The Wish List (5 page)

‘Really?’ I suddenly feel a bit sad. ‘It doesn’t feel right without her around any more, does it?’

Stacey screws up her face. ‘Not to speak ill of the dead, but Charles thought she lowered the tone.’

I tut spontaneously.

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, he
liked
her,’ she leaps in. ‘We all did. But you know what I mean. There comes a time when every woman needs to give up topless
sunbathing.’

‘Well, I thought she was fantastic and funny and I miss her.’

‘Oh yes, me too,’ she says hastily. ‘But it’s good that the apartment isn’t going to be left empty, don’t you think?’

‘Of course. When are they moving in?’

‘Very soon, I gather. And . . . it’s a
man
.’ The second part of the sentence is loaded with implication, as if this man creature is a strange and mysterious
phenomenon, to be subjected to serious in-depth anthropological research.

‘A man,’ I repeat.

She purses her lips mischievously, her pupils dilating wildly. ‘Mmm-hmm. And he’s good-looking, apparently. Marjory on the second floor saw him with the estate agent. She said
he’s very,
very
handsome.’

I put my key in the door. ‘Stacey, Marjory thinks Cliff Richard is a great big stud.’

‘True. I just thought, seeing as you are single these days, there might be some . . .
po-ten-tial
.’

I open my mouth to protest that it’s not quite that straighforward. That I might be single now but I’m considering being attached again soon, because Rob is lovely and gorgeous and
maybe I
do
love him after all . . . when I stop myself.

Not least because my frontal cortex feels like it’s going to melt every time I think about this.

‘I don’t think so, Stacey,’ I say simply. ‘Listen, I’d better run. I’ve got a dinner to cook.’

‘Ooh – for anyone exciting?’

‘Well, yes, actually.’ A little too exciting if the truth be told.

‘Oh – sweetie, don’t do that. Come on, darling. Angel. Ow . . . that
hurts
!’

Zachary is trampolining on Cally’s knee as she attempts to conduct a conversation that’s been cut short several times amid cries of: ‘
Mummy! Pay me some
detention!
’

I spent far longer organising Zachary’s dinner tonight than my own, having sourced a recipe for Fussy Eaters’ Pasta on the internet and arranged it with carrot and cucumber
crudités in the shape of a smiley face. The website in question seems certain this will impress any two-year-old. But they haven’t met Zachary.

Cally finally grapples him into a standing position and ushers him to his chair at the kitchen table, where he narrows his eyes at my culinary offering.

‘Go ahead and dish up while I go to the loo,’ Cally tells me. ‘You’ll be all right with Zachary, won’t you?’

He takes several sharp sucks of his dummy as I wonder when the two Dobermanns are going to arrive at the door.

To be absolutely fair to Zachary, he’s not the only child to elicit this increase in my anxiety levels. They all do. As a breed, I find them terrifying. I have no idea why –
it’s not as if I was bitten by one in my youth. I just find children, particularly the little ones, terribly . . . unpredictable. And loud. And messy. God Almighty, they’re messy.

‘Are you hungry, Zachary?’ I can hear the strain in my voice, like there’s a fork impaled in my tonsils. ‘I hope you like this because Auntie Emma tried very hard to find
something that would appeal to you.’

Even I know this is a ridiculous thing to say to a two-year-old. I deserve the resultant look of disdain he throws me before turning his gaze to the fresh, puréed sauce, the special pasta
shapes and the lovingly arranged crudités. Then he looks back at me, giving nothing away. It’s like catering for A. A. Gill.

‘Tuck in!’ I add, handing him a fork. He stares at the dish, assessing it suspiciously as his lip starts to curl.

‘Is everything all right?’ I whimper, but he flings down his fork, crosses his arms, and blurts out a single, loaded word.

‘
Yuck!
’

‘I made friends with Abigail Daes on Facebook last night,’ Cally tells me after she’s spent an hour trying to coerce Zachary into consuming six pieces of
pasta and a cucumber eyebrow, before finally skipping to the cupcakes.

He’s in the living room now, engrossed in a
Bingbah
DVD and probably smearing the cake on the sofa, but I’m beyond caring.

‘Wasn’t she the quiet one in 4R?’

‘Yes – glasses and a funny twitch.’

‘What’s she up to these days?’

