by Anna Maxted
Vivienne, who is reluctant to share her thoughts after the Molotov cocktail episode, says hesitantly that my mother does seem subdued but it’s probably because she’s realised ‘life goes on’. I quash the ripple of irritation (do I never learn?) and assure Vivienne I’m grateful for all that she’s done for my mother. I say this to flatter her into doing even more. Because I intend to do a lot less. Call it selfishness or self-preservation – I’m too shattered to care. I feel terrible about it but I have nothing more to give. The exertion of continually buoying up my mother is slowly drowning me. And of course I’ve disappointed my father yet again. So I seek refuge in the words of a dead actor. Or was he a cricketer? I’m not sure. Whatever, I’ve tried and tried, failed and failed and so I’m quitting. No use being a damn fool about it.
I am fantasising about being involved in a non-fatal car crash so I can spend a week in hospital watching talk shows and being fussed over, when the phone rings. Every time Laetitia wants to avoid someone she orders me to take the call. Unfortunately, it’s a one-way deal. I adopt a 1950s BBC clipped telephone voice in the hope that, if it is my mother, she won’t recognise me.
‘Helen?’ says the person at the other end. ‘Are you okay? You sound funny.’
I clear my throat hurriedly and cry, ‘I’m fine! fine! It’s just, er, it’s just a bit mad here today. How’s it going?’ And guess what. As of a minute ago, it’s going well. Tom has called to ask me out on a date. Not a vague, hopeless ‘we’ll speak sometime next week to arrange something’ half-promise, but a real, solid, write this down in your diary date. The date is in thirteen days’ time as he’s off to Manchester tomorrow to attend some vet association congress – or as he says – ‘a ten-day piss-up with a ball at the end of it’. But he’s looking forward to seeing me. I restrain myself from asking any giveaway questions like ‘is Celine going?’ And I refuse to consider that Tom will meet a beautiful, intelligent female vet who drives a BMW Z3 and specialises in saving bunny rabbits’ lives, and instead concentrate my mind on the facts. Fatboy’s peach of a doctor has asked me out – me, Helen Gayle Bradshaw, a stumpy, grumpy dogsbody who drives a Toyota and kills spiders without a twinge of regret. Here is my chance to make it right!
I replace the receiver smiling and I only stop when Laetitia says sweetly but in a voice that brooks no argument, ‘Helen, the writer who infiltrated the brothel doesn’t want to pose for the picture so I need you to go along to the shoot – they’ve got the costume, it’s all set up – if you leave now, you’ll be there by two.’ I stifle a sigh and get my coat. As Marcus said the day I had to stand outside the Houses of Parliament, disguised as a giant tampon, in protest against tax on sanitary protection, ‘Helen, you’re so very lucky. You have such an interesting job.’
The second jolly surprise of the week is that Lizzy has finally pinned Tina down to a girls’ night out. ‘Wot no Adrian?’ I joke to Tina.
‘He’s got a stag night,’ she says curtly.
‘Oh right,’ I say. In truth, I feel hurt. As if Lizzy and I are a stop-gap. But I force myself not to take it personally. (Michelle says I ‘take everything personally’.) I don’t own Tina. It’s her life. She’s not obliged to see me. It’s not like we’re related. Mini reprimand over, I am able to brush the hurt to one side and say, ‘Well, it’ll be nice to see you properly, out of work, you old slag.’
After the recent downturn in our relationship, the endearment sounds false and awkward. For a second, I worry I’ve insulted her. But Tina seems to collect herself, and replies cheerfully, ‘You too, you big tart.’ The evening in question is this Thursday. On Wednesday Lizzy informs us ‘Bring some loose-fitting clothes for tomorrow night.’
Exsqueeze me? To my and Tina’s mutual horror, Lizzy has decided that beer, bars, and batting eyelids are not on tomorrow’s agenda. She has taken it upon her do-gooding self to snap us out of our alcohol-quaffing, poky bar-propping, fast-food stuffing, suffer in the morning, rut. To me, she says in a firm tone, ‘I’ve been watching you and you’ve eaten nothing but junk for weeks. You’ve got black rings round your eyes. You look like a racoon. You need to do something for you.’ To Tina she says mysteriously, ‘This will calm you.’
We stare at her suspiciously. ‘What?’ we chorus. (Me, still wondering if racoons are svelte creatures. I mean, she could have said ‘panda’.)
