Square One Read online

  Nell Frizzell

  * * *

  SQUARE ONE

  Contents

  1 Keys

  2 Jungle Book Duvet Cover

  3 Tin Foil

  4 Wooden Bangle

  5 Swimming Towel

  6 Lanyard

  7 Dishwasher Tablets

  8 Cheese Scone

  9 Biffa Bin

  10 Toothpaste

  11 Milk Bath

  12 Mushroom Super Noodles

  13 Clipboard

  14 Potting Shed

  15 Stamped Addressed Envelope

  16 Ukulele

  17 Flat White

  18 Plaster

  19 Carrots

  20 Condoms

  21 Poppadum

  22 Corner Cupboard

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Nell Frizzell is a journalist, writer and Vogue columnist. She has written for the Guardian, VICE, the Telegraph, Elle, the Observer, Grazia and the BBC among many others. Her first book, The Panic Years, is an exploration of bodies, babies and the big questions facing modern life. Square One is her first novel. She lives in Oxford, in a very small house full of pasta and bedding and bikes.

  Also by Nell Frizzell

  The Panic Years

  To all the daughters.

  And their dads.

  1

  Keys

  Posting the keys through her own letterbox was a pretty rubbish out-of-body experience.

  Like finding her name in someone else’s address book, seeing her face in the background of a stranger’s photo, or really smelling the inside of her elbow; for a second, less perhaps, Hanna was no longer herself. She was witnessing herself from the outside. She was noticing herself, without really being herself.

  Hanna had forgotten about the keys until they’d driven to the end of the road. After three hours of loading up a rented Luton van with just enough laundry bags to bring on an attack of self-loathing, she and her father had finally turned the corner and were out of sight when she felt the small prick of recognition. In her thigh. The clutch of keys, held together with a silver ring in the shape of a turtle, was pressing into her leg with an insistence that felt almost like an accusation. She’d put her hand on the dashboard, like a driving instructor preparing to fail a quaking seventeen-year-old, and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Her dad, thinking she was referring to the cheese and brinjal pickle sandwich he’d started to eat with only one hand on the wheel, slipped the offending item into his door pocket.

  ‘No. Stop the car. I’ve forgotten something.’

  With a small sigh, they pulled in behind a van advertising ‘Cranston Scaffolding – Experts in Erections’ and Hanna creaked open the door. The day was unseasonably warm and as she lowered her foot towards the pavement, a thick blare of sunshine hit the tops of her ankles, picking out the thin, pale hairs like the feathering around the top of a shire horse’s hoof. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done anything to this winter pelt. Through a combination of thick tights, winter boots and unintended chastity, nobody had really looked at her Mr Tumnus legs for months. Not least her. And yet here she was, looking like something ready to be strapped into a harness and made to pull a cart full of apples to market.

  Walking back to the no-longer-hers house felt like the longest march in history. Continents had shifted in the time it took her to ease the keys from her pocket. Rivers had changed course quicker than her route round next door’s hedge. Glaciers had tunnelled out valleys in the space between her old front gate and former letterbox. At the door, her arms felt heavy, her head stiff. She lifted the flap and, for less than a second, she could smell the air inside the house. A combination of Persil, old coats, coffee and cat, with just a hint of cooking oil and damp, hit her nose. The oxygen of her old life ached through the gap in the door and into her lungs. It was heady. It was intoxicating. It was stale. Before she had a chance to think, she’d pushed the keys through the hole, scraping her fingers on that strange and brittle little moustache that rests across the top lip of so many letterboxes. She heard the dull clunk as they hit the floorboards on the other side and turned. Biting the inside of her cheek – an old habit born of being lacerated by train-track braces and their stray wires during adolescence – she walked past the gate and back down the road. She didn’t look back. She didn’t know if Joe was watching her. She couldn’t bear it if he was. Or if he wasn’t.

