Never Google Heartbreak by Emma Garcia Read Free Book Online

lovely. Very subtle.’
    She smiles and whips out a hairdryer and a huge roll of a brush. I see steam rising from my head as she blasts away. She sprays and teases the sections around my face, shows me the back. I nod even though I suspect my hair might look a bit like a helmet. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. She brushes me down and leads me back to the skinny receptionist, who cheerfully takes payment. ‘That’s two hundred pounds, please.’
    I swallow and pass over my credit card. I glance at the bill; fifteen pounds of it was wine. It’s worth it, though. It’s the best hairdresser’s in London. My hair will look great when I get home and mess with it a bit.
    ‘Your hair looks lovely. Are you pleased?’ asks the receptionist as I key in my PIN.
    ‘Oh yes! It’s great. It’s really great. I think it’s great,’ I say, and for some reason I start to laugh. I give a little wave, stumble out of the door and scuttle away to meet Lucy.
    It feels scarily windy around my ears. Are people looking at me funny? Are they looking at my hair? I think a girl back there by the tube might have been. Luckily the place where I’m meeting Lucy is only round the corner; I can get her verdict and fiddle with my hair in the loos. The bar is an underground tavern where the wine is great and they do nice tapas, our usual swifty venue. I clunk down the spiral staircase and spot Lucy at one of the corner tables with a bottle and two glasses.
    ‘What do you think?’ I ask her, fluffing up the sides of my head.
    ‘Have you had it done?’ She squints as I sit opposite her.
    ‘Er, yeah. It took three hours to look like this.’
    ‘Actually, it is a bit shorter at the top.’ She lifts her bottom out of the seat to peer at my crown. ‘Oh! Quite a lot shorter.’
    ‘What? Is it?’ I feel about and touch some frighteningly tufty layers. ‘Does it look all right?’
    ‘It looks nice.’
    ‘Nice? I don’t want nice! I just spent two hundred quid.’
    ‘You spent two hundred pounds on your hair?’ she asks, incredulous.
    ‘I had a full head of lowlights.’
    ‘You spent two hundred pounds having your hair made slightly more brown?’
    ‘Yes, Lucy, I did.’ I pour a glass of wine and glance at Lucy’s silky hair, so silky that her ears poke through. How could she understand, bless her?
    ‘Well . . . no, good luck to you. Is that eighties cut back in, then?’
    I pick up the tapas menu. ‘Poor Lucy. Don’t be jealous of my loveliness.’
    ‘But you are so beauootiful,’ she says in a Disney way.
    ‘I know, it’s a burden,’ I say. She raises her glass and we chink. ‘Let me tell you about the dress . . .’
    We finish the bottle and order another and talk through every aspect of Saturday. How I should be when I meet him. What I’ll do if he wants to talk. How I should be gracious about his new girlfriend. And then I take a taxi home and text Lucy to say what a great mate she is. She texts back,
‘So are you, babe.
’ And I realise I didn’t ask her a single thing about her man under the covers.
    It’s Friday, I drank a lot of wine, I feel rough and I’m late for work – extremely bad since I need a long lunch today for the waxing bonanza.
    My hair this morning looks a bit like Tina Turner’s wig. The top layers are so short I can’t even get them into a ponytail. The woman must have gone wild with the thinning scissors at the back where I couldn’t see. And lowlights? Talk about emperor’s new clothes. I try not to cry as I flatten some of it with hairspray, but the back sticks stubbornly up. I look like an ill cockatoo and I have to go.
    On the bus I check my diary in case there’s something at work I’ve forgotten. I look at Saturday. I’ve drawn a big heart shape on Saturday. The day I will win back my man! But also Jane’s wedding day, obviously. I’m not sure we’ll see so much of Jane once she marries Hugo. He never lets her out of his sight as it is. You try to talk to her