‘We are,’ says Lizzy – in a voice as pretty and munificent and autocratic as Glinda the white witch – ‘Going to my health club to do a t’ai chi class. It’s booked and paid for. Afterwards, we’re eating in the juice bar. Oh my! I’m late for my lunch appointment! See you tomorrow!’ Of all the rotten low-down cheatin’ tricks.
‘Does the juice bar sell fermented grape juice?’ I shout after Lizzy, as she speeds out of the door. The coward.
Tina and I regard each other in dismay. I say grumpily, ‘Do you even know what t’ai chi is?’
Tina makes a face, ‘It’s a martial art.’
At this I perk up. ‘It’s not aerobic?’
Tina shakes her head, ‘Nah.’
I pause for a second, recall every James Bond film I’ve ever seen and a leering feature in a men’s magazine about a blonde, beauteous television presenter who in her spare time, kickboxes. I decide that women who do martial arts really impress men and it’s about time I became one of them. ‘I’m quite looking forward to tomorrow,’ I tell Tina.
‘Me too,’ she says vacantly.
I’m stunned. I feel like Little Red Riding Hood duped by a wolf disguised as a pink lacy grandmother. Lizzy deserves to be frogmarched to McDonald’s and force-fed five Big Macs in quick succession. I should have trusted my instinct and scarpered the minute I clapped eyes on Brian, our t’ai chi instructor. He had long hair, wore purple trousers and his first word was ‘basically’. Tina and I, loitering at the back of the studio, exchanged a snide look. For the ‘newcomers’ – here, a lingering smile at Lizzy and a meaningful glance at Tina and me – he began with a short introduction to t’ai chi. T’ai chi is an ancient Chinese art, a slow pattern of movements constructed thousands of years ago to promote vitality and inner harmony.
I nodded briskly, in the hope that he’d hurry up and show us a few karate chops. To my disbelief, he droned on for eight further minutes – during which I lost the will to live – then announced, ‘I’m going to teach you how to walk.’ As I learned how to walk a quarter of a century ago, I presumed this was a joke. Sadly, no. We spent eighty-five minutes walking in slow motion. Bend the back knee, lift up the other foot – you know, walking. To my delight, Tina looked like a junior clerk from the Ministry of Silly Walks, but it didn’t compensate. I wanted to scream with boredom. It was sooooooo slooooooooooooow. Like being in detention.
I stifled forty yawns and didn’t dare look at Tina because I knew we’d both keel over laughing. Afterwards in the juice bar, Tina and I – hysterical with relief that the nightmare was over – mutated into a pair of fourteen-year-olds who found everything in the world rude and/or funny. When Lizzy politely enquired of the etiolated teenager behind the bar ‘Is your juicer working?’ we hooted and howled with raucous mirth. When Tina quipped, ‘I’m gonna beat you up – it’s going to take me ages,’ we nearly wet our loosely fitting trousers. When I ranted about Brian’s pointing foot – ‘The way he pointed his foot at stuff! His slowwwwwly pointing foot, pointing for what seemed like daaaaaays . . . !’ – we snorted and sniggered until our stomachs hurt.
Then Lizzy did a very unLizzylike thing. She swore. She snapped, ‘Will you two bloody shut up!’ Our mouths champed shut in surprise. ‘Bloody’ from the woman whose expletive of choice is ‘Fiddlesticks!’ Fiddlesticks, I ask you!
‘Why?’ said Tina, shocked.
‘We were only joking,’ I added, stifling a giggle. Lizzy looked murderous. ‘It was lovely of you to arrange it, though,’ I continued hastily. ‘It just wasn’t our thing.’
Lizzy glared at me. ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t take the piss’ – ‘the piss’? g
ood lord, this is unprecedented! – ‘out of Brian.’
Annoyed that my pink laughter bubble had been popped, I was about to blurt, ‘But the man’s an ageing hippy moron,’ when a tiny, but blessed, brain cell of common sense prevented me.
Alas, it didn’t stop Tina who squawked, ‘Ah come on, Lizzy, leave it out! Brian’s an arse!’
Lizzy’s face tightened. She placed her fork neatly at the side of her bowl of walnut, avocado and leaf salad and said sharply, ‘He is also, as of one week ago, my boyfriend. So’ – and her next words were much more Jane Austeny, much more reassuringly Lizzy – ‘I’d thank you to keep your horrid opinions to yourselves.’
Oops.
