Loe raamatut: «Zoe May Book 4»

Chapter 1

This is not how my life was meant to be.

How is it that at 32 years old, I’ve somehow wound up in my childhood bedroom? I’m sitting at the same desk where I revised for my GCSEs and I’ve been ticking off a to-do list compiled in a pink sparkly notebook I discovered gathering dust in the back of a drawer. My bedroom is like a museum exhibit entitled ‘the habitat of a 13-year-old girl’. It’s frozen in time. There’s a Take That poster on the wall, for goodness’ sake! And not one from their reunion tours, a genuine Take That poster from back when the band was young. When I was young. God, I feel like such a relic.

I cross out the last item on my to-do list – ‘Send Katy press cuttings’ – with a long satisfying swipe of my purple glitter pen. Did I mention that I’m using a glitter pen? It’s one of those ones with a random tuft of fur at the end. That’s just how I roll. Katy is a celebrity make-up artist and she’s one of my clients, because believe it or not, I run a fashion and beauty PR agency. And no, I haven’t always run a PR agency from the comfort of my childhood bedroom. I’m not a total freak. I used to have an office in Camden in this seriously cool co-working space filled with tech geniuses, cutting-edge fashion designers, artisan coffee sellers and general hipster entrepreneurs. And then there was me. Not quite hipster, but not quite geek. A businesswoman. Unlike a few of the people there who rolled in at midday and ‘brainstormed’ over team-building games of ping pong, I was really committed. But then shit hit the fan. And now I’m back at home, living in a terraced house with my mum in the quaint Surrey village where I grew up, and instead of a cool Camden office with shabby chic exposed brick walls and co-workers lounging around on expensive bean bags, I’m surrounded by wallpaper printed with tiny hedgehogs wearing aprons (not even joking) and the closest thing I have to colleagues is a row of Beanie Babies lined up on the windowsill, their colours having faded from decades in the sun.

When I say shit hit the fan, what I really mean is my ex, Leroy, cheated on me with a girl from the gym where we met. In fact, Leroy wasn’t just my ex, he was my ex-fiancé. Even saying his name makes me cringe. Leroy. What was I thinking going for a guy called Leroy? Did I really think I could marry him? Imagine standing at the altar saying, ‘I take thee, Leroy, to be my lawfully wedded husband’. Bleurgh. His name was obviously a red flag. Everything about him was a red flag actually, from the tattoo of Dr Dre on his shoulder to the way he made these horrendous grunting noises when he did bench presses like he was experiencing some kind of demonic possession. And then there was his ridiculous job as a furniture upcycler, which essentially involved buying old chests of drawers for a tenner from car boot sales, painting them blue and then selling them on for a five quid profit to someone who probably needed to go to Specsavers. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit harsh. Sometimes Leroy made a ten-pound profit. Sometimes even fifteen. Basically, he wasn’t exactly going places. And yet somehow (I blame pheromones) that didn’t matter to me. I decided that his furniture upcycling was trendy and cool and creative. I told my friends that he ‘wasn’t really an office person’ which, looking back on it, was just a nice way of saying he was pretty much unemployable. I’d stress how Leroy ‘liked to work with his hands’ as though he were an artisanal god. Ha. Artisanal he was not. A god he was definitely not. But he did like to work with his hands. He loved that. He certainly loved working his hands on Lydia – the annoyingly chipper personal trainer he started seeing while we were still together.