He’s going to tell me how life is an escalator. I have to head him off, quick.
“Dad. Listen. Please.” Somehow I muster my calmest tones. “You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t want to get back together with Josh.” I try to sound as if this is a ridiculous idea. “That’s not why I texted him. I just wanted closure . I mean, he broke things off with no warning, no talking, no discussion. I never got any answers. It’s like… unfinished business. It’s like reading an Agatha Christie and never knowing whodunnit!”
There. Now they’ll understand.
“Well,” says Dad at length, “I can understand your frustrations-”
“That’s all I ever wanted,” I say as convincingly as I can. “To understand what Josh was thinking. To talk things over. To communicate like two civilized human beings.”
And to get back together with him , my mind adds, like a silent, truthful arrow. Because I know Josh still loves me, even if no one else thinks so .
But there’s no point saying that to my parents. They’d never get it. How could they? They have no concept of how amazing Josh and I were as a couple, how we fit together perfectly. They don’t understand how he obviously made a panicked, rushed, boy-type decision, based on some nonexistent reason probably, and how if I could just talk to him, I’m sure I could straighten everything out and we’d be together again.
Sometimes I feel streets ahead of my parents, just like Einstein must have done when his friends kept saying, “The universe is straight, Albert, take it from us,” and inside he was secretly thinking, “I know it’s curved. I’ll show you one day.”
Mum and Dad are surreptitiously mouthing at each other again. I should put them out of their misery.
“Anyway, you mustn’t worry about me,” I say hastily. “Because I have moved on. I mean, OK, maybe I haven’t moved on totally” I amend as I see their dubious expressions, “but I’ve accepted that Josh doesn’t want to talk. I’ve realized that it just wasn’t meant to be. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and… I’m in a good place. Really.”
My smile is pasted on my face. I feel like I’m chanting the mantra of some wacky cult. I should be wearing robes and banging a tambourine.
Hare hare… I’ve moved on… hare hare… I’m in a good place… .
Dad and Mum exchange looks. I have no idea whether they believe me, but at least I’ve given us all a way out of this sticky conversation.
“That’s the spirit!” Dad says, looking relieved. “Well done, Lara, I knew you’d get there. And you’ve got the business with Natalie to focus on, which is obviously going tremendously well…”
My smile becomes even more cultlike.
“Absolutely!”
Hare hare… my business is going well… hare hare… it’s not a disaster at all…
“I’m so glad you’ve come through this.” Mum comes over and kisses the top of my head. “Now, we’d better get going. Find yourself some black shoes, chop chop!”
With a resentful sigh I get to my feet and drag myself into my bedroom. It’s a beautiful sunshiny day. And I get to spend it at a hideous family occasion involving a dead 105-year-old person. Sometimes life really sucks.
As we pull up in the drab little car park of the Potters Bar Funeral Center, I notice a small crowd of people outside a side door. Then I see the glint of a TV camera and a fluffy microphone bobbing above people’s heads.
“What’s going on?” I peer out the car window. “Something to do with Uncle Bill?”
“Probably.” Dad nods.
“I think someone’s doing a documentary about him,” Mum puts in. “Trudy mentioned it. For his book.”
This is what happens when one of your relations is a celebrity. You get used to TV cameras being around. And people saying, when you introduce yourself, “Lington? Any relation to Lingtons Coffee, ha ha?” and them being gobsmacked when you say, “Yes.”
My uncle Bill is the Bill Lington, who started Lingtons Coffee from nothing at the age of twenty-six and built it up into a worldwide empire of coffee shops. His face is printed on every single coffee cup, which makes him more famous than the Beatles or something. You’d recognize him if you saw him. And right now he’s even more high profile than usual because his autobiography, Two Little Coins , came out last month and is a bestseller. Apparently Pierce Brosnan might play him in the movie.
Of course, I’ve read it from cover to cover. It’s all about how he was down to his last twenty pence and bought a coffee and it tasted so terrible it gave him the idea to run coffee shops. So he opened one and started a chain, and now he pretty much owns the world. His nickname is “The Alchemist,” and according to some article last year, the entire business world would like to know the secrets of his success.