Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Kate Brook

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Hazel and Alfie have just moved in together as flatmates. They've also just slept together, which was either a catastrophic mistake, or the best decision of their lives.
Before they can decide, Hazel's sister Emily and her wife Daria arrive for a visit, setting in motion a chain of events that will turn everything upside down.
What follows will bind the four of them together, bringing joy and heartache, hope and anxiety, and reshaping their relationships in ways that none of them quite predicted.
Warm, witty, and devastatingly relatable, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is a painfully true-to-life story about family, friends, and everything in between.

Release date: June 28, 2022

Publisher: Dutton

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

Hazel didn't know much about Alfie except that he was tall and couldn't grow a full beard, and that he wore socks and sandals around the flat but somehow that was okay; also that he was a primary school teacher, and was half Jamaican but didn't seem to ever eat Jamaican food, instead surviving on pasta and pesto and that bagged salad from Sainsbury's with the grated beetroot mixed in. She knew that he had lived in two London flats before this one, that he liked Black Mirror and Louis Theroux, that his most cherished pipe dream was to hike across Europe from Sweden to Sicily, and that his top three fears were fascism, climate change, and terminal disease. She also knew he had an electric toothbrush, and a one-person cafetire that he never washed up except when he was about to make coffee in it; and she knew he'd had sex last week, because the woman had been so noisy that the whole procedure had been audible from her own room across the hall. Now she herself was kneeling naked on Alfie's mattress, forehead on forearm, various parts of her pressed against the textured wallpaper. He was thrusting from the back and fingering from the front, his spare hand on her breast. His coordination was virtuosic. The bed was squeaking and she was moaning as loudly as that other woman, probably louder, and then louder still until the moans became ecstatic sobs. In the next room Tony was playing World of Warcraft, raising the volume in tandem with her, so that by the time she came the soundtrack was blasting self-righteously through the wall.

Afterward they lay on their backs and stared at the swirling Artex above. Hazel wondered how ill-advised it had been on a scale of one to ten, where one meant they would fall in love and ten meant such extreme discomfort in each other's company that one of them would have to move house. Almost certainly over five; possibly an eight, maybe even higher. But it had also been inspired. The afterglow was warm and potent. Even if it was a ten it might still have been worth it.

"Can we make a pact that this won't be awkward?" said Alfie. What was meant by this was that awkwardness was a likely outcome, far more so than love, and Hazel, for all that she knew this was true, felt a stab of something like disappointment.

"I think that's a very good idea," she replied. She turned onto her side to face him, and they shook hands.

"It's probably time for bed," she said after that, and Alfie reached for his phone and said, "It's one thirty." Hazel swore, pushed back the covers, and sat up.

"You can sleep here, you know," said Alfie. "I mean, if you want to."

"I feel like that'd make it harder for us to stick to the pact? Might make it sort of-complicated?"

"Oh, yeah," said Alfie with a slow nod. "You could be right. Whatever you think."

She got up to gather her clothes from the floor. "Night, then."

"Are you going out there in the buff?"

"I think I can make a dash for it." She grinned and reached for the door handle, then hesitated and turned to look at him. She was tempted to lean over and kiss him on the cheek, but on leaving the bed she had crossed over into separate territory, and it did not now seem right to go back. "Thanks, by the way," she said instead. "That was awesome. A-plus-plus."

"Agreed," he said, smiling.

She opened the door a fraction and looked out. The hall was empty and Tony was still shut up in his bedroom. "Got to run," she said, and in two paces she was in her own room with the door shut behind her.


Alfie was a bad idea, she thought in the morning as she got dressed for work. It was far too early to be up on a Saturday, especially a rainy Saturday. Every day had been rainy lately. Last monthÕs heat wave had been washed decisively away and the cracked-earthenware parks now stood lush and swampy and empty. If it carried on there might be floods. It felt wrong. It was preapocalyptic, a microsample of the psychotic weather that was coming for them, only no one liked to say so.

