When I arrived home, I knocked on the front door of the ground-floor flat for the fourth time that week. I’d missed a parcel and a piece of paper informed me it had been left with Angelo Ferretti downstairs. I’d tried to catch him when I heard he was leaving or entering the building, but somehow, I’d miss him. This time, to my surprise, the door opened after two knocks. A tall man appeared in the door frame. He had olive skin and brown hair that fell to his shoulders—which suggested a former hobby of small-warrior-figurine painting or a current hobby of weekend bass-playing in a band with some sad dads—paired with a counterproductive receding hairline. I would guess that he was a few years older than me. He wore a resting expression of incredulity.
“Oh, wow! Hello,” I said, with an awkward, flustered, jolly laugh that I hated. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you to answer. I’m Nina, I live upstairs. I moved in a couple of months ago.” He blinked twice. Silence. “I tried to knock a few times when I first moved in, just to introduce myself, but we seemed to keep missing each other. Well, I seemed to keep missing you.” More blinking, more silence. “Is it just you here?”
“Yes,” he said, his accent sprinkling thickly over his vowels.
“Oh. Alma—she lives upstairs, she’s lovely—seemed to think you had a flatmate?”
“She go,” he said.
“Ah, right.”
“About three months ago, she leave.”
“I see.”
He continued to administer silent blinks, indicating that the conversational portion of this exchange was officially over.
“I think you might have a parcel for me?”
“Yes, why they leave here?”
“Because I was out.”
“But why they leave with me?”
“Because I said they could leave it with a neighbour. Is that okay? You can always leave your packages with me if you’re out.”
He shrugged and turned back into his flat. With his harshly carved features and lolloping, dislocated movements, he looked like an old-fashioned puppet being pulled by invisible strings. He returned and passed me the cardboard package. He had his hand on the door now—he wanted me to leave.
“So. Angelo. Is that Italian?”
“Why you know my name?”
“On the missed parcel slip,” I said. “It said it was left with you. Where in Italy are you from?”
“Baldracca.”
“Never been. Where is it?”
“Look it up,” he said, before closing the door.
I stood in the ringing echo of the slam and hoped that was the first and last time I would ever have to have a conversation with Angelo Ferretti from downstairs. In my flat, I opened my parcel, flattened the packaging for recycling and looked up Baldracca on Google Maps. Could not be found. I typed the word into a search engine. Its translation appeared immediately. Baldracca—Italian noun: whore (mostly used as an insult).
* * *
—
Lola was waiting for me on a bench outside the gym that evening. She had booked us in to do a class called “Body Boost,” which combined “weightlifting and tai chi to the soundtrack of eighties dance classics.”
“Can you be bothered?” she drawled as I approached, pulling me towards her and kissing both cheeks. She was wearing a stunningly strange workout combination of leopard-print leggings, a billowing cheesecloth top, aviator sunglasses, hoop earrings that were so big they rested on her shoulders and a silk jewelled headdress that looked a bit like a turban. She was drenched in the heavy, sweet warmth of her signature oud perfume.
“Haven’t you already paid for it?”
“Yeah, obviously we’ll do it, but I’m just checking if you still wanted to do it.”
“You persuaded me to come.”
“I know, it’s just—” She gestured at an enormous carton of cranberry juice she was swigging from in a performative fashion and rolled her eyes.
“The vet?”
“All night. And he stayed the next day. Think we shagged for twelve hours.”
“Lola, that’s got to be a lie.”
“I wish it was,” she said wearily, pulling a Twix out from her enormous tan leather handbag, which had her initials monogrammed in gold. Lola liked everything to be monogrammed, from her phone to her washbag. It’s as if she was worried she would forget her own name.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, through indelicate, hurried chomps.
“Why not?”
“He’s nice, but…I don’t know. He did a couple of things that cringed me out a bit. He’s the sort of man who lies in bed after you’ve had sex and waits to catch your eye and says ‘Hey.’ ”
“Oh God, that’s bad.”
“Unforgivable,” she said. She took the final bite of the Twix and put the wrapper in the bag, before pulling out a Kit Kat and a Twirl and unwrapping them both.
“You all right?”
“Yes, why?”
“What’s with all the chocolate?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. I went to a nutritionist because, you know, I sometimes get those stomach cramps after I eat? Anyway, she said the problem is, I shouldn’t be eating sugar after six, so I’m just getting these in now.” She glanced at her digital watch, informing her it was 5:59 p.m. “Anyway, I’m done with these men who use me for the night to make them feel like they’re the star in some…mumblecore romcom, you know what I mean?”
“I think so.” The truth was, I very rarely knew what Lola meant when she said “you know what I mean?,” but I found her so entertaining, I never wanted to signal at a platform where her train of thought could stop.
