Adults

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  I take photos of my coffee cup from various angles until it looks best. This courtesy phone isn’t going to win any awards for its camera, but its saving grace is that it isn’t at the bottom of the Thames. It was an interesting chat with the insurance company at the phone store. I said I’d been on a riverboat that unexpectedly swerved. Kelly takes a long time to reply – I watch the grey blobs rippling with promise – and then:

  Want to meet at lunch?

  Okay

  ‘’Sup, gingerest of whingers?’ I jump. It’s Mia. She’s wearing a dress that’s like a huge red arrow, pointing downwards. I put down my phone. ‘A word!’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Something special!’

  I pick up my phone and follow her into her office. Something special? Sounds ominous. This way, turkeys, it’s time for your special Christmas surprise! The main space falls silent around us. Fingers stop tapping keys. Eyeballs stop squeaking from side to side. I sense an imminent axe-fall.

  Mia closes her office door. Simone is under the desk, chewing a toy shaped like an iPad.

  ‘So,’ Mia says. ‘Regrettably [truly, you’ve never seen someone demonstrate so little regret] I must inform you we’re having a maje redesign, and I’m afraid “Intense Modern Woman” isn’t going to make the cut for the new-look Foof.’

  I stare at her. I think about my bank account, plummeting as it is into red below the red. I am probably going to debtors’ prison (does debtors’ prison still exist?). I am almost desperate. Scratch that: I’m desperate. I am Full Desperate.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I know they’ve been a bit vanilla the past few weeks, but I can go full rum and raisin again if you’ll just give me one more chance. Just give me another month to turn this around and prove to you I have got what it takes.’

  … to be your apprentice, Lord Sugar.

  … to be on your team, will.i.am.

  Mia shakes her head. ‘You can work out the week, but then it’s sayonara at the Monocle. We’re having leaving drinks for you! It’s all arranged.’

  ‘Oh Christ, please don’t publicise this,’ I say. ‘Give me that at least. Give me my dignity.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. People move on. Be empowered by this transition.’

  I leave Mia’s office and go to a soundproofed booth for a cry. And a look at my phone. For a few hours. Well, what’s the point in anything else any more? I post a picture of my hand doing a thumbs up in the empty booth, with the caption:

  GREAT TO GET SOME DOWNTIME IN A PEACEFUL SPOT BEFORE THE BLITZKRIEG OF THE DAY #BUSYBUSYBUSY #SENDCOFFEE

  And then I put my head on the desk and cry until I am a veritable husk.

  MISERABLE PHO

  I meet Kelly in the Noodle Hovel for lunch. When she arrives I stand up and hug her. She stiffens slightly. She orders a beer and I order kombucha. We sit opposite each other and look at the food menu. I do not want any food.

  ‘What you need to understand is that I am under siege right now, Kelly,’ I say, quietly and emotionally. ‘I was blindsided in the street. I was not in control of my actions.’

  She looks at me from under her fringe.

  I add: ‘I also got fired today.’

  ‘What? How come?’

  ‘Presumably because I’ve not got a famous boyfriend any more.’

  ‘I think that’s being slightly paranoid. Are you sure you’re not just—’

  ‘Mia’s always had the cultural hots for Art. And now my stock’s gone down. I can feel it.’

  Kelly swigs her beer. ‘Fucking Foof Towers. Fuck. Off. S’all bullshit anyway.’

  ‘Shh,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re being quite loud.’

  ‘I’m just sticking up for you.’

  ‘But still, you never know who’s listening.’

  She looks at me the way she’s been looking at me since I walked in – like she’s trying to see where my face is attached to my head or my hair is attached to my head, or something.

  ‘Yes!’ I say loudly, as though I am replying to something else she has said – something else that is a fun brand of conversation, for anyone who might be able to hear or see us.

  Kelly shakes her head and takes another swig of beer. ‘So you left a fourteen-year-old in the street at night.’

  ‘He’s a big boy!’

  ‘He’s fourteen.’

