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A woman boarded at Regent’s Park holding a baguette. She stood between a grey suit and a blue and, as the train juddered forward, the woman sunk her teeth into the bread. Piglet looked at her watch: eight thirty. She shook her head, adjusting her position to watch the woman. It was a bánh mì, she realised, stuffed with sausage, coriander, shredded carrot, pickled cucumber. Mayonnaise and sriracha oozed onto the woman’s fingers. As she watched, a glob of sauce fell from the sandwich to land on one of Grey Suit’s shiny, black shoes. He shuffled, tutting, adjusting his AirPods. The woman raised a
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She tilted her head back, and water glazed her eyes as she balanced tears. What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact?
She turned on the light, and it was too bright, bouncing off the walls, windows, and one dirty breakfast bowl in the sink, a spoonful of porridge remaining. His, she knew; he always had one mouthful too much.
The cold had made her crave pasta: hot and steaming and slick. She would make carbonara, with lots of garlic and more egg yolks than were necessary. There was butter in the fridge and leftover bacon from the weekend. How many years had it been since she had stood there, apron on, him pouring wine for her family? She considered making only enough for herself, but the thought of him bringing this up in a future argument—how many would there be?—made
As his truth ripped at her, she had held together the tatters of her body, picking up her shredded personhood from the bed around her like fallen confetti. But now, with hours passing—days—there was time. She began to imagine how it would be to tell people, how it would be to not tell people.
When she asked herself what was worse—what he had done, or what it would be like for people to know what he had done—she was reassured by her inability to answer.
When they broke apart, she observed her body. Beneath the meshed lace, her skin was puckered, hair follicles swollen by cold and by the realisation that she was married, that she had made a mistake. Because shouldn’t she be full now? Shouldn’t she be satisfied? Despite everything, she was hollow. She was hungry.
Being in it together, she thought, being over it, was like eating a birthday cake that wasn’t yours. You began with good, manageable intentions, but when things started to go wrong, spin out of control, you couldn’t stop yourself. Instead of taking a step back, putting the fork down, wiping your hands, you kept going. Eating away until there was nothing left. The consequences you would have to deal with later, but at least it was all gone for now. At least you had worried at the problem until you had eviscerated it into nothing.
Piglet closed her eyes. How to say that she had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others? How to tell Margot that she had carefully crafted her personhood on a lie—and not Kit’s, even, but the fallacy of their bliss, the superficiality and shallowness of it all.
These were the things she knew: she had married Kit; she had told her father; her family were not the people she wanted them to be; she was not the daughter that her in-laws desired. Images from the day flashed through her mind: the croquembouche collapsing this morning; the dress; her father leaving; the church; the vicar; Kit; the creeping realisation that really, really, they had made their vows in the pursuit of living a life that looked good rather than felt good.
She had eaten her heart out. It had not changed a thing. And then, listening to her new husband’s speech about how they were meant to be, how he had known from the start, she had found herself, despite her gorging, hollow. The attention from their guests, their wedding-day admiration, had not filled her up. Her father’s pride, wrested from him, had been bitter; her in-laws’ approval soured. She had plumbed the depths of this shallow life they had constructed and found there was nothing left to do but leave it.
The ripped wedding gown had been easy to remove, even on her own. She had arched her back, flexed her spine, and the buttons had burst open. She had shaken herself free and watched the ruined corset, ripped along the right-hand side, fall from her body. She had picked up the gown, draped it over the toilet, and, next to the porcelain white, it had looked dirty, deflated. She had tried not to think of her parents. It was in Margot and Sasha’s black bin now, organza bursting from the lid.
For a moment she was shocked, scared at the sight of her creation destroyed, desecrated on the lawn, before she remembered that she had chosen this ruin over the one she had been living. It would take her a while, she knew, for this choice to settle into her brain as fact, her decision like the death of a loved one: easy to forget, terrible to realize over again.
