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by Penny Parkes

  Kate blew out her cheeks, allowing the air to gradually deflate with a slow whistle. ‘I think I have to beg to differ. Call it researching the human condition. Call it a travel journal from the inside out, but don’t dismiss this, Anna. For all my worrying, and all my nagging to commit to a career and do something tangible… Well, I think you might have been doing that all along.’

  ‘So I shouldn’t just throw it all out, then?’ Anna smiled. ‘Because I have to tell you that around 3 a.m. that was a definite possibility. Hence, you know, the Lego.’

  ‘No! Shit – is that what you meant by a fresh start? Do not throw this away.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not that I can tell you what to actually do with it, either, but this is not something to be discarded.’

  ‘My lost decade – how I had to get lost to find myself!’ Anna said dramatically, holding the back of her hand to her forehead in a swoon.

  ‘Bloody hell, I’d read that. And I know you’re only taking the mickey, but seriously, I can get Sarah on the phone right now and she’d agree. Surely there’s a market for vicarious therapy and travel – sort of wanderlust porn for the mind and the senses?’

  ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why my friend does not work in marketing,’ Anna snorted.

  ‘Oi,’ Kate said, inadvertently flicking spaghetti against her cheek and ruining her perfect twirling record. ‘Just because I’m an academic doesn’t make me entirely clueless, you know. Besides, I’m pretty certain you’ve the basis for a master’s in social anthropology right here. Seriously, if you don’t want it, my mum would bite your hands off for this little stash.’ She paused and sat upright in excitement, nearly upending the bowl balanced so precariously on her lap. ‘Or you could actually come back yourself. Come back to Oxford and do this!’

  Anna’s heart flipped uncomfortably in her chest. A simultaneous longing to be back with Kate in Oxford, paired with a fearful lurch of what analysing these journals might reveal. Beyond her lapses in judgement and her nomadic clamourings.

  Psychologically speaking.

  There was a willingness to be vulnerable that was inherent in any original research, of course, but the very thought of being so exposed left Anna utterly cold.

  ‘Or maybe we can just entertain ourselves with a few Top Fives?’ she hedged, tugging a battered leather journal out of the heap. ‘And I think we can start with the Summer of Giovannis to get the ball rolling. Tuscany 2016. Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano, before ending up on the banks of the Arno. Four Giovannis in one month – you can’t say that every day.’

  Kate’s eyes widened. ‘You slept with four Giovannis in one month?’

  Anna shook her head, frowning. ‘No! I slept with zero Giovannis, but went on lovely dates with all of them.’ She sighed as she reminisced. ‘I love first dates. All the anticipation, no rules, just the promise of possibility.’

  Kate laughed. ‘So you’ve been flirting and teasing your way around the globe on a promise? No wonder you’re so frustrated with life. Everyone knows it’s the third date where things get interesting.’

  Anna shrugged. It was hard to put into words, but it never felt that way for her. The moment there was an expectation, a call on her emotions, she felt herself backing away. And that instant reserve did not lend itself to uncomplicated flings, wherever the setting. God knows she’d failed to have sex in some of the most romantic places in the world. The Maldives, Cap Ferrat, Edinburgh, Venice… The list went on.

  She couldn’t help but smile to herself, though, with the memory of her most meaningful connection in years. A month in the Lofoten Islands last year where the long, long summer nights and lack of sleep had gradually worn down her defences against the utterly gorgeous and insatiable Birger. ‘One who helps.’ And, yes, he had certainly lived up to his name.

  ‘What are you looking so smug about? And why do I get the impression that there is so much you’re not telling me?’ Kate persisted.

  ‘Well, there’s loads you’re not telling me,’ Anna countered, suddenly nineteen again. She leaned forward, pressing her hands together. ‘Like what it’s like being married, for one thing. What it’s really like.’

  Kate paused, taking her time to very slowly twirl another forkful of spaghetti, comfortable in the routines of their student days: pasta, intimacy, friendship. She shrugged. ‘You know how when we moved into Cowley Road, it just felt right? After all that time in halls the year before, we suddenly felt at home, like we could properly relax?’

