The Switch

by Beth O'Leary

  Hank might be back under control, but I don’t feel like I am. What was the matter with me out there in the fields, crying like that, screaming into the wind, running in circles? Bee’s right: things aren’t how they should be. This just isn’t me.

  10

  Eileen

  When Bee waltzes into the flat, I find myself rather tongue-tied. She’s simply the most glamorous person I’ve ever seen. Her face is breathtaking, though—or perhaps because—it’s asymmetrical, one eye higher than the other, one corner of her mouth curving a little more. Her skin is a beautiful creamy brown and her hair is extraordinarily straight and shiny, like black water sluicing over a dam. For a moment I try to imagine what life must be like when you’re that young and beautiful. You could do anything, I think.

  Half an hour with Bee and I am astonished to discover that this is apparently not the case at all.

  “Can’t find a man in this godforsaken city,” Bee says, refilling our wineglasses. “They’re all shit—excuse my language. Leena keeps telling me that there are good men out there, that you have to kiss a few frogs, but I’ve been smooching amphibians for almost a year now and I am losing. The. Will.” This last part is emphasized by several long swigs of her drink. “Sorry—I don’t want to dishearten you. Maybe the over-seventies is a better market.”

  “I doubt that,” I say, heart sinking. This is daft. I’m embarrassed even to be discussing my love life with someone like Bee; if she can’t find a man, how on earth am I meant to do it? I couldn’t even keep my own husband.

  Bee catches my expression and puts down her glass. “Oh, don’t listen to me. I’m just worn out and sick of crappy dates. But you! You have a whole world of fun ahead of you. Let’s take a look at your dating profile, shall we?”

  “Oh, no, don’t you bother yourself with that,” I say weakly, remembering all the embarrassing things Leena wrote on there. Loves the outdoors! Young at heart! Looking for love!

  Bee ignores my protests and flips open her laptop. “Leena gave me your login,” she says, tapping away at the keys. “Ooh, there’s already a few gents messaging you!”

  “Are there?” I lean forward, nudging my glasses up my nose. “Gosh, does that—oh my lord!”

  Bee snaps the laptop shut. “Ooh,” she says, widening her eyes. “Well. That’s a landmark moment for you right there. Your first dick pic.”

  “My first what?”

  She makes a face. “Wow, this is worse than telling my daughter where babies come from. Umm.”

  I start laughing. “It’s quite all right,” I tell her. “I’m seventy-nine. I may seem like an innocent old lady to you but that means I’ve had fifty extra years to see the horrors the world has to offer, and whatever that was, it’s got nothing on my ex-husband’s warty behind.”

  Bee descends into giggles. I don’t have time to reflect on the fact that’s the first time I’ve said ex-husband out loud, because Bee’s opened the laptop up again, and there’s a very large image on the screen.

  I tilt my head. “Gosh,” I say.

  “Looking pretty spritely for a man of eighty,” Bee comments, tilting her head the opposite way from mine.

  “And sending this photo is meant to do what?”

  “Excellent question,” Bee says. “I believe it’s meant to make you want to have sex with this man.”

  “Really?” I ask, fascinated. “Does that ever work?”

  “It’s a great mystery. You’d think not, but then, why do they keep doing it? Even rats can learn that ineffective mating techniques should be abandoned, right?”

  “Maybe it’s like flashers in the park,” I say, squinting at the screen. “It’s not about whether you like it—they just like showing their todgers.”

  Bee bursts out laughing again. “Todgers!” she repeats, wiping her eyes. “Ah, Leena was right, you are a gem. Now. Shall we block this particular gentleman from communicating with you further?”

  “Yes, please,” I say, thinking of Letitia’s tea leaves yesterday. “That’s enough todgers for now, I’d say.”

  “How about this guy?” Bee asks.

  I look rather warily at the screen, but this time it’s a smiling face staring back at me. It’s a very handsome gentleman, actually, with silver hair swept back from a heavy, important brow, and excellent teeth. The photo looks like it might be professional.

  “Is he real?” I say. You hear all about these people on the Internet who turn out to be strange ladies in Texas.

