Pear Shaped

by Stella Newman

  I read mine. Sagittarius: Your world will fall apart but you have your friends, family and health to support you.

  I would do things that even Courtney Love, drunk, would draw the line at, if it would mean James and I could swap star signs for a week.

  Horoscopes are bullshit.

  He is due back from China tomorrow. I text to tell him I’m going to pop round with some milk. He texts back saying not to worry, Rosie, his cleaner, will pick some up for him. I reply saying I need to pick up my Bamix blender anyway. ‘No, Soph, Rosie will wonder why you’re taking your stuff back. I’ll bring it to you at the weekend, if that’s what you decide you want.’

  I don’t care if his cleaner thinks it’s weird, and why is he so bothered either? Does it diminish his reputation in the eyes of the woman who has to clean his bathroom? What does she care? And what’s this ‘if that’s what you decide you want’ bullshit. As if any of this is my decision. Or does this mean he realises what he’s throwing away? If so, a text about his cleaner seems a strange place to finally declare his love.

  Well, he can’t stop me. I have a set of keys. If I want to take him some milk and get my stuff back, I bloody well will.

  I haven’t been to the house since Christmas Eve. As I park I feel panic rising. Too many memories. Happy memories – of kissing on the doorstep – painful memories.

  Be brave. He’s not there. Besides, you’re thin now. Everything’s going to be okay.

  I put my key in the Chubb lock. Strange, it’s unlocked. Of course – Rosie. I like Rosie but I’m not in the mood to see her; hopefully she’s up doing the bedrooms.

  I head straight for the kitchen. ‘Our’ kitchen.

  Get this over with quickly. I dump my bag on the counter and open the fridge to put the milk in.

  Very strange.

  On the top shelf sits half a freshly cut lemon, a bottle of flaxseed oil and a soy fat-free cherry-cinnamon yoghurt with one spoonful removed.

  Rosie is sturdy and Jamaican and not the type to eat soy or fat-free anything.

  I shut the door, then open it again.

  Magic. This time, I notice in the cheese compartment in the door a large midnight blue pot of face cream, two vials of nail polish and some Organic Soy Dogchewz.

  Very, very strange.

  I hear Rosie’s footsteps on the stairs and turn suddenly. She stops at the top of the stairs. ‘Jamie?’ she says in a thick Russian accent.

  I can just see her from the knee down, like the mother in Tom and Jerry. These calves don’t look like Rosie’s 58-year-old, grandmother-of-five calves. For a start, they’re white.

  Secondly, they’re practically twice the length of Rosie’s calves, and end in long, narrow feet. One foot hovers in view – toes pointed downwards, paused. The nails are painted hot pink. A thin diamond chain is hanging off the ankle.

  The Not-Rosie’s knees come into view, down one step.

  Bony, narrow, defined knees. Down another step.

  I grab on to the fridge handle for support as I feel my own knees start to buckle.

  ‘Jamie, is you?’ she says, in her Not-Rosie voice.

  Another step. I can see the next four inches of her thigh. Long, lean, slim, thin, toned.

  Another step. More leg. And now a flop of long chestnut hair swings down sideways, followed by the face. Two too-wide pale blue eyes, two dark brows raised in shock.

  I turn back to the fridge. In the brushed steel door everything is blurry. My hands are shaking violently as I open the door again, take the milk out and shut the door.

  I think my heart might have stopped.

  A voice in my head is screaming for me to move but my feet remain static. I don’t want to have to pass her on the stairs but I don’t want her coming down here either.

  It doesn’t matter. She’s fled back up the stairs, so light on her feet that I barely hear her, except when she slams one of the bedroom doors shut.

  By the time I’m back outside by my car, I am shaking so hard that I can’t get the key into the door. The metal taps and scratches around the lock like an animal desperate to be let in.

  After a minute I give up, convinced I am being watched from the house. I run round the corner and hail a taxi.

  ‘Laura’s.’

  ‘You’ll have to give me a bit more than that, love,’ says the driver.

