Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  “Nice room,” she says. “This is a different one though, right?”

  “Yes, I moved rooms since last time.”

  She takes off her shoes and gets into bed beside me. She unpacks the burgers from the paper bag and throws me a few. I unwrap one and shove it into my mouth. “Obviously, this is just a brief hiatus from my veganism.” I recall the time I caught a vegan friend tucking into a dish of sweet and sour pork in Chinatown. “Oh!” I said. “A meat tourist!” Genial, you know. She never returned my texts after that.

  “Just happen,” says Nicolette, chowing down. “Just allow yourself to be happening. Stop predefining yourself.”

  I polish off all three sandwiches, then light up a cigarette. We are side by side in bed, the ashtray between us.

  “Do you think I’m unmaternal, Nicolette?”

  “I think that question is unmaternal, that’s what I think.”

  “You’re so right.”

  “Thank you. I accept the compliment.”

  “You have ketchup on your chin.”

  “See?! You are so maternal right now.”

  “Let me wipe it off for you.”

  “More than my own mother ever did.”

  My mother shouts up from downstairs: “Do you girls need anything?”

  “No thank you!” we shout back.

  “She’s just trying to get in on it,” I say. “She’ll be up in a minute with an extravagant drink.”

  Nicolette sucks her fingertips and bats a crumb off her phone screen. “So what’s she like, his new girlfriend?”

  “She’s my ideal woman.”

  “Fuck.”

  I show her some photos of Suzy Brambles.

  “Oh,” she says, “I see your predicament. They look like a cool couple.”

  “What? Why? Because they’re both wearing black?”

  “I like her hair. I’m only being honest.”

  I puff on my cigarette. Nicolette pulls out her vape.

  “My love life’s just as disastrous, if that’s any consolation.”

  “It is.”

  She sucks hard on her vape and releases a sweet guff of apple mint. “Last week I went on a date with a man who started off by showing me the floor plans of a flat he was buying. Started off. Most boring date ever. I was like, how do we climax? With your investment statements? When I said I was leaving early, he said, ‘What makes you so great?’ I said, ‘Google me.’ ”

  “You actually said ‘Google me’?”

  “I did.”

  My mother comes in with a jug of lemonade on a tray.

  “What’s this?”

  “Homemade. I found a recipe online. It’s very good.”

  She pours two glasses.

  “It is good,” says Nicolette, taking a sip. “My mother only ever microwaved me pizza. One time a boy came round and she tried to cook a pizza in the oven, and he told me afterward part of the reason he dumped me was because it was burned on the outside and frozen in the middle. Which I think is a pretty perfect analogy of my romantic experiences to date. I gave away my sexual prime to Facebook. I’m a tundra on two legs.”

  “Have to say I sympathize more with your mother than the boy there,” says my mother.

  Nicolette drinks all her lemonade. “More?” says my mother, gratified.

  “Yes please,” says Nicolette, holding out her glass. My mother fills it from the jug.

  “Hey,” says Nicolette, “so you do tarot?”

  “No!” I say. “Not in my room!”

  “Oh, let her stay! I want my cards doing.”

  “You don’t believe in this shit too, do you?”

  My mother pulls a pack of tarot cards out of her pocket and hands them to Nicolette. Nicolette squeaks with delight and shuffles them. “Like this?”

  “Like that.”

  “Soooo exciting.”

  I roll my eyes and drink my lemonade.

  SOCIAL CATERPILLAR

  I started going online, drunk, at night, alone. Setting up semi-knavish profiles on dating sites. Stalking old spars. One time, in a stunningly productive vodka fug, I ordered fifty cardboard boxes to pack up my books. I skipped supper. I forgot the alarm code. Warning shots across my bow from the good ship Self-Sabotage.

