How to Break Your Own Heart

by Maggie Alderson

  As I was sitting there, simultaneously understanding that this list of personal calls was what had made Christopher so furious – and that they were probably all clutter-clearing enquiries – the phone rang again. I grabbed it, sure he would try and get to it first. I heard him pick up just after me and I knew he was listening in.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said a male voice, with the kind of Chelsea accent which usually rang the gallery. ‘Is that Amelia? This is Charles Dowdent. We met at Kiki’s party last night…’

  It was the antiques dealer guy.

  ‘Oh, hi, Charles,’ I said brightly and quickly, all too aware of old Flapping Ears upstairs and not wanting Charles to say anything that would reveal why he was calling. ‘Lovely to hear from you,’ I continued. ‘I think I know what it’s about, but I can’t really speak right now. So why don’t you give me your number and I will ring you back tonight?’

  He gave me the details and rang off. I waited until I heard the click as CJ put the phone down upstairs, and that was it. My former fury had subsided into an icy clear-headedness about the way both he – and Leo – had spoken to me that morning and so many other mornings. I knew exactly what I had to do.

  I tore the page with all the names and numbers out of the phone log and put it in my handbag. Then I put my coat back on and walked out of the gallery.

  With no intention of ever going back.

  9

  Fifteen minutes later I was happy to be sitting in a rattling Northern Line tube carriage on the way up to Janelle’s flat, knowing that my mobile wouldn’t work down there. I needed a little while to sit with my thoughts.

  CJ had already called me twice before I had even made it from the gallery to Piccadilly Circus underground station, which was less than five minutes’ walk, so he clearly knew I’d gone.

  I hadn’t answered, of course, although I knew I would have to return his calls pretty soon, or he would ring Ed to report me missing and, for various reasons, I didn’t want to tell Ed what I’d done yet. In fact, I needed to get it absolutely clear in my own head before I discussed it with anyone else.

  As the tube train rumbled along and I pondered the morning’s events, it quickly became apparent to me that it was the prospect of being paid for clutter-clearing that had finally given me the guts to walk out of the gallery.

  Christopher – and Leo – had been treating me like shit for years and, locked in some kind of cosy inertia, I’d let them, but now I had the prospect of doing something for myself, I’d finally had the courage to stand up to them. It was really exciting – and absolutely terrifying.

  Then, working on my father’s tightly held principle that you should always do first the thing you want to do least, I forced myself to make the call to Christopher the minute I came up at Hampstead. So I felt pleasantly rewarded for my diligence when I got the answer machine.

  I left a succinct message saying that for personal reasons I was resigning from my post and would not be returning to the gallery. Then I heard myself thanking him for employing me and hoping that the business would continue to prosper.

  It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. I certainly hadn’t planned on doing anything so gracious. Kiki would have told him to get fucked, I thought – in fact, she probably would have sprayed it on the windows – but there I was thanking him for the ‘opportunity to work at such a prestigious gallery…’

  I plodded down Hampstead High Street, fuming at myself for being such a wimp, but when you have grown up being told that everyone is judging your father’s professional abilities by your behaviour – with the implication that the entire family’s livelihood depends on it – you do become something of a world-class goody-goody.

  But it was done, I’d said it, so I tried to put it out of my mind and to concentrate instead on my new challenge. Who was this Janelle? And what on earth was I going to find at her flat that was making her so desperate?

  I stopped at a mini-mart on the way to buy some of the tools of what appeared to be my new trade: a roll of bin-liners and a box of tissues. She’d already burst into tears of gratitude when I’d rung her after leaving the gallery, to see if it was OK for me to come over right away, and I had a feeling there was going to be a lot more of the same to come when I got in there. I was a bit nervous about it because it was one thing dealing with that kind of emotional outburst from a friend – even one as normally ebullient as Kiki – quite another doing it with a stranger.

