by Libby Page
After several denials he finally admitted to it, saying she was an ex-girlfriend whom he had bumped into a few months ago – they’d both found there was something left there that they couldn’t let go of and that they needed to explore. He hadn’t wanted to tell Hannah because he wasn’t sure if it would lead anywhere. But it had.
His confession was worse than she could have imagined – not only had he had an affair, but he had fallen back in love with the ex whom he’d complained about to Hannah several times over the past two years. It seems strange to call it an affair – Hannah always used to think of that word in connection to married couples in their forties and fifties who stray with secretaries or nannies. It’s not something she ever imagined experiencing at twenty-five.
Sat on the floor with hot tears streaming down her face, Hannah thinks she finally understands the true meaning of the word ‘cheat’. She fell in love and followed the guidelines, letting her guard down and committing to Sam and to their life together. But he didn’t. He wanted to win but ignore all the rules.
They have a month left in the flat contract but Hannah cannot bear to stay there until then. Instead, Sam has been staying at his brother’s house (at least that is what he said – Hannah suspects he is with her but tries to pretend he isn’t) and she has spent the past week scouring SpareRoom and Facebook trying to find somewhere to live and trying to summon the energy to pack her things. Two days ago, she found somewhere – a spare room in a house in Bounds Green occupied by other creatives in their mid-twenties. She managed to find a van at the last minute and it is booked to collect her and her belongings tomorrow morning. But so far all she has is an empty wine glass and twenty empty boxes.
She places the glass on the floor and wipes her face with her sleeve. She has to make a start. Looking around the room she takes in all the details of their shared life. On the walls, the framed travel posters from the holidays they have been on together – a weekend in Venice, a summer holiday to Sam’s parents’ house in the South of France. On the sofa, the cushions they bought together at IKEA when they first moved in and the blanket her mum gave to them both as a house-warming present. Everything she looks at is linked somehow to him. The bottle opener resting on the table – hers, but used to open the nice bottle of red they treated themselves to when they moved in and all the other bottles they have shared together since. The pile of magazines on the coffee table that she loved to read with her legs flung over his on the sofa in the evenings when she had the night off work. A vase on the mantelpiece, empty now but bought specially to hold the huge bunch of sunflowers he bought for her twenty-fifth birthday.
When Sam left, he said she could choose what she wanted to keep, that she could have whatever she wanted. But looking around the living room and the kitchen, she finds she doesn’t want any of it. Instead, she drags the empty boxes into the bedroom. Stepping inside, her breath catches again. Since Sam left she has been sleeping on the sofa. She is much too tall for it and wakes up stiff from curling into a ball. But she can’t bring herself to sleep in their bed alone and knowing what she now knows.
The room feels very still and she pauses for a moment on the edge of the mattress, feeling her hand pass tentatively over the sheets. They haven’t been washed since he left, since they last shared the bed together, her unknowing and huddled up against the warmth of his chest. She slips a hand under the duvet, wondering if the bed would still smell like him if she were to crawl inside. She knows that she should feel angry, that she should want to shred his shirts with a pair of scissors and take all the nicest crockery from the kitchen with her to the new flat. She knows it, and yet she feels too exhausted by sadness to feel angry.
With great effort she rises from the bed and opens the wardrobe doors. Her clothes hang like a rainbow on one side of the rail, nudging up against his shirts in shades of grey and blue on the other side. Beneath his clothes are neat rows of his shoes; hers lie in a haphazard pile at the bottom of her side of the wardrobe. She stares at the wardrobe for a moment and then reaches for her clothes, still on their hangers, and lifts them in armfuls off the rail and into the boxes. She doesn’t bother folding them, instead she heaps them into a box until it is full and she starts on the next one. Once the rail is empty she makes a start on her shoes. She works quickly and when she is finished she stands back for a moment and looks at his shirts hanging neatly in the now half-empty wardrobe. As she closes the doors, one of his shirt sleeves catches in the gap between them. She opens the door, pushes the sleeve carefully back in, smoothes the shirt and closes the door again.
Apart from her clothes, the only things she packs are her records and books, her laptop and her guitar, which she props by the front door ready to carry by hand to the new house. Once the boxes are packed she returns to the living room and lies down on the sofa, wrapping herself in the blanket that was a gift from her mother. She stares at the ceiling, trying to sleep but instead simply counting down the hours until the van arrives and she will leave this flat forever. It had been their home, but as she shuffles and tries to get comfortable on the sofa she realises it is now just a flat. Just walls and doors and windows and belongings that she no longer wants or needs. When Sam cheated, he didn’t just end their relationship, he cheated her out of her home. By the time she falls asleep the sun has started to rise, peeking in through the gap between the curtains.
*
When Hannah left that little flat in Stoke Newington for the last time, her parents couldn’t get to London at such short notice to help her so she did the move on her own. She’d only paid for the van and driver, not for help with lifting (she couldn’t afford it) but in the end the driver helped her carry her boxes from the second-floor flat down to the van, perhaps because he was tired of waiting while she struggled one box at a time, or perhaps because he could tell she was close to crying.
