Love Is a Thief (7 page)

‘Kat-kins, we have asked Peter here because we want his
help with
Fat Camp
, which is something you care about, is it not? Peter very kindly agreed to help. Which is a nice starting point for this, and a preferable one to Peter’s penile function, which, while I admit I am interested, probably not in this current context. So, Kat-kins, do you want Peter’s help or not?’

Peter and I stared at each other.

‘Kate, would you like my help or not?’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first of the
Fat Camp
auditionees nervously waiting in our reception.

‘Yes … please.’

‘Then I’ll help.’

‘Well, isn’t that nice? Kat-kins asked Peter
nicely;
Peter said yes. It’s like an adult game of
Simon Says
but with obesity problems and two adults with mild to severe anger issues.’

I turned away from both of them and pretended to type something on my phone. If we were playing an adult game of
Simon Says
then a small part of my brain I had absolutely no control over had gone back to thinking about Peter Parker’s penis, and I hated that part.

‘I have to go,’ Peter said, heading for the door, ‘but I have a good idea of what you need. Everything will be here by tomorrow.’ He marched off through Reception, the entire office watching with inappropriate levels of lust, everyone except Mark from Marketing who shot an imaginary web at him as he passed the photocopier.

The very next day two men from FedEx arrived at the office. They had hundreds of parcels from Peter Parker. He’d sent fitness packs for our
Fat Campers
, motivational
books, motivational CDs, handwritten lists of personal trainers, therapists, Women Only gyms, central London park runs,
and
suggested a fitness timetable. He sent over pedometers, booked sessions at running centres for the women to be fitted with proper running shoes
and
booked a session at
Rigby & Peller
for the women to be fitted with proper sports bras. From that moment on until the end of universal time Federico Cagassi was in actual love with Peter Parker—the boy who never smiles.

the story of assumption

A
boy met a girl and a girl met a boy, they looked into each other’s eyes and they fell in love.

But the girl was from a different land, across a great sea, a land where people loved teapots, umbrellas and rain.

The heart of the boy and the heart of the girl ached when they were apart.

So the girl packed her bags and crossed the great sea, travelling high up into the mountains where the boy lived with many frogs and a selection of friendly snails.

She knocked on his door. He asked her inside. They looked into each other’s eyes and they knew they were in love.

Over time the girl became lonely. All her friends and family—the teapots and umbrellas—were all far away. The boy grew sad. He blamed himself for taking the girl away from her beloved afternoon tea paraphernalia. The feelings of blame became feelings of guilt. The boy withdrew from the girl, assuming she regretted her choice.

The girl didn’t understand why he no longer held her gaze, assuming he’d stopped loving her.

Their seeds of assumption grew like ivy; every day they assumed a little more based on the assumptions of the previous day.

One day the girl found herself packing to leave, packing to return to the land of rain and crumpets. Her eyes filled with tears, not love, her heart in pieces on the floor of lost dreams. She did not know what was left in the boy’s eyes because he no longer came home, too fearful was he of what he would see if he looked at her.

The boy lives in the mountains. The girl lives in the rain.

He assumes she’s happy now. She assumes the same.

money & the dream crusher—leah—31 years old

OK
, so I am probably not the best person to ask because I hate my ex-husband, he is the devil incarnate, but if you want to know what I gave up for love I would say Every Single Part of My Very Self. For example, my ex’s bog-standard response if I wanted to pursue any of my own personal interests, ambitions or dreams was, and I quote
,

‘How dare you spend that money on yourself? You are so selfish. We are supposed to be a family.’

He could never see that my happiness and contentment might benefit us as a couple; that an extra qualification might further my career, increasing the amount of money I could earn for us as a family; or that me feeling more complete as a person would have a knock-on positive effect on our marriage. In fact sometimes I think my possible self-development threatened him. At the mere suggestion of me spending money, on anything, he would say
,

‘Well, if you’ve got enough money to do that we could spend it on—’

And then there would always be a ‘something’ for the
house, the car, his hobbies. Once I gave up a place on a Reiki course so he could buy a pet snake and a games console, both apparently for our son, neither of which our son has ever played with; the Reiki course would have qualified me to teach, providing a valuable second income for our family
.

