‘I’m cool, don’t worry about me. You know Dillon. He’s besotted. He’ll be fine. Georgie and me, we never did appeal to the same kind of men.’
‘I don’t think women ever get to be really good friends if they’re always trying to pull the same kind of guy. Not that men discriminate much, do they?’
Flora giggled in the act of pushing the silk shirt to the back of the wardrobe with the rest of the things she had ready to give away to friends likely to be impressed by her generosity and admiring of her superior taste. ‘They’re not really bothered, are they?’
‘I heard another one yesterday,’ said Donna. ‘You want to hear it?’
‘Go on.’
‘What’s the difference between a clitoris and a bar?’
‘I don’t know, what is the difference between a clitoris and a bar?’
‘Nine out of ten men can usually find a bar.’
Flora giggled some more. Des called out from downstairs, ‘Darling, if you don’t know the difference between a clitoris and a bar by now you need to renew your commitment to drinking.’
When she’d finished talking to Donna, Flora let Dillon’s call get through.
‘What time are you picking me up?’ she asked him.
‘What time did we say I was picking you up?’ he bluffed, assuming with terror that he must have forgotten a date they had made.
‘Ten, maybe. Ten-thirty. Unless you want to eat before the party.’
Party! That was it. He must have forgotten about the party. Ten! Ten-thirty! Impossible. He couldn’t live without seeing her for another four hours. ‘Let’s eat first,’ he suggested. ‘If I pick you up at eight…’
‘Nine.’
He hadn’t booked, he was a fool! And everywhere would be crammed by half past nine. Plus, bottom line, sex was the main event of the evening, and a late kick off plus a party would mean getting to bed late and knackered and perhaps unfit to deliver a class-A shag.
He pleaded. ‘Eight-thirty?’
‘If you like. See you, sweets.’
Flora rang off and thought about getting Des to start her bath.
5. April 15–16
On Saturday night, Felix and Georgie, went to the cinema in Islington to see a Hungarian film that had won the critics’prize at Cannes. After ten minutes, Georgie fell asleep. They proceeded to the Wagamama noodle bar, where Georgie fell asleep again, standing up in the queue. This annoyed Felix; she was heavy and he felt unmanly when she slumped against his chest and knocked him off balance. He let her sit on the steps and sleep leaning against the wall until there were free spaces on the benches for them.
She managed to stay awake during the meal, although her nose nodded scarily close to the soup a couple of times. Thoughtfully, Felix told her about the film in so much detail she knew as much about it as if she had been able to keep her eyes open and see it herself. Going home, he let her sleep in the taxi until it was time to pay.
When they had finished having sex it was long after midnight. Georgie buried her face in one of Felix’s scratchy linen pillow cases and consigned herself to self-indulgent unconsciousness for twelve hours.
On Saturday night, Des made a serious mistake and went out in new boots. They took him to the Met bar without any trouble, where he met Donna. They consumed three strawberry Martinis each and agreed that Flora and Georgie were throwing their lives away.
‘Chucking themselves into the Romantic Crap Swamp,’ mourned Des. ‘Drowning in the Bog of Icky Love Mush. Disgusting.’
‘I never expected it of Georgie,’ Donna grieved.
‘I did,’ declared Des. ‘She was always the dilettante. Anybody’s for a bad poem and an empty gesture. I’m surprised you never saw that.’
‘I never did,’ allowed Donna. ‘But Flora, now – she started out useless but she was really coming round until this Dillon thing.’
‘You don’t have to live with it. But never mind,’ Des assured her. ‘We’ll get them back on track. In six months they’ll be just drooling with gratitude to us for rescuing them.’
‘It needs a name, this project,’ Donna proposed. ‘You know plenty of military types. What’s the right name for a mission to rescue two fine women from the Romantic Crap Swamp?’
‘Project Heartswap?’ he suggested.
‘Project’s too tentative. We must not fail. Operation Heartswap.’
‘Genius,’ breathed Des.
They drank to it. After that, his evening became deranged.
