by Eleanor Wood
I can see what I was trying to do, although neither of us could at the time. I’d had a tricky, unsettled childhood but then things had calmed down – four parents, new stepbrothers on my dad’s side, the classic Dad’s-every-other-weekend routine. My life had hinged on that stability for so long that I thought I could count on it. Now I had lost so much of that, no wonder I was desperate for change, to make a brand new life for us that looked different, instead of hanging around in the ruins.
After we came back from our disastrous holiday, more months went by and I began to resemble a normal human again. I became less frail. I stopped dyeing myself orange. I slept better at night and sometimes I could go a day without crying. After a while, it looked to the naked eye like the crisis had passed. K seemed mostly relieved that we’d got through it without him having to talk about it.
So, we’d made it through. Life was a bit worse and we were a bit different, but we seemed to have come out the other side together. Sort of.
Things began to look brighter when I started pouring my energy into writing. This was how I would save myself, I decided. Once I got going, the words flooded out of me with an unstoppable intensity.
I wrote a whole novel in six weeks straight, barely sleeping, not wanting to do anything else. Running away from my own life. I wrote it mostly in bed, just to stay warm – the new house had turned into a disaster.
It was freezing cold, damp and full of woodlice, and it turned out that all the floors were rotten. Everything was falling apart around us.
So, while my life was quietly in ruins, I escaped from it all by writing a sweet romantic comedy for teenagers. And – after years of trying, with various small degrees of success – somehow it ended up being the best thing I had ever written. Suddenly life got exciting again. My agent texted me while I was at work to tell me a big publisher wanted to buy the book I had written.
I immediately rang K and my mum to tell them the news. Even as I was saying it, it didn’t feel real. My mum cried with joy for me, and K took me out for cocktails that night to celebrate.
It was exactly then that all of the stress started coming out in weird physical ways. The next morning (now that I supposedly had everything I had ever wanted in my whole life) I woke up with such intense pins and needles down my right-hand side, I could barely use that side of my body. I had to call a cab to take me to work, as I couldn’t manage the twenty-minute walk. I had recently started a new job for a small healthcare publisher, so I struggled through the day trying to make sure nobody noticed. This was supposed to be the best time of my life! Yes, I was so excited! No, I couldn’t believe it either!
I began to have multiple ocular migraines every day, so severe and constant that I stopped driving, out of pure fear. I haven’t driven since and now I’ve forgotten how. More weird symptoms seemed to develop every day. I started throwing up for no reason, having to spend hours hiding in the loo at work because I was incapable of functioning like a normal human in public. Just like when I used to be bulimic, how retro!
I took to spending my evenings lying in a darkened room, unable to move. I became convinced I was probably dying. I was sent for blood tests and MRIs, and nobody could find anything wrong with me. I concluded that I was definitely dying.
A kind neurologist poked me with needles, and told me to come off the Pill immediately. I was put on it when I was seventeen because I had a burst ovarian cyst, and the Pill reduces the risk of recurrence. I don’t think anybody ever asked me if I suffered from migraines, which I always have. The neurologist was appalled that I was on the Pill at all – let alone that I had solidly been on it for fifteen years. She said my stroke risk, what with the migraines and the smoking – oh, and the family history of strokes – was probably through the roof.
I came off the Pill and immediately felt better. When I told K this, he gave me a funny look I had never seen before and asked me if I didn’t think this was ‘a bit too convenient’. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what he meant at first. Then it turned into a horrible argument.
‘It’s not exactly a surprise.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve been together over ten years. This is what happens to everyone in the end, isn’t it? Girls pretend they’re cool and they want the same things as you, then next thing you know they’ve trapped you into getting married and having offspring and you have to pretend to be happy about it or everyone thinks it’s you who’s the bastard.’
I asked him if he really felt like we were on opposing sides now, and he said he wasn’t sure. That was the beginning of the end.
We limped on, sadly and undramatically, for a few months. We went on holiday to Hydra, a tiny island where Leonard Cohen used to live and wrote many of his most famous songs – and was therefore my dream destination. I sat on our lovely roof terrace, drinking wine, while K slept a lot. I went for a lot of long walks by myself. We were polite to each other. We both did our best and it wasn’t quite good enough.
Then – almost inevitably, something had to happen – I met a man through work: a funny and handsome journalist. While I had a boyfriend at home who was barely speaking to me, I started saying I was going out with ‘colleagues’ and instead going to grown-up jazz nights with The Journalist, where we would drink red wine and talk about how our partners ‘didn’t understand us’.
I convinced myself it was OK, because we hadn’t actually slept together. But I’m not that naive – I know hanging around in bars and bitching about how useless your boyfriend is … well, it’s not cool. In fact, it is not only uncool, but incredibly dangerous.
The ending finally happened on a perfectly normal weeknight. K and I went round to our neighbours’ house for dinner. They had recently had twins; we all drank wine and ate takeaway fish and chips while the babies slept – one of them on me, while I happily ate my dinner one-handed. If I were allowed to be honest, I would admit this is actually what I would like my own life to look like. As far as I was concerned, it was a lovely evening.