  “Good question, especially with a headshot like this.” She taps away on the keyboard for a while. “OK, I’ve searched by image and the only other place this picture is used is here. Same name, the bios match up … He’s an actor, I guess!” Bee shows me a website for a theater; the picture appears beside a description of Tod Malone, apparently playing the role of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at the St. John’s Theater. “Hmm, he sounds fun. Shall we message him back?”

  “What’s he said?” I ask, peering over Bee’s shoulder.

  “Hi there, Eileen! It sounds like you’re in London on an exciting adventure—I’m fascinated to hear how that came about…” Bee reads.

  “May I?”

  Bee pushes the laptop my way; I start typing.

  “My granddaughter wanted a break in the countryside, and I wanted some excitement in the city,” I write. “So we swapped lives…”

  “Ooh, I like it,” Bee says approvingly. “That dot dot dot! Very mysterious.”

  I smile. “Why, thank you.”

  Bee clicks to send the message. “Now we wait,” she says, reaching for the wine again.

  “Why don’t we look at your dating profile in the meantime?”

  “Mine? Oh, God, no, you don’t want to see that.”

  “I’ve shown you mine!” I point out, taking a sip of my drink. I’ve not drunk wine for a very long time, but it seems to be a feature of life in Leena’s flat. There’s a stack of bottles underneath the television, and always at least one white wine in the fridge.

  “I use an app, actually, not a site like this one,” Bee says, nodding at the laptop. “So it’s on my phone.”

  “I can cope with looking on a phone,” I say patiently.

  Bee makes an apologetic face. “Yeah, sorry.” She chews her bottom lip, then, after a moment, pulls her phone toward her across the counter and types in a series of numbers. “Here.” She scrolls through the pictures of herself. There’s a short description underneath: Busy working mum. Short on time, low on patience, high on caffeine.

  Oh, goodness. If I thought Bee was intimidatingly glamorous in person, it was nothing on how she looks here. All her pictures look like they’re from a glossy magazine—“Oh, yeah, I did a bit of modeling work last year, just on the side,” she tells me airily—and her description of herself could not be much more uninviting.

  She shows me how to swipe left and right, and the page where she can message all the different men.

  “There are so many!” I look closer. “Why haven’t you answered them? That one’s very handsome.”

  “Ah, that guy was one of those super successful CEO types,” she says dismissively. “Not my scene.”

  I frown. “Why not?”

  “I don’t like dating guys who earn more than me,” she says, lifting one shoulder. “It’s one of my rules.”

  “What are the other rules?” I ask, mulling this over.

  She ticks them off on her fingers. “Must be sporty, can’t work in consulting or finance, got to be a good dancer, must be exceedingly hot, can’t have a weird surname, must like cats, can’t be posh or have rich parents, mustn’t have boring man hobbies like cars and playing darts, has to be feminist, and I mean properly feminist not just when it suits, must be open-minded about Jaime—my kid…”

  “Oh! Tell me about your daughter,” I say, distracted despite myself.

  “Jaime,” Bee says, flicking around on her phone so fast I lose track. “She’s with her dad tonight.” She’s scrolling through photos
now, and eventually settles on a picture of a young girl with dark-brown hair cropped short, beaming at the camera through a pair of wide-rimmed glasses. “Here she is,” Bee says proudly.

  “What a lovely girl!” My heart squeezes, not so much at the child—though she’s ever so sweet—but at the expression on Bee’s face. The woman has melted. She loves this child more than anything, you can see it in seconds.

  “She’s going to be a world tennis champion,” Bee says. “She’s already top in her age category at the club.”

  “Gosh.”

  “She also likes dinosaurs and reading about brains,” Bee adds. “And she’s vegan. Which is really annoying.”

  “Oh, yes,” I say sympathetically, “my friend Kathleen has that.”

  “Has what, sorry?”

  “Veganism.”

  Bee giggles. She has such a charming laugh—hearing that, and having seen her face when she looked at Jaime, I suddenly feel I know her an awful lot better, and like her much better too. That’s the trouble with dating on the Internet, I suppose. There’s no way for anybody to hear your laugh or see the way your eyes go dreamy when you talk about something you love.

