The Woman Who Wanted More

by Vicky Zimmerman

  Kate smiles back at the man. If Cecily is right and this world is full of opportunities – if only you are open to them – then he will strike up a conversation with her right now, and then he’ll ask her out. That would be destiny. Kate holds his gaze, possibly for too long as he eventually looks embarrassed and turns his attention back to his phone.

  Probably Tindering some thirty-year-old in her underwear, thinks Kate, as she heads for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  KATE IS IN A VALENTINE’S DAY meeting with the team on Monday morning, running through product lines for next year’s menus. The meeting is more like a Valentine’s Day Massacre. After sampling the scallop ‘Aphrodisiac Soup’, Dave launches into a vivid comparison of the soup with the contents of his father’s waste bag in hospital after his father suffered multi-organ failure following a routine gall bladder removal. The heart-shaped crab cakes provoke such visceral abuse Devron has to call a time out.

  Kate’s tempted to go and fetch Cecily’s book from her handbag and offer up ‘Valentine’s Dinner for a True Love After Three Decades Together’. Aim: to remind your love that while age may start to wither you, it cannot diminish your appetite for life. The menu has some delicious Italian dishes, but Kate fears that if Fletchers attempted to mass-produce angel-hair pasta with meatballs, the result would be lumpen gristly stodge that would kill off any passion in a single mouthful.

  Devron spends the next half-hour taking them through a PowerPoint on a new cross-category workstream called KIPPER – Creativity Yields Profit in Retail. Why is he talking about five-year plans when half the people in this room might not be here in a month? Why isn’t he updating them on redundancies? He was meant to get back to them three weeks ago! There’s nothing Kate hates more than not knowing where she stands.

  Her indignation swells, mixing itself with residual irritation she still feels about Nick which she hasn’t expressed satisfactorily. How dare Devron carry on like it’s business as usual? He’s the most inconsiderate man in the whole world ever – what, are they just expected to wait until he can make up his indecisive little mind?

  By the end of the meeting she’s whipped herself up into a misdirected and self-righteous rage. Before she has a chance to think, she corners Devron and demands to know the cause of the delay.

  ‘It’s unreasonable,’ says Kate. ‘We’re all in limbo. It’s impossible for us to move on with our lives with this hanging over our heads.’

  Devron looks unsettled. He likes Kate because she’s attractive, and normally isn’t too pushy. ‘I haven’t come back to you because HR are debating whether to roll out new psychometrics or keep it Simple and Lean.’

  ‘We should do Myers-Briggs,’ says Annalex, nodding encouragingly. ‘We used Myers-Briggs all the time at Pharmacore.’

  ‘Except it’s a totally unhelpful tool to figure out who’s best for a creative role,’ says Kate, feeling herself colour as she tries to tamp down her anger.

  ‘You would say that, you’re an INFP,’ says Annalex, turning to Devron with indignation.

  He clears his throat with a frown. ‘Girls, girls, you both need to calm down. It’s barely October, you’ve got weeks, and there’s always the voluntary redundancy route.’

  ‘But I’d like to know where I stand now,’ says Kate, who never feels less calm than when a man is telling her to calm down. ‘I don’t want to be put on ice till November.’ She could do without her P45 hitting the doormat alongside her birthday cards.

  ‘If you want a decision made right now you can always make one yourself,’ says Annalex, her small blue eyes narrowing in calculation. ‘Voluntary redundancy?’

  Kate’s mouth twitches in indignation. ‘I’ll wait.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS absolutely no desire to date anyone but Nick, after considering it further, Kate has decided to spend the following weekend as Cecily has instructed – not to meet a man, but to prove to that manipulative old woman that it’s impossible to. Plus she’s so wound up by the stasis at work, a weekend of distractions would be welcome.

  Nick is spending the weekend with his friends Rob and Tasha at some trendy music festival in Sussex. Rob and Tasha are cliquey hipster wannabes, the only friends of Nick she’s not fond of. Nick was their perennially single friend for so long, they see Kate as the Yoko. So if Kate were forced to take a lie-detector test, a third reason she’s willing to do Cecily’s bidding is because she is mildly bothered by the fact that Nick is off having fun with those particular friends, while she’s still in protracted limbo waiting for him, and actually not much better off than she was a month ago.

