Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Here’s an insight into my life right now: my sister is standing on my doorstep clutching a dead bird, and that’s not even close to the worst thing to happen today.
“Clemmie.” Lil’s eyes fill with easy tears, her heavy black eyeliner already beginning to smear alarmingly, as she holds up the bundle of greasy feathers. “He flew straight into my car... Do you think he’ll be okay?”
I look at the bird. The very obviously dead bird.
“I don’t think so, no.” I aim for gentle, but fall about a mile short. As I say, it’s been a long day.
“For fuck’s sake, Lil!” Our sister, Serena, appears at my shoulder, swigging directly from the neck of a champagne bottle she brought with her. “What are you doing with that thing? It’s disgusting!”
Lil glares at Serena. “I’m trying to save its life. Do you think you can do mouth-to-mouth on a bird?”
“Mouth-to-beak, surely?” I muse as Serena makes loud retching noises.
“I can’t just let it die,” Lil says again, stubbornly, and I’m standing firm in the doorway because I know that given half the chance the dead bird will end up inside my flat.
“I think that ship has sailed.” Serena pokes a well-manicured finger toward the thing. “Pretty sure it’s not supposed to be flat in the middle like that.”
Lil looks down. “Oh,” she says finally. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes, well, maybe you can put the dead bird down and come inside?” I suggest.
“Just leave it
on the ground?” Lil is horrified.
I can already see where this is heading, and I am much too knackered to organize a bird funeral. I cast a desperate glance at Serena, who rolls her eyes in response.
“Why don’t you put it in the bin?” she suggests.
“The bin?!” Lil’s voice climbs to a higher pitch.
“The
compost bin,” Serena says quickly. “Clemmie’s got about sixteen different bins, hasn’t she?” She looks at me.
“There’s one for garden waste.” I shrug. Though “garden” is a strong term for the scrubby patch of grass that came with the flat. I always meant to plant some bulbs, had great visions of myself wafting about with a wicker basket in the crook of my arm, smiling modestly when people praised my green fingers, but there was never the time. And it didn’t really matter now.
“There you go then.” Serena tosses her hair. “That’s perfect. You can return it to the earth.” Serena is a master at getting people to do what she wants, and right now she’s dropping into Lil’s language, her tone persuasive.
Lil wavers. “It doesn’t seem very dignified.”
“It’s nature, Lil.” Serena waves a hand. “You know, dead in tooth and claw.”
“It’s
red in tooth and claw,” I put in. “And I don’t think that getting hit by a Toyota Yaris driven by a tiny woman in an enormous pink coat was really the kind of poetic act of violence that Tennyson envisioned.”
“Whatever,” Serena dismisses me, getting warmed up now. “
Red, dead, it’s all part of the cycle, isn’t it? From the earth we arise and to the earth we return, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s the circle of life... it moves us all...”
I absolutely know she’s about to break into a lusty version of the song from
The Lion King, which I feel may undermine the impression she is taking this as seriously as Lil would like, and so I jump in quickly. “Come on, Lil, it’s freezing out here, and there’s pizza inside. Your favorite vegan pizza, and wine. Lots and lots of wine.”
“Fine.” Lil nods reluctantly. “But I think I should say a few words.”
“Say them quickly,” Serena says. “Clemmie needs us more than that dead bird does. There
might still be some hope for her.”
“Was that really necessary?” I mutter.
Serena doesn’t reply, just takes another mouthful of her drink, her eyebrows raised, but her meaning is clear: she thinks my life is pretty much one big dead bird, and I can’t exactly disagree.
Five minutes later, we are gathered around my open garden waste bin.
“Here lies Peter the pigeon,” Lil intones.
I’m not at all convinced that the bird lying dead in my bin is a pigeon, but now does not seem the time to quibble over semantics.
“We don’t really know how long you were alive,” Lil continues, “but you were part of this big beautiful world, and it’s sad that you’re gone. I hope wherever you are you can feel the sun on your back and the air under your wings. I hope you are happy and free.”
I feel unexpected tears prickling at my eyes, which I try to hide from Serena.
“You two are as bad as each other,” she grumbles, but I hear the reluctant affection in her voice. “
Now can we go inside? It is freezing, you know. Never mind this bloody bird; I’m about to perish of hypothermia.”
Lil swings the lid closed on the bin, and with a sigh of relief I lead them both inside.
“What happened in here?” Lil asks, peering around at my flat, which is admittedly looking a little spartan.
Serena scowls. “
Leonard happened.”
“He took all your stuff?” Lil gasps. “Your sofa? And your TV? And... where’s all Tuna’s stuff? Where is
Tuna?”
Ah, yes. The cat. Can’t think about that too hard, or I will start crying again.
