Page 2 of Under Your Spell

‘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 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-plan kitchen/living room. Yesterday it was full of Ikea’s finest flat-pack, 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 antique 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 car boot 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 of our furniture. He was benevolently leaving me the flat in the city that I could no longer afford to pay rent on. 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 who dunnit, 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, practised 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 towards 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-practised 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, despite the fact Serena is still happily drinking from her near-empty bottle. ‘The D-word sounds like you’re talking about dicks.’