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That’s where we’ve been sitting for the last hour and a half: at the coffee table on Ralph’s ludicrously regal chesterfield sofa – an unwanted and unsolicited gift from his rich parents who own this flat – going one by one through my smoking wasteland of a sent items folder. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings I’ve spent here, in the last two years, on the sofa with Ralph; TV and takeaways and midnight Christmas present wrapping. But nothing – and I meannothing– has ever had the vibe of tonight. Me, mostly swearing, sometimes convulsing, sometimes staring at the ceiling, like someone stunned, all while Ralph reads out my emails and watches me like I’m a fire that’s about to engulf the whole town.
And thankfully, some emails have been totally and euphorically benign. Like opening some sort of dark advent calendar and finding a chocolate instead of a raging ball of fire. Harmless ones I’d started and never finished (‘Hi, this sounds gr—’) and emails that didn’t even get delivered, like the confession I discovered I absolutelydidwrite to Jack Shurlock after we’d had that flirty, zingy chat and was-it-an-almost-kiss at the Christmas party before he left to go travelling. (He’s a ShurlockdotJack now and I have never been more grateful for a ‘this email address is no longer in use, please email this address instead’ message.)
But some emails – oh,some. Some have not been benign at all.
There are emails to Cate, mostly frustrated emails about Knobby Nicholas, including one telling her I wanted to put a picture of him on a bag of rolled oats and whack it with a shovel. There are stupid barely-one liners to my (fake) sweetness and light cousin Rhiannon, which are literally just ‘zzzzzz’ and ‘lolllllll, why is this compliment so shady and backhanded?’ which will definitely upset my mum and snobby Auntie Vye. There’s also one calling Prue in Accounts a ‘dangerous bigot’ too (she is, though).
The worst of the lot though – well, except for the agonising Owen engagement email that has shaved years off of my predicted life-span, of course – are the multiple scathing ‘I’m starting to dread seeing you’ emails to one of my closest friends Alexis, all of which made my heart plummet (and screech into a cushion). And I love Alexis, I really do. I’ve loved her since the day I met her seven years ago, when it was like I was suddenly introduced to a rocket. I’d started waitressing at a lively, cheap-beer-and-curry-nights pub in Southend and she worked at the bar (a second evening job for her, after interning at a medical technology company in Canary Wharf all day). I’d just dropped out of university and moved back home, Mum’s disappointment like a heavy shawl around my shoulders, and Alexis, was just .?.?.energy.A walking lit firework, sparking with hungry, nothing-to-lose determined energy that seemed to rub people up the wrong way, or rub off. To me, it was only ever infectious. Alexis is empowering. A genius. Entirely self-governed, but so loyal.Lay-down-and-die-for-you loyal. But, lately, she’s been – well.Not. At all. She’s been argumentative. Spiky, for no reason, regardless of whether I’m talking about work, or recipes, or even Owen being back. She’s been the same with Cate too. Almost .?.?.mean, and I keep asking if she’s okay, but after I see her, I’m just left wondering what we’ve done wrong. (Except, this time, I’ve actuallydonesomething horribly wrong, and thinking about what Alexis’s reaction might be makes my heart ache and accelerate in panic all at once.)
‘Ralph, can we please stop?’
‘Millie .?.?.’
‘Please,’ I say, my face buried in a cushion. ‘Just for a little, Ralph. Or a lot. Or forever? Our secret.’ My only secret, considering I apparently now havezero.
‘But this one’s mild,’ Ralph continues, his voice ever-calm, his kind, green eyes fixed interestedly on the laptop, like a teacher marking essays. ‘This is just you telling Mark M in Sales that he should not have stolen your lunch because the Tupperware was marked with your name. Valid, I say.’
‘Valid yes, Ralph, but he will now hate me,’ I sigh, faceplanting into Ralph’s cushion again; a black and blue tie-dyed mushroom print of course. ‘I think that’s the only email I haveeversent him.’
