The Sunday Girl Read online

  For the wild ones

  War is a grave affair of state; it is a place of life and death, a road to survival and extinction, a matter to be pondered carefully.

  MASTER SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

  sunday

  Master Sun said: ‘The Way of War is a Way of Deception.’

  5 FEBRUARY

  Some love affairs change you forever. Someone comes into your orbit and swivels you on your axis, like the wind working on a rooftop weather vane. And when they leave, as the wind always does, you are different; you have a new direction. And it’s not always north.

  But you learn that this was their job, their role in your life. You should let them go; you cannot blame the wind for leaving, for that is what wind does. I know all that in theory. I’m not an idiot. I’m well versed in contemporary wisdom and the inspiring nature of Instagram memes. But here’s the thing: in real life, in the sphere of true human existence, theory holds an old quill pen, while a broken heart wields a gun. No competition, really.

  So, that covers the why: love – broken love – made me do it.

  Love. And a sex tape.

  The how, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated.

  And the when?

  Well, that’s the simplest of all: it started four days, eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes after the strongest gust of wind I’d ever known decided to leave me.

  And like all snowballs, it started small.

  It was February in London, so cold. The rain was tapping lightly on the window, folded newspaper stuffed into the edges to fix the leak, and I was sitting on a beige-and-red hand-me-down rug on the floor in the middle of my apartment. I’d drunk most of a bottle of chardonnay and was conducting what I thought at the time to be a reasonably justified Sunday night Google search: how to ruin a man. Or, if I’m being truly faithful to history: gow yo ruin a nan. Luckily Google can quickly decode drunk-girl speak.

  Type that in and the following two main sets of results appear.

  One: pages full of concise, step-by-step instructions in tepid psychological warfare against your ex (most of which involve posting provocative photographs of yourself with other men all over social media; except for one page, which, if you find it, provides detailed instructions on how to acquire an undeserved restraining order).

  Two: pages full of concise, step-by-step instructions on how to win said ex back (mostly suggesting the ‘no-contact rule’ in conjunction with intermittent and low levels of those tactics outlined in option one).

  Both of these were useless to me. I refused to believe I wanted him back, and I needed something a bit stronger than the no-contact rule to inflict the kind of damage I was yearning for; I wanted ashes. Flaming ashes. The kind that only a woman truly betrayed by the man she loves can crave. I was done with making excuses for him, done with being a casualty, done with playing nice.

  The question I keep asking myself is: would I have stopped right then and there if I’d known how things would turn out? But I don’t suppose it matters – I didn’t know. Besides, I wasn’t really open to rational argument: I was fuelled by the white-hot fury known only to the young, the oppressed and the broken-hearted. And so all Fate had to do was set up her cosmic dominos around me and then wait until I let the first piece fall. Which I did, right on cue: the moment I pressed ‘enter’ and let my will to destroy him escape into the ether, that first domino toppled irrevocably and one thing led to another.

  Because that’s the thing with dominos: easy to start, hard to stop. And impossible to know where they’ll lead.

  Of course, the easy answer to ‘Would I have stopped?’ is: Yes. Damned straight I would have stopped. If face-to-face with a jury I would surely say just that. But if I am truthful, really truthful, the hand-on-my heart answer is: no, probably not.

  It was too late for that.

  Because I’d always been the good girl. The amicable, pliable, understanding girl. The kind of girl you could take home to meet your parents, introduce to all your friends and keep around long after the love faded to beige, simply because she was (I was) so very amenable. And that’s precisely why Angus loved me, needed me, why we were ‘meant to be together’: I was the ‘perfect yin’ to his yang, he was ‘a better version’ of himself when I was in the room. Kinder. Or at least, that’s what he’d always said.

  But everybody has their limit, a boundary you just can’t cross, and Angus eventually found mine.