Even if we were trying to arrange something nice, like booking a family holiday, most of the things I wanted to do didn’t interest him. No matter how passionate I was about a place or country he would say no. And when you are married at some point you get tired of battling, tired of fighting, tired of trying to maintain certain boundaries. So you give in, you agree, you give up. I was married from 22 years old to 30. This is the first time in my adult life I can really identify my own wants and needs and then, with a lot of hard work and planning, start to pursue the things, the longings sitting deep in my soul that are not connected to anyone but me. I’ve never been so excited about my future
.

coffee shop | spitalfields market | london

Good God! I had awakened the beast. It wasn’t just that Leah had a lot to say. It was that she wanted to say it all at once, and she wanted to say it all to me. Mostly because I am one of her best friends, but also because I had put a key in a previously unused lock and the door had exploded wide open. If we were in an American action film Nicholas Cage would have been standing by that door of love-lost dreams putting Semtex on the lock, frame and anything else in the surrounding door area. Leah was finally free.

‘So I’ve been working through my list of love-stolen
dreams,’ Leah said, extracting an enormous phonebook-sized document out of her handbag. ‘And I think that I’m making good progress. I’ve completed the Reiki course, as you know, and, Henry, Henry, put that down!’ Henry, Leah’s son, had her iPhone in his mouth. ‘And I absolutely loved it, box ticked.’ She ticked an imaginary box in the air. So did Henry. ‘And I’ve got some other love-stolen dreams organised. There’s a lot to get through,’ she said, patting the gigantic document that was in fact her handwritten list of love-stolen dreams. ‘But I thought it would be nice to understand why I’d let myself get to a place where I was manically dribbling into my porridge, staring at my ex-husband across the kitchen and wanting to throw Petits Filous Frubes at his head. I mean, I wasn’t always a passive-aggressive downtrodden wife.’ She was more aggressive than passive but it wasn’t the moment. ‘So I’ve decided to do a bit of alternative research, which means that if you do that you won’t have a brownie, I told you, Henry, behave or no brownie, so you are going to have to be pretty open-minded when I tell you my idea.’

‘I am not here to judge. I am here to take back what love stole.’ This has been my mantra since the early shock of Mary’s mechanical revelations.

‘Well, it was my Reiki teacher’s idea really. She thought one way to better understand the obstacles and mistakes of this life would be to understand the obstacles and mistakes of all my previous lives. Apparently there’s this thing called
past life regression
and it helps a lot of people make sense of themselves and the things they do.’ Henry was presented with a brownie and dropped half of it straight down
his front. ‘And it’s absolutely not something I would have done while I was married, because I couldn’t bear his disapproving face, or his voice, or the way he held his cutlery, so that qualifies as a love-stolen dream, doesn’t it? In fact it was already on my list.’ She flicked to page 17 to show me where
Past Life Regression
had been carefully written in blue biro.

‘If I’m honest, Leah, this is not exactly what I was expecting us to be talking about today. I’d found an equestrian centre close to your house. I was going to suggest we go horse riding together. You said you stopped riding when you got married. I think it was LSD 88?’

‘It was 87.’

‘OK, number 87, but it was on the list. I thought we could go hacking. That’s what people do on horses, isn’t it? They hack? Computer hackers hack too, obviously, but they do it in a more
let’s bring the government to its knees
kind of way, which wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking more in terms of a slow trot, through woodland. But if you want to get back love-stolen dreams from the past—I mean from the
past
past, that’s very cool. And thorough. Adds a whole new dimension. I like.’ I totally didn’t get it. ‘Well done!’ Phew.

