“No one wants to hear anything miserable right now, so make your stories light and inspirational,” the life coach tells them. Light, Clare repeats to herself, like a balloon, like sun on snow, like the after-effects of a date that went better than expected. Clare doesn’t know why she’s signed up for this session. It’s not like she needs more well-being tool kits, they’re pretty much the only thing on offer in the industry right now. She does need more lightness in her life though, that’s a dead cert. She’s been doing yoga but she’s never felt heavier than when she’s trying to lift her hips towards the sky while feeling her wrists are being dragged down into a bog that will soon swallow her face as well. The blood rushes to her head and she counts rapidly to five hoping the teacher will realise she’s nearing collapse.
Her next date via the new app is with a guy who she’s sure will turn out to be shorter than his profile claims. Or he’ll have duck feet or a weird obsession – so far the standout ones are soundproof insulation and drawing on furniture. The latter was a total travesty as she thought he was a decent bloke, even a bit eccentric and arty, which equals potentially attractive. But when he came round to hers he took a Sharpie and drew all over the brand-new table while she was in the bathroom. He couldn’t understand why she was upset. It was just a joke! He didn’t realise she was so attached to “things.” She still feels violated by his cheap vandalism.
After having a row they spent the night together anyway as though they were a couple committed to making something — anything — work out. He even went out to buy croissants and strawberries for breakfast before he left. Then at 8.03pm he sent her a “have a happy life” message and blocked her on WhatsApp. She’s furious that he had the last word, but even more annoyed by her own inability to judge character. She hadn’t been smitten exactly but he was taller than her (essential), didn’t have kids (desirable) and didn’t talk about his exes or his pension over dinner.
She tries to move on by making her days rhythmical. She’s a creature of small habits; waking up at the same time, running on one of two favoured routes, starting work promptly. She enjoys the simplicity of her own company but also likes having friends who rely on her. She pays close attention to the minutiae of their lives, stuffed with children and other paraphernalia. The children can be awesome or skin-crawlingly awful. Clare tells them to their faces when they get on her nerves while equally getting on theirs with her sudden sulks.
She doesn’t lack empathy, but she wonders if she lacks ambition. She tells herself and everyone else that she DOESN’T CARE about her job even though it makes her so stressed that sometimes she can’t sleep. She decides to take a sicky for the first time in her long years of employment and spends the morning lying in bed redesigning her life. She writes down “Clare is … competent and creative; efficient and energetic; oppositional and abrasive (maybe, sometimes). A keen listener, Clare gets irony (even when no one else does) and likes to choose her own direction…”
What if she broke it off with her current life? She tries to imagine it, but the page stays stubbornly blank. The life coach said that to create your ideal life you can’t start with compromises or with what you can’t have — you have to dream big and work backwards step by step. In reality, Clare likes her life — where it is and who is in it (there’s some room for improvement) — but not what it is. She can’t see beyond it somehow.
She thinks of the day she gave up smoking while she was on a bus to the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. She immediately felt like her lungs were full of brand new butterflies. She met an Irish boy in the hostel that night and they went out walking at dawn and she almost stood on a snake. He kissed her and told her he had a girlfriend on the Gold Coast. She said she was cool with it and anyway she was moving on to work up north for a month. He sent her a postcard when she got back to London and invited her to visit Cork one day. He flickers past on a string of glinting memories, like beads that she clicks through in her mind.
Clare declutters her flat, eats mountains of green vegetables, sees no one and swaps wine for green tea for a fortnight. She breaks her isolation by meeting Kezia, a New Zealand nomad and reliably upbeat. They talk about small victories and reminisce about when they were in Japan who knows how many years ago. They climbed Mount Zao, the haunted mountain.
“You seemed so happy up there,” Kezia tells her. “Maybe it was something in the air.” Clare remembers the almost tangible mist, the cloud fingers that reached down to touch the tourists picking their way along the trail. “Is the idea of me being happy so amusing?”
“Honestly?” says Kezia, “Sort of. I mean you have an eye for the negative.” She corrects herself. “I don’t mean you’re miserable, just that you look for what’s less-than-perfect.” She’s warming to the theme now. “Kind of like a photographer stuck in the darkroom.”
“So I’m stuck in a dark room now! That’s my life alright!”
“Not a dark room, a darkroom where images are developed. You could see it as a positive — like that kind of attention to detail, it makes things brighter and clearer, in the end.”
“Thanks,” Clare says uncertainly, “I’m not sure if I feel encouraged or depressed by that.” They walk round the rest of the common talking about other people’s problems and get a beer on the way home. It’s (almost) been a good day.
Clare goes to bed early and wakes while it’s still dark. The air seems to flow differently around her as she runs beyond her usual loop and all the way to Parliament Hill. As the light sharpens against the steely skyline she imagines she’s on an adventure in a vast volcanic landscape. She wants the feeling to last. She runs as though she’s got tiny rockets in her shoes down the hill towards the old lido. Its art deco frontage smiles squarely at the people who swim, never mind the weather. As she slows down to stretch, she notices someone watching the swimmers from a balcony. The woman leans on the iron rail, calmly smoking, between red geraniums. Clare releases her gaze and makes up her mind: she’ll quit her job (before panic sets in) and give up online dating (tonight will be the finale — she can’t remember if it’s the carpenter or the stand-up comedian). She’ll learn Japanese.
Clare eases her phone from her back pocket and counts backwards in her head: 5-4-3-2-1. She opens the Sakura institute webpage and clicks through tutor profiles until one of them catches her eye with a sweet yet severe expression. His look says “come on, do it!” and without hesitating she fills out the registration form. Still hot and with her heart racing Clare pushes through the revolving gate of the lido and uses her emergency fiver to pay her way in. In the old-fashioned changing area, she peels off her running kit like an old skin. The cold of the mottled concrete on her feet is thrilling as she rushes in her underwear past an unconcerned lifeguard and leaps straight into the deep end.