‘The pepper?’ Freya says.
‘Come on,’ Celine says. ‘I’m really asking.’
Freya and I look at each other. Celine and Adam fight all the time, but Celine’s never asked our opinion before.
‘I think it’s hard for a lot of people,’ I say, tentatively.
‘Is it hard for you?’ She stares at me and I realise how tired she looks. She’s got grey smudges under her eyes and her skin looks almost translucent.
‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I say. ‘I haven’t had one for… a while.’
‘I know, but, I mean, in the past. Has it been hard? Did you fight?’
I shake my head. ‘I, um, no? Not really. But only because I’ve never really had a proper relationship. I’ve never really lived with anyone or even…’ I drink some of my beer, but my chest feels tight. I don’t really want to talk about this.
Celine frowns. ‘What about you?’ she asks Freya.
‘I don’t know,’ Freya says. ‘I think it’s different with girls? Or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. But I like the fighting and the fucking, you know? I like a passionate relationship.’
Celine smiles for the first time since she came home. ‘We do enjoy making up, it’s true.’
‘Sometimes repeatedly,’ Freya says, holding the spoon out towards Celine. ‘Taste this.’
Celine takes some food off the spoon. ‘That is really good.’
‘Don’t put it back in the—’ I start to say, but the spoon’s back in the pan before I can even finish.
‘Celine hasn’t got any germs, have you?’ Freya says. ‘She’s perfect and pristine. I’d be honoured to have a bit of her spit in my dinner.’
‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘You’re the worst.’
‘I’m taking my perfect, pristine self for a shower,’ Celine says, putting her beer down on the table. ‘If Adam comes back, tell him I’ve left him and see what he says.’
* * *
‘There’s a new guy at work,’ Freya tells me, once Celine’s gone. ‘And he is right up your alley.’
‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘No thanks.’
Freya turns from the stove and just stares at me, her eyes narrowing, until I say, ‘God. What?’
‘He’s a writer—’
‘He works with you? So he’s actually a teacher.’
She shrugs. ‘You can be both. He’s published.’
Against my better judgement, this actually intrigues me. ‘What has he published?’
‘A novel. For children. Something to do with video games? And I think he said weasels? But the bell went, so I might have got that wrong. He said it was Book of the Month in Waterstones. Or Smith’s. He’s writing the sequel now. Anyway, he’s cute. And he reads. He was reading at lunch.’
‘A novel?’
She nods. ‘By David Nicholls. But not the film one.’
‘Us? Starter for Ten?’
‘Dunno. I only noticed the name. But he basically writes romance, right? For boys?’
I nod.
‘So!’
‘So what?’
‘He’s single, I checked.’
‘You’re suggesting I go out with a man just because you saw him reading a boy romance?’
‘And he writes!’
‘Yeah, I’m going to need more than that.’
‘Right,’ Freya says. ‘And that’s exactly your problem.’
‘What’s my problem?’
‘You’re too fussy.’ She turns her back on me while she lifts lids off pans and stirs stuff.
‘I don’t think I’m fussy!’ I say, pausing to drink some of my beer. We’ve had this conversation before, albeit not for a while.
Freya snorts. ‘Oh please. You wouldn’t go out with Neil because he said “fillum”.’
‘It wasn’t “fillum”, it was “chimley”. And that wasn’t the reason. I saw him picking his nose with his glasses.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she says, replacing the lids and turning round to look at me. ‘He does that. But, you know, everyone’s got bad habits, you just have to beat them out of them.’
I sigh, heavily.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘And you’re kidding yourself.’
‘What?’ I pick at the label on my lager.
‘Dream Man is only perfect because he doesn’t exist. If he did and you ever actually met him, you’d learn that he has skiddy pants and picks his feet and doesn’t know which is Khloé and which is Kourtney—’
‘I don’t know which is Khloé and which is Kourtney.’
‘Seriously? Khloé’s really tall and—’
‘And I don’t care,’ I interrupt.