  *

  Kate has no major hobbies apart from food and she’s still lacking the appetite for serious cooking, so instead she’s planned a Saturday that incorporates a little food, a little culture and a girls’ night out.

  On Saturday morning she heads off to Borough Market, having woken with a craving for a Bread Ahead custard doughnut. She’s waiting in the queue when the man in front of her, a craggy sixty-year-old, turns to ask if she could recommend anything. Kate can’t believe she’s actually being chatted up but is happy to share her extensive doughnut knowledge. They talk for a few minutes about custard, Kate’s Mastermind specialist subject, and Kate’s just starting to consider how she’ll avoid a coffee if he asks, when a beautiful young blonde sweeps up and kisses the man on the lips.

  ‘Ah, baby, the coffee queue was so long, I couldn’t bear to wait,’ she says in a transatlantic accent, sticking out a beautiful bee-stung bottom lip. She turns to Kate with a curious look. ‘I’m Yanika.’

  ‘Hey, sexy,’ says her boyfriend, slipping his hand round the girl’s waist. ‘This lady says the doughnuts here are great.’

  ‘Oh baby, you know I can’t,’ she says, tapping an inch of her tanned concave belly.

  ‘Oh you must,’ says Kate. ‘They’re genuinely worth the calories, and besides, you’ve got a fantastic figure.’

  The girl smiles shyly.

  ‘The custard’s a dream,’ says Kate. ‘Heavy but not cloying – and the doughnut part’s so light – the balance is perfection.’ The girl’s face lights up as Kate is talking.

  ‘I’ll take four,’ says the boyfriend to the guy on the stall. ‘And another in a separate bag.’ He hands Kate the single doughnut as she’s about to order her own. ‘For your custard wisdom. Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so nice!’ says Kate. One-nil, Kate to Cecily, and one free doughnut – the morning’s off to a perfect start.

  Kate takes her doughnut and heads east to Bermondsey Street. It’s a beautiful day and she takes cheer in the pink and orange buildings popping out against the deep blue sky. She strolls over to Maltby Street food market and stumbles across an amazing greengrocer and butcher under the railway arches. She buys a bottle of wine for Rita from a French deli, then sits at a coffee stand to watch the world go by, inhaling the smells of falafels frying and onions being grilled. All around her, hip couples are getting drunk on gin and craft beers, but Kate has a perfect cheese toastie, a coffee and a Stella Newman novel and she’s entirely content – thoughts of work and even of Nick don’t trouble her.

  Now it’s 2 p.m. and Kate’s aware she’s not doing much to obey Cecily’s diktat, so she decides to visit the trendy art gallery in Bermondsey. She has no idea what’s on but every time she’s visited previously she’s been more impressed by the glass and concrete building than the art. Today is no exception. It’s a ‘mould-breaking, provocatively curated meditation on feminism, examining the politics of genitals’. She and Nick would have a field day here.

  Kate is standing, hands on hips, scrutinising one of the paintings of a naked woman. What’s going on there? It’s so abstract – she does a sudden take when she realises that the orange lines she’s been squinting at are supposed to represent female genitalia, the black gouache lump next to them a cockroach.

  ‘Wow, right?’ says a man standing next to her, arms folded, staring
with concentration at the canvas.

  She turns to look at him: not unattractive – brown eyes, short dark hair, designer trainers which cost more than she earns in a week, which she will try not to judge him for.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kate, followed up by a ‘Wow’, because she cannot think of anything polite to say, and this man’s ‘Wow’ is possibly sincere.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ says the man, and Kate still can’t figure out whether he’s taking the piss.

  ‘You didn’t paint it, did you?’

  ‘Me? God, no. I’m a networker, not an artist. You know, when you see a canvas like this, so necessary,’ he shrugs.

  ‘Right.’ Kate nods. ‘Well, always nice to see insects in unusual places,’ she says, because that sounds facetious enough to get rid of him without sounding unequivocally rude.

