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‘Ah, ooh, she is just SUCH a cow!’ I exclaimed again.
‘She’s fine. Now, go out and buy the biscuits.’
‘What! After all that – you must be joking.’
‘Unless you want “all that” every night for the rest of your life, I would go and buy the biscuits.’
‘Fine, fine, fine. I will go and buy the biscuits. Then, I will pee on the biscuits.’
I ended up heading to the gigantic supermarket which is open all night, all the time. I think they keep the staff caged there, like animals. They all have rickets from being out of natural light for so long.
I hate supermarkets. I can stand for hours in the shampoo section, stymied. Should I be putting fruit in my hair? What will happen if I don’t? What is shampoo, anyway? Are there any more foods just out there waiting to be discovered? Etc, etc. As usual, it took me three hours to collect a more or less random selection of products, plus fourteen packets of Penguins. I’d wanted Josh to come with me or, ideally, volunteer to do it himself, but he’d started to get a bit shifty and got out work files to do stern lawyer stuff with – like, as if.
Finally I wandered home, feeling a bit mournful and stopping to put my bags down every five minutes.
When I walked in, the house was very quiet. Josh was locked away in his room – I hoped it was with his Playstation – and Addison had disappeared. I had never even seen him go to the toilet. I liked that. He was too unearthly for bodily functions. Men, or at least the ones I’ve always known, think that it’s endearing to you if they fart a lot. Addison wouldn’t be like that. And then, they’d smell of angel dew.
Feeling mildly nauseous, I backed my way into the kitchen with my sixteen bags, swung them round to dump them on the table and accidentally clobbered Kate on the side of the head. With the one with the tin cans in.
‘Ow!’ she growled at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I cringed, though I wasn’t really. But I didn’t want her to think I’d done it on purpose.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’
‘Oh, forget it,’ she said.
I did a mental double take. That didn’t sound like Kate. Surely she should be demanding my first-born child and threatening to take me to court.
‘Really, I am sorry,’ I said again, putting the rest of the bags down. I saw her properly for the first time. Her eyes were all red, and she was doing the giveaway, back-of-the-mouth sniff. As a world-class crier myself, I knew what had been going on.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked, as sincerely as I could, which of course meant it came out sounding like I was a confessional TV host.
‘I’m fine, really.’ She sniffed properly, and patted down her immaculately glossy hair. Now, there was someone who knew a bit about shampoo.
I started to unpack the shopping.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, casually, as if I was a trained counsellor and did this kind of thing all the time.
‘Nothing … nothing. Oh GOD.’ Her face completely collapsed into tears. ‘I HATE him. I really, really, really, really HATE him! And he doesn’t even CARE!’
I put down the tin of Heinz spaghetti (where had that come from? Had I let a four-year-old do the shopping?) and sat down beside her.
‘There you go,’ I said, patting her lightly on the arm and saying the things you’re supposed to. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Absolutely, he’s a bastard.’
‘You don’t even know him!’ she snivelled.
‘OK, is he a bastard?’
‘YEESSS!’
I patted her harder. ‘OK. Tell me, what happened?’
Her sobbing slowed down a little bit.
‘I was seeing this guy, and I really liked him and I thought … well, stupid bloody me, eh, how dare I think that I could ever go out with someone who wasn’t MARRIED?’
‘Oh no!’ I thought of what Josh had said. ‘I’m really sorry. Didn’t he tell you?’
‘He said he thought I knew. I asked him to come out for my birthday and he said he couldn’t, he had to take Saffy to the dentist …’
‘Who’s Saffy?’
‘That’s what I said. Then he coughed and said, ehm, it was his dog.’
‘A dog dentist.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So you guessed from that?’
‘Ehm, no. I believed him.’
‘Ooh, nasty.’
She hiccuped. ‘Then I went in to give him a surprise birthday present a day early …’
‘But it’s your birthday.’
She ignored me and sniffed even harder. ‘And he’d left his wallet open on the desk … and I saw a picture of Saffy.’
‘Not a dog?’
‘A five-year-old girl!’
‘Well, kind of a bit like a dog then …’
‘No!’
‘He could be divorced, couldn’t he?’
‘He isn’t. I asked him. And now it’s all over.’ She started sobbing again.
‘Why did no one else in the office tell you this?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t really … talk to the girls in the office.’
I bet you don’t, I thought. In fact, they probably set you up.
‘Would you like some Heinz spaghetti?’
She thought about it for a moment.
‘Yes, please.’
We sat and ate spaghetti in silence. I wanted to broach the topic of Josh, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Also, whenever I’m in Kate’s presence and trying to think of something to say, I always have a horrible compulsion that I’m about to accidentally mention Pop-Tarts, like Basil Fawlty and the Germans.
Kate appeared slightly coy and lifted up her fork.
‘Ummm … would you like to come out for my birthday?’
‘Sure!’ I said. I was so relieved she wasn’t giving me trouble, I’d agreed before I realized what I’d just committed myself to.