Chapter 16
MY TWO LEAST favourite words in the world are: moist, and gusset. My third least favourite is should. As in Helen, you should smile more. Helen, you should know what eight times six equals. Helen, I’m confiscating Cosmopolitan, you should be revising. Helen, you should do stomach exercises. Helen, you should ask for a raise. Helen, you should get a sensible job. Helen, you should visit your mother on days of the week that matter, like Fridays. Helen, you should go out tonight, even though you’d rather chop off your head, because you might meet your future husband or even this month’s shag.
All these nagging shoulds, imposed on me by my parents, my partners, or myself. I block them out yet they claw at my conscience, shaming me, dragging me down. The latest should: Helen, you should spend three hours making merry with Lizzy and Brian in the juice bar to prove your regret at insinuating that t’ai chi is less than wondrous and Brian has a silly pointy foot that he points for what seems like days. Obviously, Tina isn’t as wracked and hounded by shoulds as I am because shortly after our monster boo-boo, she excused herself on the grounds that she told Adrian she’d be home by ten. Liar, liar, pants on fire. (I’ve loved that rhyme, ever since I saw a wife say it to her cheating husband in a film then set a pile of his clothes alight in their front garden.) And so I was left – a great green pulsating gooseberry – with the mammoth task of coaxing Lizzy into forgiveness and persuading her that I thought Brian was a truly fabulous guy.
As Lizzy is incapable of bearing a grudge for longer than fifteen seconds, the first bit was easy. But as for persuading her I liked Brian. Try: excruciatingly difficult, nay, impossible. He was so repulsively, new-mannishly earnest. And the way he stared when you talked! Like Fatboy stalking a pigeon. Admittedly, these were minor sins. But despite his friendliness to me and his glowing adoration of Lizzy, I couldn’t warm to him. I kept thinking, ugh but you’re so old. Old enough to be her father. It gave me the creeps.
‘He’s forty-five if he’s a day!’ I screech to Michelle, who has ditched Sammy and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s boyfriends.
‘Some women like older men,’ she says blandly, to stifle the line of conversation so she can bring it round to the more interesting subject of her. ‘Sammy and me were about the same age,’ she adds wistfully. (She’s sixteen months older than he is.)
I make sympathetic noises and wish the doorbell would ring so I’d have an excuse to get off the phone. It’s Friday night and Luke has got Die Hard out on video. Marcus and I are barely talking but as neither of us wants to gratify the other by retreating to our room, we are about to watch Bruce Willis be macho together. According to Luke, Catalina left Marcus a few weeks back after ‘falling in love’ with a record producer. Like, wow, it must be fate.
‘So how are you fixed for tonight?’ says Michelle suddenly.
‘I’m watching a video with Luke and Marcus,’ I say, trying to make my company sound as unappealing as possible. There is no way I am driving to Crouch End to entertain Michelle. I am exhausted and plan to drink myself into woozy oblivion.
‘Sounds wild! I’ll be round in thirty!’ Pank! Gob-smacked, I wait for the phone to ring again, and twenty seconds later, it does. ‘Uh honey, gimme your address again . . .’
I’m impressed. It appears that getting rid of Sammy signals the dawn of a new era. Because in all the time I’ve lived here, I am embarrassed to say that Michelle has never once graced me with her presence. Admittedly, until eight months ago she and Sammy were residing in New York. (Sammy’s father, who emigrated after his divorce, is something big in bagels and wanted his son to join the family business.) Michelle – seeing the move as a step nearer Hollywood – browbeat Sammy into taking up the offer, escorted him out there, and found work in a beauty salon.
They stuck it out on the Lower East Side for a glorious twenty-six months before Sammy ran away home on the pretext of undertaking crucial research into the UK bagel market. (Translation, he missed his mummy.) I suspect that on forcing Michelle’s return to quaint north London, Sammy unwittingly signed his relationship’s death warrant. Hooray. But the point is, Michelle has had two-thirds of a year to visit my shambling abode and hasn’t. I’d say her excuse is she’s been too busy setting up as a freelance beautician and/or she prefers to meet in town but she hasn’t ever offered an excuse. If I do suggest she pops round, she’s suddenly ‘dead on her feet’, or has ‘shit to do at her place’. Only once did I dredge up the courage to bleat, ‘But you’ve never seen where I live,’ and she drawled, ‘Honey, I can imagine it.’
I do some imagining of my own. And it takes me approximately twelve seconds to work out that Michelle is making the journey to Swiss Cottage because the long-hours, no-perk position of Michelle’s Boyfriend is now vacant and she wishes to fill it. I stomp to the bathroom and scowl into the mirror. Will the victim be Luke or Marcus? She hasn’t met either and I wonder who will appeal most.
