Then the doorbell rang and it was Rose’s friend Simon wearing a suit and tie, and apart from the fact that the suit was a bit padded-shouldery and the knot of the tie a bit on the huge side, he looked pretty normal, and we all went, “Booo, party pooper!” but then he handed over a carrier bag that contained a magnum of Krug, pulled a mask out from behind his back and put it on, and he was Nigel Lawson. We all fell about laughing and Rose opened a bottle and found an Abba album on her iPod and put it on and we turned out the lights and started dancing even though it was only seven thirty and none of our other friends had arrived yet.
Soon Ben arrived, dressed as Robert Smith with madly back-combed hair, a baggy white shirt, red lipstick and masses of black eyeliner. He looked the very spit of the Cure frontman circa 1984, only less podgy and rather sexy, and we laughed about our totally accidental outfit co-ordination, and we seemed to have returned to normal after the so-brief-I-might-have-imagined-it weirdness before Christmas. But there was still a bit of a shadow between us after our last evening together, and for the first time ever, I actually felt shy around him. Claire turned up, looking absolutely stunning in fluorescent yellow legwarmers and an outsize black and white stripy jumper, with Pers strapped in her sling. Pers is such a chillaxed baby, she’s been with Claire to Occupy London demos and any number of parties and even a couple of pro-choice marches, and she’s really good at meeting people and in no time at all Ben and Simon and even Rose were cooing over her and making her do jazz hands with her pudgy little arms, and she was giggling like a loon and loving it.
To be honest I envied little Pers her effortlessly sociable nature. As more people began to arrive – Vanessa and Tom, Pip and Sebastian, a gaggle of Rose’s old friends from uni who I didn’t know; my mate Ash and her boyfriend Dave, Ruth from work and her girlfriend Diana, Ben’s brother Alex and various other mutual friends of ours – I got the urge to retreat to a quiet corner and spectate for a bit, and I noticed a strange thing. Even though almost everyone was in fancy dress (except Alex, who’d forgotten, and turned up in jeans and a jumper, the noodle), if you had to play a game of spotting who was my friend and who was Rose’s, I reckon you’d be able to do it with about ninety-five percent accuracy. My lot all looked just a little bit scruffy. Their fancy-dress outfits had obviously been thrown together at the last minute, based around stuff they’d found lying around in their wardrobes, as mine was. I think the only one who’d spent any money was Diana, who’d decided to come as Princess Diana and invested in a sparkly plastic tiara from Claire’s Accessories. They mostly had beers in their hands, or glasses of wine, and they were standing around in small groups, engaged in quite interesting and serious-seeming conversations. Ben and Claire, for instance, were sitting on the sofa with Pers on Ben’s lap. They’d only met once or twice before, I realised, which was weird given that I’d known Ben for years, and Claire – well, her Mum was best friends with my Mum, so I suppose you could say I’ve known her for ever. But she and Ben were obviously getting on, and when I walked past them on my way to the kitchen I could hear them earnestly discussing the future of education in inner London and how much more important a stable home life is to a child than private schooling, which is just as well because Claire wouldn’t be able to educate Pers privately in a million years, unless she won the lottery or something.
Rose’s friends, on the other hand, were standing around in big groups all talking very loudly at once, with occasional outbursts of loud laughter, braying from the men and shrieky from the women. Rose was flitting from group to group, and I wondered if she was stressing because Oliver still hadn’t turned up – every now and then, in between her flitting, she stopped and checked her mobile phone, then bit her lip and looked cross, except as the evening wore on and there was still no sign of him, she began to look more anxious than cross.
