Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  Early the next morning, Graysen has to go to work. He kisses me, says goodbye and leaves a peach pastry on the bedside table. That’s the last time we ever see each other.

  I will spend the following five years constantly wondering if Graysen was just an actor looking for a gullible audience and an escape from himself for a night. If it was all made up: the palm reading, the hotel, the fish, the eyeliner.

  Then years and years later, I will fall for a biology PhD student who will become the great love of my life. One Sunday night I will be lying on his bed in his jumper and he will get out a book to read before we sleep about a man who discovered a fish. I will grab it off him and look at the inside cover to see a photograph of a man with the same face and surname as Graysen. The boyfriend will ask why I am laughing. ‘Because it was all real,’ I will say. ‘And it was so ridiculous.’

  The Bad Party Chronicles: Cobham, New Year’s Eve, 2007

  ‘There must be something happening,’ I say to Farly as we watch our thirteenth episode of Friends while slumped across the sofa at my mum’s house at five p.m. on New Year’s Eve. ‘We’re nineteen years old, we have to be able to find a party somewhere.’ I send a seemingly personal message out to everyone in my phone book. Our friend Dan suggests a warehouse rave in Hackney, but Farly is scared of groups of people taking drugs and has never been further east than Liverpool Street.

  Just as we’re losing hope, someone bites. Felix – a friend from school who was in the year below me, who I’ve always had a gigantic crush on. He speaks of a ‘massive rave in Cobham’ and tells me it’s not one I want to miss. He asks me to bring female friends. Farly agrees to go as it’s our only option and she knows how much I fancy Felix. She’s taking one for the team, being my wing woman – going to the party for the greater good of my vagina. It’s a mutual, fair and successful system of turn-taking which we’ve long used, having always both been single – I sacrifice my night to help her pursue a boy, I bank this act of goodwill and can cash it in at any point to have her do the same for me. It’s shagging democracy. It’s swings and roundabouts.

  We arrive at the large detached house in Surrey, the Footballers’ Wives belt, to find very much not a rave, but instead a sort of sedentary oven-pizza party made up of ten intertwined couples and one burly bloke in a rugby shirt who is playing with the family Labrador.

  ‘Hello!’ I say tentatively. ‘Is Felix here?’

  ‘He’s gone to the shop to get vodka,’ the monotone rugby player replies, not looking up from the dog.

  ‘Weren’t you in the year above us at school?’ a horsey-faced girl with corkscrew curls asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, gingerly helping myself to a square of pepperoni.

  ‘Were none of your friends free tonight?’

  Felix appears with a clanking carrier bag.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouts, outstretching his arms for a hug.

  ‘Hi!’ I say, giving him a hug. ‘This is Farly. Everyone here is in a couple?’ I mutter out of the side of my mouth.

  ‘Yeah,’ Felix says. ‘We were expecting a more diverse crowd, but loads of people who said they were going to come haven’t come.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll have fun, though!’ he says, putting his arms round both of us. ‘Three musketeers.’

  The next few hours pass with a chummy, drunken ease; enough to make me think that the long road to Cobham may have been worth it. Felix, Farly and I go to the conservatory and play drinking games and we chat and laugh; at one point he puts his arms round me and Farly and I exchange the briefest half-smile and flicker of eye contact with her. Enough to make her go take a fake phone call upstairs to leave us alone. I couldn’t have loved her more.

  ‘Can I talk to you somewhere quiet?’ he asks.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, smiling. He takes my hand in his and walks me out to the garden.

  ‘This is awkward,’ he says as I sit on a plastic chair and he hops from foot to foot.

  ‘Why? Just say it.’

  ‘I really fancy your mate Farly,’ he says. ‘Is she single?’ In a nanosecond, I weigh up how much of a good person I am.

  ‘No,’ I reply, deciding I’ve got plenty of time left in life for personal growth. ‘No, she’s not single.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Is she in a relationship?’

  ‘Yes, a very serious one,’ I say gravely, nodding. ‘With a boy called Dave.’

  ‘But she was making out in conversation like she was single?’