  And so, two days before the above-mentioned Google search, that amicable, pliable, understanding girl finally snapped. A rubber band, stretched a millimetre too far. And in that moment, Life lifted the veil of saccharine I’d been hiding beneath and forced me to come face-to-face with the other parts of my psyche. The darker parts. The ugly parts. The fragile, petty, venomous parts.

  The parts I may never have found if it wasn’t for him.

  And those parts didn’t cower. They fought back.

  It’s not that I wanted to be a bad person – nobody wants to do bad things. And if it had just been our dark and distorted history, the secrets that bound us and a shitty break-up, I may have held it together. I like to think I would have just moved on. But it wasn’t. There was something else. Something more.

  And I learned about it via a Facebook message.

  At first I presumed it was spam – the title was XXX – so I deleted it. Adjusted my privacy settings accordingly, and went about my workday. But then came the email to my work address. From a different man. It read: Hi Taylor, I loved your tape. And this time, it came with a link.

  I sent it to my phone, clicked on it and a video filled the screen.

  A video of me.

  A video of me that nobody else was ever meant to see: my ruffled dark blonde hair falling over one eye as I smiled coyly at the camera. My co-star’s name was Holly. We’d met her in a club at 3am. It was Angus’s idea. I’d never even kissed a woman before her, but it was nice. Soft. She tasted of berries and salt. And the footage, dimly lit and shaky, was never supposed to leave Angus’s possession.

  He’d promised.

  Yet there it was, staring back at me, my full name included in the video’s description – this must have been how the two men found me. Google is good like that.

  My cheeks turned hot. My heart thrashed against my chest walls. And as my mind registered the horror of what I was seeing and I pressed the cross in the corner of the screen, removing it from my phone before any incriminating sound played, something broke inside me. Something vital. It was almost audible: snap.

  Maybe it was trust. Perhaps it was virtue. Or maybe it was my sanity.

  But after twenty-nine years of embracing the virtues of kindness, tolerance and forgiveness – of living by two wrongs don’t make a right – I’d finally had enough. All yin has a little dot of yang in it, after all. And so, as my boss tapped away on her keyboard just a metre away from me and I stared blankly at my computer screen, pretending everything was fine, Life whispered a new mantra in my ear: survival of the fucking fittest.

  Hence, the Google search. And everything that followed.

  monday

  Master Sun said: ‘Victory belongs to the side that scores most in the temple calculations before battle.’

  6 FEBRUARY

  It was the Monday after the break-up when I called in sick to work. Google had kept me up till 2am and I woke feeling raw and reckless, craving anaesthesia. Anything to help me forget. And so I lay in bed till 11am, staring at a crack in the ceiling and downing the bottle of champagne I’d been keeping in the fridge for a special occasion.

  Then, at 11.03am, I texted Jamie. I thought I’d deleted his number when I first met Angus, but apparently not. Because there it was, cleverly disguised under the pseudonym ‘Never-call-he-just-want
s-sex Anderson’.

  I’d met him two years before at a street-art exhibition in Brick Lane and we’d gone on two dates. The first was magical, the second was tense. Our brief affair had ended in an overly dramatic row in a backstreet of Soho – I didn’t want to have sex just yet and, well, he did. But maybe I’d had it wrong all along: maybe romance really was dead and a casual hook-up was just what I needed. So when Jamie texted back with his address I went straight over.

  ‘How was therapy?’ he asked, eyes to the ceiling, menthol cigarette between his lips and a sheet barely covering him. I watched his right hand toy with his cigarette, guiding it theatrically from his mouth and letting it dangle over the side of the bed. By ‘therapy’ he meant him. Sex. I wanted to tell him that his mouth tasted of oranges and that Life reminded me of a Rubik’s cube, not because of its complexity, but because of its complete pointlessness. And that no amount of therapy, or sex, could ever cure that.

  Instead I said: ‘It was good.’ Lie number one.

  I reached for my phone: nothing.

