Page 7 of Stella is Starting Over

‘I know.’

The first time she stayed she laughed at me for the Aesop products in the bathroom, the hairdryer and the make-up wipes. Actually, first she accused me of having a girlfriend. Then, after I absolutely insisted I didn’t and offered to let her go through the wardrobes to check for clothes, she laughed at me. ‘You really have enough girls through here to justify this?’

At the time I was surprised she’d said girl rather than woman, given that she’s an academic, and a feminist. But then this was three, four years ago? So she would have been in her mid-, maybe late twenties. More of a girl than a woman, arguably. I answered her honestly, at the time. Told her that yes, I absolutely do have enough women come here to justify it. She asked me how many and I said one, maybe two a month. Plus a handful of friends who returned time and time again for what was hopefully a low-pressure, high-enjoyment rematch. And after she’d asked me a laundry list of questions about how any of this could work, I took her to bed. And the next time she was in town, she messaged me, Fancy a rematch? And then I blinked and time passed, and we’ve done this for three nights every three months for three years. Thirty-six rematches. All from that one fateful right-swipe on an app when she was in London for a few days.

‘I have bad news,’ Orla says, when she comes out of the shower. Her cheeks are pink and she’s wearing the towelling robe. Smiling up at me through her thick, dark lashes.

‘Has the shower shelf come off the wall? Because the guy who installed it was incredibly dodgy and I told him that—’

‘I’m in love with you,’ she says.

Right.

Shit.

She’s still smiling, which gives me the horrible feeling that she might think I’m going to say it back. I can’t say it back because I’m thinking that I’d much rather she’d told me that the shower shelf had come off the wall.

‘Is that. . . okay?’ she asks, her smile fading.

‘Of course it’s okay,’ I tell her, pouring her a glass of wine. She accepts the glass, holding it between both hands.

‘Do you—’ She pauses. ‘I mean, if I have to ask. . .’ She swallows. ‘I take it you. . . don’t?’

I’d love to lie to her. I really would. I’d love to tell her I love her, then take her to bed and see what she’s like to fuck when she’s just been told that she’s loved, and then tomorrow do the same thing, and then block her the second she gets on the plane back to Dublin and pretend none of this ever happened. But for all the obvious reasons pertaining to my inconvenient moral code, I can’t do that.

‘You being here is incredible,’ I say, slowly. ‘Genuinely. I spent the entire weekend in Amsterdam thinking about counting the freckles on your shoulder blades, and asking what you thought of the last Rooney novel.’ I force myself to look her in the face, because she came here to tell me something that I mistakenly allowed her to think I was going to not only celebrate but return, and honestly the more this experience pains me the better I’ll feel about it afterwards. ‘But, no. I don’t. Not because I couldn’t – if I let myself then I would, absolutely. But I’m not like that. I don’t want all the stuff those feelings entail. Life-wise. So I’ve sort of. . . guarded against it.’

She takes a long drink from her glass and then nods. ‘I get it,’ she says.

We stare at each other for a while. I think quite a long while. ‘D’you fancy a fuck anyway?’ she says, half laughing, with a twist of a sob in the middle of it.

After we shag, we sleep next to each other, my arms wrapped around her narrow torso, and then in the morning she leaves and I pretend to be asleep.

Stella

Everyone I know has been painfully anti-dating apps. All I’ve ever heard is horror stories. The men are grim, the chat is dry, the profiles are agonising. But in the week I’ve been on Tangl, I’ve come to realise that my single friends are spoiled. If they think this is bad, they should try asking the same person what they want for dinner and hearing ‘I don’t really mind’ in response for an entire decade. I don’t know where all the negativity is coming from because I can tell you, right here, right now, dating apps are fun.

After I got home from dinner with Lou, I did a deep dive on Instagram, TikTok and various women’s magazines into the best dating app and concluded that Tangl was where it’s at. It’s described as ‘open-minded’ dating, and it has options for you to look for couples to date. On day one, I admit, I was a little bit like one of those Amish teenagers who goes to New York and sees electricity for the first time. Everyone’s profile had loads of complicated acronyms, and everyone seemed to talk in a complicated language. NSA, GGG, FWB all left me very confused initially, but now I’m a dab hand (no strings attached, good giving game, friends with benefits). I’ve uploaded three pictures, because since Rose was born, I’ve only had three decent ones taken of me, and before that I’m obviously pregnant, which might attract some quite weird people, and before that it’s so long ago that I look dramatically better and my literal worst fear apart from getting murdered by one of these men is that I get accused of catfishing.

