by Lindsey Kelk
She nodded in silence, her face open and kind and there for me, and it was enough.
‘It was easier before, everything was up for grabs. Something didn’t work out, you just did something else. Now it feels as though I have one less choice, one less option every day,’ I said, reaching for words I had struggled to find until now. ‘I know it’s not just me, I know lots of people are having a hard time right now, but I don’t know how to fix it and I feel as though I used to, or we used to.’
‘Don’t get upset,’ Sumi said, slowly, carefully. ‘But have you thought about talking to someone about this? A counsellor maybe? Only, I’ve been seeing one to talk about all the baby stuff and it’s life-changing. Not saying you need to or have to but just putting it on the table. It sounds like you’ve really been struggling.’
A rush of affection for my best friend ran through me. I’d dreaded this conversation, like I was trapped in a dark room all on my own, but now it was as though someone had pulled the curtains open from the outside. There was a light at last.
‘Have you talked to Patrick about any of this?’ she asked. ‘What does he say?’
I clenched my jaw and made a fist, suddenly tense. ‘I can’t talk to Patrick about any of this,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want him to know I got the sack, about any of it.’
Sumi raised an eyebrow but said nothing as the waiter reappeared with two immense-looking buckets of frozen yoghurt. He placed them on the table in front of us and backed away, eyes wide and transfixed, half bowing as he went. Either he was terrified of us or he was in love with us. Possibly both.
‘I talked to John,’ I said lightly.
‘Oh,’ Sumi dug into her dessert with a neutral expression on her pretty face. ‘Did you now?’
‘And I might have kissed him.’
She looked up so quickly, I was afraid her head would snap clean off. A spoon of yoghurt that had been headed for her mouth, sticking her in the neck.
‘What do you mean, you kissed him?’ she screamed.
‘All right, calm down,’ I whispered, smiling nervously at the mother and her stirring baby beside us. ‘You literally just told me you’re going to bring a life into the world and I didn’t even raise my voice.’
‘I’m having a baby, I’m not breeding chimeras,’ she replied, her voice lowered by barely a fraction. ‘What do you mean, you kissed John? When? Where? How? And again, what the fuck?’
‘At the baby shower, under the stuffed rabbit, with my lips,’ I groaned. Worst game of Cluedo ever. ‘Technically he kissed me, I was the kissee, not the kisser. I don’t even know how it happened.’
Sumi pffted loudly. ‘It happened because he’s obviously got a raging boner for you. How dare you sit there and tell me how terrible things are when you’re casually getting it on with one of the most beautiful men my gay self has ever seen, Rosalind Reynolds, you are a disgrace.’
‘Sumi!’ I suddenly very much wished we had opted for an establishment that had wine. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re unhappy and confused and you don’t know what you’re doing and we’ll get to that,’ she said, waving away the last ten minutes of emotional revelations. ‘You snogged John at the baby shower? Now with the details please.’
‘That’s it, that’s the whole thing,’ I insisted before biting my lip. ‘Except we also had a bit of a dance at the dark disco. A sexy dance.’
Sumi gasped, loudly and dramatically, with her entire body.
‘And just like with everything else, I have no idea what’s going on.’
‘Your honour, I refer you to my first point,’ she replied. ‘John’s raging boner. Wait, you kissed under the rabbit? That is kinky.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, my fingers finding my lips as my memory tiptoed back to the kiss. Short, sharp and electric. I could still feel it. ‘It’s not happening again. I just had to tell you before I exploded.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Sumi confirmed, resuming her serious expression. ‘I am listening.’
‘Did you know he was divorced?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘Oh yeah. One of my mates at the firm did his divorce. That’s how we met. Adrian thought he could train him up as a new wingman but me and Lucy couldn’t put him through that off the back of a nasty break-up.’
‘I heard it wasn’t great?’
‘The nastiest,’ Sumi confirmed. ‘You must have seen her at the bar, she’s always there, haunting the place. Blonde? Pretty? Very tall. Two red horns poking out of her forehead and a forked tail sticking out her arse. Cheated on him with one of their friends and then refused to sell him the business. It’s so messy.’
