‘Hello?’ Edie called, and Margot turned.
‘There you are! My hand’s going to sleep.’
‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ Edie said, neutrally, as she didn’t much want to renew an acquaintance with this woman, after the sting of the unwanted amateur psychoanalysis.
‘Oh I didn’t, is it your birthday? How marvellously timed, then. Which one is it?’
‘Thirty-six,’ Edie said, reluctantly.
‘Don’t tell me the truth. Don’t tell anyone the truth. You can pass for twenty-eight on a cloudy day, I’d say. Stick there until you’re forced to go to thirty-four.’
Edie wasn’t going to be won by flattery.
‘If you didn’t know it was my birthday, why have you brought me a cake?’
It was an impressive creation: a dome of mink-coloured icing, grooved by a fork and studded with walnuts. Margot had clearly gone to quite a bit of trouble.
‘To say sorry, of course,’ Margot said, gesturing again with the plate. Edie took it from her.
‘This is an apology?’
‘It’s a cake, darling. A Café Noisette. Or a Noisy Café cake, as I call it. My ex-husband used to love it. It was about all he loved.’
‘Why did you say those things in the first place?’ Edie asked. If Meg was in, she was going to get hassle for this, and Margot had to pay off her arrears in full.
‘I was a bit tiddly. Some people are simply born two drinks below par. It’s a cross I bear.’
‘Hmm,’ Edie said, at a loss for what else she should say.
‘Doing anything nice to celebrate?’ Margot asked.
‘Only the pub.’
‘Have one for me, darling,’ said Margot, stepping over the small dividing fence between the properties, and letting herself back into her house, ‘Or two.’
Despite having already consumed enough sugar to give her the jitters, once in the kitchen, Edie cut a small slice of the Noisy Café. It was the best cake she’d ever tasted. Perhaps she could forgive Margot.
38
What would tonight have looked like if HarrogateGate had never happened? Edie wondered, while absently rotating a giant blusher brush under her eyes. It left her with two pantomime splotches of dusky rouge that she then had to disperse with her fingertips.
Thirty-six; not so much mid as late thirties. She’d have worked even harder to show she wasn’t a sad single. Edie would’ve organised something like the Arts Club in Soho, squeezed herself into a full-skirted and deceptively tiny-waisted dress that required living off Cup-a-Soup and Diet Coke for a week beforehand.
Instagram would’ve been littered with pictures of her in the red-lit basement, drinking cocktails from teapots, or draped round Louis, Vogueing to eighties Madonna with assorted Ad Hoc-ers. If Jack and Charlotte had put in an appearance, Edie would have spent the whole evening conscious of his eyes on her. She would’ve been performing non-stop: ‘I’m so fun and carefree.’ Hah, the whole event would’ve been a performance.
And there would’ve been no Nick or Hannah. Edinburgh was a bit far for one-night occasions full of strangers from the advertising industry, and Nick was a London loather, whose wife never let him out.
Edie was struck by the surprising notion: she was much happier with this completely no-bragging-rights night in The Lion. It was a pleasant real ale pub with exposed red-brick walls and garlands of hop bine, walking distance from her dad’s house. It was the kind of place where people brought rain-wet shaggy dogs in, and you might happen on a group of paunchy men hunched over an intense game of Magic: The Gathering, muttering spells.
When Edie, her dad and a taciturn Meg arrived, Hannah and Nick were already there. They waved them over to a table with a bottle of Prosecco in a bucket. Hannah was in a drapey pale caramel jersey dress, hair pulled back tight displaying her great bone structure; Nick in a thin blue shirt, buttoned to the collar. They looked like a bright, happy young couple, possibly liberated from little kids for a night.
They pushed a pile of presents across the table to Edie: a framed photo of the three of them in sixth form – ‘Look at the denim and Doc Martens!’ – a bottle of perfume, more chocolate.
‘I was going to ask you what you wanted,’ Meg mumbled and Edie said, hastily, ‘Please don’t spend your money on me! A drink’s fine,’ and Meg looked like she didn’t know what to say and Edie fretted that sounded too patronising and dismissive.
Nick insisted on getting her dad’s beer and Meg’s cider. Once settled, Hannah chatted to Meg, while their dad held forth on his adventures in home-brewing to Nick.
