Free Year of Being Single by Fiona Collins Page A

that’s okay?
she texted again.
    Yes, that’s fine. Tell me about what you like?
    Oh God!
    Do you mean sexually?
she texted.
I’m not sure a lady like myself is ready for such a question!
    No! In general. What do you like doing?
    She thought, sucking on the end of a pencil. Sucking on the end of a pencil! She shouldn’t be sucking on the end of anything! She threw it down on the coffee table.
    Dining out and roller-skating?
    Where had that come from? She hadn’t roller-skated since she was fifteen. Although she did really use to enjoy it, especially if she went with a boy. There was nothing nicer, she thought, than skating round to songs from the charts, holding hands.
    Interesting!
Would you like to book me for either of those activities?
    He didn’t want to chat, did he? It was all just about angling for a booking. She felt a horrible wave of terrified, horrified shame wash over her. An escort! What on earth was she thinking? She drained her glass of wine and wondered if she had another bottle lying around somewhere.
    No thank you. Sorry. I’ll get back to you.

Chapter Seven: Imogen
    Imogen left her mum’s house to walk to the train station. She took in a deep breath of the damp, cold mid-March air, the month still in lion mode not lamb. She’d stayed over last night and it was a relief to be out of there.
    If she was honest, she felt trapped at her mum’s – the green carpet everywhere, the tired décor, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece loudly ticking the hours away. It was claustrophobic. Last night she’d retreated to her old bedroom at 9p.m. when Mum retired, and had read lying on her stomach on the bed with her feet dangling off the end, like she’d always used to.
    Her bedroom was exactly the same as it had always been. Peach, tiny floral print wallpaper. A scratched white desk with flaky bits of exposed wood, long before shabby chic became fashionable. A sink in the corner. She was the only one of her friends who had one and she used to have it edged in Aapri
facial scrub, a tiny bar of wrapped soap, Anne French cleansing milk and an Impulse body spray: Temptation. Still there, on the wooden, wall-mounted shelves, were an ancient Pippa doll (hair cut off, of course) an old cassette machine onto which she’d tape the Top 40 (swearing if the DJ dared talk over the beginning of a record), and a 1986 annual, full of tips on how to get a boyfriend.
    In that peach room she had dreamed of having a man. A Prince Charming. The person to take her way from all this. (Ha! Well, that hadn’t worked! She was right back where she started.) She saw how it affected her mum, being alone, with no man to share her life with. Imogen’s father, or the sperm donor, as she liked to put it, had not stuck around. Mum had had a wild and passionate affair with him in her late teens, then he’d moved back to Brazil. That wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded: he wasn’t Brazilian, he just lived there. He’d made little contact once he realised he had a daughter, only sending the occasional, half-hearted cheque. When Imogen was a teenager she’d dreamed of flying to Rio to build a relationship with him but now she didn’t; he’d proved himself not to be worth the effort.
    Imogen, the serious schoolgirl with the A grades, was not going to end up alone. She was going to bag herself a great man. The best she could possibly get, and she’d work at it as hard as she studied. She treated having boyfriends at school like a career, trying to climb a rung up the ladder each time. Each boyfriend had to be better than the last.
    She reached the end of her mum’s road and headed smartly down the next. She felt happier the nearer she got to the train station – there were shops and convenience stores and takeaway places and noise and smells and life. She was more comfortable in an urban environment; suburbia didn’t suit her. She’d loved drunks shouting outside her window at 3a.m. in Putney, all the noise and the bustle. And she