‘Poor John,’ I said slowly, my heart lurching at the thought of how hard that must have been for him.
‘Not that it matters to you.’ Sumi leaned back in her chair, a calm coming over her face.
‘It doesn’t?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Because you’ve got Patrick.’
‘Right, yes,’ I agreed. ‘Patrick.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Sumi said, watching me shovel my fro-yo. It really was very good, even if it wasn’t wine. ‘All you’ve ever wanted was Patrick Parker. And now you’ve got him, you don’t want him? Come on, Ros, you’re not that kind of girl. What’s going on?’
‘I just want things to feel easy again,’ I replied, sure of my answer for the first time in what felt like forever. ‘I’m tired of being tired. And stressed and on edge. I want to wake up in the morning and have all the answers. That’s all I want, for life to be easy.’
‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ Sumi said sadly, sticking her spoon into my dessert. ‘I’m a brown lesbian who’s about to use a sperm donor to become a single mother. I don’t know if I’ve ever known what easy feels like.’
‘You know I love you,’ I told her, pushing my yoghurt away. ‘And I want you to know I’m here for you for all of it, start to finish. Except not the literal start or the literal finish because I don’t want to look at your vagina. But everything else, I’m one hundred percent yours.’
‘The further you stay from my vag, the happier I’ll be,’ she said with glistening eyes. ‘Look at us making emotional breakthroughs over frozen yoghurt. Lucy would be so proud of us. And to think, I almost went vegan.’
I looked at her face, a face I knew as well as my own, and found myself smiling. It was so strange to see my Sumi without a smirk or a grin. Something had changed in her but it suited her.
‘You’ve got to talk to Patrick,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said with a sigh. ‘He’s coming to the podcast recording on Friday and to Mum and Dad’s ceremony. I need to figure this out.’
‘Who knows?’ she said, waving her spoon around in the air. ‘Maybe I’ve been wrong about him all this time and he’ll be wonderful. Maybe he’ll be able to help you.’
I nodded but something inside me sank sadly. Even though I wanted to agree with her, I knew in my heart that I couldn’t.
‘You’re going to have a baby, aren’t you?’ I said, finding a smile for my friend.
She nodded and rested her elbows on the table, cradling her chin in her hands.
‘Ros?’
‘Sumi.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
I reached my spoon into her fro-yo and grabbed a scoop with a side of strawberries. ‘Shoot.’
‘How was the kiss with John?’ she asked, batting her eyes at me.
‘Oh, sod off,’ I mumbled, looking away.
‘Oh dear,’ she grinned. ‘You are in trouble.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
By Friday morning, I was a wreck.
The entire week had been eaten up by production prep and wedding planning, leaving me with only the odd minute here and there to worry about my own life. Thankfully, Patrick was caught up with a deadline and hadn’t had time to see me before the podcast recording, which he’d sworn up and down on the graves of assorted family members that he was going
to attend, and all my friends were preoccupied by their lives. Adrian with Eva, Sumi with work and Lucy with being ‘too fat to live’, to quote her directly. While I hadn’t given an awful lot of thought as to when I would prefer to be pregnant, the height of summer seemed like the worst possible option. I was only carrying a food baby from all my stress eating and that was uncomfortable enough. I couldn’t begin to imagine what an extra thirty pounds strapped to your ribs must feel like.
‘Hey, Ted,’ I tapped my boss on the shoulder, smiling brightly.
‘Ros?’ My boss yanked out his AirPods. ‘What are you doing here? You should be at WESC, you should be backstage, you should be—’
‘It’s all sorted,’ I said calmly, pointing to the great big box on the floor beside me. ‘I was there this morning, the set-up, the soundcheck, it’s all done. I just came back to get the tiger mask and see if there was anything else you needed.’
He pressed both hands against his face and breathed out a gargantuan sigh of relief. ‘Thank fuck, Ros, thank fuck,’ he laughed. ‘Because for a minute there, I thought maybe you’d fucked up and I was going to have to fire you on the spot.’
