for ad agencies and was about to land a gig on the writing team of a sitcom pilot. It seemed we were approaching some terrific threshold: the tantalising possibility of unqualified London success, so close we could taste it in the air and on each other. Our many and varied friends pumped us up.
We’d sell my place, use the equity to shoot for a four-bed fixer-upper on the edges of Highbury and use the Holloway rent to help pay for the works. Iain was in his mid-thirties by then, I was about twenty-six. Life was so good, we just didn’t realise it yet.
‘So, how was it, then? I’ve been waiting for the call all day!’ Iain shouted at me from the kitchen. It was just Iain and me, as you know. We were getting on for twenty years together when I met you. Those years, all the times we’d relished together, all those we’d survived as a couple, had stitched us into each other. That’s how it felt. Not every woman would let Iain be who he was, live the life he enjoyed, and not every man would fit to me. For one thing, I had always been adamant that I never wanted children. I suppose you could say I was a victim of neglect as a child. Iain was the first person I wanted to tell. I also told him I couldn’t risk putting someone else through anything like the experiences I’d gone through. It was too terrifying and, anyway, Iain knew we didn’t want sober lives where we’d have to lock down at six o’clock. Us with kids, who would we be? Not us at all. We agreed early on to leave the breeding to people less interesting than us and focus instead on having a fantastic life together, one that would allow our creative selves to thrive. I believed the narrative was holding.
‘Hello, gorgeous.’ I kissed Iain’s cheek, damp with steam from the pan he was hanging over.
‘Hello, you.’
He and I still looked broadly the same as we did in the pictures for the Evening Standard spread. I’ve always looked after myself. I run. I go to the gym. I run to the gym. I don’t wear leggings unless I’m at the gym. And it is only relatively recently I seem to have found myself in that specific category of invisible I didn’t really understand existed until, one day just before I got ill, I realised I hadn’t told a single slowing van driver to fuck off when I ran to the gym. I could now run all the way down Green Lanes wholly untroubled. Not a single beep. At first it felt liberating, this mid-life cloak of invisibility, for that purpose at least. But I suppose I never thought it would sweep over people like me, and so emphatically, especially when I wasn’t even old yet. Or perhaps I was.
A couple of weeks before I met you, I’d pulled out some short shorts I’d not worn since I was thirty-odd. I ran and waited for the cat calls, but nothing. It seemed white van men were able to age a woman by her calves and thighs alone, but what exactly was old about mine? I hated that I cared. Women like me were supposed to be better than this.
‘How was it?’ I repeated Iain’s question back to him. I’d been wondering what to tell him. I wanted to talk about you, but I also knew if I said what was really on my mind, I’d sound completely neurotic. But I did need to confide in him. Because he and I were best friends. Each other’s only friends.
We’d had many lives together. The one shortly after the Evening Standard spread is where our luck started to turn. London itself seemed to move against us. Iain’s pilot got pushed to midnight, the series dying quietly at birth. My latest manuscript, my final attempt at writing sustained prose in my own voice, was rejected by the second agent and then it seemed like I’d run out of things to say.
‘I’m wai-ting,’ Iain sang, his fingers squeezing the black plastic valve of boxed red he would have started on a couple of hours earlier, sending a drink for me gushing loudly into an expectant tumbler.
Soon after the sitcom was canned, he was made redundant. There was no justice in it, but as he passed forty, Iain was ageing into a professional leprosy. He could only get bits and bobs of freelance work. We started to lose a bit of confidence. By the time I’d been at Leadership for the best part of ten years, I was being paid an editor’s salary, but the fixer-upper crept up to £400,000, then £450,000, then suddenly £700,000 and after that, we stopped looking. We upped the rent on Iain’s place and decided to stay put at mine until the bubble burst. That first day I met you, we were still waiting for the pop.
‘Well, I’d say today certainly feels like the start of “An Exciting New Chapter”.’ I repeated the subject line of Gemma’s first all-staff email (and in gauche title case too) as I hung my jacket up. My eyes caught the poster that darkened my hall, hovering over our lives for the last five years. It was the real reason why I still lived in what should have been my bachelorette flat.
It was a one-off poster of The Film. The Film was supposed to be the start of An Exciting New Chapter for me and Iain. Perhaps Iain would tell you one version of the story, but let me tell you mine from where I think it starts.
As my father had the temerity to die on my mother when I was nine, it had been instilled in me at an early age that no one can save you from yourself, especially not a man. My mother spoke to me only when she sought to remind me that we are all truly alone and no white knight will come to your rescue. This is the one thing my mother and I agreed on. I had looked to my writing to save me, but as I got past thirty, something changed. I lost the will to write for myself. I thought about writing all the time, but the memory of my second manuscript being rejected for the final time, when I felt I’d so nearly become published, hurt too much to put myself through the process again.
The ideas didn’t come. I started a couple of drafts, but somewhere I’d lost whatever it is you inherently have, what I had for a short window in my twenties: the innate belief in what you say and the expectation your words will always find a willing audience. Because that’s how people like you carry yourself about the world, isn’t it? You think someone should always be primed, waiting to listen to you. Maybe not being able to write for myself was the very earliest sign of the beige clouds swirling. While my creative life was in stasis, Iain was still trying to make his happen. Then a way for me to ride his wave came along; a chance for him to save me from myself.
He invited me and most of our old mates to go in on a film he would write and produce. It didn’t take much for us to put our money in; we were all going to be Executive Producers. It proved irresistible to me and everyone else whose dreams had faltered as their fortieth years approached. We put our faith in Iain’s ability, some of us, admittedly, with fingers crossed behind our backs. Because it wasn’t necessarily that we believed Iain was a born auteur. Ultimately, the film fulfilled the belief there had to be something that would provide a final chance to make good on our lives, to snatch victory from the jaws of middle-aged defeatism.
All my savings for the fixer-upper went into the film, and when more money was needed, I wanted to believe remortgaging my Manor House flat to the hilt and adding Iain to the deeds to extract even more from the lender would be the penultimate paragraph on a story that ended marvellously, historically, for him and for me. But no matter what you said about the film, it was not good. It was appalling. It did not rescue us. It died a death and killed our friendships with all those who’d let themselves believe Iain would produce a work of excellence that would generate life-changing money for all investors. Iain said sorry over and over, but there was nothing to say sorry for, not really. He’d made no promises, but he had tried, hadn’t he? We had tried. The one thing your generation excels at is making stuff with your iPhones, pouring your innermost thoughts into your tweets and your blogs until you get better at it and/or something finally sticks. For people like us, things aren’t so easy; and they certainly didn’t come as cheap.
But I admit, I made a mistake. I looked outside of myself for salvation.
It got so that our friends stopped calling us. Part of me was relieved because whenever I saw them, at some point the conversation always turned to The Film. What might have been. What was lost. We had to find new bodies to come back to ours, buying the last round and plenty of coke for those who would venture to Manor House. But soon enough, we found ourselves going home alone together, and at some point a couple of years ago or so, we stopped going out much at all. Then, when we weren’t really looking, we became truly middle-aged.
You don’t need a specific reason to suffer from a mental malaise but I know your