a thirty-something who should have mastered her classic look by now. I look down at myself: far from it.
I swipe my fob against the screen and pull the door to just as someone is getting in the elevator. I curse my timing, because there is an unwritten code in this building that no one shares elevators, when I notice the man who has beaten me to it.
His hair is dark, curly, wildly untamed. He shoves it impatiently out of his eyes with each hand, alternately.
And I breathe like I am due to jump out of a plane in two seconds because an alarm bell has gone off and is drowning out everything else.
It’s not just this man’s hair. It’s his dark eyes, it’s the hunching of his shoulders as he heaves his large rucksack onto his back and puts a takeout food bag on the floor. It’s the sigh he does, so internal for an external noise. It’s his long legs and his straight jeans and it’s his nose, slightly too Roman for most but not for me.
This man and my ex-fiancé, Luke, who used to live here in this flat and get in this elevator with me, do not share a passing resemblance. Instead, they are doubles. Identical. Interchangeable.
For once, I climb the stairs and slam the door of my flat behind me. But like the Thai spices, the man from the elevator has crept in anyway. I know – rationally, I know – that it wasn’t Luke, that it couldn’t be Luke, that my ex-fiancé isn’t here, in London, clutching his takeout in the elevator of my building. That after what happened, his former home is the last place he would ever come. But there is a part of my brain that the message hasn’t reached and that’s the part that is making my heart hammer into my chest, surely audible through the wall to next door, I think, as I realise I am leaning against it. I gasp for air.
After a few seconds I hear Lexie, her tiny voice quiet, gentle, the opposite of my own. A northern lilt, I sometimes think, though English accents are still not my forte.
‘Tom?’ she asks, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. ‘Can you bring me a …’
But the end of the sentence falls away. As ever, there’s just enough wall between us to mask life’s detail.
But Tom. Not Luke, Tom. Tom from next door. I must remember that, when my heart starts racing, when my mind starts racing and at 4 a.m. Especially at 4 a.m. I pour a glass of wine, down it and – forgetting to switch my shoes – kick the generic flowers that were delivered from a generic former colleague to say a generic thank you out of the way and head out with my phone, trying to fight a feeling that Lexie from next door has stolen my Luke. That Lexie from next door has stolen my fucking life.
December
‘I miss Islington,’ sighs Anais as I flick the kettle on and she yanks off a tan Chelsea boot in the hall behind me. ‘Bloody Clapton.’
I’ve known she was coming round for a week now – she had a Christmas lunch around the corner – but still I had run around flustered for five minutes before she arrived. Endeavouring to put on eyeliner, remember how real people (I haven’t really considered myself to be one of those since I started working from home) dress and shove piles of post into drawers. Tom’s been away for a week now. I am flailing.
‘Remember why you live in Clapton, though,’ I say, brandishing a mint tea box and something ridiculously expensive from Planet Organic at her, and she nods to the latter, of course, because we are middle-class Londoners. ‘You own your place. No chucking your money away on rent.’ I sigh. ‘We’ll be here forever, because Tom’s dad will never put up the rent and we’ll never get anything better so we’ll never have the motivation to get a mortgage.’
It’s not just Anais; I say this to everyone, all the time. It’s my only response to my self-consciousness over how lucky we are to have moved this year into a Central London flat that has its very own swimming pool in the basement.
It’s still such a surprise to me, too; my own parents have barely lent me twenty pounds in my life – they’re of the ‘learn the value of money’ school of parenting. I’ve been encouraged to be utterly independent. Which makes this whole scenario pretty ironic.
Now, for less rent than my friends pay in Zone Six hellholes, I live somewhere where there is no paint chipped in the communal areas but walls that are freshly covered in high-end magnolia once a year. Where cleaners spirit away dead flies or discarded ticket stubs with the speed of a five-star hotel and then fling the windows open so that the feeling is hospital sterility. Where every type of night and day life we could need is in walking distance.
Right now, Islington’s anonymity soothes me. I walk out of my flat with nowhere marked out as my final destination and I wander up the high street past hipster thirty-somethings with children dressed in fifty-pound jumpers on scooters. At weekends, I clamber onto the bookshop on the barge on the canal, picking out piles of worn, second-hand classics. I smell the brunch that’s being eaten in seven-degree cold on the pavement like we are in Madrid in July and I know that that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in this country, but does here, because we are in a bubble. Nothing is real. Nothing gets inside.
Round here, CEOs play tennis at Highbury Fields with their friends like they are fifteen. In summer, I watch thirty-somethings charging around a rounders circle with friends. At the pub, there will be no locals but there will always be someone who is twenty-two and excited, who has just discovered that they can get drunk on a Monday and eat an assortment of crisps for dinner without anyone telling them otherwise.
On sunny evenings, we drink gin and tonics in overpopulated beer gardens that spill onto pavements. For Christmas, I have bought everything I need within the radius of a ten-minute walk from my flat. We are spoilt children and I adore it. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever known before.
But by repeating my mortgage conversation on loop, it’s become true to me. I’ve started to care about ownership and getting my hands on an enormous loan that will never be paid off. Whatever I had, it turns out, I would look over my shoulder to see what someone else had and want it, too. This is me. Perhaps it is everyone.
And there are downsides to life in this part of London.
We’re transient because we know this isn’t where we will settle.
It does happen: I look up at the family houses that surround Highbury Fields and like everyone, I wonder who could possibly have that life, that real life, living here beyond their thirties and becoming a family here, becoming old. But there are bins outside, spilling out with pizza boxes and wine bottles and toilet roll holders and nappies. It’s real.
Most of us, though, will never be the 0.000001 per cent with their pizza boxes. If you’re thirty-nine, Islington looks at you sadly like you’ve stayed at the party a little too long. Perhaps you could have a quick Sunday afternoon picnic on the green on your way out but then yes, it will be time for you to head off to the suburbs.
Anais is doing just that and building a life. Where she goes to sleep, there are old food markets and boozers and there are people who have lived there forever, who sell vegetables loudly and look at you blankly when you talk about brunch. There are new people, sure, but it’s not like here. Here, heritage ebbs away every time a greengrocer’s becomes a gin bar and a rental notice goes up in the window of the old pub.
