A Hundred Pieces of Me (47 page)

‘I wish I could. But I’ve really got to revise.’ Gina’s exams are looming over her, now so close that she can’t actually fit the reality of them into her head. Like a huge iceberg, or the Titanic, just a sheer face of facts and stress. She deserves one day in London with Kit but two days makes her feel sick and panicky.

‘Aw, sure? I wanted to take you to the National Gallery. There’s an amazing Holman Hunt retrospective.’ He’s talking over her head, gazing out at the city below. Then his voice drops. ‘So, do you think you could live here?’

Gina shivers with excitement. They haven’t explicitly discussed what’ll happen after her finals. Janet hopes she’ll do a law conversion course ‘because there’s always work for lawyers’; Terry is careful not to hope anything other than she’ll come home now and again, and not max out her student loan too catastrophically.

One thing Gina does know, though, is that she’s not going back to Longhampton. Not now Kit’s opened the door to a louder, faster, more colourful world. London scares her, and she’s not sure how she’ll fit in, but now she’s seen it, Longhampton seems even greyer. She’s somewhere between the two. Their pod rises higher over the river and she’s surprised not to feel more freaked out by the height. The glass feels so safe.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But I don’t know what I’d do. Are you still going to be here?’

‘If you are, of course I will be.’ Kit is still in his venture capital job; every time he talks about leaving, he says, they give him another technology project to work on. ‘I was thinking about cashing in my savings and travelling, but I’m flexible. We can do anything we want to. No ties.’

He squeezes her as he says it, and his hug releases a little butterfly of anxiety inside her: finals next year are Gina’s last official hoop. After that, there are no more. All decisions, all choices are her own. Unlike Kit, she doesn’t really relish the thought of that. How will she know if she’s made the right choice? How will she know if she’s chosen the right job, the right flat?

At least she knows she’s got the right man. That’s something.

‘You’ve gone quiet,’ he says.

‘I’m just looking at the view.’

Millions of houses spread out beyond the thick steel ribbon of the river. Gina imagines millions of people inside them, all slotted into routines of alarm clock, bus, work, home, sleep. And those routines slotting into bigger routines of date, marry, baby, school. The cogs ticking on and on, pushing you further into your choices, only to flick you into a different channel when you least expect it. Like it did for her mum.

The prospect of real life entices and terrifies her.

‘Look,’ says Kit, suddenly. ‘We’re at the top.’

The pod stops for a moment and Gina feels weightless, teetering not on the edge of London, but the edge of the limitless world opening up to her.

Everything’s possible, good and bad, and only she can decide which way it’ll go. Can I do that? she wonders frantically. How am I supposed to know if I’ve got it right? When will I know if I’m wrong? ‘I wish we could press pause on this second,’ she blurts out. ‘And be this happy for ever. Here. Just us.’

‘Why?’ says Kit, amused. ‘Everything’s just about to happen. All the amazing things out there are waiting for you to find them. This is when you’ll really start to live.’ He nuzzles her neck. ‘When
we
’ll start to live.’

Gina wants to believe him, but something inside her is resisting, telling her it’s not so sure it’s that simple. It would have been nicer, she thinks secretly, if he’d told her that in her cosy, shabby turret bedroom back in college, surrounded by her posters, and her vases, and her flowers. In the bed they both know so well, curled up together, breathing each other’s sleepy, familiar breath.

Here, in the glass bubble over the Thames, it feels as if there’s someone else with them – the sophisticated, complicated city that Kit fits into so smoothly and Gina’s slightly scared of. She already feels nostalgic for her university days and they’re not even over yet.

Let go, she tells herself, as the pod begins its slow descent. Have faith in yourself, and let go.

She imagines herself swallow-diving from the top, a long graceful plunge into the murky river of royal barges and police launches.

‘Gina, you can do anything you want,’ Kit whispers in her ear, as if he can hear her doubts. ‘You have no idea how incredible you are because you just see something and you do it. It’s one of the reasons why I love you.’

Gina’s whole spirit lifts as it always does when Kit tells her he loves her, and for a moment she believes him: that the world is opening to her, and the right thing will somehow rise up and make itself known, through her doubts.

This is the start of my adult life, she thinks, and kisses him until the wheel stops at the bottom for them to get out.

Gina had hoped the last box she unpacked from her old house would turn out to be symbolic, and maybe contain some mystically apt item that would sum up the past few months.

With every box that was emptied and folded up, her flat had become lighter, and so had she. For the first time in her life, Gina felt absolutely no desire to fill the spaces that emerged around her. Instead she enjoyed arranging the few objects she’d kept, looking at them properly in different places. There was room for her to spread the Sunday papers on the floor and read them at leisure while the sun streamed in through the picture window and Buzz snored raspily in his basket.

But the final box didn’t contain anything very interesting. It was marked ‘spare room’ and it was stuffed with the random contents of the chest of drawers in their second guest bedroom. Old ripped jeans, odd socks, T-shirts ‘for painting in’, and Stuart’s work shirts with worn collars that she’d always meant to learn how to mend. Not even a forgotten tenner in the pockets.

Gina tipped the lot into a black bin liner and took it down to the fabric recycling bank by the supermarket. And she didn’t have a moment’s regret about it – which, she realised on her way back, was the mystical sign she’d been looking for.

She’d discovered an ability to throw things away.

Her original plan, back in the grey days of February, had been to finish the unpacking by her birthday on 2nd May, but as it turned out, she’d done it with ten days to spare. Admittedly, there were a few racks of clothes that Naomi was supposed to be helping her to sell, and she knew she had to do a second, more ruthless edit of her wardrobe, but the wall that had once been blocked with boxes was now cleared, and decorated with her growing list of a hundred things, and the Polaroids she was taking. The spiderweb of words and images looked so good that Gina wasn’t even sure she wanted to buy a big picture to hang there.

