Just Saying: An absolutely perfect and feel-good romantic comedy Read online

  ‘Eight fifteen.’ I had to crane my neck to see my watch, because my arm was trapped under his. ‘God, I’m hungover. We shouldn’t have opened that last bottle of wine. I don’t know if I’m up for Parkrun today. Seriously.’

  ‘Come on, Alice. Getting out of bed is the hardest part.’

  ‘You get up first. Go on. Bring me a coffee. Please?’

  ‘It’s your turn. I made it last week, remember? Even though I was the hungover one.’

  ‘I could make the coffee and we could have it in bed. Go on, let’s sack it off, just this once.’

  ‘Alice! You’ll feel miles better afterwards – you know you will. You always say…’

  ‘But it’s my birthday,’ I objected. ‘We could go to the farmers’ market instead. Get some breakfast.’

  ‘Well, since you put it that way…’

  I rolled over and turned my face up to his, feeling his hands start to caress my back, and I knew I was safe. There weren’t many ways of persuading Joe that staying in bed was a better idea than getting up and running five kilometres, but this was one of them.

  Two blissful hours later, we burst out into the morning. The air was fresh and clean, and I could tell that it was going to be a glorious, roasting-hot day.

  ‘God, I’m starving,’ Joe said. ‘I hope the burger van will be at the market today. They do those killer breakfast butties, remember?’

  ‘Or the place that does the lamb wraps.’ My mouth watered at the thought. ‘Or we could have hot dogs with fried onions.’

  ‘God, stop. You’re torturing me. I want all that stuff.’

  ‘And cake.’

  ‘Carrot cake, or salted caramel?’

  ‘I vote for both.’

  We turned onto a street lined with Victorian houses, flanked by tall chestnut trees, and we walked on, Joe’s hand warm and strong in mine. Soon we were joined by a flow of people – young families with their babies in buggies, older couples carrying wicker baskets, pairs of twenty-somethings like us heading out for brunch in the sunshine.

  Although it had only just opened, the farmers’ market was already crowded. The organic vegetable stall had a queue snaking round it, people examining bunches of asparagus, peppers so shiny they looked like they’d been polished, bundles of dark leaves with rainbow-coloured stems and punnets of glistening strawberries.

  ‘What do we need?’ I asked Joe.

  ‘I thought we could get a chicken to roast tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe make a salad, and something for pudding. Apricot tart, maybe?’

  ‘Sounds great. I guess I’ll be on chopping duty, as per usual.’

  ‘So long as you don’t almost chop off a finger, like you did last time.’

  ‘It was your fault. You pinched my bum and distracted me.’

  ‘Your bum distracted me first.’

  I watched as Joe pored over the table of fresh chickens as intently as he read through a legal contract on his laptop, before selecting one that, as far as I could tell, was no different from its poor, dead brothers and sisters.

  ‘I reckon I’ll be working late most nights this week,’ he said. ‘So I’ll probably eat at the office. We could make some soup with the leftovers from this.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I agreed, although I knew that I’d be working late most nights too, and also ducking out from the office at seven to grab a tub of noodles or yet another cheese and pickle sandwich – or, if the pressure was really on and I couldn’t leave my desk, ordering a pizza on Uber Eats. And I knew that the leftover chicken would sit forlornly in the fridge until the following weekend, when one of us would guiltily throw it away.

  I followed Joe round the fresh produce stalls, growing steadily hungrier and casting longing glances towards the line of food carts on the other side of the market. But there was no point suggesting we eat first and finish our shopping later: my boyfriend was on a mission. He chose seedy wholemeal bread, a bag of dusty baby potatoes that he said were Jersey Royals – and, considering they cost about fifty pence per potato, they should have been – a paper bag of golden apricots, a tub of fresh cream and a load of tomatoes in an array of colours that, as far as I was concerned, tomatoes had no right being.

  My presence was pretty much superfluous – he’d given up trying to pass on his obsessive interest in food and cooking to me long ago. But I was content following him around, half-listening to the in-depth discussions he had with the stall-holders, by the end of which he practically knew the name of the goat whose milk had gone into the cheese (Bunty Farquahar-Smythe, possibly, given the price of the cheese) and the location of the tree on which the apricots had grown.

