by Lisa Jewell
And look at all these lovely twiddly bits you get with everything. Look at this little paper coaster she’s been given with her champagne cocktail, with the pretty scalloped edges, and look at all those newspapers over there, hanging off polished mahogany poles. This carpet’s great—it’s got the hotel insignia all over it. Nadine wants some personalized carpet in her flat, with ‘NK’ woven into it and swirls and curlicues all over the place.
Nadine was hidden in a cosy little corner of the bar, nestled on to a tiny, squishy sofa but within easy eye-contactable distance of the barman. Her head swam pleasantly and the lines of Spanish current affairs she was attempting to translate, using her school Spanish, in the newspaper in front of her were starting to lose their clarity. It was five thirty and it was still raining outside. Nadine was drunk.
‘God—there you are! Thank God!’ A small pixie-faced girl with cropped black hair and a bindi on her forehead collapsed next to Nadine on the sofa. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’ It was Pia. ‘Fabienne’s doing all the shops in the lobby and Sarah’s doing a corridor-by-corridor trawl for your butchered body. We’ve been phoning your room all afternoon. I was about to call the fucking police.’ Her tiny little nose wrinkled up and down with the drama of it all and she slapped Nadine on the arm with annoyance at so much expended worry.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ said Nadine, suddenly very conscious of her lips not working in harmony with her tongue, of the fact that if she didn’t watch out she could very easily start slurring. ‘I didn’t think. I’m sorry. Hit me again.’
Pia grimaced and slapped her arm again. ‘Bad photographer,’ she scolded, teasingly. ‘What are you?’
‘I’m a bad photographer,’ said Nadine, dropping her head into her chest.
‘You’re also a pissed photographer, aren’t you? Breathe on me,’ Pia ordered, pointing her minute nostrils towards Nadine’s mouth. Nadine let out a small puff of air. ‘You are! You’re drunk! Blimey, Deen. It’s not even six o’clock yet, and you’re off your trolley! Well,’ she said, getting to her platformed feet, ‘there’s only one thing for it. I’m going to find Sarah and Fab and get them down here. I expect a full round of whatever that is you’re drinking, on the table by the time I get back. OK?’
‘OK.’
Nadine watched Pia striding across the insignia-ed carpeting towards the twinkling lobby outside, her tiny little hips twitching from side to side in skintight black pedal-pushers, her ankles looking like they might snap with the weight of the platform shoes that were strapped onto them. Every man in the room turned to watch her as she went.
She was back within minutes with Sarah, the Sloaney, blonde, pencil-thin make–up artist with the dirty laugh, and Fabienne, the voluptuous and ripe-fleshed Renault-ad girl with the vertiginous cleavage. Nadine supposed that in company like this she was probably the dumpy red-head with the stupid clothes on. Nadine smiled to herself. She didn’t care. She loved drinking with beautiful women. It was so much fun, the night-time equivalent of going to the park with a cute dog. You got loads of attention and everyone talked to you.
‘You dirty old lush,’ said Sarah, peeling off a cashmere cardigan and revealing elegant arms and shoulders in a tiny pink vest-top, ‘how much have you had to drink?’
Nadine giggled, shrugged and hiccuped. The three girls laughed. ‘Say no more,’ said Sarah.
The bartender arrived at their table and off-loaded four more champagne cocktails, each with its own little scalloped coaster, and a tiny bowl of pistachios. Brave now, in the company of other women, Nadine threw him her best smile and said gracias with all the Spanishness she could muster. He smiled back at her and she blushed, and the girls all nudged each other and teased her and Nadine settled down to enjoy what was obviously going to be a top girly night.
By eight o’clock the previously sedate bar had exploded into Saturday-night mayhem, and the quartet of lary English girls drinking champagne cocktails in the corner were no longer drawing quite so much attention to themselves. Pia had been entertaining them, as ever, with hilarious accounts of the men in her life, peppering her stories with well-chosen swear-words and physical demonstrations of various events using her tiny little stick-drawing body to great comic effect. Nadine was so drunk by now that she was hugely appreciative of Pia’s diverting behaviour, meaning as it did that she could just sit there grinning like a fool and not have to make any kind of intelligent conversation.
