“Please keep doing that. It is literally the most soothing thing,” she said. I looked at her screen and began to read the e-mail she was composing aloud:
Simon, you just can’t expect me to reconfigure my wants and my needs to suit you. Knowing that I’m at a different point of my life to you, instead of understanding it you almost use it as a weapon—
Silent Jean looked at us and sighed surprisingly loudly for someone who rarely exercised her vocal cords. “Queenie! Privacy, please!” Darcy snapped, turning to look at me. Her bright blue eyes looked through my dark brown ones.
“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Lots,” I groaned, banging my head down on her partition so loudly that Silent Jean jumped in her seat.
“Right, let’s go, come on!” she chirped, looking apologetically at Jean and sweeping me up and away. She’s the most intuitive of my best friends, though Darcy has known me the shortest amount of time; that we’ve worked together and spent every weekday talking to each other for the last three and a bit years has meant that we know each other better than we know ourselves.
She’s very beautiful, with a complexion as rosy as her outlook, and looks like one of those wartime girls whose pictures their army husbands would kiss at night. You might think that that aesthetic doesn’t really have a place in the present day, but she makes it work.
Darcy bundled me into the lift, forcing me to step on the foot of a man I hadn’t seen before—he was dressed in a tweed jacket with glasses too big for a face that I would have thought was handsome if my entire brain weren’t concentrated on heartbreak. He looked at me and opened his mouth to complain, but instead stared until he looked down at his phone. “It’ll be all right, Queenie,” Darcy whispered, putting her arm around my shoulders.
“You don’t even know what’s wrong,” I whispered back at her. “So you can’t say that.” The lift zoomed to the ground floor and we bundled out, words of sadness and betrayal and abandonment firing out of my mouth at a hundred miles per hour.
“I just don’t know what to do! Things have been so bad for such a long time, Darcy. It’s relentless,” I told her, my pace quickening the more irritated I got with my stupid situation. “We argue every single day, about absolutely everything, so much that he’s started going back home to stay with his parents at the weekends, and when it’s really bad, he stays there in the week and commutes! From Peterborough! Then this weekend, when we really got into it, he told me that he needed a break, and that he thought I should move out.”
“Yeesh.” Darcy winced. “Did he mean it? Or was he just angry?”
“Darcy, I have no fucking idea. We stayed up all night talking and bickering about it, and I agreed to move out for three months, after which point we could revisit things.”
“Why are you the one moving out when he can go and stay with his parents? It’s not like you have that option.” Darcy linked her arm through mine.
“He said he can afford to stay on in the flat because my entry-level wage is nothing in comparison to his big-boy fucking Web developer salary.”
“Is that a direct quote?” Darcy asked, horrified.
“He’s always been like that about money, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s using it against me.” Darcy squeezed my arm tighter to her. “I just don’t understand why he isn’t better at understanding that he needs to lean into all of my stuff. He knows I love him,” I huffed. “Why doesn’t he fucking see that?”
My expletives weren’t suitable for a public dining space, so Darcy herded me away from the cafeteria and toward the tiny park near our office. I guess it can be called a park even though it’s really only patches of damp earth and bare branches surrounding what is mainly concrete, but it’s nice to have something resembling greenery in central London. We warded off the sharp October air by huddling together on a wooden bench that wobbled dangerously, especially when my gesticulating really tested it.
“He knows that I have stuff, he’s always known about my stuff, so why can’t he be understanding?” I looked at Darcy for a response but carried on talking before she could say anything. “It could all be fine. We have a break, I move out for a bit, sort my head out; then in a few months, all fine, I move back in and we’re happy forever,” I assured myself.
“Like an interracial Ross and Rachel?” Darcy offered.
“Friends is the only reference you could think of?” I asked her. “There weren’t really even any black people in Friends.”
“I think you just need to give him a bit of time, and a bit of space. Once you get out of there, he’ll realize how hard it is not having you around,” Darcy said. She is very solutions-driven, a welcome counter to my impulsiveness and inability to think things through. “Have you been sleeping together?”
“No, not that I haven’t been trying.” I sighed. “He thinks it’s a bad idea. It’s been a month since we had sex.” Darcy winced again.
“It’s killing me.” I threw my hands to the sky in mock exasperation. “I just wish it could all be fine,” I said, resting my head on Darcy’s shoulder. “What if this is the end?”
“It’s not the end!” Darcy assured me. “Tom loves you, he’s just hurting. You’re both in pain, don’t forget that. His pride will be in pieces because of this whole break thing. Men don’t like to admit that they’ve failed at anything, let alone relationships. I once suggested a break to Simon, and in response, he booked a triple session with his therapist and then got his eyebrow pierced. Things will get better.” Darcy rested her head on mine. “Oh! What did they say at the hospital yesterday, by the way? You know, the scan thing?”
“Oh, all fine.” There was no point in telling her. “It’s just stress or something.”
“Tom went with you, though, right?”
“No, he went back to Peterborough on Sunday evening. Haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
“Are you kidding?” Darcy squawked. “Do you need to come and stay with me and Simon for a couple of nights? Are you still having those stomach pains? We can look after you.”
“No, I’m all right,” I said. I wasn’t hurting anymore, but in place of the pain was something else, something sitting heavy that I couldn’t quite identify.
* * *
Wanting to kill some time before I got home to reminders of my disintegrating relationship, I went to Brixton for some Jamaican bun, hoping that I could kick-start my appetite with my favorite comfort food. I climbed the steps out of the Underground and stood catching my breath at the top.
I inhaled a little too hard, and the smell of incense from the street sellers made me sneeze as I turned into the market. I hopped over a puddle that looked as suspicious as it smelled sour and carried on weaving through what always felt like thousands of people. I made it into Brixton Village and followed a route to the Caribbean bakery that was etched in my memories of Saturday shopping trips with my grandmother. I turned a corner and went to walk straight into the bakery, but was instead faced with a trendy burger bar full of young couples. The men were all wearing colorful oversize shirts, and their female companions were all wearing colorful overpriced coats.
I frowned and retraced my steps, turning various corners in my search and convincing myself that I’d dreamt the bakery’s existence before going back to the burger shop. I stood for a minute, trying to recall some sort of memory of going there.
? ? ?
“Hullo, hullo, how you keeping, Susie?” My grandmother smiled at the plump Jamaican woman behind the counter. The whole bakery smelled so sweet. And not sickly sweet: it smelled sugary, and warm, and familiar. I stood on tiptoe and looked over, seeing how her pristine white apron strained over her soft, round stomach.
“I’m good, tank you, darlin’, you good?” the woman replied, flashing a gold tooth at me. “And the little one, she getting big!”