Page 3 of I Know How This Ends
I ’ m all about the data, so here’s mine:
Name: Margot Wayward (or “Maggie”/“Meg” to my grandfather)
Nationality: British/Australian
Location: Bristol
Profession: Meteorologist
Height: 5'10" (or “six foot” if you’re a man on a dating app)
Weight: None of your damn business
Star sign: I’m not even going to humor this question
Pets: No thanks
Looking for: Still very much figuring that out, with the help of a collection of data and multiple notepads lined up on my kitchen counter
It tells you almost nothing about me, right?
I love information as much as anyone, but the truth is usually in the details we try to hide.
What this data doesn’t tell you is that I haven’t washed my current bra in eight days but would rather die than admit that to anyone, I use hair grips to pick my ears when nobody is watching, and I have an errant hair on my cheek that grows to whisker length if I don’t regularly cut it with scissors.
It doesn’t tell you that I frequently close kitchen cabinet doors by kicking them or that I will “leave a saucepan to soak” for a full three days and once got drunk and bought a new one instead of just washing up the old one.
It doesn’t tell you that I have a PhD from Imperial College but don’t know the alphabet without singing the song first, or
that I clip my toenails over the toilet and don’t always pick them up if they shoot across the bathroom. I am snappy and entitled
with my Alexa, even though she’s never anything but helpful, and I only wear navy, black and white because I like to convince
myself I’m sophisticated and French, which I am very much not: I’m just lazy.
I am acerbic, judgmental, impatient, hypocritical, sometimes imperious.
I can be both arrogant and also deeply insecure.
I am a slob but irritatingly meticulous, childish and prickly; I instinctively don’t like seventy percent of humans and make
that painfully clear within seconds of meeting anyone new; I’m not a fan of most animals (with the exception of tortoises,
armadillos, hermit crabs, turtles, basically anything with a hard, impenetrable shell—you see where I’m going with this metaphor).
I’m nowhere near as funny as I try to convince myself I am.
Or as self-aware.
And none of this is written on my dating profile, because if it was, there would be no Married John, no Mister Olive Calculator,
no Sir Body Count. If I told the truth about who I actually am, it would be a wasteland of nothing and nobody, so instead
I judge others for editing themselves favorably too. I search relentlessly for the data in others while keeping the data of
myself locked safely away behind a password I refuse to share.
I hide the truth behind other, lesser truths: from men, if not from myself.
Frankly, it is exhausting and my love life is not unlike one of the cardboard boxes lying in my hallway: packed up with swear words written across the front, Sellotaped shut and easy to ignore until it falls over and smashes everywhere.
At which point, I simply step right over it.
Eight months ago, I left my job as chief meteorologist at the Met Office in Exeter, moved back to my home town of Bristol
and started @MargotTheMeteorologist, an Instagram account where I, Margot, talk about—shockingly, prepare yourselves—the weather.
I used to spend my work days sitting in an office and examining enormous swathes of data coming in from approximately two
hundred and sixty synoptic weather stations from around the UK, but I now spend them making short videos about special clouds
and bending winds, flash floods and graupel.
Bored and lonely, I started responding to every comment and to everyone in my inbox, where people started turning up in ever-increasing
droves to ask extremely specific questions about what the weather might be like at their granddaughter’s christening next
Saturday, in Hull, at 2 p.m. (Raining, always raining.)
A couple of celebrities shared my posts, and my followers rapidly grew.
Before I knew it, my page had grown to 250k+ followers and I was making enough money from advertisers and sponsors to stop
looking for a meteorology job because I had found one, entirely by accident. Enough money to put toward a deposit on a Clifton
flat with a tiny, unnecessary guest bedroom. Enough money to live off takeout and buy clothes online at 3 a.m. when I’m too
tired to sleep, which I then fail to return because I’m too tired to go to the Post Office. Enough to enjoy literally none
of it while I keep up with a work schedule that has escalated from time-consuming to time-obliterating. It’s also steadily
giving me the posture of an orangutan as I hunch over my phone or laptop, eating pot noodles and optimistically scanning the
ingredients for a vitamin content that patently isn’t there.
Not that I’m complaining—it’s my digital baby—but it’s making it hard to stop the rest of my life from unraveling as fast as I frantically knit my career together.
Every day, in between making new content, looking up data and responding to messages and emails, my phone peeps like a hungry newborn penguin.
Today’s missed notifications:
Eve: How was Date 15? Is it love?
