The Flatshare: A Novel

I’m sitting on the balcony crying like a toddler who’s dropped their ice cream. Full on, stuttering, mouth-pulled-wide crying.

The sudden rememberings are striking at entirely random times now, just bobbing up out of nowhere and sending me absolutely reeling. This one was particularly nasty: I was minding my own business heating up some soup, and then BAM, up it popped – the night Justin came around in February, before the Facebook message, and brought Patricia. He’d looked at me with total disgust, barely saying a word to me. Then, when Patricia was out in the hallway, he’d kissed me goodbye on the lips, one hand on the back of my neck. Like I was his. For a moment, as I was remembering it, I felt with absolute horror that I still was.

So. Despite me being technically much happier, this remembering thing keeps happening and ruining it. It is clear that I have some problems to confront here, and my diversionary tactics are no longer serving me. I have to think about this.

Thinking time means I need Mo and Gerty. They arrive together, an hour or so after I text them. As Gerty pours out glasses of white wine, I realise I’m nervous. I don’t want to talk. But then once I start I can’t really stop, and it all comes out in this big garbled mess: the memories, the old stuff from the very start, all of it right through to the flowers he sent me last week.

Eventually I trail off, exhausted. I down the rest of the glass of wine.

‘Let’s not beat around the bush,’ says Gerty, who has literally never beaten around a single bush in her whole life. ‘You’ve got a crazy ex-boyfriend, and he knows where you live.’

My pulse starts to quicken; it feels as if there’s something trapped in my chest.

Mo shoots Gerty the sort of look that usually only Gerty is allowed to give people. ‘I’ll talk,’ he says, ‘and you can be in charge of the wine. OK?’

Gerty looks as if someone’s just slapped her in the face. But then, curiously, she turns her head away from him, and from where I’m sitting I can see she’s smiling.

Weird.

‘I wish I hadn’t said I’d go for a drink with him in October,’ I say, faced with Mo’s listening face. ‘Why did I say that?’

‘I’m not sure you did say that, did you? I think he chose to take it that way,’ Mo says. ‘But you don’t have to see him. You don’t owe him anything.’

‘Do you two remember all of this?’ I ask abruptly. ‘I’m not imagining it?’

Mo pauses for a moment, but Gerty doesn’t miss a beat.

‘Of course we do. I remember every bloody minute of it. He was vile to you. He’d tell you where to be and how to get there, and then he’d walk you there because you wouldn’t be able to find your way on your own. He’d make every argument your fault, and he wouldn’t give up until you were sorry. He’d ditch you and then pick you up again at a moment’s notice. He told you you were overweight and weird and nobody else would want you, even though you are clearly a goddess of a woman and he ought to have felt lucky to have you. It was terrible. We hated him. And if you hadn’t banned me from talking about him, I would have told you that every bloody day.’

‘Oh,’ I say, in a small voice.

‘Is that how it felt to you?’ Mo asks, with the air of a handyman with limited tools trying to patch up the damage done by a bomb going off.

‘I . . . I remember being really happy with him,’ I say. ‘As well as being, you know, really bloody miserable.’

‘He wasn’t horrible to you all the time,’ Gerty begins.

‘He wouldn’t have been able to keep you with him if he was,’ Mo goes on. ‘He knew that. He’s a smart guy, Tiffy. He knew how to . . .’

‘. . . play you,’ Gerty finishes.

Mo winces at her choice of words.

‘But I think we were happy together once.’ I don’t know why this feels important. I don’t like the thought of everyone seeing me in that relationship and thinking I was an idiot for being with someone who treated me that way.

‘Sure,’ Mo says, nodding. ‘Especially at the start.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘At the start.’

We sip our wine in silence for a while. I feel very odd. Like I ought to be crying, and I sort of want to be crying, but there’s a strange tightness in my eyes that’s making tears impossible.

‘Well. Thanks. You know, for trying. And sorry for . . . making you stop talking about him,’ I say, looking down at my feet.

‘It’s all right. At least that meant you would still see us,’ Mo says. ‘You had to come to this on your own, Tiff. As tempting as it was to bulldoze in and whisk you away from him, you would have just gone back.’

I muster the courage to glance up at Gerty. She holds my gaze; her expression is fierce. I can’t imagine how hard she found it sticking to her word and not mentioning Justin.

I wonder how on earth Mo persuaded her to leave me to do this on my own. He was right, though – I would have just pushed them away if they’d told me to leave Justin. The thought is faintly nauseating.

‘You’re doing great, Tiff,’ Mo says, topping up my wine. ‘Just hold on to what you’re figuring out. It might be hard to remember it all the time, but it’s important. So do your best.’

*

Somehow, when Mo says something, it seems to make it true.

It is so hard to remember. One week with no sudden memories or random Justin appearances, and I waver. I wobble. I almost topple altogether and decide I made the whole thing up.

Thankfully Mo is there to talk to. We go through incidents as I remember them – shouted arguments, subtle jabs, the even subtler ways my independence was eroded. I can’t believe how not-OK my relationship with Justin was, but even more than that, I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed. I think that will take a while to sink in in itself.

Thank God for friends and flatmates. Leon has no idea this is all going on, of course, but seems to have clocked that I need some distraction – he’s cooking more, and if we don’t speak for a while he’ll start a new thread of notes. It used to always be me that did that – I get the feeling that initiating conversation is not something Leon is particularly keen on doing, as a rule.

This one is on the fridge when I get home from work with Rachel, who’s come around so I can cook her dinner (she says I owe her indefinite free meals because I’ve ruined her life by commissioning Crochet Your Way):

Hunt for Johnny White is going poorly. Got drunk under the table by Johnny White the Fourth at very grimy pub near Ipswich. Nearly had a repeat of our memorable bathroom collision: slept in and was extremely late x

Rachel raises her eyebrows at me, reading it over my shoulder. ‘Memorable, eh?’

‘Oh, shut up. You know what he means.’

‘I believe I do,’ she says. ‘He means: I keep thinking about you in your underwear. Do you think about me naked?’

I chuck an onion at her. ‘Dice that and make yourself useful,’ I say, but I can’t help smiling.