  Four months earlier, Hanna had been chopping an onion and listening to a podcast about weathermen when something started to trickle down her spine like cold tea. A feeling like malign gravity started to leak across her shoulders, down her collarbone and over her ribs. This wasn’t a panic attack, not a fever or a stroke. Standing at the kitchen counter, staring into the pine-effect cupboard door in front of her, she had been hit full force with something wet and blank and true. She was lonely. The loneliness that for months had been welling up inside her body had finally breached the watershed somewhere around her neck and now poured through her, unchecked. Those puddles, which had seemed a bit like hunger, a bit like sexual frustration and a little like sadness, suddenly overflowed with a thick, biting ache. She was lonelier than she had ever been in her life. The hours before bed had stretched ahead of her, utterly empty.

  Her friend Dom had spent three days suggesting plans and then failed to commit to any of them. Even if by some miracle he was free, Dom lived in Hackney, Hanna in Brockley, meaning it would take both of them an hour to reach somewhere even vaguely central. Her colleagues had all gone straight home from work murmuring about the gym or having a flat viewing. And Joe? Well, Joe had been at band practice. Of course.

  Joe’s band was, let’s be charitable here, awful. Microwave Death had formed when Joe was twenty-one and studying maths at Sheffield University. Their first EP, Are You F**king Kidding Me?!, had sold twenty-six copies. They didn’t do many gigs. They didn’t have a website. They didn’t have fans. And yet, they still had band rehearsals four times a week. Because of band practice, Joe had missed: Hanna’s twenty-fifth birthday party, every anniversary bar their first, the day Hanna had to be rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis, her first day at a new job, her appearance as a vox pop on the six o’clock news talking about the cost of Boris Johnson’s failed Garden Bridge, all the meetings with all the estate agents, their best friends’ wedding, and enough dinners to feed the cast of Hollyoaks, past and present. All this would be frustrating enough if the band were brilliant, made money and brought great music into the world. That night, as the smell of onion spread from Hanna’s fingers across her hot and sobbing face, it suddenly seemed unbearable. The band was shit. And yet there she was, alone again, because when it came to the crunch, the band always came first.

  The loneliness washing through Hanna erupted that night into an argument. One of the few she and Joe had ever had. Standing in their hallway, shoeless and wild-eyed, she’d hurled words at him like thunderbolts: ‘selfish’, ‘childish’, ‘egomaniac’, ‘hopeless’. Seeing him standing there, his eyes fixed on the coat hooks, his mouth shapeless, she’d wanted to smack him. She’d wanted to punch him, tear his skin, split him open with her bare hands and force this feeling on to him too. Her loneliness was too great, too heavy, and she demanded that he finally take some of the weight. She was going to make him take responsibility.

  ‘You’ve made your choice! You chose them! You just didn’t bother to tell me!’ she’d screamed, trapped in their tiny hallway, hitting her elbows on banisters and radiators as she tried, desperately, to make him listen.

  Finally, her fury spent and the tang of onions soaking up her sleeves, he’d held her against his chest and stroked her back with his fingers. He’d shushed her like a baby. Laid his lips on her hair without quite kissing
it. In a voice that seemed to come from someone else entirely, she’d told him that she was lonely. Unbearably lonely. She was hanging in space, not going forward, unable to go back. His reluctance to plan the future, to get a mortgage, to even talk about babies, had made her feel cold, dark and remote. It was as though someone had pressed pause on her life. Her self-esteem was at rock bottom, she felt like a bit part in her own life, and she had spent so long having her hopes gently quashed by Joe’s ambivalence that she had almost no idea who she was or what she wanted any more. Finally, she’d turned her face – a liquid mask of tears, snot and mascara – up to his and told him that she couldn’t live like this for ever. She wanted an entire partner, and Joe was no longer that.

  Reaching the passenger door, Hanna swung herself up on to the van’s high metal step to climb back in.

  ‘Well, that was great fun,’ she said, chewing the inside of her mouth.

  There in front of her, sitting on the grey, lightly stained polyester seat, was a sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper and covered with her dad’s small, unjoined-up handwriting. She looked at the words. What do you call a man covered in leaves? There were three little dots in the bottom right-hand corner, slightly speckled with orange grease marks. She turned the sandwich over and read the back. Russell.

