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“Haven’t you?” he asks me. “I mean your job is going nowhere, isn’t it?”
“I am applying for a promotion in the new year. But it hasn’t been easy.” He’s right, my job has been a stagnant pool.
“So, will you get a pay rise?”
I’m not sure why we are talking about my job all of a sudden. “I hope so. But it won’t be anything much, not by your standards.” I try to laugh a little.
“Well, let me help.” His voice sounds stronger, Andrew is always much better when talking about money. “I’ve paid for a bedsit in advance, six months, to help you until you get your pay rise.”
“Bedsit?” I glance around the large penthouse apartment with a panoramic view of Manchester.
“Well, I’m not going to dump you out on the street, not after four years, I’m not an arsehole.”
“Are you breaking up with me?” I try to laugh again.
He says nothing, but the expression on his face says it all. And he’s not just breaking up with me, he’s moving me out of his life, he’s rented me a bedsit.
A bedsit!
He wants me gone that badly?
A week before Christmas, ten days before my birthday, two weeks before the swish New Year’s Eve party his company is throwing. A month before Kenya.
“But Kenya?” The question asks itself without my permission. As if we’ll have to stay together for the sake of the giraffes and baboons.
“How do you know about Kenya?” He suddenly looks guilty. “Uh… I was … I mean I wasn’t…it’s just Barbara—” He clamps his mouth shut but it’s too late.
Barbara? The fashionable, colour-coordinated fiancée of his friend James. The ex-fiancée, it seems, of his now ex-friend, James.
Memories flash through my mind like film trailers. Seeing Barbara in our favourite Italian restaurant as I walked past. “Just having dinner alone, special me time.”
Barbara in designer yoga clothes at our new gym, the one Andrew insisted on joining even though it’s miles out of my way.
Barbara at every party we’d been invited to, alone, without James.
“Say something,” Andrew now prompts me.
His bad communication skills must be catching because I can’t think to say anything, I open my mouth; a sob escapes me.
“Don’t cry,” he says, getting up from the table. Andrew hates emotions, tears freak him out. He potters about the kitchen, lifts the lid off the saucepan, sniffs. “Mmm.” He dips a spoon and tastes. “This is great.”
“When do you want me to move out?” I say to his back.
“Well…” he says around a mouthful. He was always one for eating straight out of the pot. Now he drops the spoon and shoves a hand into his pocket and brings out an envelope and hands it me.
Mind still blank, I open it. Inside is a key and some folded papers. It’s a tenancy agreement. Signed this morning. So that’s what he had in his pocket, not an engagement ring then.
“The bedsit is paid for from today.”
Chapter two
Elodie
The microwave pings to announce that my Muller Rice is ready. I would have cooked a special breakfast for my birthday, but the bedsit Andrew rented for me doesn’t come with a toaster or an oven and I hate cooking on electric hotplates. So, birthday rice pudding it is.
When we first moved in together, Andrew suggested I didn’t need to work – he made ten times my salary, but I insisted on working and keeping my own separate bank account. It now makes our split surprisingly straight forward. I took my clothes, my books, my laptop, my phone, my books, my laptop, my phone, all hurriedly packed into black bags. I didn’t take anything that wasn’t mine. Not the apartment I decorated, not the furniture, not our friends, and not the future I’d planned. All of them belonged to Andrew.
My sister hoped to cheer me up with an invitation to spend Christmas with her. It would be nice to go to faraway New Zealand, and see our mum too, but I only have 3 days off from work. That’s basically flying to Auckland, kissing them all at the airport and then flying back again. So, I stayed in Manchester, went for lots of long walks around lots of boring streets that all look alike, gave loose change to homeless young people on street corners, and tried not to cry.
