A Hopeless Romantic

‘Sorry, Pads,’ she said.

‘But –’

‘Leave me alone,’ said Laura, a sob rising in her throat, batting her hand at Paddy, who was standing incredulously in the corridor watching her as she walked away. ‘I’m so tired.’ She said it almost to herself. ‘I just want to sleep. Just leave me alone.’

Laura went back to bed. She ate the food she could eat without leaving the bed. The wine she left – it wasn’t a screw-top and she couldn’t face getting the corkscrew from the kitchen. She ate a Crunchie bar in two mouthfuls. She was too tired to read the paper. She picked it up, scanned it, but the story about a school of orphans in Zimbabwe made her cry again, so she threw the paper on the floor and turned over, facing the wall, tears rolling across her face. The salty, MSG flavour of the crisps was around her mouth, and she licked her lips, sniffing. She closed her eyes.

About an hour later there was a knock at the door.

‘Laura?’ came a voice tentatively.

Laura opened her eyes, but said nothing.

‘It’s me,’ said Paddy. ‘Look. Are you OK?’

Laura chewed her lip, praying he wouldn’t come in, banking on a bloke’s natural aversion to crying women. This was particularly strong in Paddy, sweet though he was in other ways.

‘What’s wrong, Laura? I’m…I’m worried about you!’

Laura pulled the duvet over her head as tears filled her eyes again.

‘Look,’ said the voice again. ‘I’m going out now. I don’t want to bother you. I’m not going to come in. Will you just say “Yes” now to let me know you’re alive and you haven’t been attacked or anything?’

It was a good tactic. Laura patted the duvet away feebly with her hands, and said quietly, ‘Yes.’

‘Right,’ came Paddy’s voice, sounding relieved. ‘Look, darling. I’m sorry about whatever’s happened. Is it Dan?’

‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘Don’t. Don’t worry.’

She didn’t know why she said it, except she really didn’t want Paddy thinking she was actually dying or something. It was her problem, not his, poor man.

Paddy said cheerily, ‘Oh. Well, you’ll sort it out, I’m sure. I know you, Laura! You know what you want, don’t you?’

There came no answer, so he said, ‘Well, bye then,’ and seconds later Laura heard the front door slam. She lay there quietly for a moment, then put a pillow over her head and screamed, as hoarsely and loudly as she could, till the urge to shout had gone out of her and she was crying quietly again until she fell asleep.

All through Sunday, Laura slept or lay in bed feeling sorry for herself, not moving. She didn’t have anything to do, and she had absolutely no one to answer to, and all she wanted to do was hate herself a little bit more, and the solution to that seemed to be to lie festering in a hot, sweaty bed, with greasy hair and greasy fingernails and skin, feeling achy and uncomfortable. White saliva remains crusted in the corners of her mouth. Her breath smelt rank. That day she ate only a packet of crisps and another chocolate bar. Her stomach rumbled, she felt alternately sick and hopelessly weak, with head-rushes every time she sat up or turned over. Her pyjamas were bunched up around her, uncomfortable, twisted in the baggy sheets. She left her room twice, to go to the loo, scuttling each way like a crazy person so she didn’t see Paddy. She heard sounds of him moving about, a television on in the sitting room at the other end of the flat, but he didn’t come near her and for that she was grateful. She just wanted to be alone, to feel as totally rotten as it was possible to feel, to push herself as far away from the hopeful, deluded girl who ran out to see Dan every week with smooth silky tanned legs and clean, shiny hair.

She slept fitfully, and she kept dreaming. She dreamt she was running to tell Dan something, but she couldn’t get to him; though her legs were long and she was running as fast as she could, she never seemed to make it any further. She dreamt Dan was lying next to her, his arms wrapped around her, and that he was kissing her neck, her shoulders. She dreamt he had texted her to tell her it was all a mistake, but each time she woke up and checked her phone there was nothing. She dreamt she was on holiday with Dan and Amy and her friends, in a huge villa somewhere, and she could hear them laughing but didn’t know where they were, where any of her friends were.