From the Met in Park Lane he stupidly walked to the far side of Soho, queued an hour and a half for The Tube Club, threw down vodka-cranberries on top of the Martinis, danced madly then agreed to go down to Equinox for the Ginger Spice Tribute Night.
At Equinox he switched to vodka and Red Bull, threw a few of his famous karate kicks in Wannabee and pulled the venue’s Top Shag. Top Shag was a Danish model, twenty-two years old, school of Johnny Depp. Top Shag demanded drugs. Des acquired drugs.
Together they went on to some place in Brixton. Des retained the impression of arm-waving, snogging, and bad beer. Top Shag disappeared with the drugs. Des forgave him. He forgave everybody. He loved everybody. He wanted to huggle everybody.
Soon, Des huggled a body over whom another body wanted to maintain the illusion of ownership. The other body was very large and hit him in the face. Des forgave him. He captured the attention of another body that tried to have sex with him using a floppy penis in the alley outside. Des forgave them all. They went to some flat. Des wanted to take a piss but his trousers were uncooperative. The body tried to have sex with him in the kitchen but the penis failed at the last minute.
Des tried to throw up but the kitchen sink moved. He noticed that his boots were getting messy and sat down to take them off. That was when he discovered the blisters. His feet had become a mass of sacs of white skin. He told the body that they looked like a pair of thalidomide squids. The body said its mother had talked about thalidomide.
A few hours into Sunday, just as the body finally presented him with a standing penis, Des passed out in a pool of mingled bodily fluids on a kitchen floor in Herne Hill.
In a cab, it took Donna three-quarters of an hour to ride the glittering torrents of traffic from Hyde Park Corner to Tower Bridge. While the driver cursed fifty-two coaches of tourists, inched along the top of Trafalgar Square and waited out the roadworks on the Embankment, Donna retouched her mascara, repainted her lipstick, resurfaced her cheeks and meditated pleasantly on Operation Heartswap. Up to this point, she judged her evening a success.
At last she arrived at the Pont De La Tour and joined a colleague from Direct Warranty to entertain two global board directors over from Denver with their wives. The wives were malevolently polite to her. They ate small pieces of food stacked in miniature pagodas on vast white plates and discussed the state of the world reinsurance market, the economic prognosis for the former Soviet Union and the latest Washington sex scandal.
Donna’s mood crashed. Boredom loomed. She was afraid of boredom, she felt her heart race when it attacked. Boredom always prowled the fringes of her mind, a savage, multi-headed monster with old entrails caked on its filthy jaws.
Over the de-caffs, she launched a politically incorrect dissertation on the attributes of lesbians. Once the company showed itself willing to be titillated by this iconoclasm, she indicated that she would be receptive to their views on African Americans. Eventually, the visitors felt uninhibited enough to speak judgementally of Jews. They left the restaurant with sparkling eyes, four more New Worlders exhilarated by the old forbidden thrills of Europe.
‘How do you do that?’ her colleague asked with admiration while they waited for their cabs.
‘They were dreary,’ she explained. ‘I had to do something. I think they enjoyed it.’
‘You bet they enjoyed it. I just hope they never tell.’
‘They won’t dare,’ she promised him as he opened her taxi door.
The journey home was a short ride over Tow
er Bridge. In her flat, Donna sat at her desk looking out over the river. From nowhere, a vision of Dillon came into her mind. He scurried, his shoulders were bent, his face was white and tense.
Operation Heartswap required men with blood in their veins and time on their hands. Dillon had the first, but not, at that point, the second. She needed him idle. Donna fired up her computer and planned a major rationalisation of the new business department of Direct Warranty.
Flora was not feeling hungry that evening, but Dillon pressurised her until she identified a need for sushi. He drove her across town to the nearest Yah! Sushi! and perched unsteadily beside her on a tall stool at the counter, choosing from a conveyor belt of dainty plates. While Dillon made a pig of himself with fish things, loaded up with ginger, mustard and God-knows-what, Flora dissected some disappointing rice rolls and extracted the chips of avocado.