Alfie was a bad idea, she thought as she brushed her teeth and blinked down onto a mascara wand. He was a slut, quite possibly very unscrupulous. He was affable in a way that she had taken to be natural but now suspected of being calculated. She would not be surprised if all his behavioral decisions were made with the end goal of sex in mind. He was evidently a man who followed his cock.

Because Alfie was such a bad idea, she did not respond when he texted her saying: Great time last night. Still thinking about it. X. It sounded like he might want to repeat the experience, which was flattering, but she would not allow herself to be drawn in. The stakes were too high. She couldn't move house; she couldn't afford it. The landlord had only put her rent up once in the three years she had been there, which meant everywhere else would be more expensive by now, and anyway, she didn't have enough in her bank account to cover the costs of moving. If she was going to have to listen to him driving women wild every weekend it was best she try to forget that she had once been one of those women herself.

To avoid the temptation of messaging him back, she left her phone in her bag, hanging by the staff toilet at the cafŽ, and for several hours made a concerted effort not to think about it. On her lunch break she didn't go near it, instead picking up a crime novel from the bookshelf by the sofa, which hooked her for the entire hour. You were supposed to leave a book if you wanted to take one, but since they only paid her minimum wage she reasoned that a secondhand paperback was the least she deserved. When she put it in her bag her hand hovered over her phone, but with a monumental effort of willpower she resisted, and went back out to the coffee machine.

It wasn't until three o'clock that she allowed herself to break the embargo. As her hand closed around the phone she felt a rush of excitement and relief. Then she saw that she had twenty-four WhatsApp messages, five missed calls, and two voicemails. Every single one of them was from her older sister, words to the effect of "Where are you?" and "Have we got the date wrong?" and "Are you okay?"

She remembered now: Emily and Daria were supposed to be visiting this weekend. She'd forgotten about it because she'd written it down on a scrap of paper instead of in her calendar, and then when someone asked to swap a shift with her she had looked at the calendar and seen nothing there. She called her sister back.

"Oh my God," she began as soon as there was an answer. "I'm really sorry, I'm so useless, were you waiting in the rain? What are you up to? Did you find a cafŽ or something?"

There were voices in the background.

"It's fine!" said Emily, laughing at something. "Your flatmate let us in."

"Oh? Which one?"

"Er," said Emily, pausing, and then quieter, as if she'd moved the phone away from her mouth: "I'm so sorry, remind me what your name is?"

"Alfie," came Alfie's voice.

"Alfie!" said Emily, full volume again. "We're just having a beer. When are you getting back?"

2

Alfie had returned home that afternoon to find two women standing at the entrance to his building. He held the door open for them, assuming they were waiting to be buzzed up, and they walked behind him up the stairs to the second floor, then followed him along the corridor that led to number twelve.

"Oh!" one of them had said when he put his key in the door. "Do you live in this flat?"

"Y-yes?" said Alfie, suddenly wondering whether he did or not.

"Then you know Hazel?"

Alfie felt his face warm up. "I know Hazel, yeah. Are you . . . ?"

"Her sister," said the woman, holding out her hand, which he shook. "Emily." Her hair was the same dark blondish color as Hazel's, only it was cut just above her shoulders and she had a fringe. "This is my wife, Daria," she said.

"Nice to meet you both," he replied. "I'm Alfie. Come in."

"So where is she, do you know?" said Emily as they piled in through the door.

"At work, I think. Were you expecting her to be here?"

Emily sighed and exchanged glances with Daria, who laughed and said, "Oh my God."

"She knew we were coming!" cried Emily. "We discussed it! She said she was free! I'm so sorry, turning up on your doorstep like this. We were supposed to be staying here for a couple of days. Hazel, honestly."

"She never mentioned it," said Alfie, in surprise. He considered himself fairly easygoing, as a rule, but he wouldn't have minded a little advance notice. "I guess she forgot."

"Is it inconvenient?" said Daria, looking worried. "We could probably find a Travelodge or something?"

"Oh, no!" cried Alfie. "Don't be silly." He smiled broadly, for good measure. He couldn't honestly say it was convenient, when he'd had hopes of being the sole or at least the main object of Hazel's attention that evening, but they seemed nice enough, and he didn't want them to feel unwelcome. "It shouldn't be too long before she gets back," he said. "Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee? Or a beer?"

