Turning Thirty Read Online Free Page A

‘The thing is, Matt, you’ve got to have known we were at that stage.’
    â€˜Were we?’ I tried to catch her eyes but she wouldn’t look at me. Instead she was back to playing with her toes.
    â€˜Well, maybe not that stage exactly. But we were definitely at the stage where we’d start looking at other people – me, the cute motorcycle delivery guy with the dreadlocks who always smiles at me when we share the elevator; you, the girl in the deli with the belly-button ring, who gives you extra filling in your sandwiches because she thinks you look cute.’
    â€˜Which deli girl?’
    Elaine narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You’d better believe I made her up.’ She giggled. ‘Before either of us would realise, looking would lead to longing, which would inevitably lead to doing, and I’d hate for us to finish that way. Absolutely hate it. We’re better than that. This way we keep an element of control. We can split up with dignity.’ She went on thoughtfully, ‘You know, I never was your dream girl, was I? And you certainly weren’t my dream guy. We just sort of drifted together. And you’ve got to know that if things had stayed the same and my dream guy had turned up—’
    â€˜I would’ve been in the way.’
    â€˜And vice versa.’
    She’d made a very good point. I’d always thought that Elaine (whose opening gambit to me was, ‘Hi, I have a thing for British men’) would’ve been far more suited to someone taller, more manly looking, with big hands, a boarding-school education and perhaps a family connection to a minor member of royalty. As for me, I suppose I looked like I should’ve been with someone a bit creative, a singer, an artist, a dancer – the kind of woman who’s a bit mad. Not barking mad, but Janis Joplin mad. The kind of woman who walks around without shoes on in the summer and attempts suicide on an annual basis. Joking apart, she had a point.
    â€˜So you mean to say that if we’d rented Pride and Prejudice like Sara wanted instead of The English Patient we’d still be together? Now, that’s a weird one.’
    Elaine laughed like I’d really tickled her. ‘No,’ she said, when she’d recovered, ‘it still would’ve happened. But instead of all that English Patient stuff I would’ve realised that you were never going to be my Mr Darcy.’
    â€˜Or you my Elizabeth Bennet.’

five
    â€˜I mean, we’ve been struggling since the dawn of time,’ said Elaine plaintively. ‘We do waaaaay too many things that annoy each other.’
    It was 7.30 a.m. and Elaine and I were walking along the street towards the subway on our way to work. Four weeks had now gone by and my back was considerably better because I was now sleeping in our bed. Elaine, however, had decamped to the Sofa from Hell because she felt guilty about my bad back. Paul Barron had taken me out to lunch earlier in the week to tell me that my transfer request had been confirmed and that I would be free to leave as soon as I told Human Resources where I wanted to go. He even spent an hour trying to persuade me to stay, which was both flattering and embarrassing. I told him I’d let him know where I wanted to go as soon as I’d made up my mind. He gave me a weird kind of shoulder squeeze that I think was meant to say, ‘It was good to have a guy like you on the team,’ but which came across as a Vulcan death grip. For hours afterwards I had twinges down my back.
    â€˜Breaking up is definitely the right thing to do,’ I said, as we descended the stairs to the subway entrance.
    â€˜Without a doubt,’ she replied. ‘I was a terrible girlfriend, really. Probably one of the worst in living memory. I don’t cook, I don’t clean, and I leave my underwear drying on the radiator, which I know drives you insane.’
    This was all true, Elaine