  I sent away for a pack of those caterpillars that you incubate and watch grow into butterflies. I kept them patiently in a tank in the corner of the dining room, watching them slow down and slowly form their chrysalises and hang like seedpods. They made it look so easy. When they hatched, the butterflies clung to the side of the tank, drying out. If you kept them too long in there they died, but I released them too soon. Or maybe it was too late in the year. I found them dead and dangling from hedges and bushes. I came in carrying one, once. Art was in the kitchen, holding a pack of five beer cans by the empty loop where the sixth had been.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said.

  “Work, then round at Kelly’s.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A butterfly.”

  “Looks dead.”

  “It is dead.”

  He slept down in his studio. I slept in the bed—or rather, I lay there, staring at the ceiling, stalked by my own thoughts.

  He came in first thing. He hadn’t slept either. His breath was beer. He said: “Are we breaking up?”

  I nodded. He started to cry. I got up and went to the toilet. The smell in there. In the end, it was like cutting open a shark’s stomach. Tin cans and toddlers’ limbs. Everywhere we’d been.

  REALLY THO

  I’m terrible with endings in general. Sometimes I turn a song off halfway through because I can’t bear the demise. When the battery on my phone or laptop gets below 50 percent, I can feel the anxiety start to build in my stomach. By 30 percent, it’s in my throat.

  DEALS WITH STRANGERS

  “Hand them back when you feel ready,” my mother says to Nicolette.

  Nicolette instantly stops shuffling and is about to hand over the cards when she pauses and looks uncertain. “No, wait,” she says. “Maybe I’m not ready. How will I know when I’m ready?”

  “You’re ready when you’re ready,” says my mother. “Don’t overthink it.”

  Nicolette’s face splits into a grin and she nods. “Thank you,” she says. “So is this just about the future, yes? Not about the past. I would like to just know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to … dwell on anything that’s been and gone.”

  “Of course, in simple terms,” says my mother. “Although really they are one and the same.”

  “I love how you talk.”

  “I see a man with glasses and a kind face in your near future. Can you accept that?”

  “Accept it?” says Nicolette. “I’m counting on it! When is this happening? Can you give me a ballpark figure? Weeks? Months? Can I request he has a job and no fungal foot issues?”

  “Now,” says my mother, “I’m going to lay the cards out in what we call a classic horseshoe.”

  I pretend not to look. I am giving my lemonade all of my attention. Would you look at this lemonade, would you just, oh wow I mean this is a thoroughly engrossing lemonade.

  “Can you do it so it’s mostly about love?” says Nicolette. “That’s all I’m really here for. I’m just being honest. You can cut the health and money stuff.”

  “That’ll change.” My mother deals the first card. “Death.”

  Nicolette gasps.

  “It doesn’t mean death, it means regeneration,” my mother says.

  “Christ, Nicolette, have you never watched a horror film?”

  “It’s got a freakin’ skeleton on it, Carmen.”

  My mother turns the next card. “The Three of Cups.”

  A new arrival. Also, the “party card.”

  “That looks better,” says Nicolette.

  She deals the next.

  The Sun.

  “There’s some travel on the horizon,” my mother says.

  “I’m so ready for that,” says Nicolette
. “Just don’t let me get delayed at the airport, for God’s sake, or it’s not worth it, not for a short break. Unless you think it’ll be something longer? Do I need to start looking into visas?”

  My mother and I look at each other. Next.

  The Empress.

  My mother peeks under the next card and then puts it down flat. She sighs and sits back. “Darling,” she says to Nicolette, “I’m not sure these are for you. They just don’t feel right. I’m sorry, something is going wrong. Sometimes the energy interferes with surrounding forces. It could be someone in the next house. These walls are thin.”

  “They’re not that thin,” I say. “This is a well-built, structurally sound property.”

  “It all feels right to me,” says Nicolette. “Keep going!”

  My mother turns over the Ace of Wands, then the Page of Cups. She looks perturbed. “Do you think …” says my mother. “No, I shouldn’t say.”

  “What?” says Nicolette. “Do I think what?”

  “Well, is there any way you could be pregnant?”

