Читать книгу Love, and Other Things to Live For - Louise Leverett - Страница 7

Chapter One – The Curse of a Burning Flame

I awoke to the sound of a clock.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

Opening my eyes to the beginnings of a new day.

I don’t smoke, barely drink, have never experienced casual sex and so this was the tasting menu of new discoveries. I had decided to dip my toe in the final waters of youth as an almost goodbye to my carefree years, complete with late nights and a series of events that had caused my heart to pound and my head to spin. What began with a plethora of shots and inappropriate dancing with a man I barely knew but had worked with my friend, so not a total stranger; perhaps emotionally but certainly not geographically, had now ended with the realisation that the answer to my predicament did not lie at the bottom of a bottle. I had persuaded myself I would see him again, clinging onto the slim thread that last night meant something. But it didn’t. And to be totally honest, lashing out at the world as redemption for a broken heart just wasn’t as fun as I had imagined it would be.

I was getting over someone. Charlie. Perhaps not going the right way about it but trying all the same. And although my appearance suggested I was carefree, inside I was hurting. Slowly seeping through the cracks of my show, my life, was the added complication of a career low. On a whim that was no longer whimsical, I had left university and a path to study law, exchanging it for the butterflies-in-your-tummy notion that you should chase what sets your heart on fire. I’d lit the match only for it to fizzle into charcoal once the reality hit that photography jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by. My dreams had been dowsed cold by stress and financial burden. And now, adding the salt to my wounds, having made the somewhat optimistic decision to move in with a man I’d just met and barely knew, I was back in my old bedroom and back in the flat I’d shared for years with my best friend, Amber. Despite many a raised eyebrow, I’d ridden the wave of infatuation all the way to the shores of his flat overlooking the Thames and now I’d slunk back, just three months later, humiliated and alone.

As I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for my head to stop spinning, sipping on a glass of stagnant water filled with stale, iridescent bubbles, images from the previous night cascaded through my mind. There was wine, spirits, more wine… more spirits… and dancing. Lots of dancing. Crazy moves, big moves, bold moves, total abandonment of body, mind and self-control. Dancing with friends, dancing alone, dancing with the man now lying next to me. I slowly massaged my brow in a belated attempt to melt the thought away.

Looking over at him, the semi-stranger sleeping beside me, I slowly shuffled my way out of the bed and across the corridor to the bathroom. I glanced in the mirror at my reflection: tousled hair with last night’s make-up, a squiggly smear of mascara underlining each eye like a spelling mistake. If this was being young and free it certainly wasn’t as enjoyable as my friends had suggested. It was all their fault, obviously.

I crouched above the strange, cold toilet pan, the back of my thighs skimming the bowl, my mouth stinging as if stripped by a razor blade. I wasn’t about to play the blame game. It was all my own choice, a mess that I had gotten myself into in a moment of panic – a searing fear that I might be getting left behind. But falling behind whom? Myself? As I spun the empty cardboard toilet roll hoping to magic a stream of paper, it seemed as if I’d forgotten to learn the rules to a game that I was now, apparently, an expert at playing.

It was late December, and waking up was beginning to hurt. I made my way across the pavement, halfway between streetlights and sunlight, and turned onto the street that was familiar. I started the day carrying make-up in my handbag, using a public toilet as my vanity: a wanderer, a nomad in between places. And that’s exactly where I was, in between places.

I longed for my early twenties: the days of the invincible and raw misconception of youth. It was all fun and games back then. If you don’t invest fully then no one gets hurt. But unfortunately, my recent experience with one particular man – the only man, in fact – had become a harsh lesson that I was wrong. We’d met, feelings were felt and it was now over. I’d been hurt.

In my mind the cause of these relationship problems is that men and women don’t understand one another; that, as the well-known book says, we literally are on different planets when it comes to matters of the heart and relationships. Of course, what transpired, in human form, was a cosmic connection that no amount of textbook knowledge could account for. My friend Sean assures me that when it comes to the formidable topic of that four-letter word beginning with ‘l’ ending with ‘e’, both on the outskirts of ‘o’ and ‘v’, there is no distinct correlation between the sexes. It’s just quite hard, for all of us.