  ‘He can take care of himself!’

  ‘But I asked you to take care of him. And you left him. Because your ex is seeing someone new. That’s your priority.’

  There is a waiter beside us. ‘Are you ready to order?’ he says.

  I shake my head. ‘The Art thing is not even the worst thing I’m contending with,’ I say.

  ‘Actually,’ says Kelly, ‘I only have forty-five minutes, so can we order soon?’

  ‘Please could you give us just a few minutes?’ I say to the waiter. He nods and walks away.

  ‘I can’t think about food while I’m telling you about this. I’m not even hungry.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kelly says.

  ‘He’s seeing Suzy Brambles,’ I say, giving this sentence the delivery it deserves.

  ‘Suzy … Brambles?’

  ‘Don’t say her n-name.’

  ‘Is that a real person?’

  ‘As real as the real on my face.’

  ‘Well, it’s never nice to find out about these things,’ says Kelly, and now she does talk quietly. I am relieved but also slightly unsettled by the sound of her voice. Still, she doesn’t know the whole story, so I fill her in. I tell her about the arm picture, the comment, the likes, the messages, the fact Suzy unfollowed me after clearly using me to find Art. We have to tell the waiter to go away again twice.

  Kelly looks at her watch and smiles at me in a way she’s never smiled at me before, like someone who’s about to tell me I haven’t got the job might smile at me, a nice person with bad news. It isn’t the way you expect a friend to react to this crushing tale of woe.

  ‘What do you think I should do?’ I say.

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t really care about the job, I can get another job, but the humiliation of Art and Suzy – I just can’t begin to process it.’

  ‘Well, it is annoying.’

  ‘Annoying?’

  My own voice rises then and Kelly’s eyes fill with tears. FINALLY, the appropriate response! I hate to see her cry but I’m also glad she’s crying. We can cry together about this. For weeks. Months!

  She stops crying and wipes her eyes dry. I await her succour.

  Eventually, she speaks. ‘Look, Jenny, I know you’re having a hard time. And I wanted to meet you to talk about it. But we’ve been together almost an hour and you haven’t asked me one question about me. Not one. You haven’t apologised for leaving my teenage son alone on the street. I thought I could trust you. You cannot be trusted.’

  I halt my inner celebration. ‘Er, I’m the one with the catastrophe right now, Kelly.’

  She nods and looks at her beer bottle. ‘So I guess I should tell you that Paul sent Sonny a message via his mum’s Facebook and Sonny got all excited and replied and now he’s just ghosting him again, and I could fucking kick myself for not monitoring it all more closely. And it looks like Esther is going to sell the house soon because her kids are pressuring her to, and there’s no way I’ll be able to find anywhere in London as cheap so I’m looking at where else in the UK to live.’

  ‘Don’t even talk to me about money! No one could be more worried about money than me right now.’

  Kelly slams her beer bottle down. I jump.

  ‘You own your own house!’

  ‘Which I can’t afford any more!’

  ‘You have A NICE LIFE with few responsibilities. You need to grow up and take responsibility for things.’

  I whisper-hiss: ‘Don’t you dare “as a mother” me! I have a mortgage! That’s as bad as a child!’

  ‘So sell it and live somewhere cheaper. You have op
tions. My tax credits are fucked. I’ll be uprooting Sonny while he’s doing his GCSEs. I might not get another job I like as much that’s also flexible around school hours.’

  ‘He won’t even be at school for that much longer. He’s practically an adult. Time he started fending for himself, in all honesty.’

  Kelly sits mouth-breathing for a moment. It’s not a good look, even for her. Then she says, calmly, almost gently: ‘Jenny, can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course. Ask me anything you want. I have many more details to share.’

  Kelly moves her head almost imperceptibly to the side and back again. She says: ‘Do you think we would be friends if that day hadn’t happened, with Sonny on the dual carriageway?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve just been thinking a lot about our friendship and how it occurred.’

