“He’s fine,” I said.
“Soon he’ll be your husband!”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said with a chuckle.
She chuckled knowingly too. “It’s wonderful, being married.”
“I know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know. But it seems great.”
“I miss my husband every day. He was not like your lovely boyfriend, he was very set in his ways. But he brought me a cup of coffee in bed every morning until the day he died. Fifty-eight years of being woken up with fresh coffee. Aren’t I lucky?”
“Very,” I said. “Very, very lucky.”
“You tell me if you want to stay here, if the noise continues.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
—
When I went back to my flat, the music was even louder. I tried putting my headphones in and listening to a podcast as I ate dinner, but I could still hear and feel its vibrations through the floor. I opened my laptop and looked up when exactly I could call the council with a noise complaint. I then sat on my sofa, flowering in fury, watching the clock until exactly eleven o’clock when I rang noise patrol, gave them my address and asked them to deal with Angelo. I opened the curtains, stood by the window watching the road and waited for them to arrive. I imagined this was what spinsterhood might be like and I really did find it thrilling.
At 11:20, two figures arrived at the front door. I went downstairs, opened it to them, showed them the entrance to Angelo’s flat then hurried back upstairs. I locked my door and sat on the floor with my chin resting on my knees and waited—they knocked, but he couldn’t hear them. Then they used their fists to bang, but I think he assumed it was me so ignored it. Finally, they shouted repeatedly that they were from the council and, very suddenly, the music stopped and I heard the squeak of his creaky door open. I pressed my ear against the wall and heard the jumble of hands-off, bureaucratic non-threats that belong to the vocabulary of local councils. From Angelo, I heard just one question, which he asked over and over again: “Was it her?”
I heard noise patrol leave and waited for Angelo’s door to close, but there was silence. I heard him walk up the stairs. I wished that I had turned all my lights off to make him think that I was asleep. He reached my flat and stood at the door—I could see the shadow of his feet block the hallway light through the crack above the carpet. He remained there, saying nothing, until the hallway self-timer turned the lights off and I lost the outline of his feet. He stayed for a few minutes—in the absence of shadows, my ears attuned to the sound of his breathing. I wondered how long he would stand there, why he stood there, whether he would say anything and if he knew I sat inches away from him. I was too scared to move in case I made a noise, but I also feared I would be sitting in a silent stand-off with him all night. After another minute or so, I heard him walk downstairs and the door to his flat close.
I thought about the day I had moved into this flat. In the first month of living there, I had experienced such deep daily contentment in knowing these square metres were all mine. But now, I felt the omnipresence of an intruder. I felt unwelcome and unsafe in its walls. I felt like I had been infested with cockroaches and there was nothing I could do to get rid of them. I had to either live with it or move. It was then I knew that there are a handful of situations that, regardless of how happy you are without a partner, loot your single status of all its splendour. One of them is dealing with a nightmare neighbour on your own.
I wanted to call Max. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted his straightforward, tough advice and his firm, unrelenting affection. I picked up my phone to call him, but instead I read through our old messages to each other and watched how he had suddenly grown cold and formal before he disappeared. I went to his name and number in my phone contacts and stared at it, looking for a sign of animation, like I was watching someone in a coma, waiting for a sign of life.
I walked around my flat and searched for evidence that he’d been there. I held the copy of the book he’d left on the bedside table the last time he stayed. I touched the set of drawers he had helped me put up in the bedroom. His red woollen hat was in the cupboard. I turned it inside out and put my face into it—my knees reacted to the instantly recognizable scent of him. I hated him for making me a woman who breathed in an absent man’s knitwear like it was a reviving salt. But every day since he’d disappeared, I’d needed proof he had existed. Yes, he had been here. His trace was here. I hadn’t dreamt him at all.
But finding proof of his existence meant I had to ask myself a harder question: if he was real, but he was gone, had I dreamt our relationship? Had I invented what we were to each other? The magic that I had felt when he’d picked me up and kissed me on the dance floor the first night we met, “The Edge of Heaven” our soundtrack, was that one-sided? Did Max make everyone feel like that? Was he an illusionist? Was this a show-stopping, spangled deception he could perform on anyone? The love I’d felt, the details of him I’d studied like an academic, the future I’d tentatively begun to think about—were they sleight of hand and tricks of the mind? Had I fallen for it?
I wondered how long I’d be waiting for an answer. I thought about Grandma Nelly and how she waited for her husband who never returned. I tried to recall being in her house when I was little and what she’d look like in the morning when the post came. Had she really stood at the door and waited every day for his handwriting on the front of a letter?
There was so much I thought I’d known about Max, but now I questioned whether we had been perfect strangers in a pretence of togetherness. We had first met as five photos and a few words about our respective hobbies, jobs and location. Our meet-cute of Linx profiles was anything but spontaneous—it was curated and censored, enabled by an algorithm, determined by self-selection. We’d read the signage of each other and we’d filled in the rest with our imaginations. Had I created kismet from coincidental—from the fact that we’d both grown up to the sound of a Beach Boys album, which was probably the favourite album of every baby boomer alive? Had I applied more soul to him than he possessed, because of the vintage concert posters on his wall? Had I trusted him too quickly and fallen too deeply, because I’d projected my own version of his personality into the holes of my knowledge of him?
