Pretending: The brilliant new adult novel from Holly Bourne. Why be yourself when you can be perfect?
Page 34
My phone lights up and buzzes angrily in my hand.
Dee: HELP ME HE IS A CRAZY PERSON
I smile as the taxi passes the looming ostentatiousness of Big Ben and we drive over the black currents of the Thames. There will never be a time when I don’t want a mid-date message from Dee.
Tori: He can’t be as bad as last week’s surely?
Dee: He’s married, Tor. HE’S MARRIED!!
Tori: Then why is he on a date with you?!
Dee: He said he WOULD get a divorce but he CAN’T FIND HIS WIFE BECAUSE SHE VANISHED.
I tap out a few replies as the cab plunges through the murky depths of South London – where glittering lights are replaced by concrete slabs of sort-of-affordable housing as long as your parents can help you with the deposit to dodge inheritance tax. I try to find the right mix of sympathetic, concerned, and taking the piss.
Tori: Seriously, are you OK though? It would only happen to YOU. X
Dee: I’m safe! I’m home. I really want to drink Merlot with my spritely young housemates but we’ve got the wedding of doom tomorrow.
Tori: Don’t remind me. I’m still picking you up at 9, right? X
Dee: 9 it is.
Then five minutes later:
Dee: And, it’s not me. This is just what dating is, Tor. Everyone apart from me is either boring or totally insane.
I put my phone away as we slow down around the park. The pavements are clogged with smokers and drunk people spilling out of bars, ripping into boxes of fried chicken, laughing loud and shrill and leaning into each other, and putting their hands on each other’s chests. We pull up at a red light and the taxi throbs softly from the music blasting out of a flat above. London never rests. It doesn’t do bedtime or catnaps or even dozing. It’s so exhausting living somewhere this constantly awake.
The thought of coming home to Tom makes me feel safe. The thought that he will be there, and that he says he loves me; the thought that I don’t have to go back out there into a world of ghosting and dick pics and messages with two ticks but no replies. But the thought of no Tom … I shiver. The thought of the alternative. The thought of starting again. Thirty-one and alone. Thirty-one and putting that number on an online-dating profile. Knowing the assumptions people make about that number. The wilting pair of ovaries they see. The desperation they smell. The sand you leave behind on the chair as the hourglass pours from top to bottom …
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