It was when Rose went off to boarding school that this great divide between our friends opened up, I suppose. When I look at other sisters I know, their social circles are pretty homogeneous. There might be this one’s friends from her book group or that one’s friends from her running club, but by and large they’re much the same kind of people and they all sort of fit together. But when Rose first brought Vanessa to stay with us for a week over the summer holidays almost fifteen years ago, it was like an alien had landed in our house. Although she was only twelve, Vanessa had her hair highlighted, her toenails painted lime green and her legs waxed. She wore matching bras and pants from Sloggi. She had a mobile phone of her own, which was virtually unheard of for anyone under the age of eighteen in those days. She had not one but two ponies, and every night of that week she rang her mother, who she called Mummy, and had a long conversation about how Dapples and Buzz’s schooling was progressing ahead of the pony club championships later in the summer. She really did. The following holiday Rose went off to stay with Vanessa’s family in Gloucestershire, and came home with highlights, painted toenails and waxed legs of her own. Granny went completely mental and told her that painted toenails are vulgar at any age and totally unacceptable for a child of thirteen, and made her clean it off. I paint mine now, of course, every couple of weeks in the summer, although it has to be the most boring activity in the world, ever, but every time I do I can still hear the note of horror in Granny’s voice as she told Rose off.
“As they used to say to us at school, care to share the joke?” I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t even noticed that Oliver had turned up at last, was standing next to me, and I must have been grinning away to myself. I told him about Granny and Rose’s toenails, and he laughed. Then he said, “Rose certainly knows how to throw a party. I’m afraid I’m letting her down rather, I’m not much of a mixer really.”
“Nor am I,” I said. “Give me a couple of friends down the pub and I’m perfectly happy, but Rose loves doing things like this.”
Oliver said his worst nightmare was having to entertain clients at work, when you’ve got nothing whatsoever in common with them and you can’t think of a single thing to say and nor can they.
I laughed. “Sounds like hell. Why do you do it?”
“They expect it,” he shrugged. “Schmoozing’s part of the job, even though I don’t think many of us enjoy it much. The guys who have children, especially, hate it when they’ve been in the office since seven and they’re stuck there until eleven and not even doing anything productive.”
I murmured something sympathetic.
“Your friend’s daughter is gorgeous,” Oliver said. “Kids are great at that age – still babies but starting to get really interesting.”
This came as a surprise to me, although I suppose it shouldn’t really – among the people I know it’s generally the men who like babies and the women who don’t. Before she found out she was having Pers, Claire was pretty relaxed about whether she’d ever have a family, and even now she’s told me she finds other people’s kids terribly boring. Rose is positively anti the idea of motherhood too. But Ben and Alex are brilliant with kids, love nothing better than chatting to them and playing peek-a-boo and god knows what else. I wouldn’t have thought Oliver was the paternal type though, and I looked at him with renewed interest, and said so.
“I’d have liked to have settled down in my twenties,” he said, “only I hadn’t met the right person. I thought I had for a while, but I was wrong.” We both looked at Rose in her white basque and stockings, her golden curls beginning to soften and drop down her neck. As always, she was at the centre of a shrieking, braying crowd of her friends.
“D’you think you have now?” I asked.
“Well, it’s early days,” said Oliver, “but I think…”
But before he could finish whatever he was going to say, Rose started rounding everyone up to go on to the roof terrace, from which if it’s a clear night and you’re quite tall and you crane your neck a lot, you get a reasonable view of the fireworks in the South Bank. She came bustling over to Oliver and me with a tray laden with glasses and said, “Would you mind c
arrying those upstairs, Ollie?” and thrust a couple of bottles at me, and I took them and we all left the flat and filed upstairs.
It was bloody cold up there but the view is amazing, I have to say. You can see the chimneys of Battersea power station sort of looming over everything, and in the distance the glimmering lights of Westminster. There was a thin drizzle falling, not enough to actually count as rain, and I could see little beads of moisture sparkling in the amber light on my madly teased hair.
