Limehouse Taster

After My Own Heart by Sophia Blackwell

Chapter One: Counting the Thunder

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1♕ There are some people you feel sorry for. Not just the ones who’ve always

had it bad. Not the earthquake victims and abuse survivors and anyone who happened to be in the wrong country at the wrong time, but the ones whose lives just don’t go right. The ones who leave school trailing Girl-or-Boy-Most-Likely clouds but never figure out what they want to do, whose wedding photos are shamefacedly shoved in a drawer within two years of the ceremony, who never quite hit rock bottom but still don’t manage to do what they came to do.

When I turned twenty-nine, I started wondering if I was one of them. Now here I am, sitting in a horseshoe of fold-out chairs full of people who woke up one day and decided something was wrong.

I’d like to say that I chose to be here, but I didn’t. I’m here because Jamie, my best friend and ex-girlfriend, recently had her life overhauled by this mildly worrying group called The Path and asked me and my girlfriend Kate along with her tonight, ‘just to check it out.’ The Path encourages you to ask your mates to do this, but we’re still horrified that Jamie asked us and traumatised that we’re here.

♕2 Jamie is smiling like an aid worker and keeping an eye on us to check we

don’t bolt into the nearest pub. Kate’s hardly said anything all night, but that’s nothing new; she’s hardly said anything for weeks. She gets depressed sometimes, I know, and this is one of those times. She gets up and goes to work every day, but still some days, especially on weekends, I come home and it feels like she’s hardly moved. She can sit for hours when she’s like this, staring at the walls.

I try not to worry. I tell myself we’ve got through this before – we can do it again. Winter makes people sad sometimes and this has been a long one. It’s January, the sluggish, coal-scented early days of the year, and I know I can’t be the only person on earth who feels relieved that Christmas is over, that all that enforced happiness, is behind us. Next year, I tell myself, will be better.

I’m over-compensating like the bargain-basement singer I am. It’s hard to turn it off. I smile encouragingly as people with nametags spill the details of their lives, like I can’t think of anything better to do with my Thursday night.

Our group leader is young, sharp-suited and so clean he looks like he’s been laminated. Surely no one looks like this in London. His level of happiness is

♕3 bordering on offensive; I consider it a victory if I leave the house without being

mugged or forgetting my keys.

‘I always thought I knew how to live, how to listen,’ he tells us. ‘I was a success at my job, popular, had plenty of money…but something was missing.’ He pauses for effect. ‘There were so many possibilities that I was missing out on. Now I’ve completed the course, I know what I’m committed to…being the best version of me I can possibly be. And now everything is amazing. Amazing.’

He looks like he’s on the verge of orgasm. I could do without this, frankly.

I give him my best contemptuous stare but he beams back, unaware that he’s being scorned. My world does not admit these squeaky-clean young men with their sleek hair and city pinstripes. I like dark, quirky things. East End pubs that look like they were burnt out in the Blitz and never redecorated, gay clubs with sweaty go-go-dancers’ poles and posters for Porn Idol.

♕4 He passes out pieces of paper and tells us to start looking at the areas of our

lives we could improve. Everything’s neatly compartmentalised; health, career, relationships. The tick-boxes remind me of the forms I used to file back in my temping days in medical records. The ones for the children always upset me; they had little cartoons they could tick or circle to indicate their level of pain. Smiley face, frowning face, clenched face exploding with tears. I’m glad I don’t have one of those forms; there isn’t a face bad enough for my state of mind tonight.

Defiantly, I give myself decent marks; I can do that, I’m an adult now. Kate hasn’t written anything. Our leader looks around and politely asks the red-haired Australian girl on my left to tell him what she’s written. She starts talking about how she’s never got on with her mother. I relax slightly. Maybe he’ll never get to me. Mothers take up a lot of time.

I’ll admit it, I’m not good at dealing with people’s pain. One of our friends, Cathy, had just split up with her girlfriend after ten years, and while Kate was spending a lot of time with Cathy, I avoided her, like her sorrow was catching and my resistance was low. At my birthday party last September, Cathy had strode in, pale and drawn, declared her intention of getting completely

♕5 plastered and sat in a corner gulping wine so relentlessly the air around her

seemed to evaporate. She ended the evening hanging over our toilet while the guests made nervous jokes about peeing in the empty bottles. In a flat as small as ours, it’s hard to avoid something that toxic. Pathetically, I tell myself that things might not be perfect, but at least I’m not Cathy Holmes.