We live in the digital age of a steady stream of information right there on our computer screens, influencing our relationship to commerce, the food we eat and now, even our love lives. We can flick through the online catalogue of human faces, swiping left or right depending whether we like what we see, in exactly the same way our grandmothers picked out a cut of meat at the butcher’s. It’s safe, sterile even, but not quite real. Before we’ve even met them we know a person’s age, occupation, habits, likes, dislikes – basically all the information our ancestors would have found out across a table in the romantic haze of candlelight and that second bottle of wine. We look to our ancestors with a smug confidence that we know better. We live safe in the knowledge that while the notches on the bedpost rack up, no one ever has to get bored with each other.

But through the bright lights and heavy laughter of a fun night out, a little voice of truth inside knew this wasn’t for me. I couldn’t even handle a man not texting me back, never mind flicking past my face amidst the scores of other women, ten or even twenty at a time. In this twenty-first-century world, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I have remained tied to the notion of monogamy, or old-fashioned love, as it’s now known. A stagnant belief that I should probably keep to myself, not exactly like the love we see in the movies but in my heart of hearts, not far off either. I bet Tom Hanks didn’t have to ask Meg Ryan if she was still seeing other people as they made their way down from the top of the Empire State Building.

For both sexes, it’s certainly been a transition. Although every generation will say they were witness to an epic change in cultural climate – the Thirties’ prohibition, the world war of the Forties, the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies – I still maintain that the biggest change, both in the cultural and social climate, was the dawn of the digital age. The invention of the Internet brought along with it a speed of living beyond anybody’s imagination. We have the ability to remain in touch with lost friends, lost colleagues… even past loves. But I can’t help but think that there are some people who were just meant to be left behind.

As we look around amidst the sea of fast culture, our minds and hearts are expected to keep up with an ever-changing, ever-evolving landscape. Fast love turns to fast disappointment – a speedy turnover in a global economy piling pressure on those struggling to keep up. Me being one of them. We’ve lost the element of fear that drives us to do the unimaginable, the senseless. We must focus on those spectacular and rare moments when our hearts overrule our heads and swiping a screen is revealed to be just that, a perfunctory movement completely separate from the glimmer of excitement that the sound of a voice brings or the way the heart beats when a certain person is near.

Instead, we keep ourselves at a distance through computer screens, safe inside the trenches, afraid to advance towards enemy lines. But within this battle of dating warfare it is sometimes hard to work out who the real winners even are. It certainly wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t now.

And where else do we set this tale of the digital age but in the vast, diverse, empowering city of London. She is the modern-day metropolis inhabiting a wilderness of magic, mystery and intrigue. To me, London is the only permanent fixture within the landscape of movement, bright lights and imagination, a heady mix of corporate business and artistic dreaming: an odyssey of restaurants, bars and nightlife and people… oh so many people, all collectively inhabiting as a bottleneck of strangers, roommates, bedmates and friends. It is the man-made land where the lonely find company and the unemployed find jobs amidst part-time renters and full-time problems.

And it isn’t so bad: except the overcrowding, the pollution and the house prices because here, anything is possible, and as much as I wanted to stay under the duvet and come out once the storm had passed, I knew that I had no other option but to set sail. I had a career to find, a love to forget and a future to behold.

So as I stand on the precipice of a year so unpredicted, I’m going to ask a small question to the universe and see what I get offered back: why do I feel so unshakeably restless and what will inevitably be enough? And if, as I anticipate, the road gets a little bumpy, my armour will come in the form of my friends. The collection of people whom you choose to ride the wave with: the truth-tellers, the heart-menders, my people to live for.

I met Amber at an after-hours course on corporate law. I was failing my second term quite badly by then and had embarked on some extra-curricular activity in a desperate attempt to boost both my grades and my passion for the subject. Amongst the rows and rows of twenty-year-olds in suits, Amber sat perched on a stool diligently scribbling into a hot pink notebook. She smiled and waved me over.