  Silence put its pretty hands around my throat, its thumbs into my windpipe and my chest grew tight: it was Angus’s forty-third birthday that Friday, 10 February. My gift for him, a carefully selected cashmere jumper in heritage green, was already wrapped and scorching a painful hole in the top of my wardrobe. He’d never wear it now.

  I lay back down and Jamie slung his free arm around me in a half-hearted embrace, the charade of intimacy making me feel more alone than any amount of isolation ever could. I reached across, took his cigarette and inhaled. Angus hated me smoking – cigarettes, weed, whatever – said it made me taste trashy, and so I’d stopped doing it for the most part while we were together. Anything to fit into his shimmery world of high-grade cocaine and Chivas Regal.

  But I’d missed it. And I liked watching the cloud of smoke dissolve above me as I exhaled. It felt like a symbol of my flickering spirit, the one part of me I’d never let even Angus touch.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ Jamie asked, reaching for his cigarette, taking one last drag then stubbing it out on a CD cover beside the bed. Coltrane, Blue Train.

  ‘Nope,’ I replied.

  He looked at me with clever eyes, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ I said, sitting up and looking at him over one shoulder. ‘We broke up.’ I glanced around the room, searching for my underwear. The air was like ice and giving me goose bumps, so I wrapped my arms around my breasts and stood up. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a barrister? How the fuck do you piece together a defence with a brain like that?’

  ‘Idiot,’ he replied, burying his face in the pillow. It was lemon-yellow. I remember that. It seemed an oddly feminine touch for the bed of a self-proclaimed confirmed bachelor.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,’ I said.

  ‘I meant him,’ he mumbled, turning his head to the side so he could see me.

  I wanted to crouch down and look under the bed but I couldn’t; I was naked. Instead, I walked through to the living room – I could feel his eyes on me as I moved.

  ‘Where are you going?’ came the muffled voice.

  ‘I’m looking for my shoes,’ I replied, locating my underwear on the edge of his caramel leather sofa. My handbag lay on the floor beside it. I put on my pants, threaded my arms through the loops of my bra and reached back to fasten the clasp.

  Our two empty glasses sat on the coffee table in front of me: vodka and orange. Basically brunch. And beside them lay a half-eaten block of dark chocolate and two copies of a book.

  I picked up one of them.

  ‘What’s this?’ I called through to the bedroom as I read the cover: The Art of War.

  ‘What’s what?’ he replied, appearing naked at the door.

  ‘This,’ I repeated, holding up the book.

  ‘I have a student shadowing me this week – it’s supposed to help him with strategy.’ He walked over to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. I could feel his breath on the top of my head. ‘Why don’t you take one? It’ll give you a head start.’ I could hear amusement in his voice.

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’ I put it into my handbag.

  And that’s how it happens, how the dominos fall. Within the five days since the break-up, a sex tape had led to a drunken Google search, a drunken Google search had led to a sick day, a sick day had turned into a drunken romp with a scoundrel, a drunken romp had turned into a free book and that free book would soon turn my life upside down. Forever.

  My dress was draped across a dining-room chair. I moved away from his embrace, slipped it on and then returned to him.

  ‘Do me up?’ I asked, presenting him with my open back. And he complied.

  ‘Can you get me a car?’ I asked sweetly as I put on my shoes.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, dialling already. ‘Do you think the patient will need repeat therapy sessions?’ he asked, holding the phone to his ear.

  ‘Maybe.’ Lie number two. It had left me feeling worse, not better. Every moan reminded me of Angus and every time I closed my eyes I could see Holly’s body pushing up against mine, the warmth in my hair turned red by the low light as her fingers ran through it. I wouldn’t be doing it again. I chewed slowly on a piece of dark chocolate and listened as he ordered the car.

  By the time I got home my eyes were as heavy as suburban windows tired of holding up their blinds all day, my tongue was dry and my nose was running from the cold. The three flights of stairs to my apartment felt like six, I kept trying to put the wrong key in the lock, and the booze had worn off. But my mind was awash with inspiration.

