Kitabı oxu: «Love Is A Thief»

–AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM TRUE LOVE MAGAZINE—

What has love stolen from you?

Is there something you always wanted to do but stopped pursuing it when you fell in love? A hobby or dream? What negative effects did falling in love have on your life? What love advice do you have for me?

Perhaps some of you are interested in going on your own Love Quests, taking back what love has stolen. It doesn’t matter if you are in love, out of love, searching for love, avoiding love, married, divorced, gay or straight. True Love wants to hear from you.

Can’t think of anything? Then let’s turn this on its head. Ask yourself the following questions: ‘If you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life alone, you would never fall in love, never settle down, never have children, what would you want to do? What would make you happy? What would fill up your time, your heart, your soul for the rest of your days?’ The answers to these questions are the dreams we need to get back.

I’m going on quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole.

I have missed my own love boat. I am loveless and boatless with a whole lifetime to fill. I’m going on a quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole. So, are you with me? Do you want to join my ship?

Pirate Kate xx

Love is a Thief
Claire Garber

www.mirabooks.co.uk

prologue

The bog standard public display of being over your last relationship is when you get yourself into a new one. It’s like holding a giant banner in the air that reads:

‘Look at me, everyone! I have found someone else. I am OK. Someone else wants me. Someone else needs me. Someone else chooses to be with me. My last relationship was insignificant, barely noticeable in fact, like bellybutton fluff. My ex-girlfriend is just like the fluff from my belly.’

I think it’s all crap. I think the public sign you are over your last relationship is when you don’t care about the public sign. That said, I do have feelings, and Gabriel starting a new relationship just a few weeks after we broke up, well, that was emotional pain on a level I’d never previously known. Whether or not I believed in the validity of his stupid relationship with an emaciated French girl with fake tits and limited intellectual abilities, he had found someone else, they were on holiday together, and they were taking photos, lots of photos, and putting them on Facebook in an album entitled True Love while I was, well, I was bellybutton fluff.

But it wasn’t just that I had lost Gabriel, it was that I was so goddamn sad about breaking up with him that even the thought of being with someone else made me feel sick. I didn’t want to kiss anyone else. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I didn’t want to share my home with anyone else. I wanted him. So as I couldn’t cope with replacing him, and I couldn’t speed up the process of healing from him, I just needed to fill up the time.

Because the reality is, I might just be ‘that’ girl. You know the one. The girl who, for no particular reason, doesn’t get the guy, doesn’t have children, doesn’t get the romantic happy ever after. So I needed to come up with a plan. I needed to get back to basics. I needed to ask myself a few important questions:

What did I like doing?

What didn’t I get to do because I was with Gabriel?

What didn’t I get to do because I fell in love?

More importantly, what would I be happy spending the rest of my life doing if love never showed up again?

Now that was a starting point I was interested in.

the beginning

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

In 1990 a man called Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. He was trying to find a way for particle physicists to access the same information at the same time from wherever they were working in the world.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

As with so many things in life, the end result turned out to be a little different from the initial objective. The seed he planted grew into something so far-reaching it touched every single one of us in an infinite number of different ways.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

The Internet now provides us with free accessible education. It can teach you a second language, how to cobble a shoe, how to install a new kitchen or build a satellite that will orbit the moon.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can run your business off it, meet the love of your life on it, find the recipe for a mushroom risotto before fixing your own kettle then learning the origins of the word ‘broken’.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

You can also see images of just about anything you want. I’ve seen the inside of an atom; the surface of Mars; the expression on Mandela’s face the day he was released from prison.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

But what the Internet has most recently shown me, its greatest gift of all, is a set of photos of my ex-fiancé on holiday with what I can only assume is his new girlfriend. And in these photos, although I’m no Tim Berners-Lee, I’m pretty sure I can see his fully functioning, fully operational, Internet-connected mobile phone. The very same phone he currently seems unable to answer.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

‘Well, she’s obviously not going to get off the floor,’ Federico said, to my grandma. They’d stopped speaking to me about 45 minutes earlier. They spoke about me, around me, over me, across me, but never actually to me. My grandma reached down and tried to take the phone from my hand but my fingers were stuck around it like a human claw or a strange device that unconventional men might purchase in Soho.

‘Darling Kate, you need to give me the phone,’ she said, trying once again to prise it away. I gripped on as if it were my only remaining portal back home. A small circle of people had formed around us. Apparently it’s not commonplace for a 30-year-old woman to sit in the middle of Heathrow Terminal Five, surround herself with her own luggage and start weeping.

‘Just one more try?’ I pleaded with Grandma while Federico wandered from person to person regaling them with stories of the origins of my tears.

‘Well, I told her that, yes, I did. I told her when she moved there. I said, “You can’t trust the French,” and not on account of their political history, of which I am a great great fan, especially that adorable Marie Antoinette—have you seen the film? Fabulous costumes, fabulous, although terribly restrictive of the female form. No, I mean on account of the language barrier. Because how do you ever know if you are truly understanding one another? Who, for example, decided that a pomme was an apple? And what if they were pointing to a tree when they said pomme, but we were looking at an apple because we were a little bit hungry so we called a tree an apple, and now the French are confused by Tesco’s obsession with stocking as many different varieties of edible tree as is genetically modifiably possible to create? Well, it’s a complete disaster is what it is!’