Her bladder was telling her that a trip to the Señoritas was imminent, but her head was telling her that she was too pissed and too red in the face and her heels were too high and she didn’t know where they were and she’d have to wander around for ages, gormlessly trying to locate them, and that when she did there’d probably be some poor anaemic Spanish woman in there whose job it was to sit in a toilet all day, and there’d be three pesetas in her little saucer and Nadine would feel really guilty about not leaving her anything and it was all far, far too much trouble, so she should just cross her legs and not drink anything for a while because that would just make her need to go even more, and she was half-way through this desperate mental monologue when she suddenly realized that Sarah was asking her a question.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered, pulling herself back into the proceedings.
‘I said, are you still going out with that really cute-looking bloke I met last time I saw you?’ said Sarah.
Nadine racked her mind. The last time she’d seen Sarah socially was about six months ago when she was going out with?…with?…Jimmy, of course, the thirty-nine-year-old chiropodist whose hair, spookily enough, was exactly the same shade of red as hers. Everyone had taken them for brother and sister in the couple of months they’d been together, which Nadine had found deeply insulting given the age difference and the fact that he was—well, not bad-looking as such, but certainly not what you would describe as a ‘really cute-looking bloke’. Sarah couldn’t possibly mean Jimmy.
‘You know,’ said Sarah, noticing Nadine’s confusion, ‘the guy with all the hair and the big eyebrows—he had some kind of weird name. The A&R guy.’
Nadine choked on her cocktail. ‘What!’ she exclaimed, wiping her chin with the back of her hand and laughing, unnaturally loudly. ‘You mean Dig?’
‘That’s it,’ cried Sarah, ‘Dig! I knew he had a silly name. Yeah, Dig. What happened to him—are you still seeing him?’
Nadine laughed over-loudly again and shook her head. ‘Dig and I are just friends,’ she said, ‘we’re not going out together.’
‘God, you’re joking,’ said Sarah, ‘could have sworn the two of you were as together as Posh and Becks.’
Nadine laughed again.
‘No, really,’ continued Sarah, her eyes glittering with the excitement of intimate revelation, ‘what is it with the two of you? There was a real chemistry there. I remember it really well—he had his arm around your shoulders.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Nadine, ‘we’ve known each other for a long time. We’re very affectionate with each other.’
Sarah was shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. There’s more to it than that. I told Neil about you two when I got home that night. I said to him that I’d never been able to understand why you never went out with decent men, but that it looked like you’d finally found one. I was full of it, how happy I was for you and how lovely he seemed and how well matched and all that. Have you ever met him?’ She turned towards Pia.
Pia nodded, effusively. ‘He’s gorgeous, ’ she drawled and Nadine wondered, not for the first time, at Pia’s ability to tailor her opinions to fit the moment. She’d always agreed with Nadine, before, that he was too skinny and too short and had too much hair.
‘Honestly,’ said Sarah, addressing Fabienne, ‘he’s really cute-looking and sweet and polite, and you should see the way he looks at Nadine—Neil never bloody looks at me like that and he’s asked me to marry him!’
Nadine laughed again. This wasn’t the first time someone had told her what a lovely cou
ple she and Dig made—many other people had made that mistake over the years—but tonight, with her heart broken and her head full of Delilah and all the stuff that had happened over the last week, it was hugely reassuring to hear. Her stomach did a strange floppy thing that made her feel all weak.
‘What do you mean,’ she asked, ‘the way he looks at me?’
‘I dunno,’ said Sarah, ‘he just seemed—so proud of you. It was like he was showing you off. The way he had his arm around your shoulder and the way he laughed at your jokes. I honestly thought that he was some new boyfriend who was completely besotted with you.’
‘Hm,’ smiled Nadine, ‘well. He’s not. He’s my mate.’ Nadine was feigning nonchalance. She wanted to hear more—more about how Dig looked at her and more about how good they looked together and more about what a great couple they made. She needed to hear it.
‘So why haven’t you two ever got it together?’ asked Sarah. ‘Is he gay?’
