Preloved

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.Join our mailing list to get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster.CLICK HERE TO SIGN UPAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. For Matt, my very favourite old thing If only one could clear out one’s mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one’s wardrobe.BARBARA PYM,Some Tame Gazelle Gift It sits outside the shop, self-conscious in its splendour.An odd sight among the usual split bin bags and supermarket carriers, spilling old sweatshirts and balled-up T-shirts like soft guts across the pavement. A gold holographic gift bag – pristine, not a re-use – with a foil rosette stuck to the side and carefully curled ribbons around the handle.The bag stands proudly upright despite the wind. Something heavy inside weighs it down, from within a crinkling nest of polka-dot tissue paper. There is a tag on the side – inscribed, so now it can’t be reused – with a message in black ink, slightly smudged.Suzy Q, saw this and thought of you. Hope you like it. Lots of love. 1It was the dinner that did it.Gwen sat, chewing. She rolled the braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta around her mouth, and as she did so the thought popped into her head. It arrived in two beats, ba-dum, like coins dropping into a slot machine.This might be one of the nicest meals I’ve ever eaten, it went, and there is nobody here to tell.It wasn’t self-pitying, exactly, the thought. She didn’t bat it away, the way she might have done – had done – so many times in recent years. She merely took the thought out as if from some mental filing cabinet, held it up and considered it as fact.It was fact. There was nobody else here to share it with, except the waiter. The nice waiter, who had discreetly turned the sleeve of her coat the right way out again and picked up her hat in one clean, deft motion when she had dropped it on the floor with an apologetic ‘oof’. Did the waiter count? Not really.She would tell him it was nice, but it wouldn’t be news to him. The waiter probably ate braised ox cheek with buttery Parmesan polenta for his dinner three nights a week, whenever he wasn’t eating leftover razor clams or picking at the blackened ends of rolled loin of pork. No, the waiter wouldn’t care that this meal set a kind of high watermark in the oral history of Gwen’s stomach. He would smile, because she would smile. He would smile, because she would tip.She hadn’t even had dessert yet. What would happen when dessert came? Sticky toffee pudding with bourbon ice cream and – because Gwen liked to believe she had given up living within other people’s limitations, at least when it came to sweet condiments – a jug of custard. Both, not either/or.Perhaps dessert would be disappointing, she thought. She half hoped it would be, for by now she was swept up in the idea of this dinner, this surprisingly good dinner in a near-empty suburban gastropub, as both pivotal and fateful. Perhaps the pudding would be dry and claggy with not enough sauce, and she’d snap out of it and remember all the reasons she was alone here with nobody to tell. Good reasons! Multiple reasons! Reasons she had recited once, over and over, in gulping half-sentences on the top of the 43 bus.Or would she take one bite of the best sticky toffee pudding she’d ever had in her life, and cry in front of the smiling waiter?The pudding came. It was dark, sticky and dense with dates, swimming in a generous lake of treacle. It wasn’t the best she’d ever eaten, but undeniably top five.Gwen didn’t cry. Instead, she made a list. 1. Find something to doThis was too vague, she knew even as she was halfway through writing the sentence. The TED talk she’d watched several months ago on Better Goal-Setting To Harness Your Untapped Productivity Superpower had made it clear: be specific. Or at least she thought that was the gist.But if Gwen had specifics then she wouldn’t be writing the list, or surreptitiously licking a dribble of toffee off the paper with a smeary finger. Vagaries were the best she could manage right now. The weak, fridge-magnet platitudes of the suddenly unemployed.Unemployed. She repeated the word a few times under her breath, plodding and ominous. Three dumpy syllables that felt too heavy for someone who hadn’t even left yet. Not technically. Not for another four days.Officially, it was company cutbacks. The economic climate, necessary restructuring and streamlining in the face of a fast-evolving market, yada yada, blah blah.Unofficially, it felt like no small coincidence that Gwen had lost her job a week after pointing out, in a client meeting, that the agency was overcharging a small not-for-profit with inflated rate cards and several billable services they weren’t providing at all. Gwen didn’t usually cause scenes. A tense silence had fallen over the sandwich platter.Her redundancy package – her boss had insisted on calling it a ‘package’, as though the money might come wrapped up with a complimentary tote bag and a selection of snacks – was generous, enough to live on for a few months at least. It was a token of appreciation for her loyalty to the company, he’d said, though this felt spiked with irony. Besides, Gwen knew the amount was stipulated by contract on the basis of how many years she’d been either too lazy or too underwhelming to get hired elsewhere. HR were probably kicking themselves for making her too comfortable. She was kicking herself for not dumping them before they could dump her.Still, it turned out mediocrity had a price tag, and it was enough to cover her