‘Weren’t you here last week?’ she said. ‘Bit dry, wasn’t it…’

‘A bit,’ I said, looking around at the huddles of people talking confidently about shareholder’s rights.

‘I’ve got a party later – correction – I’m working at a party later, it’s this launch for a cosmetics line. They’re going to use my face as a guinea pig. Fancy it?’

She asked me in a way that left me feeling as if I had no option.

‘There’s a free bar?’

And that wasn’t a question.

‘Sure, sounds good,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Great. I’ll see you outside at nine.’

I learned on the way to the party that her name was Amber. She was funny and sharply clever – the type of clever that scared you into not talking, knowing you’d only come off worse in a discussion. Since she couldn’t afford law school, she’d been forced to undertake night school as a sideline to her modelling – a part-time arrangement that wasn’t going to be forever, she said.

I followed her black ponytail through the crowds and soon found myself sandwiched between the trays of complimentary champagne and a group of shoppers eagerly awaiting the tutorial. I watched Amber, seated on a high stool, her long black hair swept clean off her face, as the make-up artist demonstrated contouring for the less attractive people who believed they needed far more make-up than she did. To my surprise they actually looked interested. I still didn’t know who she was, but I’d been able to find a seat next to a real palm tree, shipped in specially for the launch, and I was already three glasses down of the free champers. Gradually, our eyes kept meeting in the midst of face priming and bronzer application and a shared look of disdain proved instantly that we could be friends.

‘Where in God’s name did I put my phone?’ she yelled once the crowds had dispersed, demonstrating the feistiness that she would inevitably need to become a lawyer. As we both began lifting coats and scarfs she emptied out her handbag onto the counter, sorting through the contents, with strips of white tissue paper still clipped in her hair.

‘I think it’s next to your coat.’ I nodded as I downed the rest of my champagne.

‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling it free. ‘I’m supposed to be at another night class but skipped it to be here. Do you think that’s bad? They offered me fifty quid an hour so I couldn’t say no, really.’

She smiled at me, a smile so full and disarming that it is rarely seen between two women – especially in a big city.

‘What are you studying?’ I asked, looking at her large black leather bag, bulging with a ring binder and textbooks.

‘I want to work in e-commerce,’ she said, pulling out a hair tie and wrapping it around her wrist. ‘It’s retail, essentially, but covering trade laws. Apparently in five years we’ll only be buying online and since I won’t be able to model forever I thought I might need a Plan B before my face sags. Do you smoke?’

I shook my head.

‘Shame. I like your bag,’ she said, referring to my pink rucksack, spinning the conversation on its head.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I like your shoes.’

Since that night, we’ve both stuck around. It’s not that she’s a good friend per se, it’s that we’ve become a firm fixture in each other’s lives. First we created memories and then memories created a history and with that came the foundations of a friendship. Solid but low maintenance.

I wish I had her brains. I think she even surprises herself with her razor-sharp intelligence at times. She’s a pro-choice, pro-women ball-buster, blazing the path, charging ahead so that the less confident ones, like me, can trot along behind. She’s the one who will convince you that just one more tequila shot won’t kill you, knowing that she’ll also be there to hold your hair back when you’re hanging over the toilet bowl slowly coming to the realisation that it might. For the record: she can hold her drink, I can’t. She is also the friend who will read every text he ever sent you and piece together the scenario like the Robin to your Batman, sharing the burden so you feel like less of a sociopath. She can spot a liar from forty paces, she’ll defend you but never judges, and beneath the attractive exterior she is actually pretty tough – a lot tougher than me – and life is a little less scary knowing she is on my side.