‘How can he be with someone else?’ I pleaded to my audience of 19 women of varying different ages and a security guard called Albert. The other security guard, Jim, had gone to speak with UK Border Control, who were concerned I was a suitcase-laden bomber. ‘How?’ I asked them again. ‘If one person is meant for one person then he must be feeling incomplete and restricted, like a piece in the wrong puzzle. He’s in the wrong puzzle!’ I said, getting high-pitched and red-faced. And I don’t think anyone thought Gabriel was in a puzzle, unless a puzzle was a dirty great metaphor. ‘So? What should I do?’

‘Perhaps she could try him one more time?’ one lady nervously suggested to Grandma. I looked around the human fence surrounding me and they all nodded confirmation. My grandma sighed and rolled her eyes. So I switched my phone to speakerphone and pressed redial for one final try. I held the phone in the air so everyone could hear. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. Then we all looked at the phone.

‘Hi, this is Gabriel,’ the phone said. ‘I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

Then everyone went a little bit silent. Actually I don’t think you can be a little bit silent. It’s an either/or sort of thing. We were silent. And no one would look me in the eyes. So I switched off my French mobile for the last and final time and I handed it to my grandma, who put it straight in the nearest bin.

Then I just sat there, on the highly polished floor of Heathrow Terminal Five, I just sat there, surrounded by every single one of my possessions, and I wept, and I wept, and then I wept some more. If every teardrop were a piece of my soul they would never be able to put me back together.

six months later …

It’s the thing I hate most in the world, after eating noises. First place definitely goes to the noises people make when they eat; mostly it’s the chewing-swallowing noises I hate, but also the preparation noises: the chinking of knives and forks against plates in a quiet room; the noise as someone opens their saliva-filled mouth; and Lord forbid if someone actually clinks their fork against their teeth when placing food into their noisy gob. But after that, after the food-noise thing, the thing I hate most in the world is heartbreak, and I am surrounded by it every single day at work, because after the ‘incident’ at Heathrow Terminal Five my friend Federico invited me to work with him at True Love magazine.

It was Grandma Josephine’s idea originally. She’d said it was important to keep oneself busy when one was feeling broken and empty on the inside. Then she’d said something about paying one’s own rent and there were mutterings about inflation and pints of milk. So now I go to work every day, Federico by my side, and once there I am exposed to a multitude of grotesque eating noises and bucketloads of daily heartbreak, although we never let our readers know about the heartbreak. No, True Love makes everything look love-covered and golden, and I hate that. I hate the love-covered golden heartbreak.

‘Well, it’s a twatting mystery is what it is,’ Chad said, pacing around the huge heart-shaped table in the middle of the huge heart-shaped boardroom. ‘When was the last time we had this much post?’ he said on his second circuit of the room. Loosie, his officious 24-year-old American assistant, strode after him flicking through her notebook like an obnoxious linesman.

‘Two thousand and one, Chad,’ she said, flipping to the correct page. ‘Just after 9/11.’

‘So what the fuck am I missing?’ Chad said, looking to everyone in the room. ‘Why are there 27 sackfuls of post? What the fuck did we write about last month?’ It was common knowledge that Chad never read his own magazine. He didn’t even check the copy before sending it to print. ‘Well? What did we advertise?’ he asked the room. ‘Have Royal Mail fucked up and forgotten to deliver the post for the last 11 years?’ He looked from face to face. ‘What-the-twat was so exciting about last month’s edition?’

Every face in the room turned to me. It was like white-faced choreographed mime at its most terrifying. I say every face turned; Chad’s didn’t. He’d started on his third circuit of the room, tearing around the enormous table, which was bright pink, glass-topped and viciously sharp-edged. In fact that table was more unexpected than the postal situation and had injured 11 members of staff in the last week alone: nine on the jagged edge of its glass top; the tip of the glass heart had drawn blood twice, and Mark from Marketing cracked his knee on it two weeks ago and still walked with a noticeable limp.

‘It’s not just the post, Chad,’ Loosie said, scowling at me, flipping over another page of her notebook as Federico emitted a strange squeaking noise from the other side of the room. If he could have climbed inside his Nespresso machine and drowned himself he would have done. I knew the minute the postman arrived we were in 27 sackfuls of trouble and I’d deliberately positioned myself next to the boardroom exit. And excuse me, but I’m not one of those girls who’s ashamed of running away. I’m not ashamed of anything after being forcefully removed from Heathrow Airport by mental health professionals.

Loosie opened her mouth to speak and Federico crouched down as if he were expecting an explosion. I leant forward and rested my forehead on the cool surface of the dangerous glass heart. There was absolutely no way we were going to get away with it.

You see, my job at True Love was supposed to be the easiest at the magazine, and by that I mean it should in theory be impossible to mess it up. All I have to do is read the letters our readers send us then rewrite them into something more interesting. That’s it. Our readers write in (normally in their hundreds) and share stories with us: stories of how they met their one true love; or how much they gave up to save their one true love; or perhaps how they reignited their one true love. I then pick the best ones, call them up, interview them, then rewrite their special intimate moment into a thousand words of tear-jerking genius for an insubstantial salary and absolutely no writing credit. In the writing world I am the lowest of the low. They call me the ghost-writer. I’m a ghost, in the literary sense of course.