Lil blinks, the facts registering. “He took your cat?”
“Len said it’ll be better for him in the new place,” I say, trying to keep the words light. “And he’s right. It’s a proper house and not near any of the main roads. Much safer.”
“He took your cat!” Lil repeats, and this time murder sparkles in her big blue eyes. “He left you for another woman, took all your stuff, and stole your cat?! I hate him.”
I look around at the near-empty open-concept kitchen/living room. Yesterday it was full of IKEA’s finest self-assembly furniture, neat and well ordered. Sure, it wasn’t really to my taste—all the clean, contemporary lines and lack of clutter were a bit soulless, but it had been perfectly nice; it had looked like a home. Now, with the single armchair that I once found on the street (I’d told Len I bought it at an antiques fair, otherwise he’d have never let it through the door), the sagging, half-full bookcase, and the table lamp in the shape of a mermaid holding a seashell, without a table to sit on, it looks like the final few minutes of a jumble sale.
“It was his stuff,” I say with a shrug. “He chose it, he paid for it. I suppose I just didn’t realize how
much of it was his until the movers came and took it away.” Which they had done, today, while I was at work. At a job I would soon no longer have. At that thought the headache I’ve been battling flares.
“I always knew he was the worst,” Serena says darkly, draping herself across the kitchen counter and flipping open the lid on the giant pizza box. “I’ve been telling you this for years.”
“You said he was boring,” I reply, “which, to be fair to him, you can hardly say now.”
Len and I had been together for four years, and then, ten days ago he told me that not only was he leaving me for Jenny, a colleague from his accounting firm, but that the two of them had been seeing each other for the last eighteen months and that she was three months pregnant. Len, Jenny, their baby, and my cat would all be moving to a four-bedroom cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside, along with all our furniture. He was benevolently leaving me the flat in the city, which I could no longer afford to rent. It was all very tidy.
Prior to this experience, I had always been a little dubious of people who were blindsided by events like these.
How could they not know? I thought. Well, let me tell you now—I had no idea. Not an inkling, not a single notion about any of this had so much as flickered on the edge of my mind.
When Len laid the facts out for me, standing portentously in front of our fireplace, like he was a detective in a bad Agatha Christie adaptation revealing whodunnit, my first thought was that he was joking.
That didn’t last long because Len wasn’t much of a joker, and frankly none of the words coming out of his mouth were very funny.
“I just think we’ve both been going through the motions for so long now,” he said, and his words had the stiff, practiced quality of a rehearsed speech. (I found out later this was because Jenny had literally written him a script, which demonstrated good sense, because Len does have a tendency toward vagueness, and our breakup was nothing if not extremely clear.) “You and I are too different. It’s not really surprising given your background...” That, I felt, was a particularly sharp twist of the knife. “We’re not really in love with each other anymore, Clemmie. We’re just used to being together. You’ll see, this is all for the best.”
At which point I promptly threw up into the empty Quality Street tin I was clutching.
The fact that he wasn’t wrong was of little comfort. I didn’t miss him, so much as the familiarity of having another person around, the worn-in routine of our lives, which seemed so tightly entwined. I did, however, miss the cat. And the sofa.
“I’ll admit, I was initially distracted by how boring he is,” Serena muses now. “It’s possible I hadn’t realized that his boiled-egg personality masked the heart of a villain. But now, now I see.” Her voice is dangerous, promising retribution, her glower impressive. She helps herself to a slice of pizza and bites into it with unnecessary violence.
Lil hops up onto the kitchen counter and begins to pull the foil off another of the champagne bottles Serena arrived with. “He
was so boring though, Clemmie.” She tugs the cork from the bottle with a well-practiced
pop. “You can admit it now.”
“He wasn’t boring,” I protest. “He was steady, reliable. I liked that about him.”
“Jesus, Clem.” Serena exhales in exasperation. “He was your boyfriend, not a Volvo. You deserved way more out of a relationship.” She pauses heavily here before delivering the blow. “Besides, we all know that this whole thing with Leonard was actually about the D-word.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I snap, buttons instantly pushed. “And don’t say the D-word.”
“Got to agree with Clemmie on that one.” Lil nods, carefully pouring champagne into three mugs, even though Serena is still happily drinking from her near-empty bottle. “The D-word sounds like you’re talking about dicks.”
“Ew.” Serena accepts a mug that says ACCOUNTANTS ARE GREAT BETWEEN THE (SPREAD)SHEETS, a gift from me that Len doesn’t appear to have been as emotionally attached to as he was to, say, our good glassware or the vacuum cleaner.
