Amanda looked at the customers already seated beside her. A couple of determined-looking Christmas shoppers, scribbling lists while they waited for the shops to open. That reminded her—she hadn’t bought a thing yet. She’d been away last Christmas. A phone call home had been gift enough. Or so she’d told herself. This year she might need actual tangible gifts. A mum fed her baby a croissant, pushing small bites of the flaky pastry into an eager little mouth while talking on a mobile phone wedged under her chin. A guy with a laptop caught her eye. He had red hair, teased and gelled into a fin, and he was wearing a sky blue polo-neck sweater. It made him look like Tintin. She was smiling to herself, wondering whether he knew he looked like Tintin, when she saw him look up from his newspaper—the
Guardian
—
and follow someone with a long lascivious gaze, his mouth practically hanging open. The object of his undisguised desire was a tall, willowy blonde, wearing skintight black trousers and unfeasibly high-heeled dominatrix boots. Oh God, she thought. How obvious. As Miss Whip-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 53
lash passed and was gone, he looked back toward his paper, but his eyes lighted on her instead. He caught her amused disapproval and almost squirmed with discomfort, coloring pink above the polo neck and giving a small shrug that admitted his guilt. Amanda raised a mock judgmental eyebrow at him, smiled, and shook her head at him.
An hour later, she was reorganizing a filing system to which the last temp had clearly not been emotionally committed. Everything was filed under M for miscellaneous. Fired up by a double shot of espresso and a fervent desire not to be drawn into the office politics that simmered and occasionally boiled over around her, she attacked the task. Who could do this every day?
Barbara’s Journal
The Shop
I’m a bit sad today. We’ve just come back from the solicitor’s office—I’ve signed all the right pieces of paper, and the shop is not mine anymore. I sold it to someone really nice. I’m pleased about that. I even turned down a slightly higher offer from some woman I just didn’t think was going to be right for it. A husband and wife team—they have a new baby, and they’re going to move a bit more toward toys and little handknits and things, but essentially keep it the same. You can see that they are brimming over with ideas and schemes. Part of me wanted to talk to them about it—their excitement was contagious. But I didn’t. I signed the papers, handed over the keys, and came home. It makes me sad. I remember when I felt that way about it.
Mark says we’ll get another shop, when I’m better. Put the money away while I achieve that, let it grow a bit in a high-interest account, and then get a better site, more square footage. I got extra 54 e l i z a b e t h
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money, for the stock and the goodwill. . . . I was a bit surprised to see how much it was worth, when I remember what it cost me when I started it. . . . He says maybe we’ll put a little coffee bar in the back, with one of those shiny Barista machines, cater for the ladies who lunch. But I don’t know if I ever will.
That shop was much more than a business to me. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a good business, she says proudly! Wasn’t I the original juggling single mother? That and pioneering meditation techniques in labor, which I’ll tell you about later. Did you girls know what a model for the modern woman your mother was?! I knew diddly-squat when I got started. Thank God for all the fun Mum and Dad never had. They left it to me. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to get me started—the rent, stock, money to print flyers and advertise in the local paper and paint the front of the shop. I loved that color. Sea foam, it’s called. I remember being so proud and so excited and so bloody terrified, standing and watching the painter peel off the tape where he’d put the name of the shop.
White letters, Castellar typeface, on a sea foam background. It looked so classy. The bank manager and the accountant scared the
**** out of me, and I didn’t think I’d ever get the hang of that side of it. But I did. Studied my bookkeeping course and all the govern-ment small-business handouts at night, when you lot were sleeping.
Sometimes I ironed at the same time. Who knew you could? I was exhausted, most of the time. Made some pretty big errors in the early days, too, though none of them, thank God, big enough to put me out of business . . . although it was touch-and-go for the first few years.
I found a niche in the local market. More luck than judgment. It was never going to make us rich, but it made us independent, which was worth more than gold to me, after Donald and I split up. I’ve always tried to teach you girls that. Always be able to walk away and be on your own. Sounds defeatist, doesn’t it, when you say it
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like that. But it’s anything but, I think. There’s such a joy and such a satisfaction in it.
