Heartswap

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘So,’ Georgie prompted her, digging into the caviar. ‘Let’s see yours.’

  ‘Mine’s – well, different.’ Flora was sitting with her knees together, one hand coyly covering the other, resting on her thigh. Mischief sizzled in her speckled eyes. As Georgie was about to say something reassuring, Flora revealed her left hand. The ring was huge. It was funky. It was a micro-sculpture, with silver claws clasping a blue-white crystal to a chunk of metal.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Georgie wondered about the thing. The crystal looked as if it might crumble like a piece of cake.

  ‘Isn’t it? It was the biggest one. I had to have it. It’s celestite. Full of heavenly energies. And the rest is platinum.’

  ‘Oh, celestite.’ Georgie had made a bet with herself that the crystal thing would last six months with Flora.

  ‘It’s incredible. Like a modem for the astral world, you know. Brilliant for spirituality, enlightenment, empathy, openness, clear thinking, seeing the truth and keeping a pure heart.’

  Georgie acknowledged that her own heart was not pure in this matter; her heart was hazy misgiving and she needed to change the subject. ‘I can’t believe we’re both getting married at the same time! This is just too amazing.’

  They had to stand up and hug again, until they noticed the waiter approaching with the bottle, when they disengaged, because in No 1 Lombard Street hugging was not performed. Flora smoothed her hair. Ten-year-old girls in ballet classes had that kind of hair, very long, very straight, very shiny, very brown. Flora’s hair made Georgie feel guilty, a non-specific free-floating guilt about the effort she had to put into her life. And guilty about her own hair, a dark, dysfunctional mass that could only be straightened with much effort and was usually twisted into a pleat, clipped back and forgotten.

  ‘There’s so much, air in here,’ she said, looking around. ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Nobody has time for lunch now. People are so into their health and that’s really good. And there’s so much movement. Hiring and firing, especially firing.’ Flora winked over the rim of her glass, the gesture of a wise woman who had chosen a better life. ‘Ever since Asia and everything. Everybody watched Japan like watching a train crash. So they all want to get in the office at six and look good. I’m so glad I’m out of all that.’

  ‘That’s me you’re talking about. I still have to start downloading the prices from Tokyo at six. Actually I was in at half-five today, since it’s my first week. When I left the country I never thought you’d take a flying dive out of the City.’

  ‘Well,’ said Flora, and stroked her hair again.

  ‘So?’ Georgie prompted her.

  She wanted to know how life fell out when you kissed goodbye to a salary and set up a consultancy as a healer of sick buildings. Flora was beautifully unchanged. Nothing random with Flora, nothing unconnected, everything was placed exactly like the stems in a Japanese flower arrangement. Flora was still a dancing child who skipped smiling through life with the pure-hearted belief that the world would provide. Her smile was for herself. Flora’s smile never vanished, even on the day when she had lost 25 million dollars somewhere in the system at Ardent Holdings and the IT director himself had to come down from the fifty-third floor to find it. Flora smiled as if she knew a secret. She believed she knew many secrets: health, serenity, and a pure heart. Georgie wanted to believe that they really were enough to support a life.

  ‘How was it?’ Georgie prompted.

  ‘It was incredible. Really. I mean, looking back, I must have been crazy. I just got these cards printed.’ Flora dipped into her bag and produced a card. Handmade, with something like rice grains pressed into the edge. Flora Lovelace, Environmental Consultant. ‘The last month at work I went to every party and just passed them around. And Donna was great.’

  ‘Donna? Donna the prima donna?’ When Flora and Georgie sat side by side at Ardent Holdings, Donna dominated their lives from her corner office. On Donna, Flora’s special charm had been absolutely lost. ‘Did I miss something? You’re being mentored by Donna?’

  ‘She put me on to my first client. National Bank of New Caledonia, opening their first London office, wanting to get everything up to speed.’

  ‘But running a scam, right?’

  ‘Of course they were running a scam but they paid up front and I never looked back.’