Ben and Oliver opened the bottles of champagne and Rose filled up the forest of glasses on the trays, and someone got out their iPhone and found the BBC broadcast, and we all started to count down to midnight. It was pretty cool really – we could hear the tinny sound of the chimes over the phone’s speaker, then a few seconds later the real thing, ringing out faintly but clearly in the still, damp air. And we could just see the first glimmer of fireworks in the distance. Everyone hugged and kissed everyone else – I embraced Claire, warm in her fuzzy jumper, and Pers who was fast asleep on her chest, not in the least fazed by the bangs. I hugged Rose and we grinned at each other for a moment, happy that we were sisters, and for the moment at least, friends. I kissed Ben, who I realised I’d hardly spoken to all night, I even did a ‘mwah, mwah’ air-kissy thing with Vanessa. Then Oliver approached me and I felt all shy and awkward for a second, and we moved together for a polite kiss, the kind you give your sister’s bloke, only somehow it went wrong and our noses bumped together and then I felt his lips against mine, warm and dry and tasting slightly of champagne – or maybe that was the champagne on my own mouth, I don’t know. It only lasted a second but I literally reeled with his closeness. His shoulders felt lean and strong under my hands, and the bit of his hair brushing against my skin felt so silky I longed to twine it around my fingers. Then we pulled away from each other and smiled, and everyone joined hands and bellowed out a tuneless rendition of Auld Lang Syne, and Oliver, who still had my hand in his, asked softly, “So what are your resolutions for this year, Ellie?”
I hadn’t really thought about it in any detail, but I heard my voice say very confidently, “Oh, this is going to be a big year for me. Lots of things are going to change.” And I looked at the last golden glimmer of fireworks beyond the bend in the river, and suddenly I was very sure it would be true.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I’m hungry,” I said to Ben. “It’s the fifth of January and I’ve been Hank fucking Marvin for five fucking days.”
It was true. Well, not strictly, strictly true – there’d been moments when the hunger had faded, like two spoons into a particularly dreary bowl of tomato soup – but true enough. Of course I’d experienced hunger before in my life, but only in a ‘great, what’s for dinner?’ sort of way. This was an annoying, background hunger that seemed to wipe out the possibility of all rational thought, and I hated it. I’d woken up on New Year’s Day with a bit of a hangover but a deep sense of purpose, told myself that today was the first day of the rest of my life and all that stuff, and made myself a cup of tea and two pieces of Rose’s organic wholemeal toast, with Marmite but no butter, and when I’d finished it I’d still felt hungry, and that had pretty much set the tone for the year so far.
I sipped my Perrier water morosely and looked at Ben’s pint with an expression that I imagine must appear on the faces of those poor mentally ill women who abduct babies from supermarkets, the moment before they snatch the buggy and leg it.
“I’m doing Weight Watchers,” I said. “Well, kind of. I’m basically eating dry toast and soup and boiled vegetables.”
“That’s not Weight Watchers,” Ben said. “Lucille did that last year and she ate normal food.”
“Yeah, but I can’t have normal food in the house,” I said. “If there’s nice stuff in the fridge, even tofu kind of nice, not family pack of Mars bars nice, I’ll lose the plot and eat it. I’ve no control, I’m scaring myself.”
“What about Rose’s food?” Ben asked.
“Well, she never buys anything interesting apart from smoked salmon, and she gets given boxes of chocolates from grateful clients,” I said. “But I made her do a ritual cleansing of it all before she went off skiing. It’s the scorched earth policy. It worked for Napoleon and hopefully it will work for me.”
“You threw away chocolate?” There was a look of genuine horror on his face. “Ellie, these are bad times.”
“I know,” I said gloomily. “And it was the good stuff too – those salted caramel ball things, and the beautiful swirly-topped ones that look like something from Fabergé, and three giant-sized Toblerones. Although those were mine, obviously, not Rose’s. And we didn’t actually bin them, I took them round to Claire’s – she can be trusted not to eat them all at once.”
“Hmmm,” said Ben. “It sounds like it’s time for me to stage an intervention.”
“What do you mean?” I said, pushing aside a vision of him turning up with all our friends and them making me trough bars of Galaxy like some sort of feeder orgy.
“If you want to lose weight – not that you need to – you need to do it sensibly,” he said. “I’m not having you giving yourself rickets or something because you’re living off boiled potatoes and frozen peas, which if I know you is what you’re doing.”