  ‘I thought you might be hungry,’ said Iain, smiling down at her. ‘After hoofing all that stuff into the back of the van. And I knew you wouldn’t have time to make anything.’ Hanna was still balancing on the step, suddenly very tired. ‘Do you remember the last time you came to Oxford, just before Christmas? You ate an entire cheese and onion pasty on the walk from the station to town. Well, I thought this would save us buying a pasty.’

  ‘God, those sandwiches you made me every day for school,’ said Hanna, her foot in mid-air, the tang of nostalgia in her mouth. ‘You’d wake up at, like, dawn, put on some Zimbabwean funk, and assemble a sandwich almost perfectly designed to turn me into a social outcast.’

  ‘Those sandwiches were a culinary—’

  ‘Tuna mayonnaise with sundried tomatoes and sweetcorn?’ Hanna interrupted. ‘Grated carrot with cheese and peanut butter? Humous and sliced red pepper? Jesus, Iain. If it smelled, stained fabric and would fail a customs exam, you would put it in a sandwich.’

  ‘Hey, my Punjabi pachranga pickle was—’

  ‘Just opening my lunchbox was like an act of chemical warfare!’ Hanna’s voice was a little more rasping than she’d intended. ‘Nearby children would wrap their hoods around their faces to block out the smells. Even teachers would make comments about the drains.’

  Iain laughed, a little sheepishly. ‘Ah, but the notes, Han. You’ve got to admit the notes were good.’

  Hanna felt her breathing slow, a little. ‘Yes, OK. The notes were good.’

  ‘I mean, they were very good. Sometimes I’d be there for half an hour doing you those crosswords or drawing the cartoons.’

  ‘OK, I said the notes were good.’ Hanna was quieter now.

  ‘Added Consonants! Guess the Song from the Lyric! Hanna’s Adventures in Numberland! They were—’

  ‘Thank you, Iain. Dad. That’s really …’ Holding the crackling parcel in her lap, Hanna gave out a long, juddering sigh.

  ‘No worries.’ Iain sniffed, quickly and sharply. ‘Now, shall we get this show on the road? I’ve already finished my thermos, and with my old-man bladder that means I’m going to need to pee pretty soon.’

  Hanna tried not to picture Iain standing at the urinal of a service station off the M40; his drooping cock, his age-flattened arse peeping above his sagging waistband, the dribble as he did up his flies. Or worse, to save time, would he pull over in a layby and piss into a bush, the powerful slipstream of passing lorries spraying that urine all over his shoes and the side of the van?

  ‘I’m sorry it took so long,’ said Hanna.

  ‘Ah, it wasn’t so bad.’ Iain was leaning over the steering wheel, craning to see both sides of the junction before pulling out.

  ‘And I’m sorry I haven’t been to visit since before Christmas,’ Hanna added, surprised to hear herself apologizing. She had never visited much. Even though Oxford was only an hour away, the gravitational pull of London had been too strong. ‘I suppose I’m making up for lost time now though!’

  Neither of them laughed. Hanna started unwrapping the sandwich. This, she knew, was a four-cornered missive from her father’s heart; a token of his support, a dispatch of affection that he would never have been able to put into words. Without asking, he had fallen back to one of the useful services he had performed throughout Hanna’s childhood. Where her mum would have screamed obscenities about Joe or fired a machine-gun attack of questions about her future into the side of Hanna’s head, her dad had made a sandwich. Brie, mango chutney and yellow pepper. And why not?

  ‘Do you remember that bike ride to Abingdon?’ asked Hanna, looking down at the joke on the back of her sandwich.

  ‘I do,’ said Iain, grinding the van into the middle lane to overtake a minibus with the words ‘Inspector Morse Tours’ painted along the side in gold.

  ‘What do you call a man covered in chain grease …?’ said Hanna, turning back to look at her father.

  ‘Ollie Hans!’ Iain laughed as if it was the first time he’d ever said it. ‘And what do you call a woman covered in type?’ He was chancing his arm and he knew it.