  ‘Englefield Road.’

  He nods and looks at me in the rear view mirror, trying to figure out if I’m going to puke in his cab.

  Laura lets me in and I sit on her hall floor, my back against the front door. She bends and looks in my eyes with an optician’s gaze, but I’m focussing on the past.

  ‘What happened? He’s not back is he?’ she says.

  ‘Please can you get my car?’

  ‘Sure, where is it?’

  ‘His. Please. Before 8.30.’

  ‘It’s seven o’ clock now …’

  ‘Tomorrow … 8.30’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to stay here with you now, and I’ll get it first thing.’

  ‘8.30. The car. I’ll get a ticket.’

  ‘I promise I’ll go before 8.30.’

  ‘Or a clamp. A clamp. The car.’

  Years ago, when my grandpa had a stroke, my brother and I visited him in the hospital. He recognised us okay but when he started talking he came out with sentences such as ‘Tell the nurse one two one two’ or ‘Your grandmother one two one two and there’s nothing in the paperwork one two one two,’ – all the while counting out numbers on his fingers. My brother had laughed nervously but I remember bursting into tears as soon as we left the ward, seeing this man’s brain reduced to a malfunctioning dashboard. This thought comes to me now as I sit on Laura’s wooden floorboards, a draft blowing onto my lower back.

  ‘8.30, a clamp, 8.30,’ I say.

  ‘It’s okay, Sophie. Do you want me to go right now?’

  I nod, calmer.

  ‘I’ll be back very soon. Don’t move …’

  I am going nowhere. I lean sideways and Laura squeezes past me out of the door through the narrow gap I’ve allowed. My head is numb, as if packed to the edges with cladding. I can hear my breathing loudly.

  I feel the same as I felt after getting chronic food poisoning from a bowl of old rice in the Fletchers’ canteen last year. After violent nausea and projectile vomiting by the bins in the car park, I’d sat against a damp brick wall feeling exactly like this. Not a sense of relief. More a sense of ‘Oh! That wasn’t fun. Okay. Interesting. I can’t move.’

  I am still sitting here when Laura tries to re-enter her flat a while later. I shift sideways to let her in and she comes to sit next to me and takes my hands.

  ‘The car’s here, it’s safe. I bought us some whisky, some Ben and Jerry’s, some fags and some Mint Aero Balls. The Four Guilty Pleasures of the Apocalypse.’ She unpacks the treats on the hall floor and goes to fetch glasses, spoons and an ashtray.

  I shake my head and keel sideways, lying down on the hall floor and shutting my eyes.

  ‘Soph, let’s get you to bed,’ she says, stroking my hair.

  No. ‘Pillow. Here. Please.’

  One of Laura’s nicknames for me is Dormouse because of my ability to fall asleep anytime, anyplace, anywhere. When we used to go clubbing, at 3am she’d be on a podium doing pills like there was no tomorrow. I’d be curled up asleep in the chill-out room, some terrible art student lava lamp graphics synched to the sounds of the Café del Mar album in the background. Compared to a fag-butt sticky corner of Bagley’s, Laura’s floor is a Posturepedic mattress.

  ‘Soph, just this once, please – you’ll be more comfortable in bed. I promise.’

  ‘Please.’ I stay on the floor while she half-heartedly tugs my arm. ‘Don’t make me move, Laura. I can’t move.’

  When I wake up five hours later I find myself covered by a duvet, a pillow under my head.

  There is a flashing blue light on my phone. Three missed calls and a text message from James that he must ha
ve sent from Beijing airport: Sophie – she is a friend. She’s just staying at the house while I’m away. I promise you that’s the truth.

  He calls at 8am from Heathrow.

  I ignore it.

  I lie down on Laura’s bed, chain smoke, and think about Noushka – her name like a low punch followed by a slap. I think about how her legs compare to mine. I think about how young she is. How not very bright. How James looked at her when she was on stage that night.

  He calls again at 9, 10.30 and 11am. Wow, guilt makes you work hard, I think.

