Again, there was laughter. The group split in two like a cell dividing, and Richard peeled off to talk to the man on his right about an online start-up business that was creating ‘buzz’. Richard traded numbers with him, and they spoke to each other with purpose, while Malcolm, the American and Eve were left, with the only thread of connection still being Elise. Around them, there were bursts of laughter and conversation, the tinkling of glasses and the opening of cans of beer, layered on top of music and the smell of dope.
‘I always thought it sounded like such good old English school fun.’ The American had to shout a bit now. ‘Something out of a Famous Five book. My high school was all about the cafeteria, fried food and lots of girls wearing lots of make-up and short skirts and thinking they had reached the pinnacle of life because they could spell small words with pompoms. I thought it was you.’
‘No, wasn’t me,’ Eve said. ‘I’m Australian. Went to school a long way away from here.’
‘Oh, okay, not you.’ The American shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway, it seemed so foreign to me,’ she said. ‘So wonderful and foreign. Where’s a long way away, then?’
‘Sydney,’ Eve said.
Malcolm raised his eyebrows for no reason. Maybe he was saying ‘another one’, Eve thought.
‘That is a long way away,’ the American said when the pause became too long. They all took a sip of their drinks at the same time, and then let them fall at the same time, and then nodded at the same time, the synchronised movements so awkward.
‘It was a long time ago, too,’ Eve said. ‘A long, long time ago.’
Malcolm obviously didn’t feel the need to contribute.
‘I wish I knew then what I do now,’ the American said.
Eve looked over Malcolm’s head at what was happening in the room, in case there was someone from the orchestra she knew. Somebody was passing around a tray of mini-quiches. She looked at the American, who she guessed was on the precipice of over-sharing, and began to calculate exit strategies.
‘What are you girls talking about? You wish you knew what?’ Malcolm asked.
‘You know,’ the American said. ‘That it was probably the biggest gift in the long run not to be one of those girls.’
Malcolm still looked perplexed and took another sip of his drink.
‘Oh, you don’t get it,’ the American said and sighed dramatically. ‘I just wish I knew then that it would actually serve me better in life not to be the girl with everything at school. You know, the anointed one. I agonised at the time, but I’m the one who left Cedar Rapids because my career took me around the world. I’m good at my job, I’ve turned out more than fine with men, but, god, at the time, I was fifteen and going down in flames every day. I’m here now, and those girls peaked at eighteen.’
‘What do you do?’ Eve asked.
‘I’m a risk-management analyst.’
‘Oh,’ Eve said. ‘Great. Risk management? It takes you around the world. That’s great.’
‘Maybe you should have become like that mother in the US who got a hit man to kill the cheerleading captain, Kathy? Locked the doors and took her out mid-gym class,’ Malcolm said, missing a beat.
‘I would put more than Renee Rogers on my hit list, that’s for sure,’ Kathy said, and they laughed. ‘I have a list. There were some fucking evil girls,’ she continued, her voice louder now – so loud that Richard and his conversation partner turned for a second to see what they were talking about. Then they turned back.
‘I love how you girls never forget a name from school,’ Malcolm said. ‘You can’t remember someone you worked with for five years when you run into them on the street, but if you went to school with them twenty years ago, clear as day.’
‘You know what I mean,’ Kathy said, looking at Eve. ‘I’d do things differently. I think everyone would. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ Eve said to the American trying to claim her. Then she made a show of discovering that her glass was empty. ‘But you can’t go back. I’m just going to get another.’
Richard was deep in conversation, and Eve mouthed to him that she was going to the kitchen. He pulled out of the conversation and swung around towards her.
‘Do you want one? I just need to go to the bathroom first.’ Eve was careful to say ‘bathroom’ she once asked where the toilet was at a dinner party and Richard didn’t speak to her for two days. He wrote, in very small, perfect letters, on a Post-it note the next morning addressed to ‘The Girl with an Intellectual Disability in the House’ and left in her underwear drawer, ‘It’s bathroom not toilet’. That was how she knew.