  ‘Right, all done,’ he said at last, hefting the bulging nylon shopping bag onto his shoulder. ‘Only the best for your birthday Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Speaking of lunch…’

  ‘Right. God, I’m starving. What shall we get?’

  As if pulled by magnets, we both turned and followed the crowd – and our noses – to the row of food carts. There was the familiar burger stall, where two bearded guys were flipping patties, toasting buns and frying eggs on a sizzling hot plate. There was the hot-dog woman, turning a tangle of fragrant, floppy onions with a giant pair of tongs. There was the roast-dinner-in-a-Yorkshire-wrap stall, the rich smell of simmering gravy making my mouth water.

  But the longest queue of all seemed to be for a new stall.

  ‘Korean street food,’ Joe read. ‘Shall we give that a go?’

  ‘Isn’t that, like, cabbage and stuff?’

  ‘Kimchi. Fermented cabbage. Like sauerkraut, only Asian.’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘I’m not sure you’re selling this to me.’

  ‘Come on, Alice! It’s good to try new things. And if you don’t like it, I’ll have yours and you can have a burger.’

  I edged closer and read the menu, handwritten in chalk on a blackboard fixed to the side of the trailer that formed the stall.

  ‘Peanut and noodle salad. Pork and kimchi stew. Bleurgh.’

  ‘Fried chicken bao, though. How good does that sound? There’ll be spicy sauce on it, too. Give it a go.’

  ‘Fried chicken with spicy sauce. Okay, now you’re talking.’

  In spite of Joe’s foodie adventurousness, he couldn’t come close to me when it came to hot sauce. If we went out for a curry, I’d offer him a taste of mine and watch, laughing, as he winced and broke out in a sweat, insisting that it was fine, really delicious, but that he’d stick with his mild chicken korma. On the rare occasions I cooked, it was usually chilli con carne, and he’d hover over my shoulder, watching anxiously as I added spices to the pan, trying not to comment or criticise until he snapped and said, ‘Are you sure that’s not…?’ But he’d always struggle through like it was some test of manhood, bravely having seconds and assuring me that it was the best thing he’d ever tasted, then quenching his burning mouth with a huge glass of cold milk.

  As we joined the end of the long queue, Joe took out his phone and started scrolling through messages. Even though it was the weekend, he never switched off. If he wasn’t running, he was shopping. If he wasn’t working, he’d be in the kitchen, preparing some kind of feast. And when he did take some downtime, it would be to sit on the sofa, Xbox controller in hand, competing furiously with a bunch of strangers online in whatever was the latest game that he was determined to master and win at.

  While he scrolled and typed, I watched the couple behind the food cart’s makeshift counter. The guy was taking orders, accepting cash and returning change, turning to call over his shoulder at the woman behind him. He was nice-looking, I thought – a dark, stocky bloke with a neatly trimmed beard and a gold ring in one ear. The woman had her back to him, swiftly assembling meals with a pair of chopsticks. But when she turned to say something to him, I was brought up short by how pretty she was.

  She was small and lithe, with a cascade of auburn curls held back from her face by a coiled phone-wire hair tie. Her arms were bare in her bright red vest top, and there w
as a tattoo of a mermaid snaking up one bicep. Her skin was as pale as cream, and as smooth. She moved from one side of the tiny trailer to the other – from the gas burner, to the array of condiments, to the guy at the counter – as if it was a stage and she was a dancer.

  When she smiled, it was like a spark of electricity.

  ‘What can I get you?’ the guy asked, and I realised I’d been so busy gawping at his colleague that I’d barely noticed us reaching the front of the queue.

  ‘Oh, sorry – one fried chicken bao and one kimchi and cheese arancini please,’ I said. ‘Joe?’

  Joe broke off from his laser focus on his phone. ‘Sorry, sorry. One spicy beef bao and one portion of fried dumplings please, mate.’

  When he spoke, the girl froze, like the music driving her rhythm had stopped.