As I stood in the chasm between who I thought he was to me and the reality of a person who never wanted to speak to me again, I realized just how much we hadn’t known about each other. I didn’t know what his handwriting looked like if he sent me a letter; he wouldn’t recognize mine. He didn’t know the name of my grandparents; I didn’t know the name of his. We’d barely seen each other around other people, apart from waiting staff and strangers in queues. I’d never met any of his friends—I hardly heard about any of his friends, which, for some reason, had never seemed strange. On our first date, he’d told me how untethered he was and I hadn’t taken that as a warning. Nor did I question why he spent most weekends by himself in the countryside. I didn’t know why his dad moved so far away when he was so young. I didn’t know if his mum was waiting for a letter too. He didn’t know my dad before my dad started leaving the house at six a.m. to go look through the kitchen cupboards of a stranger’s house he thought was his. And now he never would.
I deleted Max’s number along with all our messages and I knew then that I would never see or hear from him again. I accepted it. It was over. He was gone.
Two
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
The last months of winter marked the beginning of the most tyrannical of pre-spring rites: hen dos.
I didn’t want to go to Lucy’s hen do. I barely wanted to go to my actual friends’ hen dos. At thirty-two, I had been to plenty—I’d sat through enough Mr. and Mrs. videos to know that every man’s favour
ite sex position with his future wife is either doggy style or girl on top. I’d sipped through enough penis straws and blown up enough flamingo balloons to create 150 tonnes of plastic for landfills. I’d declined every invitation to hen dos from the age of thirty onwards. But Joe had pleaded with me to go—he said that it would make Lucy feel more “comfortable” about me being part of the “wedding party” if she felt I was there for both of them rather than just for him. Katherine dropped out at the last minute, as she was feeling a bit too pregnant to spend the weekend whooping on command. Thankfully, Lucy invited Lola in her place—she was often the first reserve for hen dos of women she’d only count as an acquaintance. She was also regularly invited to the evening-only, post-dinner portion of a wedding reception of couples she didn’t know that well. I think the reasons for this were threefold: she was fun, she always bought a present from the gift registry and she was always single. And single women at a thirty-something party carried the same calibre of entertainment as a covers band. We weren’t pregnant so we’d always drink, we had no one to go home to so we’d always stay out late and we might get off with someone which gave the evening some narrative tension for everyone else. And best of all: we were free!
* * *
—
Lola was applying make-up at a café in Waterloo, next to her monogrammed wheelie suitcase. She was wearing a floor-length Navajo cardigan, a denim rompersuit and a pair of white cowboy boots. Plaits as thin as embroidery silk threads ran through her masses of blonde hair and half-a-dozen pearly clips kept it pulled back off her face. Lola still wanted to look like the girl her fifteen-year-old self had wanted to look like.
“I’m going mad, Nina,” she said as I approached her and she pulled me in for a hug with the hand not holding a mascara tube. “Absolutely fucking mad.”
“Why?”
“Andreas. The architect from Linx.”
“Let’s get to the platform and you can tell me what happened.”
“I need to finish my make-up.”
“Do it on the train,” I said impatiently. Lola was infuriatingly laissez-faire about transport.
“Let me just finish my eyes,” she said, aggressively thrashing the mascara wand through her eyelashes over and over again.
“No one remotely fuckable is going to be on a train to Godalming, trust me,” I said.
“Okay,” Lola said, doing one last thrash on each eyelash before putting away her make-up bag and standing up with her suitcase. “So, we’ve been on about five dates now. Things are going really well. But I know he’s sleeping with loads of other women and, while that hasn’t bothered me before, it’s starting to make me feel insanely jealous.”
“Okay, firstly—how do you know he’s sleeping with lots of other people?”
She retrieved her phone from her handbag as she walked, opened WhatsApp and presented me with the screen.
“See? Online. He’s always online.”
“So? He could be talking to a friend?”
“Men don’t talk to friends, that’s not how men work, they’re not like us. And if they do, they message things like: See you there at four, mate. They’re not glued to their phone for hours and hours of the day.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. Joe was on loads of WhatsApp groups that just traded rubbish gifs and memes all day.”
“What kind of groups?” she asked immediately, her eyes twitching from what looked like little to no sleep.
“Oh, you know, like footie practice. Or Ibiza 2012, which just rumbled on and on.”
“But he’s on it all night every night. It’s the night shift that really worries me. Men aren’t online until two a.m. talking to anyone else other than a girl they’re trying to have sex with.”
“How do you know he’s online until two a.m. every night?”
