arguing with myself over the content of my post for twenty minutes, I just couldn’t do it. And in a radical bid to distract myself, I did something drastic.
‘Hello?’
‘Mum? It’s Angela.’
‘Darling, how are you?’ she asked, sounding fairly relieved, as though she thought it might have been the Avon lady from number fifty-four. ‘Are you coming home?’
‘No, not yet,’ I said, pacing the apartment. ‘I’m fine though, I’m staying with my friend still and I’m working for this magazine. Things are really good.’
‘But you’re coming home soon, dear?’ she asked again. I could just see her frowning in the mirror above the phone, probably fiddling with her hair, looking out of the window into her impeccably kept garden, watching next door’s cat shit all over her flowerbed.
‘I don’t know, Mum,’ I said, eventually coming to a standstill by the window. ‘I’m having a really good time. The writing thing is really exciting, I’m doing an online diary for the magazine’s website.’
‘That’s lovely, I’m very proud.’ The same dismissive tone that she had used for my GCSE, A level and degree results. Grrr. ‘But darling, you know, I would really like you to let me know when you’re coming back. You must have a date for your flight? And the hotel must be costing you a fortune.’
‘Mum, I’ve just told you, I’m staying with a friend. I don’t know when I’m – do you know what? It doesn’t matter. Why was Mark at your house when I called last week?’
‘I just don’t know why you can’t tell me when your flight is,’ she chuntered on. I was starting to regret the phone call all together.
‘I don’t have a flight booked so I don’t know when it will be,’ I repeated, thinking about how different the views were out of our windows. I could see yellow taxi cabs, the Chrysler Building and thousands of New Yorkers hustling and bustling around the city. From my mum’s window, she would be lucky to be able to see her Clio in the drive, the post office, and Mr Tucker from next door, possibly thrilling the neighbourhood by gardening shirtless. He was fifty-two. ‘Why was Mark answering your phone?’
‘He was dropping off some of your things, Angela.’ I could tell she was starting to get just as pissed off with me as I was with her. ‘I know he’s done a terrible thing to you, but I have known him for a lot of years. I can’t just pretend he doesn’t exist.’
‘Yes you can.’ Was she serious? ‘You can very easily pretend he doesn’t exist. He doesn’t as far as our family is concerned.’
‘Just because you have chosen to run away instead of confronting your problems, doesn’t mean I can,’ Mum tutted down the line. ‘I see Mark’s mother every week at Tescos.’
‘I haven’t run away,’ I said. This was not the supportive mother-daughter talk I’d been envisioning. ‘I’m doing something with my life.’
‘And maybe if you had stayed and talked to Mark, you would have realized how terrible he feels about things,’ she carried on, completely ignoring everything I was saying. ‘Maybe you would have been able to sort things out. Not that I’m saying you should, he did cheat on you, I know.’
‘He wants to sort things out?’ I asked. The idea hadn’t even crossed my mind.
‘Well, maybe he would have if you hadn’t run away, I don’t know,’ she said, sounding distracted. ‘But now he’s moved in that Katie girl, I don’t suppose the two of you will ever get back on track. I suppose if you called him …’
‘He’s moved in with – he’s moved her with in?’ I stopped her in the middle of her sentence. ‘Into our house?’
‘Well, you disappeared, dear,’ she seemed to be listening again. ‘What was he supposed to do? Not that I’m making excuses for him. He should never have done what he did, but, he did explain—’
‘Mum, I’ve got to get off, I’m going out,’ I needed to be off the phone right away. ‘I’ll call you when I know more about coming home.’
‘All right, darling, speak to you soon,’ and she hung up before I could.
Knowing for a fact that Mark had moved that girl into my house was all too much for my brain to process, but it did put the blog problem into perspective. I sat down in front of the laptop, blocked out the images of the filthy mare wearing my Cath Kidston apron and cooking with my beloved lime green Le Creuset casserole dish and emailed the blog to Mary. Mark who?
Once Jenny had returned from her Sunday spa appointment at Rapture and checked that everything had been exfoliated, waxed and moisturized to her own high and Jeff-ready standards, we headed out to Brooklyn. I was justifiably nervous, not having spoken to Alex about our ‘double date’ and not having spent more than fifteen minutes forcing my hair into some sort of shape, slapping on some of my miraculous MAC mascara and lipgloss. But my (still amazing) Marc Jacobs bag made everything better. I wondered if I could feasibly go out in my pyjamas and still feel like a grown-up if I were carrying this. Jenny practically skipped all the way to the L train, barely a sentence tripping over her tongue that wasn’t directly related to Jeff.
‘So it’s totally on with Alex tonight?’ she asked, holding my hand and skipping lightly as we crossed the road over to the subway.
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I was with Tyler this morning, don’t you think it might be a bit tacky to sleep with Alex tonight?’ But just saying the words sent shivers all the way down my spine.
‘I knew this would happen,’ Jenny shook her head, swiping her Metrocard. ‘You weren’t even OK dating two guys, you were never going to be able to sleep with two guys. Not at once.’
‘Christ, it’s not a threesome, Jenny.’ I followed her down the stairs, shaking my head. ‘And you didn’t want to share that information with me? Really, I’m OK seeing them both, I like them both in different ways, but I don’t know. Tyler is so much fun, and Alex is, well, it’s different.’
‘But you like him more than Tyler?’ she asked.
‘It’s different with Alex, harder to explain. I like the way he makes me feel about myself. With Tyler it’s kind of more about how he literally makes me feel,’ I tried to explain without blushing. ‘Did you ever do that experiment at school where you get three white flowers and you put one in an empty vase, one in a vase with water and one in a vase with food colouring?’
‘Yeah,’ Jenny nodded, ‘but I really don’t know what that’s got to do with you getting your kicks with some hot banker.’
‘Shut up,’ I smiled wryly and hopped on the train as the doors slid open. ‘OK, don’t laugh but the flower without any water just wilts and dies, right? And the flower with the water blossoms and it’s just really ordinary but beautiful, then when you add the food colouring it—’
‘It takes the colour into the flower,’ she finished for me. ‘Oh my God, you’re so meta! Doll, your first analogy. I’m so proud of you.’
‘Thanks. I feel validated,’ I said, patting her thigh. ‘I know it’s cheesy, but it’s the best I can come up with. Before I was just suffocating, with Tyler, it’s like classic and romantic, he has a structure to his