‘And this is one to your mum that simply says, “I just had to ask.”’
I peel my face from the surface of the cushion and look at him. ‘Really?’
‘Yep. Just that. See. And this next one,’ says Ralph, optimistically, ‘says .?.?.Oh.’
‘Oh?’
His Adam’s apple boomerangs in his throat. ‘It’s .?.?. it’s to your mum again, and it says “I just had to ask .?.?.”’
‘You’ve already said that.’
‘No, this .?.?. this one has more. It says, “I just had to ask .?.?. Mum, do you love me despite having nothing to share about me at brunches with your friends or in Auntie Vye’s conservatory? All those things my brother does that you seem so bloody delighted by—”’
‘Oh, no.Stop.’
But, of course, he doesn’t because Ralph knows we have to do this.Iknow we have to do this. I just don’t want to. I want the before-life back. Life B. E.Before Emails.
‘“Because I don’t know if I will ever be like Kieran, or if I will fall in love again, or have children, or know what my credit score is, or even pay off my student loan. Hashtag unfinished art degree.”’
‘Why did I say hashtag?’ My voice sounds part helium balloon now. ‘Anything else?’
‘Just .?.?. “You make me feel like a failure. LOL.”’
‘LOL.Right. Of course.’
Ralph puts a gentle hand between my shoulder blades, and settles back with me, on the sofa, which squeaks beneath us like a leather jacket. He’s wearing theStranger Thingspyjamas he asked for on his last birthday – pyjamas his parents had handed over in a stiff, luxury gift bag, their faces etched with bewilderment like they had been forced to hand him, their son the ghoul, a human liver. (They, of course, later gifted him a £500 smart watch he didn’t want too.) And as much as everything seems to be slowly and rapidly going to shit, I’m so glad for Ralph right now; that I answered the ad for a room to rent in his – well, technically, his parents’ – flat, two years ago, when I was utterly heartbroken and half a person after Owen broke up with me. Ralph and this flat at Four, The Logans, have become a safe constant for me since then. Ralph is simple and calming. Someone who could have gone into the family business (cruise ships worth multimillions) but decided he wanted a quiet, straightforward life instead because small, straightforward things are what make him happy. His job at a pet shop. His hobbies, like swimming and karate and puzzles and mushroom plants. Living with Ralph and his dependability is like good feng shui or something. He’s an anchor. A safety net. An extra brother, of sorts.
‘What am I going to do, Ralph?’ I say into the dim, quiet living room. All the lights are out, except for the television on the wall, and Ralph’s gold floor lamp shaped like a palm tree. ‘I know I keep asking that, but I’m fucked, aren’t I? Totally fucked. You can say it. I can take it – well, I can’t, but say it anyway.’
‘Certainly not. You are not fucked.’
‘But I feel it. Today was just – it was dark, Ralph. Nobody would even really look at me. It was like .?.?. like I was a naughty dog who’d mauled the furniture or something, and everyone had been given strict instructions to not make eye contact orshe might do it again, and worse still, she could shit on the carpet!’
‘It’ll blow over, Millie,’ Ralph says gently. ‘Everything always does eventually.’
‘Yeah.Sure.’ I lean forward to the coffee table, tip the last dribble of wine from the bottle into my glass.
Everything looks the same; smells the same; the TV even plays the same cycle of weeknight soaps and news items. But everythingfeelsout of place. Scary. As if my life has been shaken like a big massive snowglobe and now everything needs fixing. Just when it was all trundling along so seamlessly, soquietlyuntil this morning at work. Petra, God bless her heart, had given me the world’s most banal filing task to do in the almost-always-empty-and-used-for-document-storage office next to reception, and I stayed in there all day, only scurrying out to greet visitors and delivery men, and wanting to completely melt into the floor like gunge every time an email reply dropped from random recipients (ranging from ‘???????’ and ‘lol wtf?’ to ‘Millie, answer your phone NOW’).
