‘The pay is terrible.’
‘Stop sugar-coating it. Can I think about it and call you back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have a good last day.’
‘Thank you, Jonathan.’
Jonathan clicked off. He glanced around his apartment and looked at Sissy, who gazed back at him, expectant. He met Dante’s alert, fathomless eyes. ‘What would you do, Dante?’
What advice could Dante possibly give him? Just when he managed to fall in love with a beautiful delicious vet, he no longer had a reason to stay in New York City. He supposed he could find another apartment and another job. Doing what? Something less soul-destroying than advertising and more lucrative than comics. Or maybe he should leave New York, find another place to live that wasn’t so expensive. But what about Dr Vet? All his life he’d been hoping to fall in love, really in love, and now? It occurred to him that falling in love could ruin your life as easily as fix it. It could stop you making important choices, tie you to a place that wasn’t right or a timeline that didn’t suit. Being with Zoe felt nothing like being with Julie, but in some ways it was worse. Love trapped you into orbit around the loved one. He wanted to spend every spare minute of his life with Zoe. He wanted to sleep every night with her, feel the soft rise and fall of her breath and the steady beat of her heart. But what about the days? He could stay in his free apartment if his nerve and his luck held out. And a free apartment would give him thinking time, time to sort out the rest of his existence, get a job or at least figure out what job he wanted.
A free apartment in New York and true love: what sort of idiot would give that up?
Dante stared up at him and Jonathan knew what Dante would do.
He called Greeley back.
‘That was fast.’
‘I’ve decided,’ Jonathan said.
‘Good,’ said Greeley.
40
Jonathan packed the last box into his rented van. Max opened a beer and tossed one to his friend. They clinked cans.
‘To change,’ Max said, and Jonathan nodded, stowing the beer in his coolbag.
‘To change.’
‘When I’m running Comrade like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory,’ Max said, ‘you wanna come back and work for me?’
‘Nah.’
‘OK, pal. Find your own road. But don’t come crawling to me when you’re circling the drain with a fistful of food stamps.’
He texted Zoe. Ten minutes?
And she texted back: Great.
He turned to Max. ‘Can you hang on here for one minute with the van?’
Max nodded, and Jonathan ran up the stairs to his apartment one last time, surveyed the empty space, hesitated for a second, then dropped the keys on the kitchen counter and clicked the door shut behind him. He turned and ran back down the stairs.
‘Thanks for all the help, Max. Don’t be a stranger.’
‘I won’t,’ Max said, with a rare absence of sarcasm. ‘When you back?’
His friend shrugged.
‘Well, don’t be too long in the woods. You’ll get termites.’
Jonathan opened the passenger side door and both dogs jumped in. He walked around and climbed up into the driver’s seat, turned the key and swung the van out on to Fifth Street, waving out the window to Max and nearly hitting a woman who shouted and gave him the finger. Max shot him two thumbs-up.
He picked up Zoe and Wilma. Zoe handed Jonathan her backpack with a sleeping bag strapped to the base, which he tossed into the van with his things. Aside from his mattress and books, there was just one box of kitchen stuff, one of clothes, shoes, and one marked miscellaneous. He’d taken his drawing board apart and slid it on top. The 1950s kitchen table folded flat but he’d left the two chairs.
Wilma jumped in next to Dante, and they greeted each other affectionately. Sissy squeezed in between them and Zoe clambered in last. Jonathan leaned over and kissed her.
‘What an adventure,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see the place.’
‘I really hope you like it,’ he said, and they set off.
Arriving mid-afternoon, they were met by Greeley, boyish today except for a touch of pink lip gloss. He showed Jonathan to a cabin not far from his own. With its square main room, out of which a small kitchen, bathroom and bedroom were carved, it was not entirely unlike Jonathan’s New York apartment except that most of the walls were windows and the views from most of the windows were trees.
Jonathan set up the bed and his drawing board and unpacked his clothes on to shelves in the closet and stacked his books against the walls. Within an hour it felt like home and, after a long walk and a swim in the lake and dinner, he and Zoe went to bed, as did the dogs, and they lay under striped wool blankets smelling the trees and the fresh air and the rough pine smell of the cabin just as he’d imagined they would, the length of her body pressed against his, just as he’d imagined it would. He experienced a vague melancholy, already wishing she didn’t have to leave.
‘When are you setting off?’ he asked her.
She pulled his arm over and around her waist. ‘Not quite yet.’
‘What if you get lost halfway up the mountain?’
‘I won’t,’ she murmured. ‘I have a map.’
‘I’ll take good care of Wilma.’
‘I know you will.’
‘But that doesn’t mean we won’t miss you.’
‘I’ll be back,’ she said drowsily.
And as she dropped off to sleep, Jonathan looked around him, noticing that many things which he was sure had, in the past, existed mostly in two dimensions, seemed to have gained a bit of substance, a slight curve here, a shadow there. Zoe wasn’t at all the sort of two-dimensional being he’d grown accustomed to accepting as an object of love, and the dogs were more fully formed than most of the people he knew, complete with facets he was certain he hadn’t begun to discover, while all around them the world seemed more nuanced, less hopeless and less flat.
Dante put his head down on his front paws and half-closed his eyes. Wilma sighed contentedly, using the curve of her friend’s back as a pillow. Sissy chased grouse in her dreams.
As he lay in bed, still awake, Jonathan began sketching out a new story in his head. In it, James renewed his contract in Dubai for another ten years so that the dogs lived with him forever, and after six months in the woods he returned to New York with a book about being young and single and confused and searching for work and meaning and love in New York City, and the book did better than anyone expected and while it didn’t exactly make him fabulously rich it gave him enough money to go on writing and drawing and not working in advertising ever again. As for Zoe, she and he stayed in love, and lived happily ever after. Or was it Greeley he lived happily ever after with?
At that particular moment, it didn’t really matter how it turned out. It was his story, he thought. He could write what he liked.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Meg Rosoff grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and moved to London in 1989. The bestselling author of ten books for young adults and children, she has won or been shortlisted for twenty international awards including the Orange First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal and the National Book Award in America. Her first novel, How I Live Now, sold nearly one million copies and was made into a feature film. Meg Rosoff was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014. She lives in London with her husband, daughter and two lurchers.
megrosoff.co.uk
@megrosoff
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
How I Live Now
Just in Case
What I Was
The Bride’s Farewell
There Is No Dog
Moose Baby
Picture Me Gone
First published in Great Britain 2016
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Meg Rosoff, 2016
Meg Rosoff has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be id
entified as author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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Meg Rosoff, Jonathan Unleashed
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