‘Pan Asian Marketing Director for a global software company. She’s based in Singapore.’

I nearly spit out my tea.

‘I was shocked too,’ Cally says. ‘She never really had much about her, did she?’

‘Wow.’

‘You should see the pictures of her apartment on Facebook. It’s stunning. The size of a football pitch.’

I stand up, banging my head on the space-saving recess next to my back door.

‘She’d have to be work-obsessed to get to a position like that,’ I venture, placing the dishes in the sink.

‘Actually, she seems to be up to quite a lot. She’s getting married next year, to a guy that looks like Olivier Martinez. And she’s climbing Kilimanjaro in October, to raise
funds for a charity she’s on the committee of. Oh, and she was voted Woman of the Year by her colleagues in April.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Please tell me she’s fat.’

‘Size eight. Tops.’

‘That’s settled, then. I hate her.’

Obviously, I’m joking. Clearly. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone their fabulous lifestyle and achievements and I have absolutely no doubt she’s had to work extremely hard to get to
where she is today.

But while I’m certain I don’t feel resentful, I definitely feel
something
.

Something that is still lingering as I’m clearing up the devastation after Cally and Zachary have left. I go to open the freezer to put away the litre and a half of hidden vegetable pasta
sauce I might get around to eating myself one day. And when I close the door, I’m confronted by something stuck to it with a magnet: the list.

I pick it up and stare at it, reading each line.

I don’t know what it is
exactly
that persuades me to make the decision there and then.

Maybe it’s because the countdown to turning thirty has well and truly begun. Maybe Abigail Daes and her luxury Singaporean apartment have brought out my competitive side. Or maybe
it’s that picture of my mum on her thirtieth birthday, taken less than a year before she died. Since it tumbled out of my photo box, I haven’t been able shake the feeling that I should
be treating every second of my life as precious – grasping every opportunity, no matter how mad or scary.

It could be all those things, or none. But once the decision is in my head, there’s no going back. So I clutch the list and head to the living room, where I fire up my laptop and type two
words into Google.

Polo lessons.

‘Are you serious?’ Asha splutters into her tea.

‘Actually, I am.’ I’m at her flat on Thursday after work, trying to ignore the implication that I must’ve suffered a severe blow to the head.

‘But, Em,’ she says gently, ‘how are you going to buy a cottage in Rutshire?’

‘I can do half of that one – the polo lessons. Besides, I didn’t say I’m necessarily going to do
everything
. There’s got to be flexibility or it’d
become a full-time occupation and I’ve already got one of those. But by the time I hit thirty, I want to have achieved . . . I don’t know . . . seventy-five per cent. Enough to make the
point.’

Asha’s flat is at the top of an enormous Victorian terrace off Lark Lane. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of a place, courtesy of the travelling she’s done over the years, with
rugs from Turkey, batiks from Swaziland, tea caddies from Hong Kong and a dozen other far-flung places.

She examines the list and raises an eyebrow. ‘Have a one-night stand. When are you going to do that, then?’

‘That’s in the twenty-five per cent I won’t bother with. I haven’t got the bottle to even try it.’

‘But you have to
jump out of a plane
,’ Asha points out. ‘Remind me how many people you’ve slept with, Emma?’

I suck in my teeth and start counting on my fingers until I’ve used up both hands twice over. Then I look up. ‘Three.’

I’m no prude; at least, I don’t think so. I’ve simply never found myself in a position to have sex with someone who isn’t a long-term boyfriend. Of whom, there have been
only three.

‘Surely picking and choosing things on your list destroys the object,’ Asha muses. ‘Shouldn’t it be all or nothing?’

‘Two minutes ago, you thought I was deranged to even consider this!’

She laughs. ‘Maybe I’m coming round to the idea. You could spend six months ticking things off your list, then have a party to celebrate.’

‘I’d like a thirtieth-birthday party,’ I confess. ‘I’ve never done anything before because my birthday’s so close to Christmas. I think I’m due
one.’

‘Well, if you’re going to have a one-night stand, it’s Cally’s birthday night out on Saturday – that’s the ideal opportunity.’

I squirm, really wanting to drop the subject. She notices. ‘You’re still not sure you did the right thing with Rob, are you?’

