People LIke Her(40)
I open my mouth to give her the epic bollocking I’ve been mentally rehearsing in the cab, but it won’t come.
“Oh, Winter, for God’s sake. You don’t need to cry. Coco seems okay. You’re fine, aren’t you, Cocopop?” I say. With some irritation, looking at the state of Winter, I can see that I am going to have to comfort her.
I put my arms around the girl’s heaving shoulders.
“We should never have asked you to take Coco; it’s not part of your job.”
“It’s not that, Emmy. Well, it is that. But it’s also . . . the reason I was looking at my phone, the reason I was distracted . . . Becket dumped me. He says he just wants to concentrate on his music right now. He doesn’t have the headspace for anything else,” she wails as she waves her phone at me. “What am I going to do? Where am I going to live?”
Sensitive, caring artist Becket has told Winter it’s over and asked her to move out by DM. A really, really long DM. More of a poem, actually, by the looks of it. I’m going to have to dispense relationship advice while we wait for the doctor to show up, I realize. I check that Bear is asleep in his pram, let Coco pick a bag of M&M’s from Winter’s haul, absentmindedly stroke the nape of her neck as she shovels them into her mouth.
“Come here.” I motion for Winter to sit down next to me on the end of the bed. “What happened? Did you two have a fight?”
“No, Emmy, that’s just it. I thought it was all going so well. We never fight, we are—we were—totally into each other. I don’t understand. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.” She starts hiccupping, and hands me the phone to read.
I can’t bear to read the whole whiny, self-important, solipsistic thing, but quickly get the gist. Winter is trying to make a career for herself, and she isn’t giving him—the artist—enough attention. She’s been distracted by her new job and isn’t spending enough time fawning. There is a list of gigs she missed, a DJ set she turned up late for, that time she told him that she couldn’t post a picture of the cover of his EP on her Instagram feed because it interfered with sponsored content she had booked in. And he also sort of thought she’d maybe do more around his flat, like cooking or something, you know? So he could concentrate on creating?
Christ, this guy sounds like a dick.
“Winter, I know this feels like the end of the world now. But honestly, I went through the same thing as you over and over again in my twenties, and it all worked out for the best. These are just practice runs, you know, these hot idiots who break your heart? They help you work out what you want, what you actually need. And if you’re anything like me—and I think you are, in a lot of ways—what you need is someone who has your back. Someone who is not always competing with you. Who is willing to support you fully in whatever it is you want to do—even if they don’t entirely understand what that is—and who doesn’t feel threatened when you do it well and people notice,” I say, squeezing her knee. “And I promise, there really are men out there who don’t feel that being in a relationship with a successful woman somehow diminishes or overshadows them.”
She dabs away a tear. “Are you talking about you and Dan? God, I totally never thought of you guys like that. I just thought that you’re, you know, a mum and dad,” she says, looking at me quizzically, and I can see that in her head she is trying to imagine us as a younger couple, a young couple, trying to imagine the kind of people we used to be when we were her age.
Oh, come on, I think, is it really that difficult?
“You’ll meet someone else,” I tell her, resting a hand on her arm. “Someone who goes out of their way to make you feel special, who looks at you like you’re the only woman in the world, who listens and laughs and loves you the way you deserve to be loved. You’ll find your Dan.”
For some reason this sets her off sobbing again. I offer her a tissue. She dabs her eyes and then blows her nose on it.
“Oh God,” she moans, “that’s very romantic and everything . . . it’s just . . . it’s just . . . Becket’s parents own our flat. I haven’t really earned anything from influencing since I quit my job to go full-time and I’m already in so much debt I can’t look at the credit card bills. Everyone said it was easy, all this. Irene made it sound like there would be loads of money right from the start. I mean, I get sent stuff. But it’s, like, never stuff you actually want, is it? Bags in the wrong color, dresses that don’t fit. And some of the hats”—she wrinkles her nose—“they’re so awful, they don’t even sell on eBay.
“You can’t eat free clothes, or pay your rent with them. And the holidays and the turmeric lattes and smoothie bowls for brunch with the other girls, and the giant bunches of flowers for props, the hair and beauty stuff, and you have to look different in every photo, and . . . and . . . I don’t even have a proper camera . . .” She is now blowing great big snot bubbles, tears dripping from her chin. “Everyone else has an Olympus PEN!” She literally howls at the injustice of it all.
I could kiss the doctor when he arrives to give Coco a once-over, giving me the excuse I need to hug Winter one more time and send her off home. He says that he is almost certain that her wrist isn’t broken but wants to check. The nurse will be back in a little while to take her down to X-ray, and until then we should just sit tight.