‘Wouldn’t that be hilarious?’ I replied, polite smile still pasted on my face. Clearly the fact my entire career depended on what happened that afternoon hadn’t even occurred to me. ‘No, everything is great. Snazz should be getting to the venue in about an hour so I’ll head over now so I’m there to meet him. See you there?’
‘See us all there, the entire company is coming,’ he confirmed as a dozen pairs of eyes furtively peered up at me from behind their computer screens. It was like being watched by a whole family of meerkats. He lowered his voice and covered his hand with his mouth. ‘Except Kelvin. We didn’t invite Kelvin.’
I followed his eyes over to a young man across the room. He was wearing prosthetic elf ears and a deerstalker and was peering at his iPhone, laughing loudly to himself. I looked back at the appalled expression on Ted’s face. I’d have invited Kelvin before any of the rest of them. At least Kelvin looked like he knew how to have a laugh.
‘Right, see you in a bit,’ I said, squatting down to pick up the heavy box, unassisted. But Ted had already replaced his noise-cancelling headphones and gone back to ignoring me, as had everyone else.
‘As god intended,’ I muttered, waddling out of the office and into the street.
Patrick’s flat was only twenty minutes from the PodPad offices but twenty minutes was a long way to walk in twenty-nine degrees while carrying a giant cardboard box. Aside from a touch of tepid drizzle, the rain still hadn’t come and the streets of London were full of people wearing next to nothing. I felt wildly overdressed in my jeans and T-shirt but it felt indecent to see the city down to strappy vests and little shorts when we were definitely more of a black-opaque-tights kind of a town.
I’d said I would pick Patrick up en route to the recording but I was nervous about seeing him. Not because I was worried I’d say something stupid or cock up in some way but because I had been sure that he was the answer to all my problems for so long and, suddenly, I wasn’t quite so certain any more.
Pretending I wasn’t sweating through my T-shirt, I stood in front of his door and juggled the box in my arms to reach for the doorbell.
Right before I pressed, I looked at the giant box and smiled. The tiger mask. It would be funny, wouldn’t it? I thought it would be funny. Sumi would think it was funny. I was prepared to bet John would get a laugh out of it. But would Patrick? Without overthinking it, I whipped the mask out the box and, with one deep breath, I jammed it onto my head. Not ideal for my claustrophobia but it would be worth it, I thought, jabbing the doorbell, for the look on his face.
Sweat trickled down the back of my neck as I waited for Patrick to answer and, as the seconds passed, I began to question the sense of my plan. What if I ruined the mask and Ted got mad and fired me? What if my sweat ran into my eyes and mixed with my mascara and blinded me and I couldn’t produce the podcast and I lost my job? Or even worse, what if Patrick didn’t open the door at all because he clearly wasn’t home? And then I tried to take the tiger mask off and realized it was stuck on my bloody stupid head?
‘Oh shit,’ I muttered, trying to work my fingers into the opening around the neck, tugging and pulling and twisting and wiggling. It was no good, the thing was stuck on, the fur matting against my skin, and the more I struggled, the tighter it seemed to squeeze.
‘You’re not going to pass out in a tiger mask,’ I told myself sternly, desperately trying not to panic even as the mask got tighter and the world outside got darker and my breathing became more and more erratic. Abandoning the safety of Patrick’s front step, I walked back out onto the street, searching for help, but of course there was no one around. I’d have taken any kind of human contact, even the youths my nana was so worried about, anyone who had the strength to yank this bloody thing off my head. And then, I saw them at the end of the road, two men walking towards me. Just as I was about to shout out for help, one of the two men came into focus. One of the two men was Patrick.
It really didn’t matter who the second man was, I knew, with every fibre of my being, that Patrick would not feel like introducing me to a friend, colleague or family member while I was wearing a giant tiger’s head. I had two options: I could run in the other direction even though I couldn’t see very well, end up on the main road, get run over and find myself on the six o’clock news as ‘Local Mad Woman Wearing Tiger Mask Causes Ten-Car Pile-Up’. Or, I could hide in his garden. I opted for the latter.
