Good Material

All of this is an explanation and not an excuse for why I chose to catfish Andy in that first month after we ended. I know it is inexcusable and I still can’t believe I did it. No one can ever find out that one Sunday afternoon I set up an email address and then an Instagram account for a woman called Tash; that I sourced all her Instagram posts from strangers’ social media profiles which I posted over the course of a week to make it seem like a believable account.

‘But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?’

Here’s what I’m getting at: I don’t know if I really want to move on, because the further away I get from the pain, the further away I get from her.

‘You are locked in a prison of your own nostalgia. You need to let go of the past.’

But I’m not a member of that club any more. No one is. It’s been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So
what do I do with all its stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I’m no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird?

I miss going to bed knowing other people are also asleep in the house. This is the first time I’ve slept somewhere on my own since the break-up. Was Jane right when she said that men don’t know how to be single? Am I really so reliant on the ambient shapes and sounds and smell of another body?

‘Reverse break-up schedules,’ he explains. ‘When men and
women break up, men hate everything about their ex-girlfriend for three months, and then they miss her, and then they think they love her, and that’s when they text her. Meanwhile, she has spent three months loving him and then she hates his guts forever,’ he says, leaning in for emphasis, his breath hot and tangy with gin. ‘We were never meant to be with each other. Men and women are not compatible.’

I process what he’s said. ‘Hang on, this isn’t relevant at all. What you’re saying is I’m following the female pattern of behaviour in a break-up. And hopefully she’s following the male. But we don’t know that. Maybe she just went straight to hating me and stayed there.’

‘Andy!’ he shouts from the window as he rolls it down. ‘Remember: a broken heart is a jester’s greatest prop.’ I smile defeatedly. ‘You’ve been handed a clown wig and collar. You could get some of your best work out of this.’

He keeps saying this: that I need to find my dignity, that I’ve lost my dignity. That he’ll always respect me, even if I don’t have my dignity. These are the things my friends seem to prize above all else when at their most drunk, the words repeated ad infinitum: respect and dignity.

‘No, you mustn’t do that,’ he says gravely. ‘Samuel Johnson said: “Having a penis is being imprisoned with a mad man. But you must let the mad man speak.”’