Jules: It’s obviously not love or she’d have told us already
Eve: She could still be enjoying the love haha ;)
Jules: Then she’d definitely have told us. Probably during. Stats and observations etc
Eve: laugh face
Jules: You can’t just say “laugh face” Eve what’s wrong with you
Eve: It was supposed to convert automatically sad face
Missed call: Mum and Dad
Eve: Maggie? Worried. CONFIRM ALIVE STATUS.
Jules: It’s OK, I’ve just seen a new post on Insta—she survived D15 hurray
Missed call: Mum and Dad
Missed call: Mum and Dad
Missed call: Mum and Dad
Grandad: Hello Meg thin
Grandad: king of you
Grandad: hop you gah
Grandad: well make
Grandad: sure
Grandad: you are wearing substreet
Eve: Maggie are you still coming?
Jules: That’s what he said
Grandad: Substreet
Missed call: Mum and Dad
Grandad: SUBSTREET
Eve: Shall I resend address?
Grandad: I MEAN SUNSCREEN. Grandad
In the meantime, my burner phone has been chirping up like a younger sibling dancing in front of the television for extra
attention. Not that I have any siblings, but I spent enough time at Jules’s house when I was a child to know exactly how annoying
it is.
Morning Margot! How’s your day going? Henry xxx
It’s hot today isn’t it? X
I think I’ve burned my eyelids LOL. Not a good look. Xx
What are you up to? Xxxxx
Sighing, I put my laptop down for the twentieth time.
Last night, Henry was looking so promising—delightfully succinct and Darcy-like, a man of few words and, hopefully, knee-high boots—but he’s already irritating me.
It feels like I’ve accidentally subscribed to a mailing list simply by adding an item to my cart.
Why doesn’t he have anyone else to text?
Why so many kisses? Why does he think the logical solution to three unanswered texts is to send yet another one?
Ping.
And a totally unrelated GIF of a dancing cat.
Teeth gritted, I reply:
Hello! Sorry, super busy with work. Yes, super hot. Nice cat.
Can we leave it until our dinner to chat?
Margot x
There’s a short silence while I wonder if Henry is single because his last girlfriend walked him up a mountain, took his profile
photo and left him there because he wouldn’t stop sending her unrelated GIFs of otters holding hands.
Ping.
Really sorry. I’ve only just started online dating. I’ll rein it in. H
I’ll just go ahead and add nasty cow to my long list of character flaws.
No—I’m sorry. Just overwhelmed with work. Really looking forward to meeting you. Hope the eyelids are better soon. See you
on Monday! Xx
Then I rub my eyes, yawn and blink at my watch.
It’s nearly 6 p.m. already and yet another day has disappeared, evaporating like the ocean carried by strong trade winds.
Everything hurts. Back, hands, neck, arms, the deepening frown line between my eyebrows. I’m steadily becoming one of those
projections of what humans will look like in a hundred years: a semicircle with claws for hands and no discernible chin.
My phone peeps again.
Eve: Where are you? Should we wait?
What do they mean, where am—
It’s Tuesday. Panicking, I glance down at myself—black shorts, navy tank top, something crusty stuck to the front (freeze-dried carrot?)—then
give up and sling a long, bobbly navy cardigan over the top so I look a bit like a grandma getting ready to flash someone
in a park. I thrust on some cheap flip-flops, hop over the smashed dinner plates, grab my keys and trip over yet another box
on the way out.
“Fuck fuck fuck—”
Nearly there!
I lie as I start shuffling down the road.
Sorry sorry.
My Instagram account may be my baby—in a figurative, emotional, physically draining sense—but there’s another, much more literal
baby that needs my full attention now.
“Bloody hell,” Jules says as I burst into the clinic room. “We could hear you clacking all the way down the corridor like
a shire horse.”
“Or someone having sex,” Eve says from the bed. “Badly.”
Then she starts giggling and quickly clapping her hands together to demonstrate. Somebody has already been given valium.
“Sorry,” I say again, adjusting my face mask and hairnet. “I told Alexa to set an alarm, but I shouted at her yesterday and
I think she’s still sulking.”
The nurse, physician, embryologist and sonographer have all paused so they can assess the obligatory turquoise gown I have accidentally put on backward, like a superhero cloak.
This is Embryo Transfer Number Six, and it makes fifteen dates look like child’s play, inappropriate pun intended.
At the end of a bad date, I have a belly full of Italian food and a slightly grumpy sense of despair and more time wasted.
Eve gets to go through cramps, bloating, hormonal fluctuations, nausea, fatigue and an enormous series of hefty cheques, and—so far—her poor little belly has remained empty.