  I needn’t have worried. It was obvious from the moment I walked through her front door – or, rather, squeezed through; it was no easier getting in there than it had been at Kiki’s place – that Janelle’s problem was not so much disorganization as full-blown shopping addiction.

  The things blocking her hallway were carrier bags of every imaginable colour and provenance. I took in Harvey Nichols, Topshop, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Jimmy Choo in one glance. And it was clear that none of them had been opened since she had brought them into the flat.

  The other thing that made total sense from the moment I walked in was where all the money for this shopping – and to pay me £600 a day cash – came from. There were framed gold and platinum discs right along the walls.

  And when I saw her, a tiny peroxide blonde with high cheekbones, beautiful full lips, almond eyes and the gorgeous dark-golden skin of mixed race – or a very good spray tan – I realized immediately she was one of the Honeypots, a girl band who’d had about seven number-ones before splitting up in volcanic style.

  Not being aged nine myself, the mother of pre-teen daughters, or even a fan of weekly magazines, I just hadn’t immediately recognized her famous name.

  ‘So how long have you had a shopping addiction?’ I asked her, settling into one of the three sofas crammed into her sitting room.

  It still had the price tag on the arm and the cushions were still in plastic wrapping, which was lucky, as the rest of the room was pretty filthy. The carpet looked as though it had never been vacuumed.

  ‘I’m not no addict,’ protested Janelle, clearly offended. ‘I’ve never been in rehab. Two of the other girls in the band have been, but not me. I think you’ve got me mixed up with Shanelle, or Lorelle.’

  ‘Well, how long have you been shopping like this?’ I tried again, gesturing at the spanking-new stuff all around us. The side table next to me had no fewer than four table lamps on it, all still wrapped in the plastic they had come in, like a mini Christo installation.

  There were numerous mirrors and pictures propped against the walls, many of them also in their original packaging, and all the flat surfaces were crammed with porcelain figurines, silver photograph frames and other overpriced knick-knacks.

  She just gazed at me blankly.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your flat, Janelle,’ I said. ‘You’re not disorganized, as such, it’s just too full. You can’t tidy up because there’s nowhere to put all this stuff you’ve bought and you can’t clean because you can’t get round it.’

  She continued to look at me brightly with her surprisingly green eyes. Contact lenses, I realized. And no sign of a light on behind them.

  ‘The sofas,’ I said gently. ‘Do you really need three? And four table lamps for one table? And all those mirrors?’

  She looked around the room and I could see it still wasn’t registering with her. It was as though she were blind to it all.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, standing up. I took her hand and led her back into the hall. ‘ These carrier bags, Janelle,’ I said. ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘Just clothes,’ she said, her voice getting a little higher. ‘Some shoes and bags…’

  ‘Have you ever taken any of them out of the carrier bags?’ I asked.

  She shook her head, and a frown started to form between her perfectly arched eyebrows – well as much of a frown as the Botox would allow.

  ‘That’s not normal, Janelle,’ I said firmly. ‘When most women buy something new, especially from shops like these, they can’t wait to get it home
and try it on. So all this makes me think it’s the shopping itself that gives you a buzz, rather than the clothes as such – or the lamps, or the sofas, or the knick-knacks…’

  Finally, I could see she got it. The tears started to flow silently down her cheeks, and I already knew from my very short career as a clutter-clearer that they signalled a breakthrough.

  As I had done with Kiki, I said nothing, just tried to look sympathetic and let her get it all out, as she spluttered her story between gulping sobs – how she still couldn’t get over having so much money after a difficult childhood with her single mum and how she just kept spending to prove she really had it.

  And maybe because, deep down, she didn’t really think she deserved it, I thought to myself, so she was subconsciously trying to get rid of it all. Ed had a name for clients like that: he called them ‘HBB-LSE’ – High Bank Balance Low Self-Esteem – and, according to him, their confusion about self-worth meant you were doing them a service by taking their money from them.

