It’s fascinating how emotions can tie your life together.
One minute you’re twelve, standing in the middle of a playground while people fight over who doesn’t get you as a teammate. The next you’re in your thirties, single and standing by the lifts of an office you’ve just been fired from because nobody wants you as a teammate. Same sensations, different body. Literally: my cells have cunningly replaced themselves at least twice in the interim.
The office door swings open. “Cassandra?”
Ronald has worn the same thing—a navy cashmere jumper—every day since he started working here a few months ago. It smells really lovely, so I’m guessing there must be plural.
He walks toward me and I immediately panic. Now and then I’ve caught him looking at me from the neighboring desk with an incalculable expression on his face, and I have no idea what it could be. Lust? Repulsion? I’ve been scripting a response to the former for a month now, just in case.
I am honored by your romantic and/or sexual interest in me given that we’ve only exchanged perfunctory greetings, but I have a long-term boyfriend I am almost definitely in the process of falling in love with.
Well, that excuse isn’t going to work anymore, is it.
Ronald clears his throat and runs a large hand over his buzz-cut Afro. “That’s mine.”
“Who?” I blink, disoriented by the grammar. “Me?”
“The plant.” He points at the shrubbery now clutched under my sweaty armpit. “It’s mine and I’d like to keep it.”
Ah, the sweet, giddy flush of humiliation is now complete.
“Of course,” I say stiffly. “Sorry, Ronald.”
Ronald blinks and reaches out a hand; I move quickly away so his fingers won’t touch mine, nearly dropping the pot in the process. It’s the same fun little dance I do when I have to pay with cash at the supermarket checkout, which is why I always carry cards.
I get into the lift and press the button. Ronald now appears to be casually assessing me as if I’m a half-ripe avocado, so I stare at the floor until he reaches a conclusion.
“Bye,” he says finally.
“Bye,” I say as the lift doors slide shut.
And that’s how my story starts.
With a novelty mug in a box, a full character assassination and the realization that when I leave a building I am missed considerably less than a half-dead rubber plant.
2
It’s not all bad.
At least tomorrow I won’t be sitting in a loud office with a reception that looks like it’s been licked by King Midas, listening to people who don’t like me eat crisps, desperately hoping nobody calls for an Idea Hurricane, and pretending all the lies I’m being paid to tell don’t make me want to rip my skin off with my fingernails.
Tomorrow will be a good day.
Obviously, the day after that I’ll be sitting in my bank manager’s office, breathing into a paper bag and begging him to extend my overdraft, so I should probably make the most of it.
“Cassandra?”
The lift doors slide open with a ping and I charge toward the exit, holding my cardboard box defensively out in front of me like some kind of Trojan shield.
“Miss Dankworth?” Credit to the receptionist: she isn’t easily ignored. “Hang on a second—I’ve got Mr. Fawcett on line nine, and he says it’s company policy to make sure you hand in your pass before you leave.”
Cassandra Penelope Dankworth: that’s my name. Thanks to my (dead) parents, I sound like a cross between a Greek heroine and a killer’s basement.
“Can’t stop,” I manage. “In flight mode.”
My heart is racing, my veins and pupils are dilating, my lungs are expanding and oxygen is racing to my brain in preparation for what it now assumes is imminent physical danger. Which is super handy if you need to run away from a rampaging woolly mammoth and not so handy if you’re just trying to get out of an office block in central London without vomiting on your trainers.
Panicked, I body-slam the front door repeatedly until the receptionist takes pity on me and lets me out with a click.
Fresh air hits me in the face like a bright wall.
Eyes shut, I stand on the street for a few seconds and attempt to recalibrate. The insides of my eyelids are flickering—tiny warning flares sent up by dozens of sinking ships—and if I don’t find a way to calm down immediately, it is going to happen, and nobody wants that: not here, not on a public pavement, not in central Soho surrounded by people eating eight-pound crayfish baguettes.
