Page 76 of Stella is Starting Over
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I used Louella’s Instagram. That sounds like stalking. I mean, I went over to Louella’s to talk to her – she’s having a baby by the way – and I mentioned you, and she showed me your Instagram story, and so I knew you had just got back, so, yeah. . . Instagram.’
‘You deleted yours,’ I say. It’s not a question. I know she deleted it because I initially thought she’d blocked me and was massively relieved when I realised she hadn’t.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I was trying to sort my life out, and watching loads of videos and seeing loads of pictures of people from school who were mean to me now having these great lives wasn’t really helping.’
‘Fair,’ I agree. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I ask, trying to sound normal. So far, we’ve mostly talked to each other like our sentences are being put through Google Translate five or six times until they barely make sense any more.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Water. Please.’
‘Water. Good.’ I go to get her a glass. ‘How are you? How have you been?’
She smiles, but she also looks sort of tearful, which is really confusing. ‘I’m good,’ she says. ‘Better, at least. I went freelance. Sold my house. Rose turned two.’
I know quite a lot of these things because I’ve googled her at least once a week since I last saw her and I got a property alert for her house when it went on the market, then looked at the pictures of all the work she’d done to the house and desperately wanted to message her and tell her what a fucking amazing job she’d done.
‘That’s great,’ I say weakly.
‘So, Dublin,’ she says, similarly strained. ‘Are you. . . living there? Or just visiting?’
‘Visiting,’ I say. ‘I went to see Orla.’
Her face falls.
‘No!’ I say, too quickly, too panicked. ‘She’s getting married. To someone else. Jason, she’s marrying a guy called Jason. He’s nice. He’s an English teacher. He likes Of Mice and Men, which is a red flag but nobody’s perfect.’
She laughs. ‘Wow. That’s great. Good for Orla.’
‘Good for Orla,’ I echo.
I hand her a glass of water and then we sit on the sofa, both bolt upright, facing forward, not touching. The screensaver is on the TV, showing pictures of various natural-beauty sights in the world. ‘I think that’s probably Iceland,’ she says eventually.
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Or Norway.’
We wait until the picture changes.
‘I think that’s Cornwall,’ I suggest.
‘Or it could be Scotland.’
Neither of us says anything while we wait for the picture to change again and time moves more slowly than I ever imagined it could. I rack my brains for something to say because this is going about as badly as it possibly could. Then I shift slightly and knock the controller, which wakes the TV up and reveals that I was playing a football video game against a teenager somewhere in central America.
‘Can I say something?’ she asks.
‘Please,’ I reply. ‘Please say something.’
She turns on the sofa so that she’s facing me.
‘I had lunch with Gavin earlier, and he told me—’
‘Gavin? Don’t we hate Gavin?’ I interrupt.
She laughs. ‘I mean, yes and no, compared to some of the men I’ve met in the last eighteen months, he’s actually okay.’
‘Fair.’ I laugh.
‘Anyway,’ she goes on. ‘I thought I had to get my life in perfect shape before I let myself have someone, and I thought I was meeting the wrong people because the universe was punishing me for dating when I should be happy at home with my baby, and I. . . I had all these rules and these plans, and I had such a strict idea about how it had to work. And it was all pointless because it all went wrong anyway, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I didn’t deal with it better last year, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where my head was at, or that I was too ashamed of what had happened with Richard to contemplate letting anyone else touch me again for a long time. I owed you that. You were a really, really good friend to me and I didn’t return that because I was selfish and self-involved, and I think, sometimes, when bad things happen to you, it’s easy to become selfish and self-involved, but I shouldn’t. And I’m sorry.’
She takes a deep breath.