Josh wasn’t coming to Kate’s birthday do. He was on parental duty. His parents were officially now genteel poor, living in a huge house they could no longer afford to run. They’d been cleaned out by that, Josh’s education, and the education of his three sisters, who were all beautiful, and all completely stupid. Despite these extremely positive attributes, none of the girls had ever got married, which meant no new influx of old money into the fforbes’ family coffers. The family, though, were holding up very well, marching on with some good stories and a lot of dogs and gin and tonics.
Which left, as far as I could make out, all of Kate’s City friends and, ahem, me. Actually, I wanted to go. Young, rich, probably good-looking men … I liked the sound of it. Obviously, I was going to marry Addison, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get taken to nice restaurants in the meantime.
Unfortunately, everything I had to wear was grubby – the market was going to make you dirty anyway, so it scarcely mattered – apart from my pyjamas, and I didn’t think they would cut it. Finally, I dug up an old black summer dress which was so faded it could pass as grey, the colour du jour, apparently. It was too chilly, even in April, to wear it, and as I didn’t have a tan it gave me an air of being clinically dead, but it really was all I had, which depressed me more than I wanted to think about.
I teamed it with my favourite daisy necklace and twirled in the mirror. I looked nine.
I was meeting Kate and her gang at some posh pub over an ice rink near Liverpool Street station. It was mobbed and full of braying, identical young men, who had rather better skin than the young men I’d grown up with but were just the same old wankers – with money.
‘You’ve got to take it to the EXTREME!’ one rather red-faced young man was hollering to his chum, two feet away.
‘Quite!’ the other, equally stolid, chap bawled back. ‘That’s why I’m chartering a helicopter in the Canadian Rockies next season!’
‘Uh … yars! Me too!’
The women were all eerily like Kate: their hair was shiny, and their lips were pursed. In fact, it was quite difficult to track Kate down in the thicket of size-eight Nicole Farhi, but I spotted her eventually. She didn’t exactly appear overjoyed to see me, which pissed me off – I was feeling a bit off-the-beam as it was.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she said a little stiffly – reminding me that we were only forty-eight hours from wanting to murder each other. I nodded stiffly back, handed her a parcel and looked around. There were about eight guys in various stages of hee-hawing: my kinds of odds, I thought to myself. All around were champagne bottles and buckets.
‘Great!’ shouted one of the men. ‘More champagne!’
I realized they were talking to me, and I panicked. Meanwhile, Kate had opened my present – a furry penguin. I’d thought it would be funny, but everyone stared at it in disdain.
‘Oh, how charmante,’ said one of the blokes, before the company stared at me one more time, cottoned on to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to be buying them any champagne, then turned back to each other.
Kate gave me a half smile, and handed me a glass of champagne, then prodded the man to her right.
‘James, this is Holly.’
James grunted at me. Kate leaned over to the person he was talking to, and nudged him as well.
‘And this is James B.’
‘James B.’ I nodded.
‘And over there are Jamie Egbert, Jim, and, ehm, Finn.’
Only Finn heard and tilted up his head. At first sight he looked a little odd, and I couldn’t work out what it was. Then I realized that his tie was loosened, and he appeared to be wearing dirty spectacles. This reassured me, and I gave him a rather gushy grin, which clearly terrified him, as he instantly returned to staring at his glass.
‘So!’ said Kate brightly. ‘This is all very nice.’
‘Who are all these Jameses?’ I asked her.
‘Work colleagues, mostly,’ she said.
‘All of them?’
‘Err, yes.’
‘Birthdays can be horrid, can’t they?’ I said sympathetically.
‘What do you mean?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing! Lovely champagne.’
I played with the glass for a second, then tried to lean into the two Jameses’ conversation. They were talking ferociously about tax liability and the nastiness of the government for trying to extract money from their enormous pay-cheques to finance boring old services, and they managed to avoid looking me in the eye for ages whilst I tried to think of a ploy to enter the conversation.
‘I hate tax too,’ I announced when one of them paused for breath. ‘Mind you, I don’t pay more than ten pee in the pound.’
They raised their eyebrows at me. ‘Really? What do you do with it? Is it offshore?’ asked James 1.
‘God, I wish I could figure it out,’ said James 2. ‘Did you form a limited company? What’s your secret?’
‘Ehmm … actually, most years I, just, ehm, fall below the threshold,’ I mumbled.
Their faces registered shock, then instant embarrassment at registering shock – after all, they were terribly well brought up boys.
‘Oh, lucky you,’ said one of them, then clearly wished he hadn’t. I felt an absolute pariah; you really shouldn’t go drinking in the City unless you have at least one toe made of gold or something.
‘What do you do?’ asked James 2, regretting he’d ever bothered to focus on me.
‘Ehm …’ I thought frantically. This conversation, however demeaning, was the only thing I had going on, and it was about to finish two seconds after I said ‘florist’. And they may all have been wankers, but they were handsome, rich wankers, so a girl has got to try. Now, let me see: Astronaut? Philosopher? Nurse? Ooh, they loved that.
‘I’m a nurse,’ I said. It was worth it just to see their little faces light up.
‘Way-hey!’ shouted one of them. ‘What kind of nurse?’
I took another slurp of champagne. ‘I work in the … waterworks department.’
James 2 turned white.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve washed my hands.’
‘Oi! Jimmy! Egbert! Finn! Come and meet Kate’s flatmate – she’s a nurse!’
