The Girl Before

I pick up my pen, then put it down again. A list of everything I want to keep would take all night. But then I think some more, and that word essential seems to float out of the page at me. What, really, is essential? My clothes? Since the break-in I’ve virtually been living in the same two pairs of jeans and an old baggy sweater. There are some dresses and skirts I’d want to take, obviously; a couple of nice jackets, my shoes and boots, but nothing else I’d really miss. Our photographs? They’re all backed up online. My few half-decent pieces of jewelry were taken by the burglars. Our furniture? There isn’t a piece that wouldn’t look tacky and out of place in One Folgate Street.

It occurs to me that the question has been worded this way deliberately. If I’d been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I’d never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it’s important, I find myself wondering if I can’t just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin.

Maybe that’s the real point of The Rules, as we’ve already dubbed them. Maybe it isn’t simply that the architect’s a control freak who’s worried we’ll mess up his beautiful house. Maybe it’s a kind of experiment. An experiment in living.

Which, I suppose, would make Si and me his guinea pigs. But actually I don’t mind that. Actually I want to change who I am—who we are—and I know I can’t do it without some help.

Especially who we are.

Simon and me have been together ever since Saul and Amanda’s wedding, fourteen months ago. I knew the two of them from work, but they’re a bit older than me and apart from them I didn’t know many people there. But Simon was Saul’s best man, the wedding was beautiful and romantic, and we hit it off right away. Drinking and talking turned into slow dancing and exchanging phone numbers. And then later we discovered we were staying at the same B&B and, well, one thing led to another. The next day I thought, What have I done? Clearly, this was yet another impulsive one-night stand and I was never going to see him again and would now be left feeling cheap and used. But in fact it was the other way around. Si called the moment he got home, and again the next day, and by the end of the week we were an item, much to the amazement of our friends. Particularly his friends. He works in a very laddish, boozy environment where having a steady girlfriend is almost a black mark. In the kind of magazine Si writes for, girls are “babes” or “hotties” or “cuties.” Page after page is filled with pictures of B&K, as it’s known—bra and knickers—though the articles are mostly about gadgets and technology. If the article is about cellphones, say, there’s a picture of a girl in her underwear holding one. If the article is about laptops, she’ll still be in her undies but wearing specs and typing on the keyboard. If the article is about underwear, she probably won’t be wearing any underwear at all, but instead holding it up as if she’s just slipped it off. Whenever the magazine throws a party, the models all turn up dressed pretty much as they appear in the magazine, and then the pictures of the party get splashed all over the magazine too. It isn’t my scene in the least, and Simon told me early on that it wasn’t his either—one of the reasons he liked me, he said, was because I wasn’t anything like those girls, that I was “real.”

There’s something about meeting at a wedding that turbocharges the first bit of a relationship. Simon asked me to move in with him just a few weeks after we started going out. That surprised people too—usually it’s the girl pushing the guy, because she wants either to get married or just to move on to the next stage. But with us it was always the other way around. Maybe that’s because Simon’s a bit older than me. He’s always said, the moment he saw me he knew I was the one. I liked that about him—the way he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was me. But it never really occurred to me to ask myself whether this was what I wanted too, whether he meant to me what I clearly meant to him. And recently, what with the burglary and the decision to move out of his old flat and find somewhere new together, I’ve started realizing it’s time for me to make a decision. Life’s too short to spend it in the wrong relationship.

If that’s what this is.