The Plus One

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  ‘All?’

  ‘Aye. I’ve done the Mayr clinic; you know the one in Austria where you must chew all your food fifty times. And I’ve done Green Pastures in Arizona, where you only eat grass for ten days.’

  ‘Actual grass?’

  ‘Actual grass,’ she said, nodding. ‘It were hell. And colonics every day. But I’ve never felt so clean in all my life.’

  ‘Have a look on the board and see when your massages are,’ said Jane, waving her fork at a pinboard behind us.

  The pinboard had postcards pinned to it with slogans like ‘Be grateful to everyone’ and ‘No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again’. In the middle of the pinboard was a sheet of paper with our names next to times and massage rooms. I was due to have a shiatsu massage at seven. ‘Mum, you’re at seven this evening too. Deep tissue in room three.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Mum. ‘Massage then bath and bed. No chance of a nice glass of wine, I suppose?’

  Jane shook her head.

  ‘You have a lot of anger in your stomach,’ said Isabel, my masseuse, an hour later. I was lying on blankets on the floor of the massage room in a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms while she prodded my stomach with her hands. ‘I just need to get a bit…’ She pushed her hands deeper, as if she was trying to get them underneath my ribcage. ‘There, that’s it. That’s releasing your liver a bit. Feel that?’

  ‘Erm…’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, do you drink a lot, Polly?’

  ‘No. Not really. I mean I’ve probably been overdoing it a bit recently because I broke up with someone but…’

  ‘Ah, that explains all the anger then. It’s very angry, your whole system,’ she said, circling her hands on my stomach again before it bubbled. We both heard it. ‘There!’ said Isabel, like a delighted midwife. ‘You see? That’s energy shifting about.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘terrific.’

  She prodded and pushed and poked – sometimes with her elbows – for the next half an hour while my stomach made more embarrassing noises.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said every time, while Isabel reorganized my internal organs.

  ‘There,’ she said, finally, cradling my head with her hands. ‘You have much better energies now, Polly. Would you like a glass of water?’

  ‘No, no, don’t worry. I think I’m going to go back to my room and have a shower, but thank you very much. That was—’ what was the right word? ‘—extraordinary.’

  ‘You are most welcome. Namaste,’ said Isabel, putting her hands together in prayer position and bowing.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said solemnly, putting my hands together and bowing back.

  Mum wasn’t in her room when I got back to the cottage so I ran a bath in her bathroom. There was a Kilner jar of bath salts next to it, so I chucked in several handfuls for good measure. Bit more purging couldn’t hurt. I’d run it too hot so I pushed the cold tap on again and slowly lay down, squeaking as the hot water scalded my back.

  ‘Polly, are you all right? What on earth are you doing?’ came Mum’s voice from her room.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Mum, I thought I’d grab the first bath. How was your massage?’ I shouted back.

  ‘Blissful. He had a good go at the knots in my shoulder and neck.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Yes, an Australian. Long hair. If you’re doing that I’m going to walk down the hill a bit and see if I can get any reception.’

  ‘OK, cool, won’t be long. I’m just going to flay myself for another ten minutes or so.’

  I heard the door close behind her and lifted my leg out of the water to turn the cold tap off with my foot. I would not be walking anywhere to check my phone. I would read the book about detoxing my soul on the bedside table and fall asleep. Although in the end I didn’t even get that far. I climbed into bed and fell asleep before 9 p.m. Must have been something in the bath salts.

  The next morning started with an early yoga session at 7.15 a.m. Mum stood in the studio trying to touch her toes. She got to just below her knees and stood up again.

  Aidar was sitting on his mat in the corner, rubbing his eyes. Jane was lying on her back, eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling like a twenty-a-day smoker. Alison hadn’t appeared. I sat down on my mat. I’d never been very sure about yoga. All those weird positions like Barking Dragon done by people with t-shirts that say things like ‘Love’ and ‘Joy’.

  ‘Right then,’ said a blond man with an Australian accent, walking through the door in a vest that said ‘Breathe’. ‘Morning, everyone, let’s get started with a few breathing exercises. Legs crossed, on the mat.’

