EIGHTEEN

When Maggie messaged me to say that she had a friend looking for somewhere to live, it felt like everything might be falling into place. It was one of those moments where my world, which had been so close to collapsing in on itself, began to restore its equilibrium.

‘She’s a bit of a hippy,’ Maggie said in her message, ‘but she’s so sweet and warm, you’ll love her.’

Getting a flatmate didn’t make me feel like I was moving on from Owen. Or if it did, it was more that I was moving on after an appropriate amount of time. If there was an appropriate recovery period after consuming your partner, I had calculated it to be around five weeks.

Absorbing Owen had started to feel more normal, a traumatic but natural phenomenon with an overall net positive outcome. A bit like giving birth or finding faith after contracting a serious disease. I couldn’t feel Owen physically within me. I couldn’t have a conversation with him. I wasn’t possessed. I had not entirely lost touch with the absurdity of the situation, but I was accepting it like a scar or a new haircut.

I glanced out the window at the exact moment Odile opened my front gate. When I told her so, she said, ‘It must be a sign!’ and laughed. Odile was probably around Maggie’s age with pronounced crow’s feet that made her look like she was smiling even when she wasn’t.

I offered Odile a cup of tea and watched her reflection in the kettle as I waited for the water to boil. She looked around the kitchen, moving with her entire body to soak everything in. She was so grounded, like her soul – rather than just her feet – was connected with the kitchen lino. She swayed a little, a tree that had taken root in the flat hundreds of years ago. She belonged there so much more than I did.

I wanted to show her around, to assert my power over my habitat, but I just stood in the living room and pointed to the rooms that branched off it – kitchen, bathroom… When I pointed to my room she nodded politely and stayed put, and when I pointed to the spare room she wandered inside as if it were already hers. I stayed in the living room, watching her.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said, and it was.

We sat down and talked about the details. I told her I had chosen a green energy supplier, which I thought would please her, and she responded kindly to my vanity. She told me about the bookshop where she worked, how it didn’t pay much, which was why she couldn’t live on her own but was much happier with company anyway. I told her that the room was available immediately and she said that was great, she was staying with a friend at the moment and she didn’t want to outstay her welcome there.

I tried to explain my situation further.

‘I was living here with my—’

‘Oh honey, there’s no need. I can see you’ve been through great trauma, you don’t need to explain yourself.’

I smiled weakly. ‘You can move in whenever you’re ready,’ I said. I wondered how much of my story she already knew from Maggie.

s

Owen and I had been living in the flat for less than three years. After university, we lived in a shared house with a bunch of people, most of whom we hadn’t spoken to since. We got a tiny one-bed flat when I started working at the council. About two years before he quit his job, Owen got a pay rise, and we moved here. At that point, we thought we had put in enough time at work to earn the right to a moderate life. Back then, I thought we had already paid the price of comfort.

I had great plans for the spare room. I thought the extra space would be reflected within me, as if I might be able to grow into it. I bought a yoga mat and a vintage desk. I used neither, but at first it didn’t matter. Just the existence of a spare room was enough to prove something, to prove how far we had come.

When we moved in, we were just playing grown-ups. We had a loving, long-term relationship, a flat with a spare room, respectable jobs. We nearly got a dog, but decided to wait, to give ourselves something to look forward to. People knew us as a unit – Allison and Owen, Owen and Allison. To me, this was a great success. Whenever anybody invited Owen out, it was assumed that the invitation was extended to me, and vice versa. Sometimes I wasn’t invited – ‘Boys’ night,’ Owen would say – and I gave myself a proverbial pat on the back for coping on my own, although mostly I ended up finding someone else to hang out with. On the nights when I found no replacement for him, and had been forced to spend the evening alone, I would drink in front of the TV so that my soberness would not sour his return. When he asked me in the morning how my night had been, I would tell him it had been lovely, peaceful, that he should go out more often. I didn’t tell him about my crippling doubt, the arguments I ran over in my head, how I had planned exactly what I would say when he revealed there had been someone else, how I had to push so hard against his body in bed to fight the magnetic repulsiveness of it. I tried to play it cool. For a while, that was almost enough.

But it wasn’t long until we weren’t playing any more. Somewhere along the line, we started to grow up. It was difficult when Owen went freelance. It started with the bills: he couldn’t pay on time; his clients were late on their invoices. I paid his share of the rent for the first two months, and I resented him for it. And then he was working late, replying to emails and making phone calls in the evenings and on weekends. His life was more important than mine, his job was more fulfilling, his talent more promising, and just like that I became a version of the mother I always feared becoming, Owen sucking the life out of me, growing better and brighter as I collapsed in on myself. I wonder now if that was what he was always looking for – a mother figure. And if so, did he not know me well enough to know that I was not maternal in the least, that I would quickly come to begrudge caring for him as he superseded me in life?

s

I’ve often wondered if there’s anything as awful as getting to know somebody. It’s like a puzzle – intermittently fun and frustrating. No matter how careful you are, there are always pieces missing. I was always frightened by the notion that I would never truly know someone, and I would never truly be known. Because what if you gave away too much in return for too little? What if they didn’t need you as much as you needed them? What if the balance of my life was well and truly fucked? What if I had got it all wrong? And perhaps even more frightening was the thought that if I was getting it all wrong, I wouldn’t even realise. I would have nothing to compare it with. I had no idea what right looked like.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, Owen’s value to me had always lain in his fragmentation, and the more I tried to piece him together, the more I realised how many pieces had been lost, or were simply not available to me, and I became distraught and increasingly lonely. I wanted everything he had, and I was happy to sacrifice the remaining scraps of my identity for it.

s

While I had gained a flatmate, I had lost a valid excuse for not quitting my job. As it turned out, quitting was not as hard as I had imagined.

