The Forgotten Guide to Happiness. Sophie Jenkins
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that he was still in the Bahamas and that he hadn’t caught the flight after all. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m staying on here a bit longer.’
I felt so instantly bad, so painfully crushed by unhappiness that I just wanted to know the worst so that I could stop feeling this utter dread about what he was going to say. But at the same time, I was terribly scared to hear it.
‘Mark, just tell me, is this it?’
Again, the long pause.
I waited helplessly for the judgement.
‘Look, I’ll call you later,’ he said finally, and he cut me off.
Back home, waiting for the call, I obsessively went through his texts and checked his Instagram and Facebook pages and studied the pictures he’d posted of the free-diver, Helga. I rang his parents, Judy and Stephen, hoping that they could tell me what was going on, but although Judy greeted me warmly she was vague and said she believed he was working. I left messages pleading with him to phone me.
He finally did get in touch, jolting me awake from a restless sleep a couple of weeks later. From the background noise it sounded as if he was in a bar. He was remorseful, but he told me he was staying in Long Island a bit longer because this was a good assignment, and it might turn out to be one of his best.
If he’d left it there, it would have been easier to live with. But he went on to say that there had been too much pressure on us being the perfect couple and he didn’t like the way people assumed they knew him because of Marco in Love Crazy. He said I’d written things that were meant to be private. He needed some space because we’d rushed into living together, he said, forgetting it was his idea in the first place.
I listened to his familiar voice against the drunken tumult of the background noise and stared at the shadows on the ceiling.
‘So it’s my fault?’ I didn’t say it indignantly but more out of self-knowledge. I couldn’t make people like me, and the fact that he’d left me didn’t come as a surprise. My pillow was damp. I hadn’t realised I was crying.
‘I’ll call you when I get back,’ he said.
But as the time went by, every buzz and ping of my phone ignited hope and then plunged me back into a depression which drained the colour from my life. When I first wrote in my blog about his non-appearance at the airport the supportive messages helped a lot, but people don’t have a great tolerance for relentless misery. Love Crazy was in the bestseller lists and the vitriolic responses I got for ruining the dream of happy ever after resulted in my total withdrawal from social media. I gave up the blog and poured my emotions into Heartbreak.
And look how that worked out.
As I closed the door to my flat behind me, Mark’s black and red Trek bike cast its shadow on the wall like a Banksy stencil. I hung my red jacket on the handlebars. I’d bought the bike for him when I got the first payment for Love Crazy and it was currently my most expensive coat rack.
I was in the hall, still standing by the bike, still holding the heavy Tesco bag and listening intently because I sensed something strange about the flat; something off-kilter. I crept towards the lounge, caught a glimpse of movement, a flash of blue and red, and I froze. But no. It was the reflection of the Tesco bag. Still, I waited and listened.
Despite what thriller writers want you to believe, no woman in her right mind goes into her flat, senses something suspicious and calls out, ‘Hello? Anyone there?’ No – the thing to do is to be alert, and at the faintest sound, run back out of the door as fast as you can. This is writing what you know. However, I want to point out that writing what you know doesn’t mean everything you know is worth writing about. I was holding the evidence right here. Just because a story is true doesn’t make it a good story.
I looked out onto Parliament Hill Fields. I could hear the distant repetitive thwok from the tennis courts. My desk was cluttered with pens, mugs and pages, just as I’d left it that morning when I was full of optimism. The table was clear. The cushions on the lemon sofa were plumped. All seemed as it should, but it felt wrong.
I put my typescript on the table and went cautiously into the shady bedroom. Duvet crumpled, blinds still shut. And suddenly I realised what was different. When I’d left that morning, Heartbreak was a literary tragedy that was going to support me and help me pay my bills. Now it was a worthless cliché. I’d been dumped by a guy; simple as that.
Here I was, surrounded like Miss Havisham by the relics of our love story – his unwanted bike, his discarded clothes, the last fumes of his aftershave. Stripped of literary worth, they were meaningless. No story here; nothing to look at, stand back, stand back.
Writing Heartbreak, I’d imagined Mark reading it and rushing back, begging for forgiveness, appalled at the pain he’d caused me. Now I realised he would have resented me for making him feel bad. Who wants a book that makes you feel bad? As Kitty said, that’s the sort of thing we can do for ourselves.
Well, I’d finally got the message.
It was like taking yellow sunglasses off and seeing the dull hue of reality.
House keys, bike, clothes, me.
Who leaves all that behind? Someone who doesn’t want them any more, that’s who.
Next morning I woke up, hungover, with my pillow over my head, fighting for air. I’d slept badly all night, just on the edge of unconsciousness, and rolled over, relieved to see dawn bleeding into the room. I felt shabby, with a pounding headache that made me squint. Even with the curtains closed, the room seemed unreasonably bright.
My failure crowded me in and I got out of bed, walking on a lean. Glancing at the empty bottle and the greasy pizza box, depression clung to me like a cold, wet cleansing cloth.
The letterbox rattled and there in the hall lay a letter from my publishers, forwarded to me by Kitty.
I tore it open, hoping that the publishers had made a mistake and they wanted Heartbreak after all, but no. Still, it was the next best thing. It was a royalty cheque.
For five pounds and seventy-one pence.
I studied it carefully. How could that be right? I pointed at each word as I read it, hoping I was delusional. But no.
How had this happened? I was now officially broke.
Fresh panic made my heartbeat thud chaotically around my skull like a squash ball.
I held my head in my hands to steady it and I sat at the table and suddenly recalled that I’d had some drunken inspiration for a new plot. Trembling, I checked my notebook in case I had become Stephen King under the influence. I’d written: Mopeds. Virgin. Stern letter. £10,000-ish. There might be a story there somewhere but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I got dressed and decided to address the main problem, insolvency, by going to visit my bank.
I had to wait to see an advisor. I sat on one of three seats by a low orange partition that acted as a wall for the desks behind it. The light buzzed like a bee in a jar. Although there were three desks set at angles, only one was occupied so I settled down to wait, and with nothing else to do I watched the advisor, a thin man with vertically gelled hair, greet his client, an old, bald Asian guy with an anxious expression. He sat down cautiously and pushed a paper across the table.
‘Is this your name?’ the advisor asked him.
The old man leant forward and confirmed it in a low voice.
‘What’s your address?’ the advisor asked, studying