  ‘I’ve been a little nostalgic—’

  ‘No, I don’t mean nostalgic. I mean re-evaluative, if that’s even a word. Have you not, too? It all feels like it’s been a bit of a blur until now, but I’m slowing down and taking stock.’ She flicks the loose edge of the label on her beer bottle with her nail. ‘Have you never thought that day on the dual carriageway forced us to be friends?’

  ‘Forced us?’

  ‘You know how you’re friends with people at school because you’re in the same class? You’re sort of institutionalised. What even makes you make friends with someone when you’re older? Would we have found each other naturally? Would we have forged a friendship, naturally?’

  ‘Probably.’ A cupboard opens in my mind and I see that day, by the dual carriageway. Then my heart beats and the cupboard slams shut. ‘Do you think she’s better than me because she’s younger? Do you think that’s why he’s gone for her? I always saw him with an older woman, but he’s got a surreptitious agenda – I know it, even if he doesn’t.’

  Kelly looks at me sadly.

  ‘I love you for a whole variety of reasons, Jenny.’

  I swell at this.

  ‘And I think some of them have run out.’

  I shrink.

  ‘You haven’t always been this fragile maniac. You used to run at things. You used to have everything you needed. You used to not look back. I don’t know whether you noticed – to be honest I don’t know what you notice any more, other than the way you come across to certain strangers – but I don’t have many friends. You’re one of a handful of people I can really talk to. Could really talk to. All I see of you now is this phony self-promoting person who I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, they do say that the people you know the best are the people you end up hating the most on social media. You see through the façade. Otherwise you just think, oh there’s that fabulous person having a glorious time.’

  ‘Stop with the theories! You’re wasting time caring about all this superficial shit while the world goes to Hell in a handcart. Babies are in cages on the Mexican border. Someone I went to school with just set up a food bank in my hometown.’

  ‘I am very aware of reality. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘You’re a fucking child! I have empathy fatigue where you’re concerned. And I’m not even sure it’s just – well. Maybe we’re done. Maybe we’re just done. Now. At this point.’ She nods to the waiter.

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  She shrugs.

  The waiter starts heading over. ‘Are you ready to order?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think so, almost.’

  Kelly puts a five-pound note and two pound coins on the table. She gets up.

  ‘I meant what I said about the way we met,’ she says. ‘Because right now, I don’t think I actually like you. That’s the honest truth, Jenny. I don’t like you. We’ve never had a friendship. We had a romance begun by a meet not-so-cute.’

  She walks out. I stare at my kombucha. I suddenly remember people might be looking at me. I take a picture of the kombucha.

  To all the ferments I’ve loved before

  I post it as I pay the bill.

  BREATHING FOR ONE

  Towards the very end, Art started refusing to do social engagements as a couple. He started cancelling his attendance at birthdays, weddings, drinks, everything. I was busy with my own preoccupations. I couldn’t bring myself to wear anything I’d worn while I was pregnant and charity-shopped most of my cardigans and jeans. I couldn’t even bear to wear the same perfumes, so they got shoved in the charity bags, too, even though I wasn’t sure whether an opened bottle of perfume was sellable or would be classed as tampered with. I thought I might be being superstitious – feeling like those garments were somehow cursed, or would bring back bad memories. But the truth was, I was tampered with. I felt like a different woman. Nothing fitted me or suited me from my previous life. I was less fleshly. More insect. I had eyes and ears in strange places.

  At Sonny’s birthday party – a big one, his thirteenth – Art made his excuses ten minutes before we were due to leave the house. I passed them on to Kelly and Sonny. I was the go-between. The middle-woman. The PA to his flakiness.

  Sonny said: ‘He can’t be bothered with us any more, can he?’

  Kelly said: ‘Not that he ever really could.’

  I had a row with Art about it when I got back. I told him what Kelly and Sonny had said.

  ‘I’m not playing happy families on your terms, is that it?’ he said. ‘I’ve been there plenty of times. I’ve ummed and I’ve ahhed in all the right places. Give me a break.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You were really playing the part for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you appreciate that.’

