‘I can almost understand if you go to Vegas – it’s a stag. You might have told me before now … but to go to a beach with a couple, it’s too weird …’
‘Please. I don’t want tonight ruined, it’s their anniversary.’
‘I’m not going to ruin their bloody anniversary. We’ll talk about it in the car and then it’s done. Vegas, I can just about accept, but the Cayman Islands …’
‘Okay, okay, I get it, Sophie, Vegas. Enough. We’ll go away in February.’
Since James revealed he’s going off to Vegas, my mind has been on paranoia overdrive. When he popped out of my flat on Sunday morning to buy the papers I convinced myself he was never coming back. The sense of relief I felt when I heard my front door open made me sick with shame. I have become obsessed with the way he moves his fingers and thumb on his right hand whenever he talks about his trips to Moscow.
Of course I cannot live like this and so I have tried to explain to my brain that thoughts of abandonment will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focus on the negative and bad things will happen. I tell myself ‘everything’s better than fine’ a dozen times a day. But as much as I may have pulled the wool over my mind, it seems I cannot trick my body. The collection of anxiety stones that I carry inside me has grown into a Japanese rock garden in my chest.
It is now a week later and we’re having a pizza at The Lansdowne, James’s local pub.
‘Have you even looked up flight availability for Vegas?’ James is such a last-minute person at times. Plus he’s rich – he can afford to book flights late.
‘There’s loads of space, it’s fine.’
‘Is it still hot at this time of year?’
‘It’ll be mild, mid-60s?’
‘Why don’t you book it?’
‘It’ll be fine. Let’s just enjoy tonight.’
Two days later, on the 23rd, we’re in Selfridges buying last minute presents. The sale has started early and the store is rammed with bargain hunters demonstrating a marked lack of Christmas spirit. Earlier, I saw two grown women literally come to blows over the last Eve Lom travel set. The handbag hall is like a zoo; leopard print totes, pony-skin satchels and python clutches expose the fact that the human is the scariest animal of all. Up on second, women’s shoes must be carnage.
We’ve retreated down to the basement. I’m scanning the bookshelves trying to remember which football autobiography Laura told me to buy for Dave. James is flicking through an oversized coffee table book with black and white photos of models in various states of undress.
‘I don’t even know what day you’re leaving,’ I say, turning to James who is slowly turning the pages – too slowly for my liking. ‘When did you say the flight to Vegas was?’
He freezes. ‘Oh. Yeah. There’s a flight to Vegas out of Heathrow at 10am on the 25th.’
‘The 25th.’
He nods, then quickly closes the book and moves behind a pillar, towards a table of bestsellers.
‘The 25th of December,’ I say, hurrying to catch him up.
He looks guilty and grabs the nearest book to hand – the
latest Katie Price – and starts studiously reading the blurb on the back.
‘You’re unbelievable,’ I say, dumping my shopping bags on the floor and waiting for him to put the book down. Ten long seconds later he is still hiding behind the pink and white cover, pretending to read, and I’m forced to snatch it out of his hands.
He sighs. ‘If I’m going to Vegas I really want to be there with the boys. They’re going on the 25th …’
‘You can say it, you know, you can say ‘I AM FLYING ON
CHRISTMAS DAY
AND I WILL BE AWAY
FOR CHRISTMAS DAY AND NEW YEAR’S EVE.
’
‘What? You said you don’t even like New Year’s Eve,’ he says.
‘I don’t like New Year’s Eve, that’s not the point. You didn’t tell me you were flying so soon. I thought I’d see you on Boxing Day, or on Christmas Day in the evening.’
‘You’re going to Laura’s.’
‘For lunch. But I’ll be home later. It’s Christmas Day.’
‘You’re Jewish, Soph,’ he says,
‘I still do Christmas,’ I say. ‘You said you were going away for
New Year’s
.’
‘I am,’ he says, ‘it’s only a few days difference. We’ll go away in February, somewhere nice and sunny.’ He picks up
my shopping and gestures for us to head towards the escalator.
Oh, fuck it. He’s going to do what he wants. You might as well be gracious. You’ll have another forty Christmases together.
‘Fine. Fine,’ I say, shaking my head and following him out through the crowds.
It’s not that big a deal.
It’s only a few days difference.
We’ll go away in February. Somewhere nice and sunny.