Now before we go any further I just want to state, for the record, that I am a hopeless romantic. I am a love lover. I am a princess waiting patiently for her Prince Charming to arrive, on a horse, or a donkey, or even in a London black cab. Or at least I was. Prince Charming was supposed to whisk me off my feet, take me somewhere super and tell me not to worry about the impossibly high house prices or how I will fund my retirement. He was also supposed to be handsome, funny, an emotional mind-reader and have an average to large penis. But the readers of True Love kept telling me that getting Prince to turn up at all was pretty difficult, and only the beginning of your prince-related troubles. Because Princey may not possess the above clearly defined characteristics; in fact some readers told me their prince didn’t possess any at all. But they fall in love regardless only to discover love involves focus; love involves compromise; love involves sacrifice. It’s hard to maintain it, difficult to look after, impossible to control. Eventually, almost all our readers lost the bloody thing and became Waiting Princesses again.

Not that we let the public know this. We only showed them the end result, when all the pieces were perfectly back in place. But I saw the void in between. I heard about ‘the time I lost him’ or ‘why wasn’t I enough for him?’ or ‘I gave up 15 years of my life for him; he didn’t want kids; I gave up my place at university; delayed something; didn’t travel somewhere; he doesn’t eat spicy food so I haven’t eaten Indian for 12 years; he prefers me blonde, skinny, fat, tanned, waxed, hairy.’

Women seemed to be constantly subjecting themselves to men, not that the men asked them to, I never heard that, just that women seemed to do it anyway.

My grandma always says, ‘Don’t subject yourself to a man, Kate, subject them to you!’ and I think what she means by that is decide what you want in life and get the man to fit to that, not focus on the man’s needs and try to accommodate, mould, shape, change, compromise yourself to please him. I always found it a bit confusing because I thought subjects were things we studied at school. But subjects or rather subjecting yourself is apparently a universal force, like some kind of giant whip, or invisible force field that humans can apply to one another. My grandma knows this stuff because she’s a world-renowned feminist, and a prolifically productive one at that. She’s written books and papers on just about everything to do to with women, and men, and force fields of oppression. Living with her as a child, I was constantly surrounded by paper towers of manuscripts and books. I ran around them with my best friend, Peter, and we pretended the towers were actually paper trees in paper forests, which was odd because they were trees before they were chopped down by a burger company wanting to graze cattle on the newly deforested land, then made into paper for us to build paper trees with …

And that’s what I wanted True Love to write about—not the cows and the trees and global deforestation; that’s more Time Magazine than True Love. No, I wanted True Love to write about the things love took away. I wanted to help women go out and get those things back. I wanted to help them reclaim all the things that love had stolen. And I wanted to ask what they’d do if they were me, a 30-year-old girl who found herself at relationship and life Ground Zero having well and truly missed her own love boat. So I’d suggested this to Chad. I’d said, ‘Chad, I want to go out and get back all the things love stole. It’s going to be like Challenge Anneka¹ but with love and boats and the occasional high five. Please let me do it, Chad, please. Give me something to believe in after my bed for two became a bed for one.’

And I had planned to do that every day. I was going to help people reclaim their love-stolen dreams until the pain in my heart went away and the word Gabriel, or Gabe, or on the odd occasion the ‘Ga’ sound no longer brought me to tears. Because as Prince Charmings go mine turned out to be gut-wrenchingly rubbish, and I don’t think I’m the first girl in the world to think their allocated prince was a little bit shit, but Chad had said, ‘No.’

Then I’d starting crying, because since the break-up I’ve become something of a continuous weeper. Prior to this I thought us Brits were stoic and watertight, but now the tears come fast, in plentiful supply and with the most minimal of provocation.

And since then the most controversial thing the magazine had published was 400 words on the physical effects of heartbreak being directly comparable to Class A drug withdrawal (which is totally true, by the way, for any of you feeling violently ill after a recent break-up). No, True Love had continued to eulogise the positive benefits of love, teaching readers how to secure as much of it as possible, often through purchasing one of the many products Chad sold advertising space for, and, when they finally did get it, encouraging them to write in and share it with a love-hungry world. Or at least that was our position until last Friday…

And just for the record, before that Loosie starts speaking again, you should probably know that she’s had it in for me since I made fun of her funny American accent, and the fact that she speaks with the speed and intonation of a concrete-cracking power drill, and the silly spelling of her name …

‘As I said, Chad, it’s not just the post.’ She glared at me. ‘We’ve received an unusual amount of voicemails; three hundred on the main phone line, a hundred and twenty on the back-up line, and there’s something called a facsimile machine that keeps ejecting pieces of paper with what looks like handwritten messages. I’ve called IT and asked them to take it away. We’ve also received various gift boxes from motivational speakers; have been contacted by the publishers of almost every self-help author in Europe; and the BBC called, three times; and Kate, well, Kate seems to have received an awful lot of messages today too.’ You see, I told you. She hates me. ‘Yes, lots of people have called saying they want to speak to Pirate Kate.’ Oh no. ‘And most of the post seems to be addressed to Pirate Kate—’ I looked across the room but Federico was quietly humming to himself and looking the other way ‘—and everyone seems to want to talk about their love-stolen dreams.’

‘Their what?’ Chad said, spinning on the spot to face me.

‘Their love-stolen dreams, Chad,’ Loosie repeated, even though Chad had heard perfectly well the first time. At that moment, thankfully, Mark from Marketing burst in the room. Actually he hobbled on account of his knee injury from the giant heart-shaped table, but that sounds less dramatic, so imagine he burst.

‘The servers are down!’ he yelled, after bursting.

‘The servers are down for what?’ Chad said, super irritated, with me.

‘For everything, Chad, for everything, the main site, the micro-sites, client side—everything’s crashed. Too many people are trying to access them at the same time.’ Mark’s voice sounds as if he’s got an apple pip stuck up his nostril, if you know what I mean.

