by Clare Pooley
At the same time every morning, he went out and walked the local streets for an hour, picking up any supplies he needed on the way. His list today read:
Eggs
Milk (1 pint)
Butterscotch-flavored Angel Delight, if poss
He was finding Angel Delight more and more difficult to track down. And since today was a Saturday, he would buy a fashion magazine. This week was Vogue’s turn. His favorite.
Sometimes, if the newsagent wasn’t too busy, they would discuss the latest headlines, or the weather. On those days, Julian felt almost like a fully functioning member of society, one with acquaintances who knew his name and thought his opinions mattered. Once, he’d even booked an appointment at the dentist, just so he could pass the time of day with someone. After spending the whole appointment with his mouth open, unable to speak as Mr. Patel was doing goodness knows what with a selection of metal instruments and a tube that made a ghastly sucking noise, he realized this was not a clever tactic. He’d left with a lecture on gum hygiene ringing in his ears, and the resolution not to return for as long as possible. If he lost his teeth, so be it. He’d lost everything else.
Julian paused to look in through the window of Monica’s Café, which was already filled with customers. He’d walked this road for so many years that in his mind, he could picture the various reincarnations of this particular shop, like peeling back layers of old wallpaper when you’re redecorating a room. Back in the sixties it was the Eel and Pie Shop until eel fell out of favor and it became a record shop. In the eighties it was a video rental store and then, until a few years ago, a sweet shop. Eels, vinyl records, and VHS tapes—all consigned to the dustbin of history. Even sweets were now being demonized, blamed for the fact that children were getting larger and larger. Surely it wasn’t the fault of the sweets? It was the children to blame, or their mothers.
He’d definitely chosen the right place to leave The Authenticity Project. He liked the fact that he’d ordered tea with milk and not been asked all sorts of complicated questions about what specific type of leaf he wanted and what sort of milk. It came in a proper china cup, and no one demanded to know his name. Julian’s name was accustomed to being signed at the bottom of canvases. It did not sit comfortably scrawled on a takeaway cup, like they’d done in Starbucks. He shuddered at the memory.
He’d sat in a soft, scarred leather armchair in the far corner of Monica’s, in an area lined with bookshelves that he’d heard her call The Library. In a world where everything seemed to be electronic and paper was a rapidly disappearing medium, Julian had found The Library, where the smell of old books mingled with the aroma of freshly ground coffee, wonderfully nostalgic.
Julian wondered what had happened to the little notebook he’d left there. He often felt like he was slowly disappearing without trace. One day, in the not too distant future, his head would finally slip under the water and he’d leave barely a ripple behind. Through that book, at least one person would see him—properly. And writing it had been a comfort, like loosening the laces on those uncomfortable shoes, letting his feet breathe a bit more easily.
He walked on.
FOUR
Hazard
It was a Monday evening, and getting late, but Timothy Hazard Ford, known to everyone as Hazard, was avoiding going home. He knew from experience that the only way to escape the comedown after a weekend was to just keep on going. He’d begun pushing the start of the week further and further back, and bringing the weekend further forward until they almost met in the middle. There was a brief interlude of horror at around Wednesday, and then he was off again.
Hazard had been unable to persuade any of his work colleagues to hit the City bars that evening, so instead he’d headed back to Fulham and stopped off in his local wine bar. He scanned the sparse crowd for anyone he knew. He spotted a reed-thin blonde, her legs entwined round a high stool and her torso leaning over the bar, looking like a glamorous bendy straw. He was pretty sure that she was the gym buddy of a girl his mate Jake used to go out with. He had no idea what her name was, but she was the only person available to have a drink with, and that made her, at this moment, his very best friend.
Hazard walked over, wearing the smile he reserved for exactly this sort of occasion. Some sixth sense caused her to turn toward him and she grinned and waved. Bingo. It worked every time.