On Christmas Eve, just before midnight, James tells me he’s flying to the Cayman Islands the following morning, without me.
For the second time in this relationship I feel like he’s punched me full on in the guts.
He’s decided against Vegas. Though there is indeed a 10am flight to Vegas on the 25th. And the weather is indeed mild – mid-60s. But he’d been booked on the 2pm flight to the Cayman Islands a week before we’d even had that conversation.
Oh, he wasn’t lying; apparently I was asking the wrong question.
He wants some quiet time away.
I point out that he’s staying with a married couple and their three screaming kids.
Turns out he wants some quiet time away from me.
I am silent for five minutes, during which time I start to piece together what has actually been going on in this relationship. James stares at me with scared eyes. I can’t work out if he’d rather I was devastated or furious.
‘Is this still about that ridiculous thing from before?’
He nods.
‘This is about my weight?’
He doesn’t react.
‘I’m not fucking fat, James.’
‘It’s something to do with your weight …’
He’s confused.
He ‘doesn’t know if he loves me enough’ to marry me.
Here’s a little clue: he doesn’t.
Merry Christmas.
1.
noun
– a baked pudding consisting of a crumbly mixture over stewed fruit
2.
verb
– to fall into tiny fragments, disintegrate
Boxing Day.
My alarm goes off at 5am. 5am?
For a brief moment, I’m so confused with tiredness I forget I’m ‘in a bad place’.
Then I spy the untouched Christmas dinner on my bedside table that Laura insisted on bringing round yesterday, while I lay here in shock.
With instant despair I remember everything, including the fact that I’m due in a
really
bad place within the hour: Fletchers, Kilburn High Road.
Today is ‘Patronise The Shopfloor Workers Day’; those of us from Head Office who couldn’t think of an excuse quickly enough spend eight whole hours ‘mucking in’ at our local store, pretending to be at one with the shelf stackers. Outside it is snowing, but the automatic doors
stay open due to the flurry of customers coming to take advantage of our exciting Boxing Day bargains: selected turkey pâtés are now half-price.
I end up in Wet Fish. No one told me to bring gloves, so my fingers are like frozen crab sticks, hoisting leaky pouches of protein from a stack of crates. I feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for these mackerel too – bet their Christmas wasn’t great either.
Five hours into my shift and I’m finally starting to enjoy myself. My hands no longer reek of fish residue. I’ve finished stacking, and am now price checking with a cool gun that picks up barcodes from 20 feet. Joyce on Ambient is telling me about her ex who left her when she was eight months pregnant, for a girl with a tattoo of Robbie Williams on her breast.
‘So, why did you split up with this nob-head then?’
I pause my gun over the Sugar-Free Santa Lollipops. ‘I’m not sure we’ve actually split up …’ Her eyebrows rise.
A woman with too many layers in her hair and a Regional Manager badge reading ‘K Dobbs’, swoops on us from the Bakery section. ‘What are you doing?’ she says to me.
‘Price checking.’
‘You are who?’ she says, so close now I can smell last night’s sherry binge.
‘Sophie Klein. Head Office.’
‘I didn’t ask where you work. You’re doing that all wrong. Chilled first, then Frozen.’
‘Denise in the office said start here …’
Her gaze drifts over my shoulder towards biscuits. ‘Chilled, Frozen.’
The ‘normal’ me would never let a K Dobbs bother me. But today I’m very far from normal. I go to the loo thinking I’ll splash my face and come back in a moment. Forty minutes later, I’m still sitting on the cubicle floor trying to stop sobbing. My eye make-up tracks down my cheeks. There’s no loo roll so I’ve been forced to blow my nose on my own t-shirt: classy.
And now I have acute pains in my lower gut which, if last night’s bathroom performance is anything to go by means I have a Very Big Problem. And a dilemma. What to use as makeshift toilet paper: my yellow Fletchers fleece or my t-shirt? I’m screwed either way. There’s no bin in here. How am I going to dispose of either without attracting attention and then sudden death by humiliation?
If I run really, really fast can I make it the mile back home in the next three minutes?
Stick around. It gets a lot worse.
I need to leave town.
Don’t worry, not because I shat myself at work. I didn’t, though I might as well have. In the end K Dobbs came to hunt me down and found me on the loo, knickers round my ankles, sobbing. I begged her to fetch Joyce. Joyce came in,
bless her, and went back to the shop floor to buy me some bog roll (they only had the Jumbo 12 pack with Rudolphs on, I must remember to pop in and give her the cash back).
