Heartswap

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Oh, yeah. I think one of his old girlfriends really trained him up. He loves doing all the stuff guys hate, you know. Says it really turns him on.’

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Georgie, her eyes now enormous.

  Flora was about to elaborate when they sensed a disturbance at the far end of the bar. There was flouncing in the coat-check area and fawning from the manager and a raised voice saying something about taking care with other people’s property.

  All over the room, people took their attention off their glasses and their companions and looked to see what was happening. Minimal was also the Bit Bar’s style, and minimal was the behaviour practised within its smooth beech-clad walls. Most of the clientele needed to abuse chemical substances to be capable of more than the animation of a zombie. A raised voice was an event. Slowly, ripples of concern spread around the room.

  ‘Who is that?’ Georgie asked, dragging herself upright to get a good view of the action.

  ‘I forget how tall you are,’ said Flora. This was another thing which bugged her. Georgie was four inches taller than Flora, so sometimes she slumped to try to look smaller and other times she over-braced her shoulders and flattened her spine too much. Either way, a disaster for her upper vertebrae, inducing tension in the neck, crushing the cervical nerves, blocking the energy flow to her upper chakras. Flora visualised Georgie’s third eye firmly closed and her thousand-petalled lotus tightly shut up in a bud. No vision, no enlightenment. Sometimes Flora considered that all the problems Georgie had with spirituality could be traced back to her height. It was karma, of course, the payback for an earlier life.

  There was a crescendo of voices at the entrance, then the coat-check girl shot off to the toilets in tears and the cause of the outbreak surged forward, leaving the manager bobbing apologetically in her wake.

  ‘I think that’s Donna,’ Georgie announced.

  ‘It is really?’ Flora whipped around and half-rose to get a look at the new arrival. ‘This is just brilliant. That woman is such an icon.’

  ‘I can remember when you said she intimidated you.’

  Flora was no longer paying attention. A black-haired figure was powering towards them on legs as thin and smooth as knife blades. Pearl grey suit, white skin, black hair and a violet pashmina streaming over her shoulders.

  ‘Georgina!’ throbbed the woman’s voice. ‘And Flora! Together again! My best babes!’

  ‘Donna!’ Flora sprang up and there was kissing. It seemed rude not to do the same, so Georgie lurched to her feet and into the miasma of scent which brought back memories of their rough, nervy, sleep-deprived mornings at Ardent Holdings.

  ‘Look at you,’ Donna homed in on Georgie, holding her at arm’s length and making her twist to be admired. ‘You look terrific now. Chicago’s being good to you, huh?’

  ‘You always said Georgie was world class,’ Flora put in.

  ‘It’s a great city,’ was all Georgie could say. The twisting manoeuvre was dangerous. She thought she could feel the vodka sloshing around against the inside of her skull. She was disappointed. In a few more seconds, she identified the cause. Donna was unwinding her shawl and making as if to join them, which was going to move the evening up a couple of levels. End of bonding, no more cosy, no more girly Friday-night downtime.

  ‘I said she was looking fantastic,’ Flora went on, smoothing her skirt as she sat.

  The waiter arrived like a speeding bullet. ‘Just a juice.’ Donna took a perch on an empty chair at their table. ‘And more of whatever my girls are having. I always knew you were a star, Georgie. A star and a babe. Unbeatable.’ She nodded, agreeing with herself, fingering the tooth-like grey pearls of her necklace. Statement jewellery, that was Donna’s thing ‘Good to see you, really good. How long are you here?’

  ‘She’s come back,’ said Flora.

  ‘You’re back? You mean like back, like for good?’ The winged black eyebrows undulated in perplexity. ‘You’re back from Chicago?’

  ‘Not entirely my decision.’ Even through the blanket of vodka Georgie felt the fangs of doubt.

  ‘So where are you?’

  ‘Eon Plc. Still in fund management.’

  ‘But that’s good. Good, good. Quite a track record. They’re getting a great team together over there. You’ve probably heard that I moved on from Ardent.’ Donna sent a nod to Flora, an inclusive nod which said that this was a person on the inside track with her, a person already trusted with all her material intimacies. ‘Into products. I’m at Direct Warranty.’

