Love Is A Thief. Claire Garber

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

       prologue

      The bog standard public display of being over your last relationship is when you get yourself into a new one. It’s like holding a giant banner in the air that reads:

       ‘Look at me, everyone! I have found someone else. I am OK. Someone else wants me. Someone else needs me. Someone else chooses to be with me. My last relationship was insignificant, barely noticeable in fact, like bellybutton fluff. My ex-girlfriend is just like the fluff from my belly.’

      I think it’s all crap. I think the public sign you are over your last relationship is when you don’t care about the public sign. That said, I do have feelings, and Gabriel starting a new relationship just a few weeks after we broke up, well, that was emotional pain on a level I’d never previously known. Whether or not I believed in the validity of his stupid relationship with an emaciated French girl with fake tits and limited intellectual abilities, he had found someone else, they were on holiday together, and they were taking photos, lots of photos, and putting them on Facebook in an album entitled True Love while I was, well, I was bellybutton fluff.

      But it wasn’t just that I had lost Gabriel, it was that I was so goddamn sad about breaking up with him that even the thought of being with someone else made me feel sick. I didn’t want to kiss anyone else. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone else. I didn’t want to share my home with anyone else. I wanted him. So as I couldn’t cope with replacing him, and I couldn’t speed up the process of healing from him, I just needed to fill up the time.

      Because the reality is, I might just be ‘that’ girl. You know the one. The girl who, for no particular reason, doesn’t get the guy, doesn’t have children, doesn’t get the romantic happy ever after. So I needed to come up with a plan. I needed to get back to basics. I needed to ask myself a few important questions:

      What did I like doing?

      What didn’t I get to do because I was with Gabriel?

      What didn’t I get to do because I fell in love?

      More importantly, what would I be happy spending the rest of my life doing if love never showed up again?

      Now that was a starting point I was interested in.

       the beginning

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      In 1990 a man called Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. He was trying to find a way for particle physicists to access the same information at the same time from wherever they were working in the world.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      As with so many things in life, the end result turned out to be a little different from the initial objective. The seed he planted grew into something so far-reaching it touched every single one of us in an infinite number of different ways.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      The Internet now provides us with free accessible education. It can teach you a second language, how to cobble a shoe, how to install a new kitchen or build a satellite that will orbit the moon.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      You can run your business off it, meet the love of your life on it, find the recipe for a mushroom risotto before fixing your own kettle then learning the origins of the word ‘broken’.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      You can also see images of just about anything you want. I’ve seen the inside of an atom; the surface of Mars; the expression on Mandela’s face the day he was released from prison.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      But what the Internet has most recently shown me, its greatest gift of all, is a set of photos of my ex-fiancé on holiday with what I can only assume is his new girlfriend. And in these photos, although I’m no Tim Berners-Lee, I’m pretty sure I can see his fully functioning, fully operational, Internet-connected mobile phone. The very same phone he currently seems unable to answer.

       ‘Hi, this is Gabriel. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message I will call you back.’

      ‘Well, she’s obviously not going to get off the floor,’ Federico said, to my grandma. They’d stopped speaking to me about 45 minutes earlier. They spoke about me, around me, over me, across me, but never actually to me. My grandma reached down and tried to take the phone from my hand but my fingers were stuck around it like a human claw or a strange device that unconventional men might purchase in Soho.

      ‘Darling Kate, you need to give me the phone,’ she said, trying once again to prise it away. I gripped on as if it were my only remaining portal back home. A small circle of people had formed around us. Apparently it’s not commonplace for a 30-year-old woman to sit in the middle of Heathrow Terminal Five, surround herself with her own luggage and start weeping.

      ‘Just one more try?’ I pleaded with Grandma while Federico wandered from person to person regaling them with stories of the origins of my tears.

      ‘Well, I told her that, yes, I did. I told her when she moved there. I said, “You can’t trust the French,” and not on account of their political history, of which I am a great great fan, especially that adorable Marie Antoinette—have you seen the film? Fabulous costumes, fabulous, although terribly restrictive of the female form. No, I mean on account of the language