The Authenticity Project

by Clare Pooley

felt, sometimes, like an old Ford Fiesta, broken down on the hard shoulder, while everyone sailed past her in the fast lane.

She was desperate to speak to someone, but she couldn’t think who to call. Her friends were all caught up in their own busy lives and wouldn’t want her inflicting her misery on their evenings.

Monica realized that it was the first time in years that she’d gone for two hours without checking her phone, except when she had actually been asleep or out of signal. It was strangely liberating.

It seemed so improbable that the right man would just show up on this tiny beach on this tiny island. But, as is so often the case, as soon as he’d decided to stop trying, as if the universe was flirting with serendipity, the perfect solution just dropped into his lap.

Julian had noticed how each new entrant to the class changed the dynamic and the mood of the whole group, like mixing a new color on to a palette. Riley added yellow. Not a pale-primrose yellow, a deep-cadmium yellow, or a dark ochre, but the bright, hot yellow of sunshine.

Baz looked totally smitten, and Benji a little jealous. Riley himself seemed totally unaware of the effect he was having, in the same way a pebble doesn’t see the ripples it forms in a pond.

Monica was one of his most diligent students. She listened intently and was really keen to get it right. But today, for the first time, she was drawing with her heart, not just her head. Her strokes had loosened up, become more instinctive. As he watched her laughing and joking with Riley, he knew what had made the difference: she’d stopped trying so hard.

Riley had turned up late. She knew she’d said tenish (she’d been trying to sound relaxed and casual), but she’d meant ten, obviously. Not ten thirty-two.

She grasped, desperately, for her mental list of reasons why this was absolutely not a good idea. Then, as he kissed her again she tore it in half, ripped it into shreds, scattered those pieces over the side of the bridge, and watched them float like snowflakes into the river below.

Recently I found a photo of me, aged about twenty, and realized that I’d lost myself. Back then, I was kind and optimistic and brave. I used to travel, seek out adventures. I learned how to play the saxophone, to speak Spanish, to dance the salsa, and to paraglide. I don’t know if it’s possible to be that man again, or if it’s just too late.

Anyhow, working in the City eats away at your soul. You never actually make anything, other than more money.

Most of the men Monica knew had hang-ups. They felt inadequate about the school they’d been to, the house they’d grown up in, their lack of sculpted abdominal muscles, or the number of notches on their bedpost.

Tai chi meets hardness with softness, so incoming force exhausts itself. It is philosophy for life also. You understand?”

He loved the way she’d picked up Julian and so elegantly pulled him into her circle, making him feel wanted and useful, not pitied.

Wherever they went, people stared at them. Riley must have been stared at his whole life, because he seemed totally oblivious to it. Were they all wondering what is he doing with her?

For a second, her eyes met those of the young mother, who seemed to say, Look at your life, so frivolous and empty. This is what really matters, what I have.

and, just at that moment, the girl in the café turned and looked at Alice with pity in her eyes. You poor thing, she seemed to say, don’t you wish you were me? And she did.

She’d been in such a rush to complete the perfect picture: handsome, wealthy husband; terraced Victorian house in the right part of Fulham; and beautiful, happy baby. She was living the dream, wasn’t she? Her followers certainly thought she was, which made her feel horribly ungrateful.

“Is good to be surrounded by nature,” she’d explained. “And is good karma. The birds are cold, hungry. We feed them, they are happy, we are happy.”

Monica heard the familiar voice in her head chanting he’s just not that into you and crushed it like a bothersome gnat. She refused to let anything spoil her mood. Tomorrow was going to be a perfect day.

There’s nothing an addict likes less than a sober person.

How extraordinary that she had been envying Monica’s life, when all the time all Monica wanted was what Alice took most for granted.

She wasn’t just drinking to let her hair down at parties, she was drinking to get through the day. She pushed that irritating thought to one side. She deserved her glass of wine (or three) in the evening. And everyone else was doing it too.

He looked as if he were crying. What on earth was that all about? Perhaps she wasn’t the only one having a tricky day. She felt a little guilty about how much that thought cheered her.

But most of all, she cried for the girl she’d thought she was becoming; one who was impulsive, spontaneous, and fun-loving, who did things on a whim, without worrying about the consequences. The girl who wrote secrets in notebooks and scattered them to the wind. The girl who fell carelessly in love with handsome strangers. She was gone.

There was no way she was going to get romantically entangled with him again, but they could be friends, she supposed, for Julian’s sake.

As a lawyer, she’d hated it when an adversary settled too quickly.

Hazard had never been bothered about other people’s opinions of him before, but since getting sober he found himself wishing that, just once in a while, someone would tell him he was doing a really good job, and that he wasn’t a terrible person.

No one was going to give Julian the satisfaction of asking him to elaborate.

“Hazard, you’re doing really brilliantly, you know. You are the real superhero around here,” he said.

The more he thought about it, the more the idea of having his own business excited him. He could be like Monica! What would Monica do? had become his new mantra, in his bid to become more thoughtful, more sensible, more dependable.

And there was Alice, feeling she had to do it all alone, and desperately trying to make it look perfect.

Sometimes, there is nothing lonelier than a roomful of people.

“Sure, Hazard. The only person you love is yourself,” she replied, which wasn’t true at all. The only person he’d never been able to love was himself.

She went into the bathroom, splashed her face with water, then doubled back and added a lick of mascara and some lip gloss. She wasn’t trying to impress, obviously, just making sure that Hazard didn’t have any excuse to sneer at her again.

“You have no idea how hard that is for me, Hazard,” she said. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he replied. “I know exactly how hard it is. It’s the same way I feel every time I walk past a pub. You know, we all try to escape life somehow—me with drugs, Julian by becoming a hermit, Alice with social media. But you don’t. You’re much braver than any of us. You meet life head on and try and fight it and control it. Just a little too much, sometimes.”

A year later, she’d met Anthony. He’d adored her. Still did. He told her constantly how lucky he was to have found her. He made her feel special, loved and secure. He’d never made her feel grateful, but she was—every single day.

“Are you happy, Mary?” he asked, realizing that he really wanted her to be. “Very,” she replied. “After I left, I learned to be my own sun.

“Oh, but you’re so much stronger than I was, Monica. You’d never let anyone treat you the way I let Julian treat me. And, you know, despite everything, I don’t regret one single day I spent with that man. Not one.

“When I wrote all that, I didn’t know you.” “I know you didn’t know me. So why did you feel qualified to make judgments about my kitchen cupboards, for fuck’s sake?”

He felt like a tornado had whisked him off for a few months to a Technicolor land, where everything was a little strange and intense, where he had no idea what lay around the next bend in the yellow brick road, and now he was back in Kansas feeling strangely . . . deflated.

Mrs. Wu beamed as her food was exclaimed over and ordered Benji around like a benevolent dictator.

Surely it would be better to live a messy, flawed, sometimes not very pretty life that was real and honest, than to constantly try to live up to a life of perfection that was actually a sham?

“So Betty’s completely relaxed about the whole thing now?” Monica asked. “She seems to be,” Benji replied. “Although, she’s got herself completely worked up about gay rights in China. Did you know that homosexuality was only legalized there in 1997? But the thing that really upsets her is that China won’t allow gay couples, there or abroad, to adopt Chinese babies.” “Well, if anyone can persuade the People’s Republic of China to change their policy, I’m sure it’s Mrs. Wu.