Nadine snorted and slapped her thighs. ‘Dig? God, you’re joking. He’s deeply heterosexual. Too heterosexual, if anything.’
‘So why not? Oh—don’t tell me. He’s trapped in some long-term relationship with the wrong woman?’
‘No! He’s a serial monogamist, like me—except his relationships are even shorter than mine.’
‘So, the two of you are unattached, you’re affectionate with each other, you’re best friends and you’ve known each other half your lives?’
Nadine nodded.
‘Why the hell aren’t you going out together? That’s more than most supposed couples have going for them, y’know?’
Nadine nodded again and felt a little hysteria building in her stomach.
‘Don’t you fancy him, even a little bit?’ asked Pia, nudging her playfully in the ribs.
Nadine was about to give her usual knee-jerk response to this question, asked of her in the past, many times. ‘Oh no,’ she was about to sneer, ‘he’s too small for me.’ That’s what she always said—he’s too short. And then she’d make some joke at his expense about his lack of stature and his skinny legs and his big eyebrow and his sticky-uppy hair, and everyone would laugh and the subject would get dropped immediately. But tonight—tonight she was going to be honest. She needed to get it off her chest, off-load on to someone else the frightening realization that she was in love with her best friend. And Dig was gorgeous. Of course he was. Anyone could see that. His eyes twinkled and his lips curled when he smiled. He was small, but he was taller than her. He had great eyelashes and wonderful buttocks. He was sexy as hell. As sexy as he’d always been.
Nadine looked at Pia and grinned mischievously. ‘We-ell,’ she grinned, and all three girls began screeching with pleasure, ‘he is kind of cute.’ Blood rushed to Nadine’s head as the words left her lips. She felt strangely excited and unburdened. She joined in the excited laughter of her companions and then had to stop herself sharply when she realized that she’d almost peed herself—almost, but not quite—a very close thing. ‘Ooh,’ she said, covering her mouth with a hand, ‘excuse me, girls. Nature is shouting very loudly.’
‘Oh no!’ sighed Pia, in dismay. ‘Not now. You can’t go now. You’ve just admitted to fancying your best friend, for God’s sake!’
She stood up stiffly, every muscle in the lower half of her body clenched tightly. ‘Gotta go, girls, really, really gotta go.’ She shuffled from foot to foot while she waited for Pia to get out of her way and then made as inconspicuous a dash for it as she possibly could, across the insignias and towards the large marble lobby.
Nadine felt a bit wobbly on her feet as she negotiated the small gaps between tables and chairs in the crowded bar. She was much more drunk than she’d thought. She felt heavy and ungainly. Her shoes felt like breezeblocks and the cool, high-ceilinged lobby felt as vast as a skating rink as she tapped her way across it towards the toilets. She was sure everyone—all these business types with their smart little suitcases and their unsmiling, not-on-holiday faces—was staring at her, staring at the red-faced, slightly panic-stricken girl with the ginger hair and the strange dress walking uncertainly across the marble floor. It was like another world out here—Nadine had that odd walking-out-of-a-cinema-into-bright-sunshine feeling.
She pushed open the toilet door with her shoulder and was pleased to find the large, plush, mirrored and wallpapered room empty. Not an anaemic Spanish woman clutching a paper napkin in sight. She threw open the door of the first cubicle, lifted the hem of her dress and then began fumbling with the tops of her knickers, which just didn’t seem to be where they usually were. She started panicking as she felt her bladder weakening and threatening to explode before she’d sat down. She finally located the tops of her knickers, yanked them down and then landed somewhat heavily on the seat, sighing with unspeakable pleasure as she released her tensed muscles and let it all out. ‘Aaaaah,’ she smiled to herself. ‘Aaaah.’
Afterwards, she confronted her reflection in the mirror and started giggling. She wasn’t quite sure why: it was a combination of how awful she looked (flushed and wild-eyed) and how pissed she was feeling (it was always a sure-fire sign that you were really drunk, when you started laughing at your reflection in the toilets).
But it was also a slightly nervous reaction to what had happened just now, in the bar. That comment about Dig. That sudden rush of feelings. Admitting to a bunch of girls she hardly knew that she thought Dig was ‘cute’, when she hadn’t even admitted it to herself since she was eighteen years old.
