The Forgotten Guide to Happiness

CHAPTER THREE

Reflections

If we could edit our own lives, there are plenty of things in mine that I would delete and rewrite, but looking back, the way I said goodbye to Mark is the main one I would change. It was more than a year since we’d first met up while I was travelling. We’d been living together for almost four amazing months and for me, our relationship was still exciting and new. But the day he was due to leave for his assignment in the Bahamas I was part of a panel of authors at the British Library, so we said our farewells at the flat. His blond hair was still wet from the shower and he kissed me long and hard and as I looked into his brown eyes I was thinking, I really have to go now. Mark never closed his eyes when we kissed and I kept mine open too because the kiss was deeper that way. It was a kiss to remember him by.

But my mind was more on the time than the kiss, because I was nervous and I didn’t want to be late for the panel. I loosened the hug but he was still holding me tight.

‘I wish you were coming with me,’ he said into my hair.

‘Yes.’ I should have said me too, but that would have been hypocritical. I’d chosen to stay behind because I had Love Crazy to promote and the book meant everything to me. Being a novelist had been a lifelong dream since the age of six when I’d self-published a slightly derivative story on coloured paper, which my mother had immediately ruined by correcting the mistakes in black felt-tip.

We had one final kiss before I hurriedly left the flat, but at the door something made me turn back. I told him reassuringly, ‘It’s not as if you’ll be away for long.’

He nodded.

It turned out to be a clear example of dramatic irony.

I’d forgotten what it was like, being alone. After living with Mark, the solitude was more empty than I remembered and I missed him more than I’d imagined. It wasn’t just physical; I missed his presence too, and without his energy I felt lethargic and aimless, as if I was ill. To begin with, we spoke to each other most days but when I went to Penrith to do workshops for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s conference, we messaged instead. I used my time productively and wrote drafts of short stories, planned the outline of my next novel, updated my blog and received humorous tweets from my followers on how to keep busy while Mark was away.

I counted down the days until finally it was time to get my legs waxed, my eyebrows threaded and my hair blow-dried and, feeling good, I took the train to Heathrow to welcome him back. The idea was to surprise him.

His flight was due to land at 11 am and I got there earlier than I’d expected so I bought a sandwich and a coffee. As I ate my sandwich I studied the people around me on my side of the barrier; the drivers holding up names, the girls checking their phones, the family groups distracting bored children, the parents watching hopefully. I watched the passengers coming into the arrivals hall. Some looked tanned and energised, others were tired, doggedly pushing trolleys, but happiest of all were the eager travellers who came through knowing somebody was there to greet them.

And as I watched, each reunion almost brought tears to my eyes. I imagined what it must be like to get off a long flight and see someone who loved you waiting to welcome you home.

For Mark, that someone was me.

Glancing at the indicator board, I saw that his flight had landed and I felt the thrill of excitement. I threw away my cup and sandwich wrapper, wiped my hands with a lemon wipe and edged nearer to the barrier until I found myself standing next to an elderly man in a navy blazer who was holding a bouquet of lilies. Their heavy sweet scent was so strong that I turned to look at him.

He smiled back at me. I had a warm feeling of connection; we were two different generations there for the same loving purpose.

I could see the faint shape of people beyond the sliding doors and suddenly the travellers were coming through in a rush with their Virgin Atlantic tags. The old man and I pressed ourselves against the barriers, scanning faces. My heart was beating hard as I searched for Mark and the people came through in wave after wave and then the cabin crew came through with their wheelie bags and the crush around us gradually eased as the drivers met up with their passengers and the divided families became whole again and after a while, out of the original welcoming committee, it was just the old man and me.

We gave each other a wry, philosophical shrug. Well – it hadn’t gone the way I’d imagined but I thought about it logically. The airline could have lost Mark’s bags and he could be still in baggage claim. Or maybe he’d left his passport on the plane and then had to be accompanied back to look for it. Or I’d missed him in the crowd. Of three possible options, I considered that was the worst scenario, the one that ruined everything.

With a beep-beep-beep, an airport golf cart came through the automatic doors carrying an old lady with fierce red hair and my elderly companion knocked his flowers on the barrier as he ducked under it, showering me with pollen, and greeted her with a kiss.

