Many Moons

JUNIPER: Today

is my Birthday.

JUNIPER: I am Looking for Love. I am Actively, looking for Love.

You know those traffic light parties where you wear red if you’re not available, amber if you might be and green if you absolutely are? Well I’m on green. Constantly.

Happy Birthday.

By the way.

Oh.

Thank you.

No one has written happy birthday on my Facebook wall yet, so I write a post – can’t believe I’m 24 today!

It’s earlier than I realise and when I pop into The Spence Cafe for a Green Tea – I hate it but it’s supposed to be so good for you – it’s nearly empty. There’s a woman in one corner and in the other is a group of about six adults, talking and smiling. They look nice. They’re a funny mix of old and young, but I quite like that, I think that’s quite sweet and they all have, without fail, kind faces.

I fall in Love with every man I see, do you ever get that?

One of the men in the big group has a copy of Wolf Hall on the table and a nice smile which feels a bit like fate and when they break in conversation I ask how it is?

My voice cracks a little and I realise it’s the first conversation I’ve had all day.

...

The book, is it good?

Yes.

It’s pretty dense though, isn’t it?

I guess so.

I couldn’t get past the first chapter.

No?

No.

I’m Juniper. It’s my birthday today. That’s my Real Name.

Right? I’m Tom. That’s my real name too.

He goes back to his group of friends and there’s a part of me that’s going, really? Is that it? We made a connection, I thought we might get married and have babies, mini Toms and Junipers, spend Sundays reading the papers in bed, between John Lewis sheets with a ridiculously high thread count – whatever a thread count actually is – with the dogs trying to jump up, and the chickens making a noise in the back garden and we’d get up to get the egg and have a cuddle, and carry on renovating our converted Victorian warehouse apartment.

But of course I realise that it would be Odd or actually pretty Mental to say that.

So he says.

I think I am going to invite the boy next door to the party.

He hasn’t been here long but the people who were there before pretty much set up a brothel in there and – I don’t judge – but it was getting to be such an issue that we were thinking of moving, so it feels a bit like fate that he’s turned up.

He did put a strange note through our door once and we pinned it to our fridge for a bit. I didn’t, Jess did. I did laugh though, I can’t lie. I mean, I literally can’t lie. Apart from this phase I went through when I was about sixteen whenever I was drunk. We used to go out in Slough and Slough is quite, well, you can imagine, it’s a bit of a. Well. I don’t want to be rude. But it’s a bit of a shit hole. And all these women – these really huge, fat ladies, would go out to the local club – it’s called the Sound Exchange – exchanging Sound for Screaming Women and Groping Men and White Awful Noise – and it had carpets, we used to dance on carpets, what kind of a nightclub has carpets? But. Anyway, they’d all be in the club, in the toilets, adjusting their outfits from Jane Norman – which is the worst name for a designer I have ever heard – and worrying about what they looked like, and I’d just pipe up from nowhere, a sense of panic I suppose – and be like, you look gorgeous, you’re so thin, you’ve had nine kids? Well you could have fooled me. And I feel bad about it, I do, but I was drunk and when you’re drunk it’s different rules.