Predictably, Dillon moved for cutting the party and going back to 17A for sex, making it necessary for Flora to explain that the party was an important networking opportunity and the host was an important client with a new office in Hampstead, who’d invested thousands in her special skills and now wanted to show off the results. The effort of this explanation annoyed Flora.
Dillon claimed to have heard of her client and said his reputation was dubious. To save energy and make sure Dillon never trivialised her work again, Flora expressed all her feelings, telling him that anybody who cared anything about her would have realised that her work was far more important than any bodily appetite, especially sex, and that he was an insensitive bastard.
These events took place as they drove north to Hampstead and waited out the traffic jam on Heath Street. To encourage Dillon to use his brain the next time he took her out, Flora also shared her opinion that he should have had the sense to leave his car and take a cab, whose driver would have known the backroads and not wasted so much time. Dillon began to feel hot and sweaty.
At the party, the client towered over them and made Dillon look embarrassingly young. The client was a massive man with steely hair, who used his hands like table-tennis bats, dispersing his guests about the premises to his liking. Paffff … he spun Dillon away into an airless little room occupied by the host’s personal trainer and his reflexologist. Piffff … he chipped Flora into the big room by his side and introduced her to people.
Dillon needed air. He wanted Flora. Leaving his oubliette to find these two essentials, he noticed that the so-called office ended in a large room containing a bed, a wall of mirror and two pots of suggestive red orchids. He could not remember Flora mentioning this detail. Anxiety energised him, but before he could complete his crossing of the corridor, he started gasping for breath. He felt his face pulsing with heat. His neck was as stiff as a tree trunk. His chest was burning, his eyes were popping, be couldn’t speak, he was on the floor. ‘Who is that? I think somebody should take him to hospital,’ said an irritated voice.
The paramedic was a fatherly man who was easy with the term ‘anaphylactic shock’. ‘Tuna does it, undercooked tuna, that’s the usual suspect.’
‘It was supposed to be raw,’ Dillon said.
‘Mad, you are. You gotta be mad,’ the paramedic diagnosed as Dillon was rolled in a blanket and strapped to a stretcher.
After this embarrassment, Flora had a good evening. The energy was churning like a washing machine. Her host told his guests that the success of his party was largely down to her Environmental Aroma Balancer and the Euphoric Blend (neroli, ylang-ylang, black pepper). He claimed a 300 per cent increase in business since her visit and she passed around her cards. She promised that fishtanks were unnecessary and noted universal relief, which she expertly converted into an ecstasy of anticipation.
After the guests left, promising to call, Flora mentioned a new club. The client called a taxi and took her there. Cash immediately resolved the question of membership. They were sucked into the depths of a squashy red velvet sofa. Flora reminded the client to book a follow-up consultation to cleanse the energy of his personal space after the party. Flora’s client suggested that she ditch the loser, meaning Dillon. Flora invited her client to ditch his wife. As she expected, this question was not resolved.
When Flora realised that the synthetic smell of the sofa was making her nauseous, her client was properly shamed and whisked her home to 17A. Since he was richer, older and smarter than Dillon, it seemed only fair to allow him a goodnight snog.
Flora slept blissfully until midday on Sunday, when Dillon had the nerve to call from a hospital far away to ask her to pick him up. She gave him some indication of the scale of her disappointment and went back to sleep.
A couple of hours later, Dillon came round to 17A with a very large bunch of pink tulips. From behind her curtains, Flora saw him knocking at the door. He was about to give up, leave the flowers and go when a minicab pulled over and out of it crawled Des, who let Dillon into the house. For some reason, Des was walking barefoot and carrying his boots.
Feeling a little trapped now, Flora allowed Dillon to take her to Spitalfields market for peppermint tea and a bagel. In return for listening to Dillon telling her that he had nearly died, she accepted as a present a pyramid of labradorite, sold by the man who had crystals from Katmandu. It was obviously a highly charged mineral and well worth sixty pounds. In the evening, after she’d sent Dillon home to work, she meant to meditate for an hour, but as soon as she began, the next move with Georgie manifested itself in her mind so she made a call. Georgie’s phone was on recall.