Chad looked between me, Federico and Mark.

‘Everyone, back here, tomorrow, 9 a.m.,’ he yelled before marching out of the boardroom followed by Mark, who, for the sake of the dramatic content of this scene, also marched out.

¹Challenge Anneka - British television show. Aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Anneka (tall, bottom-length hair, wore jumpsuits and used mobile telephones way before the rest of the world) would be set a challenge. Anneka and her helicopter-flying, mobile-phone-wielding team would then have a limited amount of time to complete the task. Anneka managed such things as repainting a Romanian orphanage, building a seal pool and ‘finding’ 10 double-decker buses for the National Playbus Association. She was a bit cool, super charitable and also a really really fast runner.

the pianist—beatrice van de broeck—90 years old

What didn’t I do because of love? Well, I didn’t study piano. It was 1936 and I was offered a place at the Juilliard School in New York. You’ve probably never heard of it but Juilliard was already one of the greatest music schools in the world. Some of the most successful pianists of our time have graduated from that school.

Well, my father, a very conservative Belgian man, toyed with the idea of allowing me to go but the school couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to find work after graduation. To have a daughter move to America was one thing, but for her to become an unemployed musician, well, that was quite another. Ultimately he gave me the choice. To do what was expected of me and marry a wonderful man who I was very fond of, or to go. Of course I agreed to marry. That was the right thing to do, the proper thing. And my husband bought me the most beautiful Steinway piano as a wedding gift. I played it every day until the day he died, God rest his soul.

But after passing up my place at Juilliard I never took another piano lesson. I stayed just as I was; good but not great; a pianist but not a musician, not a performer. So if there had been no husband, if there had been less of an obligation to marry and settle down, if I had been free as a bird like you are now, you beautiful young girl, that is the first place I would go. That would be my love-stolen dream. And if I was there I would cross my fingers and all my toes and hope that love never showed up so I could stay there forever.

grandma’s villa | pepperpots life sanctuary

‘We will do everything possible to make sure you keep your job. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to the ghostwriting team at True Love. Your writing equals a young Barbara Cartland,’ and other such platitudes had spouted from the mouth of Federico as soon as we realised the trouble I was in. Then we’d jumped in my car and driven straight to see Grandma Josephine at Pepperpots Life Sanctuary, the most exclusive old people’s home in Western Europe². There’d been no mention of Federico’s involvement in my current predicament. No, we’d skipped over that like Dorothy sprint-hurdling down the Yellow Brick Road. But within seconds of actually arriving at Grandma’s villa Team Kate had fractured, with Federico knocking me to the floor as he pelted down the hallway diving head first into Grandma’s impressive walk-in wardrobe. He re-emerged a few seconds later screaming, ‘Where’s the Chanel?’ before dragging most of the contents into the middle of Grandma’s enormous open-plan lounge. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying on an assortment of different furs, spinning backwards and forwards on the spot like one of those figurines in a music box.

‘Well, I told her to start small,’ Federico said, trying on his third fur. ‘Didn’t I, Kat-kins? I said, “Make Chad think it was his idea,” but she went ahead and did it anyway, yes she did, like a boisterous young bullock filled with his first flush of hormones.’ He took a sip from a large Margarita and threw on another fur. And just for the record he’d done no such thing. He’d said, ‘Go big, Kat-kins!’ high-fived me, poured an Appletini down my throat then substituted my diligently ghost-written True Love reader story for a two-page advert inviting the readers to get in touch and share their Love-Stolen Dreams. But apparently the truth held no place in Grandma’s colossal lakeside villa.

‘What we don’t understand,’ Grandma began, her best friend Beatrice nodding along, ‘is why Chad will just assume it was Kate.’ Beatrice and Grandma were dressed head-to-foot in black Lycra Parkour³ outfits and looked like Bond girls for the over-80s. ‘Federico, you must tell this Chad someone else submitted the advert. He’ll listen to you.’

‘I see your point, Josephine, yes, I do,’ Federico said, collapsing into a pile of dark brown furs, looking like the walnut on top of a giant Walnut Whip. ‘But if we are stood in Truth Town, Josephine, and it feels like we are, Chad doesn’t always listen to me in the work environment, no he does not. In fact sometimes that handsome mountain of a man doesn’t listen to me at all. But that is a totally different work drama of mine and today isn’t about me, it’s about Kat-kins, but let’s just say if we are touching on the subject, and it feels like we are, that I need to work on establishing better boundaries; emotionally, professionally and sexually.’ He whispered that last word before sipping on yet another Margarita. I was still dry as a pre-ignited bush fire. ‘And Chad thinks it’s Kat-kins because she presented the idea to him a few months ago.’ He passed Grandma a piece of paper that I recognised as my colourful and mostly felt-tip-based A3 presentation. Grandma unrolled the paper then shielded her eyes.

‘I know,’ Federico said as he scurried to the other side of the room to try on what looked like a man’s dark blue blazer. ‘It’s like she’s taken it to the local preschool and asked a group of mentally challenged under-5s to create her important business proposal for her. Did you do that, Kat-kins, did you?’