‘The rhubarb wine was lethal. It didn’t get you here,’ he tapped his head, ‘it attacked the extremities. Like a nerve poison. Left men unable to walk.’
‘Would you make some more?’ Nick asked. ‘If you had an order?’
‘I wouldn’t toy with those forces again. Necromancy,’ her dad said, shaking his head. ‘It’d raise Aleister Crowley himself.’
Nick laughed and her dad looked gratified and Edie thought she should make him socialise more often. He was vehemently against online dating, or the ‘‘How much is that doggy in the window” self-promotion, as he called it. ‘I’d rather drink ink.’
Meanwhile, Hannah asked Meg about work at the care home. Meg simply couldn’t keep up the strop in the face of Hannah’s intelligent, interested questions, nor could she get unwound at someone who saved lives for a living. Soon the table was harmony and half-cut bonhomie.
Edie glowed a bit. Her friends were so nice. This was so nice. In London, she had to strive to feel good enough for her social circle – carefully tidying the messier, less cosmetic parts of her life away. She’d never questioned whether the fact she felt had to put on an act was telling her something.
When they were two drinks down, Hannah leaned in to Edie and said: ‘Nick told me about the Facebook group.’
Meg was temporarily out of earshot, petting a scrotty-looking Alsatian over by the umbrella stand.
Edie felt embarrassed about her online disgrace, even if in front of her oldest and most internet-averse friend. Edie nodded. ‘Lovely, wasn’t it.’
Hannah looked at her, taking in Edie’s discomfited expression.
‘Here’s an inspiring thought,’ Hannah continued, in an encouraging tone. ‘I’ve been thinking about your situation to avoid thinking about mine, I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I’ve been trying not to think about it either, so it’s good someone is.’
‘What if you and Jack had kissed, and the bride hadn’t caught you?’
Edie paused. She’d never considered that option, in life’s great (You Don’t) Choose Your Own Adventure. ‘Uh …?’
‘This is what I predict. He’d have kissed you and enigmatically disappeared back into his oh-so-romantic wedding before you could ask him why. You’d be in a bigger, more confused mess about him than ever. He’d have gone off on his honeymoon to St Lucia and you’d be in purgatory. He returns a happily married man with a tan, and now you really shouldn’t be putting him on the spot and asking what it’s all about. So you bide your time, carry on playing along, thinking the answer will turn up eventually. Only he’s given you this massive new bit of hope.’
Edie gazed balefully at the knots in the wooden table. ‘I’d have been crying in some bar in Edinburgh after he led me another merry dance, and then the ultrasound picture would go up online, wouldn’t it?’
‘In one,’ Hannah said.
Edie held her breath. All the times she’d wished so badly for things to have gone differently, without thinking that things continuing as they were would’ve been pretty terrible, too. Jack was going to hurt her one way or another. This way, at least everyone knew what a bastard he’d been. She’d never considered that her desire for privacy and secrecy had suited Jack down to the ground.
‘The way I see it, you’re still better off going through what you’re going through, than that fucker having got away with it yet again. Change is often painful.’
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Edie nodded.
‘You are frighteningly incisive.’
‘Ah, well,’ Hannah said. ‘If I was that incisive I’d have made my own change and left Pete five years ago, before I was mean to him all the time. It’s mainly the benefit of having no feelings involved in this, other than concern for you.’
At last orders, after Meg and their dad had taken their leave, Hannah announced they were ‘definitely going dancing’ and Edie caved easily, as drunk people do.
They got a cab and ended up in the Rescue Rooms, a nightclub-live-venue-bar-and-fast-food outlet rolled into one, with low ceilings and full of the smell of hormones and sticky soft drinks and chips.
Edie looked around the room and accepted ‘old enough to be their mother’ was no longer a figure of speech but a stark mathematical reality. They got some necessary hard spirits and seats by the dance floor, where the first up to throw their moves were wheeling around under a disco ball.
‘Do you realise they’re dancing to The Cure and New Order and The Smiths the way we danced to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones? Proper vintage parents’ music,’ Nick said.
Edie and Hannah groaned.
‘Time bastard,’ said Nick, shaking his head.
‘Time bastard.’ They clinked plastic glasses, and drank.
