Wishful Thinking by Jemma Harvey Page A

groups, smokers have Nicorette patches, hypnotism, and, no doubt, support groups. But there’s no professional help if you’re addicted to a person. No Ex-girlfriends Anonymous, no substitute drugs (except possibly chocolate), no Nigellette patches. I would have to struggle through on my own, trying not to dwell on the times when it had been good: the cuddles, the comfort of coming home to someone.
    I’d never lived with a boyfriend before, and now there was a Nigel-shaped hole in my life and only time, or someone else, would fill it up. I missed his nagging principles, his sense-of-humour bypass, his little-boy petulance, his pocket-torch jaw. I missed all the things I shouldn’t have missed. Georgie rated him so low I knew she wouldn’t understand. But he had cared for me, or seemed to, and I missed that most of all.
    I stuck it out for a week. A week of cold turkey – of sweaty panics, hot flushes, that feeling that there are insects crawling under your skin and only a phone call will make them go away. Eventually, I succumbed, and went to the bookshop. I knew it was a mistake – I had no intention of telling the others – but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know – I had to know if there was any way I could put things back together, if he cared about me, if he cared about R, if the nightmare I was stuck in was all my future. He gave me a chilly unwelcoming look for which I didn’t blame him. He looked tidier and more clean-shaven than usual and not at all as if he’d been sleeping on a park bench.
    â€˜I wanted to see if you were okay,’ I said.
    â€˜I’m okay.’
    â€˜Sorry about the other night.’ I was losing all the points I had scored, but I was beyond caring. ‘I’m afraid I was awfully drunk.’
    He shrugged. ‘You did me a favour.’
    â€˜How . . . how come?’ He seemed to be armoured in ice, and I couldn’t make a dent.
    â€˜Rachel’s booted her husband out. I’ve moved in with her. I don’t know how to put this tactfully, and frankly, I don’t see why I should try. You’re a fat lump of bourgeois complacency with no sex appeal and a very limited outlook. I was compromising my integrity just spending time with you. You offered me the soft life and I took it – desperation makes the best of us prone to weakness – but now that I’ve left I feel like a chicken who’s flown the golden coop. I’m myself again. I’d like to pity you, but I’m not sure you deserve it. Go back to those superficial airheads you call friends. I wish you joy of them.’
    I just stood there. I wanted to say: ‘How is the soft life with Rachel?’ but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything at all. After a moment – how long a moment I have no idea – I turned round and walked out. I felt lower than an earthworm. I shouldn’t have gone there: I had courted humiliation, and humiliation was what I had been given, in spades. I’d thought I wanted the truth, and now I had it. This was worse than cold turkey – this was just cold. It was Claudio’s vision of hell in Measure for Measure , being imprisoned ‘in thrilling regions of thick-ribbèd ice’. When I got home I tried to eat, by way of comfort, but I felt sick. I couldn’t drink. I didn’t have the courage to call Georgie or Lin and tell them what had happened. There was only me, and my humiliation. I wanted to be angry – anger is good, anger is positive, it keeps you warm – but I was only empty.
    In bed, I lay wakeful, re-enacting the scene with Nigel with various different endings, all better than the original, until sleep sneaked up and caught me unawares. Blissful oblivion. Then in the morning there was the business of waking up to being me, humiliation and all. I wondered how someone who was size sixteen could feel so small.
    It was many nights before the only plus