Page 1 of The Notecard
Part One: March
Meg
It’s a Wednesday evening and what I wanted to do tonight was sit on the sofa with a bottle of wine, a takeaway, and watch Grey’s Anatomy. Instead I have Mum giving me the gory details of her sex life and telling us about the young man she’s met online. To put this into perspective, my mother is fifty-two and Jason (online man) is thirty-nine. He’s admittedly ten years older than me, but for a fifty-two-year-old woman (who has only been separated from Dad for a few months) he is young. Poor old Dad is fifty-four and shamelessly wears horrible cardigans like they’re the most fashionable thing in the world.
‘I feel like I have a whole new lease of life,’ says Mum. ‘Did you know you can go online, swipe right, then that night you could be having sex? If I was your age, Meg, I’d be out with a different fella every night. Black, brown, yellow…’
‘I’m not sure you can say yellow, actually,’ says Laura, intently flicking through a wedding magazine.
‘Whatever,’ says Mum. ‘You girls have no idea how lucky you are. You know your father is the only man I’ve ever slept with. The same penis my whole life!’
Now probably isn’t the time to mention that I’ve only had one sexual partner since James. I’ve never liked or been great at one-night stands. I haven’t had many. Number one and I was eighteen, drunk, and in a club called Inferno (not as hot or as cool as the name suggests). I barely remember anything about it. His name was Greg, he was tall, it was awkward in the morning and I left quickly. Number two was during Freshers Week at university. Again I was drunk (a recurring theme), he was studying philosophy, and his room in halls wasn’t far away from mine. He had long hair and I thought he was deep and meaningful. He cried when he came, and I was sick in the ensuite soon after. I spent the rest of the year avoiding him. Number three was two months ago and the worst one yet. I was drunk enough to let my guard down, but not drunk enough that I didn’t know what I was doing. Back at my flat and he ended up crying because he couldn’t get an erection. I told him it was alright, and that it probably happened to most men, before I packed him off in an Uber (still blubbing about his lifeless penis). Not a great night for my self-confidence after everything that’s happened. I think I only did it because I wanted to feel something else other than gut-wrenching sadness. My one-night stand record stands at three and two of those ended up with the man in tears.
Mum takes a swig of her wine and then fills up her glass from the bottle. Mum has always been ‘that sort of mum’. Never the cake baking, pick you up from the school gates with a smile and a kiss dressed appropriately mum. She wasn’t Gail Clifford’s mum. Year Eleven and Gail Clifford was ‘The Girl’. Captain of the netball team, mountainous breasts, and a wonderful mum. Her mum made delicious cakes, worked full time at a solicitors, always looked immaculate, and we thought Gail was just about perfect. I was somewhat pleased to recently learn that she dropped out of university, got pregnant, and is now a single mum living in a council flat in Croydon. I’m not saying that because of her mum or her mountainous breasts, but because she spent four years at secondary school calling me ‘boy tits’ because I didn’t have boobs until I was fifteen, and even then they were nothing to write home about. Push-up bras were literally a game changer for me.
I get up and walk into the kitchen because I sense Laura is going to start talking about her wedding again. She’s getting married to Simon in August, and it’s all she can and wants to talk about. It’s six months away and I’m already bored with it. I think weddings are quite a selfish pursuit. Just because she’s met someone and wants to spend the rest of her life with him, I have to have an opinion on what shade of white her dress should be, what I think about flowers and place settings. I have to discuss whether a string quartet is too last century, and what they should have is a folk band because one of Simon’s old school friends is in a folk band (a bit Mumford & Sonsey) and they might be perfect. I’m not being mean or jealous (definitely not jealous), but it’s her big day and yet she expects me to care about it as much as she does. Breaking news, Laura: I don’t. That makes me sound harsh, but if you knew my sister you’d understand. We love each other. We’d do anything for each other (within reason). I want her to be happy, and I’m almost certain she feels the same about me. But we also have a sibling rivalry that makes us want the other one to be that little bit less happy than us. Unfortunately the past year and she’s been considerably happier than me. She got her dream job in television, she’s getting married, and they have a lovely flat in Clapham. Two bedrooms, original wooden floors, modern kitchen, and a small garden. She’s only twenty-six, and yet she has her shit together. It’s so together it’s forming into larger balls of shit. She has all the shit, while I feel like I’m probably just a bit constipated.
I shouldn’t say that. I love my job. I work for a marketing agency in Clerkenwell. I work in brand management. There’s a lot of social media based campaigns and most of the people I work with are brilliant. Lots of creative design orientated people. It’s quite a young company too. At twenty-nine, I’m one of the older (wiser?) heads. It was my first job straight out of the university, and although it isn’t my dream position, I’m happy there. It isn’t work that’s the problem, it’s everything else. More specifically, it’s James.
I walk into our small kitchen where Keri is standing by the side looking at a cookbook, a puzzled expression screwed across her face. Keri is my flatmate and best friend. She is an extraordinary human being, who is both completely useless at life and incredible all at the same time. I can explain this conundrum with one simple story. She’s unemployed, having lost her last job because she decided to save a pigeon’s life. She found the pigeon injured and almost dead outside of her place of work. Rather than leave the pigeon to die alone, she took it into work, and did her best to give it the best life she could at her desk. The pigeon was soon discovered, and when Keri’s manager asked her to take the pigeon outside, Keri said she couldn’t because it was dying. Keri was swiftly asked to leave (along with the now dead pigeon). She buried the pigeon in our local park. We had a ceremony with music (Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You), Keri cried and read out a poem. ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone...’ Four Weddings And A Funeral is her favourite film.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Baking a cake,’ says Keri.
