Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  I have decided I like Konrad a lot. I also feel like I am struggling to compete, and I despise him for that. Imagine meeting someone at a party who is more intelligent than you. Surefire way to ruin your whole fucking night. “How old are you?” I say. “You’re not in your twenties, I can tell.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You’re not dancing.”

  “Neither are you.”

  “I can dance. Look. Watch. You see? I’ve got moves. I’ve got shapes. I’m a motion wizard.”

  “You can stop now because you have proved your point.”

  “Thank you. I think you are younger than me.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Wait, what? Thirty-five? I was thinking more like thirty-one or -two.”

  I don’t know whether the music actually stops or just feels like it stops and suddenly there are two other people in the conversation. She’s thirty-five? Fucking hell!

  “Oh no,” Konrad says. “Really? No way. I never would have said that.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Oh no no no no no.”

  “What?”

  “You have to go home.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you have a husband? Partner? Kids?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You have to go home. You can’t be doing this.”

  “You can’t send me home!”

  Konrad looks at me like he is truly sorry for me. I say: “Look, buster, you are the one who is almost completely bald. So. Who needs to go home? Not me. I think the bald person. Who votes for the bald person going home before me? Let’s have a referendum on this.”

  Everyone is looking at me, a little sadly.

  Konrad is almost my age. Is this why he gravitated to me? I don’t know whether he is bald by nature or design. It’s not the kind of thing you can ask on a first meeting. It bothers me every time I look at Prince William, the recession of his hair to almost nothing, because I do view him as a contemporary for some reason. When Prince William is fully bald, I will know that I have to stop going out, for good. But then—where is my own body and hair going? We’ve lost touch. It’s doing its own thing, that’s for sure. It has plans.

  Nicolette comes over. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” She bats everyone away. “She’s had a tough day.”

  I suddenly feel very weary—very weary indeed.

  “Let me get you another drink,” Nicolette says.

  “You know what, I don’t think I can.”

  “Don’t let them send you home!”

  “No, it’s not that—it’s just … I am all asunder, Nicolette.” I think of the sofa, and the faces of the people in the TV drama I’m watching, those friends waiting for me on Netflix. I think of a sandwich. I am shamefully, helplessly allured. “Is it terrible that I would rather go home right now, Nicolette?”

  “No. I mean, that’s okay, if it’s what you really want.”

  “I have to confess: whenever we have a night out planned, I’m relieved when you cancel. I love seeing you, but I’m so … tired at the moment. There, I said it. When you’re going out the night before we’re due to go out, a little part of me always hopes you’ll get fucked up and feel dreadful so you have to cancel our night out. Or you’ll get sick. Sorry. It’s nothing personal, it’s just I can’t really do this. It doesn’t make me happy. I can do a bar or a party for, like, half an hour, then I’m done. Do you hate me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  But she’s making a face over my shoulder—is she? Oh God, is that daylight now? When it gets light, that’s the really grim bit. And my mother will wonder why I’m so late, but at least she will be there in the morning and maybe she’ll boil me an egg. No, not a boiled egg, I do not like the thought of that at all. Maybe pour me a cold sparkling drink that will refresh me and exfoliate my mouth. Yes, that would be nice. I swallow. I see that I have possibly been working very hard. I have been simultaneously trying to figure out the codes and rituals of a realm, an institution, while also trying to present myself as appealing. I feel very, very stretched and thin, like I might almost snap. I have been connecting, and connecting, and connecting. I’m like an algorithm system with feelings.

  “Nicolette, I’m going to go now.”

  And I go. The failed pseudo (antisocial) party girl.

  * * *

  On the way home I eat a pizza so hard I feel each point stab the back of my throat. It is my throat again. Boy, is it. I find myself having to spit on the ground shortly after—a big cokey, tomatoey gob. A woman walking her dog stops and stares at me, disgusted.

  “I have cancer,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says, understanding.

  It’s not an outright lie. To be fair, I probably do, on some level. Most people do, after a certain age.

  On the bus, pizza crumbs embedded in my skirt, I see a man who looks like Art would, old. He looks like a chamois leather thrown over a squash. He moves his bags for me as I make to get off. He has learned how to be kind—I can tell by the pride he takes in it, this acquired skill. He is a social craftsman. I think: Time will take you too, Art, eventually. It will dampen your spirits. It will mock your desires. And you will be a better man for it. And I will be a better woman.

  JUNK E-MAILS

  Hi! Just really wanted to reiterate how pleased I am about you and Suzy XXXX

  I mean Suzanne

  Floozanne

  hahaha

  Like. realy pleased so pleased

  I do hope I can meet her son

  Soon! Autocorrect makes drunks of us all!

  Imagien if she had a son with you lol

  I would be fine with tho

  With it

  I woud givei t my blessing

  The blessed child

  Speak soon! Xxxx

  JUNK TEXTS

  Hey Kel, how are you? X

  Kelly?