  ‘Rita Book,’ Hanna replied, tasting the salt from her tears across her top lip. ‘I was, what, thirteen?’

  ‘Yup. About that. You were going to start upper school that September.’

  That day had been one of the happiest of Hanna’s younger life. An uncomplicated day of joy as she leaned over the precipice of adolescence and decided, just for now, to stay a child. It was also, she now realized, a memory that Iain had held close all these years too.

  ‘I’m really only planning on being at yours for a month, tops,’ said Hanna, after a brief pause. ‘Once I’ve got a job, I should be able to start renting a room somewhere. Maybe Cowley or Rose Hill. They’re still a bit more affordable, aren’t they?’ Hanna thought of the two-up, two-down terraces she’d walked past on her way to middle school.

  ‘They’re still the more affordable areas, sure,’ said Iain, before taking an enormous bite of his sandwich. Chunks of red pepper and bits of cheese started to crumble out of his mouth, like a dog trying to eat sand. It was revolting to watch.

  ‘I could probably find a shared house or something,’ Hanna said, as much to herself as to Iain. Hanna had been applying for jobs, rewriting her CV, going to job interviews and Instagram-stalking potential bosses for months before moving, but to no avail. Her last temping job, for a construction firm who were looking to invest in social enterprises as a way of greenwashing their more harmful practices, had come to an end a couple of months after that big, hideous, relationship-ending argument with Joe. It was hardly surprising; like so many of Hanna’s jobs up until that point, the work had been dull and moderately paid and only tangentially related to what she really wanted to do. Her dissertation had been on microfinance and environmental conservation – at one point she really thought she knew how to save the world. Today, she wasn’t sure she could even save herself. Sharing the rent in Brockley had torn through every scrap of Hanna’s savings while she’d tried to decide what to do.

  Though she was unsure where to go, all the jobs Hanna had initially looked for had been in London. Jobs that might just pay her enough to be able to afford her own one-bedroom flat, somewhere very quiet, far from transport links. Then jobs that would mean she could become somebody’s lodger, somewhere very quiet, far from transport links. Then jobs that would qualify her for housing benefit, somewhere with no transport links at all. When these had all turned to ashes in her inbox, and Iain eventually offered to put her up for a few months while she found her feet, she’d started looking for jobs in Oxford. A free flat was, after all, a free flat. She’d started to fantasize about a new life, miles away from Joe, in t
he small, golden stone city. She’d begun to think of her move to Oxford as a sabbatical: she’d get a job, earn enough to rent her own place, maybe start growing vegetables in the garden, and rebuild her self-esteem, away from the piss and chicken bones of London. As the date she’d given Joe for moving out approached, a gnawing anxiety had started to spread through her intestines. She needed work, a job – any job – that could pay enough for her to rent a room. She’d applied to work on the reception of a local refugee housing charity; she’d applied to be a private maths tutor; she’d applied to do admin at the local art school; she’d applied to manage a coffee shop; she’d applied to be a marketing assistant at the local paper. She’d spent so long looking on the city council jobs website that she’d ended up applying to manage a weekly local car boot sale, despite having absolutely no relevant experience, not owning a car and not being able to drive. There had been a couple of promising interviews – one at a museum, another at a local PR agency – but nothing had come of either yet. Maybe things would be different when the new financial year kicked in. Even so, with her bank balance wilting like a bag of supermarket salad, she’d had to accept that, until she got a job, sleeping in Iain’s spare room was her only option.

  ‘Sure,’ said Iain, spitting a tiny bit of lettuce on to the steering wheel. ‘Something will come up, I reckon. Why don’t you eat your sandwich and we can talk about the flat when we get back to Jericho.’

  Hanna felt the weight of the greaseproof paper parcel in her lap. It didn’t make her pain go away. It didn’t make life any more certain. It didn’t make her feel any less adrift in an unknown future. But, as they drove down the A40, soaring above London on the Westway and out into the green of the Chilterns on the way to Oxford, the sandwich in her lap did remind her of something. That she was a person. A whole person. And if that person smelled like an ungodly combination of brie and mango chutney then, well, so be it.