  ‘And what exactly …’

  ‘I do a basic Feng Shui rundown, very simple, no fishtanks or anything unless they want fishtanks, then I dowse the site with a crystal pendant just to check the energy flow. The celestial service includes the horoscope and numerology analysis of everyone working in the environment. The clearing ceremony gets rid of stagnant energies in a new office and cleanses the space with sound, light and scent for the new owner. I can work with the designer, getting the lighting right, choosing natural materials. Quite simple things can also make a lot of difference, painting a wall a more inspiring colour, moving the furniture to ease the airflow. When everything else is in balance …’ she dipped into her bag once more and brought out a glass bottle attached to an electric plug ‘… the Environmental Aroma Harmoniser. In this reservoir here, I put an individually blended selection of essential oils whose fragrances are released throughout the day when the balancer is switched on. You can choose the model with a time-clock to release aromas only when you need them, or by changing the reservoir, you can choose to change your scents through the day. I’ve got this guy working on designing a totally automatic aroma system. People like a reviving blend in the morning, then calming if it’s a stressful environment or energy-boosting maybe in the afternoon. It’s scientifically proven, you know. A study by the University of Arkansas showed that changing scents in a workplace enhanced productivity. I also blend ambient perfumes for the home. I get the oils from this Australian company that imports only organically grown …’

  ‘Flora, you’re pitching. You could never pitch.’

  Flora’s smile glowed. ‘Oh, I know. And I know Donna only set me up because she was going to have to fire me and if I resigned it saved Ardent the cost.’

  ‘This was all Donna’s idea, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, in a way. But I never saw what there was to pitch in all that crappy buying and selling. This is something I can get excited about.’

  Georgie sipped her champagne. Whatever, her sip said. You are my friend, we walk the path of life together. I accept you as you are. If you can be sincere about dowsing the energy flow in what is actually a high-class money laundry, that is how you are. You could not be sincere about suggesting a pension-fund manager protect the life savings of hundreds of little Mom-and-Pop pension-holders, by moving out of a bad market at the right time, but that was how you were. Whatever.

  ‘It’s just so real, Georgie. I feel so connected, so in tune with all the right energies. I feel I’m really, really doing something to keep the world turning, you know. And it works. I have the proof, I have Dillon. When we did it,’ she leaned forward and dropped her voice, ‘I made this blend of vetiver to relax him, lavender to balance him and a shot of black pepper for hot, hot sex. And I energised my marriage corner with a rose quartz crystal. Voilà. Result.’

  ‘Your MBA is better than my MBA,’ Georgie reminded her.

  ‘Dillon is a Harvard MBA,’ Flora replied. ‘And he is just adorable. I can’t wait for you to meet him. By the way, I brought you something to say welcome back.’ From her bag she took a rounded package wrapped in tagged red paper and tied with orange silk cord. It was heavy and fitted exactly into Georgie’s palm.

  ‘Beautiful paper,’ Georgie commented, dipping into her bag for a square black envelope fastened with a bead and a tassel.

  ‘Why thank you. You dear person. Handmade in Nepal, the paper.’

  They opened their packages. Georgie held a lump of shiny black crystalline mineral with rainbows glinting from its facets. Flora held a floppy disk.

  ‘It’s a screensaver,’ Georgie explained, ‘based on the dream net
s of the Hopi Indians. With pipe music.’

  ‘Oh, wow!’ Flora caressed the disk tenderly with her clean round fingertips. ‘Dillon can install it for me. And yours is a piece of carborundum from Ecuador. Its special energies will stop the bastards grinding you down.’ Her eyes crackled at Georgie;

  ‘Just what I need. Thanks a million.’

  They giggled. They swapped more kisses. They broke the code and hugged again. They unclinched and flicked their hair back in place and poured out the last of the bottle.

  ‘So why are you living on the other side of the City? I’m never going to see you. I was dying for an excuse to throw Des out, I’m sick of falling over his Absolut in the freezer and his Nikes on the stairs. Isn’t Seventeen-A good enough for you now you’re almost a married woman?’

  After the desk at Ardent Holdings had come the straight and narrow house in Bow Quarter, a dwelling chucked up two hundred years earlier to shelter French immigrant silk-weavers. 17A had a drunken staircase and a sublime eastern light in the front rooms. Georgie had painted the common parts in yellow and her room in mauve. Flora had painted her room in six different shades of white. The Scumbag always claimed he could smell rot in the joists.