  Anna nodded. ‘Like we could breathe…’

  Kate shrugged. ‘It’s a bit like that, right now. But with more sex. And presents.’ She laughed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, the presents are nice, but actually I just feel like we’re on the same song sheet. Like committed to be on the same song sheet. Is that weird? Am I officially the worst feminist ever?’

  ‘Yup – you’re a rubbish feminist these days – we can’t ignore that fact, K. I mean, the moment you mentioned pink jobs and blue jobs, I worried for you.’ Anna couldn’t resist teasing her. ‘But actually, if part of feminism is having the life you want, then aren’t you just honouring that?’

  ‘Oh that sounds so much better than what Gilda said at work. She thinks I’m selling out to the patriarchy.’

  ‘Gilda with the impressive moustache and wonky eye?’ Anna clarified. ‘Hmm, well it’s one opinion. But you haven’t taken Duncan’s name, have you? Or given up your job to look after him?’

  ‘Nope, and it makes me indecently happy that I out-earn him two to one and can refuse to take the bins out with a clear conscience.’

  ‘Well there you go then. It’s all about what works for you. Like, each person needs their own version of life that respects their beliefs and their politics and, you know, loving who they want to love,’ Anna said seriously. If you put it like that, then there was no failure in the choices she herself had made.

  They had felt right at the time.

  And even if they no longer resonated with her, and at times made her feel a little ashamed of the time she had wasted, then she had only to remind herself of one of Marjorie’s favourite maxims: time you enjoy wasting is never really wasted time.

  ‘Pod? You do know that you can tell me anything, right? I mean, if you secretly long to be an accountant, or have fallen for the gorgeous Gilda, or you’re pining for the Arctic Viking chappy from last summer—’

  ‘Birger,’ Anna supplied.

  ‘Right, that one. Just know that I’m here. Unconditionally,’ Kate said, her gaze still searching Anna’s face as though trying to read the tea-leaves in the bottom of her cup.

  ‘I know,’ Anna said, a slightly tearful smile catching her unawares. ‘I really do know, actually. And I also know that it sounds mad to admit it, but having you there, even miles away, is actually what gave me the confidence to get out there and get on the tiny ferry to nowhere and the little seaplane – oh, and that road in America that frightened me shitless.’

  ‘One hundred miles and not a single car.’ Kate nodded.

  ‘Route 50. No people, no bends – enough to drive a person crazy.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ Kate said. ‘You’ve been bonkers for as long as I’ve known you, anyway. Just a quiet simmer of nutjob beneath the surface.’ She grinned. ‘It’s one of the reasons I love you actually. Perfection is so suffocating.’ She stood up and dumped her bowl in the sink. ‘I mean, seriously, look around this town. Could you live here? Really? Even though we know it’s all smoke and mirrors, wouldn’t you need a little more – well, a little more grit in your life?’

  She stood over the table and flicked through the journals again, each beautifully labelled and bursting with extra photos and enclosures. ‘You’re very good at editing to the heart of things. You always have been.’ She picked up the notes from Anna’s aborted short story, the bare bones sketched out on napkins and notepaper from the fancy London roof terrace last week. ‘Why is it so much harder when it’s your own words, I wonder?’

  ‘Because you get too clo
se,’ Anna replied simply. ‘Two thousand words was all they needed and look, I’ve got at least three thousand right there – half-formed thoughts and sentiments without a single clue how to pull it all together.’

  ‘So you gave up?’ Kate asked, intrigued, skim-reading the notes and glancing up. ‘This is good though, Anna. Really good. Can you not fillet it down to the core and just send it off?’

  Anna plucked it from her fingers and crumpled the pages into a ball, tossing them into one of the storage boxes on the floor. ‘No point. The deadline’s probably already passed.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Kate flinched as Spook silently appeared in pursuit of the balled-up paper. She bent down to rescue the pages, barely avoiding an angry swipe, and then stopped dead. Standing up slowly, she had a strange expression on her face. ‘Can I just ask – all this stuff here? It’s all so beautifully organised and curated…’

  Anna nodded. ‘You kind of have to, or you lose track of where you’ve been, you know?’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Kate replied, before bending down again and lifting up the carrier bag she’d spotted. A bag haphazardly, almost violently, stuffed with crumpled letters and envelopes. An A4 folder was bent double in amongst it all. Something had been worthy of filing. Once.

