Getting Over Mr. Right

by Chrissie Manby

  I decided I had to get rid of the letter at once, as though disposing of it would mean it had never existed. In the safety of my flat at last, I lit the scented candle in whose gentle light I had wished so many times for a reconciliation with the man I loved. I tore the hateful letter into pieces and fed them into the flames, crying bitterly all the while. I drank a bottle of wine while I was at it.

  Then I went to bed, leaving the candle burning. I slept fitfully until I was woken good and proper by the smoke alarm …

  “You’re lucky to be alive” was what the fireman said to me as I stood outside the block where I lived, wrapped in a gray blanket, while everything I owned in the world sizzled away to nothing. “You don’t know how fortunate you are that your landlord installed a smoke alarm in the first place! And that the woman from across the road saw your curtains on fire and called us. It could have been much, much worse. You are a very lucky girl indeed.”

  I nodded mutely. I didn’t feel lucky. And I didn’t feel very much like a girl. I felt old and stupid. My upstairs neighbor, Miranda, who had also been evacuated, glared at me, as if I needed any reminder that I was an idiot.

  How could one little scented candle have done such an enormous amount of damage? The fire brigade’s initial investigation suggested that leaving the candle burning was compounded by the fact that I had also left the sitting-room window open. It was a warm night but also breezy and the wind had blown the curtains inward so that they brushed across the flame, and that was all it took. Towering inferno. It took the firemen a good couple of hours to make sure the fire was out.

  My neighbors and I were taken from the scene to the hospital, where we were checked over for smoke inhalation.

  It was no surprise when the fire brigade confirmed that there was no way I would be able to move back into my flat anytime soon. Everybody who lived in the building had to find somewhere else to go. The flat above mine was damaged by smoke. The flat below by water. My landlord was facing a mammoth insurance claim. The combination of fire and water had left the building as shaky as a fun house at the fair. It might be months before the place would be declared safe again.

  I muttered my apologies to my neighbors, who were thankfully quite restrained given the terrible situation I had brought upon us all. At last Miranda even admitted that it might have happened to her. She told me that she often used candles as part of her spells. Spells? Who knew that so many people in London practiced witchcraft? She promised to cast one for the swift resolution of our sudden housing problem.

  For now, however, I had nowhere to go but back to my parents. Home. The place where they have to take you in.

  In the middle of the night, when the taxi the hospital had ordered dropped me off in Croydon, Mum was full of maternal concern and praised God for my safe return. The following morning, when the reality of the situation was beginning to hit me like a runaway bullet train, she was slightly less full of love and forgiveness.

  “You left a candle burning! For heaven’s sake.”

  The ear bashings came thick and fast. My landlord warned me that his buildings insurance might not cover my stupidity. My contents insurer told me that my claim would likely be dismissed. My mother reminded me all day long that I might have killed myself and half the street. I began to wish I had. I had lost my boyfriend, my job, and now my home.

  “Don’t even get me started about what you did to poor Becky at the wedding,” Mum added when I thought things couldn’t get worse. Of course Becky’s mother had called to tell her the moment I left the reception. I was a marked woman as far as she was concerned.

  My depression deepened when I saw what the firemen had managed to salvage from the flat. All my clothes had been ruined by smoke, fire, or water. My books had gone the same way. My DVDs had cracked or melted. None of my favorite photographs had survived. All I had left were four mugs, including the chipped one I had been meaning to throw away for months. And one more thing.

  “We found this in the bottom of the wardrobe,” said the fire officer as he handed over a charred biscuit tin. I didn’t need to look inside to know that Mini-Michael would be perfectly unscathed. “We thought it might mean something to you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s just great.”

  I didn’t even have a bedroom in my parents’ house anymore. It had long since been converted into Mum and Dad’s “office” and “gym.” The single bed I had grown up with had been replaced by a NordicTrack treadmill and a swanky desk from Ikea, complete with computer workstation and printer bay. Mum had even bought some of that weird plastic stuff to put over the carpet so that she could scoot about on a wheelie office chair. There was really no room for me, even with my worldly goods reduced to nothing but a few mugs and a voodoo doll of my ex-boyfriend.

  My mother tutted loudly as she watched my dad and brother move a filing cabinet out of the office and onto the landing so that I could have some space on the floor to sleep on. The NordicTrack would have to be moved as well.

  “I suppose I’ll have to do my exercises in the conservatory now, where anybody looking out of their back windows can see me!”

  “Forget it. Leave the NordicTrack where it is and I’ll get a hotel room,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Dad, who hadn’t been anywhere near the NordicTrack since the day he put his back out while assembling it. “You’re our daughter. You’re more important than whether the neighbors see your mother in her tracksuit. What kind of parents would we be if we sent you to a hotel?”

  Mum nodded grudgingly. “Your father’s right. You can stay with us for as long as you like,” she told me.

  “And we’ll be happy to have you,” said Dad.