Her name, it turned out, was Blanche. Stupid name, thought Hazard, and he should know. He poured himself lazily on to the stool next to hers and grinned and nodded as she introduced him to her group of friends whose names floated into the air around him like bubbles, then popped, leaving no impression at all. Hazard was not interested in what they called themselves, only their staying power and, possibly, their morals. The fewer the better.
Hazard slipped easily into his usual routine. He took a roll of banknotes out of his pocket and bought a showy round, upgrading requests of glasses to bottles, and wine to champagne. He reeled out a few of his well-tested anecdotes. He plundered the long list of his acquaintances for mutual ones, and then spread, possibly even invented, a flurry of salacious gossip.
The group coalesced around Hazard in the way it always did, but gradually, as the large station clock on the wall behind the bar ticked past the hour, the crowd thinned out. Gotta go, it’s only Monday, they said, or Big day tomorrow, or Need to recover from the weekend, you know how it is. Eventually, only Hazard and Blanche were left and it was just 9:00 P.M. Hazard could sense Blanche getting ready to leave and felt a rising sense of panic.
“Hey, Blanche, it’s still early. Why don’t you come back to mine?” he said, resting his hand on her forearm in a way that suggested everything yet, crucially, promised nothing.
“Sure. Why not?” she replied, as he knew she would.
The revolving door of the bar spat them out on to the street. Hazard put his arm around Blanche, crossed the road, and strode down the pavement, not noticing or caring that they were occupying its whole width.
He didn’t see the small brunette standing in front of him like a traffic obstruction until it was too late. He barreled into her, then realized that she’d been holding a glass of red wine, which was now dripping rather comically off her face and, more importantly, was spreading like a knife wound over his Savile Row shirt.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, glaring at the culprit.
“Hey, you walked into me!” she replied in a voice cracking with indignation. A drop of wine trembled at the end of her nose like a reluctant skydiver, then fell.
“Well, what on earth do you think you were doing just standing in the middle of a pavement with a glass of wine?” he yelled back at her. “Can’t you drink in a bar like a normal person?”
“Come on, leave it, let’s go,” said Blanche, giggling in a way that made his nerve ends jangle.
“Stupid bitch,” said Hazard to Blanche, keeping his voice low so the stupid bitch in question wouldn’t hear. Blanche giggled again.
* * *
• • •
SEVERAL THOUGHTS COLLIDED when Hazard was woken by his strident alarm. One: I can’t have had more than three hours’ sleep. Two: I feel even worse today than I did yesterday, what on earth was I thinking? And three: There’s a blonde in my bed who I do not want to deal with and whose name I can’t remember.
Luckily, Hazard had been in this position before. He slammed off the alarm while the girl was still asleep, mouth open like a Japanese sex doll, and carefully picked up her arm by the wrist, removing it from his chest. Her hand dangled down like a dead fish. He placed it carefully on the rumpled, sweaty sheets. She appeared to have left so much of her face on his pillow—the red of her lips, black of her eyes, and ivory of her skin—that he was surprised she had any left. He eased himself out of bed, wincing as his brain clattered against his skull like a ball in a game of bagatelle. He walked over to the chest of drawers in the corner of the roo
m and there, just as he’d hoped, was a scrap of paper with a message scribbled on it: SHE’S CALLED BLANCHE. God, he was good at this.
Hazard showered and dressed as quickly and as quietly as he could, found a clean piece of paper, and wrote a note:
Dear Blanche, you looked too peaceful and beautiful to wake. Thanks for last night. You were awesome. Make sure you close the front door properly when you leave. Call me.
Had she been awesome? Since he had virtually no memory of events after around 10:00 P.M. when his dealer had shown up (even quicker than usual on account of it being a Monday), it hardly mattered. He wrote his mobile number at the bottom, carefully transposing two of the digits, in order to avoid it being at all useful, and left the note on the pillow next to his unwelcome guest. He hoped there’d be no trace of her when he returned.