“If I wanted to talk about penises,” my sister continues loftily, “I would simply talk about penises. But fine.” She clears her throat and gives me a stern look. “Clemmie—you know your whole relationship with Leonard was actually about Dad.”
“Speaking of penises,” I mutter, taking a long drink from my own mug. The champagne is cold, crisp; the bubbles rush through my blood. Serena buys only the best.
We all have our own relationships with our father—in my case it might best be described as a passing acquaintance. When your dad is an ageing rock god who managed to impregnate three women in the space of four months, things tend to get complicated.
“It’s true that Len was the antidad,” Lil muses. “It doesn’t get less rock ’n’ roll than an accountant from Surrey.”
“Not sure what you’d know about rock ’n’ roll,” Serena scoffs.
“I’m a musician.” Lil crosses her arms. “I know about all sorts of music.”
“Only music made by women who look like Victorian ghosts.” Serena smirks while Lil splutters, though it does appear that she is wearing a voluminous white nightdress underneath her giant pink coat.
“That mass-produced crap you put out at your label can hardly be called music.” Lil is indignant.
Serena flicks her curtain of subtly balayaged hair over her shoulder. “Being popular isn’t a crime. God forbid a song should have a beat, something people can actually dance to.”
“Can we not?” I interject wearily, the argument a familiar one.
Both my sisters followed in our dad’s footsteps with careers in music, yet they manage to be two barely touching circles on a Venn diagram: Serena is a terrifyingly efficient executive producer at one of the biggest record labels in the world—polished, gorgeous, her fingernails constantly clacking over the screen of her iPhone, while Lil is a tiny angelic waif who wins over festival crowds with her sweetly rasping voice, acoustic guitar, and flower-child energy.
“No need for you to wade in, Miss I-Haven’t-Listened-to-New-Music-in-Two-Decades.” Serena huffs.
“It’s
Dr. I-Haven’t-Listened-to-New-Music-in-Two-Decades, thanks,” I reply, refusing to take the bait. There’s no point in us getting bogged down in my parental issues, when there’s plenty of other stuff to be upset about. “And I was under the impression you were here to help with my problems,” I finish forlornly, clambering onto one of the stools at the small breakfast counter.
“We are!” Lil exclaims. “Of course we are. So tell us what happened? I thought you said they were going to extend your contract?”
“I thought they were, that’s what the head of the department told me, but there have been cuts and...” I trail off, pinching the bridge of my nose to stop the tears from falling. I cannot keep crying or at some point I will simply disintegrate.
“If they told you they were going to keep you on then that’s what they should do,” Serena huffs. “You’re brilliant, an expert in your field, and all your students love you. This is bullshit.”
“I suppose being an expert in the field of obscure medieval literature doesn’t mean I’m as in demand as you’d think,” I say into my mug.
Ever since I’d finished my Ph.D. five years earlier, I’d taken one badly paid, short-term contract after another, always hoping that the job would turn into something more permanent. Here in Oxford, I thought that had finally happened, but it seems that the universe wasn’t done crapping all over me. Just when I thought I’d be able to catch my breath, to actually start adult life at the ripe old age of thirty-two, I find that I’ll be jobless when term finishes for the summer. Jobless. Boyfriendless. Soon to be homeless. So much for adult life.
I drain the mug of champagne and hold it out to be refilled. Silently, Lil complies.
“So, we need to make a plan,” Serena says firmly. “Find a new job for you.”
“Academic posts don’t come up that often,” I say. “And they all have about a trillion applicants because of that. Trust me, I know. And even if something
does miraculously come up for next year, it won’t be until the start of the autumn term, which leaves me a good four months totally unpaid.” I am feeling extremely sorry for myself now.
“How about a short-term loan?” Serena asks. “Just until you get something sorted.”
I’m already shaking my head. “I can’t take money from you.”
“You know there’s always Dad,” Lil suggests, and then winces when I glare at her. “I know you don’t want to, but I’m sure—”
“I don’t want his money,” I say, trying to keep emotion out of my voice.
“You’re being so unnecessarily stubborn about this,” Serena says. “He’s a shitty dad whether you take his money or not, might as well let the old duffer do something to help out. And besides, he’s not as bad as you—”
I cut her off with a wave of my hand. My sisters look at me for a moment and then sigh in unison. They know this is an argument they won’t win.
“So what will you do?” Lil asks. “Have you told your mum?”
I grimace. “Not yet. She’ll want me to come home.”
The three of us knock back some more of the champagne in thoughtful silence. I can barely feel the bubbles anymore, a pleasing buzz hums through me.
“
I know what we should do,” Serena says finally, and her words are smudged by the alcohol, just a little soft around the edges.
“What?” I ask.
She grins. “We should cast the breakup spell.”