  I pick up on the fifth call.

  ‘It’s not what you think, Soph.’

  ‘Just tell me how long this has been going on.’

  ‘Soph. I need to see you.’

  ‘I don’t need to see you. Just tell me the truth.’

  ‘She is, was staying at mine ‘cause she’s doing PR days around the launch. I was out of town … I haven’t even been in the house at the same time as her.’

  ‘She’s still there then.’

  Silence.

  ‘So, she’s still there. And now you’re there.’

  ‘Nothing’s happened … nothing’s happening.’ He omits to say ‘nothing will happen.’ So very, very James.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I say. ‘You’re a fucking liar.’

  ‘I AM NOT,’ he says, defiant till the end. ‘Listen, I can see why it might look weird, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened with us.’

  ‘What has nothing to do with what happened with us?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said “it has nothing to do with what happened with us”.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, well, it was just a sentence … stop analysing everything, you’ll always read stuff into the most innocent things, you’re mad.’

  I will be soon, I think.

  ‘You went to Moscow three times in December,’ I say, thinking back to the way his fingers kept fidgeting strangely when he talked about those trips. I should have said something then. I should have called him on it. ‘Was she there?’

  ‘Her family’s in Moscow.’

  ‘Was she there?’

  ‘She was visiting her family.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘She’s a friend, she’s got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Was he in Moscow? I didn’t see him at the launch.’

  ‘I don’t know where her boyfriend was or is. What is this, twenty fucking questions?’

  ‘What’s her boyfriend’s name? If you two are friends, she must have mentioned his name.’

  ‘SOPHIE. I’m not going to be interrogated like this. If you can’t calm down and talk about this like an adult …’

  I slam the phone down.

  My mind flits back to when Laura was going out with Carlos, when we were twenty-one. She suspected he was cheating with a girl named Aimee; he denied it. She stood outside Carlos’s front door, looking through his letterbox and saw Aimee walking round naked. She rang Carlos, heard his mobile ring inside the flat, and heard him down the phone and through the door, saying he was in Manchester till the following day. When she told him she was outside his front door, he continued to claim he was in Manchester.

  Black is the new black, and James is the new Carlos.

  I figure out pretty early on the following morning that bunking off work to lie in bed is a bad idea. While the thought of listening to Devron talk about his soft shelf wobblers fills me with despair, the alternative – sitting on my own in my flat and thinking about James – is beyond hellish.

  Besides, I now have something urgent on my to-do list: check I don’t have the clap. Always good to keep busy after a break-up, isn’t that what they say?

  The spectacularly lovely thing about my trip to the VD clinic is that it is only three doors down from where James and I kissed in the street, when that crazy tramp woman came up to us. That was the first night I slept with him. We had sex three times that night. I wonder if he’d already realised I wasn’t his normal physical type, I think, as I fill out a form asking me if I have ever put my penis in another man’s anus.

  ‘I think I have the wrong form,’ I say to the lady behind the desk.

  ‘So you do. Try this,’ she says, handing me a new clipboard, as I start the box-ticking over again.

  As I have walked out of a Tuesday afternoon status meeting at the exact point Devron stood up to present ‘10 Inspirational Shopping Trolley Designs from Around The World’, I am in no hurry to get back to the office. Nonetheless my colleagues think I have just popped to the loo, so I figure twenty minutes is probably the most I can spend in the clinic without alerting Janelle to my absence. (In the last month Janelle has twice caught me hiding in the fridge with Zoe; she’s so entirely on to me.)

  ‘Is it alright if I just do the urine, not the scrape thing?’ I say to the receptionist.

  ‘It’s better if you do both.’

  Hmmm, better for who, I think.

  I pee in a jar, post it through a cubbyhole and I’m back at my desk fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Where have you been?’ says Janelle.

  ‘Er, having a wee?’ I say.

  And because I am telling the truth – well, a James sort of truth – I appear to be sincere, and she can’t haul me up on the fact that I have missed Devron’s weekly death-by-boredom slot.