Early on Monday morning she was awake, gazing around the room, looking at the detritus of her self-incarceration through the grey haze cast by the curtains. By this time Laura had been in her room for over two days, and she was starting to freak herself out. But the thing about self-loathing is it stops you from taking the smallest of steps to make yourself feel better – even tying your hair back in a ponytail, or opening the window for some fresh air. She desperately wanted to get up, get out of bed, have a shower, but she couldn’t. It was easier to lie there and not do anything. She couldn’t go in and talk to Paddy. He’d told her all along she was stupid for seeing Dan! She couldn’t tell her parents; the shock of the whole sorry mess would kill them. She couldn’t call Jo, though she desperately wanted her wise, sanguine best friend’s advice. Of course she couldn’t call her – imagine what she’d say! Imagine how she’d enjoy it. And then there was the job, the money too…Laura closed her eyes again, and realised that perhaps of all the lows over the past couple of days, this was probably her lowest moment. She didn’t even have the energy to cry, and somehow that made it much worse.

She thought about what she had to do now, and the enormity of it overwhelmed her. Fix things, fix things left, right and centre. And then, in the middle of it all, get over this man. Straight away. Laura knew she’d been stupid, but three days on, she still knew Amy’s pregnancy drew a line under their affair once and for all. There was no way they could carry on. She wouldn’t even have wanted to, even if Dan had left Amy for her. No, it was over. Apart from the baby, being with Dan had effectively ruined her life. She had to understand the consequences of a bad relationship.

When she looked across the months to come, long Dan-less months of not sharing things with him, telling him things, being with him, her stomach clenched in sharp pain and her heart beat so loudly in her chest she felt it might burst. It was over. And so was that part of herself. When she thought about how she’d misjudged it, how she’d run ahead and fallen in love with him without stopping to look at whether he was the person she thought he was – well, she wanted to kick herself. Except this wasn’t the first time and she knew enough to recognise she’d done it before. One thing was for sure, though: it was the last time.

Yes, the last time she’d fall like that. Absolutely the last time. A clean slate. A smooth, glowing feeling washed through Laura, stopping the cramps in her stomach. A clean slate, a project, someone to be, a new her. She looked past the grey-blue curtains at the crack that let the sunlight in. Yes, the good feeling persisted. She would be someone new. That was the only way to be. She was going to change.

Laura’s problem was that she kept casting men in roles they weren’t suited for. Just as, aged sixteen, she had cast Mr Wallace in the role of a Pre-Raphaelite-esque musician when in fact he was a rather weedy, nervous, weak man unable to withstand the breathless attention of a budding, pubescent girl. Just the same as she had been with lovely Josh, for a year before Dan, casting him in the role of decent, kind househusband, the perfect partner, the modern male, when – what was it that she had actually loved about him, really? Laura tried to think, and couldn’t come up with the answer. He was a great man – kind, funny, clever, hard working – but there was no way he was the man for her, she realised now. Why hadn’t she seen it? And why hadn’t she seen it with Dan? Why had she learnt so little from her time on earth and not bloody seen it at all with Dan? The man she’d cast in the role of ultimate love of her life, Mr Dependable, ride-off-into-the-sunset-with soul mate. Well. Hah.

The sun was growing brighter. Laura swallowed, tasting a bitter, mouldy fur on her tongue. She sat up, her hands on her knees, and was considering what to do with this newfound zeal – whether to convert it into something by taking the first of a thousand small steps and jumping in the shower, or whether to lie back and think about it some more. What should she do? The energy of the question fazed her, and she would have probably lain back down and closed her eyes again, a fatal tine of the fork to take, when, thank god, fate intervened.

Laura didn’t know what happened first, the sight of it or the sound, but as she was sliding back down under the duvet again there was a sickening thump noise, and the window flew into a million pieces, hitting the curtains and flying past, hurling fragments onto the bed. A pigeon landed at Laura’s feet. Dead. Or dying.