  ‘Well, they’re not together any more officially,’ I ad-lib. ‘But they’re still kind of a thing. It’s very full-on. She’s on the phone to him right now, in fact. You know how it can be at New Year. Thinking of all your regrets and the things left unsaid and so on and so forth. Anyway, she’s definitely not ready to move on with anyone.’

  Farly returns to the table bouncily, bottle of wine in hand. A deflated Felix excuses himself to go to the loo.

  ‘Did you snog him?’ she asks excitedly. ‘Was I interrupting?’

  ‘No, he fancies you and he’s asked if you’re single and I’ve said no because I’m a bad person and I don’t want you to get off with him so I’ve said you’re in a complicated on-off relationship with a boy called Dave and it’s all very upsetting and you’re not ready to move on with anyone.’

  ‘OK,’ she replies.

  ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘Of course it’s OK,’ she says. ‘He’s not my type anyway.’ We hear the footsteps of Felix.

  ‘I said you were just on the phone to Dave,’ I garble in a whisper.

  ‘Yeah,’ she speaks up as Felix sits back down. ‘So anyway, yeah, that was Dave on the phone just now,’ she says robotically, with all the nuanced subtlety of a character in Acorn Antiques. ‘Again!’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, same old, same old. Wants me back, thinks we can make it work. And I’m like, “Dave, we’ve been here before.” I did feel something though, even though we aren’t together. It just makes it all the more obvious to me that I’m definitely not ready to move on with anyone,’ she parrots.

  Felix chews his lip aggressively then downs the rest of his wine in one. ‘Nearly midnight,’ he says and leaves the table to head into the house.

  As we chant the countdown, I stand in the heavy, dull, cream suburban living room belonging to the family of this boy I have never met and I swear to never, ever plan an evening around a potential conquest again. We stare at the flatscreen television, playing out the BBC coverage of red-cheeked, drunk people in scarves cheering on the South Bank and I yearn to be there. Big Ben strikes at midnight. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ plays. Then, for some reason I don’t think I will ever be able to fathom, everyone in the room starts slow dancing like it’s the last song at the disco. Apart from Felix, who is at the other side of the room sulkily playing a game on his phone. I turn the brass handle of the mahogany antique drinks cabinet and help myself to a bottle of whisky. I look over at Farly, who has the family’s black Labrador on its hind legs to make it stand up, its paws in her hands. They too slow dance to the funereal sway of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  We’ve missed the last train back to London, so I stand outside the house and ring some local taxi companies for a quote to get home but they’re all too expensive. We are trapped in Surrey for at least eight hours in a house full of couples and a crush who doesn’t fancy me – all from the year below me at school. I re-enter the seventh circle of suburbia and see Farly and the miscellaneous rugby player necking up against the fridge before sneaking into the airing cupboard. I go to the garden to chain-smoke the rest of my cigarettes on my own.

  ‘Where’s Farly?’ Felix asks, who’s had the same idea as me. I can’t be bothered with the charade any more.

  ‘She’s in the airing cupboard with that rugby player guy,’ I say expressionlessly, before taking a glug from the whisky bottle.

  ‘What? What about Dave?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I say, lighting my cigarette and exhaling smoke into the
cold, still night air. ‘She and Dave are very complicated, Felix, and the sooner you realize that the better. It’s up, it’s down, it’s on, it’s off.’

  ‘But she said it was on an hour ago,’ he replies in outrage.

  ‘Yeah, well I think he probably rang again and they probably had another fight and she probably realized she was over it, actually.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, sitting down on the garden furniture next to me and taking a cigarette. ‘This is the worst New Year’s Eve ever.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. We watch the last of Surrey’s fireworks in silence. ‘It is.’

  10th November

  Dear anyone I’ve ever met and a few people I’ve never met,

  Forgive the group email I feel absolutely no repentance for. Sorry for the shameless self-promotion I feel absolutely no shame about. I am emailing you because there’s a vanity project I have been working on for all of a fortnight and I feel all of you owe it your time, money and attention.