  ‘New Business Director,’ Flora supplied. ‘Actually she’s Dillon’s boss. Did I tell you it was Donna who introduced us? We owe it all to her.’

  ‘He’s a bright boy,’ Donna shook her head, regretting her mistake. ‘Just two hundred pounds of pure top-quality intellectual capital. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought they’d have some fun, make a great couple. I didn’t see her getting quite so carried away with him, our impetuous friend here. But she thinks that’s what she’s into.’ She paused as the waiter arrived and distributed three red drinks around the table. ‘Maybe you can talk some sense into her, Georgie.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Flora giggled, and squeaked and shook her head violently, shaking with it the whole length of her hair. ‘Georgie’s on my side.’

  ‘You can’t be. She’s just started a business. She’s twenty-eight. It’s practically child-rape.’ She was not really kidding. One of the first things to learn with Donna was that she was usually most serious when she was joking.

  ‘Georgie’s getting married too,’ Flora announced.

  Donna said nothing. A major nothing. She flicked away the skirt of her jacket – long jackets were her thing too, a dandy touch added to the principal-boy legs. She took a sip of her juice. She looked around, she looked, at the ceiling. Her unconcern was deafening. Georgie felt fear in the pit of her stomach, another sensation she remembered from morning meetings at Ardent.

  ‘But this calls for champagne,’ Donna announced, eventually.

  3. April 14

  ‘I suppose what I’m afraid of is what it would do to me.’ Donna poured out the last of the bottle.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Georgie, and put her hand over her glass. She was too late and the champagne splashed her fingers. Donna picked up her own glass and looked into it with a sad face. ‘There’ve been times, you know, with some cute bloke or other, when I’ve thought it would have been nice. Then I’d get this vision of one of those doo-dahs for storing old plastic bags hanging on the back of the kitchen door. I’d see myself actually wasting thought on a plastic bag. Balling it up and stuffing it in one of those doo-dahs and telling myself I’m being a responsible home-maker and saving the planet.’

  She raised her glowing eyes and looked at them. Flora was giggling and swaying like a sapling in a storm. Georgie was licking champagne off her fingers. ‘Which is such bullshit, isn’t it? What does it matter if a plastic bag gets thrown away now or after spending six months balled up in a doo-dah on the back of my kitchen door?’

  Georgie started to laugh in her contralto range then shot into soprano for a hiccup. Flora’s giggles were getting out of control. At nearby tables, people looked over their way. Nothing minimal about this hilarious party. Did they really belong in the Bit Bar?

  ‘Pointless! Total waste of life! When they’re storing plutonium waste in leaky rusty old oil drums on the edge of Lake Baikal? I mean, what do all my plastic bags really mean to the planet, actually? And I’d see myself actually buying that doo-dah, and they are so naff, all of them.’ Flora squawked.

  ‘And I’d see myself actually trailing round shops looking for a doo-dah that was, like, in the lower echelons of naffness.’ Georgie was laughing like a big cat purring.

  ‘And actually being pleased when I was able to buy a doo-dah that was the least worst doo-dah in all London, a doo-dah I could bear to look at to hang on my kitchen door so I could waste time wadding up old plastic bags and stuffing them in it so I’d have a
really good supply of old plastic bags when I needed them. I mean, whoever needs an old plastic bag, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Nobody!’ chortled Flora. ‘Never!’

  Georgie thought about plastic bags for muddy trainers, which led to small boys in football kit, which led to commercials for washing powder, which led to a vision of herself in a floral pinny pegging a thousand nappies on a washing line in a slum back yard.

  ‘I will be responsible for fifteen million in new business this quarter.’ Donna held out her arms as if an angel was getting ready to drop the rational explanation into them. ‘They cost my time at a thousand a day. If I kept a doo-dah full of bags in my kitchen I’d see two million in lost business every time I looked at it.’

  Flora’s smile temporarily faded. ‘My God, Donna, fifteen million a quarter – that’s awesome.’

