Free Leftovers by Stella Newman

dinner later with our friend from school, Dalia. After Polly’s first husband walked out she spent two years bringing up her little girl Maisie on her own. But Polly would never think of herself as a leftover; she got on with life without a fuss. Maybe when you have a kid whom you have to put first then it’s easy, though it didn’t look easy.
    And then she met Dave, and Dave is amazing and it didn’t bother him in the slightest that Polly wasn’t young and perfect and baggage-free. He proposed after three months, down on one knee, singing Sinatra’s ‘All of Me’, in their local curry house. The wedding’s in six weeks’ time and I cannot wait to dance away the ghost of Spencer and celebrate Polly and Dave’s union. If anyone deserves all the happiness it’s Polly. And men like Dave restore your faith in the universe. Shame there’s only one of him in the universe.
    And then of course there’s Dalia: successful and gorgeous and thick as four short planks where men are concerned. ‘
Better to have loved and lost
…’ That is so entirely not true when it comes to Dalia and Mark. Honestly I think Tennyson would have developed writer’s block when faced with making sense of the on/off relationship between Dalia and that douche ‘property-developer’ (i.e. trumped-up estate agent) Mark Dawson.
    Perhaps, after considerable pondering, with quill in mouth, Tennyson might have come up with the following:
    ‘Better to have never loved. In fact better to have stayed home watching
TOWIE
repeats than to have wasted so much time at the beck and call of an odious man-boy who tells you, through word and deed, that you’re not quite good enough for him. Where is thy self-respect, girl? The man is clearly a cock-head.’
    But I don’t suppose Tennyson would have used a word like cock-head.
    So yes, there are worse things than being single. And there are worse things than being alone.
    The girls are coming round at 7 p.m., and even though Polly’s meant to be on a pre-wedding diet, she’s asked me to make spag bol – her favourite. Dalia is off the carbs, since Mark poked her in the thigh a few weeks ago and just shook his head. But it pains me that a paunch-laden forty-four-year-old man dares criticise my friend’s weight. She’s been shrinking ever since she met him.
    So I’ll make the spag bol. And if Dalia wants to eat the bolognese sauce on broccoli instead of spaghetti, that’s up to her. But after a glass of wine she’ll probably be herself again, at least for a while. And I’ll make the brownie pudding. Then I can take some in for Sam on Monday morning.
    First things first though, chores: put the laundry on, tidy the flat, do the recycling. I head to the recycling bins round the corner armed with my cardboard wine delivery box, filled with bottles. Thank goodness no one I work with lives in my area and has ever witnessed me at these bins on a Saturday morning. Every time I stand here I curse myself for not having removed the thick tape from these boxes back in my flat, and yet I never do. Because now, not only do I look like an alcoholic (six glass bottles smashing the message home) I also look like I’m drunk. I mean, like I
am currently drunk at 9 a.m.
, not just I
am a drunk
. I try to tear the tape but it won’t come off so I try to pull the box apart but it’s tougher to rip than the Yellow Pages. I stand wrestling with it like an old souse in a pub brawl. I grunt a bit, pull and shake it, then try to bash it through the slot, even though I’ve tried this twice already and I know it doesn’t quite fit. Then I jump on it, kick it, manage to tear a tiny corner off it and end up grunting again, before throwing it in despair onto the pile to the right of the bins where all the less civic-minded people simply dump their cardboard in the first place.
    I’m exhausted. That’s more than enough interface with the real world for one day. I return home, put Prefab Sprout loudly on the stereo in a