My spoon full of porridge stops on the journey to my mouth. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, why do you tell everyone everything?’
‘I don’t know. I just do.’
Megan gets up and stretches her arms over her head, leaning left into it and making a small straining sound. ‘I just wonder what you get out of it,’ she says, ‘compared to what they get out of it. All these helpful advice givers.’ She bends down and touches her toes. ‘I just worry sometimes that you come out of it confused, and they come out of it feeling much better about themselves.’
The porridge sticks in my throat. I take a sip of tea and force myself to swallow. ‘It’s a bit early for Megan psychotherapy, isn’t it?’
She pats my head, then picks up an oversized plastic rainbow-necklace from the side and shoves it unceremoniously over her head. ‘Probably. I’m just using you as a distraction from how much shit I have to get through at work. I dunno though. Be careful today, April. At work, I mean. Don’t fall into that trap of being the untogether one whom people care about deeply, but whom they also use to feel more in control of their own lives. Even if they don’t mean it, don’t let them put that on you.’
Then, with a collecting of handbag, a muttering of ‘why do back-to-back meetings fucking exist in this fucking world?’ and a kiss blown in my direction, Megan is out of the door. Leaving me with my half-eaten breakfast and too many thoughts to be having at this time of the morning.
The heatwave is hanging on and nobody in London can believe their luck. This morning BBC News threatened it could last the whole summer, but everyone’s still seeing it as a treat rather than a warning. I walk through the red-brick streets towards the Tube station, dodging a collection of teenage schoolgirls giggling in navy uniform, and smelling of sun-lotion mixed with vanilla perfume.
The Tube is too full to get onto. The doors clunk open to reveal a comedy sketch of commuters stuffed into the carriage, like that clowns crammed into a car trick. Despite this, people are still determined to force their sweaty bodies into the impossible situation. I stand back and watch the spectacle, and, somehow, space is found for most of them. The doors slide shut and the Tube rattles off, leaving just me and a few other stragglers waiting.
Do people really use me to feel better about their own lives?
Am I really that person?
When the next train whirrs in, it’s much emptier, and I feel smug at the tiny win against London. I even manage to get a seat, putting my blazer down so my bare skin doesn’t touch the gross cushion. The stench of one man opposite is so putrid that he could be used as smelling salts. Sweat’s already drenched his business shirt, and he’s eating a cereal bar so aggressively that crumbs of desiccated oats are spraying from his mouth like a whale’s blowhole. He finishes it with a chomp and dusts off his remaining mess like a rhino scent-marking a river with their own shit.
I hate you, I think, as I look at this man.
Once I get to Baker Street, I treat myself to a coffee, so I’ll be slightly late and won’t have to handle all the ‘how did it go’s?’ I stand outside Pret and watch everyone scurry to work in a haze of self-important Tasmanian Devil tornadoes. Simon once said ‘Pret coffee is shit’, when it literally all tastes the same to me.
‘Fuck you, Simon,’ I say out loud, taking a hearty swig. ‘It’s just fucking coffee, you tosser.’
This anger is new, the bitterness fresh out of the box. I have been many things in my life – frantic, desperate, obsessive, silly, motivated – but never cynical. Never angry. But it’s like I’ve only been pushing it down, letting it form pockets of hatred in my body like undetected tumours, and now they’ve all burst and the cancer of it is spreading rapidly.
I finish my perfectly-adequate coffee and check the time on my phone. It’s 9.34. I toss my cup into the rubbish bin next to the homeless man, fibbing when I say I don’t have any change, but feeling like I’m still a good person because at least I didn’t ignore him. I walk up the street to our office, punch in the entry code