She had help at least at the other end, from her new housemates. There were five of them in the house, including her. Poppy was the young woman whom she had met when she’d viewed the house a couple of days before. She was a dancer and actress and immediately chatty and friendly, despite Hannah’s sombre attitude. She shared the top floor of the house with Lily, a quiet, slim woman who introduced herself as an artist but who also worked as a part-time sales assistant in a shop. On the middle floor was Bemi, an acrobat/events organiser with a pet lizard called Maud, and Sophie, a Scottish musician/marketing executive with a double bass called Betty. Hannah’s room was on the ground floor, which was a relief when it came to moving in. There was another bedroom on the same floor but it was currently empty – Poppy told her they were still looking for someone to move into that room and that for now they all shared it as a practice/arts/yoga space.
Once the housemates had helped her unload the van and Hannah had paid the driver, the others left her to unpack. She remembers standing among the boxes and listening to the quiet chat of her new housemates in the living room down the corridor, feeling somehow even more alone than she had felt in the flat. It seemed to her like the housemates were all friends and she felt like an intruder. And however helpful they’d been carrying her boxes from the van into the flat, she couldn’t help but feel bitter disappointment at being back at that point again, with just a room of her own after sharing a whole apartment with Sam. It felt like starting all over again and that filled her with a sense of loneliness unlike anything she’d felt before.
But she hadn’t met Mona yet, Hannah thinks in the café, who over the course of just a few years has come to feel more like a sister to her than a friend. She smiles at the thought. This time she is not alone and she doesn’t have to start all over again after her break-up. She can just continue her life with Mona, in their flat with the posters on the walls, clothes drying in the hallway and wine always in the fridge. Hannah puts the phone back in her pocket, already looking forward to their dinner together next week.
3.00 a.m.
Dan
‘You know,’ says the man after a while, not looking up from his crossword, ‘You seem a lot better than those kids who were in here earlier.’
Dan pauses, his hand hovering above the crossword page. He is aware of the song playing from the speakers – Elvis Presley singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – and the shape of the waitress sitting at the counter, staring out the café window. Headlamps flash past outside, brightening the room in quick bursts. Dan pictures the university library, dark and empty at this hour. He thinks about the students who were in here earlier – imagines them sleeping soundly now, half-drunk glasses of water and open packets of paracetamol next to their beds. He thinks about his mum, and the mantelpiece topped by his school awards.
‘It might not seem like it now,’ continues the man, ‘But I’m sure everything will work out for you.’
The black and white boxes of the crossword swim into one another as Dan gulps hard.
‘I’ve met some really horrible kids your age,’ the man adds, looking up this time and finding Dan’s quickly blinking eyes, ‘My son included.’
The man laughs, and Dan raises his eyebrows. He didn’t picture the man as a father – somehow it is hard to imagine his life outside of this café. He seems to Dan as a kind of apparition, existing only in a world of insomnia and crosswords. But of course, that is silly – he has a life to return to, a family, his own problems, a home.
‘I love him, of course I do,’ the man continues, ‘It just happens when you have a child. You love them and always will. But he can be a mean bastard. A foolish one too. You don’t seem like that. I bet your mum was proud of you.’
Dan is silenced, his head spinning, his heart beating hard beneath his jumper. He doesn’t know this man but his words cut through his clothes, through his skin, right inside.
Dan nods slightly, the only acknowledgement of the man’s words that he can manage. The man nods back, and they return their attention to the crosswords.
After a while the man stands up.
‘It’s time for me to go,’ he says, ‘I’d better get back if there’s any chance of me doing any work tomorrow. Good luck with your studies. And everything.’
‘Good luck with your writing,’ replies Dan.
The man reaches out to shake Dan’s hand and he takes it, enjoying the warmth of another person’s hand in his.
‘Your crossword book,’ says Dan, pointing to where it sits on the table.
‘You keep it,’ he replies.
The man heads to the counter, says something to the waitress, pays and then leaves, waving at Dan before he goes.
Dan is on his own again, left with an empty plate and a half-completed crossword.
After a few moments, the waitress comes over, carrying a tall glass filled with strawberry milkshake, an extravagant swirl of cream and a strawberry resting on the top.
‘The customer who just left asked me to make this for you,’ she says.
As she says the words, Dan realises he never asked the man his name. The milkshake sits on the table, ice cold and the colour of kindness.
Hannah
At the small table the young man finishes his strawberry milkshake, using the long spoon she gave him to scoop the last droplets of pink from the bottom. He is smiling and it makes Hannah smile too. She is just wondering at the young man’s story when a gorilla and Marilyn Monroe step into the café. Hannah can’t help but stare at the new customers. Once they are inside, the gorilla tugs at his mask, pulling it off to reveal a flushed but very much human face. Hannah lets out a sigh of relief.
‘God, I was burning up in that,’ the man says. He holds the mask by his side, the rest of his body entirely covered in a hairy gorilla suit.
‘You could have taken it off ages ago,’ snaps Marilyn Monroe while attempting to smooth her white dress, which is looking somewhat crumpled.