  ‘So, my little Pea Pod, dare I even ask what this little monstrosity represents?’

  She plonked the bag on the table, a small tear in the side widening with the impact, the handles stretched thin, almost to breaking point. Whatever Anna had been carting around had apparently deserved no respect or attention whatsoever, as though she couldn’t bear to look at it, let alone handle it. Toxic.

  ‘Put it away,’ Anna scowled. ‘It’s nothing important.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Put it away!’ Anna stood up, her good mood evaporating as an all too familiar wave of shame and anger overtook her. She made to snatch for the bag, but Kate was too quick and she only caught the edge of the handle, this last affront too much for its fragility, as the bag tore and its contents spilled across the table. ‘What the fuck, Kate?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Kate said, her face blanching even beneath her tan. ‘I didn’t mean to rip it. I just thought—’

  ‘You didn’t think,’ Anna hissed. ‘Not everything needs to be analysed to death you know.’ She began grabbing at the papers, her actions suddenly jerky and out of control. All thoughts of happy reflections eclipsed in a moment by the logo on the headed paper.

  Kate stepped away from the carnage and caught Anna’s hands. ‘Stop. Stop now. We can tidy it away again in a moment. No reading required. But right now, I’m more concerned by how one carrier bag of paperwork can trigger a whole Jekyll and Hyde situation in my best friend.’

  Anna sank back against the wall, her breath uneven and the red heat in her face gradually abating. ‘Read it,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll understand. But then I don’t want to talk about it. Ever.’

  She gave Kate’s hands a reassuring squeeze and then walked out of the room.

  Chapter 50

  Chipping Norton, 2019

  Anna came back downstairs, slightly shame-faced at her teenage flounce from the room a few hours earlier. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said from the doorway.

  Kate looked up from the table, her hair skewered into a tousled bun with a biro and a distracted expression, the same expression she wore in the Bodleian when she was detangling one of her historical tomes, teasing out its secrets and subtexts, immersing herself fully in the life and times of some bygone feminist.

  ‘Oh God.’ Anna smiled. ‘I’ve left it too late to apologise and you’ve gone down the rabbit hole, haven’t you? I’m one of your case studies now.’

  Kate said nothing but simply pushed back her chair and walked across the room, wordlessly pulling Anna into an enormous bear hug and dropping a loving kiss on the top of her head. They stood together for a moment, framed in the double doorway, the house silent around them, save for the muted purring of the cat, no doubt draped across the top of a cupboard somewhere, elusive and still piqued by Anna’s presence.

  ‘I’m not going to do the sympathy thing, okay,’ Kate said eventually. ‘I mean, you’ve always told me that you had a tricky time growing up. But, honestly? I had no real understanding of what that meant – you know, in actual day-to-day life.’ She paused and squeezed Anna’s hand. ‘I do now.’

  Anna just nodded. ‘It’s all in the past.’

  Kate pulled a face. ‘Is it though? Because, Anna Wilson, apart from being incredibly bloody impressive – I mean, how many kids come back from that kind of start in life, to end up where you are?’

  ‘Unemployed and unemployable? No sense of direction and with a deep-seated fear of commitment? I’m going to go out on a limb and say quite a few,’ Anna said with a sigh. ‘See, I’m not totally oblivious to my shortcomings.’

  Kate swatted at her, with no small amount of force. ‘Argh! You will literally be the death of me! I mean, seriously – only you could reel off all your challenges and gloss over all your achievements. I’ll begin shall I? You have a First from Oxford. You’ve had the same – rather unique, slightly strange – job for nearly a decade. You have a strong and lasting friendship with me – that’s a commitment whether you realise it or not. And’ – she let out a hard breath of frustration – ‘to the very best of my knowledge you’re not broke, or addicted to anything. You’re also bright, articulate and bloody gorgeous. If the four Giovannis didn’t convince you of that though, then heaven help us all.’