  For the second time in a month Laura says: if you want to call him, don’t. Write him an e-mail. Don’t send it.

  So I write him another email every day, and because Devron is no longer in the Maldives and I am in the final stages of my custard project, I spend only half the entire day staring at my screen, crafting the email, changing the font, deleting, snipping, shaping, adding.

  Feb 4th

  Hello again James!

  Great news! You are STD free. I highly recommend hanging out at your local council-run genital health clinic, it’s a terrific way to spend one’s leisure hours. And they’re so twenty-first century, they’ll even text you the results!

  Feb 5th

  Guess what? It’s a year ago to the day since I first met you. You may not remember, but that night you chatted me up. Did I pretend I was a 28-year-old leg model? Did I ever lie to you about what I look like? You asked me to tango, remember? Oh, the bloody irony.

  Feb 6th

  All the money in the world can’t paper over the cracks in your soul. You don’t want to admit you cheated because that makes you the bad guy. The fact that you let Noushka put a soy cherry yoghurt – which isn’t even food – in my bloody fridge, tells me that you are at best a fool, and at worst, well … the Devil has all the best tunes, so CLEARLY you are not the devil …

  Feb 7th

  You can tell your new girlfriend next time she’s interviewed and asked to describe her personality, she might want to include Predator, Fiancé-stealer and Moron in her list of nouns (and yes, I know they should be ADJECTIVES, not NOUNS, but then ‘I like jewellery’ isn’t a personality trait now is it …)

  Feb 8th

  You are a gold-plated cliché.

  Here’s what I bet:

  You’ll end up marrying Noushka or some identikit hard-bodied, hard as nails gold-digger who is years younger than you, who you think is feisty but is actually just spoilt.

  The minute you have kids, you will realise that having kids is not like having toys, and you will feel your age plus ten years immediately.

  Your previously perfect shiny wife will be knackered and hormonal, like every new mum is, and will fail to continue making your penis the centre of her universe. At this point you will begin to wonder what has gone wrong.

  Even with the best marriage counselling in the world, you will be resentful and bored after seven years, but by that time your erectile dysfunction will have kicked in, and she’ll be shagging Gareth, her personal trainer, who overdoes the free sunbeds at work and wears Lycra t-shirts with deep v necks. And you won’t be able to divorce her because then she’ll take you for half your cash.

&n
bsp; So, to that end I wish you both good luck, Good Luck, GOOD LUCK.

  Feb 9th

  I have been reading about sociopaths. There are seven signs that identify a sociopath, and you check eight of them. You are irresponsible, selfish, charming, self-interested, impulsive, ruthless and cruel and I rue the day I ever met you. When you told me your grandfather made his fortune by torturing helpless little minks, I should have paid closer attention.

  Feb 10th

  You are a shallow, emotionally immature, half-baked, fully fledged idiot. You said on our first date that you never lied, yet you are the most dishonest human I’ve ever met. Your self-justification reflex is so strong, you probably don’t even see how cowardly you’ve been. That wouldn’t fit with your view of yourself – Saint James, King James, Mr Wonderful. I’ve got news for you Mr Wonderful – when you realise what a giant mistake you’ve made, I won’t be sitting around waiting for you. Well, maybe I will, if you realise in the next month or so …

  Feb 11th

  How dare you call my friend Debbie fat! Oh, and by the way, I had my BMI measured yesterday and my body fat is 18.2%, which actually makes me officially ‘underweight’ according to government statistics.

  And another thing! That night you met Pete and you said I should keep losing weight, Pete thought you were an arse.

  Feb 12th

  In future if you want someone to project manage your kitchen, HIRE A KITCHEN PROJECT MANAGER. (Try Google or the Yellow Pages.) Pay them a 15% fee. This will work out considerably less emotionally damaging for them than a proposal of marriage, which is subsequently retracted.

  I would say ask Noushka to help next time, but no doubt she is brainstorming her next toenail polish business plan (toes/fingers – they’re the same bloody thing, James!)