  ‘Micky,’ he says, extending his hand to Kate. ‘What do you do?’

  I seem to attract awful men in awkward situations, thinks Kate. ‘My job is to think of alternative ways of communicating that carrots are crunchy. It’s a hugely specialist line of work. There’s only a few of us in the country with the requisite skill set.’

  ‘That’s . . . cool?’ he says, looking to her for confirmation.

  Kate smiles a neat goodbye and moves with haste to the next canvas. It’s by the same artist and depicts a woman’s bottom with a wasp edging very close to the danger zone.

  Seems Micky’s not one to be deterred by sarcasm. ‘What I find most relevant about this artist,’ he continues, ‘is how she’s not afraid to push boundaries. Good taste is utterly redundant.’

  ‘Apparently so. I guess I’m old-fashioned, but give me a Monet any day.’

  ‘But that’s my point, this is provocative,’ he says flirtatiously. ‘People are so uncomfortable with challenge.’

  ‘They’d be more uncomfortable with a wasp up their backside,’ says Kate, and heads for the door before he has time for a comeback. Really, Cecily has no idea what it’s like out here.

  *

  Kate’s due to meet Cara and Bailey at a pub in Clerkenwell for a night out, but when she checks her phone Bailey has sent an apologetic text – her ex-husband ‘forgot’ he’s taking his girlfriend to the opera and he can’t have the kids after all, and it’s too late for Bailey to find a babysitter. Kate is walking to the pub when Cara texts – she’s running an hour late, and she’s bringing the hot Dane from the other night.

  Kate sits alone nursing a gin and tonic, thinking back to the dates she’d had just before she met Nick. There was the TV producer who was super-chatty, and returned from the toilet with a crescent of white powder round his nose. When Kate had pointed it out he’d claimed it was moisturiser – no second date there. Then there was the host of her local pub quiz who’d taken her to a restaurant in Chinatown that served frozen dumplings filled with meat of dubious origin. When he’d realised Kate wasn’t going to sleep with him he’d called her uptight, then claimed he’d lost his wallet – no more pub quiz for Kate.

  Cara and the Dane eventually arrive looking like they’ve just rolled out of bed. Cara sends him to the bar, then whispers excitedly to Kate, ‘I’m moving in with him.’

  ‘What? You’ve literally known him two weeks.’

  Cara shrugs and tosses her hair to one side. ‘By the time you’re our age you know what you want. Why not just get on with it?’

  ‘Er, because you don’t know a person after fourteen days?’

  ‘But what a fourteen days!’ says Cara, her brown eyes sparkling. ‘We’ve spent every night together. He’s got the most amazing penthouse in Chelsea. Last night we sat on his terrace naked drinking champagne . . . and the sex!’ she says, raising her eyebrows almost to her hairline.

  Kate can’t tell if her abdomen aches because Cara’s man sounds too good to be true and she doesn’t want her friend getting hurt – or because she can’t stomach being around such highly sexed-up lovebirds. She has to excuse herself before closing time because she’s worried the spark these two have between them might rub up against something more flammable in her.

  On the way home she stands, smoking, waiting for her bus at the Old Street roundabout. The lights and neon from the shops and billboards make the night sky a dull yellow-grey. Traffic’s at a standstill. There are people everywhere, couples on dates heading home, buzzing partygoers only now starting their nights out. How many people alone in this bus queue still believe in true love, or is it a fantasy that gets beaten out of you as you get older?

  At home in bed Kate forces herself to compile a gratitude list: one amazing custard doughnut. And it was free. Her health. The beautiful weather. A great book. That’s a pretty good day.

  She pictures Cecily, trapped inside her book-lined walls. Cecily couldn’t write any of those items on a list; she wouldn’t even have gone outside to enjoy the sunshine. She stays stuck in her room, living in memories. Kate is lucky – even if she doesn’t always feel lucky. She still has a future full of possibilities. She just needs to figure out what they might be, and how to go after them.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  RITA HAS CALLED AN emergency meeting on Sunday morning to discuss reports that two local youths were spotted by Mr Pring in the communal garden on Saturday night, smoking what looked like ‘a marijuana cigarette’. Mr Pring operates a zero-tolerance policy on everything but vintage porn, and has insisted the committee discuss how and when to involve the local constabulary.