That just left me.

My mood had changed completely by this time; I was dulled by the anticlimax. Even if Mark had just at that moment come through the doors I could only have managed to express relief. The thrill of the surprise element had gone. So I phoned him.

When he answered, he sounded groggy. ‘Hello?’

‘Mark, where are you? Are you okay?’ I asked urgently.

There was silence. It seemed to go on forever. I recognised it as the silence of a storyteller wondering where to start.

‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘I was going to call you.’

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. ‘I’m at Heathrow,’ I said indignantly, as if it would make a difference.

‘Okay,’ he said warily. ‘What’s the time?’

I looked up at the indicator board. ‘Ten past twelve.’ A new crowd of meeters and greeters was gathering and I edged my way through them towards the relative quietness of a bureau de change. ‘Ten past seven, your time,’ I added, because at that point I knew without a doubt 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.

CHAPTER FOUR

Catalysts for Change

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 the screen.

The old man sensed my interest and glanced at me crossly. He turned back to the advisor and huddled further across the desk, like a man with something to hide – an exam paper, for example.

‘In Hong Kong?’

The advisor paused. ‘No, UK.’

‘No address in UK,’ the old man said sternly.

‘There’s nothing here under this name. But then how—’

The old man scribbled something down. ‘Try this way,’ he instructed.

Triple-tapping of the keyboard, and then … ‘Sorry. I’m not finding it. If you have your account number—’

‘I give you my money! Hundreds! Thousands!’ the old man cried out in panic.

Imagine that! What a nightmare! Putting all your money in a bank and suddenly they’ve got no record of you.

A slim, blonde woman stood over me. ‘Are you waiting to see an advisor?’

‘Yes,’ I said, so I don’t know how the story turned out.

Better than mine, I hope.

We walked over to one of the empty desks. ‘How can I help you?’ she asked warmly as I sat down, which led me into a false sense of security. She reminded me of Meryl Streep, with her glasses and her up-do, so I told her the whole sorry story about my book being turned down. As the horror of it came back afresh, I asked her for an overdraft to keep me going until I wrote another novel and got my advance.

She turned her attention from me to the screen. ‘You already have an unauthorised overdraft which is costing you five pounds a day,’ she said blandly.

‘Five pounds a day? No wonder I’ve got no money. If you could just authorise that overdraft so that I don’t have to throw money away, that will be great.’ I was showing her how astute I was, financially speaking.

‘You have already exceeded your overdraft limit.’

‘Well, I’d like to extend it. It’s just temporary, until I get my advance.’

‘What date are you expecting to receive that?’ she asked, fingers poised so she could type it in.

I was starting to feel uneasy. ‘I don’t have an exact date because I have to write a new storyline first but I’ll do it as soon as possible, obviously.’

She frowned and I remembered I didn’t actually like Meryl Streep much.

‘Approximately how long will it take?’ she asked. Her voice was a couple of degrees colder.

‘Well …’ I began, getting panicky – it was giving me writer’s block just thinking about it, ‘I actually know two authors who’ve written a whole book in a fortnight.’ One of them is a woman with an overactive thyroid. If I ever have to have an illness, that’s the one I’d choose because it revs you up – the body is working perpetual overtime and you can get a lot done with that spare energy. An overactive thyroid is like natural cocaine. On the minus side, like cocaine, it makes you more prone to having a heart attack, but I’m just saying, if.

She lowered her fingers and turned her attention from the screen to me. ‘You’re saying you’ll only get paid once you’ve written a new book?’

‘Yes.’ I shouldn’t have poured my heart out to her – bad mistake. I thought she’d feel sorry for me, but here she was holding it against me already.

She looked at her screen again. ‘You currently don’t have sufficient funds to cover your direct debits.’

‘Exactly! That’s why I’m here.’

She was so frosty you would have thought I was asking her to lend me money out of her own pocket. Where was the compassion, the eagerness to help?

After a bit more tapping and clicking, she said, ‘As you have reached your overdraft limit, we can’t extend it. A limit is a limit,’ she explained, enunciating clearly.