Freya pulls a face. ‘You know Kim, right? That’s the most important thing. Actually, did you see the thing about…’
She starts telling me something she read about Kim Kardashian’s new baby – or that she’s going to have another baby, I’m not sure – and I congratulate myself on a successful subject change. It’s not usually quite that easy to shift Freya’s focus. Particularly when it comes to my lack of love life.
* * *
After dinner – we had to turn up the music in the kitchen to drown out Adam and Celine’s shouting while we ate Freya’s corned beef hash – I go to my room and read one of the new romance novels from the delivery today until my eyes are closing and I’m reading the same line over and over. I take a break to download the sample of the latest David Nicholls (I’ve read One Day, but nothing else) and then switch off my light. It’s not even ten o’clock.
I’m almost asleep when I hear low moaning coming from downstairs. I groan and roll over, pressing my face into my pillow. Great. No chance of me getting to sleep for a while yet then.
‘Oh god, yes. There. There. Yes.’
I bang my head on my pillow.
‘No! There!’ Celine shouts. ‘Not there. No. No! There!’
Celine lets out a low moan and I clamp my hands over my ears and try to do what I’ve done to help me get to sleep for years now: tell myself a story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve daydreamed before going to sleep. I’m not a big daydreamer during the day, but I always like to have a little story to tell myself when I get into bed. I think I can even remember the very first one. We were on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a static caravan that belonged to someone Dad knew from the pub. We went out on a boat trip around the bay and the guy who owned the boat was really cute. I remember Dad teasing me about how smitten I was and I got annoyed ’cos I was embarrassed. But then in bed that night, I told myself a story about being out on the boat again, but just me. And the guy had fallen overboard and I’d had to leap in to save him. And that was it. I’m not even sure there was any kissing. Just that he needed help and I saved him and it felt good.
‘Shit! Ow, no. That’s my hair. You’re on my hair!’
As I got older, the dreams definitely started to include kissing. And sometimes more, but usually not because the set-up was so involved that I fell asleep before I got to any sex business. The dreams almost always involved a celebrity or a character from a TV show or film. After watching Friday Night Lights, Tim Riggins kept me busy for months. Sometimes I’d get something wrong in the set-up – dream me would say something real me would never say, or someone else would do something annoying or out of character – and I’d have to go back to the beginning. Over the years, I’ve come up with a series of concepts that always work, no matter who the leading man is: sitting next to a stranger on a plane who turns out to be someone super hot. Or trapped in a lift. Or on holiday on a tropical island where the super hot guy just happens to be on holiday alone, recovering from heartbreak. They’re all flexible, all reliable. I don’t know if anyone else does this. I hope so. I’ve no idea how anyone gets to sleep otherwise.
‘Oh yeah,’ Adam groans. ‘Go on. Go on! Go on!’ He sounds like he’s encouraging a horse.
But once I started having the park dream – the recurring dream I’ve been having for ten years now – that was the thing I though
t about before bed the most often. I would relive the actual dream and then embellish it a little. We’d have a picnic. Or we’d be kissing on the bench. Or I’d be in the park waiting for him and would see him in the distance and know he was coming to meet me. Or he’d be on the bench alone and I’d be late and watch him for a while, knowing he was waiting for me, knowing how happy he’d be when I got there, knowing we were in love and happy together. Once I pictured us arriving at the same time at opposite sides of the park and running to meet each other, but that one was too cheesy even for me.
Adam is making a high-pitched squeaking noise, so I scrunch my eyes up and try to focus on the park dream. I’m in the park… And he’s on a bench…
‘Oh fuck!’ Celine shouts. ‘Oh shit!’
‘Get in!’ Adam shouts.
And then they’re both mercifully quiet. I think about the park dream and slide one hand down between my legs.
Chapter Three
I’m in the park.
The sun is shining and he’s walking towards me along the path, looking over at the row of shops opposite. A bus passes, an advert for a Reese Witherspoon romcom on the side, and he glances back over his shoulder.
