Chapter 1
In which Freya complains, and tells us a little about her past.
Welcome to Fragments of a City, a novel told in fragments.
I did not want to move here. I did not want to move anywhere, really, but I can think of dozens of places I’d prefer to the City. It’s not that I was happy, but my life was made of shapes I recognised: a tidy flat I owned, with decent, surface-scratched furniture; a large sofa, plump like steamed pudding; well-watered plants whose leaves were lovingly polished once a month. A lush view of a park through the window, furry saplings and splintered benches. A Tesco Express just four minutes away, always stocking those Polish fried onions I like so much. A short walk to the high street with two pharmacies, a Jamaican baker selling dense carrot cake by the slice, and a fried-chicken-and-pizza place with plastic tables glazed by ancient grease and two-for-one offers after ten pm. My life looked like what I’d imagined for myself as a teenager, but only when I’d allowed myself to dream big.
‘Why me?’ I asked Chris when my transfer was announced. He’s my manager’s manager’s manager, a bumbling, sniffling sort whose face looks a little ill-defined, like someone forgot to draw borders.
‘You speak the language,’ he said.
I do, sort of. I studied it at Uni and I can get by provided I stick to the topics of conversation covered in a university course: education itself, basic geography, directions, and the works of Italo Calvino.
‘But the job is in English,’ I said.
‘It helps, still.’
‘Right. And Luisa?’ Luisa, who was actually from there; Luisa, who could probably hold a conversation about, I don’t know, election fraud, or whatever people talk about nowadays.
‘Thing is…’ Chris’s skin looked flushed, his cheeks reddening to a delightful bright hue. ‘She has kids,’ he explained, making a wide gesture with his hands, spreading them to encompass the width of his argument.
‘Okay.’
‘And a partner.’
‘Right.’
‘A lot easier to move on your own.’
Ah. ‘Isn’t it discrimination? To move me because I’m divorced?’
‘No,’ Chris said immediately. ‘No, it’s not a protected category. I checked.’
******
My favourite video on Instagram: a girl learning to do a double Axel. In the first scenes, grainy, patterned with interlaced footage, the girl is small and unsteady, a newborn deer on shaky legs. She performs a little jump and wobbles to a stop. Riding the musical crescendo, she gets better; occasionally, you see her slim body meeting the ice, folding onto itself like a paper bag, but her jumps get higher, smoother, beautiful in that gravity-defying way of ice skaters. It gets posted a lot, by different pages, and the caption is always somewhere on the “practice makes perfect” spectrum.
I thought getting known, becoming clear to someone else, I thought it’d be the same. I thought you could marry someone and by sheer virtue of exposure, they’d dismantle you, a system of fleshy bits and lizard brain, and understand the pieces, how they fit together. I thought James could know me in that simple, instinctive way mothers understand their toddlers’ babbling while it remains incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
We met at university. I was new to London and he was new to me. He was a year younger than me, just eighteen, and quite bright, too. Bianca, my best friend, had introduced him to me because she knew him in a hazy, unspecific way.
It was just like any other university romance, except at the end, when it came to its natural conclusion, I simply didn’t let go. I suggested we get a flat the two of us, somewhere small, somewhere which stood forty minutes from the closest underground station, but still cheaper than sharing with strangers, and imagine all the fights you can avoid? All those silly discussions about house chores and rotas and dishes piling on top of the dishwasher—I’d do it all, I told him, I’d clean the toilet till it was sparkling and rub an old toothbrush into the silicone grouts. I’d remove wine stains from the carpet and sick stains when he’d drink so much he’d throw up from the bed, which we both knew was a regular occurrence. Flatmates don’t put up with that, do they?
I made myself very useful and very available; I told him about my mum and my stepdads and even about Francesco (not the truth, but something similar). I listened when he talked about his job (some form of engineering) and his friends (though I disliked them all) and deflated gently, oozing my essence so he could grasp it and I could be understood.
But when it ended, when all of it ended and he broke up with me, he told me I’d manipulated him. He said, ‘I don’t even remember why I asked you to marry me. Did I even ask you?’ As if he’d been unconscious for the planning and the wedding itself (which, admittedly, he had been, for large portions of it, or too hungover to think it through).
And as I stood a single woman again, with my little perfect mortgage signed in my name only, I realised that I was an entire untouched universe, that he’d never gotten to know me at all.