  Anna wrinkled her nose. ‘Please stop.’

  ‘I will not. I’m going to keep going like a broken record until you appreciate that we all have strengths and weaknesses. You are not the sum of your failings.’

  ‘How come I feel like this then?’ Anna said quietly. ‘As though I’m stuck and can’t move on?’

  ‘Because you’re stuck, and you can’t move on,’ Kate said gently, slowly pulling Anna over towards the table, travel journals now catalogued neatly by year at one end, and the contents of the Co-op bag stacked across the table. Sorted, it seemed at first glance, by placement. Which in itself was pretty sobering, when you realised just how many stacks there were.

  A catalogue of Anna’s childhood in care.

  ‘Have you read them all?’ Anna asked, her voice a shadow of its usual self.

  ‘No. There’s a couple of sealed envelopes. But I had a field day with your psych evaluations and your school reports though,’ Kate said gently. ‘Have you? Read them?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t need a psych assessment to tell me what’s in my head; I have to live with it every day. I know who I am and some shrink’s opinion is never going to change that.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Kate, placing a smart blue folder in front of her, its cover dog-eared and stained from being shoved into the mix with the other documents. ‘This one might have given you a boost actually – you’re charming and well adjusted by all accounts. Gifted too. Empathetic. Resilient. Ambitious. But then I knew all that already.’

  ‘You see?’ Anna managed a smile. ‘Money for old rope.’

  ‘They also said you were struggling to get closure on any of this. Cited a visit to your dad during your GSCEs as a flash point. They recommended ongoing therapy actually, once you left school.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was a bit busy if you recall.’ Anna couldn’t help the instinctive prickle in her voice, the snide bite. She stopped herself. ‘Sorry. It’s kind of weird thinking that you probably know me better than I know myself now.’

  ‘No worries. I think I’d be a bit tetchy too if my entire teenage experience had been catalogued and analysed. Can you even imagine what they would have made of my comfort blanket ’til I was fourteen? I mean, seriously, how much comfort does a person need?’

  As if Spook could sense the atmosphere in the room, he dropped down from his perch on the dresser, draping himself across Anna’s lap, limp and pliant, his moanful purring more soothing than one might imagine. ‘Bloody hell,’ Anna said with
a small yelp of laughter, ‘I must be a sad sack, if even the mad cat has deemed me worthy of attention.’

  ‘We had words,’ Kate said seriously. ‘I briefed him while you were upstairs. Although he is a weird little fucker, isn’t he? Just sat and stared at me with those huge eyes for like an hour straight.’

  ‘Spooky by name,’ Anna said, stroking his long, soft fur and feeling her heart rate settle. One half of her was strangely relieved that Kate now knew where she came from, the other half was still battling a mortified humiliation at the whole sorry picture.

  ‘Well, look, while you’re sedated by the enormous cat, do you think maybe it’s time to open these? They’re postmarked on your eighteenth birthday.’ She gave a small nervous laugh. ‘And to be honest I can’t quite believe you never opened them.’

  Anna picked up the two envelopes, both with the same date on the postmark: a sliver of an official-looking letter and a square cardboard envelope, pink and tired, with a typed address sticker incongruous on the front.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ she said. ‘This one is my “you’re-eighteen-now-and-you’re-on-your-own” kiss-off, and this one’ – she tapped the pink square – ‘is possibly the saddest kind of birthday card you can ever receive as a child. Think of it as a really pathetic version of a telegram from the Queen, a soulless box-ticking exercise from the local authority.’ She picked them up and was about to toss them into the bin when Kate reached forward and snatched them.

  ‘Did you learn nothing at Oxford? Every source is valid. Now open the sodding envelopes, Pod,’ Kate said, the soothing tone eclipsed by her shocked frustration. Never one to delete a voicemail half played, or discard a movie or book before the end, Kate needed completion. And couldn’t really understand those who didn’t. ‘Please? If they’re what you think they are, then fine, you can chuck them.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Anna said, again with the petulant tone, but this time on purpose. She shook her head. ‘Give them back then.’ Kate handed her the pink envelope first, warily, as though Anna might not be trusted not to shred it instantly.