Twenties Girl

“Is this your lover?” She turns around.

“I wish,” I say sardonically.

“Don’t you have any lovers?” She sounds so pitying, I feel a bit piqued.

“I had a boyfriend called Josh until a couple of months ago. But it’s over. So… I’m single at the moment.”

Sadie looks at me expectantly. “Why don’t you take another lover?”

“Because I don’t want to just take another lover!” I say, nettled. “I’m not ready!”

“Why not?” She seems perplexed.

“Because I loved him! And it’s been really traumatic! He was my soul mate; we completely chimed-”

“Why did he break it off, then?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know! At least, I have this theory…” I trail off, torn. It’s still painful talking about Josh. But, on the other hand, it’s quite a relief to have someone fresh to download to. “OK. Tell me what you think.” I kick off my shoes, sit crosslegged on the sofa, and lean toward Sadie. “We were in this relationship and it was all going great-”

“Is he handsome?” she interrupts.

“Of course he’s handsome!” I pull out my phone, find the most flattering picture of him, and tilt it toward her. “Here he is.”

“Mmm.” She makes a so-so gesture with her head.

Mmm? Is that the best she can do? I mean, Josh is absolutely, definitively good-looking, and that’s not just me being biased.

“We met at this bonfire party. He’s in IT advertising.” I’m scrolling through, showing her other pictures. “We just clicked, you know how you do? We used to spend all night just talking.”

“How dull.” Sadie wrinkles her nose. “I’d rather spend all night gambling.”

“We were getting to know each other,” I say, shooting her an offended look. “Like you do in a relationship.”

“Did you go dancing?”

“Sometimes!” I say impatiently. “That wasn’t the point! The point was, we were the perfect match. We talked about everything. We were wrapped up in each other. I honestly thought this was The One. But then…” I pause as my thoughts painfully retread old paths. “Well, two things happened. First of all, there was this time when I… I did the wrong thing. We were walking past a jewelers’ shop and I said, ‘That’s the ring you can buy me.’ I mean, I was joking. But I think it freaked him out. Then, a couple of weeks later, one of his mates broke up from a long-term relationship. It was like shock waves went through the group. The commitment thing hit them and none of them could cope, so they all ran. All of a sudden Josh was just… backing off. Then he broke up with me, and he wouldn’t even talk about it.”

I close my eyes as painful memories start resurfacing. It was such a shock. He dumped me by email. By email.

“The thing is, I know he still cares about me.” I bite my lip. “I mean, the very fact he won’t talk proves it! He’s scared, or he’s ru

There’s silence. I look up to see Sadie sitting with her eyes closed, humming softly.

“Sadie? Sadie?”

“Oh!” She blinks at me. “Sorry. I do tend to go into a trance when people are droning on.”

Droning on?

“I wasn’t ‘droning on’!” I say with indignation. “I was telling you about my relationship!”

Sadie is surveying me with fascination.

“You’re terribly serious, aren’t you?” she says.

“No, I’m not,” I say at once, defensively. “What does that mean?”

“When I was your age, if a boy behaved badly, one simply scored his name out from one’s dance card.”

“Yes, well.” I try not to sound too patronizing. “This is all a bit more serious than dance cards. We do a bit more than dance.”

“My best friend, Bunty, was treated terribly badly by a boy named Christopher one New Year. In a taxi, you know.” Sadie widens her eyes. “But she had a little weep, powdered her nose again, and tally-ho! She was engaged before Easter!”

“Tally-ho?” I can’t keep the scorn out of my voice. “That’s your attitude toward men? Tally-ho?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What about proper balanced relationships? What about commitment?”

Sadie looks baffled. “Why do you keep talking about commitment? Do you mean being committed to a mental asylum?”

“No!” I try to keep my patience. “I mean… Look, were you ever married?”

Sadie shrugs. “I was married for a spell. We had too many arguments. So wearing, and one begins to wonder why one ever liked the chap in the first place. So I left him. I went abroad, to the Orient. That was in 1933. He divorced me during the war. Cited me for adultery,” she adds gaily, “but everyone was too distracted to think about the scandal by then.”

In the kitchen, the oven pings to tell me my lasagna’s ready. I wander through, my head buzzing with all this new information. Sadie was divorced. She played around. She lived in “the Orient,” wherever that’s supposed to be.

“D’you mean Asia?” I hoick out my lasagna and tip some salad onto my plate. “Because that’s what we call it these days. And, by the way, we work at our relationships.”

“Work?” Sadie appears beside me, wrinkling her nose. “That doesn’t sound like any fun. Maybe that’s why you broke up.”

“It isn’t!” I feel like slapping her, she’s so a

“Count On Us,” she reads off my lasagna packet. “What does that mean?”

“It means it’s low fat,” I say, a little reluctantly, expecting the usual lecture that Mum gives me about processed diet foods and how I’m a perfectly normal size and girls these days are far too obsessed about weight.

“Oh, you’re on a diet.” Sadie’s eyes light up. “You should do the Hollywood diet. You eat nothing but eight grapefruit a day, black coffee, and a hard-boiled egg. And plenty of cigarettes. I did it for a month and the weight fell off me. A girl in my village swore she took tapeworm pills,” she adds reminiscently. “But she wouldn’t tell us where she got them.”

I stare at her, feeling a bit revolted. “Tapeworms?”

“They gobble up all the food inside one, you know. Marvelous idea.”

I sit down and look at my lasagna, but I’m not hungry anymore. Partly because visions of tapeworms are now lodged in my mind. And partly because I haven’t talked about Josh so openly for ages. I feel all churned up and frustrated.

“If I could just talk to him.” I spear a piece of cucumber and stare at it miserably. “If I could just get inside his head. But he won’t accept my calls, he won’t meet up-”

“More talking?” Sadie looks appalled. “How are you going to forget him if you keep talking about him? Darling, when things go wrong in life, this is what you do.” She adopts a knowledgeable tone. “You lift your chin, put on a ravishing smile, mix yourself a little cocktail-and out you go.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” I say resentfully. “And I don’t want to forget about him. Some of us have hearts, you know. Some of us don’t give up on true love. Some of us…”

I suddenly notice Sadie’s eyes have closed and she’s humming again.

Trust me to get haunted by the flakiest ghost in the world. One minute shrieking in my ear, the next making outrageous comments, the next spying on my neighbors… I take a mouthful of lasagna and chew it crossly. I wonder what else she saw in my neighbors’ flats. Maybe I could get her to spy on that guy upstairs when he’s making a racket, see what he’s actually doing-

Wait.

Oh my God.

I nearly choke on my food. With no warning, a new idea has flashed into my mind. A fully formed, totally brilliant plan. The plan that will solve everything.

Sadie could spy on Josh.

She could get into his flat. She could listen to his conversations. She could find out what he thinks about everything and tell me, and somehow I could work out what the problem is between us and solve it.