Twenties Girl

“We should never have told her about that,” she murmurs, rubbing her brow. “We should never have mentioned it-”
“Because if you’d done that,” I continue inexorably, “you would never have got back together again, would you? Dad would never have said that he was the bow to your violin and you would never have got married.”
This line about the bow and the violin has made it into family lore. I’ve heard the story a zillion times. Dad arrived at Mum’s house, all sweaty because he’d been riding on his bike, and she’d been crying but she pretended she had a cold, and they made up their fight and Granny gave them tea and shortbread. (I don’t know why the shortbread is relevant, but it always gets mentioned.)
“Lara, darling.” Mum sighs. “That was very different; we’d been together three years, we were engaged-”
“I know!” I say defensively. “I know it was different. I’m just saying, people do sometimes get back together. It does happen.”
There’s silence.
“Lara, you’ve always been a romantic soul-” begins Dad.
“I’m not romantic!” I exclaim, as though this is a deadly insult. I’m staring at the carpet, rubbing the pile with my toe, but in my peripheral vision I can see Mum and Dad, each mouthing vigorously at the other to speak next. Mum’s shaking her head and pointing at Dad as though to say, “You go!”
“When you break up with someone,” Dad starts again in an awkward rush, “it’s easy to look backward and think life would be perfect if you got back together. But-”
He’s going to tell me how life is an escalator. I have to head him off, quick.
“Dad. Listen. Please.” Somehow I muster my calmest tones. “You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t want to get back together with Josh.” I try to sound as if this is a ridiculous idea. “That’s not why I texted him. I just wanted closure. I mean, he broke things off with no warning, no talking, no discussion. I never got any answers. It’s like… unfinished business. It’s like reading an Agatha Christie and never knowing whodunnit!”
There. Now they’ll understand.
“Well,” says Dad at length, “I can understand your frustrations-”
“That’s all I ever wanted,” I say as convincingly as I can. “To understand what Josh was thinking. To talk things over. To communicate like two civilized human beings.”
And to get back together with him, my mind adds, like a silent, truthful arrow. Because I know Josh still loves me, even if no one else thinks so.
But there’s no point saying that to my parents. They’d never get it. How could they? They have no concept of how amazing Josh and I were as a couple, how we fit together perfectly. They don’t understand how he obviously made a panicked, rushed, boy-type decision, based on some nonexistent reason probably, and how if I could just talk to him, I’m sure I could straighten everything out and we’d be together again.
Sometimes I feel streets ahead of my parents, just like Einstein must have done when his friends kept saying, “The universe is straight, Albert, take it from us,” and inside he was secretly thinking, “I know it’s curved. I’ll show you one day.”
Mum and Dad are surreptitiously mouthing at each other again. I should put them out of their misery.
“Anyway, you mustn’t worry about me,” I say hastily. “Because I have moved on. I mean, OK, maybe I haven’t moved on totally” I amend as I see their dubious expressions, “but I’ve accepted that Josh doesn’t want to talk. I’ve realized that it just wasn’t meant to be. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and… I’m in a good place. Really.”
My smile is pasted on my face. I feel like I’m chanting the mantra of some wacky cult. I should be wearing robes and banging a tambourine.
Hare hare… I’ve moved on… hare hare… I’m in a good place….
Dad and Mum exchange looks. I have no idea whether they believe me, but at least I’ve given us all a way out of this sticky conversation.
“That’s the spirit!” Dad says, looking relieved. “Well done, Lara, I knew you’d get there. And you’ve got the business with Natalie to focus on, which is obviously going tremendously well…”
My smile becomes even more cultlike.
“Absolutely!”
Hare hare… my business is going well… hare hare… it’s not a disaster at all…
“I’m so glad you’ve come through this.” Mum comes over and kisses the top of my head. “Now, we’d better get going. Find yourself some black shoes, chop chop!”
With a resentful sigh I get to my feet and drag myself into my bedroom. It’s a beautiful sunshiny day. And I get to spend it at a hideous family occasion involving a dead 105-year-old person. Sometimes life really sucks.
As we pull up in the drab little car park of the Potters Bar Funeral Center, I notice a small crowd of people outside a side door. Then I see the glint of a TV camera and a fluffy microphone bobbing above people’s heads.
“What’s going on?” I peer out the car window. “Something to do with Uncle Bill?”
“Probably.” Dad nods.
“I think someone’s doing a documentary about him,” Mum puts in. “Trudy mentioned it. For his book.”
This is what happens when one of your relations is a celebrity. You get used to TV cameras being around. And people saying, when you introduce yourself, “Lington? Any relation to Lingtons Coffee, ha ha?” and them being gobsmacked when you say, “Yes.”
My uncle Bill is the Bill Lington, who started Lingtons Coffee from nothing at the age of twenty-six and built it up into a worldwide empire of coffee shops. His face is printed on every single coffee cup, which makes him more famous than the Beatles or something. You’d recognize him if you saw him. And right now he’s even more high profile than usual because his autobiography, Two Little Coins, came out last month and is a bestseller. Apparently Pierce Brosnan might play him in the movie.
Of course, I’ve read it from cover to cover. It’s all about how he was down to his last twenty pence and bought a coffee and it tasted so terrible it gave him the idea to run coffee shops. So he opened one and started a chain, and now he pretty much owns the world. His nickname is “The Alchemist,” and according to some article last year, the entire business world would like to know the secrets of his success.
That’s why he started his Two Little Coins seminars. I secretly went to one a few months ago. Just in case I could get some tips on running a brand-new business. There were two hundred people there, all lapping up every word, and at the end we had to hold two coins up in the air and say, “This is my beginning.” It was totally cheesy and embarrassing, but everyone around me seemed really inspired. Personally speaking, I was listening hard all the way through and I still don’t know how he did it.
I mean, he was twenty-six when he made his first million. Twenty-six! He just started a business and became an instant success. Whereas I started a business six months ago and all I’ve become is an instant head case.
“Maybe you and Natalie will write a book about your business one day!” says Mum, as though she can read my mind.
“Global domination is just around the corner,” chimes in Dad heartily.
“Look, a squirrel!” I point hastily out the window. My parents have been so supportive of my business, I can’t tell them the truth. So I just change the subject whenever they mention it.
To be strictly accurate, you could say Mum wasn’t instantly supportive. In fact, you could say that when I first announced I was giving up my marketing job and taking out all my savings to start a headhunting company, having never been a headhunter in my life or knowing anything about it, she went into total meltdown.
But she calmed down when I explained I was going into partnership with my best friend, Natalie. And that Natalie was a top executive headhunter and would be fronting the business at first while I did the admin and marketing and learned the skills of headhunting myself. And that we already had several contracts lined up and would pay off the bank loan in no time.