  ‘Are we a family, Art? Is that what we are?’

  ‘I feel like you’re about to trap me with this question. It’s a trick, isn’t it?’

  ‘Because you’re never here. You’re always out.’

  ‘YOU’RE always out,’ he said, banging his head with his hand. ‘The lights are on but no one’s home.’

  He was wrong about that. Sometimes I closed my eyes at night and it was like there was a light still on at the back of my eyes.

  POPULAR PROBLEMS

  On the Tube home I listen to Leonard Cohen. Listening to Leonard Cohen makes me feel as though as long as I can be wry and observant about the world then everything will be okay.

  An email arrives, from Mia.

  Yo! Are you not coming back after lunch? What about your leaving drinks tonight?? We have a hashtag #JENNYSDEFOOFING

  MIA

  I don’t reply. It takes a lot for a person like me not to reply, but I don’t. Instead I text Nicolette.

  Fancy a drink later? Lots to tell you. X

  Yes

  I have news too

  X.

  Good Christ, could everyone stop with the news? I’m all news’d out.

  Then I think:

  Is she pregnant?

  WHY DOES MY BRAIN INSTANTLY THINK THAT? FUCKING BRAIN. Why is this the automatic news-related question – the, Say it brain, say it, you’ve said everything else – the worst news-related question. The question that makes my heart feel full of soot.

  What? X

  Tell you later! X

  I text Nicolette a time and a pub and then I put on ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ by The Pretenders and slide into a fantasy where I walk into a sunny café where the song is playing and my mother and Art and Kelly and Suzy are all there and I’m all, Oh hi, I just got back from this brilliant trip where I won the equivalent of an Oscar for journalism, and they all stand up and hug me and clap and we end up having a celebratory brunch together and it is ASTONISHING and inspiring how cool I am with everyone about everything.

  A man comes through the carriage with a worried look on his face. I pull off my headphones and sit up.

  ‘Has anyone lost a black rucksack?’ he says.

  We all sit up.

  ‘Black rucksack? Anyone?’

  I look back down the carriage. Now, I want eye contact. I want reassurance. W
e all do. How far away is this rucksack? Has anyone looked inside it? Will we throw it off at the next station? Could we not just throw it off now?

  Two more people come through the carriage, the same look on their faces. Plain-clothes traffic police? Plain-clothes Tube workers?

  There is an announcement over the tannoy: ‘Can the cleaner report to receive a message. I repeat, can the cleaner report to receive a message.’

  It’s obviously code.

  ‘It’s code!’ I say. People nod at me, thanking me for my insight. They are glad to be on a train with me, hurtling towards death.

  Then nothing happens. The black rucksack isn’t followed up.

  When I get to my stop, part of me wonders whether I died an hour or so ago; whether the train exploded. And everything since has been some kind of dead-brain dream. I have thought this periodically throughout my life – mostly when I’ve been on public transport.

  I should probably stick to cabs.

  It starts to rain, so I wait for a bus at the bus stop. I’m just wondering how to document this – how to make it more exceptional, more meaningful, more like an actual moment in life, when my phone pings with an email and—

  You know when you just know?

  Hi.

  Hi.

  How are you?

  Peachy.

  I’m sorry you had to find out like that. It can’t have been very nice.

  Thank you for understanding. And being patronising. I appreciate it.

  Can we please talk on the phone?

  No. We barely did when we were together so what’s the point in starting now?

  To acknowledge our new relationship as friends.

  Right-oh. So I suppose Suzanne knows we fucked last month?

  I thought we were going to be cool about that?

  People change their minds, Art. Often in the most inconvenient ways.

  I just wish we could draw a line under the negativity and move on. I want you to meet Suzanne. I think you will like her. She’s very kind.

  Are you trying to make me feel better or worse, telling me that? Is her kindness testament to your goodness, or is it indicative of my future pleasure in her company?

  Haha. I still like how you talk, Jenny.