  Kellyyyyyyy

  Keeeeeelllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

  BURNOUT

  I go to look at Suzy’s page but instead somehow find myself looking at Kelly’s. I go through all of Kelly’s recent posts, seeing where she’s been. It strikes me surely, somewhere deep around my solar plexus, that I have missed some major events in her life. Not just Sonny’s birthday, but her birthday. Her mum’s seventieth. A trip up north for her great-aunt’s funeral. I look at who else she has been spending time with, who she is currently seeing as a more valid and mature person than I am. I look at who has been commenting on her posts. I see a comment I left on there ages ago, months ago—the last comment I left her, I think. On a picture of her doing a jewelry class with her mum, I have written:

  HI HO SILVER!!!! WORK IT, YOU ABSOLUTE GEMS!!!! XXXXX

  It is a comment I have obviously thought about a lot. The sight of my own rabid communication, the ECG spikes of exclamation marks, of my leaping emotions, is wearying.

  Why am I looking at this now? Wearying my weary self with my own wearyingness?

  I say it out loud. I say it right out of me. “This is ill behavior. I am ill.”

  THERAPY SESSION #2

  The second therapist I saw, when Art’s pictures had hit the big time—possibly because Art’s pictures had hit the big time—listened straight-faced, even when I cracked jokes, and that put me off (Is it protocol, to be dour? I wanted to say), so I gabbled to fill the silence. I told her how I was scared and jealous of Art’s success, about how I was sure he’d leave me now for someone famous and cooler. I told her how I saw women flinging themselves at him, sometimes otherwise respectable women, desperate to touch the hem, and that made me feel even sadder and more scared and I wasn’t sure whether that was for him, or them, or me. After forty-five minutes had passed, I ran out of steam and material. She nodded sagely and said, “I think that was very good work for today, Jenny. Same time next week?”

  “I’m not sure—am I … meant to feel different?”


  “Not yet. Give it time.”

  Time was something I knew I didn’t have much of. Time was already a fucking worry.

  “Okay.”

  I pulled on my coat. Picked up my handbag. As I stood, we shook hands, and she said, “What’s his name, by the way?”

  If she’d asked tentatively, I might have understood. But she showed such a lack of self-awareness that my trust in her evaporated in that instant.

  “Whose?”

  “Your partner’s. The famous photographer!”

  “Art Wilson,” I said instinctively.

  “I’ll google him!” she said.

  I looked at her face, trying to ascertain whether she was joking, whether she was making an ironic reference to the exact cause of the problem. It became apparent that she wasn’t. She was … well, there’s no other word. The simplest of reductions. She was excited.

  I blinked and bade her farewell.

  I canceled my appointment the following week, before the required forty-eight-hour notice period.

  By text.

  IN THE BIN (ONE WHOLE DAY)

  APP IDEA

  Gin is not my friend, I realize for the hundredth time. But more than that, I need to stop using my phone drunk. When oh when will they create a Breathalyzer app that disables your phone when you’re over the limit? A phone in the hands of a drunk person can do more damage than a car. I swear I’m first in the fucking queue to be liberated from this risk. There should be some kind of SAS service you can subscribe to that detects when you’re about to use your phone fucked and sends out special forces who crash through the nearest window and wrestle you to the ground and pry your phone out of your stupid drunk hand and incinerate it in a portable incinerator. Then they force-feed you a pint of water and two ibuprofen and two acetaminophen and a burger and put you to bed. I would pay for this service, why does it not exist? It’s unthinkable it doesn’t. Yet another example of technology being ahead of humanity.

  Sometimes I feel like it would be safer to stay in and never go out or see anyone or communicate at all, just to be sure there’s nothing to regret.

  The day after Bin Day, I get up in the afternoon and cycle to the park. I steer my bike around a root-crinkled patch of tarmac. A teenage couple passes me. They’re holding hands and having a stilted conversation. Their hoods are up. I hear myself go ah.

  Evening is coming. The path is banded with the shadows of trees. I sit on a bench and get out my phone, which I’ve had on silent, because that will show it.

  Kelly has replied! (FINALLY.)

  Hey love thanks for your message. Bit tied up but I’ll get back to you asap x

  Don’t thanks-for-your-message me—WTF????

  Big wait. Two minutes. Then:

  I just need a little time away. Take care x

  Kelly?????

  I look around in the park. There is nothing soothing. Everything is dead and dying and dirty. I look at Suzy Brambles’s feed. And, horrors (seek and ye shall find), there’s a new picture of Art and Suzy at a café. They are messily eating ice creams, is there anything better in life! This warrants several ice cream emojis and some starbursts. They’re really going for it now, no holds barred. Jenny knows, so let’s let rip. Fuck off. Fuck off both of you. And mostly fuck off ice cream. It’s November. Has no one any self-respect? I’ve always believed that emoji use is a pretty good gauge of mania, and right now, from where I’m standing, Suzy is on the edge.

  I leave a careful comment: Looks delish! With one emoji. A sane, simple yellow heart. Not as demanding as a red heart. Sort of more carefree.

  Suzy does not like my comment.

  I imagine them discussing my comment. Naked, postcoital, with espresso martinis. So delightfully capricious wurhahhah.…

  I wait ten minutes, and then I delete it.

  I instantly regret deleting it.