  ‘Morning, Simon,’ said Jane, sitting up and beaming at him in, I noticed, a fairly low-cut gym top.

  ‘Good morning, Jane, how are you?’

  ‘I’m wonderful, thank you. I’m not sure we’ve got Alison today. I don’t think she’s a morning person.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Simon. ‘Morning, Susan.’

  ‘Morning, Simon,’ said Mum. ‘I feel ever so good after last night.’

  ‘That’s what all the girls tell me.’ He winked at her. Please.

  ‘Sorry, we haven’t met,’ he said, holding his hand out to me.

  ‘Hi, I’m Polly.’

  It was like shaking hands with Samson.

  ‘Polly, lovely name.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Right then, everyone else on your butts. Legs crossed, eyes closed. Deep breaths in for five. One, two, three, four, five. Then out for five. Five, four, three, two, one.’

  We made a stiff bunch of four. Mum and I burst into laughter every few minutes, failing to stand on one leg for more than three seconds.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, girls,’ said Simon, ‘You’re trying.’

  He had the thick arms of a lumberjack, I thought, pulling my knees to my chest. My stomach rumbled and I twisted my head to the side to see if anyone heard.

  After an hour, Simon told us to lie flat on our backs. ‘One leg in the air, please, another quick stretch of your hamstrings before breakfast.’

  I put my right leg in the air. Simon walked across, knelt down and pushed his shoulder into the back of my thigh, stretching it further. ‘Let’s get a bit deeper with that,’ he said.

  Given that I was wearing old Lycra running leggings with a crotch that had, over the years, developed that smell of musty, dead mouse, I found this disconcerting. But, obviously, I didn’t say anything. I just tried to concentrate on not farting. He had a tattoo on his bicep, some sort of Hindi, I thought.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, nodding towards his arm, trying to break the quiet awkwardness of this man being within sniffing distance of my vagina.

  ‘The tat? It’s a Sanskrit mantra,’ he said. ‘Change legs.’ He put my right leg down and I swung my left one into the air.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘May all beings everywhere be happy and free,’ said Simon.

  Ha, fat chance, I thought, as he pushed into my left leg with his shoulder. Quite hard to feel happy and free when you felt so sad you’d recently considered googling ‘has anyone ever actually died of a broken heart?’

  ‘Right, you lot,’ he said after a few seconds, lowering my leg down and winking again. ‘Breakfast time.’

  The following two days were more of the same. Up at 7 a.m. for yoga, a breakfast that involved several kinds of nut, a hike into the hills, more nuts, more yoga, more discussion of bowel movements, more meditation, more massages. On the final afternoon, Mum and I walked up to the cottage and sat in deck chairs outside it. Well, I sat in the sun, Mum sat in the shade underneath an umbrella, fanning herself with her copy of The Lady.

  ‘How you feeling, love?’ she said.

  ‘All right, but I think my shoulders are burning,’ I said, opening one eye to squint at my right arm.

  ‘I meant about Jasper.’

  ‘Oh.’ I paused for a moment to think. The truth was I didn’t really know. My brain was still churning through
it all. ‘All right. I mean, I hate him. But I think a bit of me is still in love with him at the same time.’

  ‘Oh, darling, that won’t change overnight.’

  ‘What I still don’t get though is how he can have said all that stuff, have told me he loved me and so on, and then did that. How can anyone do that? I keep going over it again and again in my head. I just can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine having gone away with someone else. How does that even work?’

  ‘They’re just so different. To us, I mean. You’re a brilliant, talented, beautiful girl. And he’s just a… silly, silly boy.’

  ‘He’s a fucking moron.’

  ‘Well, let’s not lower ourselves to vulgarities, Polly darling,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, Mum, I’m sorry. More importantly, how are you?’

  ‘I’m all right, darling,’ she said, resting her copy of The Lady in her lap. ‘It’s been a funny few months, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But you’re feeling…’

  ‘I’m feeling all right,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’m starting to feel much better. Less tired.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, feeling guilty that I’d been as wet as a flannel over Jasper, when Mum had been so stoic about cancer.