Kate, Cathy, her ex-girlfriend Zoe and I used to be a foursome. We’d go to each other’s houses for dinner and play at being grown-ups. Pub quizzes, Sunday roasts, endless games of Pictionary. Cathy and Zoe’s breakup affected Kate and me like a virus, as if, once we’d seen it was possible, it seemed suddenly, horribly likely.

After another strained night out with Cathy, Kate had turned to me and said, ‘You know, even if that happens to us, I still want you in my life.’

I panicked and blurted, ‘You can’t have me. Not like that. If we broke up, that would be it.’

It may have been naïve, but at the time, I hadn’t known it was a choice.

♕6 Kate and I weren’t getting on. She hated her city law firm job. She hated

everything about it; the pressure, always watching her back about her sexuality, her creative leanings, the poetry she wrote and everything else that she couldn’t talk about at the water cooler. She told me I was her real life, but something about the look on her face when she said that made me feel like she’d rather I wasn’t, that she wanted something of her own.

She should have had something of her own. After all, I was always out singing, chasing my dreams in the back rooms of pubs with sulky boys and doll-dressed girls. Everything in my world’s ironic. None of it’s like this room, this stew of grievances and revelations. The idea that people can work on themselves makes me nervous; if I start admitting to myself my life might be better, it might fall apart, and so I keep telling myself to accept the imperfections in our relationship, to make a virtue of constriction and compromise, like most of the girls I know.

The red-haired girl with the mother issues finishes her story and hints that she’ll sign up for the course. Our little preacher turns away, satisfied. Don’t pick me, I think, for once in my life.

♕7 ‘And how about you?’ He squints at me. Of course.

I wonder what he sees when he looks at me; unwashed hair, dyed black and bundled Rosie the Riveter style into a polka-dot scarf, the Camden girl’s uniform. Skin-tight, straining cherry-print dress, bubblegum pearls and heels that could have your eye out.

‘I’m fine.’ I show him my score-sheet, like it means something.

He looks scandalised. ‘Really? Fine? Everything’s completely perfect?’

‘Pretty much.’ Jamie’s looking at me like I’m not playing right. ‘I’m only here with my friend. Because she asked me to. We both are.’

Look at me, Kate, I think. Back me up. Laugh at this with me.

Jesus, didn’t I deserve to be happy? I’d never approached the world thinking it owed me anything; I was too much of a girl for that. I was grateful, a tad complacent maybe, bordering on the kind of smug-bastard cheerfulness usually only seen on celebrities and toddlers. On good days, I told myself that

♕8 this, my happiness, was my contribution to the universe. On bad days, I knew

that was basically crap.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I say. It is, damn it. I’ve got the lot – a plushy pr job in publishing, a feisty, successful girlfriend, a flat – and outside the nine-to-five, my singing career’s going pretty well. Even on the days when I suspect it’s not, at least I’m not old enough to have outgrown my ‘up-and-coming’ tag. Not quite. I just have to keep slapping on the pancake makeup and playing in darkened rooms.

‘Tell us a bit about yourself, ’ the boy in the suit says. Usually, people don’t have to encourage me to perform. It seems ironic that it should be happening now.

‘Look, I…I’m sorry, but I’m not really into this.’ The Australian girl looks mutinous. God, she only sold her soul a minute ago. ‘I’m just happy with what I’ve got. OK, it’s not always been easy, I’ve probably got a few things that need working out, but…’

He pounces. ‘Like what?’

♕9 ‘Well…my dad left when I was sixteen.’

‘That must have been hard,’ he says. ‘What happened after that?’