  ‘Felix wanted to be near the hospital.’

  ‘Notting Hill? Haute Notting Hill, near Portobello? His hospital is where?’

  ‘Isleworth. I know. He still has a forty-minute journey in.’

  ‘Out. Isleworth is out. You have a journey in. It must be forty minutes at least.’

  ‘Over an hour. But his work is brainwork, you know. Not like what I do. He needs his mental energy, he needs to get in fresh and hit the ground running.’

  One of Flora’s eyebrows lifted in doubt. ‘We have to compromise,’ Georgie insisted. ‘I have to work in the east, he has to work out west. Notting Hill is in the middle.’

  ‘Not in price, exactly. What’s it costing you?’

  ‘He likes the area. I like the area. I’m earning really well, Flora. Why not?’

  Flora sighed. Men meant conflict. Even talking about men spoiled the harmony of the moment. She decided to move back to the safe subject of bliss. ‘Can you believe this? We’re both getting married.’

  ‘I was fine as I was, you know.’

  ‘You said.’

  Flora thought that Georgie stressed too much. She collected things to make her anxious like a mad millionaire collecting tin soldiers. Georgie liked whole armies of things to worry about. Felix, now. Flora had never met the man but she knew him from the grief he had given Georgie.

  The way she had introduced him, Flora recalled, had been just a shade apologetic. Right for me now but not for me in the larger sense, definitely not. Not my type but good therapy. Just part of the Scumbag repair programme. Short term. Transient. A phase I need to go through.

  Six months of that, and then there had been a shift. Georgie had started with answers to questions nobody had asked, such as ‘Felix needs time’ and ‘Felix believes in living for today and I respect that’and ‘Felix says his research comes first, he must go wherever it takes him’. Now Georgie was planning to marry Felix, and Felix apparently needed to live in the most expensive district on the Central. Line. Flora considered asking Georgie if she was sure about marrying this Felix person, but the energy was not right so instead she sighed to herself and said, ‘So no more girls’nights out then.’

  ‘No way,’ Georgie answered swiftly. ‘We can still go out, of course we can. Felix has an evening lecture Wednesdays, we can do it then.’

  ‘Wednesday …’ Flora was testing the wind. She was smiling as if she knew the answer to every riddle asked since the beginning of human intelligence. ‘I kind of like to do my yoga Wednesdays.’

  ‘OK,’ Georgie sensed the challenge and picked it up. ‘Friday, like it used to be.’

  ‘Friday,’ Flora agreed. ‘We can start in the Bit Bar.’

  ‘You know,’ she added after a moment of thought, ‘you’re different.’

  ‘Thinner,’ Georgie admitted. ‘Haircut.’

  ‘No, there’s something else. Your energy’s changed.

  You’re reckless, that’s what you are. Reckless. If I could read auras I could see it, it’d be a red flash just … there.’ She pointed to the air above her friend’s right eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve done reckless,’ Georgie told her. ‘It knackered me. I’m grown up now. I can be whatever I want. Wait till you see my car.’

  2. April 10–14

  That night, Felix got home just after nine. Because there was parking at the hospital, and a good Underground connection from their home to the City, they had decided it made more sense for him to take the car. This caused Georgie a pang, because she had been awarded a covetable Audi coupé and she had named him Flat Eric.

  ‘How was Flat Eric?’ she asked him once there was a glass of Chardonnay in his hand.

  ‘The car was OK,’ he answered. ‘But I think the timing is a little out. You could get someone to look at it. How was your friend?’ He put a special emphasis on the word ‘friend’, an accent positioned to tell Georgie that it was fine for her to see her old friends, that he was not jealous, that he approved.

  ‘Flora’s just the same,’ she said happily.

  ‘That’s good. It’s good to find that friends haven’t changed, isn’t it? Enhances the sense of continuity of life.’

  ‘Yes.’ Just for a second, she had to struggle with her nerves. ‘We fixed to go out in the evening on Friday.’