This Thursday, some of my girlfriends are coming to dinner to ‘cheer me up’, which is very sweet of them, and when they put the date in the diary two months ago (this is how long it takes to get four women in their early thirties in the same room), it was much needed. But right now, the idea of wasting a night talking about their actual careers, houses and lives, when I could be making small talk with boys on the internet, is less than appealing.

I’ve literally never done this before. I was too much of a baby to try the apps when I was at uni, and then I met Gav, so there wasn’t any need to. But oh my god, the dopamine hit you get when you open the app and there are all these men just waiting there, it’s insane! I’ve never even been bought a drink in a bar by a guy who isn’t Gavin and now I’ve got like seven of them just sending me messages. And sure, if I met them, half of them would turn out to be losers, probably more than half. But that doesn’t matter. At the moment they’re not real. They’re deliciously, delightfully fictional and the only thing that matters is that they’re interested. In me.

It also transpires that it’s pretty distracting. I’ve tried to keep it to evenings and naptimes because I keep reading studies about how babies with phone-addicted parents don’t develop empathy, and I need Rose to grow up empathetic so she likes me more than Gavin. But my self-control is limited, and it’s turning into an issue with my girlfriends.

Kate, Olive, Steph and Louella all arrive on time, which means they’ve been for a drink together after work. I’m hurt by this, even though I shouldn’t be. I told them to come around seven; they’re here around seven. The fact that they stopped for an Aperol outside the pub on the way home doesn’t mean that they weren’t excited to see me. And it doesn’t mean that they like Louella more than they like me, an ongoing concern of mine. Louella and I are only eleven months apart because our mother thought that breastfeeding was a contraceptive device. I was born in September, Louella in August, so we’re in the same school year and therefore both, conveniently and very inconveniently, share a friendship group. Obviously it’s nice and I shouldn’t complain about it, but having Louella – who is stunningly beautiful and effortlessly cool – as a sister is not totally without its challenges and I do sometimes wonder if I might have turned out a bit emotionally healthier if I’d at least had a couple of my own friends.

Anyway, they all file into the house, looking around, I think probably searching for signs of progress. When Gavin and I moved in it was deeply, painfully unloved. The previous owner had locked it up and moved abroad, and it had sort of rotted from the inside. We bought it for a bargain and then spent all of our time doing it up. I learned to wallpaper, learned to tile, learned to cut the most impressive straight edge around a power socket with a paint brush. We were seventy per cent done when Gavin left, so thankfully the open-plan kitchen-living room is decent, as is the TV room; our bedroom and Rose’s bedroom are done, and we’ve got a working bathroom. The rest of the house, all the hallways and the downstairs bathroom, are still untouched from the 1970s. Not a decade famed for its decorative elegance.

‘It looks stun,’ Kate says, putting the wine down and throwing her coat on the sofa. It does not look stun. We’re at a full seven drying racks, all covered with Rose’s clothes – mine are festering in the laundry basket upstairs – and there is a carpet of plastic blocks across the entire floor. All of the post is in piles on the kitchen table and the vegetables I’ve been chopping are cluttering most of the counter space.

‘And you look stun,’ Olive adds. I really hope this is less of a lie than Kate’s comment about the house.

We gather around the table, fill our glasses and start the download. Kate has given her boyfriend an ultimatum: propose or split. Olive is thinking about leaving her job because she found out that a guy a level below her is getting paid more and when she asked why, her boss explained it was because he’d just become a dad. Louella has had mastic Botox in her jaw to stop her from clenching all the time and none of us believe that’s why she did it, and Steph is stressed because her sister is doing a terrible job planning a very expensive destination hen do for her when what she really wanted was a lunch followed by karaoke in London. I listen to all of this, genuinely interested. But every time my phone buzzes, my hand reaches for it and flips it over and I literally cannot stop myself.

I’d put it on silent but if Gavin called because there was something wrong with Rose and I missed the call, I’d never get over it. Every time I check the phone I tell myself off and resolve that I’m not going to look at it again. And then it buzzes and I look at it again. Chris, a 37-year-old software designer originally from New York, now living in Shoreditch, is asking me to recommend somewhere for a newbie. I consider telling him that ‘Elephant Rhyme Time’ at the Wandsworth library is pretty exclusive and worth putting your name down for, but think better of it.

‘Stella, what the fuck?’ Olive says eventually.