How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?: An utterly laugh-out-loud and unputdownable page-turner by Kristen Bailey

Author:Kristen Bailey [Bailey, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838889760
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2021-06-29T18:30:00+00:00

‘Christ, Susan. What the hell? Maybe if you take the legs and I take the arms?’ says a teacher, as they try and carry their former colleague out of the karaoke lounge. This may not be the best idea. Susan is the crier who slumbers so deep I fear she may be in a coma. The group is absolutely wasted. I feel responsible but if Tom is looking on I think he’d be proud. Not a good night until someone is throwing up in a bush, he used to tell me. I hate that these may be the words a lot of people remember him by.

As I walk among them, down the long steep pavements of Park Street, I hear murmurs of kebabs and one group member waxing lyrical about the joys of extra chilli sauce. I’m glad I won’t be sharing a hostel room with him later. Don’t kiss that bus stop either. I don’t think that’s hygienic. Naoko skips arm in arm with another down the road. I like that I’ve given her some freedom tonight, that Tom led her here to me, to this foreign place. An arm suddenly drapes itself around me.

‘Oh my god, this night was so awesome. Thank you so much for arranging it.’

Robyn. I’ve not interacted much with Robyn today as she seems to have taken it on herself to be the group leader, the attention-seeker, the flirt. When she left Japan, she went on to marry a brain surgeon, divorce a brain surgeon and now works as an estate agent. You can imagine her shiny hair and teeth standing at an angle, arms crossed on a sign on someone’s lawn.

‘It’s been nice to meet you all in person, to be fair. Before you just existed as names and stories.’

‘Did Tom have stories about me?’ she asks.

That you slept with Pablo and you ate tuna out of a tin like a cat?

‘He did.’

She holds her hand to her chest, her eyes glazing over.

‘I say a little prayer for him every night.’

‘Like Aretha Franklin?’ I reply.

She keels over like that might be the best joke she’s ever heard.

‘The time we had together,’ she says, ‘I will always hold that close. I think about it all the time.’

This always feels the hardest part of my grief: that it’s not mine alone, I’ll always have to share Tom. He was someone’s friend, son, nephew, colleague or neighbour. We all knew different parts of him, in different moments in time. It is sometimes difficult to comprehend this; sometimes I feel we exist solely as him and me, Grace and Tom. Just us.

‘I just can’t believe that someone I slept with is actually dead.’

The words fall out of her so easily. I halt for a moment. You know who I am, right?

‘Are you OK, honey?’ she asks, as she notices the blood draining from my face.

‘You slept with him? In Japan?’

My tone gives the game away and she stops walking, the mixture of that revelation and the late-night air sobering her up quite quickly.

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