  I wonder whether I can retype it quickly and put it back or whether they will have noticed and see that I typed it twice. I don’t want to look unconfident or weird.

  But maybe I do want them to talk about me. I want to be in between them as they’re walking along. I wonder whether he’s giving her a hard time for using her phone.

  I could always blame it on a bad connection. I’ve posted things twice by accident several times before. Well, once. It’s feasible. But when—when would I get my chance to explain myself? Unless I put it in an e-mail to Art, or would that seem excessive?

  With every second that passes I feel more panicked. My mind incessantly shrieks: It’s now or never! There’s a good chance she didn’t see it before I deleted it. Not everyone checks their comments every ten seconds. And if they do then that makes them the ones with the problem, does it not? Yes! This justifies it. If Suzy notices that I posted the same comment twice with two minutes in between, then SHE is the loser. Perfect.

  I type it again.

  I post it.

  I look at it.

  Oh God, I hate it.

  I hate myself. I writhe inside. I feel uninhabitable. I need to bite something. Anything. Maybe my fist.

  I notice that someone is looking at me from the next bench. They look away quickly into their burrito.

  DRAFTS

  BURRITOFACE,

  DID YOUR MOTHER NEVER TELL YOU THAT IT IS RUDE TO STARE?

  REGARDS,

  JENNY MCLAINE BA HONS.

  LOOK, NO HANDS

  Hi Jenny I just happened to notice online that Art is with that Suzy person again, I think perhaps you do have cause for concern. Mummeeeeeeeee xxx

  I’mon my bike please don’t text me a out thia

  So she’s got her feet under the table

  WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS IMPORTANT FOR ME TO HAVE THIS INFORMATION

  She looks like a praying mantis crossed with Wednesday Addams

  Stop

  SOMEONE JUST ALMOST KNOCKED ME OFF MY BIKE

  I’m just saying she got her claws in quick. We should probably go to the exhibition

  I ALMOOST DIED HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY

  Stop being dramatic

  STOP TEXTING ME JESUS CRHIST I AM COMMANDEERING A VEHICLE

  Can you pick up some lemons if you pass a shop?

  WHAT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ABOUT THIS SITUATION

  DRAFTS

  Subject: To the woman in the F iat 500 who cut me off on the corner just now

  Dear Madam,

  Huge thanks for almost knocking me off my bike, but even more for alerting me to your precious cargo with the prominent BABY ON BOARD sign. This piece of information is invaluable to me as another road user. I tend to smash willy-nilly into cars containing fully grown people. However, I make sure to drive exceptionally carefully behind vehicles such as yours, knowing that you are transporting The Future rather than just another worthless adult human.

  BR,

  Jenny McLaine BA Hons.

  HI HI HI

  In the corner shop I say hi to the man behind the counter and then I examine the two fridges. I buy three lemons—all he has left—even though one is mottled with something unfortunate. I take a can of diet cola and a can of diet cherry cola because one thing—lemons—feels like too little to purchase. I don’t want him thinking I’m using his shop in a trivial manner, because that sort of treatment can be demoralizing, I know. I look at the cheeses. I pick up a packet of feta. I make an approving noise so that he knows that I like his feta. It’s a small sound, somewhere between the word nice and just a huh—something like a high-pitched nah. I put the feta back—carefully, respectfully—because even though I am not going to buy it, I am not being dismissive of this feta. I want him to feel that. I look at a few other things, handle them, and make similar sounds of approval. Eeaorw. Aoooirw. Mmmmooooer. I want him to know that I like everything he has in here. He has pleased me with his choices at the warehouse, or the wholesaler, or wherever he selects his goods. He has done A Good Job. He is A Good Shopkeeper. As I pay I say, “You have a wonderful shop.” I take my change and it jangles, just li
ke me. Why do I want to look more nervous than I am? So he’ll like me? Feel less threatened? I have got myself into a mind-set where it’s almost as though a display of nerves is a social compliment; not to show them is an insult. To be confident shows a lack of respect somehow.

  This whole thing is getting quite difficult to live with.

  BACK AT HOME

  my mother greets me in the hall.

  “Jenny, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Here are your lemons that almost killed me.” I hand her the bag. “I hope they taste as good as near-death. One of them is rather shop-soiled.”

  “Aren’t we all, darling.” She takes them. “Are you really all right?”

  “Yes! Godssakes.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I have some freelance work to do and I’ll probably just watch TV. Something soothing like a nature documentary.”

  “Soothing? They send you berserk.”

  “Maybe going berserk is how I relax.”

  She takes a lemon out of the bag and inspects it. “How are you feeling about Art’s exhibition? Do you want to go?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe. I mean, of course I do.”

  Curiosity will get the better of me otherwise, I know it. How can I not meet her? In the flesh. The least fleshly of all beings. The wraith who has stolen my life.

  My mother takes the lemons to the kitchen. I walk into the lounge. Her phone lights up on the table. Instinctively, I walk up to it and look. I defend myself thus: we are conditioned to look at a lit screen these days, are we not?

  It’s a message from Art.

  I peer at it, confused.

  Is it my phone? Have our phones somehow got mixed up and she has brought my phone? My brain scrambles for an explanation.