  ‘Friday? Sweetheart, can you ask me tomorrow when I’m by my diary? I have no idea what my schedule is on Friday …’

  ‘Just us. Flora and me. We always used to …’

  ‘You mean Flora and I. So you two want to go out by yourselves on Friday?’

  ‘We always used to …’

  Felix was sitting dead-centre on the sofa, picking through a little bowl of celery sticks and red pepper slices on a bed of ice. Georgie had taken the chair. Since Felix expected to finish work late quite often, they had decided not to eat a big meal in the evening, but to sit together like this, put on some music, talk over their days and share a low-calorie high-vitamin snack of Georgie’s devising. Consecrated time, Felix called it. He chose the music, John Coltrane tonight.

  ‘Hum? Who did?’

  ‘Flora and me. No, Flora and I.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s right. Did what?’

  ‘Flora and I want to go out on Friday. Just us.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I love you so much, sweetheart.’ He reached across the corner of the table and cradled her face. She could smell the pepper juice on his fingers. ‘You’re so special. You really, really understand me. Quite naturally, you’re just following the instinct. You want to go out Friday. That means I can stay at the hospital and keep working without any sense of pressure, any of that feeling of a little woman tapping her feet, waiting for me to get home. I really used to hate that. I’m so lucky to have found you. Come here, let me hold you a moment.’

  And he pulled her over to sit beside him. He kissed her neck and then unbuttoned her blouse a little way and started on the upper slopes of her breasts. Not wishing to appear rejecting, Georgie brushed her fingertips over his head. She wondered where this was going. She was tired but Felix had a ravenous libido and thought that a sensitive lover should avoid the banality of always making love in bed.

  He murmured from below her ear. ‘Interviewing bio-med graduates today, there was one … She had this split in her skirt, kind-of off centre. When she crossed her legs there was all this thigh. Gave me a bit of a stiffie. More than a bit, I must admit.’

  Looking for longer term anxieties, Georgie wondered also about the other women, the women before her, the little women who had tapped their feet and waited for Felix to come home.

  ‘She was the best qualified,’ he murmured in a ho-hum tone. ‘So we’ll be making her an offer.’

  ‘Mummy, I’m going to get married,’ improv
ised Flora, talking to herself while she parked in the cracked driveway behind a Christo-like package of polythene and string that was undoubtedly Baby Brother’s latest boat. It sounded weak.

  ‘Mum, I’ve decided to get married,’ she tried, stepping around the turd in the side alley that had undoubtedly been left by Middle Brother’s dog. It sounded tentative.

  ‘Good news, Mum. I’m planning to get married,’ she suggested, opening the back door very quietly so as not to disturb Big Brother, who was undoubtedly working.

  She had to hold the door because her mother was bending over the washing machine, stuffing it with her brothers’clothes.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming today,’ her mother greeted her. The breasts sloshed about under the sweatshirt as she stood upright. The thighs in the washed-out leggings quivered in sympathy. Her mother’s body moved around like one of the fairground rides that flings itself out to each point of the compass in turn. From habit, Flora felt embarrassed and looked down. Feet and paws had left muddy imprints on the vinyl floor covering. Something slithered under the sink. ‘It isn’t Sunday, is it?’ her mother asked.

  ‘No, it’s Wednesday,’ she confirmed. Time, like everything else, was never disciplined in this house.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ her mother demanded, slamming the washing-machine door. ‘Because I don’t know why you’ve come to tell me about it if it is. I’ve got enough trouble here, I don’t need any more.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Flora pacified her.

  The kitchen door crashed open. She stood back to let the dog through. ‘Yo, Wormy,’ Middle Brother greeted her. He opened the larder door. For a few seconds the two doors filled the mean room. Flora and her mother retreated to the scullery. The house had been built in the thirties in a new suburb full of hope. Since then, hope had relocated and none of the house’s subsequent owners had found the money to remodel it for modern domestic living.

  Middle Brother kicked the back door shut, shot a pile of dog meal into a bowl, threw the packet back into the larder and shouldered past them into the house, tipping over the dog’s water bowl on the way.