“Because I basically just sit there with our chat window open on my phone not talking to him but watching him be online. I cancelled dinner with a friend last night to do it.”
“Lola.”
“I know. Pretended I had a cold. Had to post an Instagram story of me fake-drinking Lemsip to support my alibi.”
We put our tickets through the barrier machines and walked along the train platform.
“Why don’t you ask him about it?”
“What would I say?”
“Say that you’ve noticed he’s online a lot on WhatsApp, make a joke about it.”
“No, he’ll know what that means. I don’t want him to think I’m trying to control his sex life or be possessive.”
We boarded the train and sat on the nearest free seats next to each other.
“Okay, then you have to stop thinking about it for now and then have the exclusivity chat when you feel that it’s appropriate to have it.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, looking out of the stationary train’s window. “When will this all end? I just want someone nice to go to the cinema with.”
“I know,” I said.
A man ran along the platform for the train with a baby strapped to his chest. He held its head protectively. The train guard blew a whistle to signify its imminent departure and the man put his foot into our carriage’s door.
“Come on!” he said with a grin. “You can do it!” A woman ran towards him, luggage in both hands. She approached the doors. “YES! MY WIFE!” he shouted triumphantly, holding both arms aloft in celebration as if she had reached the end of a marathon. They both stumbled on to the carriage and caught their breath. They laughed.
“Good job, mate,” she said. They found two seats, still breathless and laughing, and arranged their bags and baby paraphernalia around them in a sprawling mess. I realized I was staring when they both caught my eye inquisitively. I jerked my head away and looked out at the passing city. Lola squeezed my hand. I smiled at her and squeezed it back. I’d never felt more grateful for her friendship than since Max’s disappearance.
Max may have no longer been in my life or on my phone, but he was everywhere I went and in nearly every thought I had. I had spent Christmas at home, staring at my phone like it was 2002. I had spent New Year with Lola, clanking our glasses together for meaningless toasts about hating all men. I had spent January writing the first few chapters of the new book, grateful to have a new work project and a deadline on which to focus. I hadn’t experienced this type of pervasive love sickness since I was a teenager—it was impossible to rid my thoughts of him. I’d notice a knot in the wood of a table that looked like his nose in profile. When two of the letters M, A or X were adjacent on a page, my eyes would instinctively dart to those words first. I heard him in song lyrics, I saw him in crowds on tube platforms. It was bone-achingly tiring and oppressively dull. Daydreaming of him, while previously satisfying when we were together, was now like MSG for the mind. It expanded in my brain, making me feel momentarily full, and then quickly disappeared, making me feel horribly empty. An abundance couldn’t satiate me and none of it felt nourishing. And yet I couldn’t stop. Lola told me there was no way to bypass this stage of a break-up and I had to go through it. My fear was that the feeling would linger because there was nothing final to mourn.
“Right, what are we expecting from this one?” Lola asked, while looking in a monogrammed compact mirror and loading more make-up on to her already plenty-adorned face. “Stripper?”
“No, definitely not, Lucy’s a prude.”
“Prudes love strippers though.”
“That’s true,” I said. “And chocolate body paint. And massage oils. Classic sign of someone who doesn’t enjoy sex that much, if they own massage oils.”
“So, no stripper,” she said. “What else do you think they’ve organized?” I took out my phone and opened the hen do WhatsApp group named LUJOE HENS! which had been pinging incessantly since its inception six weeks ago.
“There’d better be a lot of booze for the amount that
we’ve had to contribute for food and drinks.”
“There never is,” she said. “It will be one bottle a head for the whole weekend and one slice of overcooked lasagne.”
* * *
—
We were the last ones to arrive at the large house in the Surrey countryside that was rented for Lucy’s hen do. Most of the twenty-five—twenty-five—women who were attending had opted in for the full three-night stay, whereas Lola and I were only coming for the Saturday night and Sunday daytime. We were greeted by Franny, the maid of honour, Lucy’s best friend and a professional soprano, which I have always found is an entire genre of woman. They were normally in possession of very large breasts, which they’d developed at a young age and therefore had a quiet sense of imperiousness in any all-female group. They were angry at everyone while also being jolly about everything. They also wore silver Celtic jewellery and floaty dresses and blouses that, quite rightly, exhibited their impressive cleavage. Franny, immediately, met all those expectations.
“Hello, latecomers!” she trilled merrily. “Nina and Lola?”
“Yes! Here we are! So happy to be here!” Lola said with a huge smile. She was so good at this; at throwing herself into any uncomfortable situation with enthusiasm: immersive theatre, stand-up comedy shows, hen dos organized by bossy sopranos. I was in awe of her.
“Hello!” I said, comparatively weakly. “I’m Nina.” I shook her hand formally.
“And I’m Lola!” Lola said, embracing her.
“Well, lovely, so glad you made it in one piece. Why don’t you pop your things upstairs in your room, you’ll see your names on the door. Then head back down for a glass of fizz and we can get going with today’s activities!”
“Great!” I said.
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