  ‘It’s hard being on your own sometimes, Polly love,’ Mum went on, as if psychic. ‘And it’s brutal having your heart broken, but it’s better than being with the wrong person. You don’t want to marry the wrong person.’

  ‘But you and Dad weren’t wrong…’

  ‘No, no! He was the right person for me,’ she said, ‘he just had to leave us a bit early, that’s all. And until Sidney came along, there wasn’t anyone else I wanted to sacrifice my life for. Never sacrifice anything. The right person will only add to your life, he won’t take anything away from it.’

  I leant back in my deckchair, wondering whether I’d ever be as wise about men as my mother. Was it being in your sixties? Maybe it was.

  ‘Do you know what I always thought?’ she went on, fanning her face again with the magazine.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I always imagined Bill might be the right person for you. Eventually.’

  I opened my eyes again. ‘What? Bill? Mum, come on. No. Gross. Absolutely not. And anyway, he’s with Willow.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not right,’ Mum said. ‘Terribly sweet but not… Well… I’m not sure she’s challenging enough for him.’

  ‘Well, they’ve bought a dog so I feel like they’re as good as married,’ I said. Bill, I mean honestly. Perhaps the sun had made her temporarily mad. I loved him but not like THAT. I’d known that ever since we were teenagers. Bill was the friend who bought your mum flowers and always called when he said he would. One of the nice guys, which was all very well for some. Like Willow, for instance. But I’d always wanted more than that. I’d always wanted to be shaken by love, consumed by it, inflated with passion and longing and with someone I ached for when we were apart. That was real love, right? Although, I reflected, reaching for the sun lotion, that was before I met Jasper and had actually been rocked by love. Perhaps I should dial my expectations down a fraction for whenever I next had a boyfriend, in five hundred years’ time. In real life, all that emotional turbulence was quite trying.

  I was off men for the time being anyway. I was going to take a break from worrying about being single and not having a plus one at Lex’s wedding. Maybe it was the Spanish air making me feel stronger. When I got home, I was going to concentrate on finding a new job and potentially try to drink a bit less wine. Be healthier. Start taking vitamins. Eat five a day, or was it ten a day now?

  ‘Buying a dog doesn’t mean you have to get married, Polly darling,’ Mum continued from her chair. ‘Which reminds me, I wonder how Bertie’s stomach is?’

  I closed my eyes again at the prospect of a conversation about Bertie’s movements.

  ‘Anyway, there might be a nice chap at Lex’s wedding,’ she went on. ‘A friend of Hamish’s you haven’t met.’

  That seemed unlikely.

  ‘You never know,’ she added.

  People always say that. ‘You never know.’ As if you’re going to meet someone when you pop to the shops for a loaf of bread. Or on the bus. I never saw anyone promising on the bus. It was usually teenagers sexting one another or mothers ramming everybody’s ankles with their buggies.

  ‘Nope, no more men,’ I said, my eyes still shut.

  Later that night, I got out of the bath and brushed my teeth, wiping a circle in the steamed-up mirror. Four days of eating like a creature from Farthing Wood had at least perked up my skin, I noticed. And the dark circles under my eyes had gone. Plus, when I looked down at my belly, that was a bit flatter. Which would help with that blood clot of a dress that I had to wear at Lex’s wedding.

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ said Alejandro, putting my bag into the boot of his car the next morning.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said primly, climbing into the back, where Mum was already sitting, headscarf in her hands, rubbing her head.

  ‘I feel ever so much better, Polly darling,’ she said. ‘Do I look better?’

  I nodded because she did. She looked less tired. ‘Yup, Mum, you look like a total babe. Like Sinead O’Connor.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘An Irish singer.’

  ‘I don’t know him. But look, here, can you hold my phone and take one of those, what are they called? Belfies? For Sidney?’

  At the airport, I turned my phone on for the first time in five days and it started vibrating instantly. Dozens of boring work emails, a message from Lex asking if I’d died, a message from Bill saying could I ring him, five million more misspelt messages from Lala.