Turns out K Dobbs is no stranger to heartache either. She, Joyce and I had a cup of tea and some whisky in the staff room, then my two new best friends put me in a double fare minicab and sent me on my way, 11 rolls of Rudolph toilet tissue under my arm.
No, I need to leave town because I have the keys to my new home, a dream kitchen, and the future I dreamed of, but for one thing.
Where do broken hearts go? Whitney?
Probably best not to turn to Whitney Houston for relationship advice.
I have five days off work. I need to do something exhilarating, lift my spirits.
I should climb a mountain, learn to kitesurf, swim with sharks. I should go Ayurvedic in India, meditate, get perspective, get food poisoning and get properly thin.
Or the really scary option.
I love my mother, I truly do. When I’m in London, I miss her and I worry about her. She sends me funny very-safe-for-work jokes on email, and recipes, and photos of her and Lenny looking downtrodden.
But I think I have perhaps made a poor choice of holiday destination.
On New Year’s Eve I took two of my grandma’s diazepam, swallowed down with a cup of tea, and got into bed at 9pm. No point ruining any one else’s night.
On New Year’s Day I got in a cab, got on a plane, took another two mazzies and eleven hours later landed in California, where dreams can come true. Let’s hope not. Last night I dreamt James was living in a gold castle with a Bulgarian hooker who looked like Mel Gibson’s latest paramour. When I tried to talk to James he said he could remember my face, but couldn’t quite place me.
I have been here for four days, and fly home tomorrow
evening. Stupid, to come for such a short time, but I’d needed to move; I didn’t think it through properly.
When I split up with Nick, I got the feeling that my mother would have rather kept Nick in the family and seen the back of me.
‘What did you do to that poor boy?’ she’d asked. I’d tried to explain, but she was sure I’d made a huge error of judgement, and driven away the best thing that ever happened to me.
So I have not told her about James. I will not even say his name. I fear she will either tell me that he was too old and what was I thinking of going out with a paedophile in the first place; or that he was right, and I am looking a bit large round the hips.
I had thought my brother and Shellii would be in town, that I’d meet my niece, but Shellii has dragged them to some insanely expensive post-natal raw foods spa in Arizona, so it is Mum, Lenny and me.
Every day I wake up at 7am, then go back to sleep till around midday. I emerge from my room for lunch – usually picking at half a bagel from their breakfast. Then I sit by the pool for an hour or two and read the
LA Times
, including all the money-off coupons. My favourite headline so far: ‘Guinea Pigs – not from Guinea, and not Pigs!’
I then go for a run down to the boat club, passing power-walkers with power-walking dogs, admiring all the Christmas decorations that the Balboa residents adorn their houses with. Elves and Elvises. Six-foot-tall fairies and penguins and angels. Illuminated giant gingerbread men, bigger than James. Damn. Bigger than a tall man.
After my run I will pop in to Ralphs, my favourite American supermarket. I love the smell of American supermarkets like I love the smell of fresh coffee.
Then I will come home to find my mother watching the 70-inch TV while Lenny rests. We’ll then argue for twenty minutes about what to have for dinner. I keep telling her I’m not hungry, but she insists I eat something. And then when I say, ‘maybe something healthy, tuna salad?’ she’ll refuse to make it, saying she had one two weeks ago, and how about a nice pork chop. I’ve never liked pork chops. ‘In-N-Out Burger?’ she says, ‘your favourite …’
‘Healthy! I said healthy!’ I then usually storm back to my room, take two sleeping pills and begin all over again.
Today I am at the ‘Ralphs’ part of my daily routine.
For the first time since Christmas Eve, I am actually hungry. What with the running and the half bagel I seem to have been subsisting on, I am now officially thin. My bra is half empty/half full, my trousers won’t stay on my hips, even my shoes feel too big.
So, I shall find myself a treat in Ralphs – with my
increased muscle to fat ratio, I don’t even need to feel guilty about it.
I start at the chocolate milk fridge. I seem to be craving something cold, but there are too many confusing lo-fat, 1% fat and 2% fat variants, and what I actually think I want is a Mars milkshake, but they don’t have them. I haven’t drunk one for a decade. Maybe they don’t even exist any more.