Читать книгу Love Is A Thief - Claire Garber - Страница 15

OK, so I am probably not the best person to ask because I hate my ex-husband, he is the devil incarnate, but if you want to know what I gave up for love I would say Every Single Part of My Very Self. For example, my ex’s bog-standard response if I wanted to pursue any of my own personal interests, ambitions or dreams was, and I quote,

‘How dare you spend that money on yourself? You are so selfish. We are supposed to be a family.’

He could never see that my happiness and contentment might benefit us as a couple; that an extra qualification might further my career, increasing the amount of money I could earn for us as a family; or that me feeling more complete as a person would have a knock-on positive effect on our marriage. In fact sometimes I think my possible self-development threatened him. At the mere suggestion of me spending money, on anything, he would say,

‘Well, if you’ve got enough money to do that we could spend it on—’

And then there would always be a ‘something’ for the house, the car, his hobbies. Once I gave up a place on a Reiki course so he could buy a pet snake and a games console, both apparently for our son, neither of which our son has ever played with; the Reiki course would have qualified me to teach, providing a valuable second income for our family.

Even if we were trying to arrange something nice, like booking a family holiday, most of the things I wanted to do didn’t interest him. No matter how passionate I was about a place or country he would say no. And when you are married at some point you get tired of battling, tired of fighting, tired of trying to maintain certain boundaries. So you give in, you agree, you give up. I was married from 22 years old to 30. This is the first time in my adult life I can really identify my own wants and needs and then, with a lot of hard work and planning, start to pursue the things, the longings sitting deep in my soul that are not connected to anyone but me. I’ve never been so excited about my future.

coffee shop | spitalfields market | london

Good God! I had awakened the beast. It wasn’t just that Leah had a lot to say. It was that she wanted to say it all at once, and she wanted to say it all to me. Mostly because I am one of her best friends, but also because I had put a key in a previously unused lock and the door had exploded wide open. If we were in an American action film Nicholas Cage would have been standing by that door of love-lost dreams putting Semtex on the lock, frame and anything else in the surrounding door area. Leah was finally free.

‘So I’ve been working through my list of love-stolen dreams,’ Leah said, extracting an enormous phonebook-sized document out of her handbag. ‘And I think that I’m making good progress. I’ve completed the Reiki course, as you know, and, Henry, Henry, put that down!’ Henry, Leah’s son, had her iPhone in his mouth. ‘And I absolutely loved it, box ticked.’ She ticked an imaginary box in the air. So did Henry. ‘And I’ve got some other love-stolen dreams organised. There’s a lot to get through,’ she said, patting the gigantic document that was in fact her handwritten list of love-stolen dreams. ‘But I thought it would be nice to understand why I’d let myself get to a place where I was manically dribbling into my porridge, staring at my ex-husband across the kitchen and wanting to throw Petits Filous Frubes at his head. I mean, I wasn’t always a passive-aggressive downtrodden wife.’ She was more aggressive than passive but it wasn’t the moment. ‘So I’ve decided to do a bit of alternative research, which means that if you do that you won’t have a brownie, I told you, Henry, behave or no brownie, so you are going to have to be pretty open-minded when I tell you my idea.’

‘I am not here to judge. I am here to take back what love stole.’ This has been my mantra since the early shock of Mary’s mechanical revelations.

‘Well, it was my Reiki teacher’s idea really. She thought one way to better understand the obstacles and mistakes of this life would be to understand the obstacles and mistakes of all my previous lives. Apparently there’s this thing called past life regression and it helps a lot of people make sense of themselves and the things they do.’ Henry was presented with a brownie and dropped half of it straight down his front. ‘And it’s absolutely not something I would have done while I was married, because I couldn’t bear his disapproving face, or his voice, or the way he held his cutlery, so that qualifies as a love-stolen dream, doesn’t it? In fact it was already on my list.’ She flicked to page 17 to show me where Past Life Regression had been carefully written in blue biro.

‘If I’m honest, Leah, this is not exactly what I was expecting us to be talking about today. I’d found an equestrian centre close to your house. I was going to suggest we go horse riding together. You said you stopped riding when you got married. I think it was LSD 88?’

‘It was 87.’

