Perfect Day

can see Marie’s itching to try them on.
    Marie squeezes her foot in.
    ‘Too small for me. I must be the Ugly Sister.’
    It was like a fairy tale. For a moment, Kate wonders whether it could have had a happy ending if only she hadn’t stopped the story with her incessant questions. If they’d reached the white beach fringed with palm trees, would they have lived happily ever after?
    How strange it is that human beings talk about life as a sort of continuum, trying to do everything as a smooth preparation for the next bit. They learn and work and save and marry and reproduce as if they’re on a sort of gently rising curve on a graph. But it’s not like that. Life pivots on single moments. Sometimes they’re so tiny and fast you don’t even see them happening, and sometimes they’re so unexpected you don’t allow yourself to believe.
    It would only be an illusion of happiness, she tells herself, because if he’d gone with her, he would have been a bad person, wouldn’t he? And she wouldn’t want to be with a bad person, would she? But he didn’t go. So he was a good person after all.
    She can’t get her head round that.
    ‘Do you think you can have a future if you don’t have a past?’ she asks out loud.
    ‘Christ, I bloody hope so,’ says Marie, delving into the bag again.
    ‘What’s this, then?’
    She’s holding up Sasha’s Magic Carpet.
    ‘A book.’
    ‘You’re kidding,’ Marie says with deep sarcasm. She flips open the first page. ‘Hey, look what it says here!’
    ‘Kate. Thanks for giving me back my life. Love, Alexander. What’s that all about then?’ Marie asks.
    Kate takes the book from Marie and hugs it to her chest. She will keep the book for ever, and as the memories grow weaker with time, it will remind her that she met someone who thought she was special.
    He was not a dream, not a fairy tale, but a real person that she chanced upon.
    And the world is full of possibility.
    ‘What’s the time?’ Kate asks Marie.
    ‘Coming up to midnight?’
    ‘Shall we go out and have some champagne?’
    ‘ Champagne ? What are we celebrating?’
    ‘Do we need a reason?’
    For a moment, Marie looks shocked.
    Then she says, ‘I know just the place.’

    ‘So you saw, you conquered, you came!’ Marie shrieks.
    Kate’s sure that everyone in the room has heard, but nobody looks at them. They’re sitting at the bar of a very exclusive club. She doesn’t like to think why Marie’s allowed in when she’s not a member. In the corner by the door, there’s an actor Kate recognizes from a television cop series. When he gets up to go to the toilet she sees he’s much smaller than she thought.
    ‘Yeah,’ she says, nonchalantly.
    ‘Jesus!’
    ‘Haven’t you ever?’ Kate guesses.
    ‘Not really,’ Marie says, taking out a cigarette.
    Either you have or you haven’t, Kate wants to tell her, but she doesn’t. It’s funny to have experienced something about sex that Marie hasn’t. She feels a little bit superior, and a little bit sad for Marie.
    ‘So did you fuck all day?’ Marie asks bluntly.
    ‘No. We talked a lot.’
    ‘Tell me about it,’ Marie says wearily.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Most of the punters want to talk. They want to tell you about their marriages and why it’s not their fault that they’ve failed, and I’m lying there thinking, oh just shut the fuck up and get on with it. I don’t want to know...’
    Which is why it was different with Alexander, Kate thinks, because she did want to know about him. He is not a punter and she is not a whore.
    ‘He’ll be back,’ Marie surmises.
    ‘I won’t be here. I’m going home. I said I’d go home if I had a day with him, didn’t I?’
    ‘You crazy?’
    ‘It’s not him... not like that...’ Kate tries to explain. ‘Last night I thought if I could have him for one day I wouldn’t want anything more. I’d be happy with what I’ve got for the rest of my life—’
    ‘Oh please!’ Marie interrupts, exasperated.
    ‘Wait! I know that’s not true now. I do want more. And I’m going to get it.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I want to write.’
    ‘You’ve always wanted to be a writer,’ Marie says, bored with something she’s heard a thousand times before.
    ‘Well, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to write. That’s what he says. So that’s what I’m going to do. Write.’
    ‘What’ll you call it? Love with a Stranger?’ Marie says mockingly.
    ‘Not an adult novel. Not yet. I’m going to write stories