Sean is a different kettle of fish: a jester in a cashmere cardigan. A New Yorker living in London who I’d met at a farmer’s market while embarking on a celebrity-endorsed, high-intensity juice detox. We decided that we would go for sober dinners together and talk about sensible topics like our careers and world affairs. The detox lasted one month, our friendship somewhat longer. On the inside, half an inch beneath the funny, confident exterior, lies a quiet determination, an unyielding passion which leads him to still be in the design studio at eleven thirty, long after his team have gone home. He won’t think twice about spending a month’s rent on a jumper and will somehow convince you to do the same. He is the friend who will sit and listen to your problems without so much as mentioning his own: there’s a resilient enamel that coats a sensitive soul, a soul you have to keep your eye on because deep down you know he isn’t keeping an eye on himself. For years he dated Paul, a man almost twice his age, who would do spontaneously romantic things, like arrange a weekend for two in Europe for a birthday celebration. I remember these fine details, as I was the one roped into hiking up Regent Street looking for a pair of brown-leather ankle boots specifically for the occasion.

‘I never thought I’d be jealous of my best friend, his older lover and a pair of gloriously soft ankle boots,’ I said, pressing my hand firmly inside one. Far from the perfect audience, I watched him walk up and down the carpeted floor of Russell and Bromley one Saturday afternoon as he looked at me for encouragement.

‘Just take them,’ I said, in desperation, perched on the seats designated for customers to try on the shop’s wares, ‘and then you can take me for a cocktail.’

There’s one memory that will last beyond the drunken nights, the cinema trips, the endless stream of gossiping phone calls – the time I got a different kind of phone call one cold, rainy night in November. It was 2.30 a.m. and I was fast asleep when my phone rang loudly on the bedside table. Seeing it was Sean I assumed he’d been partying and had locked himself out again and needed a place to stay. I almost ignored it.

‘What do you want, Sean?’ I snapped. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

There was a silence. I could hear talking in the background as my eyes slowly opened and I came to my senses.

‘Sean, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’

‘It’s Paul,’ I heard, quietly but clearly. ‘He’s been in an accident. I’m at the hospital.’

Thirty minutes later I walked down the long, squeaky corridor that seemed endless and sterile. I turned into the waiting room and saw Sean seated wearing a pale blue jumper and jeans. The sort of outfit you put on in a hurry, I thought to myself. I crouched down and put my arm on his back. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.

He lifted his head, his face reddened and swollen from the tears. ‘He was driving back from work and a lorry clipped the wheel arch. You know how fast he drives.’

I sat there and held him until sunrise.

Paul’s funeral was on a sunny Tuesday morning. It was a small affair, there were no hymns and two readings, and it was over by midday.

Last but not least is Marlowe: graceful swan, mother earth incarnate, encyclopaedia of heaven-sent advice from the sane and grown-up world. She is perfect and I am a mess. We’d met as teenagers – two cocky, know-it-all dreamers, whose backsides were about to be spanked by life right into next Tuesday. While I’d continued this behaviour well beyond its sell-by date, she’d been forced to grow up far quicker than the rest of us. Marlowe is a class act who is seemingly unshakable navigating obstacles that would leave others screaming into their pillow. There’s an apologetic air about her, as with those who have spent their life subject to the jealousy of their peers. It’s as if they need to make it up to those around them for not being clumsy, or slightly chubby or keeping a coat on when they’ve spilled soup down their jumper. Or for being born into success, for that matter. Marlowe is constantly under the watch of her parents who seem to guide the trajectory of her life from the conservatory of their conservative city townhouse. Her dad was a famous journalist and now deep into writing his memoirs, and her mum was an English socialite, whose glamour and impeccable sense of style has been retained well into her sixties.

Marlowe was always going to succeed in whichever field she chose to pursue so you can imagine our surprise when things took a turn for the unexpected, a few years ago, one summer afternoon in July. It was the hottest day of the year and London had quite literally come to a standstill. The smell of Hendrick’s gin filled the air, and for the first time in a long while a drought had threatened to take hold across Britain.