‘So—do you? Do you fancy Dig?’ she asked her reflection, trying to pull a serious face and dissolving into laughter yet again. ‘Do you? Do you want him? Do you want to see him naked? Do you want to see his willy?’ She slapped her hands down on the marble surface and laughed out loud. ‘How do you feel about Dig’s willy, Nadine? Do you want to hold it in your hand? Do you want to kiss it, kiss its little shiny head?’ She nearly overbalanced as her laughter increased and had to grip on to the marble to keep herself upright.
‘Do you want him?…Do you want him to kiss you? Would you like it if Dig held your face in his hands and kissed you on the lips?’
Nadine eyed her blurred reflection, her blotchy, disproportional features, her messy hair, her diametrically opposed eyes—the woman in the mirror who looked like an older, fatter and sartorially less refined sister.
‘I vont you, Dig’—she experimented with a Garbo approach—‘I vont you.’ She laughed at her reflection again and then let her head fall into her chest. She sighed heavily. ‘Oh God,’ she moaned to herself, ‘oh God. Dig. I do. I want you. Oh, bollocks.’ Her head felt too small, far too small, to accommodate all the stuff that was going on in there.
Her mind started sending her picture postcards from the past. There was one postmarked 12 September 1987, a shot of Dig wandering down Bartholomew Road in the dark, jumping up on that wall when he didn’t know she was looking and punching the air. There were the doodles she’d drawn all over her old diary when she was a teenager. Nadine Ryan Nadine Ryan Nadine Ryan. And there was Dig’s old kite, the one he’d given her the day they went to Primrose Hill. Dig ’n’ Deen, 13 September 1987, for ever ♥.
More pictures flashed through her mind. Flying kites on Southend beach with Dig and his dad. Waiting for buses in the rain on Saturday mornings with Dig to go down to the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange. Queuing up outside the Electric Ballroom on Saturday nights, hair thick with backcombing and Elnett. Saying goodbye in the setting sun on the last day of school, the burning car outside Caledonian Park that was now inextricably linked with her memories of that night—broken hearts and burnt-out cars.
She pictured Dig’s flat, his anally arranged knickknacks and ornaments, his spotless little kitchen, his plumped-up cushions and fluffed-out duvet. She saw him launching himself from the sofa, suddenly, in the middle of a film, as he often did, to pick a bit of lint off his floor. She remembered his endearing excitement at finally leaving home at the age of twenty-seven and buying h
is flat, all those nightmarish weekend trips to Ikea in Brent Park and hours spent discussing the relative merits of seagrass carpeting versus wooden floors, and then trawling around Allied Carpets for two, three hours at a time to find exactly the right shade of beige.
She imagined the two of them, sitting side by side on his blue-cord sofa drinking big bottles of Bud, watching the telly, smoking and snuggling up to each other, the warmth where their thighs pressed together, the weight of his head on her shoulder, the smell of his sweet, beery breath when he turned to share a joke with her. All that stuff she’d taken for granted for ten years, all that lovely, warm, easy, intimate Diggy stuff.
All that lovely stuff that Delilah was currently getting her perfectly manicured mitts all over.
As these thoughts surged through her mind, Nadine became filled with a sense of resolve and strength. She couldn’t let Delilah win, not again, not this time.
Nadine squinted to focus and glanced at her watch. Quarter past eight. Quarter past seven in London. She felt her pocket for her door key, pushed open the toilet door and strode purposefully towards the lifts. She didn’t feel self-conscious now as her heels clattered against the hard marble. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth while she waited for the smoothly humming lift to slink its way down to the foyer and collect her.
She wove a bit as she made her way down corridor after corridor on the fourth floor, her heels sinking into the soft carpeting, one stiff flower arrangement blurring into another, brass-plated light fittings with pleated shades guiding her on her way. Nadine liked being drunk and alone in a hotel. She wanted to break into a run and start careering around the place like a kid. She wanted to shout and scream and play hide-and-seek.
She wanted to speak to Dig. Right now. This instant.