Asha knows the story of my relationship with Rob inside out; she and I have dissected the whole thing, like a frog in a school biology class. She always has been a brilliant listener –
patient and generous, never far from the end of a phone. If only that made things any clearer.

Rob and I met last year after he walked into the offices of Little Blue Bus Productions for a meeting with Perry about a fundraising dinner for Alder Hey children’s
hospital.

Rob’s company is big on ‘corporate social responsibility’ so he’s often charged by his boss with generating cash for worthy causes – something he enjoys almost as
much as his day job as a ‘wealth manager’. Which, as far as I can tell, means making rich people even richer by investing their money. To great effect, as I understand.

He turned up at our office at eleven thirty that day like the Diet Coke man, leaving the womenfolk of the parish so overcome with lust most of us could barely walk straight. He and I got
chatting in the lobby as I was leaving to grab some lunch – then carried on as we realised we were both heading into the city centre. He asked me if I would join him for lunch and, two Pret
sandwiches and a couple of lattes later, our relationship had begun.

To call Rob eye candy would do him a disservice. He’s a feast of gorgeousness – all tanned biceps, dark blond curls and a smile so dazzling it could alert passing ships to hazardous
rocks.

But there’s more to him than looks. He’s sweet, charming, clever, my dad loves him and, basically, he’s as close to perfection as it’s possible for anyone who isn’t
Matthew McConaughey to be. If I wrote a list of things that were right about Rob and a list of things that were wrong, there would be virtually nothing in the second column. He does own a Craig
David album, but that’s a minor misdemeanour in an otherwise overwhelmingly positive list of attributes.

I miss him so badly it sometimes makes my insides ache. Which begs one almost constant question.

Why
wasn’t it love?

No. Let me rephrase that . . . why wasn’t I
sure
it was love?

There have been so many times since we broke up that his absence has been so aching, so cold, that it
must’ve
been. Yet, something stopped me from saying yes when he asked those
big, beautiful and destructive words back in the spring.

He’d booked us in for a couple’s spa day at a hotel in Cheshire and we’d spent many hours being massaged, pampered and steaming up the Jacuzzi well beyond its highest
setting.

Afterwards, we went for a walk along the Roman Walls in Chester and paused to sit under a tree by the River Dee as the sun glittered on the water. He’d never looked more fanciable. The day
had been perfect. The evening had been perfect. Then it all went wrong when he said something that turned the blood in my veins to stone.

There was a long prequel in which he declared me to be the most ‘awesome, sexy and wonderful woman’ he’d ever met. How I’d made him happier in eight months than
he’d been in his life. How he’d been keeping a lid on his feelings but could do so no longer.

All the time I was thinking: God, I think he might be about to suggest something really outlandish, like going on holiday together.

As he continued talking, I’ll tell you what was going through my head:
A week’s a bit long, but I’d consider three days in Rome. Or maybe Barcelona, because you can get an
easyJet flight there—

‘Emma, did you hear me?’

‘Of course! Where were you thinking?’

He looked taken aback – and unnervingly happy.

‘Well, we’d have to take a look at a few venues but . . . does that mean it’s a yes?’

Then something clicked. Nobody could be
that
happy about the prospect of a dirty weekend, even if I promised to go on a spending spree at Agent Provocateur and take a course of
pole-dancing lessons in advance.

With my heart hammering, I shoved my hands in my pockets and found a packet of mints Dad had left in my car at the weekend, feeling a sudden urge to put one in my mouth. ‘You’re not
talking about going away, are you?’ I mumbled.

‘Emma, I don’t care
where
we do it, I only care
that
we do it.’

‘Do . . . what?’ I asked, praying his answer would be ‘snow-boarding’.

He sank to one knee and uttered four words that killed my blissful notion that what we had together was frivolous, thoroughly enjoyable and just a bit of fun.

‘Will you marry me?’

I nearly choked on my Fox’s Glacier mint.

My bid to tackle the list gets off to a flying start.

By Saturday, the day of Cally’s thirtieth birthday, I have a polo taster lesson booked, although it’s not until the end of September. I cancelled this morning’s hair
appointment so that I can ‘grow hair long’, as the list puts it, despite my awareness that aspiring to look like Daryl Hannah in
Splash
by December might be ambitious. And I
Googled various Michelin-starred restaurants – even though, as I did so, something hit home.