Tom doesn’t reply to my message telling him what time and where we are meeting. And then – what took you so long, Tom? – he blocks me.
I am incensed, briefly, but I know I need to go about this another way anyway. If I had met Tom as Rachel, he could have recognised a face that looks familiar enough for it to bug him until he places it. And then he would have known I was lying. That I wasn’t Rachel and had a different career altogether.
Far better that he knows me as me.
And he will.
Time for Plan B.
It came from something someone said at work. We were in a meeting, the others making geeky songwriter in-jokes around the piano while I played and zoned out. I felt my shoulders settle. I felt people drift further away. The part where there was human interaction was always the inferior bit of my job; far better to be lost, rhythmic, to feel strong as I pounded the piano keys harder and harder and forgot that my colleagues were even there. Forget the world was there.
‘Harriet! Harriet!’
I was angry that this voice had cut through my playing.
‘What?’ I bit, fingers snapping away from the keys, turning around to them in anger.
‘We’re stopping for now, okay?’ said my colleague Jacob. ‘Just going to order some food in and chill out for a while.’
In the chat that followed as we ate our pizza, Jacob joked that our industry would make a good sitcom and I zoned back in, just long enough to snip.
‘I’m not sure any of us are funny enough for a sitcom.’
Not us. You.
I wasn’t jovial; I was in a bad mood after a two-hour stint looking at old pictures of Luke between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. this morning.
Luke. Tom. Luke. Tom.
‘A documentary, then,’ said Steph. Steph? Sam?
These women look the same with their skinny jeans and their highlighted hair and the same trainers. People think London is the home of the unique, what a joke. I’ve never seen more ubiquity in one place. At any given time there is one restaurant you should eat at, one brand you should covet for your wardrobe, one book you should be obsessed with. They might as well send out a memo at the start of the month.
And yet, I’m still here. Why? I wonder. Too lazy to uproot again? Nowhere else I belong? Clinging onto something I thought I was going to be doing with Luke? Or, lately, is it more to do with Tom?
‘Oh yeah, now you’re talking,’ said another dramatically. ‘A dark documentary exposing the cruel underbelly of the musical theatre world.’
They laughed and I thought about how unfunny they are, and how much I dislike them, and how much I dislike everybody I spend time with really, and how no one who’s in my life matters to me while David, Frances, my friends, Mom and my dad are outside its parameters.
And then I remembered something I saw on Tom’s social media and had an idea.
When you have no one to lose and an empty spot inside you where those people used to live, you can do whatever you want, whatever you fancy, and there are no consequences. It’s one of the best things about being me.