Page 32 of The Fallback

‘You know that you’re great, too’ her mother said, ‘just as great as Mitch. But it’s about whatyouwant, not about keeping up with other people.’

‘I know, you’re right,’ Rosie wailed, the pent-up emotion now fully unleashed in her voice, ‘but if he does meet someone and settle down then I’ll miss him!’

‘I see,’ her mother said sagely. Rosie wondered just how much her mother did actually see – probably most of the whole sorry mess. ‘You can’t make yourself want a partner and children just because that’s what society wants.’

‘I’m not, Mum!’ Rosie said snapped.

‘OK,’ said Susan, ‘but you can’t make yourself want what your best friend wants, either.’

‘Maybe not,’ Rosie replied, ‘but what if I end up sad and alone? I don’t know whether I do want to settle down and have kids, but I worry that I’ll regret it if I don’t.’

Susan sighed. ‘That’s the perennial problem, darling. No one ever feels ready to settle down and have kids but, sometimes, you meet the right person at the right time and everything falls into place.’

There was a long pause. Rosie considered asking her mother the question that had been burned into her brain for so long: what if you had met the right person at the right time but they didn’t feel the same way? What were you supposed to do then?

For a moment Rosie wondered if they had been cut off, but then her mother continued, ‘And then, sometimes you don’t. And you pick yourself up and get on with the life that’s been handed to you.’

Not for the first time, Rosie wondered how her mother had actually felt when she and Dad had divorced. Susan always brushed away Rosie’s queries with, ‘Oh it was a long time ago, darling.’ But now that Rosie thought about it, her mum would have been younger than she was now when her dad left, leaving Susan with two small children.

‘How did you manage?’ Rosie eventually asked.

‘What with?’ her mother queried, willfully pretending not to understand.

‘With us two? With Chris and me, when Dad left?’

‘Well, I just did what I had to do, I got up each morning and made sure both of you had what you needed and felt loved,’ Susan replied pragmatically.

‘But it must have been so hard, on your own,’ Rosie pushed. ‘Wasn’t it difficult?’

Susan sighed. ‘When things didn’t go as planned, I always found it easiest not to overthink it. I put one foot in front of the other and just kept going, until suddenly, one day, I realised that I wasn’t simply keeping going, I was living and that actually the three of us had made a pretty good life together.’

Rosie felt a strange rush of pride in her irritating, opinionated, brilliant, loving mother and realised that if she was going to go ahead with this, with having a baby with Mitch, that actually having her mother in her corner would be invaluable, because Susan had done it on her own as well.

‘And anyway, darling, it was all such a long time ago, I barely remember it.’

Rosie rolled her eyes, realising that their heart-to-heart was over.

ChapterNine

Rosie woke to the sound of her alarm. The September mornings were still light enough that she could see fingers of sunshine filtering around her curtains. She stretched and rolled over to turn off her alarm. Not for much longer would sunlight greet her in the morning. The days were starting to get shorter and before long, the clocks would change and it would be back to dark mornings and dark evenings. She loved seeing daylight at both ends of the working day, but she also savoured the feelings that dark evenings brought: cosy pubs, festivities beginning, London lit up with Christmas lights.

Showered and wrapped in her dressing gown, Rosie poured herself some cereal in her favourite bowl, the one Mitch had brought her back from a long weekend in Prague many years ago, and carried it to her tiny kitchen table. Picking her phone up, last night came flooding back as she was bombarded with notifications. At first, she presumed they must be from Mitch, who she still hadn't heard from, even forgetting to message her to wish her mother a happy birthday from him. But knowing Mitch he had probably sent her mother flowers instead. Rosie made a note to ask her mother next time they spoke.

But she quickly realised the messages weren’t from Mitch. Notification after notification came pinging through from the dating apps she had reactivated the night before. Gavin had liked her, Simon had sent her a message, Brandon wanted to know if she was single.

Why would she be on these sites “Brandon” if she wasn’t single? But Rosie had lived long enough and experienced enough of the London dating scene to know that what she thought was completely unacceptable in a relationship was, to other people, perfectly normal, sometimes even desirable.

The notifications kept rolling in. For a moment, Rosie watched them scroll down her phone screen before she placed it face down on the table, feeling slightly sick. She couldn’t face dealing with them right now and she had to leave for work. At some point she should go through them, just to check that theywereall offensive before she permanently deleted them. But there were loads of them, how did people do this and hold down a full-time job? Maybe she could hire someone to handle it for her? Mitch would be perfect but getting him more involved would derail the whole purpose of this endeavour.

It was a beautiful morning, the sun was cutting through the early haze with the promise of warmth later on in the day. Rosie hesitated on her doorstep – bus or tube this morning? The tube would be quicker but it would be busy by now. She looked at her watch; she’d never get a seat at this time and she really didn’t fancy starting her week in the armpit of a stranger on the Northern line. So she turned left towards the bus stop. It would take longer but so long as she missed one stuffed full of school kids, she should get a seat.

Ten minutes later, and Rosie was happily sat on the upper deck of the bus. She even had a double seat to herself, although she knew that wouldn’t last. Breathing deeply, she decided now might be a good time to brave those messages. Hopefully she would be able to unearth any promising ones swiftly and delete the rest.

The first ten were predictable spam, the eleventh was a photo which Rosie feared would now be indelibly imprinted on her mind. She spent the ten minutes it took to get through the traffic lights near Vauxhall Bridge trying to work out if there was a way of reporting a user for sending unsolicited explicit pictures before giving up and hoping someone else would do it. What possessed people to think that strangers would want to see intimate parts of their anatomy? Swiping away a message from Jasmine without reading it – she must remember to message her back later – she went back to Match, hoping not to see any more pictures which would make her sick in her lap. The bus stalled in traffic but Rosie barely noticed, becoming increasingly engrossed in and grossed-out by her fellow humans.

And then there was one message that took her by surprise, actually sounding genuine – in that he could spell, didn’t sound like a complete lunatic and hadn’t sent her an intimate picture by way of a bizarre flirting ritual. Intrigued, Rosie clicked on his profile only to have her hopes dashed immediately; it was obvious that the man in question was at least twenty years older than her. Rosie realised she really needed to double check she had set an age limit on Match. She gave him credit for putting up a realistic picture and listing his actual age, but not enough credit to countenance dating him. She declined the ‘match’.

She almost missed the last message, deleting it along with the rest of the junk. But the name caught her eye; Graham – the academic, classical music enthusiast – had written her a message. The bus pulled in at a stop almost jolting her phone from her hand. She swore quietly under her breath and caught her bag just in time before it fell onto the floor.

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