‘Well, I’m gay, so that wasn’t always easy, though I think my mum might have been even more pissed off if I liked boys. Definitely the ones who got you knocked up at nineteen – like her. She was very beautiful. Still is. Used to be a model and general girl-about-town and she was way wilder than I’ll ever be. She’s not one of those creepy I-could-be-your-sister women, though. She knows she’s my mum and she makes sure I know it too. She always had men beating the door down…’ Suddenly, I feel as tired as I am. ‘I don’t see the point of this. I’m happy now. I grew up, got a job, got a girlfriend…’ I indicate Kate, branding her, forcing her briefly into my life. ‘I’m fine.’ Then a moment of madness overtakes me and I hear myself say, ‘The only thing that’s not working is my relationship.’

I’ll always remember how I said that. My problem. Well, it is now.

Kate gets up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘I can’t.’

♕10 I watch, disbelieving, as she walks out, leaving me with my ex and a room

full of earnest strangers. One of the group leaders follows her out, a mumsy blonde who’s presumably on hand to help anyone who cracks. I imagine people do, but it takes more than a temporarily mad girlfriend and a man who looks like the lead singer of a Mormon boy-band to break me.

‘You see?’ I spread my hands, vindicated, and get up to follow her.

Jamie puts her hand on mine. ‘Let her,’ she says. ‘If you want to stay, stay.’

I don’t want to stay. I didn’t want to be here in the first place. But as the door swings shut behind Kate, I realise something scarier, given that I have nowhere else to go.

I don’t want to be with her either.

I sit down, ignoring the stench of pity. I’m fine. Haughty, feisty, string of gritted pearls for a backbone, still my mother’s free spirit, my father’s Princess Eve. I just took my eye off things for a moment – that was all. I never was the kind of person you felt sorry for. But now, apparently, I am.

♕11 I stand in the street outside our flat, phone in hand. I don’t know what’s

waiting for me but I don’t think it’s good. I just want a moment’s silence first. It’s cold enough for snow. Lyrics for a new song have been bumping around in my head since I got off the bus. Kate usually writes my lyrics – she’s the poet – so it’s odd that they should be springing into my head now. To calm them down, I’d taken out my work diary and scribbled them in the back: Perhaps I should shut my face and just let some kind of grace unfold/but there’s no coat, no leather, no fur/no joy, no glory, no her/ it’s the coldest day of the year/and nothing can make it any less cold.

Freezing rain is coming down. The thunder’s started, the sky rupturing above our street. Where will I go, if I don’t go in? If I can’t go home?

I count the beats between the thunderclaps, the way my mother taught me when I was small and scared. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand – and then it comes.

I open the door, walk through the tiny hallway and turn into our bedroom.

She’s sitting on the bed, knees hunched up, head bowed.

♕12 One one thousand. Two one thousand.

When did I stop paying attention? How can I take it all back?

She looks up at me, and I know this is it.

She says my name. ‘Evie.’

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The course of true love never did run straight . . .

Evie Day has never wanted a boyfriend – she’s gay, out and proud, and as far as she’s concerned, her life is perfect that way. But when her girlfriend leaves her for a leggy blonde, everything changes – her flat, her friends, her future – and she finds herself having feelings for an old friend, who just happens to be a man. To say that things aren’t turning out the way she planned is an understatement.

With her best friend Jamie’s Big Fat Gay Wedding looming on the horizon, Evie struggles to choose between her ex, her old friend, a new best friend in the form of a beautiful, chaotic burlesque artist, and a grumpy but distracting new flatmate.

All she wants to do is find The One, but for Evie, thinking straight never did come naturally.

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After My Own Heart by Sophia Blackwell

Sophia Blackwell was born in Newcastle in 1982, read English at Oxford and now lives in London. She has performed her poetry at some of the UK’s biggest venues and festivals and her first collection, Into Temptation, was published in 2009 by Tollington Press. Her short stories have been included in the Limehouse anthologies Boys & Girls and Men & Women.

After My Own Heart is her first novel.

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Limehouse Books is an independent publisher of quality fiction and non-fiction. Founded in October 2009 – originally under the name Glasshouse Books – we have grown to publish ten print titles.

Uniquely we commission every title we publish and obtain World English Language rights in both print and digital. Our aim is to be a small, focussed publishing house with a global reach. We have an eclectic list of titles, all of them with one unifying characteristic:

Books that are beautifully designed and produced, printed to respect the environment and published for me, you, everyone.

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