  Then she turned around, very slowly, and looked at us.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Joe.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Joe said. ‘Zoë.’

  I felt suddenly cold, like the sun had passed behind a cloud – and suddenly, definitively, no longer hungry.

  I tried to ask Joe about Zoë after that. I mean, obviously I did. She wasn’t just an acquaintance he’d bumped into, I was sure. That moment when she’d heard his voice, over the sizzle of her pans and the hubbub of the market, and frozen, right there. The way they’d looked at each other, even when, after those first two identical, breathless exclamations, they’d returned to a more normal ‘How random is this?’-type conversation, which had been brief because the queue was building up behind us.

  There’d been something there. Something important.

  We found a wooden table in the shade to perch at and eat. I took a bite of my bao, which was perfection – crisp-coated, tender chicken in a pillowy steamed bun, piled with some sort of pickly stuff that I assumed was kimchi and slathered with sauce that was pretty damn lethal, even by my standards.

  And then I felt my throat close up a bit, and I asked, ‘So where do you know her from?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Come off it, Joe! You know who. That girl at the food cart.’

  ‘Oh, right. Her. Just from uni. We were mates and then we kind of lost touch once we graduated. You know how it is.’

  I kind of did… But I was active on social media – I followed loads of my old friends who I didn’t speak to any more on Instagram, as well as those I was close to. I belonged to several dozen different WhatsApp groups where nothing would be said for ages, until there was a flurry of activity when a night out was planned or someone split up with her boyfriend or whatever. Joe wasn’t. He’d deleted his Facebook and Insta accounts a couple of years back, when everyone was panicking about data security, and not started up new ones. He posted on Twitter and LinkedIn solely in his professional capacity, and he texted or rang his mates only when they were planning to meet up.

  So, when Zoë had said, ‘I’ll find you online,’ I reckoned she had her work cut out for her.

  ‘Were you close, though?’ I persisted, taking another bite of my lunch and swallowing it with difficulty.

  ‘Sure.’ Joe finished his bao and opened the cardboard carton of dumplings. ‘Want one?’

  I shook my head, but passed him my rice and cheese ball. There was no way I’d make any headway with that.

  ‘What happened, though? I mean, she seems like a really nice person, and—’

  ‘Hey, Alice.’ Joe turned to me, his mouth full of dumpling, then swallowed. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’

  ‘God, no. I mean, why would I be? It’s not like I care about you, or anything.’

  He poked my shoulder with a wooden chopstick, leaving a smear of sauce on my skin. ‘She’s just someone, right? Someone from way back. We’re not close any more. We’re not going to get close again. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed reluctantly. But for the rest of the weekend, I kept remembering Zoë’s sparkling smile, and hearing that unfamiliar note in Joe’s voice when he said her name.

  Three

  I’ve never been as terrified as I was on my first day at Billings Pitt Furzedown. Actually, scratch that – the day I came for my interview was even more terrifying. And the one after that was pretty bad, too. But it’s that first day that sticks in my mind. I turned up at the twenty-storey glass building in the City fifteen minutes early, wearing the same cheap suit I’d worn to both interviews, my legs so wobbly with nerves that I struggled to walk in my high heels. I waited in the downstairs reception area, watching as several other trainees turned up and waited too. Some of them were in cheap suits like mine; others clearly came from different backgrounds and had the clothes to prove it, too.

  There was a bloke wearing a tie from Balliol College, Oxford. One girl had a swishy blow-dry like Kate Middleton’s, and another was even carrying a Hermès handbag. I wondered if it had been a graduation gift from her parents, or if she’d just randomly purchased it on a shopping trip, the way I’d pick up a pack of tights in Primark (and, knowing me, ladder them the first time I put them on).

  But I didn’t have long to speculate and I didn’t want my new colleagues to notice my sidelong glances at them as I wondered whether they too felt like they were about to puke up their cornflakes onto the marble floor. It seemed like those twenty minutes passed in a flash, and soon we were all collected by a minion from HR and whooshed up to the sixteenth floor in the lift to begin our first day as trainee solicitors. We were given access cards and a brief tour of the building, issued with passwords for the server and intranet and shown where to find the loos and make coffee, although no one was brave enough to ask how the space-age coffee machine actually worked.