Luke? He’s not my type – too kind and easily intimidated – but Michelle thrives on bullying. And, if you aren’t privy to Luke’s odious, malodorous bathroom habits, he is beguiling. Messy blond hair, green eyes, winsome smile, clumsy manner. A human Labrador. The only problem I can foresee is Luke’s tendency to speak the bald truth. Please God Michelle never asks him his opinion on her recent DIY switch to peroxide blonde. I dismiss the thought that I am concentrating on Luke’s potential because I suspect Michelle and Marcus will get on – will get it on.
I do not want this to happen – I know Marcus would see it as a triumph against me – but I have a bad feeling about its inevitability. A small stone of nauseous fear in the pit of my stomach. At the risk of sounding disloyal, Michelle has been out to trounce me ever since I made the rash error, twenty-one years ago, of beating her in the egg and spoon race. And she isn’t stupid. She knows that my recent hate campaign against Marcus isn’t born of indifference. As for Marcus. Whatever else he is, he isn’t choosy.
Consequently, when Michelle arrives fluttering under such a weight of mascara it’s a miracle she can keep her eyes open, I brace myself. I march into the lounge where Luke and Marcus are slumped on the sofa. ‘You two, this is Michelle,’ I mumble, hoping her entrance will go unnoticed. Their necks jerk round like ventriloquist’s dummies. Michelle wiggles her fingers in a cutie-pie wave and is treating Luke to an appreciative once over when he emits a loud, involuntary belch. ‘Pardon me,’ he says politely, but he’s blown it. I curse him as she transfers her predatory gaze to Marcus. He looks her straight in her come-hither (and anywhere else you fancy) eyes, and pings from the sofa and across the room.
‘Charmed,’ he says, taking her hand and gently pulling her towards him to kiss her cheek.
‘Me too,’ she replies silkily. I flare my nostrils in disgust. A millisecond in and they’re like a pair of baboons flashing their arses. Except more blatant. I can hardly bear to watch.
The remainder of the film is ruined as Michelle pretends girly mystification at the plot – it’s Die Hard, for God’s sake! – and keeps whispering at Marcus to explain. Needless to say, the sleazebag is thrilled to oblige. ‘Does anyone mind if I turn on the light?’ I snap as I notice Marcus patting Michelle’s lower arm to emphasis a point. ‘Watching telly in the dark gives me a headache.’
Luke looks concerned, ‘I’ve got
a Nurofen somewhere if you want,’ he says.
‘Forget it,’ I say miserably, ‘it’s probably a tumour.’ I walk to the kitchen and pour myself a mug of red wine. I knew this would happen. But I didn’t know it would feel quite so bad. I try to feel good about bringing Ken and Barbie together. Michelle needs compensation after dumping Sammy. And while she’s insensitive, it’s not as if she’s swiping my current squeeze. Meanwhile Marcus hates me so it would be churlish – and pointless – to try to keep him to myself. Anyhow, he’s soiled goods. This pep talk has no effect. I still feel like crying.
The tears are pricking at my eyelids when Michelle sings, ‘Is that wine you’re guzzling, you greedy girl? Are you gonna hog the whole bottle or can we guys have some?’
Self-pity is engulfed by violent rage. I casually rest one hand behind my back and tense it to a claw. This alleviates tension and allows me to reply in a fond tone, ‘Ah Michelle! I forgot – it takes more than a man to keep you off the booze! Help yourself!’
She darts me a look reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I quake inwardly, keep the smile pinned to my face, and make a mental note to avoid being left alone with Michelle ever again.
The rest of the evening is excruciating. I do my best to crush the sweet bloom of romance without success. My first bout of psychological warfare is to order four large pepperoni pizzas, ‘On me!’ Luke is thrilled beyond belief. Marcus and Michelle are – as planned – livid. Michelle faces a dilemma. She hates to eat in front of men – ‘it looks gross’ – but loves to maintain that she gorges herself daily on chocolate and pizza as all self-respecting supermodels do. Ha ha ha.
Marcus is equally torn. Pizza and all its fatty cohorts – curry, kebabs, burgers – are purgatory to Marcus. He hails from a genetically obese family and is so afraid of nature taking its pudgy course, he observes the eating habits of an anorexic sparrow. His mother and his two elder sisters weigh, at a conservative estimate, seventeen stone apiece. Marcus has so far warded off fate by exercising manically and eating healthily, but he lives in fear of the big bloat. (If I want to infuriate him I say, ‘Hey Marcus, just roll with it.’)