‘I thought I’d brought you up better than this, Kate.’ Grandma tutted, holding the presentation in my face. Personally I think it’s hard to quantify whether Grandma brought me up better than a colourful A3 presentation. Certainly she brought me up better than my parents, but they are really odd and thankfully almost constantly away. They call themselves Peaceful Extreme Non-Violent Dangerous Environmental Activists (PENDEAs) but I know that they are not non-violent and last week I saw images of them on Channel 4 News. They were wielding machetes on the deck of a recently impounded aid ship entering the Gaza Strip. Dad had face paint on, Rambo-style. I don’t know you well enough to tell you what my mother was doing, but let’s just say that occasionally she feels exposing her breasts is the best way to evoke peace. So my upbringing was better than hanging about with them, but better than a colourful A3 presentation? I wasn’t 100% sure.

‘Well, Kate, there is only one way you can save your job,’ Grandma said as she threw my presentation in the fireplace and lit a match, the felt-tip-covered page burning with a greeny-orange flame. ‘You must find something impressive to write about so that Chad doesn’t want you to leave.’

‘By tomorrow?’ I guffawed. ‘I’ve got more chance of inventing a time machine and catapulting myself back into the past.’

‘Well, she could write about that lovely Delaware,’ Beatrice suggested. ‘People always like to hear news about her.’

‘Delaware!’ Grandma nodded before punching the air victoriously. ‘You must speak to Delaware O’Hunt!’

‘Why would Kate be able to interview Delaware O’Hunt?’ Federico said, grabbing hold of Beatrice’s shoulders. ‘Why, I ask you? Why?’ He was trying to stay calm but he was shaking her quite violently.

‘Because she lives next door,’ Grandma said, walking out to her terrace and peering over the fence, ‘and normally she pops in for vino before her jazz fusion rock dance class.’

‘How did we not know about this, Kat-kins?’ Federico shout-whispered. ‘The most media-shy actress from the golden age of film living here, next door to Grandma, and you let me come here, drink Margaritas, eat lovely sushi wraps, of which there doesn’t appear to be any today,’ he said, looking about the place, ‘and we never knew about Delaware? This is slapdash, Kat-kins! Totally slapdash!’ He placed his forehead against the window overlooking the next-door villa. ‘I love her,’ he quietly wailed to himself as his breath created misty patches on the glass. ‘I completely love her.’

You see, Delaware O’Hunt wasn’t just an actress. She’s a screen idol of the 1950s. She made more movies than any other actress, starred with all the greats, made plays, musicals, films, won an Oscar, got married, then divorced. She had a tumultuous love life and wore the most incredible clothes. In fact there is nothing in Delaware O’Hunt’s current wardrobe that I wouldn’t run over hot coals to wear even now she is a proper pensioner. But I can’t for a second imagine how love negatively affected the gorgeous Delaware. Love was all around her; love chased her down the street; love made posters of her; documentaries about her; sang about her. She was a world-famous actress, one of the greatest of the greats. It didn’t look as if love stole anything at all.

‘Darling, she doesn’t seem to be in so why don’t you pop back at the weekend and I’ll arrange for you to have a chat? Federico, if you come early we can go rock climbing together.’

‘Thank you, Josephine, thank you.’ He was speaking like a 1940s actor. ‘I’ll be back at the weekend, first thing, first thing I tell you.’ He punched the air with Delaware-inspired enthusiasm. ‘Oh, and Josephine,’ he said, extracting himself from the dark blue blazer that looked in my opinion to be from Hugo Boss Menswear, ‘I L.O.V.E. the jacket. It’s so on point. Try it, Kat-kins, try it,’ he said, passing it to me. ‘Girl in Boy is black to last season’s pattern on print.’

‘Oh, that’s not Josephine’s jacket,’ giggled Beatrice. ‘He thinks it’s your jacket! No, that’s Peter’s jacket, isn’t it? He left it here when he came for lunch. I remember because I thought it brought out the colour of his eyes. Well, it did, didn’t it?’ she said to Grandma, who looked uncharacteristically startled.

‘Peter who?’ I asked Grandma. Beatrice seldom feels the need to contextualise.

‘Peter Parker is his full name,’ Beatrice continued. ‘Isn’t that right, Josephine? I’m sure it was Peter Parker because I very much enjoyed the alliteration.’

‘Peter Parker as in Spiderman?’ Federico asked with reignited interest in the jacket I now held.

‘No, silly,’ Beatrice chortled, ‘although he was terribly serious. No, Peter Parker is Kate’s childhood friend.’

‘Peter Parker!’ I turned to Grandma. ‘Peter Parker!!!’ I was getting a bit shouty. ‘You had lunch with my Peter Parker? How? When? How?’

‘It was a lunch, darling. Can’t I have a lunch? Everyone has to eat.’

‘Grandma!’

‘He got back in touch recently, darling, which has been very nice, if I’m honest. Well, aren’t people allowed to contact me any more? And he’s been very supportive of me regarding my move to Pepperpots. It was a huge decision to give up the family home, such an upheaval. And I hope I have been equally supportive of Peter regarding his divorce. It’s so hard to maintain a long-term relationship in this current socio-economic climate. I said to him, I said, “Peter, if you are looking for stability in the post-post-modern modernist age you’ll struggle.”’

‘Peter Parker got married? My Peter Parker got married? I mean, divorced, I mean, Peter Parker is single?’ I really didn’t know what I meant.

‘I suppose technically I’m all three,’ said Peter Parker from behind me.

It was the first time I had heard his voice in over 15 long years.

²You can’t really call Pepperpots an old people’s home. It’s more like a luxury retirement theme park set over 570 acres with its own spa, floating restaurant, dance studio and rock-climbing centre—the final stop-off for the brightest, wisest and most physically capable minds of yesteryear.