He still hasn’t looked at me, but I know that he’ll be happy when he sees me. I want to run over to him, but I make myself wait.
He turns away from the shops and sits on a bench, his long legs – in black jeans – stretched out in front of him – and tips his head back, turning his face up to the sun. And I walk towards him…
* * *
And then I wake up. As I always do. As I always have. Every single time I’ve had this exact same dream for the past ten years. Occasionally one of the details changes. Once he left the park and crossed the road and went into a shop that’s not actually there. He looked at the sandwiches. I followed him. But I still didn’t approach him or speak to him.
Once a squirrel ran up to the bench and he reached down and gave it a nut. Why he’d be carrying nuts I don’t know.
Another time I got almost right up to the bench – so close I could see his face. Except I couldn’t see it, the sun was too bright and it dazzled me. I cried when I woke up from that one.
But last night’s was the basic, standard dream I’ve been having all these years. The one I think of as the main story – squirrels and sandwiches are sort of like DVD extras, nice to know but not actually essential to your enjoyment of the plot. He is the main story. The man of my dreams.
* * *
‘You know that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Sally tells Harry about her recurring sex dream?’ Freya says, as she slides a coffee across the dining table towards me.
‘Yep.’
‘And she says that a faceless man rips off her clothes? And Harry thinks it’s really dull?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your dream’s way worse than that.’
I roll my eyes as Freya grins at me. Freya thinks my dream is boring and pointless. She can’t believe I’ve been having the same, according to her, ‘dull as fuck’ dream for ten years. And I can’t make her understand that it’s not what happens in the dream that’s important – because I agree it’s not that exciting – but the way it makes me feel.
‘Wanna hear my dream?’ Freya asks. She drinks some of her own coffee and then gets up and opens the fridge. She takes a packed lunch to work every day.
‘Not really.’
She ignores me. Of course.
‘I dreamt I was on a jet-ski and Gina Rodriguez was waving to me from a yacht. I drove up to the yacht and a door opened in the side and a wave, like, swooped me into the yacht and when I got up on deck Gina was waiting for me. In a bikini.’
‘That’s the gayest dream you’ve ever had.’
She grins at me over her shoulder. ‘Not even. It was a good one though. But you know what, if I’d been having that dream for ten years I still wouldn’t be happy. Not unless it progressed. Not unless I got her out of her bikini. Or, like, Beyoncé turned up or something. The same boring ass dream over and over again?’ She flicks her hand.
‘I don’t find it boring though, that’s the point. It’s comforting.’
‘What’s comforting?’ Henry says as he walks in.
Me and Freya are still in our night clothes. I’m wearing proper button-up pyjamas with clouds on them. Freya’s in knickers and a vest. Henry always gets fully dressed before he comes out of his room. I’ve seen him in hoodies and trackies, but never in whatever he wears at night.
‘Bea’s boring dream, apparently,’ Freya tells him.
‘Put something on, will you?’ he says, as he always does. ‘Puts me off my breakfast.’
‘Stop oppressing me,’ Freya replies, bending down to get Tupperware out of the cupboard.
Henry turns away so fast I’m surprised he doesn’t hurt himself. When he looks at me, his cheeks are pink. Freya totally does it on purpose.
‘You had the dream again?’ he asks me.
I nod over the top of my mug.
‘I was telling her that her obsession would be more understandable if the dream progressed,’ Freya says, pulling a packet of Frazzles out of the cupboard. ‘If, like, she straddled him on the bench or something.’
‘And I was saying I find the repetition comforting,’ I say. ‘Like how you can watch a favourite film over and over and love it just as much.’
‘Like Inception,’ Henry says.
‘Yes. Except I haven’t seen Inception.’
Henry shakes his head. He’s appalled at my lack of interest in Christopher Nolan films.
