A Hundred Pieces of Me Page 2

  212a High Street was the exact opposite of the house she’d just left in the desirable poets’ streets area of Longhampton, the neglected Victorian terrace that she and Stuart had coaxed from damp shabbiness to what Gina’s house magazines liked to call a ‘forever home’. Gina was a conservation officer for the council; putting back the dado rails and moulded ceiling roses was a labour of love. 2 Dryden Road’s final gift to them for their split nails and silent hours’ sanding was a quick sale: it wasn’t their forever home but several other families wanted it to be.

  If Dryden Road was a busy Victorian scrapbook collage, 212a High Street was a blank page. It was an open-plan conversion, painted throughout in soft vanilla eggshell with brand new carpets and wooden floors, resolutely featureless. No fireplaces, no skirting, no picture rails, just plain walls and big double-glazed windows that turned the town’s skyline into a living picture across one wall of the sitting room. It reminded Gina of a gallery, full of light and air, a place that invited you to pause and think. The moment she’d walked in with the estate agent, her eyes gritty from another sleepless night, a sense of stillness had come over her, and she’d handed over the rental deposit the same afternoon.

  That had been a week ago, the last week in January.

  Bright sunshine was warming the flat despite the chill outside, and Gina turned slowly on her heel, assessing the available space, and stopped at the long wall next to the window. It demanded one really fabulous piece of art, something beautiful that she could sit, gaze at and get lost in. She didn’t have the right painting or print yet, but she’d formed a middle-of-the-night plan to get rid of everything she didn’t need or love from the old house, and buy one amazing . . . thing.

  Everything from the old house.

  Her stomach rippled with nerves at the unknown months ahead. The nerves tended to ambush her, creeping up when she wasn’t concentrating to dive-bomb her good mood like seagulls. Once the novelty of her new place wore off, Gina knew it was going to be tough, dating again at thirty-three, unravelling her life from Stuart’s, and having to make new friends to replace the ones he would be taking with him. Gina had only one real mate, Naomi, whom she’d known since school; the rest of their social circle had been Stuart’s football and cricket friends.

  But this flat would help her start again, she told herself. Everything she loved would be on show, all the time, instead of hidden in cupboards. And she could decide what she brought into it. There wasn’t room for much, so she’d have to be selective. From now on; everything that came into this flat had to make her happy or be useful, or ideally both.

  One of the self-help books Naomi had pressed into her hands had been about a man who’d got rid of all his possessions, except a hundred vital things. He’d felt freed by it, apparently. Gina wondered if she could do that. It did seem wrong to spoil the serene minimalism with clutter. And the discipline would be good for her. What hundred things did she actually need?

  Could you get rid of that much stuff and keep anything of yourself? Or was that the whole point? You could focus on being you, instead of relying on your things to explain who you were.

  The thought made Gina cold and light-headed, but not necessarily scared.

  Her mobile buzzed in her pocket. It was the removal men, coming with the boxes from Dryden Road. She hadn’t been there for the packing. Naomi, in her role as cheerleader and supporter, had been firm about it. Well, bossy. In a nice way. ‘You’ve been through enough, you’re knackered, and they’re the experts,’ she’d insisted. ‘Pay them to do it. I’ll pay them to do it. If you put your back out packing you’ll only have to fork out for massages later.’

  Naomi had been right. She was usually right.

  ‘Hello, Gina? It’s Len Todd Removals, and we’re about to leave your property. Just checking you’re in to take delivery of the boxes that aren’t going to storage.’

  Some of the bigger items, like Gina’s huge velvet Liberty sofa and her inlaid arts-and-crafts wardrobe, had gone straight to the Big Yellow on the outskirts of town, to wait until she could bring herself to sell them, or find a flat big enough to house them. The rest – the drawers, the cupboards, the shelves – was all on its way to her.

  Gina checked her watch. Two o’clock. They’d arrived at her old house before eight, but even so . . . A whole life bubble-wrapped in under a day. ‘You’re not finished already?’

