She’s wearing fake Ray Bans, pink jogging pants and a puffa jacket, scrolling on her phone while her boyfriend looks the other way and smokes. Her hips look soft like marshmallow. She glances at me briefly, irritated by the sound of Andrea’s pen spinning on the table. I put the pen in my pocket and she goes back to her phone, her fat little fingers jabbing at the screen.
I always like coming to Salvatore’s. Since Andrea dumped me here, in this very booth, I thought I’d never come back, but I couldn’t resist returning to my old haunt. And the coffee’s genuinely good. The staff tell jokes in Italian and gesticulate, lamenting their homesickness, the difficulties of finding an affordable flat in this city, how much they miss Mamma’s pasta. The decor is aspirational, with wooden benches, industrial lighting and a huge coffee machine that really means business. The chairs, however, are made of cheap fabric that scratches the skin off your arse, and not in a good way. Aside from these minor details, you’d be forgiven for thinking the area was on the up, if there weren’t a bunch of hoodies outside the front door monging out over TikTok videos and pissed-up tramps in front of the pawnbrokers directly opposite, harassing the exquisitely contoured teenage girls passing by with generous, if not entirely convincing offers of a decent fuck. Despite Salvatore’s best efforts, gentrification isn’t coming to this corner of Tottenham anytime soon.
I take a couple of photos of the interior and send them to my new barista, Toni. Well, he’s not so much a barista as a kioskista. He owns the run-down corner shop next to my flat and tries to tempt passing hipsters in with his genuine coffee machine from the motherland, which he found on Ebay for two hundred euros. Bargain. I’m sort of impressed by his entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve been in Berlin six months and I’m still his only regular though. His coffee’s not awful, and he doles out free life advice on the side. He does a good job of seeming like he’s taking you seriously, makes sympathetic noises, as long as you avoid the topic of family anyway. As a fifty-year-old Sicilian from a tiny village, he tends to put family at the centre of everything, whereas mine are peripheral at best. When I told him I was coming back to London for Sally’s baby shower, he got all psychoanalytical and said I was dreading it because I actually really want kids myself and I’m jealous she got there first. I’d told him about Andrea and that children were never a part of our life plan, or mine at least, but he just tutted and did his pinched finger thing, muttering to himself about le donne difficili and slid my third espresso across the counter. He’s on Instagram now, where he uploads reels of himself trying to replicate Italy in milk foam. He’s only got three followers: me, his mum and his ex Hillary, who lives in Florida and got married years ago but is still pining for her Sicilian lover. So he claims, anyway. And why not? I’ve moved abroad and I still follow Andrea. I’m not the one pining though. She’ll realise before long that she shouldn’t have left me. Or at least she’ll have both legs amputated after a really bad motorbike accident and then I’ll be the only one by her bedside. Joke. Of course I don’t wish her any such ill will. One leg would be enough. A girlfriend with no legs at all might be too much for me. Or rather too little.
Pinky stands up and looks across at me. I realise I have the pen in my hand again, I’m clicking the plunger. In and out, in and out. Her boyfriend’s paying at the counter. Am I jealous that he gets her fat little fingers all to himself? Not really. She’s probably boring as fuck. Even the intelligent ones start to annoy me after a while.
I put the pen behind my ear and pay at the till. I could just not go. If it weren’t for Sally, I’d just stay here all day. But for my oldest friend, I am just about willing to spend my afternoon standing around in a tiny kitchen with a gaggle of airheads that make Pinky here look like an Oxford professor, smiling like I mean it and eating cake that tastes of despair, congratulating Sally on the impending arrival of her bundle of joy. As if she needs my congratulations. I’ll just be standing around on the edges and make everyone nervous because I don’t belong there. None of that lot were really okay with the whole gay thing from the start, but at least a couple, even a lesbian one, still follows a certain logic, has limits that make sense. Now I’m just gushing out over the sides, washing over the edges where I’m looking in from a distance, eating pinkified doom sponge, saying gosh what a lovely pram.
In the Turkish restaurant opposite, a family is celebrating the birthday of a grandma who looks older than Gobekli Tepe. She’s sitting at the end of the table nodding, the party hat on her head hanging so far forward that she’ll have a face full of kebab meat before you know it. An animal carcass lazes in the middle of the table, the family is tucking in, the grandkids running around screeching. Grandma sleeps on. Maybe she’s already dead.
Sally’s front door opens before I ring the bell. ‘There you are,’ she says, bringing me into a hug without genuine affection. She already smells like sour milk. The others are in the kitchen drinking alcohol-free rosé and admiring the bright pink hot air balloon cake, lovingly crafted by Sally’s mother-in-law. Pink bunting hangs from the ceiling, a huge Minnie Mouse helium balloon hovers over the buffet table where the sandwiches are still covered in cling film. I could just stick my finger under the clingfilm and fish out a little triangle as if that was a completely normal thing to do. Sally probably only covered them up to give me a chance to prove my shamelessness.