This is why Will keeps telling me to start yoga. But I just don’t feel comfortable with that many simultaneous bottoms in the air.
“Excuse me.” A woman in a viciously orange bomber jacket taps me lightly on the shoulder and I jump as if she just stabbed me with a cattle prod. “You’re kind of blocking the entrance to the—Are you okay?”
I blink at her. “Banana muffin.”
“I’m sorry?”
A giddy wave of relief. “I need a banana muffin.”
With my cardboard box gripped tightly, I begin urgently scurrying toward the tiny café on the corner. Banana muffins are comforting. Banana muffins are reassuring and familiar. Banana muffins don’t wake up in the morning and tell you they care about you immensely but just don’t see a future with you anymore.
The blue café doorbell tinkles behind me and it makes me briefly think of It’s a Wonderful Life, which is a beautiful film about a much-loved man who has a positive impact on the world around him and which I, therefore, find difficult to relate to.
“Hello, young lady! Goodness, is it one o’ clock already? Or are you early?”
I stare at the place where banana muffins should be.
“Oh!” The café owner smiles as if the whole world isn’t now disintegrating beneath my feet. “I’m afraid we had a delivery issue this morning and they didn’t have the banana ones you like so much, but we do have some delicious chocolate muffins and a lovely salted caramel, which I can personally attest is—”
“Banana,” I insist, abruptly welling up.
“Not today,” he clarifies gently. “Come in at your normal time tomorrow and I’ll make sure I put a big one aside for you, okay?”
“But—” my grief feels overwhelming “—I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Then why don’t you take a seat for a minute and I’ll see if I can find you something else instead?”
The old man points with concern at the green velvet chairs and a vivid memory flashes: Will, drinking a cappuccino and grinning at me with the sharpened mouth of a cat, lined with chocolate.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” the café man adds in alarm. “How about I put some banana muffins aside tomorrow so you can take extras home and freeze them?”
I’m never going to see Will again, am I?
That’s the rule, right? They tell you they’ll stay in touch, that you’ll always be part of each other’s lives, except it’s just a script—a lie you’re supposed to see through—but you believe them until they slowly stop answering your text messages and cat GIFs and one day you see them in Pizza Express with someone else and they pretend they can’t see you even though you’re waving as hard as you can.
I just didn’t think it would happen with Will. Everything was going so well. I didn’t get a chance to construct a suitable exit strategy from our relationship or plan a response to being dumped or properly rehearse how my heartbreak might feel in my head first.
I wasn’t prepared.
“Hey,” a woman in a big gray hat says as I stumble back out of the café door. “Wait just a—”
Everything is too far away and too close at the same time, too loud and also too quiet; a yellow door, an orange can, a blue sliver of sky, a dropped navy glove, the red ring around a street sign; a kaleidoscope turning.
A pigeon flaps violently and I put my hands over my face.
It’s coming.
It’s coming and without my banana muffin there is nothing I can do to stop it.
I need to get home now.
Struggling to breathe, I stagger round the corner into a sudden blast of noise so raw and so painful it takes a moment to establish that it’s not coming from inside me.
“Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair! Fur’s not fair!”
“Fashion has no compassion!” A woman with a purple bowl cut thrusts a leaflet at me. “A hundred million animals every year are raised and killed for their fur! They spend their lives in tiny cages before being viciously slaughtered so that humans can wear their skins!”
Blue-tinged magenta; cheese and onion breath. A surge of hot electricity careers from one side of my head to the other. Cringing, I’m pushed into the sticky, bare flesh of a topless man.
“Minks are semiaquatic animals!” he shouts as I stare at his nipples. “They are biologically designed to hold their breath and so suffer horribly during the gassing process!”
“I—” I manage, tripping over a banner, and now I’m being swept down Regent Street like a paralyzed dolphin caught in a shoal of hundreds of bright, screaming, woolly-hatted fish with megaphones and whistles.
“FUR IS DEATH!”
“Fur is death!”