I’d met Lola in the loo of a club in our university town in freshers’ week. I heard a girl crying in the cubicle next to mine and when I asked her if she was okay, she wailed that she’d had sex with a boy earlier that week and asked him the next morning to text her. He said he wouldn’t be able to because he had no credit on his phone and he’d run out of money. She drove him to a local cashpoint, took out twenty pounds, gave it to him to top up his phone and said she couldn’t wait to hear from him. The text never arrived. I asked her to come out of the loo to talk to me, but she said that half her make-up was down her face and she was too embarrassed for anyone to see her. I told her to lie down. And there, in the crack between the cubicle wall and the purple plastic floor, I saw Lola for the first time. Her huge aquamarine eyes leaking mascara tears down her face that was as orange and downy as a peach from too much cheap foundation. I reached out and put my hand on hers. The bass of “Mr. Brightside” vibrated through the floor and on to our cheeks.
“I miss home,” she said.
I didn’t know anyone who was more different to me than Lola. Most noticeably, she was a pathological people-pleaser—hell-bent on making sure every single person she came into contact with not only liked her but adored her and felt sensational about themselves in her presence. And not just people she knew—she put in the same effort to woo total strangers who she would only be in contact with for a few minutes. We once went on holiday to Marrakech and when “haggling” for a vase in the medina she offered the man 250 dirhams more than he originally asked for. Another time she withdrew the last thirty pounds in her bank account on a night out, gave it to a homeless man and sat down to talk to him about his life. He, quite understandably, told me he’d give me the thirty pounds if I would take her away from him.
Sometimes I found this habit of hers slightly pathetic and frustrating; other times I had admiration for it. I was regularly envious of the patience Lola could exercise in the face of other people’s inanity and incompetence. She was fantastically good at small talk; at listening to people blither about something I knew she wasn’t interested in; at complimenting women on their ugly shoes at a party because she could tell they were in need of a compliment. I wa
s often accused of being irritable or short-fused, whereas she never got angry about anything—which wasn’t just down to her benevolence, she was mainly too busy either daydreaming about herself or worrying about everyone liking her. She was both the most tragically insecure and beguilingly confident person I had ever met.
And she loved fun, which was infectious. Her pursuit of new experiences was a preoccupation, and her permanent state of being single had given her the time to make an ongoing project of her own life. In the time I’d known her she’d learnt calligraphy, photography and origami; how to make her own ceramics, yogurt and essential oil blends; attended classes for martial arts, Russian and trapeze. She’d undergone five tattoos, crowbarring a fake meaning on to every fey, insignificant doodle; moved flats seven times and jumped out of a plane twice. I had come to realize this was not evidence of Lola’s frivolity but was instead her tribute to what she saw as the one great opportunity of being alive.
“I’m so stressed about the summer coming to an end,” she said, pulling out a half-empty packet of menthol cigarettes and withdrawing one with her teeth.
“Why ‘stressed’?”
“I’m worried I haven’t made the most of it.”
“You’ve been to four music festivals.”
“I’ve got to get to Burning Man next year.” She shook her head worriedly as she lit up. The early evening sun bounced off every ring on each of her fingers holding the white-tipped cigarette and she inhaled deeply. “And you’ve got to come with me, it might be our last chance.”
“No. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.”
“Please.”
“You burn if you want to, the lady’s not for burning. Also, what do you mean it will be our ‘last chance’?”
“The summer afterwards I will probably be pregnant,” she said. I’d known that would be her answer, but I wanted to hear her say it explicitly. Her illogical optimism about the exact trajectory of her life never failed to make me glow with fondness for her.
“It’ll be dark at four o’clock every day soon,” she said. There was no reasoning with her when she was this deep into her stupor of fun-panic I had become so familiar with. “And everyone will be in every night with their partner and children, eating stilton and broccoli soup, not wanting to hang out with me.”
“You do this every year.”
“It’s already started happening. People don’t understand what it’s like to be us. No one wants to do anything any more, everyone just wants me round for dinner. Which is nice and everything, but I don’t want to spend my Saturday nights on a happy couple’s sofa. How am I ever going to meet anyone like that? I’ve never heard of anyone meeting the love of their life because they wandered through their friends’ living room in Bromley.”
“But you can’t plan your social life around opportunities to meet men,” I reasoned. “That’s so grim.”
“Yes, I know that, but I also would just like some of our friends to appreciate that while their search is over, mine is still on. And I have supported them every step of the way on their search. I’ve written them poems for their weddings—”
“Which, in fairness, I don’t remember any of them ever asking for.”
“I just need them to help me achieve my dreams in the same way I supported theirs.”
“I don’t think we ever really stop searching.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“It’s true. I don’t ever spend time with married people and think they’re significantly less restless than single people.”
“Nina, I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to like hearing. And loads of people think it, but everyone’s too scared to say it. And it’s not about feminism, and it’s not about men and women, it’s just a fact about life. Loads of people aren’t happy until they’re in a relationship. Happiness, for them, is being in a partnership. I am sadly one of those people.”
