it’ll be easy,’ Alice had encouraged.
‘Alice,’ Thea balked, ‘I can’t kiss someone I don’t feel something for.’
Though Joshua Brown’s friend would have done anything for a snog off Thea, Thea decided then and there that unless she experienced a shudder of desire for someone, unless she could detect potential, unless her heart swelled approvingly, she’d be keeping her kisses. Warmth or revenge were not enough. She realized that it was the love she had for Joshua that was the point. Despite the fact that he was a cad. She’d read enough Austen to know that love was a good thing and, whether it made one feel wonderful or wretched, it was her ultimate requirement for a fulfilled life.
It was the dyed-dark drama student who captured Thea’s heart during her second year at Manchester University. Though she was never quite sure whether he was proclaiming his innermost feelings or reciting his lines, she adored him and was glad to lavish love on him. They smoked dope. They had his-and-hers unkempt pony-tails. They made vast vats of ratatouille. They found deep and meaningful tenets in Joy Division. They rejoiced in the intensity of their world of Us. They went InterRailing together during the summer vacation and slept on beaches, watched sunsets and professed to truly understand e. e. cummings. He fell out of love with Thea just before her finals a year later, citing that love was life’s torment and proclaiming the wring of his feelings was a headfuck.
‘Did he actually say “headfuck”, Thea?’ Alice asked, not sure whether it was interference on the Cambridge–Manchester phone line or Thea’s sobbing.
‘Yes,’ Thea said, ‘but he also said that his love for me was so all consuming—’
‘– that it threatened to devour him?’ Alice interrupted. ‘Life is love’s torment or vice versa?’
‘Yes!’ Thea gasped, comforted that Alice had obviously been in such a situation herself, no doubt with that third year from Trinity with the double-barrelled surname.
‘Did he say something about only the winds of time could determine where his seed would fall and take root?’ Alice asked.
Thea paused. ‘Yes,’ she said, hesitant.
Alice continued gently. ‘Do you remember that God-awful theatre-thing, that art-performance-bollocks you dragged me to when I visited just before Christmas?’
‘Yes,’ Thea wavered.
‘He was performing his friend’s prose poem?’ Thea didn’t reply. ‘You were gazing at him too adoringly to actually hear any of it, weren’t you?’
Thea’s broken heart clanked heavily against a sudden twist of mortification in her stomach. She was speechless.
‘Thea,’ Alice continued quietly but firmly, ‘I promise you, you’ll find love again. And I promise you one day you’ll laugh about this one. We both will. We’ll laugh until we pee our pants. Trust me.’
Alice always kept her promises and she was the one person Thea always trusted. Alice, it turned out, was quite right. Memories of Headfuck Boy continue to provide them with much mirth and they can still quote his friend’s prose poem verbatim. Headfuck Boy did not cause Thea any lasting damage, nor did he in any way alter her belief in the virtue and value of falling head over heels in love. Thea Luckmore was not one to compromise.
Alice had her epiphany over a bowl of soup, ten years later – just a few months after Mark and Saul had theirs. She left her office near Tower Bridge, grabbing new issues of magazines just arrived from the printers. Though she’d never intended to take public transport anyway, the whip of November chill that accosted her outside further justified the taxi.
‘Chiltern Street, please,’ she told the cabbie, ‘the Paddington Street end. You know, off Baker Street.’
‘And do you tell your granny how to suck eggs?’ the cabbie teased her. Alice looked confused. ‘It’s my job, love,’ he continued jovially, ‘the Knowledge? Short cuts? Crafty backdoubles? Bus lanes? I do know Chiltern Street – amazingly enough.’
‘Sorry,’ Alice said meekly, ‘I didn’t mean to.’
She thought how Bill absolutely detested her habit of giving directions if she wasn’t driving. In their early days, he had gently teased her, even indulged her. A year on, it now irritated him supremely. ‘Which way do you want to go then?’ he’d give a henpecked sigh before they’d set off. And if Alice’s route proved circuitous, or with a proliferation of speed bumps, or beset by roadworks or vengeful traffic lights, he’d let his stony silence yell his disapproval and annoyance.
‘I’m not a control freak,’ Alice said out loud, not intentionally to the cab driver but not out of context either. ‘It’s not an obsession, it’s just a trait of my character.’ She gazed out of the window, about to ask him why he was going along the Embankment rather than via Farringdon at this time of day. But she bit her lip. Was it a loathsome quirk of her personality? Should it be something she should resolve to change? She could feel her tears smarting and prickling. She’d kept them in check all morning and her throat ached from the effort. ‘Here!’ she unintentionally barked at the taxi driver who swerved and shunted to a standstill in response.
‘Can you tell Thea I’m here,’ she said to the receptionist in Thea’s building.
Thea’s ‘there there’ was precisely what Alice had come halfway across London in her lunch hour to hear. The sound of it triggered the tears. ‘There there,’ said Thea again, and Alice cried all the more. ‘Let’s get some soup in you,’ Thea soothed, guiding Alice to Marylebone High Street.
Alice sipped obediently. ‘I’m going to sound like Headfuck Boy,’ she admitted, after a few spoonfuls, ‘but if I don’t end it now, it’s going to consume me. And I’ll end up all spat out. Again. I’m just so tired.’ Though Thea knew her friend’s face by rote, objectively she noted a sallowness to the complexion, a flatness to the eyes, cheekbones now too sharp to be handsome, a thinness attributable to stress rather than vanity. ‘I’m nearly thirty,’ Alice concluded in a forlorn whisper. ‘When am I going to learn?’
‘You’re not fretting about that, are you?’ Thea asked, due to turn thirty a month before Alice.
‘Look at this,’ Alice said, showing Thea the new copy of Lush magazine. ‘It’s the “Alice Heggarty This is Your Life” issue.’
Thea read the cover lines out loud. ‘More Shoes Than Selfridges.’ She looked at Alice. ‘But I’ve never known you to buy a pair and not wear them out. ‘A Chef in the Kitchen, A Whore in the Bedroom.’ Thea patted the cover of the magazine: ‘Why, that’s a skill others envy you.’
‘Look!’ Alice declared. ‘Falling For Mr Wrong.’ She jabbed her finger at the magazine. ‘Passion Drove Me Insane,’ she proclaimed, ‘Lovelorn or Lustaholic. For fuck’s sake, I’m meant to be the publisher – not the inspiration for every sodding article.’ She sighed and continued in a quieter voice, ‘Lush is directed at the early-twenties market, Thea. I’m basically thirty and still slave to all these insecurities and issues.’
‘Bill,’ Thea said darkly, buttering a doorstep of bread and dunking it, watching the satisfying ooze of butter slither off the bread and dissolve into the soup.
Alice covered her face with her hands. ‘If I say it out loud, it has to be real,’ she said, ‘if I look you in the eye, I can’t hide from the truth.’ She laid her hands in her lap and regarded Thea. ‘He’s Mr Wrong,’ she whispered, ‘it’s as simple as that. I’m exhausted. I’m a lovelorn lustaholic and passion is driving me insane.’
‘Gentle sympathy or hard advice?’ Thea asked.
‘You’re my best friend, I need you to tell me what I need to know,’ Alice said, ‘even if it’s not what I want to hear.’