But like I say, the shop was much more than that to me. It was my office, Amanda and Hannah’s playroom, Jennifer and Lisa’s homework space. Every corner of that shop had a memory of you four in it. I met Mark there. It saved my life.
And I loved it. Every new delivery, every satisfied customer, every new friend made across the counter.
And now I’ve sold it. Mark asked me if I’d ever hoped one of you would take it on. I’d never thought about it. I suppose it might have been nice. But it breaks my cardinal rule. Well, one of my cardinal rules. You four are not here to live out my dreams for me.
I’ve had my dreams, and some of them have come true and some of them haven’t. But they’ve been my dreams. You have to have your own. Have them, cherish them, and never let go of them. Do something you love. Whoever was the fool who decided that we should work for six days and rest for one? But if you’re doing something you love, you’ll be okay.
Well sorry, Mum, but Amanda most certainly had not found the thing she loved to do. This was mental treading water. What she did for money. That was all. It was nearly time. Amanda knew this cycle of old.
Every time she came back from a trip, she tried. Tried to put down some roots in an everyday ordinary life. It usually worked for a while. She would get a job. Pay rent. Spend as little as possible of whatever was left, and save the rest. She knew she was old enough now to be saving for a deposit on a flat. Or even a car. But she only ever saved for plane tickets.
She was always getting ready to leave. Not that she didn’t have fun mean-while. Amanda always had fun.
Bex was an old friend. They’d been at school together. She and Amanda had stayed in touch all these years via postcards, texts, and the occasional 56 e l i z a b e t h
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drunken night in London together when Amanda was home. They weren’t especially close—after all, Amanda wasn’t especially close to anyone—
but there was an empty room. Bex was a beautician at an upscale salon off Oxford Street, just up from the temping job. Probably the most indiscreet beautician in London with a hilarious line in disgusting stories about her wealthy clientele and their excess body hair. Their third flatmate, sourced from an ad in
Loot,
was Josh—a gay hairdresser who wore sunglasses in all weathers and worked in some cutting-edge place in Sloane Square. Apparently he even wore his sunglasses while cutting, and he pretended to be vaguely Italian, when, in fact, he was the son of a librarian and a dentist, from Saxmundham. When she was with them at home, Amanda always felt vaguely as though she were taking part in anarchic, hilarious dinner theater. There was always loud music, and cocktails. And usually a walk-on cast of extras, since they were both fairly promiscuous. Sunday breakfast (served around lunchtime) was often a crowded affair. What they had in common, and what made this living arrangement okay, for now, was a total, dedicated lack of concern for the future. No pension, no career ladder, no ticking biological clocks or great need to nest. The flat was sham-bolic, none too clean and full of laughter.
Which was more than could be said for the office she had had the mis-fortune to be assigned to by the woman at the temping agency. Still, two weeks to go. Christmas, she’d stay. She’d promised Hannah. And then probably New Year’s—there was some all-night rave in a warehouse in Lewisham Josh had tickets to—but then . . . then she’d be on her way.
She wanted to go to Australia. She’d saved enough for a ticket—if she waited until later in January, when all the long-lost relatives had finished toing and froing, then relative bargains could be had. Maybe via Bali, or back to Thailand. She’d been there about four years ago and loved it. She’d stayed in a beach hut in Kata Noi with a Kiwi she’d met on a train in Bangkok. Three weeks of swimming and lying in a hammock, eating amazing seafood from stalls near the beach for pennies, and talking late into the night with the backpackers passing through. They all felt
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like they were extras in
The Beach
—they’d discovered Shangri-la, and it was theirs. The beach hut with the narrow veranda, where she had hung her bikinis to dry and sat to watch electrifying sunsets, wouldn’t be there anymore. The Boxing Day tsunami would have swept it away. But still, she might go back. God knows they needed the tourists to go.