Richard shook his head. Eve walked past the toilet door and headed straight for the kitchen, where she found a collection of leaning bottles in some ice in a tub next to the sink. She looked for a dry white and pulled out one that matched her mood from its icy surrounds and unscrewed the lid. It would be Christmas in two months, and she thought of the cold coming again. The wind. The jackets and scarves. The darkness at 4 pm. The tips of her fingers turning blue.
A hand grabbed her wrist as she tilted the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc over a wine glass with someone else’s lip-gloss marks on the rim. ‘Bloody Americans. She doesn’t know me,’ Eve said to Richard under her breath.
‘Glad you’re enjoying yourself. Let’s go.’
‘I’ve only had one drink. I thought we were going to stay for a couple. C’mon, let’s have another. We’ll have fun. I haven’t seen these guys for ages.’
‘Eve, we agreed. You said it: dash in and dash out.’
A woman entered the kitchen and smiled at them. ‘’Scuse me,’ she said, reaching past Eve for a bottle of wine.
‘Sorry,’ Eve said, putting her bottle and glass back down on the kitchen bench. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’
‘I’m hungry,’ Richard said. ‘Let’s get something to eat while we can. Let’s just go, now.’
Richard helped Eve with her coat on the steps outside the flat. It was cold for October. People walked past them into the party. Eve said hello to Claudia and Simon, who were on their way in. Claudia was pregnant; she hadn’t known Claudia was pregnant.
‘Just grabbing another bottle from the corner. See you back in there,’ Eve said.
‘See you.’
Eve wanted to say ‘congratulations’, but that would have started a whole conversation on the street, and Richard was already walking a few paces ahead.
‘Why did you lie to them?’ he asked when she caught up. ‘You’re a big girl. You’re allowed to leave a party when you want to.’
‘I didn’t say goodbye to Elise. I feel bad. I don’t know. Usually, it’s the sign of a crap party if people start leaving half an hour after they arrive.’
‘It was crap.’
‘It was fun. You were having a good time.’
‘I was making myself look like I was having a good time. I thought you would know the difference.’
‘Where are we going?’ Eve asked when they reached the corner, outside a closed florist shop.
‘Maybe Noshiden.’
‘I don’t feel like Japanese.’
Every now and then, they walked past another couple in dark coats, holding on to each other. Eve could already feel the cold coming up through the thin soles of her shoes. She opened her handbag, took out a knitted beret and put it on her head.
Richard sighed. ‘Eve, you said let’s just have a drink or two and leave and have something to eat. If we don’t get in somewhere now, nothing decent will be open.’
‘I don’t want decent food all the time, Richard. I would have been happy with a pizza at one in the morning.’
They kept walking, with Richard turning every five seconds to look for a cab. ‘Pizza has cheese. A lot of cheese,’ he said, emphasising the word ‘cheese’.
A cab pulled over. Richard opened the door and let Eve slide across first, before directing the cabbie, ‘Brook Street, W1, thanks.’
Eve was on a no-dairy diet. It had
started last Saturday, after they had sex in the afternoon and Richard turned to her and told her about another of her little problems.
‘You should know something, Eve,’ he said plainly. ‘You smell like fish.’
‘What?’ she said, lifting her chin up from his chest so she could see his face. ‘I had tuna for lunch, and maybe there’s some on my fingers.’ She smelt them. ‘God, I’ll wash it off. I can’t smell it.’
‘Not your fingers,’ Richard said, as Eve started to walk to the bathroom.
She turned, confused.
‘Down there. Your pussy. It really smells like fish. I can smell it when we’re having sex, and it’s off-putting. It doesn’t smell right.’
Eve put her hand on the wall to centre herself. She felt for the light switch and turned it on, now that she was there.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ he said. ‘Come here.’
‘No.’
‘Come here, Eve. It’s okay.’ He patted the warm spot next to him.
Eve went to him and sat where his hand had been patting, not knowing what else to do. She pulled a sheet around her naked body.