  And, at last, I was shown to the desk that would be mine for the next six months.

  By lunchtime, I felt like my brain was literally about to freeze and fall over, like my ancient iPhone when I overloaded it with music and had to delete Tinder to free up space. I was also starving, and too shy to ask any of the other trainees if they were planning to head to the canteen – although Hermès girl and Balliol boy had probably brought their own lobster and quails’ eggs. So I was filled with relief when Heather, my best mate from law school and also my flatmate, texted me and suggested we meet for a sandwich.

  It was her first day as a trainee too, at Borehams, an even more prestigious law firm in a forty-storey glass tower nearby. We bought sandwiches at Pret a Manger – cheese and pickle for me, tuna and cucumber for her – and went and sat in a garden square and ate, not saying much, but taking comfort from the fact that we were both feeling as new, small and bewildered as each other.

  And, in the months since then, lunch had become a ritual. On as many Tuesdays as we could (often one of us was in a meeting, or in court, or snowed under with work), we’d escape our separate offices and find each other, at about five past one, in the queue at the sandwich shop. I worked my way through the menu over the months, trying the turkey and cranberry with sage stuffing at Christmas, opting for a salad if I was trying to be healthy, and being regularly reminded throughout the winter that I really didn’t like carrot and coriander soup.

  But Heather stayed loyal to her tuna and cucumber and, when we met on this Tuesday, almost two years after that first time, with both of us on the brink of qualifying, that was exactly what she chose.

  ‘They’ll take it off the menu one day,’ I said. ‘Then what will you do?’

  ‘Oh my God, don’t! Dark days.’ She carefully picked up a couple of sandwiches by the corners of their packs, comparing their weight to identify the one with the most filling, while I deliberated between a chicken and avocado baguette and a small box of sushi. ‘Tuna and cucumber is the one stable point in my life. They can’t take that away from me.’

  We paid for our food and wandered out into the sunshine, making our way, as we always did when it was warm enough to eat outside, to our favourite wooden bench under the shade of a chestnut tree in the square. Heather walked slightly ahead of me, her glossy dark ponytail swishing over the shoul
ders of her tailored grey dress. As always, she was striding comfortably in her ballet flats while I teetered uncomfortably, my pointy high-heeled shoes pinching my toes, wishing I’d changed into my trainers before I left the office.

  ‘Have you moved into your new place?’ I asked, once we’d sat down and torn open the packaging of our food. The sushi had won, but I was already thinking longingly of the chicken and avo.

  ‘Last weekend.’ Heather took a squelchy bite of her sandwich. ‘It’s okay. Flatmates seem nice so far, although obviously not as nice as you. And it’s pretty convenient, just fifteen minutes on the Tube.’

  ‘That’s, what, four house moves in two years? You’re hardcore.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help it if the landlord wanted the place back. And it’s good to have changes in life. I don’t want to get stuck in a rut. You and Joe are lucky – you found each other, found your flat and now you’re all sorted.’

  She sighed and scrunched up her napkin. I supposed that, from her point of view, my life must have looked like the embodiment of stability. In all the years we’d been friends, it wasn’t just places to live that Heather had been through. There were things in her fridge that had outlasted more than one boyfriend.

  ‘And what about – what’s his name – Kieren?’

  ‘Ah, Kieren.’ She sighed again. ‘It’s been six weeks now, and I don’t know if I can do it any more. I mean, he’s hot enough to fry an egg on and I swear they were looking at his wang when they designed the aubergine emoji. But all the same…’

  I laughed. ‘He’s not The One?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that, necessarily. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with dating Mr Right for Now. But the thing is, he’s seriously boring.’

  ‘Boring how?’

  ‘You know I said he’s hot? He works out in the gym for like two hours every day. He’s ripped as fuck. But he talks about his workouts all. The. Time. I could legit tell you chapter and verse about how much he bench-presses, what his body fat percentage is, how many grams of protein he eats at each meal.’