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Chapter 1
‘I can’t believe I’m the one beforeThe One.’
Helen Pines stared at the picture: it had Jonathan’s familiar face scrunched up next to a pretty blonde woman, her arms tied around his neck, with a noticeable diamond ring on one finger.
Proposal in Kenya – classy.
She closed her laptop a little more forcefully than usual, and stared around her childhood bedroom: it felt slightly dustier and smaller every time she visited. Earlier, she had even discovered a fossilised glitter lip balm that had come free withShoutmagazine stuffed down the side of her bed. There were stacks ofNOW!CDs (that really should have gone to a charity shop years ago) were scattered on her dressing table and her sixth form prom dress still hung in the wardrobe. Her mum,insistedon not throwing it away. She had a bad feeling that the only time she could convince her mum to chuck out her prom dress would be when it was replaced with a meringue-shaped dress of a different kind. Walt Disney had a lot to answer for.
The dress was a fussy, puffy, midnight blue creation that sat side by side with a fussy, puffy, lilac dress she’d worn aged six for her local Carnival Queen competition. A bad, niggling memory of trying out for Carnival Queen occasionally resurfaced and still made her feel embarrassed for her six-year-old self. Her mum, in the audience, wildly gesturing for her to curtsy, an underwhelmed group of local parishioners feebly clapping, and Nanny G reassuring her that she’d look good in a bin bag, as someone crowned the pretty blonde girl, Charlotte, Carnival Queen instead. Really, someone should have realised there was something a little irresponsible about traipsing young girls around beauty pageants full stop. But that was parenting in the nineties for you.
Helen sighed and leaned back on her bed, her socked feet dangling off the edge. Today, she had learned that there were few things in life that made you feel more inadequate than witnessing your ex-boyfriend getting engaged to someone else on social media. With added gut wrench for it being in some glamorous (and surely really expensive) destination. Any holidays they had taken together seemed to revolve around his friends. Her strong hints to romantic mini-break destinations had gone ignored, as had crying into his shoulder one night asking why he didn’t want to do anything romantic with her.
His answer at the time was that he just ‘didn’t believe in that kind of thing’, and ‘he wasn’t that kind of guy’; except he was, just not with her.
It had all started so well: it was New Year’s Eve when she was invited by a friend of a friend to Jonathan’s house party. He lived in a fancy apartment with a terrace overlooking the Thames, and had employed actual waiters to serve champagne to his guests. There were so many glamorous people there, all doing glamorous things: so when she felt his hand touch the small of her back as the fireworks went off, she couldn’t believe he was choosing her. It was all too perfect. He said they could meet any night that week for dinner. Then he didn’t message. She messaged him instead, and rather than whisking her off into his life, she spent the next two years trying to convince him to like her as much as he had the first moment they’d met, when he didn’t have eyes for anyone else. She must have messed it up badly. And now he was with a woman who probably did all the right things, and never said anything neurotic, and was prettier than her. Helen just wasn’t good enough to keep him: plain and simple.
So here she was, back at her parent’s house in Cornwall, whilst Jonathan and his wife to be were undoubtedly clinking their Malbec glasses to the sight of a bull elephant, gazing up at the stars, and … urgh, it really wasn’t worth thinking about.
At her bachelorette pad in London (read: studio apartment in Hackney), Helen had decided that with a total personal wealth of £1,568 (if you didn’t deduct her overdue student loan), there was no way she could justify a holiday this year.
So, for Easter break she had decided to ‘staycation’ with her parents in Cornwall. At the time, she had told herself that it would be great to reconnect with her family, that she would love the walks and fresh air, that she wanted to meet her brother Henry’s girlfriend. That would be nice! Wouldn’t it? Instead, from the moment she stepped onto the so-crowded-you-can’t-move-in-the-aisles Great Western service to Penzance, she was hit with a wave of dread.
She was living in some kind of Groundhog Day of singleness.
The train journey down was a little too much like the trip down over Christmas, which was a little too much like the trip down over Christmas the year before, just after she and Jonathan had split up. She was so heartbroken that year that she had survived the entire six-hour journey on nothing more than a packet of Maltesers. She had intended to be blasé about the split to her parents, and make up some ‘cover story’ that he was moving away for work, that things had just run their course, yet the second she had stepped off the platform and seen Nanny G, tears had already started to pour down her face. Her mum had just sighed in resignation that Helen had messed it up again.
The following week had been a bad combination of parental sympathy and sickeningly romantic Christmas movies. Her mum had made all her favourite food in an effort to lift her spirits, and she slid from self-imposed starvation to eating an entire tray of leftover cauliflower cheese from the fridge at 2am when she couldn’t sleep. Her dad had nobly ignored his daughter’s anguish, but when he spotted Helen in the corner of his eye, holding a cushion up to her face to mask her tears during the opening scenes ofUp!, he wordlessly lifted the remote and changed the channel. Henry had placed his arm around her and pulled her onto his barrel chest for a hug.
