Other Parents by Sarah Stovell

Author:Sarah Stovell [Stovell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

30

Erin

Erin caught a taxi home from the station. She’d been in London for two days, meeting an editor who’d bought her most recent feature and wanted to discuss the possibility of more, and afterwards catching up with old colleagues. Almost as soon as she’d stepped off the train at King’s Cross, Erin felt like she could breathe again. Everything, absolutely everything, was within reach here. Opportunities, history, art, geography, power … And the food! She’d almost forgotten – though of course she hadn’t really forgotten – that you couldn’t walk a hundred yards without passing sushi or bimbimbap or shawarma, or that the Turkish bakery would still be open at 1 a.m. when she went by on her way to her hotel.

What she loved most, though, were the people – the people who went about their lives quickly, anonymously, barely looking up, not stopping her on the pavement for a chat the way they did in Burntridge, not caring who anyone else slept with or how they dressed, just as long as they didn’t stand to the left on the escalator in the underground stations, or impinge on anyone’s right to get on with their day. The people who hadn’t voted for Brexit, the people who stood on platforms waiting for a train and heard the rise and fall of five different languages and welcomed it; the enormous man buying a sandwich on Wardour St, dressed in a tutu with his hair in a tiny top knot and all the people around him who didn’t give a shit.

It was glorious.

For a day, it had been glorious. But then, on the second day, it all suddenly became too much. Everywhere was too big, too smelly, too crowded. She’d somehow managed to get lost somewhere near Charing Cross Road because she hadn’t been concentrating on where she was going, and she ended up pacing the streets for half an hour, trying to find her hotel, and there was no one to share the stress of it, or turn it into a bit of an adventure with. Rachel would have done, if she’d been there with her. She’d have just shrugged and said, ‘We’re not really lost. We just don’t know exactly where we are but we’ll sort it out,’ and she’d have dragged Erin into a bar and they’d have drunk white wine until their words slurred and eventually called a cab to the hotel and stumbled into bed for slightly drunken sex.

And that was what it all came down to. London was great, but it wasn’t home any more because Rachel wasn’t there. It bothered Erin to feel this way, to have her well-being so tied up in another person. Right now, she was happy. She was blissfully, dangerously happy and if Rachel ever left her, she was going to fall apart. She would break and become unfixable. She knew that, and she hated it. Sometimes, she wanted to take hold of Rachel, the light of her life, and rage at

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