You're the One That I Don't Want

  ‘Seriously, they are so cute together.’

  Oh my God. Make it stop. Please. For the love of God. Please make it stop.

  ‘I’m just going to get a top-up,’ says Adam, and moves away before I can stop him.

  Fuck.

  I think about draining my drink and following him, but I’m not quick enough, I realise, with dismay. Reluctantly I turn back to Brad, who’s now droning on about himself. I try to look interested – ‘Uh-huh . . . really? . . . Uh-huh . . .’ – but ten minutes later and I’m still caught in this stranglehold of a conversation. I keep smiling and nodding, but on the inside I’m crying with frustration. This is all Nate’s fault. He completely sabotaged it for me. One minute I thought Adam was going to ask me out on a date, and the next up popped Brad and ruined it.

  Talk about bad timing. I glance desperately over Brad’s shoulder to see if I can see Adam. He’s been gone ages. Where is he?

  Then I spot him. Over by the entrance to the gallery. He’s smoking a roll-up and talking to a girl. My heart thuds. A very pretty brunette. Heads bent low, they’re deep in conversation, and I see her lightly touching his arm. My stomach lurches. Who is she? Jealousy stabs, followed by a crushing sense of disappointment as I watch them break into raucous laughter. They look intimate, comfortable, together.

  ‘I’m sorry, will you excuse me?’ Abruptly I cut Brad off mid-sentence.

  ‘Oh . . . yeah, sure.’ He nods, slightly taken aback.

  I turn away before Adam sees me looking, and quickly slipping away through the crowd, I hurry into the night.

  ‘You’re home early.’

  I arrive back at the apartment to find Robyn sitting cross-legged on the floor of the living room, surrounded by piles of magazines.

  ‘Yeah.’ I nod glumly, plopping myself on to the sofa.

  ‘How’s your ankle?’

  ‘Painful.’ I wince, slipping off my sandal and rubbing my ankle. It’s gone all puffy and a large purple bruise is starting to form.

  ‘I’ve got some arnica gel for that.’ Scrabbling around on the coffee table, on which more magazines are strewn, she unearths a tube. ‘Rub it on three times a day and you’ll be as good as new,’ she instructs, passing it to me.

  ‘Thanks.’ I smile gratefully, then watch as she grabs a pair of scissors and starts attacking a magazine. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask curiously.

  ‘Making a vision board.’ She holds up a large piece of foam board on which she’s pasted various magazine cuttings. There’s a chocolate-box country cottage with roses around the door, some rosy-cheeked children, a couple of rescue dogs that look similar to Simon and Jenny. Across the top she’s cut out letters that spell the words ‘Harold’ and ‘soulmate’.

  ‘I thought you’d done one of those already.’

  ‘It didn’t work, so I’m doing another one,’ she says matter-of-factly.

  I pause. I’m sure there’s logic in there somewhere.

  ‘This is the house I want to live in. These are all the children I’m going to have.’ She starts pointing to the various pictures. ‘These are my dogs.’

  ‘And where’s Harold?’ I ask, playing along.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing – I can’t quite decide. What do you think about this one?’ She holds up a magazine, which is turned to an advertisement for aftershave, featuring a tall, dark-haired man in a suit.

  ‘Er, yeah, he looks fine.’ I nod, trying not to think about what we’re actually discussing here.

  ‘Oh good. I think so too.’ She grabs the scissors and energetically cuts him out. Reaching for her Pritt Stick, she glues him slap bang in the middle of the board.

  ‘You’ve cut out his face,’ I point out, looking at the stranger, who now has a blank space where his face should be.

  ‘Of course.’ She nods, as if that’s absolutely normal and not verging on serial-killer behaviour. ‘We don’t know what Harold looks like yet, do we?’ Wielding her scissors, she continues flicking through the magazine. ‘So I’ll leave it empty until I do.’ She glances up at me, bits of paper sticking to her hair, making her look like a crazy woman. ‘It makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Right, yes, perfect sense,’ I agree, somewhat dubiously.

  ‘Oh by the way, I’ve just remembered I’ve got something for you.’ Rummaging around under all the magazines, she unearths an envelope. ‘Theatre tickets!’