  ‘All in the van. You had a fair bit of stuff, though, love, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘I know.’ She winced. ‘Sorry. I should have had a clear-out.’

  Gina had assumed Stuart would take more than he did. Instead, he’d swept through in one morning while she was at work, packed a few small items and stuck Post-it notes on large articles (like the new bed, which he’d suddenly remembered he’d paid for) and left a note saying she could have the rest – he didn’t want to make life difficult.

  At first Gina had been hurt by how little of their combined life Stuart wanted, and then it turned out that he didn’t need a lot because his new life already had a toaster. And a duvet. And other personal touches. Within two days of his big revelation, Naomi – whose husband Jason played football with Stuart – had ferreted out the fact that he had moved in with his Other Woman, the woman he’d taken to Paris. Bryony Crawford, a friend from his cycling club, who lived in the Old Water Mill development. As soon as Naomi told her that, Gina knew exactly what kind of person Bryony would be. Storage wouldn’t be a priority. Stainless-steel-surface cleaners would.

  Gina pushed the thought away, as it started to unfurl into further, more troubling mental images. Everything coming into this flat, she reminded herself, had to be positive. Including thoughts. And she was glad none of her beautiful possessions would be ending up in the Old Water Mill, even if it meant paying for them to be in storage for a bit.

  ‘Are you there, love?’ Len Todd sounded concerned.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll expect you in – what? Half an hour?’

  ‘Great.’ The removal man paused. ‘You’d better clear some room.’

  Len Todd, and his Removals, arrived at half past two, bumping the first of the cardboard boxes up the side stairs to Gina’s first-floor flat.

  ‘If you could put it in the spare room,’ she said, opening the door to the small second bedroom, so far bedless. ‘The plan’s to fill that with boxes, with a few in the sitting room, if necessary, to keep as much of the flat as clear as possible.’

  ‘No problem.’

  He parked the box in a corner, and stepped aside to make way for a full-size wardrobe case, being lugged in by a second man. And then a third, with a fourth and fifth already dropping something heavy on the stairs outside with a muffled swearword.

  Gina flattened herself against the hallway wall. Suddenly the calm white flat wasn’t feeling quite so spacious, with this stream of sturdy men hauling in boxes nearly as big as she was. A dark cloud passed over her bright mood and she braced herself against it. There were a lot of hurdles to get over in the next few days: solicitors, unpacking, name changes. She needed this positive forward motion to lift her over them.

  As a box marked ‘Kitchen’ went past, Gina had a sudden flash of her warm-hearted house, the amiable third person in her marriage to Stuart, being cut up and broken down, packed into boxes and brought into this new place in chunks. All this stuff had made perfect sense in those rooms; it was why she hadn’t even tried to have a sort-out before she left. How could she have thrown anything away? Now, though, her old home was separated into individual bits, like a jigsaw she could never put back together in the same way.

  It was the same with all the pieces of her life so far – they wouldn’t fit back together to make the same shape ever again. So which bits should she keep?

  The removal man seemed to sense her panic. Gina guessed they’d seen enough marital divisions of property to know a break-up when they packed one. ‘Why don’t you take yourself over the road for a cup of tea while we get on with this?’ said Len
Todd, with a friendly nod. ‘I’ll give you a ring when we’re done. Don’t suppose you’ve got a kettle, have you?’

  ‘In the kitchen – there’s coffee and milk and, er, you’ll find mugs in the kitchen box.’ Naomi had packed Gina an emergency basket with all the essentials. The comforting simplicity of the single mug, single bowl, single spoon in her sleek Scandinavian-style kitchen had made her think that perhaps her hundred-things life-plan might work. It was quite restful, the lack of choice.

  ‘We won’t be long.’ He patted her arm. ‘And don’t you worry. It’ll feel like home in no time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gina, with a bright smile she didn’t feel.

  For the next hour or so Gina sat in the delicatessen next to her flat and drank two coffees, watching the late-afternoon bustle of the high street, an unmade to-do list started in the notebook next to her phone on the table.