³Parkour - or ‘free running’ - is a sport in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles using only their bodies. Skills such as jumping, climbing, vaulting, rolling, swinging and wall scaling are employed. Parkour is most commonly practised in urban areas. It is not commonly practised by pensioners.

—AN ADVERTISEMENT FROM TRUE LOVE MAGAZINE—

WHAT DID YOU MISS OUT ON BECAUSE YOU FELL IN LOVE?

Dear True Love Readers,

This year, as the clock struck 30 years old, I found myself jobless, homeless and abandoned in France by my French fiancé. I had given up everything in a fight for love, and I’d lost, knocked out in the 7th round, sucker-punched.

With absolutely nothing to my name, no home, no money and no job, I had well and truly missed my own love boat. If I had been younger I would have soothed my broken heart through the tried and tested method of boyfriend replacement and/or alcohol consumption. But this time I couldn’t. This time the pain in my heart was too great, the love lost was too huge. For many dark months all I could manage, in between fits of sobbing, was to ponder upon the following:

What on earth do I do next?

Because my One True Love had already been and gone; as had all our future plans, our dreams, our as yet unrealised wedding anniversaries, our as yet unborn children. That part of my life was over before it had even begun. So with no guarantee that love would ever show up again I needed to find out what would make me happy in the absence of love. What could I do with my time until love showed up, if love ever shows up at all. And this is where you come in.

You see, I have started to make a list of all the things I didn’t get to do because I fell in love; a list of all the hobbies, ambitions and secret dreams that were put on the back burner the day I fell in love. And I am going to go out and do all those things. I am going to go out, like a pirate on the giant sea of life, and I am going to take back what love stole. And here at True Love we want to know what you gave up for love. Is there something you always wanted to do but stopped pursuing it when you fell in love? A hobby or dream? What negative effects did falling in love have on your life? What love advice do you have for me? Perhaps some of you are interested in going on your own Love Quests, taking back what love has stolen.

It doesn’t matter if you are in love, out of love, searching for love, avoiding love, married, divorced, gay or straight. True Love wants to hear from you.

Can’t think of anything? Then let’s turn this on its head. Ask yourself the following questions:

‘If you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life alone, you would never fall in love, never settle down, never have children, what would you want to do? What would make you happy? What would fill up your time, your heart, your soul for the rest of your days?’ The answers to these questions are the dreams we need to get back.

I have missed my own love boat. I am loveless and boatless with a whole lifetime to fill. I’m going on a quest, a Love-Stolen Dreams quest, to take back what love stole. So, are you with me? Do you want to join my ship?

Pirate Kate x x

PIRATE KATE

Please send all response letters to: Pirate Kate; PO Box Love-Stolen Dreams, c/o the True Love London Office

NEXT WEEK IN TRUE LOVE: MR PURRR-FECT

—how a feline companion can take the pain out of living alone

BOTOX OR NOTOX

—should you plump and fill for your special day?

AND HOW TO CREATE YOUR PERFECT WEDDING DRESS FOR LESS THAN

£69.98

paper towers of paper souls

big red | true love office | london

Jenny Sullivan doesn’t work in a wee pod. That’s how I knew she was important when I first joined True Love magazine; that and the fact that I’d already seen her on a million different billboards, a thousand different TV adverts, a hundred different talk shows. But in terms of my working day, the reason I knew she was important was because she didn’t work in a pod. You see, the offices of True Love magazine take up the entire top floor of a converted warehouse. They are completely open-plan with one large glass room in the middle, the boardroom, then one corner office for Chad and another for Jenny Sullivan. The rest of the office is dotted with enormous brightly coloured pods each standing eight foot tall with a desk inside and a small arch to get in. They resemble giant dinosaur eggs and make the office look like an incubation chamber in an ethically questionable science laboratory—one growing human clones with above-average writing skills and the ability to sell full-page advertising space. And while there is no scientific evidence that working in giant eggs improves productivity Chad did produce a historical document claiming the Incas had done so. His historical document looked suspiciously like a normal piece of A4 paper stained with tea. And the ‘facts’ were un-referenceable on Google. Nevertheless all the staff at True Love were made to work in Work Evolving Egg Pods, or wee pods; everyone, that is, except Jenny. And I had been hiding inside my wee pod, affectionately named Big Red, since 09:15 this morning listening to them fight in True Love’s boardroom.

‘Chad, I’m just saying, Chad, this idea, it doesn’t sound very “us”, does it?’ Jenny said, manically twisting her gigantic wedding ring around her finger, ‘because people here are into love, Chad.’ Jenny drew a heart in the air with her index finger. ‘This magazine is into love, Chad.’ She did it again. She could have just pointed at the boardroom table. ‘That’s why we are called True Love magazine, Chad.’

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this yet, but Jenny Sullivan likes to overuse people’s first names. It’s a technique she read about in a book called ‘Own it—Take Life by the Bollocks’. She once said my name so many times I disconnected from it entirely.