  Kate needs to escape, so she heads to Aposta for a coffee. She almost has second thoughts when she arrives – the café is crowded with loved-up couples hogging the sofas, reminding her of her old Sunday mornings snuggled up in Nick’s bed – but she has to bury that thought because she’s here now, and Nick at this moment is probably waking up hung-over in a tent with his idiot friends and won’t be pining for her because he is so much better at living in the moment than she is.

  She orders a coffee and settles in a low leather chair at the back with the Sunday supplements. Wow, she is a complete failure of contemporary womanhood. Apparently, she should be eating freekeh and spending her Saturdays lifting her own bodyweight while wearing metallic leggings. She throws the Style section down on the coffee table in dismay, where it is immediately picked up again by a man who has come to sit a few seats away. She looks up and does a double take – she recognises him, from a Channel 4 comedy last year. He was only a minor character, but he’d performed a hilarious dance to Shakira dressed in glittery lederhosen, which Nick had insisted on rewinding and rewatching a dozen times. Nick sometimes does an impression of this dance when he’s naked and fresh from the shower – and this, as much as anything, makes Kate break into a broad grin and then a furious blush.

  The guy smiles back. He is six foot and bald, with piercing blue eyes. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and Levi’s, and his confidence and smile make him incredibly sexy. ‘I hope you haven’t ripped out the horoscope from this magazine,’ he says. ‘I need to know what Shelley von Strunckel says the stars have in store for me.’

  ‘If you’re a Sagittarius, Shelley says it’s time for a new chapter in your romantic life – say yes to an intriguing offer from an unexpected direction,’ says Kate, blushing deeper.

  ‘How did you know I’m a Sagi?’ he says, looking genuinely surprised.

  ‘Oh, snap!’

  ‘I’m Martin,’ he says, extending his hand and holding hers a moment longer than is necessary.

  Yes, that’s his name, Martin something Italian – sweet lord, it’s taking all her self-control not to ask for a selfie she can send straight to Nick.

  ‘I’m Kate.’

  ‘Kate, I don’t think I’ve seen you in here, are you local?’

  ‘Ish. You?’

  ‘Down towards Archway. I love this place, great coffee. I come here in the week to work sometimes.’

  ‘What do you do?’ She thinks it’s obvious from how starstruck she is that she knows, but somehow she feels it would be even more embarrassing to ad
mit she’s watched his Shakira lederhosen dance a dozen times.

  He shrugs and pulls a nonchalant face. ‘Ah, a bit of, you know, bit of acting, bit of comedy, but I’m mostly writing nowadays. I did a show last year, a pilot I co-wrote, and I’m writing something for HBO. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but, you know, all the good writing nowadays is on American TV. What do you do, Kate?’

  ‘I’m a writer too, you might know my work. My last big project was the small print on a range of Fletchers’ pork pies.’

  He laughs with absolute delight. ‘That is the funniest thing ever.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s why it’s funny, sweetheart.’

  Kate’s tummy does a little flip when he calls her sweetheart.

  ‘You have majorly intense eyes, Kate. Crazy thoughtful, like there’s a lot going on behind there.’

  ‘Let me tell you, Martin, pork-pie packaging does not write itself . . .’

  ‘I can see you’re a deep thinker. And you’ve got these stunning little flecks of hazel right near your pupils.’

  Kate blushes deeply. It took Nick about a year to notice this.

  Martin’s phone beeps and he glances at it and nods. ‘What are you up to this afternoon?’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a spare ticket to see a show a mate of mine did at Edinburgh, it’s at a pub in Crouch End. Fancy it?’

  Kate takes a deep breath. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘What are you doing that could possibly be more fun than comedy with me?’

  ‘I’m off to visit a grumpy ninety-seven-year-old lady up in Hampstead.’

  ‘A random grumpy old lady, or your grandmother?’

  ‘No, she’s pretty random. Actually, grumpy’s not entirely fair – she’s cool. Well, she’s interesting. She’s one of those people who has no filter.’