  ‘Yes it is. Just buying that doo-dah would probably use up half a day, that’s five hundred pounds’worth of prime executive time. But married women do that kind of thing. That’s what they do. When they’re married. Even the good ones. The ones like us. So when that happened, when I saw myself doing all that, getting married and giving my life to a plastic bag doo-dah, then I just told them it wasn’t for me. Getting married. You girls have more guts than I have. Here’s to you.’

  Donna raised her glass. Shaky with hilarity, Flora and Georgie found their own glasses and clinked them with hers.

  Georgie thought about all the cute blokes Donna had refused to marry. She saw them trudging, love-lorn, through empty lives, despairing of finding a woman foxy enough to erase the memory of the brave, the beautiful, the hilarious Donna. She felt sorry for them. She felt sorry for Donna, single forever, her kitchen pristine, her kitchen door innocent of a doo-dah stuffed with old plastic bags. She felt thirsty and she had a headache. She downed her last drops and pulled a face.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Donna. ‘The fizz in this place is crap. Let’s go somewhere decent.’

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Georgie.

  ‘That’s another thing I’m afraid of.’ Majestically, Donna rose to her feet and waved at the waiter. ‘Slowing down.’

  ‘Call him,’ Flora suggested. ‘What time did you say you’d be back?’

  Now Georgie saw herself after marriage, a crouching, oppressed little figure, forever scurrying home to a censorious Felix while free women went where they chose and got back when they liked. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘He’ll be OK.’

  ‘I can’t wait for you to meet him,’ Georgie said as she shrugged herself into her coat and knocked over a vase of phallic red jungle flowers.

  ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Dillon,’ answered Flora, catching the vase as it toppled.

  Donna masked her face in her shawl and pondered this double revelation in silence.

  ‘I’m a liar,’ Donna admitted when they had been in the next bar an hour. ‘I’m not really afraid of the bag doo-dah. Not as afraid as all that. I’d take it on, if I got married.’

  ‘It was so sad,’ Georgie protested.

  ‘It was so funny,’ Flora corrected her.

  ‘But that’s not really what gives me the screaming meanies. You want to know what freaks me out about getting married? Why I’ve never dared to do it and I never will?’

  ‘What?’ Georgie thought she might cry. Her eyes were prickling. Maybe it was the bubbles. But it was so tragic. A wonderful, wonderful woman like Donna too scared to get married. Scared! She who had more front than Harrods!

  Scared, Flora marvelled, Donna was actually scared. She who was generating new business worth fifteen million a quarter, she was scared of getting married. Of course, this was a precious conversation. Donna was really opening up tonight, she was sharing her significant stuff. Because she knew them, because she trusted them, because the energy was right, Donna felt bonded – yes, she must feel that now, bonded to them. Because of that she was talking about things nobody had any idea she felt. Amazing. Flora felt brushed by the wings of glory.

  ‘What really scares me is the shame. The shame, the humiliation. When he’ll be running around with the bimbo who’s going to be Wife Number Two and I’m the last to know. Or lots of bimbos, even. I couldn’t hack that. It would kill me, the shame of being cheated on. I mean, think of Hillary Clinton. Looking like a fool in front of all the world. Who’d want that?’

  Astral, that was how Flora was feeling. As if on the astral plane. The feeling of being a long way above everything, looking down on the table. She heard herself say, ‘Dillon won’t cheat on me because he’s totally goofy about me. And anyway I’ll never give him the chance.’

  The waistband of Georgie’s skirt was cutting into her like a wire. She reached back under her sweater and released the button. It snapped off and fell somewhere. She eased the zip down a couple of inches. That was better.

  Donna let her question trickle out on a drawl. ‘You mean you’re starting out thinking he’s going to cheat? So the answer is you’re going to run a surveillance operation on your husband?’

  ‘He’ll never know. I’m pretty subtle about it. There are ways, you know.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ Donna sighed, swirling the very expensive, very good and very delicious champagne around her glass. ‘I suppose I’m just too romantic for marriage, as well as all the rest.’

  ‘Ask her, then.’ Defiantly, Flora waved her full glass at Georgie, splashing half the precious nectar on the table. ‘If you think I’m unromantic, you ask her about Felix.’