It was the way she said it that annoyed me. ‘Hey, I know what a limit is! Words are my life!’ Knowing how ridiculous I sounded, but I was desperate. This wasn’t going at all the way I’d imagined. I hadn’t realised that banks love you when you have money, and they go off you when you don’t, like the worst sort of friends. ‘So what do I do now? If you stop my direct debits I won’t be able to pay my rent and I’ll be homeless. Is that what you want?’

‘I would like to remind you not to raise your voice.’ She pointed to a sign by the window which read: Abuse of advisors will not be tolerated.

I’d always wondered why that notice was there, and now I knew. I jumped to my feet in frustration.

‘Well you’re not getting this,’ I said, waving my royalty cheque. Impulsively, I tore it up and threw the bits over the table. My heart was pumping hard as I walked towards the stairs.

One day’s overdraft money lost in a pointless gesture. I immediately regretted it.

Back home, I lay on the lemon sofa and realised to my dismay I was going to have to ring my mother for help. She lives in Loano, Italy. (Literally, the last resort.) She can detect laziness even over the phone so as I pressed her number I sat on the edge of my desk so as to sound alert and also to enjoy the view which in all probability wasn’t going to be mine for much longer.

‘Pronto!’ she answered impatiently.

‘Mum? It’s me. Lana,’ I added for clarity.

‘Oh, this is a surprise,’ she said.

She’d been a teacher, and then a head teacher, and after the divorce she’d taken early retirement and gone to the Italian Riviera to boss a whole new country around for a change. I can spot a teacher a mile off. They’re the ones telling people off.

I took a deep breath and once again I felt the burning shame of failure. ‘Listen, I’ve got something to tell you. My new book got turned down yesterday.’

‘Got? You mean it was turned down.’

See?

Now that she’d corrected my grammar, she waited for me to go on.

‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you.’

‘Oh,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps now is a good time to think about doing something else.’

‘But I don’t want to.’ My voice started to rise. Right. Be calm. Regroup. Clear throat. ‘I didn’t call you for advice. The point is, without Mark, I can’t afford next month’s rent.’

She was silent for a long moment. ‘You’re calling to borrow money?’

‘Yes, please. It’s just until I come up with a new story.’

‘Why don’t you try asking the bank?’

Desperation made me flippant. ‘I have tried them, and now I’m trying you.’

‘I see.’ She managed to put a surprising amount of disapproval into that short sentence.

When I was little, someone gave her a book by Libby Purves called How (Not) to Be a Perfect Mother, and she’s stuck rigidly to the concept ever since.

After a long silence, she sighed deeply. ‘Do you want to come and stay here for a while?’

Did I? It wasn’t the solution I would have chosen, but it was still a solution and I grasped it, trying not to sound too eager.

‘I sort of do,’ I said.

‘Sort of do?’

‘Is that not grammatically correct?’

‘Come then, if that’s what you’d like.’

Honestly, no wonder I prefer making things up to real life. ‘But would you like me to come? You know, with enthusiasm?’

‘You’re my daughter,’ she said, which wasn’t really an answer.

I probably expect too much of her. She’s never been a Cath Kidston, cupcake-baking type of mother. If I went to stay it would like having twenty-four-hour private tuition from her. And from her point of view, she would be wasting her teaching skills on a bratty and reluctant pupil. We love each other but we don’t get each other in the slightest.

I’m guessing this was going through her mind, too. ‘Why don’t you go back to journalism?’ she suggested.

‘Definitely not! I hated that job. I hated visiting people when they were at their worst. I hated court reports, and seeing the looks on their families’ faces as their men were described as being of “bad character”. I loathed the whole Crufts Doc in Dog Collar Shock thing. Yuk!’

‘In that case, have you thought about teaching creative writing?’ she suggested.

‘Hah! Those that can’t, teach,’ I said bitterly, managing to insult us both in one sentence. I’d turned down a job as tutor at the London Literary Society a few months previously on the grounds I was too busy writing my sequel. Well, I’d had money then; I could afford to.

‘Actually, you make a far better teacher if you can do a thing,’ my mother said, ‘and despite your current setback you’re a published, successful author. Capitalise on it.’