  Nicolette laughs. “Fucking hell, I hope not! I only sleep with dicks!”

  “Must be for someone else. Sorry, it’s not always clear.”

  I feel suddenly sick. “Thanks, but we’d appreciate some time alone now to talk.”

  My mother smiles at Nicolette and pats her knee. Then her face changes. She and Nicolette hold each other in a gaze that lasts a few seconds but looks like a wondrous sad love. Nicolette jolts out of it. My mother puts the pack of cards in her pocket. She picks up the tray of lemonade and walks to the door.

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit pathetic to stay in bed much longer?” my mother says.

  “Oh, quite the opposite, Mother. This is a vital and bold protest. We’re like John and Yoko.”

  “I’m Yoko,” says Nicolette.

  “What are you protesting about?” says my mother.

  “Life! And our experience of it!” I reply. “I have emotional whiplash.”

  “Lifelash,” says Nicolette.

  “Yes, that’s it. We have lifelash.”

  “Right,” says my mother. “Do you want a gin?”

  “Yes please,” says Nicolette.

  My mother runs off.

  “Don’t let her make you a gin,” I say. “You’ll never get out of bed again. She does all-inclusive-package-holiday measures.”

  “It might help me forget about last night. I had the worst date. I thought it was going well, and then he left after half an hour, because he could ‘just tell it wasn’t going anywhere.’ Half an hour! You spend longer than that viewing a house!”

  “How rude.”

  “So rude. And I wasn’t about to let him get away with it. I pressed him for a reason and he said: ‘Okay, Nicolette, I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to tell you the truth because you’re a nice woman and I think you deserve the truth. So here it is: I simply don’t have time to pursue things that aren’t a hundred percent worthwhile—and I can tell this situation is only potentially fifty percent worthwhile, tops, so it’s nothing personal, but I’m not feeling the fire, so I’m going to save us both some time and leave.’ And he left.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Half an hour!”

  “You don’t lack anything. He is lacking, to write you off so quickly. Is there not some kind of captcha thing you have to do when you sign up to these sites, to prove you’re not an automaton? How did this guy get through? He sounds in every way soulless.”

  “It’s all binaries. One or zero. Yes or no. That’s what they send you, these men on these dating apps. Questionnaires with yes-or-no answers. Indian or Chinese. Chocolate or sex. Black or white. No nuance. Just polarity.”

  “Oh God,” I say, the lightbulb in my brain exploding, “we are thinking like computers! That’s what’s happening! That’s what all this is doing! Define yourself as one thing or the other! Do not be wrong! Do not contradict yourself! YES versus NO, thumbs-up thumbs-down, all of us junk-sick robo-emperors in a little blue arena.”

  My mother brings three G&Ts in on a tray.

  I look at Nicolette. “Do you think what is happening here is some kind of evolution?”

  Nicolette looks at me, terror in her eyes. “Into robots?”

  My mother turns around with the tray. “You two don’t need any gin.”

  “What if,” Nicolette says, “we thought it was taking us backward, giving us less thinking time, and actually it’s all going in the right direction for us to be fused with the machines psychologically into a super-race. Like love-children of Cylons and humans.”

  “Good grief,” says my mother. “I thought you were talking about dating. Can we get back to dating?”

  She hands us our gins. We all cheers and take a large slug.

  “Anyway, I’m going to delete all my dating apps,” says Nicolette. “I don’t want any more vacuous property imperialists or bankers taking me out to schmancy restaurants in Kensington. Oh no, I am just going to walk into a scruffy bar, walk up to someone, smell them, and if that smell is right, I’m going to ask if they want to fuck.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best approach.”

  “We need to get back to the sensorium. I get PLENTY of abuse on these supposedly ‘clean’ dating sites. Men rating me on my boobs, my hair, my teeth. They say way more suggestive things than that. I’d like to do this to you. I’d like to do that to you. Let me buy you dominatrix shoes for your ugly feet. Send me your oldest shoe and I’ll PayPal you a hundred dollars. Would they say those things to my face? Some of them would, for sure, but not as many of them.”

