My National Insurance number came through, eventually, and I found some office temp work. I still had no friends. No one talks to office temps. Justin was always there when I came home, talking endlessly.
The spring came. I still had no people I could hang around with on the weekend, and so I was taking myself on long walks of London, spending nothing, occasionally treating myself to a ￡2 pork bun in a Chinatown bakery. My money was running out. One day I was so exhausted from loneliness and worry that I sat down in the middle of Chinatown, next to a table offering fliers on pro-democracy protests. I hoped that people thought I was there in solidarity, a white girl who somehow “got it.” A woman asked me for a donation, and when I said I didn’t have one, she politely asked me to leave.
The same day, I found a bookshop. There are lots of bookshops near the Charing Cross Road. But this one was different, because it was mine.
It was huge and busy, but quiet, and it had a little café in the corner, with bar stools for sipping espresso on. It sold first-hand, and second-hand, and rare editions. You could buy music there, but only if it was jazz, and there was one man who ran the jazz section with astonishing enthusiasm. After I had browsed for an hour and bought nothing, I sat on one of the coffee stools in the window with the stirring realisation that I had found the first place in London that I liked. I made up my mind that I would get a job there.
It took a month. A month for them to accept that they needed someone to help cover the weekend shift, which I did in addition to my temp work, then another three months for the coffee guy to move on, so I took over his job, too. Then I was moved into fiction. I was young, and desperate for connection, and I treated everyone I worked with like a celebrity. I studied them like they were my master’s degree. Sofia, who ate a smoked-salmon sandwich from Pret every day, even on the days when she wasn’t working, and whose father worked with the Mayor of London. Who at that time, was, of course, Boris Johnson, and who, at the time, we found hilarious. Philippa, who drank Lilt, and was distantly connected to Princess Anne, through the Tindall side. Byron, who did the jazz, and ran a night in Shoreditch every Friday, which I now attended, every Friday. He was well into his forties, but loved a party, and was happy to introduce me to people that I would later befriend and/or sleep with. Radhika, who did rare editions, had a double first from Oxford, where she had also, in her own words, “caught” anorexia. She was over it now, she said. She told me never to envy anyone from Oxbridge because all of them were either egotistical bullies or trembling and frightened of themselves.
I became the girl who hated going home, who always asked everyone for a drink after work, who took up every invitation, hunted them out. A few weeks in, Radhika admitted to me that they had never socialised as a group before I had shown up. I suppose they didn’t need to. They were all from England. Had networks, old schoolmates, hobbies. But they were all lonely, in their own way. London eats at everyone. My loneliness became a galvanising force. It made people stay out, one more drink, another bar, Soho to the G-A-Y, then the horrible casinos in Leicester Square. Being Irish helped. People were ready to believe I was fun.
It was strange, because the people I now considered my best friends in London saw me, then, as a satellite friend. But those bookshop girls were everything to me. There was something ravishing about being back in the world of women again, and not schoolgirls or students, but women. They were posh and exotic, and had feminine English knowledge that felt secret and strange. I passed Rigby & Peller with Sofia one day, and she told me they were the official underwear suppliers for the Queen. I thought this was something only she was allowed to know, and then I found out the Queen had all kinds of suppliers. She laughed as she explained them to me, and linked her arm through mine, and said that no one had ever been so interested in what she had to say. She was just an ordinary sort of posh girl, and there are lots of them in London. I was probably supposed to dislike her, for political reasons, but the distance between us made me love her even more.
I was invited to her Christmas Eve party in Earl’s Court, and when I told her that I would be going home for Christmas and couldn’t, she wrapped her arms around me. “No, you can’t,” she moaned. “You have to come. Cancel it, won’t you?”
I laughed into her hair and said I couldn’t, and that my best friend was coming home, too, and that I had to see him. She let me go and agreed, although she was annoyed nonetheless.
When I packed my bags for Cork that Christmas, I looked around, and realised I had a life.
28
JAMES WAS IN NEW YORK, and was now a permanent member of staff on the late-night show that had given him the internship. He barely got to write at all, but he put his jokes on Twitter, and was developing a following. I joined Twitter to see what he was doing. I began tweeting on behalf of the bookshop. Then I reviewed books for the bookshop’s blog. The bookshop is quite famous, in a London kind of way, and so I was eventually asked to submit book reviews to the kind of lifestyle magazines that are very thick and come out four times a year. An Irish woman wrote a book that did well, and The Times asked if I would like to interview her. Opportunities like this rolled in and out, never with great regularity, but I developed a CV all the same. I built a website, which the adverts said was easy but wasn’t, and I cried three times while trying to make it go live.
I started hanging around Sofia’s flat in Earl’s Court. The flat belonged to her parents. She told me this timidly, afraid I was going to hate her for it, but I was too pleased to have a friend. If my parents had London properties I would live in them, too, so what was the point of being a bitch for no reason? She was delighted with this and asked me to move in.
She was tiny and delicate, which made me feel weird about myself, so I cut off all my hair and bleached it. I decided to be an imposing, sexy sort of tall girl. I remembered what Carey said about me having a body like Wonder Woman. We didn’t speak again, after I moved to London. Too much had happened. But the way he saw me left an impression. It changed how I saw myself.
Which didn’t mean I wasn’t insecure. There were so many beautiful women in London, and diets were useless. If I didn’t have carbs three times a day I couldn’t finish a sentence, and that was that. But men were never a problem. I dated a lot, had sex quite a bit, but my long spell of monogamy was broken. I dressed like I would have been afraid to dress in Ireland: big prints, loud colours, mad accessories. “Your clothes,” a fashion editor once told me, “have a sense of humour, don’t they?”