in Lycra now my puppy fat years had passed and slightly drunk. My dress was tiny, pale blue and strappy, the kind that seems laughable these days when I view polo necks and knee-high boots as valid going-out outfits. This was the early Noughties, though; we warmed up with cheap vodka, not cashmere socks. We thought self-care was buying ourselves a shot with our Archers Schnapps and lemonade.
‘I thought you were so out of my league,’ Tom tells me now, often.
But everything about Tom was what I wanted. I had never looked for cheeky, or bad, or sarcastic, or mean.
I wanted kind and I wanted stable. I had roots but my roots spread wide. When I was sixteen my mum and dad – an airline pilot – moved to Canada and my childhood, already an almost-version of adulthood, was very suddenly over. This isn’t a tragic tale; nothing terrible happened to me and I wasn’t orphaned or abandoned at seven. But enforced adulthood leaves a mark. I wasn’t ready, not quite. I was still battling that puppy fat and some high-level awkwardness in my own body, and I needed home-cooked meals and sofas that smelled of my mum’s perfume to give me a place in the world.
When they left, it was with an attitude of having done their parenting years. Now, we speak on FaceTime and message but I think, often, couldn’t you have given me two more years? Just to get me to the finish line instead of making me stumble my way through the last bit stunned and in shock that they had suddenly gone AWOL.
I did two years at boarding school then fled to London. At university, I was the only one without a ‘home’ to go back to in the holidays or for weekends. Sure, I could fly to Canada, but not for a two-day stint to fill up on macaroni cheese. Not to get my white washing done. Not to coddle myself in a blanket in my old bed and feel like a child again. Not to ask my dad sheepishly if he could look at my electricity bill because I didn’t know what the hell it meant.
‘You can come to me,’ said my brother, Kit, but that meant a student dive at the other end of the country with five blokes and a pubic hair mountain next to the bath.
I loved him for offering. Not enough to brave that bathroom.
So what I needed from a partner wasn’t chaos or abandonment or erratic behaviour. What I needed was goodness, reliability, someone to bring me toast in bed and book me a taxi home. It’s what Tom and I have always done, both of us, for each other.
‘I’m Tom,’ he said as I set the tray of shots down on the table in front of us. He put his hand out and I teased him for the formality and his slight poshness.
I mocked his Surrey accent, laughed when he told me later that he kept a diary that he had written in most days since childhood and downed a pint mimicking something I had read about called a ladette.
Then, when he stayed around, I felt my body relax, and I ordered the drink I actually wanted and talked to him for four hours, until the lights came on, when he walked me all the way to my front door and even carried my shoes.
I introduced him to my friends three days later. A gaggle of girl-women at a birthday dinner. I was three glasses of wine in and just starting to believe I had passionate views on obscure Nineties indie bands, when I saw Tom having an in-depth conversation with my flatmate, Alana. I smiled, tipsy and happy. He had arrived and slotted right in.
After that it’s as blurry as most things are after 9 p.m. when I was twenty-one. There was dancing, there were fifteen people all shouting the same song lyrics and there was kissing, kissing, kissing in Soho at midnight.
A couple of months later, I sat around his family’s giant dinner table, his mum dolloping extra portions of lasagne on my plate and calling me honey, and my grin wouldn’t take a break.
I glanced across at Tom, smearing garlic bread around his plate. I looked at his dad, nipping out to the kitchen for another bottle of Chianti in his slippers. I smelled melted cheese and scented candles and heard the sound of Radio 2 coming from the kitchen.
‘You’re lucky, you know,’ I said later when Tom and I were squeezed awkwardly into his single childhood bed. ‘Having a family.’
‘You have a family,’ he replied, adjusting his body in the tiny space.
But we’d have rather done this than slept separately. Sleeping separately would have felt like torture.
‘Kind of,’ I replied.
I hadn’t told him much about my own family yet. But even in our best days my family hadn’t been like this family. Tom’s mum squeezed me tight as soon as she met me; I always had the feeling that my own mum was recoiling if I hugged her. Not that she didn’t like it; just that she genuinely couldn’t cope with it. Meals weren’t a comforting event, they were functional: people did their own thing, turned up and grabbed a sandwich.
This version of family was the one I wanted, long term. Tom, tipsy on the red wine, nodded off next to me, and I lay there looking at him and thinking, I wonder if it’s you I’ll have children with? And wondering what our family would look like. Knowing, already, that it would look like tight hugs and lasagne and sheepskin slippers heading to the kitchen for another bottle of that Chianti.
Tom is still here thirteen years later; still, to me, incredible. But even Tom is just one person and one person can never be enough to carry a whole life. What a pressure I have been applying to him, what a heavy, heavy weight.
January
I am on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street, because Tom is on a 7.38 a.m. train out of Liverpool Street. I shiver; the day is pure January. Dark, cold. This feels like 3 a.m.
I waited for the door to close as he left the flat then I took the stairs, quickly, as he jumped in the elevator, and followed him out. Half an hour ago, I walked behind him onto the platform, pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, saw the destination he was heading to on the screen and everything went blurry.
Of all the places Tom could be going to on location for work this morning, I was following him to Hunstanton, the pretty Norfolk seaside town. The place where Luke and I got engaged.
On the train, I sit four rows behind him and burrow into my scarf to conceal myself – although, worst-case scenario, I figure, there’s no law that says a person can’t get the same train as their neighbour. Coincidences happen all day, every day, everywhere. They’re the basis of brilliant novels, and films, and stories. Look at my history with Hunstanton and how I am now heading back there, for starters.
I watch him and see the defeat in his shoulders. I see him sigh heavily. I see him stare out of the window for the whole journey, even though there is a book on his lap, even though it is barely light. There is a lot to be learnt from watching a person alone, doing nothing. I used to do it in hospital. It helped to pass the time: seeing if I could tell who were the dangerous ones, the violent ones. The ones, I suppose, who were the most like me. The ones who were capable of terrible things, as I was capable of terrible things.
I look around at the other commuters now, thinking what judgements they would pass if they knew about those terrible things. Could you tell what I did, if you stared for long enough? What would people learn, if anyone cared enough to watch me?
‘I