  ‘The thing is, Amelia,’ she was saying, still sniffing and dabbing her exquisite surgically adjusted nose with one of my tissues, ‘what I can never tell anyone is that I’m so flipping lonely. Everyone thinks I’m a pop star and I’ve got it all and I have got the money and the gold discs, and I know I’m not ugly and I’m proper A List and all that, but even if I ever met a nice bloke, how could I bring him back here?’

  I was beginning to understand that there was more to this clutter-clearing malarkey than just tidying up a bit, but for the time being I wanted to stick to what I knew – which was how to make a chaotic home liveable again. So I took her back into the sitting room to discuss some practical steps we could take.

  The first task would be taking any unworn stuff back to the shops where she’d bought it. Then we would have to do a thorough inventory of the rest of the flat to establish what she really loved and really needed – and then I’d put the excess on eBay for her. Or she could have a celebrity charity auction, I suggested. Then we could have the place professionally cleaned.

  The other news I was going to break to her at a later point was that I was going to find her a proper shrink to sort out the more deep-seated emotional stuff. She clearly needed it. But in the meantime, to help her feel we were making progress, I made her put all the carrier bags from the hall into five bin-liners, which we hid behind one of the sofas. Then I made her wait outside the front door while I vacuumed the filthy carpet that was revealed underneath.

  Janelle couldn’t stop smiling when I let her back in and she stood in the cleared space by the front door. She kept opening and closing it just for the hell of it, grinning at me.

  ‘It already feels so different,’ she was saying, as I told her we’d done enough for the first session and got my diary out to make our next appointment.

  ‘Here, let me pay you,’ she said, and I watched her brown fingers with their ridiculously long French-manicured nails take a wad of new £20 notes from an oversized white Chanel handbag.

  I didn’t want to count it in front of her, but I could see it was a lot.

  ‘That’s £600 for today,’ she said, looking nervous. ‘Is that OK, or do you need a deposit for the rest? I’m just so grateful you could see me at such short notice…’

  I felt distinctly uncomfortable. I’d only been there about three hours – it wasn’t even a full day. I was about to argue that I couldn’t possibly take that much money for so little work when I remembered one of Ed’s cardinal rules of business: the more you charge, the more they will respect and value you.

  He also believed it made clients more likely to recommend you to their cashed-up pals, because massive prices gave you a high ‘BQ’, or Bragging Quotient.

  This approach certainly worked for him and, now I thought about it, Christopher Mecklin seemed to operate on similar principles. It must be standard practice in that kind of luxury market, I decided. So I smiled at Janelle, told her not to worry about a deposit and zipped her money into my handbag.

  I went straight from Hampstead to Fenwicks, where I bought myself a new outfit – a lovely floaty skirt and a top embroidered with sequins, much more expensive than the kind of things I normally bought – paying with Janelle’s money.

  As I handed over the crisp notes, I felt a flush of the excitement which I realized must have been part of Janelle’s addiction. Unlike her, though, I went straight home and changed into my new things.

  Ed was out somewhere when I got back and not answering his mobile, so I didn’t have a chance to tell him about leaving my job before we met for dinner with one of his favourite clients at St Alban. It was a very jolly night and definitely not the right occasion to bring up the big change I had made so impulsively in my life.

  I just smiled and played my part as the real-life Heady Bouquet, looking interested while they talked obsessively about wine, cigars, restaurants and cars. By the end of it I could have gone on Mastermind with the Bentley Continental GT as my special subject, but that male-interest stuff didn’t phase me. Growing up in the all-male context of the school my father worked at, I’d been immersed in it since childhood.

  He and my brother were very much boy-men – rugby, cricket, Formula One, classic cars, boats, trains, aeroplanes, snooker, even hideous boxing, were the dominant themes in our household. My mum and I had our shared interests too – mainly baking, needlepoint and watching bonnet dramas on the telly – but it was the manly pursuits which dominated.