  I am hosting an evening of music, spoken word and film in an event called Lana’s Literary Salon, taking place in an abandoned car park in Leytonstone. The idea is that the evening will evoke the mind-expanding conversational traditions of the Oxford Union with the atmosphere of Noel’s House Party.

  To begin, there will be some spoken-word poetry written by India Towler-Baggs on the subjects of her recent life-changing haircut, the difficult choice of selecting her default web browser setting and finding her way back to herself through a mix of ayahuasca ceremonies and Zumba classes. She will perform all her work with a slight Jamaican accent despite attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

  As most of you already know from a steady stream of spam on Facebook, Ollie has started his own political party, Young Clueless Liberals, so he’ll be reading his manifesto aloud followed by a discussion on stage with journalist Foxy James (T4, MTV News) about his three principal aims for the party: first-time buyers, student fees and the reopening of Fabric nightclub. You’ll be able to sign up for the party at the ‘venue’.

  Then, the headline act: my short film. No One Minds That Ulrika Jonsson is an Immigrant explores the themes of cultural identity, citizenship and sovereignty in a future dystopian setting. After the three-minute film ends, Foxy will interview me on stage about it for two hours – we will reference the film and its crew (mainly my family) as if it is a universally recognized piece of work and speak with showbizzy, eye-rolly, in-jokey camaraderie about behind-the-scenes stories as if I were Martin Scorsese giving a director’s commentary on GoodFellas.

  There will be craft beer, brewed by my flatmate on the balcony of our Penge new-build. The Death of Hackney tastes like a sort of fizzy Marmite and smells like a urinary tract infection and is yours for £13 a bottle. Enjoy.

  There will also be a bucket circulating in which you can charitably donate as little or as much as you want to a really worthwhile cause: me. The sequel to Ulrika is currently in pre-production and I want to get it made as soon as possible, but I don’t want to get a boring job like everyone else (much like Kerouac, I’m just not a morning person).

  Thank you so, so much for your support with this. I will literally love every single one of you who turns up – except for people I don’t know that well, who I will greet in a cursory way then say, ‘Oh my God why is he here I literally haven’t even seen him since primary school? I think he’s obsessed with me,’ to my friends.

  May art be with you –

  Lana xxx

  Being a Bit Fat, Being a Bit Thin

  ‘Do you love me any more?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think I do love you any more.’

  ‘Do you at least fancy me?’ I asked. There was a silence.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I hung up.

  (I’ve since advised people that it’s best to lie about this if they’re dumping someone. The ‘falling out of love’ stuff is pretty bad. The ‘I don’t fancy you’ stuff is killer.)

  I was just twenty-one, I was a month out of university. And my first proper boyfriend had just dumped me over the phone.

  Harry and I had been together for a little over a year despite being completely and utterly wrong for each other. He was conservative, obsessed with sport, did a hundred press-ups before bed every night, was the social secretary of the Exeter University Lacrosse Club and owned a non-ironic T-shirt that said ‘Lash Gordon’ on the front. He hated excessive displays of emotion, tall women wearing heels or being too loud. So basically everything that made up my personality at the time. He thought I was a disaster, I thought he was a square.

  Our entire relationship was spent arguing, not least because we never had any time apart. He had practically lived at the flat I shared with Lacey, AJ and Farly in our final year at university and had moved into my parents’ house for the summer while he did an internship.

  One of our lowest moments came at the end of that long, hot, agitated August with no space from each other, when we got a train to Oxford for Lacey’s twenty-first birthday party. I went rogue from my table after the main course and happened upon a swimming pool, which looked appealing. So I took all my clothes off and went for a dip, and, when a few friends came looking for me, encouraged everyone else to do the same. The night descended into a mass pool party and I became a sort of naked, poolside Master of Ceremonies. Harry went ballistic. The next morning, Farly and AJ hid behind a tree with uncontrollable giggles as they watched him shout ‘YOU WILL NEVER SHOW ME UP LIKE THAT AGAIN!’ at me, my head-hanging shame made even more apparent by the fact the pool had been overchlorinated and my bleached hair had turned a vibrant bottle green.