‘But like Pretty Woman. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched it. I know exactly what’s going to happen. But if it’s on TV, I have to watch it. No question. And I don’t have to worry it’s going to have a sad ending or a horrible ending, I know it all works out.’
‘And they all lived anti-feministly ever after,’ Freya says.
‘It’s not anti-feminist,’ I argue, pushing my chair back from the table. I need to go and have a shower. ‘They rescue each other.’
Freya blows a raspberry.
* * *
In the shower, I think about what Freya said. I know she thinks I’m ridiculous for obsessing over the dream. But I’ve been having it for ten years for a reason. I’ve never had any other recurring dreams. I dream a lot, but I’ve never had another dream that feels as real as this one. So I don’t care that Freya thinks it’s boring or that I’m ridiculous for believing it will come true, because it has to. Otherwise what’s the point?
Chapter Four
‘We’re out of milk,’ Henry calls from the kitchen in the shop.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I mutter, before I remember that we used the last of it yesterday and I said I’d pick some up this morning on the way in and then totally forgot.
‘I’ll go out in a bit,’ I call back and carry on scrolling the intranet for price and promotion changes. If I don’t do that first thing it doesn’t get done and it’s one of the main things head office get worked up about. Once that’s done, and I’ve checked the bags, till roll and tidied the bookmarks, I tell Henry I’m popping out.
‘Will you be all right on your own?’ I call from the door.
‘I think I’ll manage,’ he says, without looking up from the Neil Gaiman novel he’s reading from stock.
* * *
The weather’s much nicer than yesterday – the sun’s shining in a half-hearted, watery way that always makes me feel weirdly positive. I’m not sure if I have some associated memory (that I can’t actually remember), but this weather makes me feel like I can do anything. But I can’t really. All I can do is buy milk and take it back to the shop. At least I can make a tea for me and Henry – that I can do.
And there’s something else I can do. I can go to Tesco. We love the Greek grocer’s, but Tesco is much cheaper and we have been told to keep an eye on petty cash. And that way I can go through the park. If Henry looks out of the shop window, he’ll wonder where I’m going
, but I trust he’s engrossed enough in his book not to notice. Plus the glass is covered in brightly coloured promo stickers so it doesn’t exactly give the best view.
I walk over the zebra crossing towards the cinema and then I keep going. There’s something about London in the sun. Particularly this bit of London. It’s so unchanged – if it wasn’t for the cars and the signs and the bus stops and the dustbins, it could be a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred.
I keep walking until I’m almost at the square and I tell myself I’ll just have five minutes there and then I’ll get the milk – and maybe some biscuits or pastries. Henry loves a chocolate twist. I open the gate and step into the gardens. Someone is sitting on the bench on the left, but as I get closer I see it’s an old woman, a small dog in a bag at her feet. It’s not the right bench anyway. I keep walking. I walk all around the path, trying not to look directly at the bench, but I can’t really help it – my gaze just drifts there automatically now.
I’m almost back at the gate when I get that weird déjà vu feeling. I’m used to it, it happens quite often, but this time it’s such a strong sensation that it actually makes me feel a bit dizzy. It feels like the ground is tilting underneath me and I wonder if I might be about to faint. That would be embarrassing. I reach out and steady myself against a tree. The feeling of the bark under my hand – rough and dry but also mossy – is familiar too. I know the next thing I need to do is to turn around. I would always look back when I get to the gate anyway, but I need to turn around now. I turn. And there he is.
He’s sitting on the right bench, halfway down the side where I just walked. He must have been behind me because he definitely wasn’t there when I passed. Everything about him is exactly as I expected it to be: black boots, jeans, a black T-shirt and a black pea coat, rectangular black glasses. His dark hair is swept back from his forehead and his face is turned up to the sun. I lean against the tree and stare at him. I know he doesn’t look over because I’ve seen this before. I know I can just watch him, that he’ll sit there, head back, eyes closed, legs crossed at the ankle.
It Had To Be You: An absolutely laugh-out-loud romance novel Page 2