A Hundred Pieces of Me by Gina Bellamy.

•        
Buzz lying paws up in the sun.

•        
The misty view from the top of the park first thing in the morning.

•        
White ducks on the dark river.

•        
An early morning bacon sandwich.

•        
My silver pedicure.

•        
The soft lilac blanket from the household shop on the high street folded over the foot of the bed.

•        
A blurry photo taken while jumping around the flat to ‘Jump’ by House of Pain
– it was supposed to represent dancing but she wasn’t sure if it worked. Gina liked it, though. She liked the experimentation of it.

Instead of buying things to fill her flat, Gina was now obsessed with the square photos and their white borders. The Polaroid camera went everywhere with her. It had the weird effect of making her look for moments of happiness instead of waiting for them to happen. Three scarlet ladybirds on a green leaf by the river reminded her of the sun on her hair, and the secret dark green smell of the overgrown foliage as she and Buzz brushed past; a moment she’d never have noticed without Buzz or the camera.

There were forty-two photos on her wall. The forty-third, she hoped, would be of her birthday cake, because this birthday was going to be her best, even if she had to spend it alone.

In fact, maybe that was the whole point.

Gina’s birthday present to herself was a day off work, and the three things that always made her happy: an early morning walk, lunch with her friends, and a really big cake from the deli.

Buzz’s present was a longer-than-usual trot, all the way round the towpath past Gina’s office and up through the Georgian streets of Longhampton towards the park, where the cherry blossom was cascading sugary petals over the wrought-iron gates of the gardens and the lilacs created an avenue of pale scent as she walked in.

Gina stopped for a moment to enjoy the explosion of pale pink, the sun filtering through it, and fixed it in her mind as a possible colour scheme in the flat. One bedroom wall could be that pale pink. She could do that every year, just for cherry-blossom time, where the sunlight would catch it. And it could be gold for Christmas, Aegean blue in August. Anything she liked.

She was still turning colours over in her mind’s eye as she returned to the flat to get things ready for her little lunch party. Naomi had taken the day off too and was coming over with Willow, as was Rachel. She wanted to thank them, as much as anything, for getting her through the last months: with all the fairweather friends the divorce had weeded out, she was even more grateful for the ones who remained.

There was only a brief moment when Gina opened the front door to find just two birthday cards – from her mum and from an ex-work colleague who’d shared the same birthday as her – that she felt the weight of making her birthday special for herself, just like she now had to make everything special on her own, but even that evaporated when Willow burst through the door an hour or so later, followed by Naomi bearing even more bags than usual and, more or less at the same time, Rachel.

Naomi gave her an indulgent night cream (‘face it, we’re getting on’), and Willow had made Gina another mug with her handprint on it, a bigger one this year.

‘You have to use it.’ Naomi wrestled it off Gina, and poured tea into it immediately. ‘No sticking it in a cupboard or on display. If it breaks, we’ll make you another.’

‘Of course,’ said Gina. ‘Even if I had a cupboard to stick it in, I wouldn’t. I’m all about the using.’

Rachel brought wine and flowers and an embroidered martingale collar for Buzz ‘from the girls in the shop’, which again Gina put around his muscular neck as soon as it was unwrapped. There was a brass disc attached to it, ready for a name, and it was seeing the blank surface where an owner’s details should be that nudged Gina into a decision she’d been toying with for a few days.

She looked up from where she was crouching by Buzz’s side. ‘Rachel, there’s something I wanted to ask. About Buzz.’

Rachel paused, chocolate cake halfway to her mouth. ‘If it’s medical, ask George. I know about as much as you do.’

‘No, it’s about his foster place.’ Gina took a deep breath and leaped into the first big decision of her new year. ‘I want to adopt him,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and he likes it here, and I can’t bear the thought of him having to adapt to another person now. Do I . . . need a licence or some sort of formal . . . whatever?’

Rachel put her plate down and clapped her hands in delight. ‘No! Oh, wait, you need a formal home check.’ She pretended to look around the room, under the sofa, behind a giggling Willow. ‘Any cats . . . any dangerous hobbies . . . any wild animals? No, this seems to be
the perfect home
. Congratulations, I now pronounce you owner and dog.’

Naomi clapped Willow’s hands together and they cheered on the sofa.

Gina’s heart expanded with happiness and she slipped an arm around Buzz’s barrel chest, wondering if he could tell what had just happened. He leaned against her. ‘What about an adoption fee?’

‘Nah.’ Rachel waved an airy hand. ‘Do you have any idea how much your donations have raised in the shop? Way more than we’d charge you. Consider it our gift to you, in return for your gifts to us.’

‘Oh, I like that,’ said Naomi. ‘It’s a karma balance. Happy birthday!’

‘Smiling doggy!’ said Willow, pointing at Buzz.

Gina looked: his top lip was pulled back from his gappy teeth in something very near a smile. But the real smile seemed to be shining from Buzz’s dark eyes as he looked straight back at her, and the trust she saw in them made her own eyes fill.
From now on this is your birthday too
, she thought, wishing the words into his graceful head.
The day your life with me started.

With Willow playing on the big chair, while Buzz watched her from a safe distance, Rachel and Naomi chatting on the sofa, Gina’s flat felt small but full of life. It didn’t take much, she realised. You didn’t need lots of friends, just good ones.

She took the Polaroid camera out of her bag and quietly snapped the scene: her new friend, her best friend, her goddaughter, her dog, her birthday cake, her flat. Having a lovely time, filling her home with their friendship.

When the print developed, Gina wrote ‘Happy Birthday to Me!’ on the white border, and went to stick it to the wall. Right in the middle of the collage.