Perhaps she should be buying more seeds and legumes? (She must look up ‘legumes’; they sounded so Whole Foods.) She searched the shelves for more seed-like products and immediately felt better. If she just bought a selection of ‘good’ foods – natural foods, lentils, wild rice, pine nuts, sunflower seeds – she could figure out what to do with them later. They would look good in her cupboard, and just the thought of buying them made her feel thinner. As far as she knew, there wasn’t a diet plan in the world that didn’t advocate seeds – perhaps she could roast her own in the oven and then put them in an old jam jar to snack on? This was definitely a possibility. She was sure she’d seen Victoria Beckham wandering around with some seeds and it seemed to work for her, even after four designer kids and two successful careers.
Rushing through the aisles, she kept an eye out for Coco, and another for Olivia. What a shame, she thought, that nowadays her friends were more like Olivia, not interesting like Coco? Coco might frankly be a bit weird, but Olivia… Olivia was everything she didn’t want to be, but was terrified she was becoming, but she also envied her. Thank god she still had friends like Ana and Dixie to keep her sane; sharing the chaos of their lives helped her convince herself that she wasn’t losing her mind, or wasn’t losing it alone at any rate.
She didn’t see Coco again, but Olivia, her back to Stella, fortunately, was paying for some bottled water at the six items or less counter when she saw to her delight that Rory had at some point managed to wipe four of his chocolate-covered fingers down the back of Olivia’s tennis skirt. The chocolatey stripes looked like shit in the bright lights of the supermarket. As if she’d run out of paper and used her hand before wiping it clean on her blue-white tennis kit. Her moment of joy was interrupted by the cashier.
‘Sorry, love, can you try it again?’
‘What?’
‘It’s not working.’
‘Oh, it must, surely.’ She felt the heat rising to her face and sweat begin to press through the pores across her top lip. She remembered with shame the unreturned voicemails from Barclaycard.
‘Wait, sorry. I’ve another,’ she tried to laugh. ‘Too many holidays, isn’t that the way?’
She found her personal bank card, and prayed to all the gods of organised family finance that she’d left some money in there.
‘That’s fine.’
The beads of sweat began to dry and Stella found consolation and distraction in the memory of Olivia’s stained whites.
‘Good lad, Rory. You’ll go far.’
Stella was still giggling at Rory when she emerged from the supermarket into a downpour. The oppressive darkness of the low clouds, the ubiquity of water all around them, filled her with blood-chilling dread and she promised herself that she’d return the calls to Barclaycard. For once, she knew that this cash-flow issue was probably not her failure. The Barclaycard was paid from Jake’s account. A wave of anxiety connecting the Barclaycard issue to Jake’s recent moodiness stopped her in her tracks but she shook it off and began to load the SUV while Rory grinned and proudly showed her his two newly minted chocolatey panda eyes.
‘Joker,’ she laughed as he screamed on being separated from his trolley.
Chapter Two
Ana
‘So, are you ready, Rex?’ called Ana, her long, dark hair dripping down her caramel back as she stepped out of the shower into their tiny mirrored bathroom. ‘Are we really going to do this? I really want it to be the right thing, for both of us, I don’t want you to feel… trapped.’
She scrunched her hair dry, wrapped herself in the towel, and padded into the wood-panelled Seventies galley kitchen where Rex was drinking a coffee.
‘Not that I have any idea where we’ll put it,’ said Ana, looking around their postage-stamp-sized studio flat. ‘I must water that plant.’ In the window of the kitchen, a spider plant, overflowing with hanging clones, was miraculously dehydrating. Weren’t they like cockroaches? Able to endure a nuclear winter, but not a Battersea spring. Part of Ana’s training for adulthood, and eventual parenthood, was built around a progression: the goal being to firstly keep a plant alive for longer than six months, then graduate to a pet and if both are still thriving 12 months later, a child. The spider plant was still alive. Her cat, Boris, a half-feral tabby, had moved out a few months before. Rex insisted he must have been run over, but Ana knew he was still alive: on more than one occasion she’d seen him hiding behind the bins. He’d pretended not to know her.
‘I told you before, Ana, if it’s what you want… what you need, then let’s do it. I will be there every step of the way.’
‘Really?’ she smiled shyly. ‘Even though it’s meant to be as stressful as divorce or losing a parent?’
‘I just don’t want to be like those people who become so obsessed with having a baby they can’t think about or do anything else. That terrifies me. If it’s meant to be, it will be. If not, we can buy a boat, sail the world, live the dream.’
‘You don’t like boats, Rex. You don’t even like the water.’
‘Actually I don’t like fresh water, hurts my contacts,’ he laughed, his blue eyes sparkling. ‘I just love you. And if it’s you and me forever, then I will still be a very happy man.’ He threw his half-drunk coffee into the sink and headed for the door, attempting to pass her.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she asked, dropping the towel to the floor. A breeze rippled over her, goosebumps all over her nakedness; her nipples stood out. She worried her nipples were too long, but no one had complained, yet.
‘Oh god, are you ovulating now!?’ He enveloped her breast in his hand. ‘The perfect handful.’ He pinched her nipple between the knuckle of index and middle finger.
She felt down between his legs and took him in her hand. ‘More than a handful mustn’t be wasted.’ She laughed as he outgrew her hand. ‘Isn’t this just the best way to start the day? You telling me you’d rather be at work?’
Ana was worried they weren’t having enough sex. She always worried she wasn’t having enough sex, and now that their sex had a purpose, was part of her life plan, part of the having-to-do because if she didn’t do it now, she might never be able to do it, she was terrified it might become a chore. A good man was hard to find and Rex was a good man. She didn’t want to have to find another. They took so long to train. She pulled him into the living room and lay back on the leather sofa, spread her legs sufficiently that he could see into her, and dangling a finger over her clitoris, she teased. ‘You sure you have to go to work right now? This second…?’
‘Oh god,’ he sighed. ‘You make me so…’
She slid down the sofa a little. One finger became two.
‘You little minx…’
She watched, smiling mischievously as, without taking his clothes off, he unzipped his trousers, releasing his at-the-ready erection, and slid it into her in one smooth, wet motion. She gasped at the hardness, and felt a moment’s relief that he still fancied her so much.
‘Oh Christ, you are so wet…’ With his long, slow motions, not the longest or slowest she’d ever known, but long and slow enough, her head bounced against the back of their beaten-up old Chesterfield. Ana loved fucking him; he was gentle and kind, not a wild animal, but the sex was good. Not the best, but good. Yes, good enough. Better than most. Better, certainly, than most of her happily settled friends, she suspected, but not the best, no. The best was gone. Long gone. And Rex was the right decision. He was. It was not a decision lightly made. It was not a decision made without robust analysis, protracted discussions with the girls. It was not a decision made without a spreadsheet.