have crippled me.’
I was babbling. ‘KT … Can’t find it … Need the song!’
‘What song?’
‘That one!’ In the depths of my grief, I couldn’t remember the name of it. ‘The makeover montage song. From The Devil Wears Prada. You know, the one that goes—do do do-do do-do-do. I need it! So I can walk along in great shoes and get a dream job and nice clothes, even if my boss is mean to me, and everything will be OK!’
Emma and Cynthia exchanged a look, then Cynthia took out her iPhone and pressed some buttons. ‘Do you mean this one?’ ‘Suddenly I See’ began to play out of the phone, slightly tinny.
I was still crying. ‘This is rock bottom! I need to listen to this song and then feel better and walk along in my heels. You see?’
‘You aren’t wearing heels, darling,’ said Cynthia kindly. ‘You think they’re tools of patriarchal oppression, remember?’
On my feet were mud-encrusted purple welly boots, which I had donned for uprooting some of the plants I’d grown in the garden, thinking I might pack them in a box and take them with me, before realising this was crazy, as I had nowhere to live, let alone a garden. That’s what you do when you’re getting divorced. You go crazy. I started crying again. ‘I know! I don’t even have any heels! Everything is awful!’
Emma and Cynthia had a quick muttered eye-rolling chat, and then Emma called out to me in a ‘talking to a mad person’ voice: ‘Look! We’re walking for you, love!’ They were marching up and down my soon-to-be-ex living room on the exposed wooden floor, Emma in sensible walking shoes and Cynthia in expensive brown knee boots.
We had noticed several subtle changes in Emma’s character since she became a primary school teacher: one, an exponential increase in bossiness; two, a habit of asking did we want to go to the toilet before we went anywhere; and three, the total loss of any physical shame. Now she was prancing about the floor, accompanied by an eye-rolling Cynthia, who gamely waved her long limbs about, then broke off as the song stopped and her phone rang. ‘Cynthia Eagleton. No, for Christ’s sake, I said send them out already. Listen, Barry, this is a serious question—what do you mean that’s not your name? Never mind, I’m going to call you Barry. Can you not do anything for yourself? How do you manage to get out of bed in the morning? Just get it done.’ She hung up, sighing. ‘I swear it’s a miracle he can even blow his own nose, that boy.’
‘Was it hard for you to get a day off?’ I mumbled dustily.
‘Only about as hard as it was for Richard Attenborough and his mates to get out of that prison camp. But don’t worry, darling. I’m here to help. Barry, or whatever his name is, will just have to learn to tie his own shoelaces.’ Cynthia’s had a lot to contend with in life. Not just the fact her mum saw fit to call her Cynthia—there was some great-aunt’s will involved—but also the fact she was ten years older than her siblings, and the only one to be fathered by her mum’s first love, who’d been deported back to Jamaica before Cynthia was even born. Still, she’d clawed her way up to a top legal job, she strikes terror into the hearts of her colleagues and she does have really nice hair.
Emma looked down at me kindly. ‘It’s good you want to listen to this song, you know. You’re done with all that R.E.M., then? Sixteen renditions of “Everybody Hurts” in a row?’
‘Not sure,’ I mumbled into the floor.
‘Well, you’ll have to be, because I’ve buried the CD in the garden and I’m not telling you where.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you want to get up now?’
‘Not really.’
‘Come on, love. I’ll give you a sticker.’
So this was me, Rachel Kenny, aged thirty, imminently to be divorced, having to be prised away from my hardwood floors, my back-garden hydrangea and my wind chimes and exposed-brick chimney piece. All those things I barely looked at but saw every day, and which were mine. I had floor dust down my front and was wearing an old college sweatshirt, partly because everything was packed, and partly because I had owned it before I met Dan, and I wanted to try to reset to that person.
This was the kind of crazy logic I was operating on at this moment in time. Things that suck about divorce, number seven: you go completely and totally out of your tree.
Finally, after two emergency trips back for things I’d forgotten that seemed really important at the time (hairbrush, muffin tray, mop), we were in the van Emma had hired me.
‘Ready?’ Cynthia asked me, settling into the wide front seat.
‘I don’t know. It’s … My whole life was there. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’
She squeezed my arm with her manicured hand. ‘I know, darling. But what’s that thing your dad always says?’
‘Um … Countdown’s never been the same since Carol left?’
‘No, I mean that other thing. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’
I stared back at the house. Dan would be coming back later. I didn’t even know where he’d been staying while I moved my things out. This was what we’d come to. ‘Do you think I should leave him a note? I mean, I can’t just … go. That can’t be the last conversation we ever have. We were together for ten years!’
They exchanged another look. ‘We’ve talked about this, Rach,’ said Emma gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but this is just how it has to be.’
We drove off. The house receded in the mirror to the size of a Lego cottage, till I almost felt I could pick it up and pop it into the pocket of my hoody, and then I couldn’t see any more anyway because of the tears filling my eyes, spilling out and running down onto my dust-stained front. Cynthia passed me a flowery tissue and Emma patted my hand as she cut up school-run mums in massive Jeeps. I closed my eyes.
Things that suck about divorce, number nine: moving out of the home you spent years creating, with nowhere else to go. And remembering halfway up the M3 that you left the KT Tunstall CD in the car, which was no longer yours, along with all the rest of your life.
I cried four times on the journey from Surrey to London. One was in the forecourt of a garage while Emma filled up (Cynthia refused to get petrol on her green leather driving gloves). Dan and I had done a lot of driving when we first got married and bought our car, a fourteen-year-old Mini. When we still had things to say to each other. We’d get the worst compilation CD we could find in the garage—Seventy Valentine’s Day Rockers! Fifty Smooth Driving Tunes!—and sing along, eating crisps, our hands touching in the greasy packet. I wondered if I’d now be sad every time I went to a garage for the rest of my life. It would make popping out for a Twix quite problematic.
One good thing about crying is it’s quite a useful way to pass the time, if you don’t mind chronic dehydration and people staring at you, so the journey went by for me in a blur of motorways, hiccuping sobs and love songs on Mellow Magic FM, and soon we were at Cynthia’s Chiswick-based palace. She has three storeys and even a garden you could swing several cats in.
We had stopped. The
