The Thirty List. Eva Woods

looked down at me kindly. ‘It’s good you want to listen to this song, you know. You’re done with all that R.E.M., then? Sixteen renditions of “Everybody Hurts” in a row?’

      ‘Not sure,’ I mumbled into the floor.

      ‘Well, you’ll have to be, because I’ve buried the CD in the garden and I’m not telling you where.’

      ‘Oh.’

      ‘Do you want to get up now?’

      ‘Not really.’

      ‘Come on, love. I’ll give you a sticker.’

      So this was me, Rachel Kenny, aged thirty, imminently to be divorced, having to be prised away from my hardwood floors, my back-garden hydrangea and my wind chimes and exposed-brick chimney piece. All those things I barely looked at but saw every day, and which were mine. I had floor dust down my front and was wearing an old college sweatshirt, partly because everything was packed, and partly because I had owned it before I met Dan, and I wanted to try to reset to that person.

      This was the kind of crazy logic I was operating on at this moment in time. Things that suck about divorce, number seven: you go completely and totally out of your tree.

      Finally, after two emergency trips back for things I’d forgotten that seemed really important at the time (hairbrush, muffin tray, mop), we were in the van Emma had hired me.

      ‘Ready?’ Cynthia asked me, settling into the wide front seat.

      ‘I don’t know. It’s … My whole life was there. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’

      She squeezed my arm with her manicured hand. ‘I know, darling. But what’s that thing your dad always says?’

      ‘Um … Countdown’s never been the same since Carol left?’

      ‘No, I mean that other thing. If you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’

      I stared back at the house. Dan would be coming back later. I didn’t even know where he’d been staying while I moved my things out. This was what we’d come to. ‘Do you think I should leave him a note? I mean, I can’t just … go. That can’t be the last conversation we ever have. We were together for ten years!’

      They exchanged another look. ‘We’ve talked about this, Rach,’ said Emma gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but this is just how it has to be.’

      We drove off. The house receded in the mirror to the size of a Lego cottage, till I almost felt I could pick it up and pop it into the pocket of my hoody, and then I couldn’t see any more anyway because of the tears filling my eyes, spilling out and running down onto my dust-stained front. Cynthia passed me a flowery tissue and Emma patted my hand as she cut up school-run mums in massive Jeeps. I closed my eyes.

      Things that suck about divorce, number nine: moving out of the home you spent years creating, with nowhere else to go. And remembering halfway up the M3 that you left the KT Tunstall CD in the car, which was no longer yours, along with all the rest of your life.

      I cried four times on the journey from Surrey to London. One was in the forecourt of a garage while Emma filled up (Cynthia refused to get petrol on her green leather driving gloves). Dan and I had done a lot of driving when we first got married and bought our car, a fourteen-year-old Mini. When we still had things to say to each other. We’d get the worst compilation CD we could find in the garage—Seventy Valentine’s Day Rockers! Fifty Smooth Driving Tunes!—and sing along, eating crisps, our hands touching in the greasy packet. I wondered if I’d now be sad every time I went to a garage for the rest of my life. It would make popping out for a Twix quite problematic.

      One good thing about crying is it’s quite a useful way to pass the time, if you don’t mind chronic dehydration and people staring at you, so the journey went by for me in a blur of motorways, hiccuping sobs and love songs on Mellow Magic FM, and soon we were at Cynthia’s Chiswick-based palace. She has three storeys and even a garden you could swing several cats in.

      We had stopped. The girls were looking at me, worried. I wiped my face, feeling like one of those criminals who needed to be bundled out of court in a blanket. You messed up your marriage, Rachel Kenny! Even though you had three Le Creuset pans and a fixed-rate mortgage! This court finds you guilty of being an idiot!

      ‘Come on, darling,’ said Cynthia. ‘Let’s get you down for the night.’

      ‘I’m not a baby, you know.’

      ‘Funny,’ Emma said, ‘because with all the crying and dribbling, it is actually quite like being with a baby.’

      I gulped. ‘At least I still have bladder control. Unlike you that time with the Red Bull shots.’

      Emma smiled and patted me on the hand. ‘That’s my girl. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

      Cynthia actually had a spare room, with a bed and soft white sheets and a carafe of water on the bedside table, plus arcane things like armoires and runners that I’d only ever seen in design magazines. Once I was settled into bed for the night—completely shattered, all my stuff in archive boxes, with no idea where my toothbrush might be—my phone bleeped with a text. Dan? My heart did a sort of funny swoop and fall, guilt and sadness and something else all in one. But no, of course it wasn’t Dan. I doubted he would ever text me again. It was Emma, asking if I was OK. I didn’t know how to answer that, so instead I composed imaginary texts to Dan, supposing he were actually talking to me and might listen to what I had to say.

      I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Please let me come home.

      I miss you.

      I can’t do this on my own.

      I didn’t send them, and for the rest of the night my phone stayed as dark and silent as the R.E.M. CD that was now buried somewhere under my bedding plants, ex–bedding plants, in a garden I’d probably never see again. I thought of him saying two years before: I’ll never leave you, Rachel.

      Yeah, right. But then, neither of us had exactly kept the promises we made that day.

       Chapter Two

      When I woke up in Cynthia’s white-cotton-and-distressed-wood (why would it be distressed? It’s in a lovely house in Chiswick. I’ve never understood that phrase) spare room, I’d no idea where I was for a moment. Had I fallen asleep in a branch of the White Company? Then it all came back and I felt the first tears of the day push against my eyelids. None of that. Today I had to find somewhere to live. I got ready in the en suite, with its rainfall shower and roll-top bath (if I was very quiet, maybe I could just stay here forever) and dressed in jeans and Converse. I brushed my hair, as I had to appear like a normal functioning member of society today, and that was hard for me at the best of times.

      Cynthia was at the scrubbed wood table with The Sunday Telegraph—she married a Tory; I know, but it can happen to your dearest friends sometimes—croissants and fresh coffee. Unlike how I’d have been on a Sunday in my own kitchen—toothpaste-encrusted jammies and butter in my hair—she was dressed in a grey wool dress and different, equally expensive knee boots. ‘There you are. Ready for the first day of the rest of your life?’

      ‘I thought that was yesterday.’

      ‘No, that was the last day of … a different bit of your life.’

      ‘Catchy.’

      ‘Croissant? Bagel? Scrambled eggs? Toast?’ Cynthia was one of those people who would hostess you to death if you let them.

      ‘Croissants would be lovely, thanks. Do you have any tea?’ It was tragically uncool, but I’d never