The head of his own digital marketing agency, Effie’s ex-boyfriend, James, had constructed his entire identity around being ahead of the curve; James had always known the best bars, owned the best albums before anyone else did. He had a collection of prized T-shirts emblazoned with the inscrutable logos of cult Japanese fashion brands, of record labels and microbreweries—Anna could rarely tell one from the other—that reached out to the like-minded souls he passed in the red brick Shoreditch streets near his office (sorry, “workspace”) and meant nothing to the pedestrians James considered to be beneath his notice.
She and Effie had both been through breakups before, but this one…Anna pulled a strand of her dark hair in front of her face and rolled it between her fingers. This one had been life-changing. Effie had thought she and James would have children together, grow old side by side. He might not have been sold on getting married, but they had been together nearly six years; the rest of them had all assumed it was a done deal—despite the fact that they might privately have wished Effie could meet somebody who was more appreciative of her.
Instead, Anna had answered her phone during one of Sonny’s cute but terrifyingly brutal toddler football sessions one Sunday morning to hear Effie lowing like a dying animal.
“He’s gone,” she managed through the pain. “It’s over.”
Anna hadn’t even been able to get to her until two days later, and the fact had shamed her. In the old days, she would have been round with tissues and wine within the hour, but an inexcusably clichéd combination of childcare and court prep meant that the heartbreak Bat-Signal had gone unanswered for forty-eight hours solid. Effie had said she didn’t mind, that she had work to get through as well—but was that proof of how busy and grown-up they both were or of how dislocated they had become?
Between them, Anna and Lizzie had made time to check in on their friend but, as the weeks and months passed since the bomb had gone off in Effie’s life, Anna found she no longer had the stamina she once did for friend emergencies. She didn’t have enough evenings free, between the ones she spent either hunched low and late, scribbling at her desk, or rushing out of the office in case she could make it back in time for Sonny’s bath. She couldn’t keep in her yawns as Effie re-trod the shock, the incredulity, and the anger over bottle after bottle, well beyond Anna’s strict ten p.m. bedtime. She couldn’t manage the headaches the next day in the office as the love fermented to spite and the yearning distilled to fury. She couldn’t help Effie every minute of the day as they and Lizzie had all done for each other in the past. When they did manage to meet as a three, Lizzie had seemed barely able to concentrate on what Effie was saying anyway.
Anna felt Effie’s text messages buzzing in her pocket as she met clients, turned her phone facedown when the calls came during briefing sessions with her juniors. How did she have time to ring during the school day anyway? After a decade of devotion to Coral Hill Prep and teaching its precocious preteen girls with the type of enthusiasm that couldn’t be faked, Effie was now one step away from being headmistress at one of the most prestigious primary schools in London. Anna couldn’t imagine the pushy mothers, for which that particularly leafy, southwest quadrant of the city was famous, standing for anybody being anything other than full Mary Poppins when in loco parentis with their highly competitive, socially engineered charges.
So Anna yelled her advice out over speakerphone as she danced around the kitchen with Sonny’s potato waffles or soaped the paint out of his hair in the bath. Each time, she acknowledged briefly to herself—and hated—that her life no longer felt broad enough to encompass all of Effie’s feelings as well as her own.
A text message more than two inches long was an indulgence to her parental mind, and further evidence that her friend’s was unraveling.
Married for a year longer than Sonny’s tiny life span and with Steve for three before that, Anna had forgotten how distant memories, unearthed emails, the gradual joining of dots could precipitate aftershocks of emotion that felt as new and disorientating as the original landslide of a relationship ending. She could no longer recall how thinking back over a conversation in a new light somehow intensified and renewed what had happened all over again. An entire relationship could be recast in a moment, a love story rewritten in a second—but Anna did not have the energy to talk Effie down every time.
Instead, her responses had become copy-and-paste jobs, her patience stretched translucent. But now that she saw Effie for the first time in a few weeks—really saw her—Anna realized that her friend was still struggling under the weight of a decision taken about her future that she had not been consulted on.
After James’s departure, Effie’s complexion, always light and prone to rosiness, had become a blotch of blue-toned gray pallor. Her baby-soft hair was thinner, her athletic build now nearly skeletal; her joints were bony hinges and her sternum a ridged xylophone beneath her T-shirt. In a past life, wearing the contented pudge that came of being in long-term, loved-up, if not exactly red-hot relationships, the two of them would have joked about the cheese-rind skin and wine-coated teeth that accompanied glamorous, emaciated sorrow, but now—one of them wasting away under her own sadness, the other bloated with domestic grudges—there seemed little to laugh about.
Anna was pleased to see that some of her friend’s former glow had been restored recently, but she still wasn’t back to full strength.
I’ll speak to her properly this week. This holiday will be just what we
