I should really stop laughing so much. I have no idea what this person is going through – maybe she’s deflecting her pain with humour, using it as a defence mechanism to hide how much she’s really struggling. The problem is, she is undeniably pretty funny. I clear my throat and try to be a bit more professional.
‘For what it’s worth, you wouldn’t believe the number of calls we get from people in a very similar position to yourself, who are feeling the exact same thing.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘So, I’m not a dick; I’m just staggeringly unoriginal.’
‘Exactly.’
More laughter – from both of us.
I hear her take another sip of her drink. ‘God, this is so weird. This is the most honest conversation I’ve had in months, and it’s with someone I can’t see and whose name I don’t even know. What does that say about me?’
‘It says that you’re feeling low and you made the right decision to reach out for help,’ I say, firmly. ‘And as for names, if you like, you can call me Jack.’
She laughs softly. ‘So I’m guessing your name’s not Jack, then?
‘Well, we use “safe names” on this line. It just makes things…’
‘Safer?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK. Well… Can I tell you my name?’ she asks.
‘Of course, if you want to. And if you don’t want to that’s fine, too.’
‘Hmm.’ I hear the rustle of the phone shifting as she moves around. I suddenly wonder where she is. What she looks like. ‘Maybe I’ll give myself a safe name as well.’
‘If you like.’
‘OK.’ There’s a pause. ‘You can call me Pia.’
‘OK, Pia,’ I say. ‘Nice to meet you, Pia.’
‘Nice to meet you too, Jack.’
The computer fades into sleep mode and in the black screen I catch my own reflection – a silly grin plastered across my face. Weird. Can’t remember the last time I saw myself smile.
For a second, neither of us says anything. And then:
‘I broke up with my fiancé,’ she says. ‘Four months ago.’
‘OK…’
Even after six years, I can’t help fighting the urge to say ‘I’m sorry’ in response to a comment like this. The first thing we were taught in training was not to express any opinion or judgement whatsoever when a caller says something along these lines. It makes sense, I guess: somebody calls up and tells you their mum has just died, you say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ and then they tell you that their mum abused them or neglected them or abandoned them. By expressing sadness or regret, you’re making the caller feel worse about the fact that they may have mixed emotions about their mother’s death.
Basically, we’re supposed to stay neutral until we have all the information. Which, in practice, is much harder than it sounds. Still, I manage to wrestle down my natural human instinct to offer condolence and instead say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’
I hear her take a breath as she considers this. ‘I felt awful because I’d hurt him, and he didn’t deserve to be hurt. And I felt bad because my mum and my sister and all my friends thought I was insane to break off an engagement aged thirty-three. But despite all that, I felt glad that I didn’t have to marry him.’
I nod. ‘It sounds like the right decision, then?’
‘Maybe. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the right decision.’
‘How did you meet?’
Not sure where that came from. I feel a giddy – and slightly pathetic – thrill at having asked a direct question, which strictly speaking we’re not supposed to do on this line. We’re meant to stick to ‘open-ended’ questions – ‘How did that make you feel?’, ‘Can you tell me more about that?’ – rather than digging into specific facts or details. I suddenly hope Carole, Green Shoots’ director, doesn’t monitor these calls, or I’m sure to be in for a strongly worded email.
Either way, Pia doesn’t seem to mind.
‘We met on Tinder’, she says, inflating the last word with about six heavily-sighed Ns. ‘I know, right – how original. But I liked him straight away. And we were good together, I think. He made me laugh and he was kind, and – honestly – when my dad died last year, he was the one who kept me from falling apart completely.’
I swallow another ‘I’m sorry’.
She carries on. ‘I love him so much for that. I always will. But I just wasn’t ever… in love with him, no matter how hard I tried to be. It feels horrible to say that, but it’s true. And when he proposed, I thought…’ She breaks off. I imagine her shaking her head, staring down at the floor. ‘I don’t know what I thought, really. That I didn’t want to hurt him by saying no? That maybe I would grow to fall in love with him. That my mum would be off-her-nut delighted, and it’s not often I get the chance to make her feel like that. Maybe even because all my friends were getting married and having kids, and I didn’t want to be left behind. Pathetic to admit it, but there it is.’
‘It’s not pathetic at all. I get it. So, what caused you to break it off?’
Another direct question. I’m a maverick. A rebel! I’m the James Dean of telephone crisis lines.
‘Well, Dom kept saying, “We should get a date in the diary”, “We should start looking at venues”, and I just kept telling him, “Ah, there’s no rush, let’s take it slowly”. Then, one evening, I came home from work early and he’d left his laptop open on the kitchen table. There was this Word document on there – five pages long… It was his speech for the wedding. We didn’t even have a date set and he’d already written his speech. And it was so… so lovely.’ Her voice quivers and breaks on the word. She takes a shaky breath. ‘He deserves someone who feels the same way. And seeing that speech made me realise: this is real. This will be the rest of our lives, unless I do something to stop it. And then he came downstairs, and I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry him. And his face just…’
She is crying now – little gulps between each word. My neck feels hot suddenly, and I notice that I’m twisting the phone cord so tightly my knuckles are white. ‘He didn’t deserve that,’ she whispers. ‘He didn’t deserve what I did to him. I just feel like such an awful person.’
‘But you can’t…’ My voice comes out croaky, and I swallow hard and start again. ‘Pia, if it wasn’t meant to be, then he will thank you in the long run. You have to remember that.’
‘But it’s been four months and he’s still suffering,’ she sniffs. ‘And I am too. It’s like my life is on pause while everyone else is fast-forwarding. I just keep thinking: Who the hell do I think I am, waiting around for some fantasy person who won’t ever show up? Maybe this is as good as it gets, so why can’t I be like everybody else, and just… settle?’
‘Look… I can’t say what you should or shouldn’t do,’ I tell her. ‘But from what you’ve told me, I don’t think you’re an awful person. Not in the slightest.’