  She ignored a call from her mother and, more guiltily, from Naomi. Both of them, Gina knew, wanted to be supportive on this day of big changes, but her instinct was to focus all her energy inwards, on herself. She tried to keep a vision in her head of her sunny, open flat and all its possibilities; what she was going to do with it; whether she should paint one wall a bright sunshine yellow to pin this positivity for days when she wasn’t quite so energised.

  Len Todd rang at twenty to four, just as the first heavy dots of rain began to speckle the pavement, and she hurried round.

  He was waiting at the foot of the stairs that led up to her flat, looking, it had to be said, shattered. ‘All done,’ he said, and dropped the keys into her hand: her old keys, and the new ones. ‘We got it all in in the end.’

  Gina laughed, and tipped him, but it wasn’t until she opened the front door that she understood properly what he’d meant.

  The flat was completely crammed with cardboard boxes. Crammed, from floor to ceiling.

  The movers had left a narrow corridor through the spare room so she could get inside, and they’d lined two walls of her bedroom with wardrobe crates. The sitting room was now two-thirds filled, the white walls lost behind brown ones. She had to turn sideways to get into the kitchen-diner. Her possessions loomed over her every way she looked.

  Gina was stunned by the unexpected invasion. It felt crushing, claustrophobic. Before her shock could tip over into tears, she started pushing the boxes away from the big white wall, where her special painting was to go. She needed to be able to see that wall, even if every other one was blocked.

  Her muscles ached as she dragged the heavy boxes around but she forced herself on. I’ve got to start sorting right now, she told herself, or I’ll never be able to sit down.

  Gina’s previous vision of sitting in the empty flat, languidly considering one item at a time from a single box evaporated. She tipped four boxes of bedding into the corner of her bedroom, and wrote ‘KEEP’, ‘SELL’, ‘GIVE AWAY’, ‘DUMP’ on the empty cases in big letters, lining them up in the limited space in front of the sofa. Then she took a deep breath and pulled the brown tape off the nearest box.

  Everything was bubble-wrapped and at first Gina couldn’t work out what the first item was, but as she unrolled the plastic, she saw it was an antique blue glass vase. She had to think twice about where it had come from, then remembered that she’d bought it when she was at university.

  I loved this, she thought, surprised. Where’s it been?

  A memory slipped into the forefront of her mind, of stopping outside the window of a junk shop in Oxford . . . fifteen years ago now? It had been drizzling, she’d been late for a lecture, but something about the curved shape had leaped out of the cluttered display, a suspended raindrop of bright cobalt blue in the middle of a load of tatty brass and china. Gina could picture it in her rooms at college, on the window overlooking a courtyard, but she struggled to remember where it had been in Dryden Road: in the landing alcove with some dried lavender in it. There, but invisible, just filling a space.

  She sat back on her heels, feeling the weight of the glass. The vase had cost twenty-five pounds – a fortune in her student days – and had always been full of striped tulips from the market, left until they decayed in that pretentious student style, falling in tissue thinness onto the stone ledge of her windowsill. Kit had started it: he’d brought her flowers on his first visit, and she’d been unable to bring herself to throw them out. And after someone had said, ‘Oh, you’re the girl who always has flowers!’ Gina had made a point of keeping the vase full because she wanted to be the Girl Who Always Had Flowers.

  At least I don’t do that any more, she thought, with a twinge of embarrassment at how much she’d wanted people to like her at university. She wasn’t in touch with a single one of them now.

  Gina started to put the vase into the GIVE AWAY box; over the years she’d collected lots of different vases, for lilies, hyacinths, roses. She didn’t need one that reminded her of Kit, and of all the expectations she’d had at university of where her life would be by now. All her life, she realised, she’d been creating this paper trail of possessions, hoping that they’d keep her attached to her own memories, but now she’d found out they didn’t. The last years meant nothing. They were gone. All the photo albums in the world wouldn’t keep them real.

