The second was Frazzle, my fluffy ginger cat, who liked to sleep on my pillow so he could keep an eye on the birds in the tree outside.
It was Frazzle who woke me, one Monday morning in late March. There were blackbirds building a nest outside, and every cheep from the birds was met by an answering chirrup of longing from my cat.
‘What are you on about, you big daftie?’ I mumbled, half asleep, trying to turn over so I could maybe slip back into sleep for a precious half-hour.
But turning over was impossible, because Frazzle was lying on my hair.
‘Ouch!’ Fully awake now, I pushed the cat gently aside and sat up. Immediately, the birds forgotten, he jumped to the floor and stared at me, meowing plaintively for his breakfast.
‘Okay, okay. Give me a second to at least wake up. Jeez, it’s like having a furry dictator ruling my life.’
I slid my feet into my slippers and stood up. It was a gorgeous day – already, although it wasn’t yet seven, the sunlight streaming through the window felt warm on my bare skin. The winter, which had felt like it would never end, seemed to be loosening its grip at last, being pushed reluctantly away by the promise of spring.
And something else was different too. Something inside me.
A couple of years back, I’d gone through a phase of doing yoga classes. I think I imagined that it would somehow transform me into this serene, spiritual person who cherished the gifts of the universe and spread good energy around the place and also, crucially, could touch her toes without gasping and grunting like my grandad after he’d been digging his allotment. I didn’t stick with it for very long – the incense the teacher burned before classes made me sneeze uncontrollably and I was always worried I’d fart when I was doing a shoulder stand – but one thing had made an impression on me. At the beginning of every class, the teacher would ask us to do a kind of audit of our bodies: assessing ourselves from our feet up to our ankles, knees, hips and so on, identifying where we were tense or sore, learning to recognise what was going on in every bit of ourselves.
I did that now, trying to figure out what it was about me, this morning, that felt different from the morning before.
The bruises I had on my shins from my workout in the gym two days ago were still there. So was the scab on my knee where I’d cut myself shaving, and the blue plaster on my thumb where I’d missed the target while chopping onions. A tingling feeling on my top lip told me the cold sore that had been threatening to erupt was still hanging around, waiting for its moment to pounce and leave me with a gross blemish that would last for days.
All normal, all just the same as yesterday.
But what was missing was deeper inside me than any of those things. The sense of loss – grief, almost – that had haunted me since I’d split up with Joe had faded. Just like that. It was like when you have a horrible hangover and eat a huge fried breakfast, drink loads of tea and take two paracetamol, then go back to bed and wake up feeling amazing. Or when you’ve had a miserable cold – the kind that makes your eyes look red and piggy and your nose stream for days – and you wake up one morning and realise you’re better.
Not completely better though. If it was a hangover I was recovering from, I’d be at the ‘Okay, I’m never drinking again but at least I’m not dead’ stage. If it was a cold, the skin round my nose would still be red and raw and I’d have an annoying, lingering cough. But I felt different from how I had when I’d woken up the day before, and the day before that, and… you get the idea.
All of me was still the same, except I didn’t have a broken heart any more.
I sprang to my feet and almost went flying as Frazzle wound himself around my ankles. While I cleaned my teeth and washed my face, he stayed constantly half a step in front of me, trying his very best to trip me up.
‘If I fall and break my neck, then who’s going to give you breakfast?’ I scolded him. ‘You haven’t thought this through, have you?’
Frazzle looked at me, his amber eyes quite clearly saying that he didn’t give a shit what I thought.
Once he was fed and I was dressed, I sat back down on my bed, trying to make sense of this new feeling of lightness, freedom, optimism. What was going on? What had happened to me? Was it the advent of spring, which was meant to bring new hope but had never done anything of the kind for me before? Had my heart finally caught up with what my head had been telling me for months: that Joe and Alice were right for each other in a way that Joe and I had never truly been? And, more importantly, without my unrequited love for Joe, what was I going to think about?
Give your head a wobble, Zoë, I told myself. You can’t go around being broken-hearted because your heart isn’t broken any more. That would be off-the-scale ridiculous.
On the bedside table, my phone buzzed furiously with an incoming notification. I glanced at it, the wild hope I would have felt in the past that it might, somehow, impossibly, be a message from Joe strangely absent. It wasn’t, of course. It never had been and now I found myself able to accept quite calmly that it never would be. It was just the astrology app I’d installed ages ago, which sent me a daily message. Some of them were inspirational, some all but meaningless, and some of them downright brutal.
If the app were a friend, I sometimes thought, I’d have unfriended it long ago. Not that I exactly had loads of friends to choose from, since I’d spent most of my twenties travelling – great for life experience, not so good for forging enduring bonds with other people.
You know that emptiness you feel inside? You going to fill it with something, or let it suck you in?
‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ I told my phone, thinking that, right in that moment, the emptiness I felt was the same kind that had made Frazzle clamour for his breakfast. But then I couldn’t help thinking, Hold on, maybe it has a point. Maybe the Joe-shaped hole in my heart could be filled by someone else.
Maybe it was time for me to stop hankering after someone I couldn’t have and find someone I could.
When I got to work, Robbie was already there. I couldn’t even use an arduous journey as an excuse, because my daily commute consisted of stepping out of my tiny flat, locking the door behind me, walking down a flight of slightly rickety wooden stairs, pushing open a door, and voila, there I was in the Ginger Cat, the pub where I worked as a chef. But Robbie had beat me to it, as he usually did, and was already sliding two loaf tins into the oven.
It was his enthusiasm that had led me to hire him, two months before – that, and the fact that he was cheap, cheerful and touchingly grateful to be offered his first proper job in a professional kitchen. Not that the tiny cubbyhole where the two of us worked practically elbow to elbow was the most professional of workplaces. But I loved it, and so did Robbie, who worked all the hours I’d let him, with boundless energy and the ability to function on about two hours’ sleep a night.
‘Morning.’ I flicked the switch on the coffee machine and heard it roar encouragingly to life. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Date and banana bread. It’s gluten free, dairy free and refined-sugar free. The punters are going to love it. And so am I – was out until four and I’m hanging so badly, Zoë. Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Sure. Double espresso with three sugars?’