Sometimes, when she was filing, Amanda thought about her addic-tion to being on the move. About whether she was running away or running toward. She loved the mystery of a plane landing somewhere new, of a train pulling into a station. She loved to stand in the middle of a market square, or a park, or a beach and take in the smells and the sounds of a world that was completely new to her. She loved being an anonymous extra in a crowd scene, like some real-life “Where’s Waldo?”—
a tiny face, wide-eyed with wonder, in a vast, ever-changing picture. She didn’t get frightened. Well, hardly ever. Once, in Malaysia, packed into a boat she knew was too full, asked to sleep for eight hours on a deck no more than four feet deep. And maybe a few times on trains and in buses, feeling a thousand strange eyes on her and her belongings, and fighting the overwhelming desire to sleep. But she was a smart girl—she didn’t do stupid things, and she didn’t take daft risks. Mum had insisted on at least one phone call a month, and she’d always made it—and, of course, now there was e-mail everywhere, and it was almost impossible to be lost. She supposed, briefly, that she’d call Mark now.
If she was running away, and not running—arms wide—toward the world, she was running away from responsibility and pressure and obligation. And she wondered why the whole world didn’t have the sense to do the same thing. Surely, she was the sane one.
It was at least five degrees colder the next morning. Bex had a day off, and Josh had never even made it home, so Amanda went to work alone, stopping outside the tube station to pick up one of the free papers that had nothing interesting to say, so that, five stops in, the paper languished on the empty seat next to her, and she was almost back 58 e l i z a b e t h
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to sleep, her head leaning back against the bulk of the thick scarf around her neck. She was thinking about warm water lapping at her toes, splayed in white sand.
“Excuse me—is this yours?”
Her head sprang up with an awkward snap. It was Tintin. What were the odds? He was holding out the free sheet.
She shook her head, and he sat down. Winter coats made the seats too small, and his whole length made contact with hers. She shifted slightly and sat up straighter.
She wasn’t sure he recognized her, or that if he did, he intended to acknowledge the fact, until he turned to her and smiled the sheepish smile of yesterday again.
She looked at their fellow passengers, establishing that there were no obvious candidates for his equally obvious admiration in the carriage, and replicated his small shrug by way of reply, rolling her eyes.
“Sorry about that.” His voice was deeper than she was expecting.
Tintin had quite a high-pitched voice. But Tintin was Belgian, wasn’t he, and this guy was clearly British. Although not very—British people didn’t normally try to establish a conversation with you on an underground train at 8:15 in the morning.
That was another thing she loved about traveling. Donning Birken-stocks and a rucksack—a proper one—was like wearing a sign on your forehead that said “Talk to me—I’m up for making friends with like-minded individuals!” Like a secret handshake, granting admission to a society where you pretty much liked everyone else who belonged.
“Hey,” she smiled. “You’re a guy, aren’t you?”
The commuters around them started to listen, although they didn’t look up from their newspapers and romance novels and county court summonses. A couple who’d been hanging on to the central pole and facing the other way, staring into space, angled themselves so that they could see who was talking. You may as well be on an orange box at Hyde Park Corner.
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He smiled a broad, surprisingly sexy smile. The sheepishness had vanished. “And you’re a feminist, I gather?”
“Just a woman who’s learned that men are utterly predictable. More realist than feminist.”
“So young, yet so jaded.”
She laughed. This was a novelty. Normally conversations like this were limited to old episodes of
Dawson’s Creek,
which she only knew about because Josh had a giant crush on Dawson and watched the show on Sunday afternoons while he recovered from the night before. In sunglasses.
Personally, she’d far rather have Pacey, but . . . that wasn’t the point.
This was their stop. Her stop. The Starbucks stop, at least. They stood up at the same time. He gestured with one arm for her to leave the carriage first, and then he walked beside her. She was amused.
“I’m Ed.”
“I’m late.”
“You want to walk faster? We could walk faster.”
Instead she stopped. The commuters behind her tutted and walked around her. Lemming-out-of-line alert. “Look . . . is this strange—albeit novel—approach something you make a habit of?”