He walked to the tube station on autopilot. He was, despite the fact that it was October, wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from the weak glare of the new day. He paused as he reached the spot of his collision last night. He was pretty sure he could see a few splatters of bloodred wine still on the pavement, like the remnants of a mugging. An unwelcome vision floored him: a feisty, pretty brunette, glaring at him as if she really, really hated him. Women never looked at him like that. Hazard didn’t like being hated.
Then a thought struck him with the vicious sideswipe of an inconvenient truth: He hated himself too. Right down to the smallest molecule, the tiniest atom, the most microscopic subatomic particle.
Something had to change. Actually, everything had to change.
FIVE
Monica
Monica had always loved numbers. She loved their logic, their predictability. She found making one side of an equation balance with the other immensely satisfying, solving x and proving y. But the numbers on the paper in front of her now would not behave. No matter how many times she added up the figures in the left-hand column (income), they wouldn’t stretch to cover the total in the right (outgoings).
Monica thought back to her days as a corporate lawyer, when adding up the numbers was a chore, but never something to keep her awake at night. Every hour she spent poring over the small print on some contract, or leafing through endless statutes, she’d bill the client two hundred and fifty pounds. She’d have to sell one hundred medium-sized cappuccinos to make the same.
Why had she allowed herself to make such a monumental life change with such alacrity, and for such emotional reasons? She who found it difficult to choose a sandwich filling without running through a mental list of pros and cons, comparing price, nutritional values, and calorie counts.
Monica had tried every café on the commute between her apartment and her office. There were the soulless ones, the tired and grubby ones, and the Identikit, mass-produced chain ones. Every time she handed over money for an overpriced, mediocre takeaway coffee she’d picture her ideal café. There would be no brushed concrete, molded plastic, exposed pipework, or industrial-style lamps and tables; rather, it would feel like being invited into someone’s home. There would be comfy, mismatched armchairs, eclectic art on the walls, newspapers and books. Books everywhere, not just for show, but ones you could pick up, read, and take home with you, so long as you left another one in its place. The barista wouldn’t ask your name in order to misspell it on your cup, he (or she, Monica added quickly), would know it already. They’d ask after your kids and remember the name of your cat.
Then, she’d been walking down the Fulham Road and noticed that the dusty old sweet shop, which had been there forever, had finally closed. A large board on its front announced TO LET. Some local wag had painted a large I in between the letters O and L.
Every time Monica walked past the vacant shop she could hear her mother’s voice. In those last few weeks, the ones that smelled of disease and decay and that were punctuated by the constant electronic beeps of medical machinery, she’d urgently tried to impart decades’ worth of wisdom to her daughter, before it was too late. Listen to me, Monica. Write it down, Monica. Don’t forget, Monica. Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t chain herself to those railings so we could spend our lives as a tiny cog in someone else’s wheel. Be your own boss. Create something. Employ people. Be fearless. Do something you really love. Make it all worthwhile. So, she had done it.
Monica wished she’d been able to name the café after her mother, but she was called Charity, and it seemed like a really bad business decision to give a café a name that implied no need to pay. Things, as it turned out, were hard enough.
Just because this café was her dream didn’t mean anyone else would necessarily share it. Or, at least, not enough of them to cover her costs, and she couldn’t keep making up the shortfall forever; the bank wouldn’t let her. Her head was throbbing. She walked over to the bar and poured the remainder of a bottle of red wine into a large glass.
Being the boss was all very well, she told her mother, inside her head, and she loved her café, the essence of which had seeped into her bones, but it was lonely. She missed the office gossip around the water cooler, she missed the camaraderie forged over pizza during late-night working sessions, she even found herself remembering fondly those ridiculous team bonding days, the office jargon, and impenetrable three-letter acronyms. She loved her team at the café, but there was always a slight distance between them, because she was responsible for their livelihoods, and right now she couldn’t even manage her own.