  “But you have to promise to get professional help” was Mum’s last word on the subject.

  Professional help! I couldn’t believe it. I never thought I’d hear those words from my mother. I’d always thought that as far as she was concerned, a mother’s advice was about as professional as it gets. What could anyone else possibly have to tell me? But it seemed that Mum was deadly serious. Over supper that night she told me she had been hearing a lot about the wonders of counseling from one of the girls in her office who was training to volunteer for Relate.

  “But I can’t afford to have therapy,” I said.

  “You can get it on the National Health Service if it’s urgent enough. And I think that it is urgent now, don’t you, dear?” As a result, Mum wasted no time in getting me an appointment with her local GP, who was going to be my GP for the duration of the time I had to stay in Croydon.

  “Tell her everything that’s happened,” Mum said. “You want to make sure she understands how bad things have gotten.”

  I felt ridiculous. Surely Dr. Tucker did not want to be bothered with my breakup tale, but when I told her I thought I was wasting her time, she pressed me gently for more details and she seemed so kind and understanding that I poured out every detail of the story (all right, with the exception of the voodoo sock and Mini-Michael and exactly what I had done to upset my best friend) and she responded with a very sensible plan.

  “Almost everybody reacts badly to a breakup,” she said. “You’d hardly be human if you didn’t. And you do seem to have been having a particularly difficult time of it. But I’m not going to give you drugs,” she continued. “I think what you would really benefit from is talking to other people in the same boat.”

  “Therapy?”

  “Yes. Group therapy, to be precise. You can get going with it straightaway.” She wrote down a name and number on a piece of paper. “This is a support group for people in exactly your situation. Call this lady and ask when the next meeting is.”

  The group that Dr. Tucker said I should join met in a church hall on a Saturday morning. Actually, “church hall” is probably too grand a name for it. It was a prefabricated hut in the corner of a wide expanse of tarmac that formed a very optimistic car park around St. Mary’s C of E. I had walked past this particular church several times a week
until I left home and moved to London and the only time I had seen the car park anywhere near full was when the local Rotary club held their twice-yearly car-boot sale.

  That morning the car park was half full. As I chained my bicycle to the railings opposite the hut (which said that I shouldn’t chain my bicycle there at all), I heard the sound of enthusiastically bad piano playing. Glancing in through the windows, I saw a dozen or so little girls in powder-blue leotards attempting to dance the polka, while their mummies and daddies looked on, glowing with pride.

  A very different bunch of people had gathered in the lobby of the prefab. They were half in because it was drizzling that day and half out because they all needed to smoke.

  “Are you here for the group?” I asked. As if I needed to. There wasn’t one person among the six in the lobby who looked able to dress him- or herself properly, let alone hold down a relationship, have a child, and raise a pristine junior ballerina.

  At five to ten the pianist in the hall played a triumphant final note. The ballerinas curtsied to their teacher and to one another and the class was done. When the doors to the room swung open, it was as though the gates of heaven were being opened for just a second. Lights, drama, laughter. Then the nice mummies and daddies saw the strange people in the corridor and hugged their precious children close. I chanced a smile at one little girl. Her mother picked her up and ran. I hadn’t bothered to put any makeup on that morning, in anticipation of my mascara running, but did I really look that bad?

  The other people seemed to know what to do. While the ballet mistress and her accompanist tidied away their equipment, the members of Broken Hearts United, or BHU, as they liked to be known for short, set up the room for a meeting. The chairs were brought into a tight little circle around a small, low table, upon which was placed a pile of photocopied leaflets and a candle. I was a little anxious to see the chairs being arranged in a neat, tight circle, having hoped to spend my first-ever group therapy meeting lurking at the back of the room, in easy reach of the exit. But there was to be no chance of that, unless I bolted before the whole thing started, of course. I turned toward the door.

  It was too late.

  “Your first time?” asked the red-eyed girl who had arranged the leaflets on the table.

  I nodded.

  “We’ll take care of you,” she said, taking me by the elbow and leading me toward a seat. “My name is Enya.”

  “Is this going to be like an AA meeting?” I wondered out loud.

  “There are probably some similarities,” said Enya, “in that we take turns to share and only offer advice if we’re asked for it. No one judges.”

  That was good. I was fed up with being judged.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll look after you here.”

  I thanked her and hoped she was right. As I settled into my seat, another confused-looking girl wandered in. She was a little younger than me, but I recognized the drawn look of serious heartbreak at once.

  At five past ten the group leader, who was called Charles, arrived. He was in such a hurry that he didn’t bother to take off his bicycle clips. No guesses as to why he was still single, I thought.

  “Sorry I’m late. Do we have any newcomers?” he asked.

  Tentatively, the other newbie and I put up our hands.

  “Good. Perhaps you’d like to tell us a bit about yourself and why you’re here?”

  “I’m Katy. I’m here because I saw a flyer on the notice board at this café I go to,” said the other newbie.