“I had tomato soup last night,” I protested. “And Ryvitas with cottage cheese.”
“Whoop de do,” Ben went sarcastically. “Apart from anything else, you need to eat in a way you can sustain, right? And can you see yourself eating tomato soup and fucking Ryvitas every night for the rest of your life?”
“Well, no,” I said. I thought about it for a bit. I suppose you could say I’m lucky, because I’ve never really needed to diet. I’ve always been just kind of normal sized, and apart from my brief and ill-starred foray into veganism a couple of years ago, my weight hasn’t really varied since I went off to university and piled on a stone, the way everyone does. So this was new territory for me, and I imagined that I’d need to go through a few weeks of pain, then I’d be a size ten (even a size eight, in my fonder fantasies) and I could go back to normal, only I’d be magically, permanently thinner and the first step of Project Transform Ellie, as I’d code-named it not very catchily in my head, would be complete.
“You need protein,” Ben lectured. “Protein’s what stops you feeling hungry. And you need food you enjoy, otherwise you’ll turn into a total misery guts. In fact I can see it happening already, and that’s why I’m going to buy you a vodka and slimline tonic before I lecture you some more.”
“Okay,” I said obediently. He went off to the bar and came back with another pint for himself and a voddie for me, and let me tell you, it was the best thing I’d tasted for a long time. Five days, to be exact. We were in The Duchess, my local pub, which used to be rough as, with gang members knifing one another in the beer garden by way of an evening’s entertainment, but now, like the rest of Battersea, it’s really civilised and has poetry nights and knitting evenings and everything. They’ve done that thing of replacing the flock wallpaper and ancient, sticky carpets with pale-coloured walls and polished floorboards and loads of mismatched furniture and lamps and shelves of dusty old books, which always makes me think there must be a company somewhere making a killing clearing out old people’s houses after they’ve died and flogging the contents to trendy pubs, but anyway it looks really authentic and quite nice. I do miss the old days of overhearing dodgy geezers planning their illegal betting scams and dog fights when you passed them en route to the bar, though. Ben had also got a bowl of olives – you wouldn’t have been able to get olives here in the old days, a wrap of crack would have been about the limit of their bar snacks – and I ate one, then took another.
“Fat,” Ben said.
“What?” I demanded, looking at the olive in horror. It was green, how could it be made of fat?
“Fat is vital in your diet,” Ben said. “It sends satiety signals to the brain, and is important for all sorts of metabolic processes. G
od, did you not learn anything about nutrition at school?”
I said I supposed I hadn’t, or perhaps I’d been reading Jane Eyre under my desk when we had that lesson.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “here’s another thing. Exercise. Look at me.”
Ben sort of waved a hand at himself, and I looked, and as ever it was no hardship. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it but Ben’s an exercise nut – he’s run marathons and is training for an Iron Man triathlon and consequently he has one of those lean, muscular bodies. Not in a bulgy sort of way, just streamlined, with lovely ridges on his torso and stomach. A lot of the time I don’t really notice Ben’s looks, because… well, I’ve sort of trained myself not to. But sometimes I’m stopped in my tracks by how hot he is – on a totally objective level, of course – and I think how lucky the girl will be who finally falls in love with him, assuming he falls in love back, of course. He was wearing a dark grey suit and a silvery tie and a purple shirt that made his eyes look very blue, and his hair, which is sort of darkish brown, was partly sticking up and partly flopping down.
“Do I deprive myself of food?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “In fact you’re constantly bloody hoovering. You’re like a one-man plague of locusts.”
“Exactly,” Ben said, a bit smugly. “That, Ellie, is the magic of exercise. Do enough of it and you can eat absolutely what the hell you like.”
This sounded tempting. I’d sort of assumed there was a different rule for boys, and they could eat like Ben does and not get fat, whereas women have to control every calorie, like Rose does.
“Now,” he said, “we’re going back to yours and stopping at Tesco on the way, and I’m going to cook you a proper meal, and in the morning you’re going to get up and go for a run. Deal?”
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