“How do you know if you’ve never been in one though? What if you’re pinning all your hopes and planning your entire life on finding this one thing and then it disappoints you?” I asked.
She stubbed out her cigarette, pulled out another one and lit it.
“And what do you mean, ‘what it’s like to be us’?” I asked.
“Single,” she said. We passed the cigarette between us.
“Do you want to go to the pub?” I asked eventually. “I know there’s one round here that does a really spicy Bloody Mary and it’s full of miserable suits looking to flirt.”
“Yeah, go on then, yeah,” she said, before adjusting her turban.
* * *
—
On our third bottle of white wine, I began to feel drunkenly maternal towards myself four hours previously, putting on a pair of leggings and trainers, truly believing I was going to spend the evening in a “Body Boost” class. Bless her.
“What happened to your man mountain, by the way?” Lola asked.
“Haven’t heard from him.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Three days.”
“DON’T cave first,” she said, pointing her finger at me and focusing her bloodshot eyes on mine. One of her enormous hoop earrings was now missing.
“Is that definitely necessary? Because I just really, really want to call him.”
“Look, three days of not hearing from a man is not all that bad. I’ve got something for the Schadenfreude Shelf,” she said. The Schadenfreude Shelf was a shameful, private ritual we’d developed a few years ago, in which we collected stories of other people’s misfortunes to make us feel better about our own. The idea was, we would always have a selection of relevant anecdotes for us to reach for in any given situation that would put our disasters into perspective.
“Do you remember a woman in my office called Jan?”
“Is she the one who competed in the Microsoft solitaire championships?”
“Exactly. So Jan had been with her husband for thirty years. Never wanted kids, was just the two of them. They were really happy—lived in a flat in Brixton and went on all these cruises to Iceland, listened to all sorts of jazz scat albums and had a Cavalier King Charles spaniel with one eye called Glen.”
“Right.”
“So Jan’s out in Brockwell Park one day with Glen.”
“The husband?”
“No, the dog,” she slurred exasperatedly. “And she sees this man, much younger than her. He’s very tall, Spanish, a sort of Tony Danza type. He comes over and he’s all ‘cute dog’ and she’s like ‘thanks’ and then he’s all ‘the owner’s even cuter’ and bless Jan, bless her, she hasn’t been chatted up since the seventies or whatever, so she’s beside herself. They go for some shisha, get to know each other, he’s called Jorge, he’s a locksmith, he’s from Girona, they exchange numbers. Long story short, they start this affair.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
“Who meets in a park these days?”
“Well. That’s it, isn’t it? So Jorge is telling her he loves her, he wants her to leave her husband, he wants the two of them to start a new life together—with Glen as well—in Cardiff.”
“Why Cardiff?”
“Dunno. And she’s thinking, this could be my last great chance at a great, passionate love affair. I want to feel that one more time.”
“But what about her lovely husband? And the cruises to Iceland?”
“Lust,” Lola said knowingly. “It makes fools of us.”
“What happened?”
“She packs two bags, one for her, one for Glen.”
“She did not pack a bag for Glen.”
“I SWEAR TO GOD,” she shouted. “One of those miniature backpacks you get on the back of a teddy bear. She writes a letter to her husband explaining everything and apologizing from the bottom of her heart. Tells him she will alw
ays love him. Thanks him for the happiest years of her life. Leaves it on the table, then goes to Victoria coach station where she’d agreed to meet Jorge.”
“And?”
“Jorge,” she said with a deep in-breath. “Never. Showed. Up.”
“No.”
“Yes. She waited there for ten hours.”
“Did she call him?”
“Went straight to voicemail.”
“Went to his flat?”
“He’d disappeared.”
“What did she do?”
“She went back home, tried to beg for forgiveness, explain that she’d temporarily lost her mind. But her husband wouldn’t let her in.”
“Oh no. Oh no no no.”
“Yup. Wouldn’t speak to her. He’d even changed the locks.”
“And the locksmith was probably…”
“Jorge,” she nodded. “We’ll never know if they ever crossed paths. Or what was said. It’s a question mark that hangs in history.”
“Where’s Jan now?”
“She lives on a canal boat,” she said, with a funereal tone. “You’ll see it sometime, next time you go for a run along the towpath. It’s called The Old Maid. There’s a painting of a one-eyed spaniel’s face underneath it. And you can smell it a mile off, because she’s always home-brewing kombucha, says it’s the only thing that makes the nights pass faster.”
“Surely,” I said in horror, “surely any name but The Old Maid?”
“She thought it would be funny. I said, ‘Jan,’ I said, ‘you cannot make your life a joke, you have to start again.’ But she wouldn’t listen. I think she’s punishing herself.”
“That’s so awful.”
“I know. The locals around her mooring call her ‘The Sad-eyed Lady of the Lock.’ ”
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