  ‘Felix and me, we just admit that there is a problem with fidelity in a long-term relationship; Especially for men,’ Georgie protested, amazed that she was sounding so lucid. ‘So we share things with each other.’

  ‘They tell each other everything,’ Flora explained. ‘If he fancies someone else, if she does, they have these great confession sessions.’

  Georgie shook her head. Not a good idea. Her head felt as if it might topple off the top of her-spine. ‘Not like that. Not a big deal. We just talk about our feelings and get rid of the transgressive thing. So once it stops being forbidden fruit, we stop wanting it.’

  ‘You mean, you’ve just got engaged and you still fancy other people?’ enquired Donna with care.

  ‘Not me. Felix. Because he’s a man and he’s got those hormones and that programming and those instincts.’ She was lying, she knew she was lying. She had those instincts. That very morning her eyes had slithered lustfully over the back of the third junior from the end of the desk when he leaned over the terminals to pass someone a note. Great lats. Lovely the way the shirt clung to that little valley down his spine. But it was just lust. She’d tell Felix tomorrow, it’d be OK.

  ‘You mean this Felix has just proposed to you and he is still aware that there are other women on the planet?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Georgie said. ‘He is a man. We’re not denying that.’

  ‘Nor are we,’ chipped in Flora.

  ‘So you agree that basically all men are bastards but you think you can stop yours reverting to type?’

  ‘Yes,’ Georgie answered in that level, no-shit way which Donna recognised as dangerously confident.

  ‘You really believe you’ve got this thing taken care of?’

  They nodded. ‘Yes,’ said Georgie, ‘we do.’

  ‘I’d put money on it,’ said Flora.

  ‘So would I,’ affirmed Georgie.

  ‘So you’re not a hundred per cent sure, then? It’s a probability, not a fact?’

  ‘Well, if you put it that way …’ Georgie felt her headache returning.

  ‘Who knows why the wind blows?’ demanded Flora. ‘We can’t know the unknowable. This is about human nature.’

  Donna-picked at the fringe of her shawl as if getting up courage to speak. Then she dropped it and said, ‘I have an idea.’

  There was some, ritual attached to the statement. At Ardent Holdings, whenever Donna said she had an idea, the result was usually a new winning strategy and big bonuses all round. Whe
n Donna said, ‘I have an idea,’ like that, a meeting would freeze and everyone would reach for their pens to make notes. Flora and Georgie leaned forward to listen.

  ‘You’re sure you’ve got your guys handled.’ They nodded.

  ‘But it’d be nice to know, right?’ They nodded.

  ‘I mean, know for sure. So you can really trust them.’ They nodded.

  ‘And you’ve not met each other’s partners, have you?’ They shook their heads.

  ‘So they don’t know who you are?’ Flora nodded. Georgie frowned. ‘You know what I mean.’ Georgie nodded.

  ‘And you’re both gorgeous.’ They smiled.

  ‘So why don’t you try it on with the other man? The other woman’s man? Like, make a play, make a pass, seduce the bastards.’

  They looked at each other. Donna continued, ‘As I see it, the down side would be that if they fall for it, you’d find out they were a pair of weak, willie-led wallies – which is just what you know already. The up side …’ And she paused for emphasis, looking deep into the four round and fascinated eyes. ‘The up side is that if they don’t fall for it, then they’re better men than you thought they were, and you can get married in total trust to a man you know can resist temptation even when it’s on a plate in front of him in an Agent Provocateur G-string.’

  ‘I hate Agent Provocateur,’ Flora complained. ‘Their bras are like spinnakers. I think their house model is that creature on Eurotrash.’

  ‘The underwear is not the point,’ Donna said with severity. ‘The point is, you’ll be able to trust your guys.’

  ‘It’s an idea. But I trust Felix anyway,’ said Georgie.

  ‘And I trust Dillon,’ said Flora. ‘But it is a good idea.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Donna, waving at the waiter for the bill. ‘I’ll leave it with you.’

  Flora gave them a crooked smile and collapsed along the banquette.

  ‘The dear girl,’ Donna smiled at Georgie, then glanced at the body, now lying with parallel limbs as neatly as it had been sitting before. ‘She shouldn’t drink, she can’t take it.’