  ‘Sidney says he and Bertie have had a lovely time together,’ said Mum in the lounge. ‘I’m going to get a Daily Mail. Do you want anything?’

  ‘I’ll come with you. I need some paper and a pen.’

  I’d decided I was going to spend the flight back writing a to-do list. Top of which was to get a new job. But what?

  It was in the airport shop that I saw it, the Posh! cover with Celestia grinning out from it, lying in a bath of avocados. I felt another wave of humiliation and quite sick at the sight of her face. I was never going to eat another avocado again.

  I didn’t exactly bounce out of bed with glee at the thought of returning to Posh! the next morning.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, sticking my head around Peregrine’s door when I got in, wondering if he’d mention Jasper.

  ‘Ah, Polly,’ he said, ‘good to have you back. Now, I’ve had an idea. Can you make a start on a piece about the Countess of Basingstoke’s new guinea pig?’

  Lala appeared in the office an hour or so later. ‘Oh, Pols,’ she said, giving me a huge, cigarette-infused hug. ‘I’ve missed you. I’m sorry about Jaz. He’s not good enough, that’s the thing. And if he wants to date boring old Celestia Smythe then good luck to him, I say. Honestly, if I see him at the Fotheringham-Montagues’ drinks party this weekend I will…’

  She rattled on while I winced internally a bit at the word ‘date’. Part of me wanted to quiz Lala on what she knew about Jasper and Celestia, but I knew it wouldn’t help. That probing her for information was essentially mental self-harm.

  So, instead of discussing Jasper or thinking up interview questions for a guinea pig, I spent most of the morning in the fashion cupboard with Legs, who had called in several pairs of shoes for me to wear to Lex’s wedding.

  ‘It is like trying to work with that monster who lives in the hills,’ said Legs, kneeling in front of me, a pile of discarded shoes lying around us like fallen soldiers.

  ‘What monster?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, that one who has all those hairs and leaves feet marks in the snow.’

  ‘Bigfoot?’

  ‘Yes. You are him.’

  ‘Thanks. What about those ones?’ I pointed at a Valentino box which contained a pair of black silk heels.

  Legs sighed and reac
hed for the box. ‘They might work. Now, do we want to talk about Jasper or maybe we don’t talk about him?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much to say, Legs. We’ve broken up and…’

  ‘OK, we don’t talk about him,’ she said. ‘Bastard man.’

  ‘He is a bastard man,’ I replied as she held out one of the shoes for me to try.

  ‘Polly, you need to wax your giant toes.’

  ‘Big toes, they’re called. Not giant toes.’

  They fitted. Just about. Obviously they cut off all circulation to my giant toes and they would give me blisters within five minutes of arriving at church, but I’d just lob a few Compeed plasters in my bag.

  ‘Joe told me your sad news,’ said Barbara as she scanned my solitary carton of soup that evening with disapproval.

  ‘Did he now?’

  ‘You should try and get him back.’

  I ignored this and fished in my purse for some coins.

  ‘A woman needs a man, Polly. And this man was a good man. He had a castle.’

  ‘A woman doesn’t need a man, Barbara,’ I said firmly, ‘and he wasn’t that good anyway. He cheated on me with someone else.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, throwing her hands in the air. ‘This is just sex, Polly. It doesn’t matter. Men need sex all the time. This is how it is. When Albert was alive he…’

  I absolutely didn’t need to hear about Albert and Barbara’s sex life. ‘I’ve got to run, Barbara. I need to pack for my friend’s wedding.’

  ‘It should be your wedding,’ she shouted at me as I left.

  ‘Thanks for sharing the news with Barbara,’ I said upstairs to Joe, who was lying on his sofa with a plate of toast balanced on his chest.

  ‘She was asking all sorts of indelicate questions about when you were getting engaged, so I wanted to shut the old harridan up before you came back.’

  ‘Hasn’t worked,’ I said, emptying my pea soup into a saucepan.

  ‘Any word from him?’ he went on.

  ‘Nope. I think he’s given up.’