‘Chad, I’m just thinking of you, Chad.’ You see. ‘Because we can’t suddenly start writing about how shit love is, become love pirates, steal love ships and go on bloody love missions. What will our poor stupid readers think?’ She looked from Chad to Federico, who was standing like a statue in the corner of the room. Chad, on the other hand, was pacing up and down the boardroom, throwing handfuls of Haribo in his gob. ‘Because I have other things I can do if this magazine folds, Chad. I’d just carry on with my modelling career,’ she said, smoothing out imaginary creases in her clothes. ‘Not a day goes by that I’m not asked to endorse some beauty product or fashion brand. It’s such a bore,’ she said to Federico, as if he’d understand such a burden, even though the only thing Federico’s ever been asked to endorse is mouthwash at Paddington Station, and that was more of a general customer satisfaction survey than a traditional celebrity endorsement. ‘And that’s before we take into account my writing career, Chad. My publisher is constantly on the phone demanding I write another bestseller. Or I could just take some time out, spend more time being a good wife, fuss over my wonderful husband and—’

‘Oh, for twat’s sake, Jenny, would you please just shut the fuck up?’ Chad said, coming to a sudden stop. ‘It would be less twatting offensive if you just put all your awards, and your accolades, and your precious photos of you and your perfect Ken Doll husband, and printed them directly onto your twatting clothes, let the fabric speak for you, then my ears wouldn’t feel like they were haemorrhaging every time you start twatting talking.’

Federico clamped his hand over his own mouth, his bulbous eyes whizzing between the two of them.

‘I get it, Jenny,’ Chad continued. ‘I get it. You are twatting f-ing great.’

Jenny looked for a second as if she was about to cry. Her bottom lip was a tremble away from a tear. Federico turned away and shielded his eyes. He says that seeing an incredibly beautiful person cry is like seeing a big shit in the middle of freshly laundered sheets. It just shouldn’t be allowed.

‘Look at the letters, Jenny,’ Chad said, pointing to the corner of the room. ‘Look at the twatting letters!’

There was a tap on the side of my wee pod. It was Chad’s assistant, Loosie. She climbed in, notebook attached to her hand, blocking my view of the boardroom. She harrumphed before speaking just to let me know how tiresome she found me, and everything to do with everything to do with me.

‘Kate Winters,’ she began, ‘on the assumption that you are responsible for the advert that ran unauthorised in the last edition of True Love, and Lord knows the way you have been pining after your ex-boyfriend we all assume that it’s you, that and the fact that no one else would be stupid enough to a) actually pitch the idea to Chad, be rejected, then pursue it anyway and b) publish what is for all intents and purposes an advert actually encouraging our readers to, Lord forbid, get in touch, you have another 29 postal sacks of letters addressed to Pirate Kate. They were by your wee pod but Chad, and by Chad I mean me, dragged them into the boardroom. You also have a gift box from a motivational speaker called Bob. He wants to take a meeting with you. And by you I of course mean “Pirate Kate”.’ She made inverted commas with her fingers. ‘And you have phone messages: your grandmother called three times wanting to speak to you about someone called Mary, someone called Delaware and someone called Beatrice. She spoke as if I should know who these people are. She also wanted to know why you didn’t start work at 9 a.m. Personally I would like to know the same thing. Your friend Leah called, twice, wanting to talk to you about her love-stolen dreams, and a man called Peter Parker called—’

I knocked over my coffee at the sound of his name. Loosie watched me, as if I were poo on a sheet, as I tried to mop it up.

‘Peter Parker—’ she paused, waiting to see if she could make me spill it again ‘—spelt his name out for me, twice, very slowly. Please tell … Peter Parker … I am not a retard. And does he know he’s got the same name as Spiderman? Don’t answer that. Federico asked to see you when you get in, Jenny Sullivan’s on the warpath for you, and Chad said to say, and I quote, “Don’t even think about starting your twatting day sitting your skinny little arse down or sniffing at a cup of morning twatting coffee before seeing me,” and by me I mean Chad—it was a quote. BTW there is a stain on your top that looks like tomato juice, but it could be ketchup. Either way we both know that it’s not from any kind of vitamin drink. Kate? Kate, where do you think you are going?’

‘I am going to get fresh coffee,’ I said, clambering out of Big Red.

‘Didn’t you hear me, Kate? You need to go to the boardroom. We are having an Early Morning Focused Focus Meeting. Go! Now!’

the boardroom | true love

As I nervously slipped into the back of the boardroom Chad was a partial blur, silently spinning himself in fast circles on his special velvet heart-shaped chair. Federico was attached to the Nespresso machine and frantically waved as I walked in. Jenny Sullivan was sitting straight-backed and straight-faced at the blood-drawing tip of the glass heart. It looked as if the heart were literally growing out from between her perfect breasts. The rest of the office were skim-reading a Time Magazine article that Loosie was silently handing out but with a noisy sense of self-importance.

The 2009 article claimed there was a link between obesity and love. It stated that within a few years of getting married women were twice as likely to become obese compared to women who were merely dating. The research had monitored over 7,000 women and found that unmarried women living with partners for up to five years had a 63% increased risk of obesity. One of the researchers wrote that, ‘The longer a woman lives with a romantic partner, the more likely she is to keep putting on weight.’ This was by no means the first piece of research to highlight this link, or the more general negative effects relationships can have on women, but it was the only piece of research Chad could get his hands on before our ironically named Early Morning Focused Focus Meeting—a meeting that has never once been focused, never once (before today) been held early in the morning and has occasionally involved several members of staff crying. Afternoon Mothers Meeting would have been a more appropriate name, or Let’s all listen to one of Chad’s never-ending monologues and try to guess how many expletives he will use.