Keri doesn’t bake. I have never seen her bake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her use the oven.
‘I got this book for Christmas. I was thinking that I’ve never made a cake before, so here I am. Although I just realised we don’t have any scales and I need scales to measure things. I think it will be alright though. Do you think it will be alright?’
‘Without scales?’ I say, before I take a sip of my wine. ‘I’m no expert, but I think you need to be quite precise when baking.’
‘Yeah, I mean, sure, but I can just guess though, right? It’s just a cake,’ says Keri, who has never even baked a potato before. She looks at me and I smile.
‘I’m sure it will be fine.’
A short pause.
‘I’m baking the cake for you, actually,’ says Keri, a slight tension in her voice. ‘I know what today is. What today would have been, and that you’re probably thinking about it. About him. So I thought to myself that you should have a cake. A single ladies cake.’
I smile at Keri. I almost start crying because it’s such a lovely thought. None of my family has mentioned it. I don’t know whether they even know what today would have been for us. For me. It’s been on my mind all day. At work. Now. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. Him. Us. What could have been. It’s why talking about Laura’s wedding is the last thing I want to be doing today. But I’m trying to put a brave face on it. Battle on. Mum’s more concerned with her Tinder account, Laura with choosing a wedding dress, but Keri is making me a cake. A single ladies cake.
‘The recipe says vegan chocolate cake. I know we’re not vegan, but I just thought that when it says to put something in that’s vegan, I’ll just put in the same thing but not vegan,’ says Keri. ‘A non-vegan vegan chocolate cake.’
‘Megs. We need you. Wedding stuff. Come on,’ shouts Laura from the living room like an overzealous P.E. teacher. She claps her hands together quickly.
I take a deep breath before I walk back into the living room. The living room of our small flat in Kentish Town. I love our flat. It’s not huge, but it’s ours. I brought over some of the nicer things from my old flat. The rug in the living room, the dining table, the desk, most of the plants, and the comfy chair. This flat means so much to me because it’s where I came when my life shattered into a million pieces. Luckily Keri’s flatmate, Aisling, was moving out at the end of the month. It meant a few awkward nights back at the flat. James agreed to move out until I was gone. Now Keri’s making me a vegan chocolate cake that isn’t vegan, and she can’t weigh anything, but it will be alright. The same words she said to me when I turned up crying on her doorstep that night. It will be alright.
I walk back into the living room and sit down next to Laura. She has a stack of wedding magazines for us to go through. We have to find her the perfect wedding dress. It’s like a fun little game. The wedding game! It’s like when we were little and would attempt a board game together. Laura would win at any cost because that’s Laura. Winning is everything to her. Mum wouldn’t care less about who won or who lost because it was only a silly game and she’d be painting her nails anyway. Dad would play if he was home, but he was often at work. I’d let Laura win most of the time because it was easier than having to deal with the tears and the arguments it would cause if she didn’t. This feels the same. She’s winning again and I’m helping her. Mum is here but more concerned with her own life and Dad is probably at work. It’s the thing about growing up. Sometimes it feels like everything has changed, and that nothing will ever be the same again, but then in moments it feels like nothing has really changed at all.
Nick
Mum’s coming over for dinner. I haven’t seen her in two weeks because she’s been away visiting someone in Norfolk. I didn’t know she knew anyone in Norfolk. A distant relative, apparently. I have to be careful with dinners when I’m working the night shift. I’m a junior doctor. A specialty registrar in Accident and Emergency to give you my full title. My hours change all the time. At the moment I’m on a run of nights, which is awful, but it’s all part of the job. Twelve hours of patients that have been involved in car crashes, fallen off ladders trying to screw in light bulbs, got in fights at closing time, or inserted various objects into their bottoms to pleasure themselves only to discover the object has disappeared inside their anus and they can’t retrieve it. You’d be surprised how many of them we get. People with instant coffee jars stuck up their bottoms, worried the coffee might escape, and like a cosmopolitan drug mule, they’ll end up highly caffeinated. That’s one Nescafe moment you never want to have.
Before Mum comes, I sneak outside for a cigarette. I know, the irony. I’m a doctor and I’m smoking. It will probably kill me, but at the moment it feels like not smoking might do a better job.
I stand outside the front of the house and light up a cigarette. I live in Kentish Town, having just moved from south London a few weeks ago. Being a junior doctor is essentially a nomadic lifestyle. From what I can gather, there’s an old lady on the ground floor. Her name’s Doris, but she goes by Dotty. She appeared at my door two days after I moved in and introduced herself with a packet of Tesco Finest Shortbread Fingers. She was delighted I was a doctor, so in her words, ‘You’ll know what to do when I’m dying’. Upstairs is a man, late fifties, beard, glasses, doesn’t seem to do anything, and he goes for a walk at the same time each afternoon. He’s called Michael Byron. At least that’s what his mail says. Across the hallway are two girls. I’ve only seen one of them. She has brown hair and is quite tall. She smiled at me. I smiled back. I haven’t seen the other one. I finish my cigarette and head back inside. I eat a mint to mask the smell of tobacco, which I know doesn’t work, but I do it anyway. Mum’s not a fan of smoking.
‘Bloody traffic,’ says Mum, walking into my flat ten minutes later.
