Calling time

Tom’s not best pleased. I’ve been off galavanting and he’s got himself worked up. Can’t blame him really. I’m acting like a teenager and treating him like my dad. Whether or not his patience runs out too remains to be seen.

Yesterday may have been one of the best days of my life. I say this with the perspective of being a third or so of the way through it, and having encountered a significant number of not so great days over the past few years and months.

It smelled of summer when I woke, and I woke late, which never happens. I bathed and shaved, picked at my blemish free face – itself, a miracle, and tied my hair in a knot, picking the dress I wore to the evening of my wedding, all short , white lacy silk, dressed down with a denim waistcoat and stacked brown sandals. It wasn’t warm yet, but it would be. I waved goodbye to the kids and Tom, who was labouring under a bin bag, and fucked off to the hairdressers where I was expensively blonded and bobbed, and then, running away with myself, I treated myself to a designer pair of yellow knickers and a bra that is more form than function. I knew I looked good because I kept getting honked at, and this time, it wasn’t my cycling. The day had heated up, and so had I.

To assuage my guilt, and because they sounded like they were having fun, I bombed it down the to Brick Lane where Tom and the kids had been partaking of free ice cream, and meet them in a bar where I had had my first extramarital kiss (a uni friend who had lost his virginity to me, back in the day, for what it’s worth.)

Jonah was playing DS and barely looked up, but Ava miowed in my direction and Tom left his seat, proud to give me an extravagant hello, before the rigmarole of toilets, drinks and changing into my new pants took up the next 15 or so minutes and when we had finished the sun had gone from our table.

Perhaps that’s it. There’s always rigmarole, but we’re good at it and our lives run the more smoothly because we can manage a lot, between us.

We grabbed bagels and they grabbed the bus home, and I rode off to Soho with the sun on my back. Met my GBF (although it is reductive to call him that, this entity who has always been capable of making me feel so entirely myself) outside a cafe amid exclamations and kisses. It had probably been at least three years.

The story goes that we failed our Oxford interviews together, but gained that more worthwhile attribute, a lifelong pal, and it’s funny to think we were 17 when we first got drunk together on cheap red wine amid the monastic splendor and refined geekery of Merton Colleges’ foreign Englishness. Me, uptight, swotty, with a new suit too old for me, and Laird, not yet out, but growing into himself, all gratuitous hand gestures and immediate overzealous warmth. There was another boy too, but we never kept in touch.

We called afterwards, grateful that we’d both flunked it, and told the other our plans to head to opposite ends of the country and afterwards, I headed shellshocked and directionless  for a trip round the world.

Yet in that heady first week of Freshers, exhausted from being our most enlivened selves, we bumped into each other at the student union, on the same course, in the same halls – a hotbed of milk fed privileged. Laird had come to terms with his sexuality, and me, well I’d lost part of my soul in King’s Cross, Sydney – but I’ll talk about that another time. Coincidence became fate, and amid a sea of new faces, it was a relief to see a familiar one.

But yesterday, his face was broader and he now sports a close cropped head and a golden beard, but his voice; deep, mellifluous, always on the edge of laughter boomed the same as ever. We flapped and hugged and found somewhere to drink, and he told me about his job – a worthwhile profession in Geneva that pays more than the prime minister, but I felt more comfortable that I had done in years, telling him about mine.

We were joined by a Bristol crowd who hadn’t exactly been my circle – the lot from the student newspaper, which I’d only ever been on because of Laird’s insistence and juvenile nepotism that got me the job as arts editor because I’d acted in a few school plays.

They were an earnest bunch, going places they eventually got to. A sweet faced girl who would pass for me, not least because she shares my name, but whose gentle determinism saw her get the job I’d always wanted; a north London trendy who never seemed so cool at the time, but whose friendship group I remain determinedly on the fringes off, and several others with whom who I’d been young and careless.

We told each other about our lives, and at 32, no one felt the need to embellish them –  we are all more or less comfortable with who we are and have had enough milestones and achievements each to not need to brag or feel undermined by others’.

We drank spritzers (and smoked)  like students, but with a much heftier price tag, and then, when the others had gone Laird’s willowy sister, a bone fide New York artist who could still be 16, joined us for a vegan meal of utter deliciousness and another bottle, this time red. Laird got the bill, in his over generous way, and we promised we wouldn’t leave it so long, before I wobbled back on my bike and got home in one piece.

It was beautiful, and reminded me who I was. Unthethered, brilliant as only Laird makes me feel, but terrified of life’s  possibilities.

Tom was never part of this life, and he represents a more limited existence, although at first, he extended my days of privilege by several years and gave me a security blanket that had been whipped out, after Bristol by moving to London, and working without knowing what it was I was working for, by day for free and by night, for too much.

When I got home, he had waited up and he waited on me, floppy from drink, and keen to take advantage of my extravagant purchases of the morning. I wasn’t having any of it. I facetimed someone else who brings out my best, and worst and Tom, rightly so, got pissed off.

I miss myself from those days and there is a bit of me trying to get back to the girl I was before she goes forever.  But then, that girl never really knew where she was going or who she really was. She still doesn’t.