We’d been invited to one of her parents’ infamous barbecues. They owned a townhouse in West London and for one afternoon a year it became home to the who’s who of the slightly elder, more intellectual social scene. At that time, we used these occasions as an opportunity to stock up on free booze before going to a club later that night, but this time things unfolded rather differently. I arrived late, as usual, and expected Marlowe to be in the garden barefoot in jeans amidst a sea of Panama hats and beige summer suits, but this time she was nowhere to be seen. I made my way through the bodies cluttering the house, loud in idle chitchat, and arrived at the bottom of the stairs where I pulled out my phone to text her. As I began to type, I looked up towards the top of the dark staircase to see her seated in a crisp white T-shirt and denim skirt, a distinct shine on her bare shins gleaming through the shadows.

‘Jess, up here,’ she said, signalling me into the bathroom.

I followed her across the marble tiled floor and there it was, lying on the sink, lodged sideways between the hot and cold taps, the end of the future as we knew it and a building block of a dilemma for Marlowe. A pregnancy test that read positive.

‘Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Is it yours?’

‘Of course it’s mine,’ she snapped, grabbing it to shake it.

‘I don’t think shaking it is going to help, Mars.’

She sat down gently on the bathroom floor and drew her legs towards her. I took hold of the test to double-check its result and took a deep breath to replace the ones I’d since lost. She looked up at me with glassy eyes.

‘What am I going to do?’ she said.

And what do you say to the perfect girl, the girl who irons her underwear, who wears white and doesn’t spill, the girl now pregnant and crying. I didn’t say anything. Instead I just sat down on the cold floor tiles next to her.

‘I can’t have a baby, Jess. I’m twenty-three years old,’ she whispered.

I noticed her hands were trembling, her chipped orange nail polish rubbing against her two front teeth. Girls like Marlowe weren’t supposed to get pregnant. She was supposed to spend her days practising law, not the alphabet. I squeezed her warm hand that was still damp from tears. At that point there was a knock at the door, one of the other partygoers, oblivious and persistent, who clearly needed use of the bathroom.

‘Just a minute, please,’ I shouted politely.

There was a brief pause before they knocked again.

‘In a fucking minute!’ Marlowe shouted through her tears.

Together we sat side by side on the cold, tiled floor, knowing that in just one afternoon, everything had changed.

In the modern world, there are many options open to women in the wake of an unplanned pregnancy but for Marlowe it seemed the most preferable answer would be marriage. The carefully arranged wedding was six months later and after much debate, they had promised as a family that she would have the baby first and start her career later. But as with most things in life, it didn’t really work out that way. Now George was travelling all over the world while Marlowe stays at home. That little blue line we had once gathered around with baited breath is now called Elsa.

Before Marlowe’s parents had led her down the road of commitment and common decency, she was a permanent fixture on our nights out. She drank like a trooper, never danced but always turned up in an eclectic mix of designer and vintage clothes, accompanied by a desperate claim that she had purchased them all in the sale. We still see her, usually for relationship or career advice or when we need a sensible opinion and a healthy meal. And despite her newfound love of the quiet life she still comes out to the big celebrations: birthdays, new jobs, new hairstyles. To put it bluntly, Marlowe is the moral lighthouse in our slightly less sophisticated world. When she announced she was getting married I cried tears of joy, Amber cried tears of sadness and Sean began sketching her wedding dress.

And finally to me, a girl who loves Mexican food and bowling and low-budget horror films, gently flying solo into the abyss: no brothers, no sisters, two parents who years ago deemed it better to carry on life apart, on separate continents in separate time zones with separate hearts. Perhaps I’m only now realising as I stand here, not quite young and not quite old, that their situation might not have been an easy one. That a family doesn’t necessarily work better together.

I’ve learned that after a while, it can get pretty tricky to always make the right decisions, to do what everyone else expects of you and to make people happy. We discard the days, the weeks, the months, the years on the journey towards the destination as somewhat unimportant compared to the magical days of a future where we aim to one day be. But they will suddenly merge together and we will realise that this day, this week, this month, this year, these little, insignificant things culminate to form our lives, all joined together, like a map of the stars but instead right here on earth: a thousand lives crisscrossing, at times colliding. But the secret is not to avoid the collision. If the horizon blurs and the plans fade, just think of the places travelled, the things seen and the strangers now known as friends: it all happened because you once made what you had thought to have been a mistake.