They requested beer, and sat sipping it at the kitchen table while he gathered up all the dirty dishes and stacked them next to the sink. "Sorry," he muttered, leaning across them to wipe the crumbs off the table, and they sat back a little to give him more space. They talked all the while, unfazed, telling him about Australia, where they'd been living for two years while Daria did a postdoc at the University of Melbourne. They'd been back a fortnight. Daria had been offered a permanent job at the University of East Anglia, Emily told him proudly, putting a hand on Daria's shoulder.

Daria smiled, looking slightly embarrassed. "Which means we need to find a place to live in Norwich," she said hurriedly, "which is why we're here. We've got some house viewings on Monday. You're only a couple of stops from Liverpool Street so you're saving us a good two hours' traveling time." They were staying with Emily's parents in rural Kent, they explained, which had no direct transport links to any of the places they needed to go, and no decent coffee either, and certainly no decent vegan food.

At the first break in the conversation Alfie excused himself and hurried to the bathroom, ostensibly to use it, but really to make it halfway presentable before either of them went in there. A deep scowl settled on his face as he removed Hazel's hair from the shower and Tony's shaving scum from the sink. He couldn't remember whose turn it was to clean that week, but it certainly wasn't his. When it looked less like an undergraduate hovel he returned to the kitchen and opened a beer. Emily and Daria launched into an interrogation, asking him how long he'd been in London (eight years) and how long he'd been in the flat (four months). What had possessed him to move into a shithole like this, Emily asked ("Em!" cried Daria), and he wondered if he should have bothered cleaning the bathroom after all. He told them he wasn't long out of a relationship and this was just an interim measure.

"Oh man, sorry," said Daria, and he said it was fine, which it was, sort of, only he wasn't sure they believed him. They were quiet for a while, and then Emily pointed at an empty Yazoo bottle in the recycling bin and said, "You can tell Hazel lives here."

At the mention of Hazel, whose fondness for chocolate milk was juvenile and very charming, Alfie's cheeks warmed again. What was it like living with her, Emily wanted to know, and he replied that it was good, fine, great. He would have stopped there but they were looking at him expectantly, so he said he wouldn't object to her taking the cleaning rota a little more seriously, and they laughed, satisfied.

"So are you an academic too?" he asked Emily, keen to change the subject.

"Oh God, no. I'm a software engineer."

Alfie said that was cool; he wished he was a bit more techy. The world was your oyster when you were techy. Emily asked what he did, and he told them about primary teaching and the school where he worked.

"I've got a uni friend who's just left teaching," said Emily. "She was written off for three months. Stress. Then she just said fuck it."

"I'm not surprised," said Alfie. "We've had one or two at our school. I've thought about quitting so many times. I just can't really see myself being any good at anything else."

From there began a discussion about education policy, during which Alfie talked in great depth about SATs and phonics and academization, and Emily and Daria groaned in all the right places, and frowned, and asked him lots of very pertinent questions that required time-consuming answers. Then they talked about governments, British and Australian and American, and then about where they were the night Donald Trump got elected. Alfie had had a beautiful dream about Hillary winning, he recounted, then woken up at four a.m. with a jolt of nervous dread.

They were on to Brexit when Hazel rang. After that they talked about climate change and the many ways in which they were all fucked, and they must have kept this up for quite a while because suddenly the door banged and Hazel was there, looking at them all with bemusement.

"Fancy seeing you here," said Emily.

"I'm really sorry," Hazel replied, pulling out a chair. She had a stud in her nose and her hair was done in a complicated sort of plait. A few strands were coming loose about her face. She was smiling apologetically, which brought out her dimples. Or maybe it was just the one dimple, Alfie couldn't quite remember. She was sitting side-on, so that he couldn't see the other cheek.

"You should have messaged me yesterday," Hazel continued.

"Don't victim blame!" said Emily. "You're just a flake!" She reached over and squeezed Hazel's face until her lips were folded up and bulging. "What are you?"