‘It’s dairy. I’ve read up about it. It’s not you, Eve, it’s dairy. We can do this – you just need to cut dairy out,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘You’re so beautiful. It’s okay. It doesn’t agree with some women. Problem solved. Four weeks, no dairy and it will be sorted. Don’t worry, my gorgeous girl, we can sort this out.’
‘Okay, Japanese,’ Eve said in the back of the cab. Richard gave her thigh a squeeze and they wove their way through the streets of London in autumn to eat some raw fish.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The blinking red light threw a small circle of crimson on the wall in short bursts. It was the first thing Eve noticed when she opened the door to the flat on this Monday evening in December. It disturbed her, the red neediness; it made her shudder before she even put down her groceries on the polished wooden floor.
Eve hung up her coat in the hall cupboard, slinging her new scarf around it, trying to ignore the relentless red throb. Who would be calling her? She ran through a list of suspects as she stood still in the hall with the shopping bags at her feet. Richard always called on her mobile, finding her wherever she was: shopping, walking to the gym, watching a movie, in the middle of an afternoon sleep.
She pushed the bags along the floor with her feet. It wasn’t work; she’d finished up with the orchestra six months ago, in June, and they had stopped calling her, asking her to do casual work, in September. She doubted it was her friends from London – one by one, they had floated away from her like leaves down a stream, and she hadn’t noticed until they had turned a corner and were out of sight. It could be Annie. She had grown into a friend since that first weekend away with Richard. Well, someone to go to lunch with and talk about where they should go in the holidays and who they needed to make sure didn’t come too.
Eve decided to leave it blinking. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, call anyone back. She didn’t know what to say to people any more. She stuck a magazine over the top of the answering machine and took the groceries into the kitchen, unpacking the contents one by one into the Hamptons-inspired cupboards.
She was going to make Greek-style marinated roast lamb, roast potatoes and greens. Perfect for a cold night in December. She pulled out the shoulder of lamb and set it up on the bench, rubbing its flesh generously with olive oil, oregano, and salt and pepper. She sliced the flesh, pushed cloves of garlic deep into the slits and then splashed some white wine across the shoulder as a last-minute thought.
She had never been into cooking before Richard. She used to joke to her old flatmates on evenings when she was starving that she would be happy with some kind of pill at mealtimes that gave you all your nutrients and filled you up. Now, she could whip up stuffed spatchcock at dinner parties and eggplant-lasagne dinners, lentil-and-beetroot lunches and home-made Bircher muesli in the mornings.
She dropped the shoulder into a roasting dish as if she was putting a gnawed-at cob of corn in the bin and washed her oily hands under the tap, hating the meat’s greasy feel against her skin. She thought again about the magic food pill. Surely, there were others like her who every now and then couldn’t be bothered with all this– the mixing, the measuring, the waiting, the cleaning, the getting it right – and were happy to swallow a pill instead?
She had to stick Post-it notes up around the flat, on the wall before she got to the stairs, at the top of the stairs, so she wouldn’t forget she had something in the oven or something simmering on the stovetop. Otherwise, a burnt smell or the smoke alarm would be her first reminder. The other must-do was cleaning. She never forgot to tidy the kitchen before Richard came home. That had become almost automatic. He hated seeing mess in the kitchen while he was eating his dinner; it ruined his meal.
Eve placed the lamb in the oven and began peeling the potatoes and cutting up the onions. She placed the greens on the chopping board so they were ready for preparation. It was just after 6 pm. Wind swirled against the windows, some of it sneaking under the cracks and whistling to her. She factored into her cooking-and-cleaning schedule getting changed for Richard. She didn’t want to look like a ‘Manchester council mum’ when he came home.
Eve poured herself a glass of wine and leant against the bench, surveying the open-plan room. She knew every inch off by heart. She could draw it blindfolded, every nook and cranny, she spent so much time here. She swore the flat was shrinking each night as she slept.