  “I’m Ashleigh. I’m here on the advice of my doctor,” I said. The group murmured approvingly. “I can’t seem to get over my breakup.”

  “Well,” said Charles, “you’ve come to the right place.”

  The meeting progressed in a very orderly fashion. After Katy and I had told our stories (mine at least was greatly abridged), Charles asked for any other contributions. Everyone put up their hands. The group congratulated one chap who had managed to go for a whole week without calling his ex-girlfriend. Another man confessed that he had broken down and called his ex, “but only when I knew he wouldn’t be home. I hung up after listening to the message on his answering machine.”

  “A good strategy,” said Charles. “Did you disguise your number first?”

  “Damn,” said the guy. “I didn’t think of that.”

  Then it was the turn of Enya, the red-eyed woman who had welcomed me to the meeting that day.

  “I’ve been coming to these meetings for quite some time,” said Enya. “And I just want to thank you all for being my lifeline in the difficult days since my breakup.”

  The group clapped at the compliment.

  “Should I tell my story for the new people?” Enya asked Charles. Charles nodded. Enya held her coffee mug tightly and looked to the ceiling, as though she was trying to prevent herself from crying. My mind was already boggling as I imagined what on earth her story could be. She looked to be in her early forties. Had she married young? Was she mourning the end of a relationship that had lasted twenty years?

  Enya continued, “Robert and I were together for eleven months.”

  Oh.

  “Our relationship was everything I had ever dreamed of. I gave my whole self to him. My body and my soul. I thought that we were building a union that would last forever. I was wrong. Shortly before our first Christmas together, he called me from the hotel in Rhyl where he was staying on business”—she made little inverted commas with her fingers when she said the word “business”—“and told me that he didn’t want to be with me anymore.”

  The other members of BHU sighed as they shared Enya’s pain.

  “I thought that I would die,” Enya continued. “I begged and pleaded for him to tell me what I could do to turn things around, but he’d made up his mind and refused to listen to me. He told me that he didn’t think he’d ever really been in love.”

  A woman who had not taken her nose out of her handkerchief for the entire session let out an anguished sob on Enya’s behalf.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not only had he broken my heart, he was trying to destroy my memories. I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was making a mistake. But it was as though he’d been overtaken by an evil spirit. The things that he said. So cruel and untrue. He told me I was needy. He told me I wanted too much from him and that was why he left.”

  Charles tutted and slowly shook his head.

  “And the pain just keeps on growing,” Enya said with a shuddering intake of breath. “Every night before I go to bed I pray that the following morning will release me. Every night I pray that my first thought upon waking will be of something other than him. Him! Him! But still my torment goes on.” She took a moment to wave her fist at the gods. “Seven years!” she cried. “Seven years! Am I doomed to eternal torment?”

  I had been taking a mouthful of tea as Enya made that last revelation. The mouthful came out through my nose.

  Had I understood her properly? Enya had managed to spin out her grief over the end of an eleven-month relationship for a whole seven years! If I extrapolated from her experience and multiplied it by the length of time that Michael and I had been together, then I was looking at almost twenty-one years of this misery. Longer than the average criminal sentenced to “life” actually spent in jail.

  “I don’t know what I did to deserve this.” Enya sighed. “I don’t know why I was chosen to bear this pain.”

  “Me neither,” I said in what I hoped was a supportive way.

  Enya thanked me for my “contribution.”

  “But what happened to Robert?” the other newbie dared to ask.

  The entire room turned toward her with disapproval in their eyes. But Enya said it was okay. She would tell the new people the end of the story.

  “He got married,” said Enya. “He has three children. He took out a restraining order against me late last year.”

  When the session had ended, Enya came across the room and grabbed both
my hands. Though she had been nursing her coffee cup for the entire session, her fingers were horribly cold. I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge being grabbed by one of his ghosts. Was Enya the ghost of my future?

  “You were so brave today, telling your story so stoically. We’re all really proud of you,” she told me in a blast of halitosis. “Some of us go on to Starbucks after the session, to go over what we’ve learned. Perhaps you’d like to come along?”

  I fought the urge to tell her that I wasn’t sure she had learned anything. Seven years grieving such a short relationship, while the guy who had left her had met someone else, married, and had a family? Enya was ridiculous. But was she really so much more ridiculous than me?

  I imagined what Michael might think if he could have heard me describing the end of our affair to this room full of odd-bods, who all had very good reason to believe that they might never get laid again. I wasn’t like them, was I? I wasn’t wearing bicycle clips. I wasn’t wearing anything that looked as though it might have been made by a blind women’s collective in Ecuador. I didn’t smell of mothballs or llamas. I didn’t have breath that could kill a dog. Did I?

  I had to get out of there. I felt as though another moment in the company of those people would only do me harm. That meeting had been what the Americans so charmingly call a “circle jerk.” I told Enya that I had to get home. My mother was expecting me for lunch.