It took a few seconds before Laura realised the person screaming loudly was her, and it was involuntary, her first involuntary action of the last two days. She couldn’t move. She sat staring and screaming at this twitching, bloodied pigeon, its feathers scraggy and ugly, its red-pink worm-like claws convulsing on her duvet, as Paddy burst into the room.

‘Stop!’ shouted Laura. ‘Don’t come any further! There’s glass on the floor – STOP!!!’

Paddy slid to a halt, inches from a huge dagger-shaped shard of glass.

‘Fuck! Fuck me!’ he yelled. ‘What the fuck! Laura! What have you done!’

The pigeon twitched again. Laura suddenly heard her mother’s voice saying (every time she wanted to feed pigeons in Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus), ‘They’re flying rats, dear. Vermin. Crawling with fleas and god knows what else.’

‘Get away from me!’ she said incoherently to the pigeon. ‘Fuck! Off!’

Paddy calmed down before she did. He looked from the broken window, where the curtains were fluttering plaintively in the summer breeze, across the path of devastation wrought by the flying glass, now in a shower across the floor, to the bed where the pigeon lay a couple of feet from Laura, who was surrounded by feathers, blood and glass, as well as crisp packets, cans, chocolate wrappers and bits of paper. He said, slowly, ‘I think you should get out of there. Where are your slippers?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Laura helplessly. She added, ‘I don’t wear them in summer. They’re too hot.’

‘Oh good grief,’ said Paddy. ‘Flip-flops?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Laura. ‘Oh – there.’ She pointed at her chest of drawers, below the window, which was covered in glass, and below it a collection of glass-strewn flip-flops.

‘Wait there,’ said Paddy, and he trotted lightly down the corridor, returning with a pair of wellington boots which he used for fishing trips (last year’s Paddy craze).

‘I’m going to throw them gingerly at you,’ he said.

Laura looked at him. ‘What does “throw them gingerly at you” mean?’ she said crossly. ‘Just throw them. Don’t knock me out. And don’t – urgh! Oh Paddy – urgh. Don’t throw them at the pigeon. Urgh!’

Paddy had prided himself on his spin bowling at school, and indeed was reckoned to be rather good at it. He tossed each welly in the air, and miraculously each landed, in a slow, spinning arc, in Laura’s outstretched hands. She pulled them on and climbed out of bed. Stepping around the glass and rubbish by her bed, she leapt across the mound of it by the door, and landed next to Paddy.

‘Er…’ she said, not knowing how to ask. ‘Paddy…?’

Paddy stepped forward and gently picked up the dead pigeon. He dropped it into Laura’s wastepaper basket, and picked the receptacle up.

‘Cup of tea?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Laura. She pulled her hair back and tied it into a ponytail. ‘Yes, yes please.’

‘Going to buy a new duvet and bin?’ said Paddy, as he pulled the bedroom door firmly shut behind them.

‘Oh, you bet.’

It was Paddy’s last week of term, so he left for work a while later, by which time they had had several cups of tea, called a glazier (Laura), deposited the pigeon in some newspaper and a bag in the rubbish bins outside (Paddy), and donned rubber gloves and begun the work of – once again gingerly – collecting each piece of glass that had managed to spray itself remarkably widely around Laura’s room (Laura). By the time the glazier showed up after lunch, Laura had showered and dressed and had stripped and washed her sheets. She threw away the duvet – she knew it was wrong and a waste of the world’s resources, but it was almost fetid AND covered in dead pigeon. There was no way she’d ever sleep with it again, she knew, and no amount of boil washes could clean it for her.

The glazier was a short, squat man, who looked as if he had been born in blue dungarees. He was called Jan Kowolczyk.

‘Well, well,’ he said when Laura came to check on him after a little while. ‘Nearly finished here, young lady, then all will be good as new again.’