  “Tell me more about these dating apps,” says my mother.

  “I’m on about six,” says Nicolette. “I can send you the details if you give me your number.”

  “Mum, I really don’t think you should go on dating sites. Someone your age will get eaten alive.”

  “I’m not going to sign up for anything!”

  Nicolette hands her phone to my mother and my mother taps her number in with a long blue nail. She hands it back. Seconds later, my mother’s phone pings with messages.

  “Just be careful though with those, Mum,” I say. “Don’t agree to meet anyone without running them by me first.”

  “I’m just looking for friendship,” my mother says.

  “Ah yes, but that’s what they lure you in with,” says Nicolette. “Watch the friendship thing. They sneak up on you. They’re like, My closest friends are women! You’re in your comfort zone, you’re in your comfort zone, you’re in your comfort zone … TAKE YOUR TOP OFF. Be vigilant, Carmen.”

  “You’re forgetting who you’re talking to.”

  I locate my phone under the covers.

  “Are you signing up?” says Nicolette. “If you do, I might not delete them just yet.”

  “No,” I say, “I just want to leave a comment on Art’s exhibition posts to say I had a good time and am proud of him. Hoorah for you. All that shit.”

  “NO!” say my mother and Nicolette. Nicolette sprays gin on my arm.

  “I also want to say NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.”

  “NO!” they shout again. Another boozy hosing from Nicolette.

  “You’ll regret it!” adds Nicolette.

  “It won’t achieve anything!” says my mother.

  “It will make me feel something, which is an achievement. And I regret EVERYTHING, so what makes this worth avoiding, unless I’m going to start avoiding everything?”

  “NO.”

  “At least let me unfollow Suzy Brambles.”

  “No! Stop being so aggressive. This is a peaceful protest.”

  “It will symbolize my detachment from the situation.”

  “UNFOLLOW HER IN YOUR HEART, JENNY,” says Nicolette. “That should be enough.”

  “It’s all too raw,” says my mother. “You need to trust yourself.”

  “I don’t know who to trust because I don’t know who I am. At thirty-five years old, at halfway, I am still
waiting for my life to start.”

  “Do you think you’re halfway? Are the midthirties halfway? Do you think you’re only going to live to seventy? My dad is seventy!”

  My mother says, “Thirty-five is just the beginning. You’re not even remotely menopausal.”

  Nicolette and I share a look.

  NEWS ITEM

  It has recently been discovered that killer whales, one of three types of mammal (including humans) to have a menopause, have this menopause due to a complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Beyond their fertile years, older females play a crucial role in the life of the group. Grandmothers help improve survival in larger matriarchal groups because they often find and share food resources communally. A pod of killer whales is made up of multiple family units, known as matrilines, which travel together. During the prolonged postreproductive life of humans and toothed whales, a wish to avoid conflict has pushed them to abandon fertility.

  NICOLETTE SAYS

  “Apparently, social media is worse for women.”

  “Is that right?” my mother says.

  “Yep.” Nicolette taps her head. “The amygdala in your brain processes emotional learning, fear, and memory. They tested a bunch of men and women and found that the women became depressed when they were presented with the same negative stimuli over and over. Men could blank the familiar stuff out and only responded to the new stuff—terrorist attacks, stuff like that. But the women reacted to the familiar stuff. It chipped away. They got anxious and depressed. And yet here we are, partaking. Perpetuating.”

  “Why?” I say. “Let’s stop and ask that.”

  “I keep telling you to!” says my mother.

  “Well it’s part of my process, I think. Going round and round. I can allow myself a few more months. My therapist told me,” Nicolette says.

  “What process?”

  “Our process. You know. Our thing. I told my therapist all about you.”

  “Right.” Sometimes I think about how many therapists in the world know about me and I feel sick with fame. “What did you tell her?”