  We had absolutely nothing in common. But he wanted to be my first proper boyfriend, and when I was nineteen that was a good enough reason to go out with someone.

  I was living in an East London flat the night he called me, staying with a friend indefinitely while I began my journalism course to avoid the long commute from Stanmore. Farly turned up an hour later at one a.m., having driven from her mum’s house, and told me she was taking me home.

  I was inconsolable on the journey back, trying to recount our conversation to Farly, but barely remembering any of the detail. My phone rang – it was him. I told her I couldn’t speak to him. She pulled over, picked up and pressed it to her ear.

  ‘Harry, why have you done this?’ she barked. I couldn’t make out what he was saying on the other end of the line. ‘Fine, but why do it to her over the phone? Why couldn’t you have come see her and do it in the flesh?’ she barked again. There was more indecipherable talking on his side. Farly listened. ‘YEAH? WELL YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF,’ she shouted, hanging up and throwing the mobile on to the seat behind her.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ she said.

  Farly slept in my bed that night. And the night after that. She ended up staying for a fortnight; I didn’t move back to the flat. It was the first time I had experienced heartbreak and I’d never thought the overwhelming feeling would be such acute confusion; as if I had no reason to trust anyone ever again. I didn’t have an exact idea of what had happened or why. All I knew was that I hadn’t been good enough.

  I also couldn’t eat. I had heard about this upshot of a break-up before, but I had never imagined it would affect me. I was, and always had been, a very hungry girl. Perhaps the hungriest of all. I hadn’t managed a diet that had ever lasted longer than two days. My family all loved food, Farly and I had loved food. My mum, a natural cook who grew up with Italian grandparents, started teaching me to cook when I was five, standing me next to her on a chair so I could help knead dough or whisk eggs at the kitchen counter. I cooked for myself throughout my teens and I cooked for everyone at university. My first ever diary entry, when I was six, was an enthusiastic record of what I had eaten that day. I recalled phases of my life by what was on a plate: the crispy baked potatoes on seaside holidays in Devon, the lurid, sticky jam tarts of my tenth birthday, the roast chicke
n of every Sunday night, bathing the dread of the school week in gravy. No matter how terrible life became, no matter how blistering the pain, I was always sure I’d still have room for seconds.

  I never felt overweight, but my body type was often muddily described as ‘a big girl’. I come from a long, tall line of giants. My brother, God love him, was a six-foot-seven teenager who had to buy clothes in shops called things like ‘Magnus’ and ‘High and Mighty’. By the time I was fourteen, I was five foot ten. By the time I was sixteen, I was six foot. But I wasn’t one of those adorably tall, lanky teenage part-foal-part-human girls – I was broad, with big boobs and hips. I was the opposite of the girls photographed in the pages of Bliss and described in The Baby-Sitters Club book series. Just as I was never mentally built of the right stuff to be a teenager, neither was my physical being well-suited to it.

  I found being so tall as a teenager difficult – I never knew how much I was supposed to weigh, because every girl was half my height and talked about their ‘fat weight’ as being a weight I hadn’t been since childhood, which engendered a great sense of shame. That, partnered with boredom eating and puppy fat, meant I was shopping for size 16s when I was not yet sixteen. I was aware I was bigger than my friends and was sometimes called fat, but I always had faith that my shape would make more sense when I wasn’t a kid. The only truly mortifying moment came when, at a barbecue aged fifteen, my parents’ extremely drunk and spectacularly overweight friend Tilly grabbed my love handles like she was steering the wheel of a ship before announcing to the garden that ‘us chunky girls have got to stick together’ and telling me in no uncertain terms that ‘men like a bit of meat on a girl’, before I received a conspiratorial wink from her husband who was, incidentally, also the width of a Vauxhall Zafira.

  Some weight slowly peeled off when I went to boarding school and by the time I got to university I was a comfortable size 14 – but I didn’t really mind that I wasn’t very slim. I still kissed the boys I wanted to kiss. I could wear Topshop. And I loved food and cooking. I understood that that was the trade-off.