thudding. She resumed the melting-metal look. ‘I thought you were testing me to see how I’d react. It’s the only reason I didn’t go full-out Basil Fawlty.’
Fortuna replied with a look of her own that suggested cheating in a counselling session was really only cheating yourself and Gloria could have kicked herself.
The Terra Pest genuinely thought she didn’t need to come back?
But no way could it be this simple.
A person didn’t just decide to change … and voila, next stop she was attending the Nicest Personality of the Year awards.
To combat the fine tremble in her hands she reached up to smooth her chestnut ponytail. The action didn’t help her feel any more in control, so she tried her top Namaste Om Life Hack and breathed out slowly through her nose, trying to think.
Okay.
She supposed she could admit, if she was absolutely forced to, that this pothole-ridden journey into self-awareness had started way earlier than three months ago, so it was hardly as if she was being thrown back to the wolves with no discernible skills.
Seeing Fortuna these last few months was really more of a top-up feature to reassure herself. A bit like adding credit to your pay-as-you-go phone when you already had plenty to get you through the social media scroll that was anytime you had longer than two seconds on your hands.
No, the real process of change had actually begun eleven months before over a game of chess.
To be honest it had been mortifying to discover that the ‘journey to being the best version of herself’, for want of any other annoyingly over-used psycho-babble phrase, was, in fact, just one great big stereotypical quest. All very Bilbo Baggins Hobbit-y and so completely clichéd, that Gloria had considered aborting her journey to being a nicer person on several occasions.
After all, remaining the OG of Bitchville wasn’t completely without its merits.
If you lived for having no friends, that was.
It had turned out though that the minimum requirement in preventing sarcastic side-eye from your ten-year-old daughter (other than not attempting to speak in kid’s vernacular) was to have friends.
Friends meant you were normal.
Liked.
Supported.
And no longer to be worried about.
So Gloria had found herself accepting that most dangerous of life challenges: Metamorphosis.
She even had her very own Gandalph. He was called Old Man Isaac and he was the oldest resident in the village of Whispers Wood, where she lived. No one knew how old he was exactly but everyone agreed he had been dispensing wisdom way before generation X, Y and Z started getting themselves into trouble.
As a direct result of the oldness and the wisdom-dispensing Old Man Isaac was frequently given elder-like status that Gloria had always thought utter tosh, so normally she wouldn’t have been seen dead going into the retired clock-maker’s cottage for fear of anyone thinking she needed advice on anything at all in her life. But then she had nearly knocked the poor man flat on the village green, so what choice did she have but to see him back to Rosehip Cottage and sit with him a while to make sure he didn’t die or anything.
See? Even back then she hadn’t been completely heartless.
Yes, her trademark modus operandi happened to be felling a fellow human with a few choice words but even she knew you didn’t go around knocking the elderly over just because you happened to be in the blackest of black moods.
The obsidian mood was because of her ex-husband Bob, and The Lecture. The Lecture that had been so acutely observed and so unrelenting in its honesty it had stripped her soul and stolen the breath from her body, rendering her utterly incapable of her usual defence: verbal evisceration at ten paces.
Robbed of a blistering comeback she’d fled the scene of the crime. Running blindly into Old Man Isaac had probably been the only thing that could have brought her to a stop that day.
Little had she known then that a mere fifteen minutes later she’d be sipping tea, nibbling on a milk chocolate digestive, staring at a chessboard and listening to the relentless ticking of eleventy-million clocks.
As the minutes had ticked by, instead of looking after Old Man Isaac, it had started to feel a lot more as if he was looking after her. This act of kindness had been the last straw for Gloria, breaching the Hoover dam of her defences so that words started trickling, then spluttering and then gushing out of her as she recounted her ex’s litany of home-truths – all of which stemmed from his going to pick up their daughter, Persephone, from school, and overhearing some of the other kids teasing her.
When she’d worked out the root cause of Bob’s lecture she’d instinctively turned to march down to the school and unleash her Mother Bear upon the teachers and parents of the little offenders, but Bob had stopped her, wanting to give her the facts as he saw them. And facts were that Persephone had been being laughed at for trying to defend her mum, and he was worried it wasn’t the first time.
Slack-jawed, Gloria had flashed-back to herself at Persephone’s age, standing at the same school gates, defending her own mother to her peers. Her chest had got scary-prickly at the memory and the sensation got worse when Bob had asked why the hell their daughter should be put in a position of defending her when, as far as he and everyone else in Whispers Wood could tell, her behaviour was fast approaching indefensible.
At first, while he’d been serving up sentences like, ‘As if Perse hasn’t already had enough to deal with,’ she’d stared at him thinking, and whose fault is that?
Next had come the, ‘Do you really want our daughter discovering that when she’s with me, you’re going through men like they’re going out of fashion,’ she’d also wanted to hurl the words, ‘Again – whose fault is that’ or at least refute the accusation. But all she’d been able to focus on was the gigantic boulder of baggage rising up from the pit of her belly.
By the time he’d got to the, ‘And what about the way you treat everyone who tries to pass the time of day with you? You can’t really want to be this bitter for the rest of your life’ part of his lecture, the boulder in her chest had pushed all the way up to her throat, making it nearly impossible to draw breath.
Then had come the: ‘Because, FYI, calling everyone out on the mess they’re making of their lives, isn’t in any way, masking the colossal hypocritical balls-up you’re making of your own and honestly? Bobby and I can’t stand to see you spiralling like this.’
For the first time in her life, she’d turned from confrontation and started running, eager to escape the boulder of baggage now threatening to unload and bury her under its weight.
In Rosehip Cottage at the end of her confession-vomit, she’d looked up from the chessboard, expecting Old Man Isaac to defend the obvious, which was that of course she was only like this because of Bob and Bobby.
But instead, he’d leaned back in his armchair, steepled his fingers together and asked, ‘Would you be in this state if anyone other than your ex had the guts to tell you to rein yourself in for the sake of your daughter and your personal happiness?’
Rest assured she’d been about to tell him she’d have liked to see even one other person dare to talk to her like that considering no one in Whispers Wood would have the first clue what it was like to have your husband leave you so scandalously.
Because Bob hadn’t just left her for a younger model.
Nope.
He’d left her for an actual model.
A catwalk model.
A male catwalk model.
Called Bobby.
Yep.
A few little walks on the catwalk