  But as she held it, she stopped seeing those things and instead saw a vase. A rather nice vase that made Gina think that, actually, she’d had a bit of an eye for quality even as a student. Its bold sculptural shape had got lost in Dryden Road’s collage of colour and detail, but it was perfect for this flat. The white background reframed it: it was still a beautiful frozen raindrop of glass, bright cobalt blue, ready for flowers to fill it.

  Gina edged around the boxes until she was in front of the big picture window, and placed the vase squarely in the centre of the windowsill, where the sun would shine through it as it had done at college, revealing the murky wet shapes of the flower stems, rigid below the papery petals.

  She stood for a moment, trying to catch the slippery emotions swirling in her chest. Then a cloud moved outside and the last light of the day deepened the blue of the glass. As it glowed against the blank white sill, something twitched inside her, a memory nudging its way back to the surface. Not of an event but of a feeling, the same bittersweet fizz she’d felt when she’d unpacked her belongings in her university room, waiting for the happiest days of her life to roar around the corner, despite her secret worry that maybe she’d already had them, anticipation sharpened with a lick of fear. Was that a memory? Was it just the same feeling in a different place? Because her life was starting again now too?

  Gina took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to keep the vase because it reminded her of college or because a visitor might be impressed with her good taste. She was keeping it because she liked it. And when she looked at it, it made her happy. It caught the light, even on a grey day. It was beautiful.

  She hadn’t bought it for her student rooms. She’d bought it fifteen years ago – for this flat.

  The blue glass vase glowed in the weak, wintry sunshine, and the white flat didn’t look quite so white any more. Gina stood for a long minute, letting nothing into her head except the liquid swoop and the deep, jewel-like colour.

  Then, with a more confident hand, she reached into the box for the next ball of bubble-wrap.

  Chapter Two

  ITEM: a brown leather satchel, with GJB embossed on the front

  Hartley, September 1991

  Georgina is experiencing very mixed feelings about her new school satchel.

  This morning, on the kitchen table, it had looked all right. Shiny and conker-brown, with brass buckles and a corrugated section inside for putting pens in. She could tell it was expensive – although Georgina wasn’t fooled by that. It was a Trojan satchel. A satchel containing a whole stack of her mother’s guilt about sending her to yet another new school although, nominally, it was a present from Terry.

  Terry is her stepfather. Before he was her stepfather, he was the unmarried son of he
r grandmother’s friend-from-church, Agnes, and then he was the lodger in her mother’s spare room when they’d moved out of Gran’s house, where they’d been living since Georgina’s dad died. Now they’re living in their own house, near Terry’s new job, a few hundred miles away. Mum, Terry and Georgina, the new family. The satchel seems to have been Terry’s idea.

  ‘You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression,’ said Terry, when she inspected it over breakfast. He works in medical sales, and has meticulously ironed shirts that he presses himself, even though Georgina’s mum irons like a demon. Tea towels, pants, even socks, if they have frills on them.

  ‘Say thank you, Georgina,’ Janet had prompted her, before she’d even had time to think about not saying it.

  ‘Thank you, Terry,’ Georgina had said obediently, and looked down at her new school shoes, so as not to catch whatever variety of look her mum and Terry were exchanging.

  Her shoes are navy blue, with the Mary Jane strap that everyone had wanted at St Leonard’s. Mum had finally given in after months of pleading, but the shoes – exactly the right shade of blue – aren’t making Georgina as happy as she’d hoped.

  Half an hour later, pretending to read safety notices outside the registration room, Georgina knows for definite that the shoes are wrong. The satchel is beyond wrong. The other first-years around her are wearing the exact same brown blazer and white shirt but her over-tidy newness is making her different – she can already pick out the kids with older brothers and sisters by their cool, worn-in, hand-me-down uniform and bags. And their confident manner, the way they’re laughing and bumping against their mates, at ease with teasing and physical contact.

  Georgina wishes she knew how to make friends. How come some people have that knack, she wonders. What do they say? How do they know the right people to home in on?

  Think about Dad.