Exclusive extract from Plan B (Review), written by Emily Barr.
It was a terrible day to emigrate. The sun was shining. The sky was a deep spring blue. My breath came in clouds all around me.
Clifton Street was beautiful. The tall white houses opposite were bleached by the light. I could smell the sea in the air, hear the distant seagulls. Anne, who lived across the road, was looking at me from inside her bay window. She waved when I looked at her, and motioned to me to come in and see her before we left. I had lived opposite Anne for seven years. I prided myself on knowing all my neighbours. I didn’t know any of them very well, but I was on friendly terms with just about everybody at our end of the street. For the past seven years, this house has been my home, my place of safety. I had lived here with lodgers, then with Matt, then with Matt and Alice. I had brought my daughter to this house two days after she was born. It was the only home she had ever known, yet she was going to grow up with no memories of it at all.
When I finally accepted that the move was going to happen, I hoped that we would go in the rain. I wanted all the bad things about the life I was leaving to be spread before me, as reassurance. I wanted spiky rain blown at me by a driving wind, a blanket of black cloud, the street full of uncollected rubbish bags pecked open by seagulls. I wanted to hear drunk stag parties arriving at the station. Ideally, there would have been a Labour Party conference blocking off the seafront with barriers and covered walkways, which always irritated me as I believed that people had a right to see their leaders walking along the street. I hoped that it was going to take us three hours to drive to the ferry port at Newhaven.
Instead, the day was perfect. The rubbish had been collected two days earlier. The seagulls circled far overhead, up in the blueness, screeching in the distance. I knew that we would leave soon. It was all out of my hands, now. We were only going because I always did what Matt suggested, and he knew that.
I was heart broken. This was an enormous mistake, a massive misjudgment. I imagined myself trying to rectify the situation. I wondered what would happen if I touched the arm of one of the removals men. “I’m sorry,” I might say. “I’ve changed my mind. Would you put all the furniture back, please?”
I was not sure that these removals men would look at me even if I spoke to them. By a strange quirk of science, my physical form appeared to be invisible to their eyes. Soon after they had arrived, at nine in the morning, I had put a tray bearing a cafetiere of coffee, four cups, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar and a plate of biscuits, neatly arranged, on the front wall. Even then, they had ignored me, but for a collective grunt that might have been “cheers”. They were more than happy to chat to Matt, to accept his questionable help and his diffident instructions. They looked straight through me when I tried to catch their eyes with my polished, cheerful smile.
I sat on the next-door neighbors’ low wall and watched the exodus of the boxes, each one marked by me with thick black pen and labeled by the removals men with a yellow sticker. I saw a box marked “Alice’s toys” pass by, followed by “Matt’s books” and “Emma’s shoes”. My life was in those boxes. My life, Matt’s life, Alice’s life. Nothing I said or did was going to stop the move from happening. I had sold my house. It had never been Matt’s house, always mine. I was proud of it. It was a city centre cottage, with small rooms and low ceilings. It felt homely. I had painted all the walls, picked up cheap furniture wherever I could, and I had made it my own. Mine, and Matt’s, and Alice’s.
I was trying to be proud of myself now, the obscene amount of money I had made from it. I had bought it for almost nothing and had sold it for a third of a million pounds. Now it belonged to a pleasant professional couple who were moving down from London. If I had asked them, if they had heard me, the removals men would not have been able to replace everything. I was too late to cancel. I had a new house, and it was in Gascony.
Matt and Alice and I were moving to France. We had known it for months. Until last week, the idea had meant little more to me than it had to Alice, who had parroted “Moob-a-Pance”, meaninglessly, at anyone within earshot. For months, I had efficiently blocked out reality, and made the whole insane adventure into an interesting talking point. I had assured myself that it could not really be going to happen, that everything would inevitable fall through at some point in the long and complicated process. It had seemed phenomenally unlikely that such an outlandish scheme could work out; it was, I knew, just another of Matt’s wild ideas.
Before Alice had come along, he had proposed a move to South Africa, where we would buy a vineyard near Cape Town, and sell our wines directly to Oddbins. “I have a good contact at Oddbins,” he has assured me, as if this made the plan foolproof.
After that, he had posited that I might care to take my newborn daughter to Thailand, where the three of us would buy a beach hut and make some kind of idealized living from catching fish and picking fruit.
It was currently extremely fashionable to pine loudly for a house in rural France and, although Matt had seemed serious when he started on about it, I had assumed that he was simply repeating conversations he had had with his colleagues. I had played along to humour him. “Yes,” I had agreed blithely. “A big house in the French countryside would be just the thing. Good schools, cheap property, bilingual children. Mmmm. It would be perfect.”
It had been stupid of me to encourage him, but I’d had no idea that he was serious.
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