‘OK, number 87, but it was on the list. I thought we could go hacking. That’s what people do on horses, isn’t it? They hack? Computer hackers hack too, obviously, but they do it in a more let’s bring the government to its knees kind of way, which wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of a slow trot, through woodland. But if you want to get back love-stolen dreams from the past—I mean from the past past, that’s very cool. And thorough. Adds a whole new dimension. I like.’ I totally didn’t get it. ‘Well done!’ Phew.

‘Thank God, Kate! Because I was sure you were going to say no. Federico said you wouldn’t do it—’

‘What?’

‘I said I wanted you to do a past life regression and he said you absolutely wouldn’t do it. He said, “Past life regression? Walking, talking fashion regression, more like,” then he went on about some cardigan you bought from Deptford Market last week and how he’s had a metaphorical allergic reaction to it. Short version of this story is that he said you’d say no. He thinks he knows you so well, that Federico Cagassi.’ She typed a message into her constantly beeping iPhone while Henry fell asleep face first in his brownie. And just for the record that Federico Cagassi does know me quite well. He knows me well enough to know I’d rather put hot coals on my bare-naked tippy-toes than regress myself into the past, which is why I whispered,

‘I don’t want to do a past life regression,’ into my hair before bursting into a fit of fake coughing. Which is when things got a bit awkward …

You see I’d never given much thought to what I’d be asked to do for Love-Stolen Dreams. I hadn’t set any guidelines or parameters. I just saw myself as a champion of others, dashing about, problem-solving, drinking protein shakes and facilitating the journeys of others. But jumping through the windows of time, to right love’s past-life wrongs, well, it was like Quantum bloody Leap but for real and I suspect without the help of that middle-aged man who smoked cigars and had communication devices wired up to the present.

‘Oh …’ Leah looked at me with disc-sized brown eyes. ‘Oh, sure, of course.’ She looked at the floor and started fiddling with her hands. ‘I just thought that you wanted to help women reconnect with themselves. I thought this was a selfless quest to take back what love had stolen, not you picking and choosing a few things that you really fancy doing, like learning to trot on a bloody great horse.’ She was getting a bit shouty. Henry woke up and crawled under the table. He knew the signs. ‘Remind me again of your new mantra, Kate.’

‘I’m not here to judge,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am here to take back what love stole.’

‘That’s a great mantra,’ she said, draining her coffee mug and starting to pack up her things. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to leave. She was going to leave, without getting properly mad, and I’d feel like a rubbish, disappointing friend and it would be awkward and uncomfortable but she’d never mention it again and I’d never forget. It would become like a humungous white elephant who sat between us everywhere we went, an elephant called Awkward Stan, and Awkward Stan would always be there, an accessory to our friendship for the rest of my entire elephant-infested life. Good God, she was manipulative!!!

‘It was just a little past life regression,’ she muttered as she wiped Henry’s face with a wet wipe. ‘We could have found out what love stole from us in the past to find out why it keeps stealing stuff in the present. The answers are in the past. I just know it.’

‘I thought the answers were on this list!’ I said, shaking the heavy paper document in her face. She blinked violently as I did it and I knew I’d gone too far. There’s never any need to shake paper.

‘Kate, all I want is that if you put that iPhone in your mouth one more time I will make you eat the thing, do you hear me, Henry? I will put tomato ketchup on it, put it in a burger bun and I won’t feed you another morsel until you have eaten it. Your choice, you are in control of your own destiny. So, Kate,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘A little regression? Making sense of the future by unlocking the love-stolen secrets of our past—speaking of the past, did I tell you I bumped into Peter Parker the other day? When did he get back?’

‘What do you mean you bumped into Peter Parker? Where was he? What was he doing? Did you speak to him? What was he wearing? Did he speak to you? Did he smell nice? How did he seem?’

‘He seemed fine. To be honest he spent the entire time explaining to Henry how his juice box would eventually end up as a biodegradable roof tile, which neither of us really understood, well, especially not Henry as he can’t count past five. Think about the regression, Kate,’ she said as she headed to the door, Henry under one arm, twelve bags under the other and quite a large piece of Henry’s chocolate brownie stuck to her bum, which, in retrospect, I probably should have mentioned…

request | regress myself into the past