‘I’ve decided I want to take True Love in a new direction,’ Chad said, mid spin, the words flying from his mouth as if from a spinning top; the sounds of the beginning and end of his sentence whizzing off in different directions. ‘Now, I know I didn’t run it past you lot first, but why the fuck would I? So keep up. I’m introducing a new section to the magazine and I’m calling it Love-Stolen Dreams.’ He locked eyes with me for a split second of every spin. ‘LSD for short.’ He grabbed the edge of the glass heart and came to a violent stop. ‘I want True Love to start having a more balanced view of love and I’ve decided to start with the twatting fat people.’ He got up to start pacing around the boardroom, but his legs buckled under him like a puppet with no master—too many spins—so from the boardroom floor he began his focus meeting speech. ‘Now, before any of you get all squeaky and high-pitched I’m not judging the fat, OK, so let’s just get that out there for any of you liberalists who are pro the obese and all that. My mum had a lifelong battle with the bulge so I know first-hand how a larger lady can feel. But our readers fessed up, OK. They put it out there. They wrote in, in twatting sackfuls, to say they blamed men for getting fat. Obviously it’s not true. I have about as much effect on a woman’s weight as a plastic satsuma but we are going to write about it anyway because apparently they give a crap. Marketing guy, put up advertising rates by 15% and call out all the diet-pill companies. In fact call anything weight-loss related: step machines, personal trainers, Paul-twatting-McKenna and his I Can Make You a Skinny Fuck book. We want it all. Yellow WEE Pod, I want a selection of short articles about celebrities whose weight has been affected by love, maybe something about the amount of calories sex burns, but how they got fat afterwards, otherwise we’ll lose the fat readers. Blue, black and silver WEES, I want to know about readers who lost material possessions because of love: houses, iPads, cars and so on. Pink WEE, I want you to write about people who cancelled travel plans for love. And I want something about how love killed someone, preferably through starvation, or through having an actual broken heart. We want the readers to go on a roller coaster of twatting emotions. Jenny, read up on queens or princesses, find one who gave up something for love, the right to the throne or something.’ Jenny rolled her eyes and huffed so heavily she could have blown herself, on her chair, across the room. ‘And, Kate—’ I went cold as he said my name ‘—let’s not forget little Kate Winters.’ I could feel everyone in the room bristling with delight at the prospect of seeing me publicly fired. ‘Kate, you have illegally published something in my magazine. You are therefore responsible for all these twatting letters.’ He pointed to the far corner of the room and I turned to look. ‘It was the ultimate breach of trust, not only that you found a way to access my copy, ergo millions of our readers, but that you then used that open channel to involve them in your own quest. Give me one magnificent twatting reason why I shouldn’t fire you then call the police and have you arrested?’

I didn’t know what to say. All I could see were the letters: thousands upon thousands of them on tables in the corner, towers of letters bigger than any paper forest Peter and I had ran around as kids. And each one was a woman, a living breathing woman wanting to share, wanting to speak, wanting to reach out and connect; every letter a different voice, a different soul. Women did want to take back their love-stolen dreams. They were like paper towers of hope. I felt my eyes twinkle at the prospect. This would keep me busy forever.

‘Oi! Pirate Kate! Give me one twatting reason why I shouldn’t fire you!’

Everyone in the room expected me to crumble, or beg or just pack up my desk and leave. But not now, not with all these love-stolen dreams laid out in front of me. Chad would have to drag me from the building by my ankles if he thought I was going to give up that easily.

‘I can give you two,’ I said dramatically, turning to face the room, who gasped. ‘Actually I can only give you one, but it consists of two words—’

‘This isn’t twatting charades!’

‘How about an interview with the media-shy Delaware O’Hunt?’ The room gasped again.

‘Actually that’s quite a lot more than two words …’ Federico muttered. ‘Even Delaware O’Hunt is three words, if you think about it, and then there was the rest of the sentence, which takes us closer to ten, although I don’t actually know if the O apostrophe gets counted with the Hunt. Does anyone know that?’ He looked around the room. ‘Anyone?’

‘I twatting love Delaware O’Hunt and you know it,’ Chad barked, sitting heavily in his heart-shaped chair. ‘Kate Winters, I swear to you now, if that interview doesn’t materialise, or you piss her off like you’ve pissed me off, then you will be thrown from the building.’ And he meant from the roof. ‘You are officially on probation. If you submit anything else to my magazine unauthorised you will be fired. If you come into the office late you will be fired. If you wear a pair of shoes I find offensive you will be fired.’ I looked down at my shoes to find they already offended me. ‘You are here because of the promise of Delaware and because a certain someone believes you are talented.’ Federico pointed at his own head. ‘I’m not so sure, so let’s see how your Love-Stolen Dreams idea pans out. But you will no longer write anything under your own name.’ I didn’t anyway. ‘You will go nowhere near the copy for next month’s edition, and as a special treat you can read every single one of the letters you helped generate. I am going to work you so twatting hard you won’t know what’s hit you. So dive in, go wild, pick your favourites then rewrite them for the magazine, in first person, obviously. And when the Delaware copy is ready email it to Jenny. Obviously it will run under her name. We can’t have a nobody writing our main twatting feature, otherwise what do I need Jenny for?’ Jenny went a bit pale and locked eyes with Chad, just for a second, before they both smiled sycophantically at each other. ‘So!’ Chad said, clapping his hands together. ‘I will be checking the copy for this edition and I read slow so everyone’s deadline is two days early.’ There was a communal groan. ‘Button it, you lot, and let’s take a moment. Close your eyes, take a breath and let’s say it together. “Thank twat for the twatting fat people.”’ He threw his unfinished apple over his shoulder and marched out of the room, Loosie in tow. Then everyone turned to glare at me. I say everyone turned; Federico didn’t. He sat in the corner giving me a mini round of applause before getting distracted by something invisible on his sleeve.