When I went into work on Monday, the HR manager, Karen, cornered me and asked for a word.

‘Allison, how are you?’ she asked as she closed the door to her office. I knew that the nature of her work required her to have a space of privacy, and I should have been grateful that we were not having this discussion in front of Jean and the others, but I wasn’t.

I said I was fine, in the hope that being vague would get me out of there faster, but Karen wasn’t having any of it.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she purred with faux sympathy, her eyes two little half-moons in her sarcastic face. ‘Darren’s been worried. He has big plans for you, you know?’

‘Actually, Karen,’ I started, before switching the pitch of my voice to sound less aggressive, more assertive, ‘I was hoping to talk to you about something.’

Karen raised her eyebrows and her lips made a little lower-case ‘o’, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Give me a second,’ I said and rushed out of the room.

Back at my desk, Jean was staring at me strangely. I ignored her, fumbled with my computer and waited by the printer for the paper to slip out. I snatched the paper from the printer tray as I headed back into Karen’s office.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘It’s my notice,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Karen, putting the paper down on her desk without reading it. ‘Do you have something else lined up?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, and for once I didn’t feel the need to explain myself any further. I wasn’t withholding out of anger; it was none of her business what I was going to do with my life, and even if I had known, I didn’t owe her an explanation. I didn’t owe anyone anything. Still, she waited for me to continue, and when I didn’t she said, ‘Is everything okay, Allison?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘brilliant.’ It sounded sarcastic, but in the moment, I meant it. I was brilliant. My life had turned a corner. Sure, I missed Owen, but I was a better person now; confident, more grateful, more ambitious. I was moving on, getting a new housemate, and I felt confident that this would change the atmosphere in the flat, bring about the peace I needed in which to settle into my new self.

s

I took a long lunch, no longer afraid of being fired, and meandered through the streets to find the shop where Odile worked. I walked slowly, moving in the general direction I knew the shop to be in, with little regard for the time I was wasting. It was time that didn’t belong to me anyway. The door was plastered with endorsement stickers from various organisations and an ‘open’ sign. Wind chimes jangled as I pushed my way in.

‘Allison!’ Odile beamed out at me from a cloud of incense smoke. ‘I was just thinking of you!’

I smiled. ‘I’ve brought the keys,’ I said. After a beat, I added, ‘To the flat.’ The atmosphere in the shop was so oppressive that it seemed to squeeze the extra words out of me.

‘Wonderful,’ said Odile. ‘You have time for a cup of tea, don’t you?’ She disappeared behind a beaded curtain before I could answer. I glanced around at the Dymo printed labels stuck to the shelves: Esoteric Teachings, Hermetic Arts, Paranormal, Satanism, Sufism, Taoism, Yoga. I did my best to avoid places like this; they revved up trains of thought that I didn’t want to be on. Odile reappeared and thrust a mug of something hot and pale that smelled like piss and lavender under my nose.

I smiled and took the mug. ‘Thanks.’

She watched me with kind, feline eyes. Like Maggie, she was wasn’t afraid of unbroken eye contact. I had sometimes wondered if Maggie did this manipulatively, forcing me to open up under her gaze. I always felt guilty for thinking it.

‘When do you think you’ll move in?’ I asked, a little more directly than I had hoped.

‘I thought I’d run a few things over tonight,’ she said, ‘and move in properly in a week or two.’

I’m not sure why it didn’t annoy me that she told me this, instead of asking. As I got to know her more, I would find that I was usually happy to follow when she told me to. I must have been so desperate to be directed. Would things have been different if my parents hadn’t gone away? They would have led me in a very different direction.

I said it would be perfect for her to start moving in immediately. She asked me to email her my bank details so she could pay her share of the rent and bills. The words, so mundane, so very un-magical, didn’t sound right coming out of her mouth, but I said yes and got out of the shop as quickly as I could, nearly taking the mug of hot lavender piss with me.

‘I knew you’d love her,’ said Maggie when I bumped into her around the corner on my way back to work. Perhaps she really was psychic. Perhaps she had followed me. ‘I know she’s a little intense, but she’s really good fun, and she’s going to have a really healing influence on you, I just know it.’

‘Yeah, she’s really nice,’ I said and wondered what she meant by healing.

s

I spent the afternoon staring at my monitor, no longer able to apply myself fully to my work. The bookshop had unsettled me, the language of it winding tightly around my insides, a string of words slicing into my guts. I remembered the articles I had read so many times in moments of masochistic curiosity. The words were so burned into me that at times it felt like I had read them in those months after my third birthday, while I waited for my new parents to find me. They were my words, they had grown with me, they had shaped me into who I was.

Sometimes I wondered when the police would be in touch regarding Owen’s disappearance, but the situation had become so normal to me by then that, mostly, I didn’t think about it at all.