“No,” she almost shouted. “Like eviscerated and murdered!”
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “You’re the girl dog in this scenario.”
“I don’t care which dog I am! I’m telling you how I feel when we’re apart!”
“And I’m telling you I feel exactly the same! Completely bereft,” he said. “Except—with a penis.”
•••
She wanted twochildren by the time she was thirty-five. She wanted them close in age, unlike her and her brother, and she wanted to keep working, unlike her mum. Adam had always wanted a big family. She didn’t care about getting married, but if they did, she’d like a registry-office situation followed by a small formal dinner. He didn’t care about getting married, but if they did, he’d like a registry-office situation followed by a big, long honeymoon. Her greatest fears were of being homeless, of being in an acid attack, and of angry sounds: sighs, clicks, tsks, grunts, anything that showed she was about to get told off. His were of mice, of erectile dysfunction, and of seeing his partner crying and not caring to find out why.
We always have totalkto each other, they said. And they were certain, bone-certain, they always would.
•••
Her lease cameup for renewal, and he didn’t ask her to move in with him—he just assumed. They were sitting at Railroad, a restaurant between London Fields and Homerton Hospital. It was small, relaxed, and you could watch the two owners cooking the three orfour options on the menu. Adam and Coralie each had a glass of red wine while they shared some salami and pickles. That was when he said it: “Whenyou move in…”
She sat for a moment in silence. She hardly registered the rest of the sentence.
“Oh no,” he said. “You don’t want to? Is this a Virginia Woolf thing? Room of one’s own, et cetera?”
“God, of course not. I love your house. Besides, I’m not a writer.”
“I’ll come back to that and argue with you later. Is it a Zora thing?”
“Oh God! No!”
The question mark stayed on Adam’s face. “It’s just,” Coralie said, “I feel like I’ve never told you why I moved to London—in the first place.”
“To work on your vitamin D deficiency? Craving Tory austerity? To lower your life expectancy? For the knife crime?”
“Sometimes you make four jokes when one would do.”
“I know,” Adam said. “It’s because I’m short.”
“Now I’m laughing—how can I tell you my bad story?”
He reached around the salami plate for her hand. “Tell me.”
The breakup with Josh had been bad. Not because she still wanted to be with him, which she hadn’t, by the end—but mainly because he’d bought out her share of their nice old flat. His parents had transferred the money to her bank account with the bleakest description field ever:Coralie Final.
It had been nice to have the money back, equivalent to every dollar she’d saved working since she was nineteen. Still, she would have preferred to have a home.
She packed her stuff, shipped her books to Darwin, and—unableto imagine a new park, a new tram route—moved a few blocks up the hill. The new apartment was small, blank, charmless, safe. It was late summer when she moved in, and all the trees had leaves. By winter, obviously, many didn’t, and she found to her dismay that, from the window in her new living room, she could see her old seventies apartment block. Not into the bedroom! Which Josh by then shared with Lucy! Nothing like that! The way the light played over it at sunset, that sort of thing. No way—she couldn’t live there. She found the most lucrative job someone with an English degree could find (in Sydney, in advertising) and paid to break the lease. It really hurt to waste that money. She could never tell her mum.
Adam snorted. “Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.”
The waiter came over to refill their wineglasses. She started on the next bit of the story, but the waiter returned with their mains. She picked at her pilaf and wondered if she could go on. It was all so horrible (the story, not the food). It was all so grim (that was an Adam word). So sordid.
“Go on,” Adam said. “Please.”
She’d googled the agency before the interview and got the sense of its founder as a guru. In his late fifties by then, he was universally considered at his peak. She soon learned firsthand that if there was a rule, or a convention, Richard Pickard broke it. Why meet clients in person when he could kayak across the harbor shouting at his Bluetooth? Why work in his office when he could be up on the roof terrace tending to his bees? He relished being elusive; he loved being “off the clock.” Bringing him a pedestrian concern, especially about budget or admin, could ruin his entire day, and ruin the bringer’s day, too, because of the shouting. So could asking him the wrong question, or not having the right size printouts of his concepts, ornot intuiting that he neededdowntime, or scheduling himdowntimewhen what he needed was a crisis, a conflict, or a compliment (ideally a prize with a trophy).
On the rare occasions he consented to sit in front of his computer, hetick-tick-ticked away like the timer on a bomb. Almost from her first day, Coralie alone could separate out the different colored wires and defuse him. It was second nature, instinctive: She knew what he needed, how to give it to him, and how to manage him. They were a great team, and they won a lot of big jobs, awards, and bonuses. At least, he won the bonuses—she was on a salary. He was the boss of the world, and at his feet, on a tiny pedestal engravedRichard’s Muse, sat Coralie.
The night outside was stormy and the restaurant very warm; a mist had formed on the window and the lights of passing cars glittered in the drops. Adam nodded at the rest of her lamb and rice. “Are you going to eat that?”
She was sharing some of the worst parts of her life—and still he wanted her scraps. She gratefully swapped their plates.