We got home and closed the front door. I was still taking off my coat when I realized that K was just standing there and staring at me.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ he said. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? All of that. I would rather fucking hang myself. We’re going to have to break up.’
I burst into tears and said yes, I agreed. He burst into tears and said he didn’t really mean it. It was too late. It was the end.
Well, except it wasn’t. Because we were grown-ups who co-owned a house and a lot of shared furniture. We still had to go on a trip to New York for my sister’s thirtieth birthday, which was like slow torture. Then we had to live in the house together for four months while we argued over what to do with it. Eventually I borrowed money to buy him out.
My family – what remained of it – were devastated. Our friends had to awkwardly pick sides. It was like getting divorced without the legitimacy of having been married. We had built a whole life together, but saying ‘my boyfriend and I are breaking up’ sounded so teenage and inconsequential.
When K and I broke up, I felt desperate for more. More forward motion in life. More passion. More excitement. Something finally happening, not just hanging around waiting for everyone to die or disappear in the end.
I spend the next five years of my life wondering how the fuck I ended up with so much less.
December 2014
While K is finally moving out, I can’t bear to be around for it. So I escape to New York with my mum.
My mum and I are soulmates, very close and scarily similar. If you look at old pictures of us at the same ages, sometimes it’s hard to tell which of us it is. It freaks us both out. Now I’m an adult, we are more like naughty sisters who drink wine and have kitchen discos together.
She travels to New York a lot for work and has a lot of friends in the city. We decide this would be the ideal place for a change of scene, and spend money that neither of us can afford on the trip. We get so drunk and overexcited on the flight out that a stewardess has to a
sk us to be quiet. We are also asked whether there has been a death in the family when we both weep loudly while watching Beaches.
Unfortunately, just as we arrive, so does a major snowstorm. It’s a freakish cold snap even for the freezing New York winter. There are weather warnings in place and people are advised not to go outdoors.
Of course, my mum and I decide to ignore this advice. We are on holiday, after all! We get wrapped up and go out for a walk in Central Park. It’s so cold, the ice rink is closed. There is not another human to be seen. It’s apocalyptic.
It’s so foggy we have to hold hands to keep together, and before long of course we realize that we are horribly lost. It’s funny at first, but then we realize we can’t feel our faces and become convinced that this is how we are going to die. When the snow thaws, they will find us and, worst of all, they will say how stupid we were to have ignored all those weather warnings.
When we eventually find our way out of the park, there are no cabs because everyone is indoors, so we have to walk sixteen blocks back to our hotel. When we arrive back there, the concierge brings us brandy and blankets.
After that, we decide not to go outdoors again. We do not leave the hotel for the rest of our holiday, not once. It’s strangely relaxing. We order room service. We sit up in our twin beds like Bert and Ernie, and watch TV. We take it in turns to have long hot baths. I go up to the hotel gym and run for hours on the treadmill, looking out of the panoramic windows at nothing but falling snow. We go down to the bar for cocktails and then go straight back up to bed. We soon feel happily institutionalized, like we have always been there and might never leave.
The thing we enjoy the most, and do more than once, is to both get into my bed and watch Grey Gardens on my laptop.
My mum and I have long been obsessive fans of the film Grey Gardens, but on this trip, our love for it reaches new heights. Watching it together here feels very fitting. It’s a strange 1970s documentary about an aristocratic but eccentric and broke mother and daughter, ‘Big Edie’ and ‘Little Edie’, who live together in their dilapidated mansion, Grey Gardens, with a lot of cats and a few raccoons.
They love each other fiercely but they bicker a lot. They wear threadbare old fur coats and diamond necklaces while singing show tunes and drinking cocktails out of jam jars. They are magnificent.
We put on lipstick and headscarves with our hotel bathrobes, crack open the overpriced minibar wine and watch it again and again. We quote it at each other a lot and take to addressing each other in exaggerated New England aristo-lady accents.
‘Could you simply be a darling and pass me the wine please, Little Edie?’
‘Of course, Mother darling. I do like your headscarf.’
‘Why, thank you. It was given to me by my cousin Jackie Kennedy. I’m simply mad about it!’
Not long after we get back, I get a tattoo on my wrist that reads ‘staunch’. This comes from my favourite scene in Grey Gardens, in which Little Edie rants about the various relatives who have underestimated her, before realizing that she is, in fact, ‘a staunch woman’ and therefore not to be messed with. ‘And let me tell you, there is nothing worse than a staunch woman’ – because ‘they don’t weaken, no matter what’.
My secret long-held dream is for my mum, my nan and I to one day live together in Grey Gardens-style drunken squalor, bickering and singing and drinking cocktails in bed out of old jam jars.
I am trying very hard to be staunch. My mum is staunch. She has been through a lot and always done it with a tremendous amount of style. We are both trying our best.
January 2015
And then I get home to an empty house and suddenly I am living entirely on my own for the first time in my life. I am extremely aware that I have gone from being ahead of the curve to way behind it. A story like this should really involve a hedonistic and secretly oh-so traumatic blur of drinking, drugs and shagging in my twenties, followed by a revelation and meeting a ‘nice’ man to settle down with in my early thirties. That’s the correct narrative, right?
