I, Sadie Swoon, feel wretched. Can Alison Grabowski see my wretchedness? I don’t know which was worse: walking around with only the idea of you, or sitting here with the real person, who has now replaced my idea of you. (A seed of memory blossoms into an imaginary garden. We walk through it. We have never stopped walking through it.) But this is the story of us, isn’t it? Loss and gain. It makes no sense. It’s wretched.

I was thinking of you when I wasn’t thinking of you.

You were there when you were here.

You were here when you were there.

I wish I hadn’t ordered this glass of wine.

Sadie hadn’t planned to drink. She wanted a clear head and the capacity to drive away from Alison Grabowski as soon as she needed to. If she needed to.

She sips pinot noir from a large glass and looks around. Red leather seats. White paintwork. A mirrored wall behind a long bar. Framed advertisements from the Fifties and Sixties. Black skirting boards. Skinny staff with asymmetrical haircuts. Lopsidedness is all the rage. (You know you’re getting older when you say all the rage.) The voice of Elvis, coming out of four speakers. At the next table, three men who all resemble Justin Bieber, eating steak sandwiches, plucking thin chips from miniature steel plant pots. A tattooed girl, sitting by herself, drinking a martini, reading Ulysses. Sadie envies the girl, she doesn’t know why. A young couple drinking beer, eating pistachios, playing footsie under the table. A man on his mobile phone saying don’t do this to me, don’t do this to us. And Alison Grabowski, who is still wearing her hi-tech trousers and grey short-sleeved shirt, but not the badge with the cartoon bear on it, the one promoting a summer camp for young carers, sponsored by Grab&Go Camping, which does a vast amount for charity.

“So, where to start?” Alison says.

 

They are dancing to the Levellers. They are chopping vegetables in the kitchen, discussing how easy it is to make a vegetable lasagne as if they are the very first people in the world to discover this. They are watching Peter’s Friends at the Odeon; afterwards they will buy two bags of chips and walk home while discussing how brilliant Emma Thompson is. They are throwing snowballs at each other in the park, and Alison says my God just stop and look at this, look at how the snow makes everything beautiful. They are eating bacon sandwiches in a cafe, reading The Times, feeling grown up. They are washing Alison’s first car, a red Fiat Panda, and the man next door says oh girls you don’t do it like that, and he disappears inside his house and comes back out with a special wheel-cleaning brush and a square of chamois leather that looks impossibly stiff. They are sitting in the front row of a Tori Amos concert, holding hands, and Tori Amos is staring at them as she sings, she is really staring, and they talk about this for days afterwards, how Tori Amos sang just for them, they call it amazing and intense and they play the song continually, ‘Cornflake Girl’, the song that brought the three of them together. They are sitting around a dining table with Alison’s parents, sister, auntie, uncle and grandmother, eating turkey and wearing paper hats. They are arguing about a women’s studies lecture on a Friday morning, the one they were supposed to go to at nine o’clock, but Alison wouldn’t get up so Sadie went alone and took pages of detailed notes and rushed home with croissants, feeling diligent, productive, generous, but Alison was still asleep, Sadie called her lazy, Alison woke up and said you’re not my wife; she got dressed and drove off in her red Fiat Panda and stomped around the garden centre, wishing she’d stayed home and eaten her croissant. They are lying on Sadie’s bed, Alison is smiling and running her fingers up and down Sadie’s arm—she says we could have sex you know, just to see how it feels, and Sadie says yeah right, as if.

 

I, Sadie Swoon, am in agony. I lost you, and now I have lost you again by finding you.

 

“So, where to start?” Alison says.

She would give it all up to be with Sadie. Bessie, the business, their home. Yes, after all this time. She knows this now and she has always known it. The outcome is irrelevant. This is not about the future, only the past, the time when she was living authentically, expressing something that felt true and real. The time when she was most present in her own life.

“I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this,” Sadie says.

“Of course not,” Alison says.

“I’m in a strange space right now. It’s making me think about university.”

“How’s Ralph?”

“I have no idea.”

Alison takes a sip of red wine. She checks Sadie’s hand, looking for the wedding ring. There it is, plain and unbroken. Has she divorced Ralph and married someone else?

“He walked out a week ago,” Sadie says.

“He’s left you?”

“I don’t think so. I have no idea. I kissed my friend Kristin in a cupboard. She’s a printmaker. Designs book jackets too. Very talented.”

Alison detests this woman called Kristin. Some things in life are simple. “So you’re having an affair?”

