“It would be weird, Lexi. You know it would.”
“Maybe the janitor’s cupboard.”
“The what?”
“Don’t schools still have those? Mine did.”
“Look, I’ll FaceTime you.”
He didn’t FaceTime me.
I went to the public library, but it was too loud. People were staring and it felt like being branded with hot irons. The books were full of stories that shouted at me and I worried they might fly off the shelves and hit me. Difficult to explain these kinds of things when a librarian is leaning over you asking why you’re hyperventilating on the floor.
So I went home, opened my laptop, and started to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was like the story was being dictated to me. It was about a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had a nightmarish childhood due to her mother passing her around to strangers who did terrible things to her, and the girl grew up to be an inventor and made millions and learned self-respect. Note the feminist angle. It was set in Norway. After my doomed trip to the public library, I realized I’d somehow managed to check out some novels, all of them whodunits set in bleak Nordic landscapes. Scandi noir. After I finished reading them I thought, That’s what my book is. I tweaked a few details and lo, a Scandi noir it became.
I knew David was going to break up with me. We’d been together eight years and the last six had been fairly rough going. He was like the Arctic. Impenetrable, cold, rugged. I used to find those qualities attractive. Or rather, I remembered the look on my mother’s face when she met him. She was all timid, couldn’t get her words out. He was middle class, which is a bit like saying he was from Middle-earth, wielding a sword that turned blue at the prospect of charging orcs. My mother finds middle-class people—or in other words, anyone with a mortgage—intimidating.
That was reason enough for me to move in with him.
Being dumped went far worse than I’d expected. I hadn’t really considered that the flat was technically David’s and that if we broke up I might end up homeless, but there it was. He came home and looked like he’d had a few drinks, and he said:
“I can’t do this anymore, Lexi. I can’t take it. You’re too much.”
I looked at what he was wearing—since when had he started wearing a shirt and tie?—and said, “Too much of what?”
“Too much of you. We need to split. I’m sorry.”
We hugged. It seemed very amicable. I felt a small amount of pride in what ego I had left that here I was facing the first big milestone of adulthood—namely, the death of my first long-term relationship—and yet I was still managing to say things like “no, no, you’re right, it’s better that we stay friends, that’s the main thing” instead of falling apart. I felt very fond of him right then, because at least he looked like he regretted us parting ways.
But the next morning, he was back to being the Arctic personified.
“When are you moving out?” he said, avoiding eye contact as he did his tie. Navy blue with white stripes. Very corporate.
I looked around at all my stuff strewn across the bedroom floor and spewing out of the chest of drawers. I had barely enough strength to make it to the toilet and back, never mind pack eight years’ worth of crap and organize a removal company. And a new home.
“When do you want me to move out?” I asked.
“By next week, if that’s all right,” he said, and I nodded as though this was a perfectly reasonable request. Note: I’d never done Breaking Up before, not when it involved moving out of my home. And I was on a daily 100 mg dose of an antipsychotic that occasionally made the bread bin initiate a conversation.
Next week came. I got dressed. Jeans, white T-shirt, bottle-green cardi, and a laser-cut necklace that spelled out protagonist in glossy black Helvetica. I filled a bag with some random items I thought I might need—a tin opener, clean socks, the toaster—and made a packed lunch.
I had forty-one pounds and fifty-nine pence in my bank account. I eyed my wardrobe, full of clothes, shoes, and Christmas presents, with trepidation. You might as well have asked me to dredge up the Titanic as ask me to find a way to pack all of it up. It didn’t occur to me to ask anyone for help. I’d put everyone through enough. I’d ruined Meg’s yellow skirt and traumatized that poor librarian.
So I took my packed lunch and bag and closed the door of the flat behind me, leaving my key on the table.
When I went outside it was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella. I had a coat, but no hood. This felt symbolic of my life up until that point. She had a coat, but lo, it had no hood.
I reached into my pocket in case I should find an unused poo bag from walking Mrs. Hughes’s springer spaniel with which to shield my head against the downpour. No poo bag, but I did find David’s prepaid rail pass. I’d found it in the hall and meant to give it to him, but the thought had trickled out of my head like a ribbon falling out of a ponytail.
At Newcastle I took a train headed to Birmingham New Street with lots of stops in between. I had no idea where I was going, and it didn’t matter, because the train was moving, and it was a mild comfort to be headed somewhere when my entire life had come to a complete stop. Plus, I was dry, and my arms ached from hoiking around the Tefal four-slice stainless steel toaster that David had bought me for my last birthday.
The train was full of commuters. As ever I picked up on the cues of people’s lives—accounts spreadsheets, text messages flashing up on screens with evening plans and reminders to pick up milk, phone conversations about a colleague or a sick aunt. I started to have those thoughts again, the ones that had persuaded me that I was already dead so it wouldn’t be a big deal if I committed suicide. It would be a relief, and everyone would benefit from it. I started to cry. No one paid any heed until my shoulders started bobbing up and down, and then a group of women gathered around me like hens and asked me what was wrong. I told them I’d broken up with my boyfriend.
“Dear, oh, dear,” one of them said, and another said, “Well, if you ask me, he sounds like a Grade A cockwomble,” and they hugged me to their fleshy bosoms.
The train stopped at Durham. The hens told me I was pretty and young and didn’t need a man, and then they got off the train. I dabbed my eyes and kept my gaze fixed on the cathedral, on its sharp spires jabbing the bellies of clouds. Cars threaded through the streets and a smudge of kids played in a back garden. I envied them their central heating and washing machines, the comfortable beds that they’d be able to climb into at the end of the day. I had none of that now, and I had the sensation of being a tiny boat cut loose and drifting rapidly along a thrashing river with a waterfall thundering in the distance. To make matters worse, it occurred to me that I’d left my medication in David’s flat. I found my mobile phone in my bra and rang his number, but it didn’t connect. He had blocked me.