Growing Up Twice Read Online Free PDF Page A

hour throughout the night, which many of my guests over the years have found unbearable, but I like the comforting rumble that can sometimes make the night seem more friendly. And it used to really piss Owen off, so that was a plus.
    I have lived there for seven years, on my own for most of it, only able to afford it because it is squalid, damp, mostly broken and prone to little outbursts of small-unidentified-black-beetle activity. I like it because it is only fifteen minutes’ walk from Portobello Road and I have two bedrooms, a big broken kitchen and a living-room with a ramshackle collection of damaged goods from Ikea.
    The landlord has never bothered to put the rent up in all these years and I have never asked him to fumigate the house, fix the leaky roof or mend the cooker so that more than one ring on the electric hob works. I am a domestic slut and so is Rosie. Our life together is a cheerful amble through the boundaries of reasonable hygiene until we reach a kind of critical mass and rush around picking things up, washing them and hoovering up the beetles (which, I’m sure, when they reach the rarely emptied-out fluffy crumb-filled haven of the hoover bag, yell, ‘Yippee – beetle heaven!’) until we are ready to begin again. The only exceptions to this rule are clothes, the bathroom, cosmetics and us. These are the only items and areas we pay attention to every single day.
    As much as I love it, I have had my toughest times here too, the worst times with Owen as well as the best. I had been thinking about upping sticks and getting a house share in the
Time Out
tradition of making new friends, but I felt so low I didn’t think I was brave enough to go through the endless rounds of flatmate interviews. Trying to look trendy enough to be fun but not annoying, and clean enough to be liveable with but not an obsessive compulsive. Pretty enough to hang out in bars with, but not so pretty that your boyfriend would want to sleep with me, that kind of thing.
    When Rosie came to live with me she saved me from having to make that kind of lifestyle-changing decision and frankly I was relieved.
    She was in a bad way back then. Chris had just upped and told her he didn’t love her and he didn’t think he ever really had. He had told her it was a huge mistake, that he had asked her to marry him just to get him out of a fight they had been having and that he hadn’t really thought of the consequences. That he had met someone not long after they got back from honeymoon who he thought might be ‘the one’.
    Looking back, I think we saved each other. The very night that she turned up on my doorstep with two suitcases, no money to pay her cab and her face streaked with mascara-tinted tears was the night that Owen had left a Post-it note for me to find when I went round for dinner that evening. It was stuck to his front door.
    ‘Gone out. Can’t face tears. It’s over,’ it had read, fluttering cheerily in the breeze. I stood there for a long moment in the rain before turning and walking away, back to the bus-stop and home. I suppose that, during the three years of on-and-off passion, infidelity and violent drunken eruptions, I had got used to his mood swings, the sudden sea changes in his regard for me. Earlier that afternoon we’d been talking on the phone about the poached salmon
en croute
he was preparing and the nice bottle of wine he had chilling in the fridge. If I’m honest, as I trudged back to the tube station, all I really felt was a kind of weary resignation, a ‘here we go again’.
    At that point I fully expected two or three weeks apart, news of another girl picked up in the park or a museum, shortly followed by long earnest conversations, declarations of our imperfect but irresistible love and before you knew it we’d be back to the beginning of our cycle. Perfect blissful passion.
    In retrospect it’s hard for me to explain how life was with Owen. When I met him I was out in full spin, living the city