Despite this disappointment, Flora felt contentment. She inspected the whole canvas of her life and liked the picture. Ten years ago she had been her brothers’punch-bag and her mother’s therapist. Seven years ago, she had been so angry! She got her MBA at the University of Aberdeen, chosen because it was definitively too far from home for her to be able to get back more than twice a year. But all that guilt turned into such terrible, unbalanced rage. It was only when she left uni that she really started to read: The Celestine Prophecy, You Can Heal Your Life, What Colour is Your Parachute?, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
Those books had changed her life. She had worked on herself and now she had accepted her choices and changed her paradigms. She had her own space, a house in the East End; she had people in her life who supported her, like Des and Georgie. She had a role model and a mentor, she had Donna. She had got out of the corporate madness, she had her own business and all these clients she could turn on to a true understanding of the universe. How cool was that?
6. April 17–20
Dillon got ready to kill small-pet madness. He opened up his laptop and took control of the meeting. ‘Small-pet policies,’ he announced, giving his voice a dying fall as he put his charts on the screen. ‘If we went into this area, the challenge would be that small pets don’t live very long. A hamster lives three years, Russian hamsters perhaps more, a gerbil will live five years, rabbits three to four according to the breed, small rodents less than two years.’ The graphics got a laugh. He’d shaped each pie chart according to the animal and animated them so the hamsters washed their whiskers and the gerbil jumped. This was going to be all over in thirty seconds – max.
‘That means that if we were to sell policies, they wouldn’t run very long, the administration costs would be relatively high. In the large-pet market we get most sales in the vet’s surgery. The owner’s standing there looking at a massive bill for Fido’s oncology and he sees the wisdom of his choice. That means commission payments to the vet. On a two-year policy, the commission we would be able to offer wouldn’t be enough to be attractive. And small animals aren’t like cats and dogs, they don’t go on for years with heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, cancer …’
‘Excellent,’ Donna interrupted him. ‘You’re saying they just die and that’s it?’
‘Ah, yeah more or less.’
‘That’s great, isn’t it?’ She canvassed the rest of the circle who nodded slavish approval. ‘That gives us a minimal risk
of high claims. Great work, Dillon.’
‘Not quite. Before they die, they get lost.’ So confident was he that he ignored the thunderclouds in Donna’s eyes. ‘They get lost with serious underwriting implications. They get down the back of sofas, inside pianos. A family in Macclesfield had their entire patio dug up because a hamster had got underneath the tiles.’ Another laugh. The team was with him.
‘Wow. People really love their small pets.’ Donna nodded, round-eyed, the way people do when they believe they are hearing a great mystery of life expounded.
‘Children,’ he protested. ‘Children love them, not the adults. Not the premium payers.’
‘So, we market to the children. You’re telling me there’s no way we can get our premiums out of children’s love?’
‘Donna, what I’m saying here is the numbers don’t stack up. My feeling is not to go any further with this product.’ He’d lost them. The team was not with him any more, they were bouncing with Donna’s enthusiasm and the cuteness of his bloody graphics.
‘You’re such a clever boy,’ she returned caressingly. ‘You’ll fix the numbers. I’m really excited about this. The small-pet market is wide open! Direct will be the first in there! I’m making this your project, Dillon. Give it everything you’ve got! Pick your team, get out there, do some focus groups …’
Dillon had a flash picture of standing beside Flora at a party admitting that he was researching public attitudes to hamster health. On a woman lacking Flora’s totally kissable lips, her expression would have appeared nasty.
‘Development costs …’ he remonstrated.
‘Give me a budget. Great work, Dillon!’ And she turned to her next victim.
On Monday Flora went about her business. She went out to see people, carrying her divining pendulum, her Ba Kwa chart and the Environmental Aroma Harmoniser in a yellow silk roll which she had designed to conserve their energies. She explained compellingly that she could make wealth, love and happiness flow through a workplace like a great river of blessings.
Heartswap Page 6