  ‘Wow, that’s great, thanks.’ I smile, taking them from her.

  ‘Who are going to take with you?’ she asks, trying to sound nonchalant.

  I hesitate. I know she still thinks I should take Nate, especially after what happened in the gym, which she declared was a ‘sign’ that the universe was trying to keep us together, that the legend was working its magic.

  I agree. It was a sign. A sign exercise and I don’t mix.

  ‘No one,’ I say defiantly. Briefly my mind flicks to Adam. I would have liked to have asked him, but after seeing him with the brunette . . . I force my mind to flick back again. ‘I’m going to put it on eBay, auction it off for charity,’ I say decisively.

  Immediately her face lights up. ‘Oh, Lucy, what an awesome idea.’ She grins, all thoughts of Nate suddenly forgotten. ‘I know just the one. It’s an orang-utan sanctuary that I worked at when I was in Borneo.’

  ‘Perfect.’ I smile, stifling a hippo-sized yawn. It’s been a long day, and not exactly one of my best. To tell the truth, I just want to go to bed and forget all about it. ‘Well, I think I’ll call it a day.’ I haul myself off the sofa.

  ‘OK, night.’ Throwing me a little wave, she turns back to her vision board. ‘How many “t”s in “serendipity”? One or two?’

  I pause in the doorway. ‘Um, one, I think.’

  ‘Cool, thanks,’ she mutters, and grabs her Pritt Stick and scissors. I leave her chopping up pages with a vengeance.

  Fifteen minutes later I’m lying in bed with my laptop. Forget men, I want to marry my MacBook. It’s dependable, reliable and you can even go shopping with it, I think, clicking on to eBay.

  I go to the section marked, ‘Sell,’ and type in the description: ‘One ticket for Broadway play to see performance of Tomorrow’s Lives.’ I add a few details, then post the listing. Hopefully someone will bid on it, I muse, searching for things to bid on myself. I’d really like a new bag . . . I start looking through the vintage section. Usually I can spend hours like this, but tonight my heart’s not in it. Instead my mind keeps sliding back to the gallery and Adam. I feel a beat of sadness. I didn’t even say goodbye.

  Regret gnaws. I wonder what he’s doing now. Probably with the pretty brunette, I remind myself. In fact, they’re probably somewhere right now, having fun, while I’m here in bed with my laptop husband. I stare distractedly at the ceiling and listen to the droning hum of the fan on my windowsill.

  Before I can sink even further into gloom, I’m distracted by the ping of an email plopping into my inbox. I look at it absently. It’s from Facebook.

  It’s like someone suddenly plugged me into the mains. Adam! The Adam. Adam-who’s-suddenly-switched-my-light-back-on-in-my-cab Adam?

  Suddenly galvanised, I click on it and it takes me to Facebook and his profile picture. I peer at it closely. It’s a photo of him in a silly hat and glasses. It’s a good sign. You can tell a lot from Facebook pictures. Anyone who has a black-and-white headshot, or a picture of themselves posing in a bikini (women), or looking bare-chested and moody (men) is slightly worrisome.

  As are all those people who have over hundreds and hundreds of friends. I mean, they’re not real friends, they’re just people they met randomly in a club one night, or in a queue at Tesco . . .

  I look at Adam’s profile. He has fifty-seven friends – not too few, not too many, just perfect, I think happily, feeling like Goldilocks.

  Now it’s my turn. Interested in seeing a really good film? You disappeared before I could ask you. Say yes and all you have to do is bring the popcorn.

  I stare at the message, f
eeling a mixture of delight and excitement. That will teach me to jump to conclusions about pretty brunettes. Quickly I type, ‘Yes,’ then smiling happily to myself, I snuggle down into my pillows and am about to log off when suddenly I notice a status update:

  My ankle twinges in annoyance. Argh, is there no getting away from him? Quick! I need to defriend him.

  I click on ‘Remove from friends’ and he’s gone.

  Chapter Twenty

  Except it’s not that easy.

  Unfortunately real life isn’t like cyberspace – I can’t just press delete and erase him – and over the next few days Nate keeps popping up everywhere. Not a literal boom! he’s right there in the flesh and standing next to me on the subway. Just small, random, apparently inconsequential things that by themselves seem like coincidences . . . but put together are starting to seem really weird.

