone? As Mum left she closed my bedroom door behind her. She hadn’t given me privacy in my whole life. It made me nervous.

I took a breath and told Fernanda I was pleased to hear from her.

‘Annie,’ she intoned, her Brazilian Portuguese vowels crashing into each other. ‘Listen. My son is a foul and ungrateful littledesgraçadoand I’m going to kill him when I see him. I raised him better than this! No! Don’t say anything! I did. But in the meantime, I’ve got an idea. Now you must let me finish before you say anything, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I agreed, and I had to admit that despite the shock of her calling, my blood began to pump a little more as she told me what she had in mind.

8

‘So basically,’ I said, gesticulating with my freshly delivered espresso martini and forcing the foamy top off the edge and onto my wrist, ‘Fernanda practically begged me to take the honeymoon. On my own. Isn’t that just the oddest thing?’

That morning my parents and Freddie had finally left the house to go back to theirs. I’d thought I couldn’t wait to be home alone and have the house to myself; to have my place bemyplace, with no busybodies swarming around. But then ten minutes after I’d waved them off with promises to stay in touch daily and Freddie whispering in my ear,I love you Annie-Doo,the silence was deafening. Being in the house alone now was different to being there and waiting for Alexander to get back from rugby training or the pub, or hearing the sound of him through the wall in the kitchen, or upstairs plodding about. Being in the house alone was sad. It was a museum to what I was grieving, and an email to the Core Four (Istillhadn’t switched my phone back on, I just couldn’t face it) was responded to as an emergency. They booked a table at a restaurant around the corner, andwe were already two cocktails deep half an hour after meeting. They’d been a bit flummoxed I hadn’t reached out sooner, but had also admitted that they knew I’d shout when I was ready. They’d been in contact with Mum by text, and she’d kept them in the loop with how I was, they’d said.

‘Nooooo!’ marvelled Jo, using a nacho as a shovel for some guacamole. She was wearing her afro hair in its natural curly state, and her only make-up was a sweep of bright red lipstick. She looked flawless – especially compared to me. I’d tried to do my make-up, but I knew it hid little of how I was really feeling. I still looked grey and sallow, despite the endorphin rushes of my daily workouts. ‘Are you going to do it?’ A blob of avocado fell to her pregnant belly, big enough to be a month away from taking maternity leave from her job as a history professor at UCL, and five weeks from her due date. She looked down to where her bump had caught it and sniggered. ‘Ooooops.’

Bri – petite, blonde and blue-eyed, a marketing director for a start-up run by one of the original employees of Google and the smartest person in any room, hands down – passed Jo a napkin, the corner of which she’d dipped in her water glass. ‘I’d totally do it,’ she said in her Lancastrian lilt, and took a glug from her gin fizz. She has mild cerebral palsy and so her muscles shake a bit, and I could see her deciding the cocktail was too full to lift without spilling, so she’d leaned forward to use the straw instead. Kezza hit her arm.

‘Don’t you dare offer to be her plus-one. If one of us is up for that it is I, the only other member of The Single Girls Support Club.’ She beamed at me and fluttered her long eyelashes as she made her case, impersonating an angel withan Essex twang, which is funny because Kezza is as tough as nails and angelic isn’t in even the top one hundred words I’d use to describe her.

Kezza has a theory that no matter how well-meaning a friend might be, there always exists a chasm between coupled-up friends and their single counterparts – whether they are single on purpose or not. She says only another woman who leaves a coffee date or meal out to go back to an empty bed truly understands certain things, and that sometimes, even knowing her friends are going home to another person leaves a heavy, peculiar sensation in her stomach. She’d had this theory since university. Even, she said, if a woman starts to loosely date a man after previously being in The Single Girls Support Club, she automatically leaves the club because she’s going home to theideaof someone, and that separates her from her single friend in a way too.

I’m in the club again,I thought,Urgh.

I glugged down the last three gob-fuls of my drink as a way to quiet intrusive and unhelpful thoughts. The girls waited for me to carry on.

‘It’s all bought and paid for. Apparently Alexander’s parents won’t get their money back if they cancel,’ I continued, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Kezza motion to the waiter to bring us another round. I pushed my empty glass to the edge of the table, shameless in my thirst. It was the Core Four who used to tease me about being too much of a ‘good girl’ to get involved in the £1 shots at The Gallery club where we spent most of our nights at uni, but even by their standards I was necking the booze ferociously tonight.

‘Try tasting the next one,’ Kezza winked. I suppressed an eye-roll. If I couldn’t get wasted now, when could I?

‘They spent so much time planning it,’ I explained,ignoring her sass, ‘that they want me to have it. Mum told them I’ve been offered to stay off work for a while—’

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