  I watch Bee as she flicks through more pictures of her daughter, and think to myself: I may not know anything about online dating, but I think I can do a better job of finding Bee a man than Bee can.

  I reach for my new project diary. I picked one up at Smith’s yesterday—Leena has mine, in Hamleigh.

  Communal area—spruce up is top of my list. I spoke to Martha about it this morning; she got quite excited and starting waving paint-color charts at me on her way out of the door. I know things are different around here, but I can’t help thinking this building could do with some sense of community.

  Below this note, I carefully write, Find Bee a man.

  “Ooh, your silver-haired thespian has replied!” Bee says. She swivels the laptop toward me.

  Todoffstage says: Hi, Eileen. Now I’m more intrigued than ever. What an exciting idea! How is your granddaughter finding life in the country? And how are you getting on in London? Is it a shock to the system?

  I smile and start typing.

  EileenCotton79 says: My granddaughter has gone very quiet on me, which either means it’s going very well, or she’s burned the house down! And I’m a little overwhelmed by London. It’s hard to know where to start!

  “Oh, Mrs. Cotton,” Bee says. “Now that is brilliant.”

  Todoffstage says: Well, I’ve lived in London for sixty-five years … so if you’d like a little bit of advice from an old hand, I could show you a few places worth visiting? Starting with a coffee shop, perhaps?

  I reach for the keyboard, but Bee waves my hand away. “Make him stew!” she says.

  I roll my eyes. “That sort of nonsense is for young people,” I tell her.

  EileenCotton79 says: That would be lovely. How about Friday?

  11

  Leena

  Friday afternoon, in the quiet of the house, with Ant and Dec twining their way between my feet, I sit down at Grandma’s computer and log in to my Dropbox. It’s all there. B&L Boutique Consulting. Pricing strategy. Market research. Operations and logistics. I settle in, not touching anything yet, just reading it all through again. In the end I get so deep I lose track of time. It’s the Neighborhood Watch meeting at five—I have to bomb it down on the bike I dug out of Grandma’s ivy–shed, and I nearly send myself flying when turning into Lower Lane.

  It’s only when I’m walking through the door to the village hall that I realize I’m not entirely sure what the Neighborhood Watch actually is. Are we … fighting crime? Is this a crime-fighting society?

  I take one look around at the motley crowd gathered in the center of the hall and decide that either these guys are in the best superhero disguises ever or this cannot possibly be a crime-fighting society. There’s Roland, the over-eager search-party organizer; Betsy, wearing a bright pink scarf, matching lipstick, and a pair of culottes; and Dr. Piotr, much portlier than I remember from my childhood, but still clearly the man who stitched up my knee when I was nine and once extricated a dried pea from Carla’s ear.

  Then there’s a tiny bird of a woman who looks as if she’s built of matchsticks, a squinty mustached man I recognize as Basil the bigot, and one very harassed-looking young woman with what I think is baby vomit on her sleeve.

  “Oh, bother,” this woman says, following my gaze to her arm. “I really meant to clean that.”

  “Leena,” I say, holding my hand out for her to shake.

  “Kathleen,” she tells me. Her hair is streaked with highlights that need re-doing, and there’s a flaking smear of toothpaste on her chin—she has exhausted mum written all over her. I can’t help wondering why on earth she’s bothered to come to this meeting instead of, I don’t know, having a nap?

  “I’m Penelope,” says the little bird lady. She holds out her hand the way royalty might—top of the hand first, as though I’m meant to kiss it. Unsure what to do, I give it a shake.

  Betsy stops short when she sees me. Her smile comes too late to be genuine. “Hello, Leena,” she says. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “Of course!” I say. “I brought the sign, for the door.”

  “Room for one more?” says a voice from the doorway.

  “Oh, what a treat!” Betsy trills. “Jackson, I didn’t realize you’d be able to make it today!”