That Christmas, she felt like a loser. No matter how many,I’m not searching for my other half because I’m not a halfmemes her two best friends, Elle and Sophie, sent to her in their group chat, Helen couldn’t shake the feeling that being dumped shortly before your thirtieth birthday was a bad thing. She didn’t feel like slinging on stilettos, marching out to a bar, and starting all over again, so she spent an unhealthy amount of time fantasising about possible ways she and Jonathan could get back together. He was a polyglot, whilst Helen still mumbled through the pronunciation of ‘croissant’: maybe she would take a language class and then in a year’s time bump into him on the Eurostar (she would be on the way to an important meeting in Paris) and impress him with her effortless French? Maybe he would wake up next to his fiancée Katy one morning, and realise that he’d made a huge mistake? He’d knock on her door … take her on a romantic holiday to make it all up to her … slay a dragon to prove his love …
Of course, now that the engagement picture was staring at her out of her phone, she knew definitively that wasn’t ever going to happen. A small, embarrassed part of her that was still holding out hope he’d come back, whimpered, and scuttled away into the recesses of her mind. The Carnival Queen dress glinted in her wardrobe. She clearly wasn’t good enough.
Helen didn’t generally see herself as ‘not enough’. Most days, her self-esteem wasokay, and she made a concerted effort not to feel down when her followers shrunk on social media, or a vlog that she produced limped up to ninety-six likes. However, as the months ticked by, and she met no one that she actually liked, she felt forgotten about – like her thirties were destined to be spent mouldering away in the shade. A feeling probably not helped by her unshaven legs (regrettably down to sheer laziness, and not a feminist statement) and descent into 24/7 loungewear.
She was really starting to worry that there was something wrong with her. Because if there wasn’t,whywas she still single? Her mum would say it was because she ‘scared them off’, Nanny G would wink and say she needed to forget finding a boyfriend and learn how to have fun instead.
That’s not to say she wasn’t liked; Helen had always had friends, just never ‘real’ boyfriends. Her love life was heavy on ‘situationships’ and low on Valentine’s Day cards. She considered herself essentially a nice person: she worked hard, she had good friends, and a blogging business with real (if unrealised) potential. But as much as it rankled every bone in her body to admit it, there was something about turning thirty that had changed things, at least for her. A heavy feeling of pressure dwelled around her dates, going out with a totally-not-right guy didn’t feel so funny anymore, and she started to notice the month’s ticking down to her next birthday.
No matter what her friends said about it being totally normal to be single in your thirties, Helen felt herself oscillating between feeling flat and sheer panic. Rather than being an ‘up and coming’ baking influencer, she now felt unquestionable pressure that she should have ‘up and come’ by now. Her best friend Sophie had coupled up with Frank, and they seemed alarmingly happy. Elle was still single but seemed to revel in the role of always being the dumper, rather than the dumpee. There was probably a picture of her under the entry ‘fiery Latina’ on Wikipedia that predictably drove men wild. ‘Treat them mean …’ she would say, tapping her false nails on her phone. In fact, Helen got the feeling that Elle thought her desire for a cosy relationship was a little lame. Maybe even weak.
Then there were her parents. Since joining them for Easter, Helen had been dodging questions about her single status like a downhill slalom. Even her younger brother was coupled up; an unfortunate injustice that was always destined to happen. Now, next time they pried about whether she and Jonathan might ever get back together, she would have to spit it out that he was actually engaged to someone else, like some monumental hairball that conceded her defeat.
To be clear, things hadn’t ever been bad with Jonathan: in fact, they were really nice. At least most of the time. She had adored him. The only snag was he seemed eternally on the fence about her. He had told her she was the most amazing woman he had ever met, but he wasn’t sure they were right together, all in the same day. Helen couldn’t quite fathom why, if he thought she was that incredible, he could never fully commit. He kept saying statements that, when placed together in a sentence, seemed to conflict with one another. Towards the end of their relationship, Helen had felt so confused by it all that she hadn’t realised just how badly her confidence had been eroded by his lack of certainty.
Her days had turned into a fug of worrying whether he loved her, or not; was he seeing someone else, or not, and who was that woman who had just followed him on Instagram? Etc. She became so on edge that he would walk away and pull the plug definitively on their two-year romance, that she had started to walk on eggshells around him. She tried to be the perfect girlfriend, tried to pretend that she was totally cool with him taking his time, and it had mercifully, eventually, ended when she had given him space to think about what he really wanted, and he had met Katy. Looking back, she had spent years of her life trying to recreate the first moment they met, when all the promise of the romance stretched out before her. When she thought she was The One for him.
As soon as Jonathan had ditched her and found Katy instead, his commitment issues seemed to evaporate overnight, and social media had reliably informed her that her boyfriend, in everything but name, was definitely not hers anymore. Her friends had told her that it would be the same story with his new girlfriend, and that he would never settle. But he just had. Apparently, his total inability to commit was in fact a reflection on her all along. It was because she wasn’t enough for him.
She sent a screenshot of the engagement picture to her WhatsApp chat ‘Queens xoxo’ with Elle and Sophie.
Elle:That man is
I’m so glad you’re not with him anymore babe. He never treated you right!!
And his new fianceeDon’t know what he’s thinking …
Sophie:Sorry babe :-( as @Elle says, it just wasn’t the right guy.