She was reminded of the questions that man—Julian—had asked in the notebook he’d left on this very table. She’d approved of his choice. Monica couldn’t help herself judging people by where in her café they decided to sit. How well do you know the people who live near you? How well do they know you?
She thought of all the people who’d come in and out today, the bell ringing jauntily with each arrival and departure. They were all connected, more than ever before, to thousands of people, friends on social media, friends of friends. Yet did they, like her, feel like they had no one they could actually talk to? Not about the latest celebrity eviction from some house, or island, or jungle, but about the important things—the things that keep you awake at night. Like numbers that wouldn’t obey your command.
Monica shuffled her papers back into their file and pulled out her phone, loading up Facebook and scrolling through. There was still no sign of Duncan, the man she’d been dating until a few weeks ago, on her social media. She’d been ghosted. Duncan, the vegan who’d refused to eat avocados because the farmers exploited bees in their pollination, but who thought it perfectly acceptable to have sex with her and then just disappear. He cared more about the sensitivities of a bee than he did her.
She kept scrolling, despite knowing this would not be a comfort, more a form of mild self-harm. Hayley had changed her relationship status to “engaged.” Whoop whoop. Pam had posted a status about her life with three kids, a boast thinly and inexpertly disguised as self-deprecation, and Sally had shared her baby scan picture—twelve weeks.
Baby scans. What was the point in sharing those? They all looked the same, and none of them resembled an actual child, more like a weather map predicting an area of high pressure over northern Spain. And yet, every time Monica saw a new one it stopped her breath and floored her with a wave of yearning and a humiliating stab of envy. She felt, sometimes, like an old Ford Fiesta, broken down on the hard shoulder, while everyone sailed past her in the fast lane.
Someone had left a copy of HELLO! on a table today; it screamed a headline about a Hollywood actress’s “baby joy” at forty-three. Monica had scanned the pages during her coffee break, looking for clues as to how she’d done it. IVF? Egg donation? Had she frozen her eggs years ago? Or had it happened easily? How much time did her own ovaries have left? Were they already packing their suitcases for a relaxing retirement on the Costa Brava?
Monica picked up her glass of wine and walked around the café turning off all the lights and straightening any errant c
hairs or tables. She went out onto the street—keys in one hand, glass in the other, locked the café door, and turned to unlock the door to her apartment above.
Then, out of nowhere, a large bloke, towing a blonde like a motorbike’s sidecar, careened into her so hard that she was momentarily winded, and the glass of wine she was holding erupted, all over her face and his shirt. She could feel rivulets of Rioja coursing down her nose and dripping off her chin. She waited for his abject apology.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. Monica felt a heat rising from her chest, making her face flush and her jaw clench.
“Hey, you walked into me!” she protested.
“Well, what on earth do you think you were doing just standing in the middle of a pavement with a glass of wine?” he said. “Can’t you drink in a bar like a normal person?” His face, with its perfectly symmetrical planes, would have been classically handsome, but it was split by the ugly gash of a sneer. The blonde pulled him away, giggling inanely.
“Stupid bitch,” she heard him say, deliberately pitching his voice just loud enough for her to hear.
Monica let herself into her apartment. Honey, I’m home, she said, as she always did, silently and to no one, and thought for a minute she was going to cry. She put the empty glass down on the draining board in her kitchenette and wiped the wine off her face with a tea towel. She was desperate to speak to someone, but she couldn’t think who to call. Her friends were all caught up in their own busy lives and wouldn’t want her inflicting her misery on their evenings. There was no point calling her dad, since Bernadette, her stepmother, who saw her as an inconvenient backstory to her new husband’s life, acted as gatekeeper, and would no doubt announce that her father was busy writing and couldn’t be disturbed.
Then Monica saw, sitting on the coffee table where she’d left it a few days ago, the pale-green notebook, labeled The Authenticity Project. She picked it up and turned again to the first page. Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead? The one thing that defines you, that makes everything else about you fall into place?