‘Thank God, Kate! Because I was sure you were going to say no. Federico said you wouldn’t do it—’

‘What?’

‘I said I wanted you to do a past life regression and he said you absolutely wouldn’t do it. He said, “Past life regression? Walking, talking fashion regression, more like,” then he went on about some cardigan you bought from Deptford
Market last week and how he’s had a metaphorical allergic reaction to it. Short version of this story is that he said you’d say no. He thinks he knows you so well, that Federico Cagassi.’ She typed a message into her constantly beeping iPhone while Henry fell asleep face first in his brownie. And just for the record that Federico Cagassi does know me quite well. He knows me well enough to know I’d rather put hot coals on my bare-naked tippy-toes than regress myself into the past, which is why I whispered,

‘I don’t want to do a past life regression,’ into my hair before bursting into a fit of fake coughing. Which is when things got a bit awkward …

You see
I’d
never given much thought to what I’d be asked to do for Love-Stolen Dreams. I hadn’t set any guidelines or parameters. I just saw myself as a champion of others, dashing about, problem-solving, drinking protein shakes and facilitating the journeys of others. But jumping through the windows of time, to right love’s past-life wrongs, well, it was like
Quantum
bloody
Leap
but for real and I suspect without the help of that middle-aged man who smoked cigars and had communication devices wired up to the present.

‘Oh …’ Leah looked at me with disc-sized brown eyes. ‘Oh, sure, of course.’ She looked at the floor and started fiddling with her hands. ‘I just thought that you wanted to help women reconnect with themselves. I thought this was a selfless quest to take back what love had stolen, not you picking and choosing a few things that you really fancy doing, like learning to trot on a bloody great horse.’ She was getting a bit shouty. Henry woke up and crawled under the
table. He knew the signs. ‘Remind me again of your new mantra, Kate.’

‘I’m not here to judge,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I am here to take back what love stole.’

‘That’s a great mantra,’ she said, draining her coffee mug and starting to pack up her things. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to leave. She was going to leave, without getting properly mad, and I’d feel like a rubbish, disappointing friend and it would be awkward and uncomfortable but she’d
never
mention it again and I’d
never
forget. It would become like a humungous white elephant who sat between us everywhere we went, an elephant called Awkward Stan, and Awkward Stan would always be there, an accessory to our friendship for the rest of my entire elephant-infested life. Good God, she was manipulative!!!

‘It was just a little past life regression,’ she muttered as she wiped Henry’s face with a wet wipe. ‘We could have found out what love stole from us in the past to find out why it keeps stealing stuff in the present. The answers are in the past. I just know it.’

‘I thought the answers were on this list!’ I said, shaking the heavy paper document in her face. She blinked violently as I did it and I knew I’d gone too far. There’s never any need to shake paper.

‘Kate, all I want is that if you put that iPhone in your mouth one more time I will make you eat the thing, do you hear me, Henry? I will put tomato ketchup on it, put it in a burger bun and I won’t feed you another morsel until you have eaten it. Your choice, you are in control of your own destiny. So, Kate,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘A little
regression? Making sense of the future by unlocking the love-stolen secrets of our past—speaking of the past, did I tell you I bumped into Peter Parker the other day? When did he get back?’

‘What do you mean you bumped into Peter Parker? Where was he? What was he doing? Did you speak to him? What was he wearing? Did he speak to you? Did he smell nice? How did he seem?’

‘He seemed fine. To be honest he spent the entire time explaining to Henry how his juice box would eventually end up as a biodegradable roof tile, which neither of us really understood, well, especially not Henry as he can’t count past five. Think about the regression, Kate,’ she said as she headed to the door, Henry under one arm, twelve bags under the other and quite a large piece of Henry’s chocolate brownie stuck to her bum, which, in retrospect, I probably should have mentioned…

request | regress myself into the past

let’s chew the fat of love

‘What did I lose as a result of love? My thinness.’
(Susan, 58)