  I moved over to the heavy blue curtains and pulled them shut: the sky outside was glowing blue-grey as it moved from dusk to night-time, and it was just starting to rain. Then I stripped off my clothes and put on one of Angus’s old work shirts – a relic from happier days that had taken on a second life as my pyjamas. It smelled like soap. It used to smell like him. I made a cup of Earl Grey tea, climbed into my unmade bed and pulled the covers up to my chest. My toes had gone numb from the cold and I could hear the upstairs neighbour getting home from work, her high-heeled shoes tapping on my ceiling.

  That was the first time I opened The Art of War.

  Chapter one: Laying plans.

  Master Sun said: ‘The Way of War is a Way of Deception. When able, feign inability, when deploying troops, appear not to be. When near, appear far, when far, appear near, lure with bait.’

  That sounded sensible enough. But far more complicated than it needed to be: I really only had one objective, and that was to destroy him in the way he’d destroyed me. Insidiously. Irreparably. Like a puzzle he slowly disassembled over the course of our eighteen-month relationship, stole a vital piece from, and then discarded, knowing that nobody would ever be able to put it back together again. But I needed a plan. A strategy. Something solid. And so, I did what I always do when I need a solution: I made a list.

  Reputation.

  Work.

  Money.

  Family.

  Health.

  Home.

  Sanity.

  Sex.

  Other.

  This, I scrawled in my journal. Actually, it wasn’t my journal at all, it was an old purple leather notebook I’d bought with the intention of jotting down useful French phrases I wanted to remember. I’d taken it to Paris on our first weekend there. And as I held it in my hands, the memory made me wince. We’d been dating for two months, were lying naked in a hotel room, bathed in a sort of pink light, the lace curtains wide open and the tip of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. He’d just announced that he wanted me to meet his parents, and I was high on hope as I traced the edge of his face with my fingertips. There was a small white scar on his upper lip, as though he’d split it as a child. ‘What happened here?’ I asked. And there was a flicker behind his eyes. A jolt. ‘Cricket,’ he said, swallowing hard. But something about that flash in his e
yes told me he was lying. That was the first time I glimpsed his vulnerability, and the memory stayed with me: the flicker, the pink light, the lace. It made me want to protect him.

  That was the night I jotted down the first entry: la magie dans la lumiere. Pages one through three were filled with similar phrases, but I suppose I lost interest by page four, because it was blank from there.

  But it would no longer be my French phrase book. From that moment on it would be a written account of my plans and progress. The sort of stupid mistake I’d never make now.

  I continued reading: ‘Heaven is yin and yang, cold and hot, the cycle of seasons.’ My face flushed hot: that description fit my former relationship perfectly. The words stared at me from the page, little cacti just waiting to make me bleed. I sipped my tea. And my mind struggled to make sense of the decay.

  Because it had all been so promising at the beginning: he was a banker and dazzling and passionate and bold. With Angus, life was like a movie: a dozen red roses at work for no reason, phone calls from the restaurant bathroom in the middle of a business lunch just to say that he missed me, long baths together chatting about nonsense. And it was sex: sometimes gentle and tender, sometimes rough. I never knew what was coming next and I’d never been so sure somebody loved me. He used to say we were the last two romantics in a time of swiping right, which suited me just fine.

  Because I wanted more than anything to believe that love was real and the words ‘I do’ meant something; that my parents were the exception not the rule. And Angus did that for me. We were picnics by the Seine on a stolen hotel blanket, sex in public places when we just couldn’t wait, late-night conversations about what our children would look like (my eyes, his hair) and inside jokes nobody else could understand. He could make me laugh with a single look across a dinner-party table. At the beginning everything was so simple: I was his, and he was mine. Within a week we were spending almost every night together. And after two I’d met most of his friends and his parrot (Ed). It was magic, like living in perpetual dusk.