  The whole family would decamp to watch Dick and the rest of the school rugby team on freezing Saturday mornings and, if the Monte Carlo Grand Prix clashed with a Dickens adaptation on TV, the cars always won out. It’s just the way it was in my family, so normal to me, and Ed’s Boy’s Own dinner conversation slotted right into the same mould.

  By the time we got home that night, I was just too full and snoozy to launch the job-leaving conversation, so after giving Ed a quick hug and kiss, I was relieved to fall into my bed while he shuffled off to do yet more tinkering in his study.

  10

  I woke up at my usual time the next morning and was about to jump out of bed when I suddenly realized I didn’t have to. It was quite a shock, and I flopped back down again, staring up at the ceiling as a wave of anxiety passed over me.

  Walking out of Mecklin’s had seemed the only possible thing to do at the time, especially with the golden carrot of Janelle’s cash waiting for me up in Hampstead, but now I wondered if I hadn’t been a little hasty.

  My so-called clutter-clearing had worked for Kiki, I could see exactly what I needed to do for Janelle, and all those other people who had called me would no doubt be similar, but that didn’t mean it was definitely going to burgeon into a proper career. I should have done a feasibility study and a business plan first – whatever they were.

  Because, if it didn’t work out, I might end up just kicking around the flat getting in Ed’s way – then I’d be completely financially dependent on him, and that really scared me. I didn’t want to turn into his mother. Or mine. Because, while my wages from the gallery had never been much more than play money, it had at least given me a sense of independence.

  On top of all that, I just wasn’t looking forward to telling Ed what I’d done. Not because I thought he really cared whether I worked at Mecklin’s or not – he loathed CJ even more than I did – but because I knew how much he disliked sudden change.

  I’d figured out quite early in our relationship that Ed was someone who liked to have things planned, and I understood why – a lonely little boy alone in a foreign country, dumped in the unloving arms of an English prep school, Ed had developed routine as his coping mechanism. To feel secure, he absolutely needed to know where he was in life, and it didn’t seem particularly weird to me. My father was a man of routine to a much more extreme degree. But unlike dull old Daddy dearest, Ed wasn’t remotely boring.

  Bowling along French country roads with him in one of his open-top cars, music playing, wind in your hair, alcohol in
your bloodstream, you felt wild and free, but Ed always knew exactly where he was having dinner that night.

  He did in London too. We only went to certain restaurants – all within walking distance of our flat – and if he had his way, we would have gone to the same one on the same night each week. I wasn’t prepared to go that far, but I didn’t object to the limited choice of venues. The ones we did go to were so lovely, and there was actually something terribly nice about being really known in them, as we were.

  Ed only had to sit down in Scott’s and a waiter would bring him a vodka martini, shaken not stirred. Ian Fleming had also been a regular there in his day and the connection thrilled Ed. We ate there at least twice a week, every week.

  Such a proscribed life might sound tedious, but I could see that having this structure in place allowed his brilliant, original mind to run free. Either that, or he really did have borderline Asperger’s Syndrome, as Kiki had once laughingly suggested.

  But while I understood it, I did rather wish it didn’t have to extend to our sex life as well. I knew it was good going that a couple who had been together for fifteen years still had regular sex – but I just would have preferred it not to be quite so regular. The marital act of love always took place on Sunday mornings and every other day on trips to France. I wondered sometimes if he scheduled it into his itineraries when he was planning them.

  Thursday, Medoc

  AM: Lafite, Pichon-Lalande, Pontet-Canet.

  Picnic lunch.

  PM: Margaux, Palmer and Rauzan-Ségla.

  Dinner: Le Chapon Fin.

  After dinner: intercourse, missionary position, condom.

  Always with the bloody condom. How I had come to hate those nasty rubber things. I was on the Pill when I first got together with Ed, but he still always insisted on using them. I’d gone along with it at first, but once we were married I’d suggested it might be nice to have bareback sex occasionally.