shiver ran down my spine as I imagined Adrian pulling up as my Uber driver. He was the worst driver on the face of the Earth. It would be like getting into a taxi driven by Mr Bean after he’d taken a Glastonbury’s worth of Molly.
‘And I’m working on my screenplay again.’
We all groaned as one.
‘My baby is going to be doing its GCSEs before you get that thing finished,’ Lucy predicted. ‘If not its degree.’
‘As if your kid is getting into university,’ he replied with a snippy grin.
Lucy shrugged and carried on stroking her stomach. Lucy never rose to anything. Lucy was an actual saint.
I listened as they bickered back and forth, laughing and poking and prodding at each other, just like they always did. Lucy beamed as she cradled her belly and, for a moment, I felt a glow of familiar, old happiness. A tug back to a time I thought had gone by. Starting Over, much like Sumi, said you should never go back, that your old life was the past and the past was over, but I wasn’t so sure. My old life was sitting right around this table and it looked pretty good to me.
‘Before I forget, Mum and Dad are having a wedding anniversary thing on Saturday night,’ Adrian said, inhaling deeply on a Marlboro Gold outside the bar as soon as Lucy and Sumi were out of sight. There was every chance he was the last person I knew who still smoked actual cigarettes. ‘Will you come? They’ve been asking after you.’
‘Are Lucy and Sumi coming?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Lucy has a Creepy Dave thing and Sumi has a Jemima thing. She’s off to Madrid to build a cathedral or something so they’re going to visit for the weekend.’
Sumi’s girlfriend was an architect, which meant she was very clever, very rich and an endless source of exciting minibreaks. I was sure there were many wonderful things about being in a relationship but having a lifetime-long reason to get out of doing things you really didn’t want to do had to be right up there with the best of them.
‘Come on, Ros, it’ll be a laugh,’ Adrian said with a wheedling whine.
‘No offence to your parents but it absolutely will not,’ I said, rummaging around in my bag for chewing gum. The hake crepe that Lucy had demanded had left a very unpleasant aftertaste in my mouth, which wasn’t too surprising since it had tasted very unpleasant. Fish finger sandwiches were definitely better. ‘Surely you’d rather take someone who might actually have sex with you afterwards?’
‘Yes, of course I would,’ he replied without so much as blinking. ‘But I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m the new Adrian, I don’t do that any more.’
‘Why?’ I asked, suspicious.
‘Because I’m only interested in forming a deep and meaningful relationship with someone I care about,’ he said, pouting. ‘I’m a reformed character, Ros, I haven’t had a shag in ages.’
I gave him a questioning look.
‘Fine, it’s been a slow summer and I haven’t had any offers,’ he admitted. ‘But please come, it’s their ruby wedding anniversary, it’s a big deal. There’s going to be an ungodly amount of food and drink and you know you want to.’
I really didn’t want to but I couldn’t say no. It wasn’t as if I had anything else to do and Adrian would cross hot coals for me if I asked.
‘Ros?’ he wheedled. He took one last draw on his cigarette, stamping it out as a black Prius with a glowing Uber badge pulled up beside us. I let out a very heavy sigh and nodded. ‘Fantastic,’ he said as he opened the car door and hopped inside. ‘Come any time after seven, can’t wait. See you Saturday.’
Without the money for a taxi, I wandered back down the street towards the tube station. It had been so good to see my friends but I couldn’t help but feel a little empty as I took myself off home instead of linking arms with the others and laughing all the way back to our shared house. The late-night milk runs, doing our makeup in each other’s rooms, snuggling up together on the sofa to watch a film. I couldn’t think of a time that I’d been happier. Now they had new homes to go to, new partners to snuggle up with. But not me.
Just like everyone else who happened to be walking alone down a busy city street at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, I automatically slid my hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I was still getting replies to my texts: my great-aunt who hadn’t realized I’d been away, my university friend Alison who wanted to know if I’d accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour since the last time she’d seen me (at our ten-year reunion with me hugging one of the student union toilets after a regrettable pint of snakebite and black). I wondered what new messages might have arrived since I’d last checked.
And then I saw it.
My heart pounded, my stomach lurched and I started to sweat, a horrible conviction that I was about to see the hake pancake again washing over me. I stuttered out of the flow of people on the street and leaned against a cold stone wall, staring at my phone, quite sure I was seeing things, quite sure it would disappear. But it didn’t. It stayed right where it was, shining up at me and willing me to open it.
I held my breath.
I opened the message.
Two words.
Hello, stranger
The text was from Patrick.
Everyone has a Patrick.
Adrian’s words echoed in my ears all the way home to my shed. Was it true? Did everyone have someone who made them feel this way? Light-headed and loose-limbed and like they might have forgotten their own name? Because if they did, someone should have warned me before things got as bad as they did. No matter how many songs I heard or books I read or films I watched, no one had ever quite managed to put into words how I’d felt about Patrick Parker. The whole time we were together, I melted at the thought of him even as I seized up with fear that I would somehow breathe the wrong way and ruin it all. He made the sun shine, the moon glow, I had a secret smile that was just for him and there was nothing I wouldn’t have done if he’d asked. He took my breath from the moment we met and I didn’t get it back for nine whole months.
And then it was over.
I turned the music up in my earphones as I rounded the corner of my parents’ road, trying to drown out the memories.
Sumi once told me everything in life was an equation, that everything had a value and could all be worked out with maths. With relationships, you took the length of time you were together, added how desperately in love you were, then multiplied it by the degree of pain of the ending to find out how badly it would affect you. There were other variables: the amount of time you’d been crushing on someone before you got together (add ten), how good the sex had been (multiply by a hundred), unforgiving habits or unappealing fetishes (subtract accordingly) and, eventually, divide by the amount of time since the end of the relationship. That was how long it would take you to get over someone.
It was a straightforward solution for Sumi; her friend was the happiest she’d ever
