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I was going to figure this the fuck out, I thought as I got up and opened the curtains. No wonder Petra was running from me. I didn’t even know who the hell I was.
It was time to stop running from the issue. I needed to start researching, starting with good old Google.
That was my new mission and I felt good about it, until I opened the wardrobe. Hanging up, sitting demurely, were all of Petra’s clothes. She’d need to come back some time today, to get what she needed for at least a couple of weeks away from here. I did not want to be disturbed while doing my research, but since I didn’t know when she was coming, I didn’t want to sit down and get settled, then be interrupted. I itched to send her a text – to check she was okay as well as to ask her when she was coming – but I didn’t want to seem desperate. My shift started at two in the afternoon, so in the meantime, I decided to clean the kitchen. Not exactly my standard response to a crisis, but it would serve to distract me at least.
Or so I thought. As it was, the monotony of scrubbing simply gave my brain room to contemplate. After a while, I put on some music to try and drown out the thoughts, but the shuffle function immediately came up with Whitney Houston. One of her iconic songs was also one of our iconic songs, Petra and I, as a singing duo – not to mention being the epitome of a breakup track. The Artificial Intelligence of our smart speaker must have heard the argument last night, for every line of this song resonated in a way that it never had before. The first verse was Petra’s perspective, the second and third from mine, as if I was responding to her. And the chorus… well, would I always love her?
Did I still love her?
…Had I ever actually loved her?
Petra had been my first serious relationship, and by the time we got together I – well into my forties by then – had resigned myself to the prospect of never getting married. Of spending the rest of my life looking after my ailing parents, then my ailing self, alone now my sister was gone. Every good-looking, slightly-queer-looking woman that passed me by had been filed in my mind as a potential partner, but none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in me until Petra. Had I latched onto her through sheer desperation? And then had I become addicted to her, to what she made me feel, physically and emotionally?
If that was the case, then how many of the couples around us, and in the wider world, were actually in love? Did love exist, or was it merely an addiction to the serotonin and oxytocin and other happy hormones that someone else released in us? Pavlovian in nature – a type of classical conditioning?
Or, if not that… a form of escape? Society’s pressure on singletons to be married and in love was immense. Everything was geared towards couples, from the ridiculous ‘single-person supplement’ that a lone traveller would encounter if they dared to book a holiday alone, to the subtle messages sent out by the media. The adverts we saw, the books we read, the television programmes we consumed. I had been an avid reader before all this business with Petra, and I could count on one hand the number of books I’d encountered with a healthy, upbeat, optimistic portrayal of a long-term single person. There were plenty that were full of doom and gloom, with hysterical depictions of lonely old spinsters and bachelors withering away alone into desiccated husks. How many of us married people got hitched to escape that fate? And how many of us would really be better off alone, if only society made it more acceptable to be so?
Perhaps I would, I thought miserably. Petra clearly thought so. My mind flew back to my conversations with Gemma. I had all but cut her off, having come so close to temptation… but perhaps I should get back in contact with her now. It was worth thinking about, if Petra and I did ultimately call it quits.
That thought caused a stab of pain to lance my heart. We couldn’t split up. I called for the smart speaker to stop playing – the next song, a more recent one from Celine Dion’s latest album, would have reduced me to tears within a minute.
It was a good job I did turn the music off, for only a couple of minutes later there was a knock at the door. My heart lurched. Was the distance so great between us already, that Petra felt she had to knock on her own front door?
“Oh,” I said dumbly as I opened the door. Neither of the women standing on the doorstep resembled the one I was expecting. It took me a couple of blinks – the light was so bright, and the house so dark – to realise that it was Cass and Felicia.
“Hello,” I said blankly, leaning on the doorframe. It was all I could think of to say.
“Petra asked us to come for some of her things,” Cass said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. I blinked again, every part of me wanting to scream and slam the door in their faces, not wanting to let them into my space.
“Of course,” I said without even registering it. Propriety trumped everything. “Come on in. I’ll make you a coffee.”
“We can come back if this is a bad time,” Cass said, but I’d already turned around and gone inside so they followed me in.
“Do you take sugar?” I called through, then jumped when I turned around to find Felicia directly behind me.
“I’m so sorry this is happening, Jean,” she said without any preamble. “It’s a shitty situation. Can I give you a hug?”
“Of course,” I said again, and she wrapped me up in her arms. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, but the sunshiney, mango-scented bubble in which she seemed to exist enveloped me. She held me for what seemed like hours, and just when a little chink seemed to open in the bubble and let the cold back in, I felt a second pair of arms surround me from the back.
“Group hug,” Cass’s voice said, and we all chuckled. Eventually, they let me go, and I turned to Felicia.
“I’m sorry, is it…? I don’t know which…”
“Heather,” she replied as if reading my mind. “The one who comes to choir. And thus actually knows you. You wouldn’t find any of my other alters hugging someone they barely know!”
“Fair enough,” I chuckled. “It’s not something I really do either.”
“Shit,” Heather said. “Did I overstep? You didn’t have to say yes to the hug.”
“No,” I waved the comment away, “I needed it. It helped, despite everything.”
“I always say Heather’s hugs have magical healing properties,” Cass laughed. “Daniella’s give you backbone, Kylie’s make you lighter, and the other two don’t really do hugs at all.”
“I’d like to meet your other… alters. Sometime.” I stumbled over the terminology, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“Well, go in the bakery and you’ll meet Daniella. I’ll try and persuade Coral to come to choir one day, although we’d probably have to sing another Eulalia Gray song for that to have even the slimmest chance of happening. And Kylie and Autumn don’t really come out… a whole lot.”
I nodded, and realised that I genuinely would like to know all of them better. Them and Cass. They were the only other rainbow relationship in the village, that we knew of, and these days young people couldn’t really afford to move down here anyway, so they needed to be treasured.
