The Woman He Loved Before by Dorothy Koomson Read Free Book Online

tears that were building up behind my face, and were already sealing up my throat.
    I heard him get up and pause for a moment, probably to put his sunglasses back on. He came down to the bottom step, stopped beside for me for a second. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.
    I nodded. I knew he was and turning up here was a brave thing to do. If it hadn’t all been so painful, I would have told him so. Instead, I stood still, my head bowed until I heard his car start up and drive away.
    Tears slid slowly and continuously down my face as I picked up my shopping bags, ready to slip back into my life as if last night had never happened.
    *
     
    ‘We’re going to have to go to theatre
now
, that bleed in her spleen seems to be getting worse and we need to get in there now if we’re going to save her.’
    Are you sure it’s my spleen that’s bleeding?
I think
. Because I’ve always thought that it’s my heart that’s too soft and easily damaged. I’ve always thought that maybe I was born with a bleeding heart.
    October, 2008
    I became a beauty therapist because I couldn’t be a biochemist any more. Well, I could, if I decided that not eating or living with my parents were viable lifestyle choices.
    I had emerged from university ready to save the world, hoping to find a way to make a difference. The research I had chosen to do wasn’t anywhere near the ‘hot topic’ it had become now; at the time no one cared if the move towards using biofuels (things like soya and corn in place of petrol) would adversely affect the world’s food resources and what we could do about it. And those who did care were not the people you financially got into bed with. So after a year of struggling to do what I wanted, I decided to stop. I didn’t want to find a job that was nearly but not quite in that area because what was the point? I wasn’t the sort of person who settled for second best, so I decided if I couldn’t do what was my real passion, I’d find a new passion. And that lay at the other end of the scale for my qualifications – beauty. It still involved chemistry and biology, indulged my love of make-up and lotions and potions, but I could train to do it in under a year, could continually train in new specialities and I would get paid in the here and now.
    The surprising thing was that I loved it. I mean, really loved it. I loved the chemical analysis of finding the right products for a person’s skin, the science-like methodology of any treatment or process. I also loved seeing the results on people’s faces when they looked in the mirror and saw what I saw when I worked on them – not the imperfections, but all the perfections that made up who they were.
    Being a beauty therapist had many perks – being taken seriously by the world was not one of them. I saw the ‘idiot’ label flash up on people’s faces when they spotted the beautician’s coat. They thought I didn’t have more than two brain cells to rub together, and that I sat around filing my nails and thinking about make-up all day. Who was I to shatter their illusions?
    Who was I to point out that to be a successful qualified, certified beauty therapist you needed to understand the human body, understand chemistry and know how to successfully communicate with people? Who was I to explain to them that when you were faced with poverty or wearing a beautician’s uniform, the uniform would win every time? Anyone who said they would rather starve than do a job like mine, hadn’t been poor enough, hadn’t had to make – more than once – the choice between food and heat. Choices like that focused the mind and hardened the heart to any sneers you might get from people who didn’t know you.
    Except possibly when you were crouched behind the life-sized wooden cutout of a female lifeguard holding a male swimmer at the entrance to Brighton Pier, clutching your bag to your chest and praying against hope that the man you had a one-night stand with nearly three months