  Like, for example, I keep getting missed calls from him on my mobile. At first I just ignored them, but when one woke me up at 5 a.m., I finally called him back and demanded what he wanted.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied angrily, before swearing blind he hadn’t rung me and it must have been an accident.

  ‘What? Twelve times?’ I huffed, before telling him he needed to learn how to lock his iPhone and hanging up.

  Which by itself isn’t that bizarre. After all, who hasn’t sat on their phone and accidentally dialled someone, or answered a call from a friend only to hear their footsteps walking down the street?

  What was bizarre was Nate calling me back the next day complaining that I was calling him! Which is impossible, ‘as my phone was locked’, I told him indignantly. Only later, when I checked my call log, sure enough there were all these calls to his number.

  Then there was this funny incident when Magda sent me uptown in a cab to fetch some ‘supplies’ from her friend Dr Rosenbaum, a peculiar-looking man in a white coat who has a pink, shiny face that doesn’t move and huge offices overlooking the park. It was all very cloak and dagger. After punching in a secret code, I was ushered inside, asked to hand over the cash and given a bag of creams and potions. I felt as if we were doing a drug deal. Not that I’ve ever done a drug deal, but anyway, that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was on the way back.

  One minute everything was totally normal. I was trundling along in the cab and the driver was cursing away on his phone in what sounded like Russian, when suddenly the engine spluttered loudly and we broke down. Guess where we broke down? Right outside Nate’s apartment. I mean right outside. As if that wasn’t enough of a coincidence, it was at exactly the same time as Nate was leaving the building! I had duck down on the back seat so he didn’t see me. A few seconds more and it would have been too late. How weird was that?

  And it doesn’t stop there. Every time I turn on the TV, he’s on it. Admittedly not him personally, but Big Bucks is always playing. What’s even worse, I’ve now got the jingle in my head and I can’t stop humming it. It’s like there’s no escaping him. It’s the same with the radio. Only this time it’s Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, which used to be ‘our’ song. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Nate.

  I haven’t heard it for years. Normally it’s Lady Gaga and Fergie and Katy Perry. Now suddenly, these past few days, every time I flick on the radio, it seems to be on every station. It’s totally freaky.

  So freaky that it gets me thinking about all the other things that have niggled me recently but which I’ve brushed off. Like Nate’s confession that he had a strange desire to walk into our gallery one day, for no apparent reason, discovering that we’d been going to the same places for years and kept missing each other, both of us finding the pendants again, even though mine had been lost for years.

  As one thought trips over another, like a row of dominoes, my mind starts whirring . . . bumping into him in the street after we’d broken up, sitting next to him at the sushi restaurant, the incident at the gym – Manhattan’s small, but not that small – and then the other night at the gallery, seeing all the TV screens tuned to his game show as I was talking to Adam, then Brad suddenly appearing just as Adam was about to ask me out on a date, mentioning Nate’s name and making him disappear . . .

  If I was superstitious, I’d almost think there was some higher force trying to stop me from going out with anyone else.

  I’m not superstitious, though. I don’t believe in all that rubbish, I tell myself firmly. OK, so I admit, I read my horoscope now and again, and yes, it’s true, I once saw a fortune-teller, but it was years ago at a school fête and of course I knew all along it was Mrs Cooper, the chemistry teacher, dressed up in a belly dancer’s outfit. There’s absolutely no way I would ever be like Robyn and believe in something silly like, for example, a legend about eternal love. Just because I’m Googling it doesn’t mean that I’m starting to have these completely insane thoughts about it coming true.

  I type, ‘Legend of the Bridge of Sighs,’ and hit return. A page opens up:

  Local Venetian legend tells that lovers who exchange a kiss as they pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs by gondola at sunset while the bells of St Mark’s are ringing will be guaranteed everlasting love and nothing will break them apart. For the rest of eternity they will never be parted.

  Because, like I said, it’s just insane. Ridiculous. Completely bananas. Hurriedly clicking off the page, I have a quick peek at Facebook to see if Adam has replied to my message, but instead all I notice is Nate. He’s still there on my homepage! He’s still my Facebook friend! I stare at his photograph with a mixture of disbelief and incredulity.