Except somehow I am now thirty-four and everything has gone wrong. In the interim, most of my close friends have ‘settled down’ (terrible phrase; if I ever ‘settle down’ please fucking shoot me). They are now in the place I was at during my early twenties – excited about making Sunday roasts for gangs of cool friends, talking about paint colours and the best place to buy a green velvet sofa as seen on everybody’s Instagram, whereas I am now the only single one. And they’re doing it more proficiently than I did, because they all seem to be planning weddings and talking about maybe coming off the Pill.
I suddenly feel very old and very out of step with other people of my age. Most of them have never had a relationship as long as mine with K, and don’t understand what it’s like to have been through a break-up that huge. People say ‘well, at least you didn’t have kids’ as if that must make it really easy. Frankly, I wish more than anything that I had a baby to show for it, at least. When my mum was my age, she had a twelve-year-old and a nine-year-old – the comparison is so depressing.
I feel battle-scarred and ancient, but my life is less ‘grown-up’ and more unsettled than it has ever been. If I were younger, I guess I’d spend this time going out every night and having one-night stands, but that’s not really an option at this point. I work long hours in my new day job for a science publisher (having been sacked from the last one, due to The Journalist unfortunately being my boss’s ex-husband), and I now have a long commute, so I leave the house every morning before 7 a.m. and get home after 7 p.m. In the evenings, I either eat a vast trough of pasta for dinner and go straight to bed, or I sit at my kitchen table listening to music and scrolling through Tinder while smoking roll-ups and drinking a whole bottle of red wine by myself.
I love hanging out with my girlfriends, but by our age that usually means drinking wine around somebody’s kitchen table, which is great but means I am unlikely ever to meet anybody new. They all seem so much more content with life than I am.
It’s my job to be the cheerful one who doesn’t give a fuck; if I can’t live up to that, I’m not sure who to be. I try to talk to one friend about how I’m feeling – old, exhausted, insecure, pointlessly angry about all that wasted time, pretty much hopeless – and I guess it makes her feel uncomfortable, because she shuts it down pretty quickly by saying this is ‘not very feminist’ of me.
Once or twice a week, I go out for lunch or drinks with The Lecturer. The Lecturer is a confusing presence in my life. We met through distant friends, on one of those random Thursday evenings when going to someone’s birthday drinks seems marginally better than getting on the train home.
On first sight, I was not remotely interested in him. He wasn’t my type and I imagined we had nothing whatsoever in common. I assumed he must be boring, despite his too-long Nineties grunge hair – which I strongly suspected might be more by accident than design. He seemed utterly unenthused and bitched about everyone all evening, so I wasn’t expecting it when he looked me up on Facebook late that same night. I only replied because I was a bit bored and drunk on the way home.
He claims to hate all humans and have no social skills, yet he takes to sending me long emails (which admittedly make me laugh) and texting me most days. I bother to reply about a third of the time, and yet still he perseveres. Eventually, I end up hanging out with him because I have nothing much else to do. The university where he works is around the corner from my office, so maybe he’s just bored too.
He takes me out for pink cocktails on a rooftop bar, and I turn up with dirty hair and a hangover. I have a surprising amount of fun and agree to go for drinks again. ‘Soon’, at his insistence.
On our nights out together we stay out drinking and talking for so long that I sometimes miss the last train home and have to stay the night with other friends because The Lecturer won’t let me come back to his flat with him. We sneak out for lunches together in the pub and have such a nice time we agree to meet again in the
same pub three hours later.
I become increasingly intrigued by him, with his corduroy jackets and his air of ennui. Sometimes I gaze at him and think, actually, maybe he is a bit like Ted Hughes or Heathcliff.
I’m dating all sorts of other unsuitable people, but nothing seems to stick. I’m not sure how I feel about The Lecturer, but I grudgingly have to admit that he is clever and interesting, and his texts always cheer me up. He becomes a constant backdrop. I start measuring my Tinder matches by whether they are as smart and funny as The Lecturer. It begins to dawn on me that most of them don’t get me in the way that he does, so I start hanging out with him in the pub more and more.
Besides, it beats drinking by myself at the kitchen table, which I also seem to spend more and more of my time doing. While I sink a bottle of red wine and chain-smoke, sometimes I dance around to Patti Smith and feel free and feminist and vindicated, and sometimes I listen to Joni Mitchell and cry my eyes out.
My most pressing concerns, as evidenced by my late-night Google search history:
coolest tattoo shop east london
cheap botox clinic
basic north korea politics explanation
best instagram filter
how old is cole sprouse
full moon cleanse for crystal dildo
health risks smoking over 30
smear test eroded cervix
mexican kitchen tiles
This seems to sum up the strange hinterland I find myself inhabiting. The constant low-level feeling that I’m running out of time causes me to make strange, panicked decisions. I know I’m looking for something but I’m not sure what it is, so I keep trying to make everything into that thing.
Unsuitable guys from Tinder. Internet stalking and unsolicited Instagram messages to boys I dated when I was twenty-one. The Lecturer. I keep hoping I can magically turn them into it, the thing that I am looking for. But I can’t.