23 Attempts at Love

Chapter 25: Independent Woman

          I reached out to Hannah, my former boss, and found a job through one of her contacts at a small, feminist publishing firm who hired me within a week of submitting my CV. After a brief stay with Mum I was moving back down to London into a small studio flat not too far from Katy and Sasha and my other friends. I needed to learn how to be independent again and to live on my own for a while, but I promised regular movie nights with the girls and to throw myself into socialising again.

My new job was bliss: I could work from home if I wanted to, and I spent my days interviewing authors for blog posts, researching market trends and reading hours upon hours' worth of beautiful, powerful words. I fell in love with working again. I fell in love with London again. Every day I felt more and more like myself. I even signed up to a French language class, determined to improve my terrible GCSE result and eventually be able to go to Paris one day and order a baguette without the locals staring me down as I stumbled my way through Bonjour... baguette please? That one?"

For the first time since I could remember I didn't hate sitting alone in my flat with my books and TV and "nothing to do". I got back into cooking. I organised more adult things to do with my friends like go to a museum exhibition by a photographer I'd never heard of, or a nude drawing class. My crude penis drawings I practiced as a teenager on notebooks have now been significantly improved.

I visited home more often. I felt a pang of guilt when I thought of Liam, but we hadn't spoken. I knew that within two months of us breaking up he'd got a new girlfriend and, from what I knew, he seemed happy. But I was happy too. Once every couple of months Sam, Katie and I coordinated visits home to have a mini-reunion with Mum. She always took loads of pictures and spent the whole week before cooking and baking and cleaning and stocking up on wine and beer and gin and anything else she could find to have a party. She once bought a pinata and fell over laughing when Sam whacked it straight into Katie's face on the first swing.

I was determined to be single. No dating apps, no flirting with random strangers, no nothing. A nude drawing class would be the closest thing I would have to a sexual encounter with anyone. Did I miss being engaged? Not really. I missed the ring though. I also missed having someone there on a Friday night when I'd had too many glasses of wine before dinner and couldn't figure out how to turn the oven on by myself. An occasional weekly burn taught me that lesson pretty quickly.

And then I fell over. I'd love to tell you a long, dramatic story of a brave hike through the wilds of London, climbing mountains or running a marathon, but I was stood still and I'd had one-too-many mimosas at brunch, and down I went like a sack of potatoes, straight over my ankle. Sasha laughed, then dialled 999. Katy fell over laughing and then pretended she'd hurt herself, too. We had to take my boots off when the swelling doubled in size.

Off to hospital I went alone. My two friends had almost died laughing but had been left behind by the two very lovely ambulance men who insisted that they could meet me after I'd finished, but that they didn't have room for them both in the ambulance and that I'd probably be quite a while. They suspected a break.

I was dressed in a very fetching hospital gown and told to strip to my underwear underneath, because the outfit I was wearing was just completely inappropriate for the x-ray machine.

"A radiologist will be with you in a minute or two, just hang tight," a nurse told me, wheeling me (in a wheelchair by this point) over to a quiet corner of a room filled with your usual crowd of depressed-looking hospital attendants. A fun game to play in hospital waiting rooms is guess the problem and then guess how it happened.

I was trying to conceal a wry smile after deciding that the man opposite me had fallen out of his sex swing and broken his coccyx, when the radiologist appeared next to me.