  I look up and feel myself flush. Jackson lopes in wearing a rugby shirt and a worn-out old cap. I was such a mess when he last saw me; every time I remember myself sweaty and snotty on his doorstep it makes me want to crawl right back to London. I try to meet his eye, but he’s preoccupied: all the elderly ladies have gravitated Jackson’s way, and he’s now wearing a woman on each arm like Hugh Hefner, only with all the relevant people’s ages swapped over. Basil is urging a cup of tea on him. Nobody has offered me one yet, I notice with discomfort. That’s not a good sign, is it?

  “Well, now that Leena’s finally here, shall we begin?” Betsy asks. I resist the urge to point out that I wasn’t the last to arrive, Jackson was—but everyone is too busy passing him biscuits to notice that. “Seats, please!”

  It’s hard not to wince as the elderly in the room shuffle themselves in front of their chairs and then—starting slowly at first, then picking up speed—they bend at the knees as best they can until they land somewhere on their seats with a thump.

  “Jackson usually sits there,” Roland says, just as I bend to sit down.

  “Ah.” I look around, still in a squat. “Jackson, do you mind if…”

  Jackson waves a large, affable hand. “Course, sit yourself down.”

  “No,” Roland says sternly, just as my bum touches the seat. “No, no, that’s Jackson’s seat.”

  Jackson laughs. “Roland, it’s fine.”

  “But you like that seat best!” Roland protests.

  “Leena can have it.”

  “What a thoughtful young man he is,” Penelope says to Betsy.

  “Mmm. And he’s been so kind about the incident with the dog, hasn’t he?” Betsy replies, folding her hands in her lap.

  I grit my teeth and straighten up. “Here’s an idea. How about we all swap seats, see how it changes our perspective?” I suggest. “You’ll be amazed how much difference it makes.”

  They all stare at me blankly, except Jackson, who looks to me like a man trying very hard not to laugh.

  “This is where I sit,” Basil declares firmly. “I don’t want to change my perspective, thank you very much. I like it right here.”

  “Oh, but—”

  “Do you know how hard it was to get into this chair, young lady?” says Roland.

  “But I can help you get—”

  “Besides, this one’s nearest the gents,” says Basil.

  “Yes,” Penelope says, “and when Basil needs to spend a penny, he needs to spend a penny, dear, there’s nothing else for it.”

  “Right. OK,” I sa
y.

  They look pleased. They have defeated my attempt at a basic change-management exercise with their talk of bladder control.

  “You’d better have this seat, Jackson,” I say, and make my way to a different chair. Best to pick one’s battles; this does not feel like the right hill to die on.

  “I really don’t mind,” Jackson says mildly.

  “No, no,” I say, more sharply than I should. “You enjoy your favorite chair. I’m perfectly fine here.”

  Once we’ve got going, I spend most of the meeting wondering what the meeting is, which is not an uncommon feeling—I’d say eighty percent of the client meetings I attend are spent this way—but does make it hard to engage with the discussion.

  The main thing that’s confusing me is the total lack of any mention of crime. So far we’ve talked about: bacon sandwiches (Roland has discovered that Mabel at No 5 Peewit Street makes excellent ones, so he’s back to boycotting Julie’s, which I gather is a café in Knargill), squirrels (Basil is very anti), and whether potatoes are fattening (I think it’s the bacon sandwiches they ought to be worrying about, really). Then everyone spends twenty minutes complaining about Firs Blandon, a local village that has apparently caused havoc by moving a farmer’s fence two feet to the left to reflect what they believe to be the boundary between parishes. I lose the plot a bit at this stage and just dedicate myself to eating biscuits.

  I glance down at the agenda. Only one more point to discuss before we reach “any crime?,” which will, I am assuming, finally cover some actual crime.

  “Oh, yes, this was Eileen’s latest little project, wasn’t it?” Betsy says. “So you’ll be taking it on, will you, Leena?”

  “Pardon?” I ask, midway through what must be my one hundredth biscuit.

  “Helping the elderly and isolated of Knargill by providing transport,” Betsy reads. “I’m not sure how she plans to manage that, but…” Betsy blinks expectantly at me.