Page 73 of Stella is Starting Over

‘Give her my best,’ he says, looking down at his plate. ‘Or does she still hate me?’

‘Oh, if she ever sees you, she’ll kill you on the spot.’ I smile. ‘So I won’t be passing on the message, but I appreciate it.’

There’s a familiar sensation, a reoccurring prickle of sadness in my chest that he knows Louella so well, inside out, that they were friends for so long, but that his shame at leaving and her judgement of him walking away is such that they’ll never speak to each other again. There are so many things like that. Friends of his I’d see once a year at a wedding and get drunk with, people he worked with who I’d bump into at the end of a night out and share a cigarette with. I took Rose to the park the other day and saw a man on a unicycle, and still reached to message Gav because of some long, tangled in-joke about unicycles that started in about 2010 and has since lost all sense of meaning. I’ll never be able to explain it to anyone, and I don’t say it to him because we’re not like that and I don’t anticipate us ever being like that again, so all those jokes and stories and memories are functionally just lost. Stories about eating spaghetti hoops in our damp flat when we first moved in together, the first shag we had the morning after our wedding, the triumph he had when he finally managed to plant something on our old balcony that actually grew, and the Greek salad I made out of the vegetables when they eventually ripened. None of it exists any more because there’s no one to say it to, and eventually, all these moments in time, floating out there, they’ll die with me because I’ve handed them on to no one. And there must be so many others, so many memories that I don’t know that I’ve forgotten, that Gavin has in his mind, that he doesn’t remind me of, and so those are lost too.

‘What about work?’ Gavin asks, puncturing my thoughts. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Great,’ I say, in genuine honesty. Because it is. ‘I went freelance,’ I tell him.

‘Wow,’ he replies. ‘You finally took the plunge.’

It wasn’t a plunge that I wanted to take. Nine months ago, after having given the combination of single parenting and working full time in the office a really good try, I came to the conclusion that if I kept doing it for much longer I would have a nervous breakdown. So I handed in my notice, and did the scariest thing I’d done since before I had Rose, and went freelance. And it turned out that the scary thing was also the best thing.

These days I drop her off at the childminder, then I walk back and get a cup of coffee, and work from my kitchen table. I write trend reports for the same magazine where I used to work – in fact, I do as much writing for them as I ever did, just a whole lot less admin. And I do other things too. Colour consultations for men who’ve just got divorced and don’t know how to sort their houses out. Sourcing art for picky couples who don’t want anything mass-produced. Writing guides to IKEA make-over hacks. And I love it, all of it, especially the parts where I’m helping other people make their homes feel more like homes. I pick when I work and how I work, and most of the time I work a couple of hours in the evening so I can opt to pick Rose up early and hang out with her in the afternoon. It turns out that parenting for fewer hours a day makes me much better at it – like I’ve got a certain number of Amazing Mum points and I can spend them all in a couple of hours now, rather than rationing them over a whole day and coming out as a moody cow.

‘Why did you want to do this?’ I ask, as we finish our food. ‘Have lunch?’

‘I thought it would be nice to catch up,’ he says, stumbling over his words. ‘And I wanted to say something, and I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Okay,’ I say tentatively. ‘You’re not going to suggest getting back together, are you?’

‘God, no!’ he says, almost insultingly quickly. Then he backtracks. ‘I mean, you’re great, but I think I pretty comprehensively killed our marriage.’

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘I think you did.’

‘So that kind of leads me on to what I wanted to say,’ he goes on, deliberately staring at a fixed point just left of my face so that he doesn’t have to meet my eye. ‘I think I should explain why I left.’

I’d assumed that the story would remain the same, that he wanted to do stand-up. Which, to my absolute horror, he is actually doing. Not on television or radio or anywhere that makes money, obviously. But he’s doing gigs up and down the country and, on the occasions that I’ve given in and googled him, he’s got pretty good reviews. He’s not going to be headlining Live at the Apollo any time soon, but he is doing the thing he wanted to do. As well as part-time consultancy work during the week to pay the bills (and, to my relief, child support).

‘You wanted to do comedy,’ I say. ‘I get that.’

He nods. ‘It is that, but it was other stuff too. I’ve, uh. Well. I’ve been having therapy.’ He says it like he’s admitting to a war crime.

‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘I have too.’

‘And my therapist said, or I said and they helped me realise.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I never really felt like there was enough space for me in our marriage. You were so good at things. You just did it all, like, even when the baby was born, you’d watched all these videos and read all these books, and you just got on with it, and when I did something stupid you’d roll your eyes and act like I was incompetent, and it made me feel shit. But it wasn’t just that, it went back ages, like when we first met and you were so much younger, you didn’t know how to do anything either, and then suddenly it was like overnight you didn’t like us eating in bed or going on package holidays, you wanted things to be different and “better”, and you were, like, in charge of making everything happen and it didn’t leave me with anything to do. I felt. . .’ He trails off. ‘Small. When I was standing next to you.’

He takes a deep breath, and then a long sip of his drink.

There are a lot of things I could say to this. I could point out that he had the same access to the same resources that I did, that he could have learned about taking care of a baby. I had the exact number of hours of parenting experience as he did on the day that Rose was born, but I made being a parent my sole focus and he just watched from the sidelines. Even if he was scared of the baby, he could have learned to cook, he could have learned to paint, any of it. Or I could point out that when we met, I was twenty-three and he was twenty-eight, and that it was perfectly normal for me to ‘grow up’ and want a less studenty way of life, that probably he should have done the same thing. But there wouldn’t be any point. It’s clearly cost him a lot to say it, and he’s not my person any more. I’d gain nothing by telling him any of that and I’d probably hurt his feelings. And while I don’t think it’s my fault he felt small, he’s someone I used to love. I don’t like that he felt that way. So instead of telling him that nothing he says changes the fact that he abandoned me when I needed him the most, I nod.

‘I get that,’ I say. ‘And I never meant to make you feel that way.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I just wasn’t right for you.’

‘Not by the end,’ I agree. ‘At the beginning, I think we were great. And at some point, I don’t know when, we stopped being a good fit. But if we’d realised that then we wouldn’t have had Rose. So I’m glad we screwed it up.’

He nods. ‘Me too.’

‘What did you want to ask?’

Another deep breath. He must have been absolutely terrified on the way here, with the amount of stuff he apparently needed to unload on me. ‘I’m seeing someone.’

That hurts. It has no reason to hurt, but it does. ‘I met her on the circuit – the comedy circuit.’

‘I didn’t think it was likely to be the Formula One circuit,’ I interrupt.

He doesn’t respond to my sarcasm. ‘She’s a comic, and she’s great, and we’ve been seeing each other for about six months. And I wondered how you’d feel about her meeting Rose?’