I expected she’d invite Andrea instead of me. This would be more her thing, she’d have been the one to do the whole baby thing, if that had ever been on the cards. No one would have trusted my uterus not to fuck it up. Maybe she was invited first and had to decline. A few weeks ago I saw that she was travelling. Somewhere with trees and waterfalls and a fat ginger bitch with glasses. Scandinavia maybe. Or Scotland. She was always banging on about Scotland. Something about writing a book and enjoying the solitude of the woods. She’d been trying to write a book for years, acted like I was the one preventing her from picking up her pen and letting the words flow from her soul. I wouldn’t have minded her writing. Nor wandering around in the drizzle or getting lost on windswept moors, if it had made her happy. But apparently, I was the problem. If she finds happiness now in some dank and misty glen with Brigid the Bovine, then good luck to her.
There’s giggling in the living room. What’s so funny? I’ve never laughed myself half to death around this lot. Wanted to kill myself, sure, but I’d have had to find some other way to go about it. Now they’re playing a game involving drinking milk as fast as you can from a baby bottle. I want to throw up. Sally’s huge, swollen breasts wobble around as she cackles. The image of all these friends and relations drinking milk directly from Sally’s nipples swims into my head and I have to grip the doorframe to avoid vomming right there and then. I excuse myself and sneak upstairs.
In the bathroom, everything is ready for the baby. White changing table, nappies in the cupboard and huge sanitary pads that remind me of those air mattress thingies you see in the pool at kid-friendly holiday resorts in Majorca. Does Matt realise what he’s got coming? Probably not. If so, he’d never have consented to this whole baby project. A broken vag wouldn’t do it for me, neither my own, nor my girlfriend’s. Another reason babies aren’t for me. I honestly can’t say which would be worse. At least you don’t have to look at your own if everything down there looks like an abattoir. Periods are bad enough. My first one was genuinely traumatic, even though I knew what was going on. Nana wasn’t even ten when she got her first period. Her mother assumed she’d have a few more years of blissful ignorance ahead of her, but she was wrong. Poor little nine-year-old Nana found the blood in her underwear and thought she was dying. She didn’t. Well, not right away. Eighty-one years later. And not from menstruating. Blood in her underwear, however, but from another source. Still. She was apparently some sort of oracle when it came to her own death.
Does everyone think about blood and death at a baby shower? Seems logical to me, but then I know I’m far from normal. I’ll just sit on the toilet seat and hide until the games are done. I take Andrea’s pen from behind my ear and draw giant tits on some toilet paper. There’s a knock at the door. Sally’s asking how I am. ‘All good,’ I say. Flush away the toilet paper full of tits and the tears that started leaking from my eyes right around the time I started thinking about the bloody pants of my simultaneously nine and ninety year old Nana.
‘We’re about to cut the cake,’ says Sally when I open the door and smile like an idiot so she won’t notice I’ve been crying.
‘Great.’ I look at my face in the mirror and stick the pen back behind my ear.
‘You’re still not over her, are you?’
‘Who?’ I just carry on looking in the mirror.
‘Who do you think?’
I run my fingers through my hair. Now I look like Peter Pan.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You know she’s met someone? She’s called Paula. Really nice.’ Sally leans on the bannister.
‘Not so nice you wanted to invite her?’
‘They couldn’t make it. On holiday.’
‘Shame.’
‘It is. Would have been a good chance for you to finally put it behind you.’ Sally smiles that horrible thin little smile she does when she really wants to dig in the knife.
‘I’m seeing someone too.’
‘Yeah? You never said.’
‘It’s early days.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Hillary.’
‘Let’s see a photo?’
‘Sure.’ I look through my photos for the screenshot I made of Hillary’s Instagram profile. In the picture, Hillary’s wearing leggings three sizes too small, a MAGA baseball cap, and t-shirt that clings to her bulging, sweaty torso. She’s crouching down to kiss an alligator. What did Toni see in her?
‘Pretty.’ Now it’s Sally’s turn to lie.
‘Yeah, like I said, still early days. We’ll see.’
‘Andrea will be happy for you.’
She does that smile again and heads down the stairs where her mother-in-law is preparing to cut the cake. Her mum plates up the slices and passes them around. I grab Minnie Mouse’s string and jab Andrea’s pen right into the middle of her. There’s a loud bang and a collective jump. Sally’s hand flies to her belly, dropping her cake on the floor. I make my exit while everyone’s fussing around with kitchen roll.
Outside, the stoner two doors down is sitting topless in his front garden. I hand him my cake, and the pen. He takes a bite, then uses the pen to dig some fluff out of his belly button. I keep walking, past the pawnbrokers, past the cafe, and past the flat where Andrea and I used to live.