parents and how they wear matching cagoules to go on really long walks, and how they never leave Norwich. He briefly mentioned his ex again when I mentioned Chrissy’s upcoming hen do – slipping it out like an accidental fart. ‘Fiona was obsessed with getting married,’ he mumbled, before apologising.
I wondered silently what he did to her in the relationship to make her insecure enough to be obsessed with getting married. Or what he didn’t do. His poor ex.
‘Weddings are ludicrous, aren’t they?’ Gretel said, stretching her arms up into the sun. ‘They’re so over the top and I think people get married for the wrong reason.’
He beamed at me. ‘That’s exactly what I think.’
I laughed inwardly when I thought of the amount of time I’ve spent planning my wedding since I was a child. The flowers, the dress – and how it adapts over time depending on the current fashions – the food, the playlist, the location, the readings. And then I considered all the time I’ve spent pretending I don’t think any of this, to men, so they think I’m someone I’m not and can love me better and therefore I can have the wedding.
We kissed again. I started it, to change the subject. We kissed and hardly ate anything. We kissed and were shouted at to get a room. We kissed every twenty or so paces as we walked back to the Tube, and, once there, we kissed some more.
On the next date, we went to London Zoo for their Zoo Nights event. Joshua paid, which was just as well because it’s bloody expensive to get in. We walked with our arms around one another as we skidded around groups of excitable drunk twenty-somethings to look at lions dozing in the heat that still won’t go away.
‘Look at that otter,’ Joshua said, leaning his chin onto my head as he pointed one out. ‘He so thinks he’s better than the other otters with that rock.’
‘I think his name is Jarvis,’ I replied.
‘Jarvis the cocky otter. Sounds like a great children’s TV show.’
Several minutes of our lives were lost to imagining Jarvis’s day to day existence. Giving him a back story and a narrative thrust, and, ultimately, a redemption arch. Then Jarvis appeared to give another otter his little rock and we both squealed in delight that our story had come true. This required a celebratory kiss that was so intense someone threw an empty bottle at us and we moved on giggling, like teenagers.
‘So, it’s rather frustrating that you’re not very stalkable online,’ he said, as we walked holding hands and licking overpriced but lacklustre ice cream. ‘Literally you were nowhere to be found on social media.’
I grinned as I imagined him typing in the word ‘Gretel’. ‘I’m not on any social media,’ I said. ‘Why? Are you on it? Doesn’t it just make you unhappy?’
It occurred to me that, like him, I usually would’ve checked by now. If I’d had a quiet moment at work, or a low moment at home, I’d have typed his name into the search bar of various websites, feeling uneasiness and guilt in my stomach, like he could sense I was doing it. Feeling sicker if I found an album still open from the holiday he went on with his university girlfriend in 2009 because people didn’t use privacy settings back then. Wondering if she was the best sex he’d ever had. Knowing he’d been to Croatia, but when he brought up the place in a real-life interaction later on, having to act surprised to learn he’d been to Croatia, rather than say, ‘yes, I know, you went with your ex, didn’t you? Tell me, are you still in love with her and only dating me because she dumped you, but you’d drop me the moment she returned? Did you do a sixty-nine together? And, can you remember what shampoo she uses because her hair is really nice?’
‘Yes, for my sins.’ Joshua took a lick of his vanilla cone, as I reflected on him being the sort of person who actually says ‘for my sins’ out loud. ‘I just assumed it’s something everyone is on, whether they like it or not. It didn’t occur to me there’s an option.’
‘There’s always an option. You don’t have to do everything the world expects of you.’
It was such a Gretel thing to say, and it went down a treat. He stopped us next to a sign that explained how deforestation works and kissed me