“Oh no, I’m not having an affair. I’ve never been unfaithful to Ralph.”

(Poor Beverley Smart. The woman who doesn’t count.)

“Right. Why did you kiss her in a cupboard? Still slightly…” Alison pauses. “Inhibited?”

Cutting!

Sadie licks her lips and thinks about what to say. “So, are you some kind of rambler now?” she asks, eyeing Alison’s outfit.

Touché!

“You know I always liked a long walk,” Alison says.

Sadie nods. She doesn’t remember any long walks. She remembers the short ones—around the park, to and from town, the cinema, the chippy—as if their feet had never stopped moving, left and right, side by side, walking through the years.

“Bessie’s the energetic one,” Alison says.

And Bessie jogs into the picture. Not literally, because Bessie is busy right now, running a summer camp in the Lake District. Energetic. Is that really the right word, Alison? She could have chosen so many others, like driven and obsessed and jumpy, but she has chosen energetic because it sounds better than the others, and Bessie is in competition with Kristin.

“Your partner?”

“In life and in business.”

In life and in business? Did I actually just say that? Alison is grimacing and Sadie is drinking and ‘All Shook Up’ is playing on the stereo.

“Hold on, didn’t you go on a date with someone called Bessie at uni?”

“Sadie, I brought her to your wedding.”

“My wedding?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

She genuinely doesn’t remember. She had two screaming babies, a brand-new husband and low-grade flu, according to her GP, who asked if she was happy and wished he hadn’t when Sadie began to hyperventilate. Just breathe into this paper bag, the GP said. Breathe into this bag and everything will be all right. And it was, in a muted kind of way, because he prescribed her antidepressants, which she took for five years without telling a soul.

“I never understood why we lost touch,” Alison says.

“It’s not easy, having twins when you’re twenty,” Sadie says, as if this explains everything. “It was all right for Ralph. He finished his degree, he just carried on. I left with nothing.”

“You left with a husband and two children.”

“One minute we were dancing, then I had two babies.”

“You sound like an advert for the pill.”

Sadie looks up, says nothing.

“Would you like another drink?”

“Please.”

 

I, Alison Grabowski, choose you, Sadie Swoon, even though you are not mine to choose. How dare you just turn up like this? You come walking into the shop, giving me no warning, no time to prepare. Do you think I’d be wearing these combat trousers and this shirt if I’d known you were coming? I would have washed my hair this morning, put on some make-up. But you gave me no time and no options. What’s changed, over the years? I had no choices then and no choices now. We’ve been sitting here for less than an hour and already I know why you’re here. The idea of life after Ralph has made you think of life before Ralph, and who was before him? I was. You were never in love with him and he must have known, yet he drifted along beside you like a boy. He’s finally dropped you, that’s why you’re here. I hate you, Sadie. You were so cold. I’ve missed you so much. I’d give it all up to be with you now. I hate you.

They sit and drink wine and there is an arch of melancholy, it rises up and over their heads, their own private architecture, their own private world.

 

“Do you remember that band we used to go and see?” Sadie says. “Acquiescence?”

“Oh God,” Alison says, laughing. “Acquiescence. The goths from Edinburgh.”

“I loved those goths.”

“I think you mainly loved the lead singer.”

“She was fantastic. We would’ve been great together,” Sadie says.

Alison doesn’t answer. She holds her wine glass with both hands, clutching it as if it were a hot drink on a cold day.

“So, are you all right?” Sadie says.

“All right?”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes, I suppose so, in a way.”

“That’s good.” Sadie pulls a food menu from a wooden stand. “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten for hours. Do you still like pizza?”

 

I, Alison Grabowski—the one wearing quick-dry technical trousers with built-in UV radiation and wind protection, advanced moisture control, cargo pockets for handy storage, anti-fungus and insect-repellent coating; the one wearing the dullest shirt I own—am sitting here with Sadie Swoon, eating pizza, listening to Elvis. I am thinking about Take This Waltz, a film I saw with Bessie last week, about a woman who leaves her husband and starts a passionate affair, and by the end of the film she is just as dissatisfied as she was at the beginning. That wouldn’t be us, Sadie, because we are the original couple, the couple that never began, and we’ve been around long enough to know that the excitement turns into something else, and I want that something else with you. We can do this slowly if you like. We can dance around it. We can sit here talking about the old days, drinking red wine. You can ask me if I’m happy and I’ll say yes, I suppose so, in a way. We’ll just dance until we’re tired of dancing.