Eve had settled into a sort of routine for her days and wondered, as she dug her hip into the bench until it started to sting, whether she had time tomorrow to slot in fixing up the crack in the skirting board upstairs. She recapped the day’s major events: in the morning, she had made herself busy by going to the gym and spending the rest of the morning learning how to make risotto from scratch from a woman in Shepherd’s Bush who covered everything, including her couches and hallway, in plastic. In the afternoon, she had watched reality TV for five hours straight, taking a ten-minute break to pluck her eyebrows after being inspired when she witnessed an ordinary mum transformed by the perfect arch. Then she had dashed out to get something to cook for dinner.
Eve looked at her watch and trod upstairs to change her clothes and put on some make-up. Standing in the bathroom, perfectly groomed, her hair tied back in a low ponytail showing off her graceful neck, wearing a black cashmere boat-neck dress and boots, Eve debated whether to watch a repeat of High Maintenance Kids or a half-hour show on the world’s most talented dogs while she cleaned the kitchen and waited for Richard. Dogs who can dance or kids who see dead people?
‘Shit.’ Eve ran down the stairs. ‘I forgot to put the potatoes in.’
She grabbed the roasting pan out of the oven with a tea towel instead of thick oven mitts and burnt her fingertips. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’
She ran some cold water and wiggled one set of fingers underneath while throwing cut, cold potatoes into the roasting tray with her other hand. She closed the oven door and sucked on the tips of her fingers. They throbbed inside her mouth, all hot and tingly. The blinking again caught her eye, red light escaping from under the magazine.
‘Fuck,’ she said, walking over to the answering machine and putting the magazine back on the pile before pressing the button.
‘Hi, Eve. What’s going on? Where are you?’ She didn’t need to say her name. ‘You need to call me. What is going on? You’re not returning my emails, my phone calls. Eve?’
She and Richard were one of the last couples on earth, Eve often thought, who had an answering machine. But Richard wanted it for when his parents called. They were hesitant about calling mobile phones, and at least with a home phone and answering machine, he told Eve, they could leave a message and feel their job of checking up on him was done. The answering machine cut off Meg mid-sentence, and then Meg’s voice was back with message number two.
‘I haven’t made it a mission like I should
have, Eve, getting in contact, but I’m going to from now. I need to talk to you. Call me or I’m going to keep calling. Every day. What’s going on?’
Eve hadn’t returned Meg’s last five calls and had ignored her last four emails. Technology can connect a hill tribe in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with an eleven-year-old boy in Atlanta, Georgia. It can also keep friends from ever touching. In the last few months, she had accidentally deleted phone messages, written emails to Meg explaining they were going offline for two weeks due to a computer upgrade, filled her in on news that amounted to absolutely nothing and waved her hand at Richard, telling him to tell Meg she wasn’t home. Once, she had answered the phone and then made her mobile ring and told Meg she had to go, she would call her back later. Eve was pushing Meg away, and she knew it was unfair. She felt sick. The last time Meg and Eve had spoken properly, it was months ago, for over an hour.
She remembered the phone call. Every word of it lay in front of her, separate and sterile, like evidence from a crime scene. Terms such as ‘choice’ and ‘enough’, ‘you’re kidding’ and ‘keep house’. Harmless words and phrases laid out like weapons. It was late August, it was warm outside and Eve was at home wearing a light floral dress and had all the windows open, fresh air circulating through the flat, dust landing on every surface and sticking like tar.
Within minutes, Meg had asked about the orchestra and her plans to get serious with a string quartet, and Eve had told her she was going to stop work because the hours were so inconvenient and they planned on having a baby, they wanted to have one next year, but they thought it best to get everything sorted now: her body, the flat, her cooking skills.
‘Eve, what do you mean “sort out your body first”? There’s nothing wrong with your body. You’re thirty-three, you have no fertility issues. You can still work and try for a baby.’
‘We just want to make sure we’ve done everything we can and we’re ready.’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? You’ll have no choice but to be ready when the baby comes. You love your work. You don’t need to stop. It’s overkill, dropping everything. What are you going to do every day until then? Keep house?’
Under the Influence Page 27