Page 32 of Statistically Speaking
A kiss that promises the whole of the universe—at least for tonight.
Chapter 13
112 Steps to a Difficult Conversation and One Angry Garden Gnome
When I wake up, I can still smell him on the pillows; a vague echo of his aftershave. My senses luxuriate in it, and in the vivid memories of the night before. I allow myself a few brief moments of respite before I force my eyes awake, force my brain to become alert, force myself into a new day.
He is gone, I can tell immediately. I have a second where I am both disappointed and relieved, and then I see the note that he has left on the pillow next to me.
I pick it up and read:
Doing the Drive of Shame home to get a shower before work. See you later, gorgeous. PS: On this day in history, I discovered that Gemma Jones snores!
I hold the paper, roll onto my back, smiling at the ceiling.
“No I don’t!” I protest to the empty room. Though I am forced to concede the point that I usually sleep alone, and therefore can’t really make a solid case for my defense.
It is still, for a little while, a distraction, this thing with Karim. This undefined, ever-changing, pretty damn spectacularthing with Karim—but I know that it will not distract forever. That I must reenter the real world at some point. I glance at my phone on the bedside table, see that it is almost 9:00 a.m. I should be at work by now.
I bite my lip, screw up my eyes against the weak fingers of sunlight that are curling around the edges of the curtains.
I pick up the phone and do something I have never done before in my entire working life: call in sick. In all my years, through coughs and colds and all the other sniffles that students like to share, I have managed to fight my way in to teach.
Perhaps it is because I am so committed to my job. Perhaps it is because I don’t have anything much else to do that is more important. It is easy for me to be committed, I know—easy for me to be organized, to cope with the long hours, the meetings, the politics, the planning, and the grading. Easy for me not to get ground down by it all—because it is the biggest single thing in my life.
I know my colleagues have to fit a lot more life into the hours they have available. They need to make marriages work, look after babies, their own teenagers, in some cases care for elderly parents. In the case of a few of the women, they have menopause thrown in as an extra treat. It is hard to find the time and energy and have anything left over for themselves.
I have none of those commitments or challenges, and it frees me up in a way that is a strength in my career—but, I suspect, a weakness in my life.
Today, I decide, rolling around on the sheets and building up to a dismount, I will be kind to myself. I will be gentle in the way I think, delicate in the demands I place on my time and my mind, as polite to myself as I would be to anyone else.I will “throw a sickie,” as they say here, to buy myself the day I need to rediscover my equilibrium.
I get up, shower, eat a slice of toast. I tidy up the glasses from last night and smile at the thought of how it ended.
I lounge around the flat, imagining it filled with laughter and love and light. It is a strange idea, a foreign concept, the thought of deliberately opening myself up to what will probably end badly.
That, of course, is what I am up against: the mental roadblocks that tell me nothing good can come of all of this.
By the time I am dressed in my running clothes and ready to pop down to see Margie, it is almost 11:00 a.m. I have wasted so much of the morning, and it feels decadent.
I jog down my fourteen stairs, planning to take Bill out and then to take Margie out. We will go to one of the nice coffee shops in town, possibly in disguise in case I bump into anyone from work. I tell myself it will be good, that we will eat overpriced pastries and watch the world go by while I tell her all about Katie. I will tell her how sad I feel, how empty, how I had pinned so many unspoken hopes and dreams on it all—but I will also tell her that I will cope. That I will grieve for my losses, that I will look to the future, and I will be better and stronger for it.
I might even, I decide, tell her all about Karim—the edited version at least. She’s getting on, after all; I don’t want to give her a heart attack.
As I make my way around the side of the building to Margie’s terrace, though, I hear voices. This is not unusual—Margie is well known in the area, and dog walkers often stop to chat to her as they stroll past.
But this time, the voice sounds familiar. The southern accent, the lighthearted tone, the infectious laughter.
I come to a standstill and peek round the corner, seeing that I am right. Erin is standing at the gate, scratching Bill behind the ears as he stands on his back legs to get closer to her, licking her fingers and making her giggle.
I pause, consider turning back—neither of them has seen me, and Bill has been distracted by affection. I could still make a run for it. Immediately I give myself a telling-off—so much for my brave new world if I run and hide at the first sign of an awkward situation.
I arrange my face into something approaching okay and push myself onward.I can do this, I think. These people are friends, and I need all the friends I can get. Normal people have friends, and even if I don’t always feel normal, I should at the very least bloody well try.
“Hi!” I say breezily as I walk round the corner, feigning surprise. “I see you two have met!”
They both look at me with odd expressions, and I wonder if I have overdone the breezy and edged into manic.
“Gemma! You look... okay,” says Erin, frowning slightly. “After last night, I was a bit concerned, and then Katie messaged me to say you were off sick today. I didn’t have your address, but you’d described this place and Bill and Margie to me so well that I thought I’d amble along and hope for the best.”
