key in the lock, when she swung open her door.
‘Ah, Missus King …’ She was wearing a mustard-yellow sun dress, which clung to her form like clingfilm around an enormous block of cheese. ‘I very happy I sin you, I bin worried sick of you. I not seen you for days.’
Behind her, an avalanche of more bin bags stretched back and up, indefinitely.
‘Eva, you saw me yesterday, remember?’ I said, peering past her shoulder. I was always fascinated about how she might sleep: wedged between shelves like you saw on those Channel 4 documentaries about chronic hoarders? Up against an ironing board? ‘We were discussing when you might ring the council for someone to help you come and move this stuff so I can get to my front door without straining a muscle.’
I just gave it to her straight these days. I was over being subtle, even polite.
She looked me up and down through those dark, hooded eyes then: ‘You look thin,’ she sniffed, ignoring me. ‘You still pining for zis, zis little man?’
I laughed. ‘Andy, you mean? No, Eva, I’m fine, it was for the best, but thanks for asking,’ I said, pushing the bags aside with my foot.
‘He no good enough for you,’ she said, as I managed to get close enough to my door to open it. ‘He too old. He no give you enough attention …!’
‘Don’t worry, Eva, I’m really okay,’ I said, then, before I closed the door, ‘Now promise me you’ll ring the council about those bags!’
I locked the door and leaned against it for a second, just closing my eyes. Silence. The thing was, Eva was right: I was pining for Andy – not pining so much as missing him; I was in an ‘Andy mood’. Joe’s message had caught me off guard and I suddenly craved the familiarity of him.
I went into the living room and turned on the TV for company – since Andy and I finished last month, I’ve done this every day – then I ran a bath. I’m also the cleanest I’ve ever been.
It’s funny; when I bought this place – a slightly shabby, ground-floor, two-bed in a small, 1930s block – four years ago with the money Mum left me, I relished coming home to an empty flat. After spending all day talking to people – often about their suicide plans: how they had the vodka and the Temazepam at the ready – I relished having a place to myself; a sanctuary from all the madness. I’d often just sit there when I got in, in silence, take the phone off the hook, read a book, eat sweetcorn straight from the can. Then, a year ago, along came Andy and changed all that. For the first time in four years, I had a boyfriend; and, what’s more, I liked it.
I made sure the bath was as hot as it could be without actually scalding me, then I got in. It was 6 p.m. – 6 p.m.! What the hell was I supposed to fill the rest of the evening with? There’s only so much lying in a bath and exfoliating you can do, after all. I thought about poor Joe – about those awful few days of bereavement, the shock, the need for people around you. Then I thought about the reality of going back to Kilterdale and seeing him after all this time, the feelings it might unearth, the memories I’d boxed up for sixteen years now. It made me so anxious.
I thought about Andy – familiar, benign Andy, who was so wrapped up in himself it made it impossible for you to think about anything else – about calling him and inviting him over, just to ‘veg’, as he put it. I imagined sitting next to him on the sofa, watching Dragon’s Den, and sharing a kedgeree (Yes, Andy was a big fan of a smoked-fish item, I thought fondly). What harm could it do?
I met Andy on a speed-dating night. I’d gone with Kaye from work – God, I love Kaye. She always says to me, ‘Kingy, never settle. There’s far too much fun to be had with a packet of Oreos and BBC iPlayer.’ (Kaye is thirty-seven and still refuses to settle. She watches a lot of TV and eats a lot of Oreos.) He was the older man – forty-two to my thirty-one – and I liked that, the idea of being looked after for a change. We chatted easily for the allotted three minutes. Afterwards, he made a beeline for me at the bar.
‘I like you, Robyn. You’re different. In fact, I’d say you’re marriage material,’ he said, and from there, ‘we’ just sort of happened. I gathered he felt free to throw around phrases like ‘you’re marriage material’ because he was going through a horrid divorce and therefore never likely to marry anyone ever again. And we had a lot of fun for a while, Andy and I. I even liked the fact he’d been married and had two kids, at first: it made him seem ‘normal’, as in, what you’d expect a normal, functioning bloke to have done at forty-two, I guess …
Before Andy, I’d given up on any kind of normal. I’d realized normal – as in marriage and kids – was not the way it was going for me. And that was fine, I’d made my peace with that. Kaye and I had decided that, if all else failed, we’d join a hippy commune and grow our armpit hair and eat biscuits all day like we did at work. But then Andy came along and he made me believe in normal again. He made me want it.
I topped the bath up with more hot water and lay back, staring despairingly at the damp patch on the bathroom ceiling, which was encroaching like an oily tide.
Finishing with Andy had probably been the most amicable ending of a relationship I’d ever known, perhaps because I’d never been more than someone nice to fill a space for him, and that was fine. It was as though he’d swooped in, post-separation, for some respite care at the Hospice of St Kindness (i.e. me, or anyone else who would listen to him) and was now recharged, ready to take on the world again. When I’d told him it was over, he’d looked disappointed and taken aback, but not hurt, I noted. It was the sort of expression you might wear if you’d just been told there was no more carrot soup on the menu and you’d have to have leek and potato.
After leaving the restaurant, we’d walked to the Tube together, even chatted as we glided down the escalator. As would be the case, a busker was singing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ with accompanying pan-pipe backing track when we got to the bottom. He’d taken hold of my elbows and we’d gazed at one another with sad smiles as the busker sang how sometimes it lasts in love, and sometimes it hurts instead. Then Andy said, ‘I’ll be in touch.’
And I’d smiled, because he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t help but promise, even at the end, something he couldn’t deliver.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to.’
‘At least let’s have a cuddle, then?’ he’d said, opening his arms; and we did, and it was nice. Andy’s a good hugger. It’s the one thing we’d both done well probably because there’s no pressure in a hug, is there?
‘Okay, bye then,’ I’d said.
‘Yeah, I will call though, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ I’d said.
‘Take care of yourself, honey.’
Then we’d turned and gone our separate ways. Two minutes later, I was gliding up the escalator when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming down the other way.
‘Sorry, I went the wrong way,’ he said, and I laughed to myself all the way home because, was there ever the end of a relationship that so exactly replicated the relationship itself? Hit-and-miss, half-baked, stop-start. Just a little bit of a shambles, basically, with some farce thrown in.
No, finishing with Andy Cullen was the right thing to do, I decided, lying there until the bath water grew cool. I didn’t want to see him, I was just scared and putting off getting back to Joe.
I decided to ring my sister, Leah, instead. It’s practically impossible to have a normal conversation on the phone with her these days because she’s always so busy with the kids, so it’s a numbers game: if you ring her ten times, you might just get lucky once. Jack, my five-year-old nephew answered. We had a short discussion about peregrine falcons – I totally dig the conversations I have with my nephew – then I said, ‘Is Mummy there?’
There was some high-pitched squealing in the background, which could have been Leah or Eden, my three-year-old niece – it was difficult to tell.