  Feeling a seed of panic, I frantically hit my keyboard.

  Delete! Delete! Delete!

  ‘It’s like I can’t break up with him.’

  Fast-forward to the weekend and I’m in a nail bar the size of a letterbox, in Chinatown. It’s Saturday afternoon, and together with Robyn and Kate, I’m ensconced in a massage chair, having my hands and feet attended to by two tiny Vietnamese ladies, who are furiously filing, clipping, cutting and scrubbing, while chattering away nineteen to the dozen.

  This is my first time, but apparently this is a weekly ritual for every self-respecting female New Yorker. That probably explains the shocked reaction my nails received when I arrived. Do-it-yourself mani-pedis might suffice back in London, but in Manhattan it’s a totally different story.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t break up with him?’ says Kate, not looking up from her BlackBerry, on which she’s managing to type a work email with her free hand.

  ‘I mean I can’t get rid of him. He’s everywhere I look.’

  ‘Manhattan’s a small place. Just ignore him,’ she responds flatly.

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ I try explaining.

  ‘Yes, it is. I’m always bumping into my rival CEO from Lloyds Carter. Last night I even saw him at the doctor’s.’

  One of the Vietnamese women doing her nails slaps Kate’s hand away from her BlackBerry. Frowning, Kate swaps hands and keeps typing with her thumb.

  ‘No, it’s more than that—’ I break off. ‘What were you doing at the doctor’s?’

  ‘Oh, I was with Jeff. He still hasn’t kicked that bug. They think he might have some kind of virus.’

  ‘What do you mean, it’s more than that?’ asks Robyn, glancing up from the book she’s reading, Cosmic Thinking Made Easy. She’s having tiny glittery flowers applied to each of her toenails.

  ‘Well, it’s not just about bumping into him. It’s about all these little things that keep happening.’

  ‘Such as?’ Robyn studies me with interest.

  ‘Such as I can’t defriend him on Facebook,’ I grumble with annoyance. It’s been three days now and every time I log on, I’m greeted with his status update and profile picture.

  ‘What is it with everyone and this Facebook crap?’ Kate suddenly looks up from her BlackBerry. ‘I don’t have time for Facebook, yet I keep getting emails from friends saying they want to poke me!’ She rolls her eyes in annoyance.
br />   ‘I told you already. It’s the power of the universe holding you together,’ chimes Robyn, as if it’s perfectly obvious.

  Kate looks at her with open-mouthed scorn.

  ‘It’s true,’ Robyn says indignantly. ‘It’s the legend of the Bridge of Sighs. Nothing can break them apart.’

  ‘Have you been on the crystals again?’ snorts my sister.

  ‘It’s true!’

  ‘What a load of codswallop!’

  ‘I don’t know what that word means,’ replies Robyn, her face flushing, ‘but you know, you really need to open your mind.’

  ‘I’m very open-minded, thank you very much. I’m just not insane,’ retorts Kate dismissively. ‘It’s not the universe keeping them together – it’s Nate! It’s so obvious. He’s trying to get back together with Lucy!’

  I glance between my sister and my roommate hammering it out like boxers. There’s Kate, in the rational-non-believing-bordering-on-completely-cynical corner, and there’s Robyn, in the irrational-believe-in-anything-bordering-on-completely-away-with-the-fairies corner.

  And me?

  I’m somewhere in the middle. I swap corners. I go back and forth. I mean, Kate’s right, she must be, and yet . . .

  My mind throws up a memory of my conversation with Nate in the restaurant when we first got back together. The discovery that for all those years we’d been at the same events, it was almost as if something was trying to bring us together.

  Something that now won’t let us break apart.

  Like the legend of the Bridge of Sighs.

  As the thought zips through my mind, a shiver runs up my spine.

  Which is ridiculous. Just ridiculous. There is no ‘something’. It’s just a silly legend. A bit of make-believe for the tourists. I’m letting my imagination run away with itself. This isn’t The Twilight Zone; this is real life. Things like that can’t really happen. Can they?