‘Yeah, but wasn’t it great seeing the face of that bus driver?’ the man laughs. Marilyn Monroe sighs and adjusts her blonde wig.
‘Two Americanos please,’ she says to Hannah, before moving to a booth at the back of the café. The gorilla follows and slumps himself in a seat opposite. He pulls a phone from somewhere inside his suit and starts scrolling. Marilyn Monroe stares out the window, her arms crossed firmly over her chest.
The couple in their fancy dress costumes make Hannah think about the night she and Mona first met. It was a few weeks after she’d moved in to the house in Bounds Green. She was still feeling shaken from the break-up with Sam and the adjustment to shared living, but the housemates seemed friendly and there was a warm atmosphere in the slightly chaotic house. Hannah particularly liked Poppy but she was often out, rushing to keep up with her busy work and social lives. When she was home she was sometimes distracted, checking her phone as she received endless notifications from endless WhatsApp groups. The other housemates were busy too, pursuing their individual passions while juggling part-time jobs that paid the bills, like her. They still hadn’t found a new housemate to fill the spare room and they were all starting to feel tense, noticing the squeeze of the extra rent they were each having to pay to cover the cost of the empty room.
Halloween was approaching and Poppy decided to throw a party, partly as a chance to catch up with her wide social group, partly because there was nothing she loved more than fancy dress, and partly because she suggested it might be a good way to find someone who was looking for a room. If they told enough of their friends that they had a spare room to fill, surely something would come up. The others agreed and soon set about preparing costumes and decorations.
There were many parties throughout the year Hannah spent in the Bounds Green house, but she always remembers that Halloween party in particular as the night she met Mona. Except she wasn’t Mona that night – she was Harley Quinn.
*
Hannah dabs paint gently onto her face. She is dressed as Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, wearing a handmade patchwork dress. Her body is covered in green paint with seams drawn in black eyeliner on top. Every few minutes the doorbell rings and Hannah listens as someone answers it, usually Poppy (she recognises her voice as she tells guest after guest how fabulous their costumes are), and conversations head past the closed bedroom door and down the corridor to the living room, where the music and the drinks are. Loud bursts of laughter rise over the sound of the music. It sounds exactly how fun should sound, but Hannah is very conscious of the fact she knows none of the voices and no one at the party, apart from the housemates she has only lived with for a few weeks.
On her green face she paints a few more seams and extends her mouth into a wide smile. She knows this party is her opportunity to make new friends and to start over again after her break-up. And yet she pauses in her bedroom with the door closed, blinking at herself in the mirror.
It has been a hard week. A bar where she made connections and had been offered a singing gig called her yesterday to tell her the space has gone to a more experienced musician and that there won’t be a spot for her any more. She had been visiting the bar every Thursday for three months, reminding them of her face and trying to chat to the manager about singing there. She now feels foolish, thinking also of the money she spent on cocktails there – money she doesn’t have to waste. She is also still reeling from her break-up with Sam.
But tonight it’s a party and the house is full. She takes a deep breath, pushing her feelings deeper inside her and adding the final touch to her make-up. She pauses for a moment at the door then leaves the bedroom, stepping out into the corridor.
The music hits her as she makes her way through the house, decorated tonight with strips of toilet roll and torn scraps of bin bags, fake cobwebs dangling from the doorways. On the stairs, a female grim reaper holds her scythe in one hand and a plastic cup of wine in the other, talking intently to Wonder Woman. Ahead of her in the corridor are a slim man in a skeleton outfit and a petite woman in white t
ights, a giant papier-mâché pumpkin covering her body from her chest to her thighs. Hannah follows them towards the living room, the pumpkin bashing slightly against the doorway. Inside, a huddle of vampires dance beneath a disco ball suspended from the ceiling. Shards of silver light skitter around the dark room, falling on the ceiling, walls and many unfamiliar faces before darting away again.
Hannah’s eyes scan the busy room, seeking out her housemates and someone to talk to. Poppy, tonight Cruella de Vil, is laughing in the middle of a group, gesturing animatedly with her hands as she talks. In the semi-darkness Hannah can just make out Bemi and her girlfriend Anya too, talking with Sophie and a couple of other people Hannah doesn’t recognise. She can’t see Lily and wonders if she is still getting ready. Everyone in the living room looks deep in conversation or dancing and laughing so happily that Hannah would feel like an interloper joining their group. Instead she makes her way into the kitchen, deciding a drink is a good place to start. As she steps inside she bumps straight into a woman dressed as Harley Quinn, a blonde, red and blue wig tied in bunches.
‘I’m so sorry!’ says Hannah, steadying herself on the kitchen table and stepping back from Harley Quinn, who she notices is holding a plastic cup which has spilt onto the floor.
‘No, it’s my fault,’ replies Harley Quinn, ‘I’m sorry!’
‘I really wasn’t looking where I was going,’ says Hannah, reaching for some kitchen roll from the top of the fridge and padding it on the floor. Inside she chastises herself for her clumsiness and for making such a bad start at fitting in to this party. Perhaps she should have just stayed in her room.
‘Thanks,’ says Harley Quinn, ‘It really was my fault though, I should have moved out of your way.’