The garden was sparse in the middle, just a small patch of lawn, lined by tall privet hedges. Without any other options, I clambered up onto his wheelie bin, trying to hoist myself over the locked gate and into the neighbour’s yard before I could be caught. It was only once I was halfway over the gate, the sharp wooden slats cutting into my soft middle, I realized I was stuck. Hanging in midair, my legs kicking the air in Patrick’s garden, my tiger head and human arms flailing wildly in the neighbour’s garden.
‘What the hell …’
Shit. It was Patrick.
‘It’s a burglar, call the police.’ I heard another man’s voice behind me, tense but assertive. ‘You’re stuck now, son. Nowhere for you to go.’
I squirmed, sweaty and sore and utterly humiliated.
‘Get down,’ Patrick ordered. ‘Get down and fuck off and I won’t call the police.’
‘I would if I could,’ I yelled from the other side of the fence, kicking wildly.
‘Probably on drugs,’ the second voice stated. ‘He’s probably on the cocaine or the crack.’
If only, I thought to myself as I heard someone approaching my rear end and watched a hand slide around the wooden door and unhook the latch from the other side. The gate opened, the hinges squealing as I slowly swung backwards until I was face to tiger face with Patrick.
‘Blow me!’ the other man gasped before raising his voice in my direction as the gate began to swing back and forth, the hinges squeaking loudly in protest at the extra weight. ‘Don’t you bloody well move, I’ve got a club in my bag and I’ll knock you out as soon as look at you!’
‘Ros?’ Patrick said, staring up at me as the swinging gate slowed to a steady stop. ‘Is that you?’
‘No,’ I replied in a voice thick with tears brought on by embarrassment and the fact I had several sharp wooden slats stabbing me in the guts.
‘Then why have you got “RR” monogrammed on your backpack?’
‘Because I’m Robert Redford,’ I choked. Every part of me was in pain. ‘I wear this mask when I’m in London so I can walk around without being bothered by my fans.’
‘Ros. Get down.’
‘I can’t,’ I whimpered as the gate swung to a stop and I finally caught sight of Patrick’s face. He did not look nearly as amused as I’d hoped he might. ‘I’m stuck.’
Without another word, I felt him grab my legs and tug as I tried to lift myself up and over the gate,
only succeeding in tearing my T-shirt and scratching my stomach as I went.
‘Take the bloody mask off,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘I can’t,’ I said again as my feet touched the floor, quickly followed by my bottom as I crumpled to the ground. ‘It’s stuck.’
Patrick reached over and took hold of the tiger’s head, yanking it roughly over my head and dropping it into my lap. I rubbed my ears and opened and closed my mouth, stretching my jaw. I was a sweaty mess, mascara and eyeliner everywhere, jeans and T-shirt torn and three deep scratches along my stomach. In my lap, I saw a big bloody smudge across the tiger’s face. I looked up to see a silhouette of Patrick, features obscured by the bright sun shining behind him.
‘Julian, this is my … friend, Ros,’ he said, gesturing at me by way of explanation. I raised a hand at the older man who was now standing by the front door, and gave him a charming wave. ‘Why don’t you wait inside, I’ll just be a moment.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Julian replied, never once taking his eyes off me as Patrick unlocked the front door. ‘Is she … well?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he answered. The older man paused on the doorstep for just a moment, taking in the whole scene, and then disappeared inside, shaking his head.
‘What are you doing, you absolute lunatic?’ Patrick asked, once the door was firmly closed.
‘Surprise?’ I offered, slowly raising my hands and attempting a smile.
He did not smile back.
‘Did you hit your head or have you gone mad?’
I crossed my legs where I sat, wondering if perhaps I had. That would be a relief.
‘That was my publisher,’ he went on. ‘He’s here to talk about my book but now all he’s going to be thinking about is the time he was attacked by a mad woman in a tiger mask. Is that the kind of thing you’d want people to think about when they thought of you?’