They ended up dancing to ‘Billie Jean’, in a swirl of dry ice that smelled like bacon crisps. With a cough-syrup-sweet plastic cup of rum and Coke in hand, Edie felt a swell of wholesome happiness that wasn’t simply inebriation.
Struck by a theory that felt very clever when sloshed, she ushered Hannah and Nick to lean in, with a flapping wave of the hand: ‘Some friendships, they’re like favourite mix tapes. You hit pause but when you un-pause and play it again, you pick up right where you left it. You know all the right words and what comes next.’
They clinked plastic cups. ‘I hope what comes next isn’t a little bit of sick,’ Nick said.
Woozy, Edie got her phone out: when you were elated, there were certain people you wanted to share it with.
The thought of the petition kept coming back to her, yet each time the recollection was dulled: it was losing its sting, by degrees.
When she piled in the door from the two a.m. taxi, sweaty, bleary of eye, internally chanting two-Nurofen-and-water to herself, she tripped over a gigantic all-white bouquet. Uh? She snapped the hallway light on and peered at the card on the box. Edie Thompson.
It was a ridiculously ostentatious, expensive arrangement: the kind of flowers you normally only saw on screen. An obscene mega-bushel of vintage roses, hyacinths, snapdragons and lilies. Edie would have to split it between three vases, at least. She pulled the florist’s miniature envelope from the box and tore it open.
Happy birthday, Edie. I’m a fan. Elliot x
Edie clutched the card to herself and giggled foolishly. He liked her! A ‘fan’? Wow. This was quite a souvenir.
Wait … Had she messaged Elliot tonight? She had a horrible feeling that she had. Edie pulled her phone out. No replies. With mounting trepidation, she looked at her sent texts. Oh Jesus, she hadn’t asked him if he extreme waxed, had she?
Elliot! I am SO DRUNBK. I just wanted to say thank you for being so nice feel like I’m finally getting myself together. FRIENDS. It’s all about friends isn’t it? The good ones I mean. I love them so much <3 PS: I’m Cardinal Woolly. PPS I have to ask you something personal next time I see you. It’s about balls & grooming haha. Edie xxx
Oh. God. He used to be a fan.
39
Edie was sweating out the hangover in the garden with her pulpy crime novel and a toasted Quorn ham sandwich when Meg joined her, carrying a portable CD player and a CD.
Edie raised her sunglasses and watched as Meg put the disc in, hit ‘play’ and sat back, silver Birkenstocks aloft on the lounger, hands crossed on stomach, eyes closed. The volume was a provocative act and Edie chose not to be provoked. She picked up the CD case.
‘Balearic Wellness Moods,’ she read aloud, over the burble. ‘Doesn’t seem very you, somehow.’
‘It was a quid in one of the chazzas in Sherwood,’ Meg said, not opening her eyes. It carried on thumping out its chilled-out vibes at a not-very-chilled out level and Edie scowled and tried to concentrate on murders in East London. Eventually she became aware of noise layered on noise, masculine tones and a brass band that weren’t coming from Ibiza.
Meg opened her eyes and said: ‘What the …?’
She turned her CD down a notch and the unmistakable vocal stylings of Frank Sinatra could be made out, soaring across the fence. There was some lusty singing along. My kind of town, Chicago is …
‘It’s that woman!’ Meg said, turning her CD off and jumping up to peer over the fence. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can you stop being so petty and pathetic and turn your antiquated crap down, please?’
‘Meg …’ Edie said, in a warning tone, and was ignored.
‘I’m enjoying a nice old singalong,’ she could hear Margot in the distance, ‘Same as you.’
‘I’m not singing along!’
‘Well no, there’s no tune to yours, is there? Shame.’
‘You’re only playing your music to ruin me playing mine!’
‘You playing yours is spoiling mine, duck. We are at what they call, an impasse.’
‘Turn it off!’
‘Ooh I love this one. IS MY IDEA OF, NUTHIN TO DOOOOO …’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Meg said, grabbing her CD player and marching indoors, as ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ echoed around the garden, somewhat appropriately.
Margot’s face appeared over the fence.
‘Fifteen-love to me! Thanks to Frank.’
Edie tried not to smile.
‘Have you two ever considered a truce?’
‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Margot said, arms dangling over the partition, displaying a flashy bracelet. ‘Whatcha readin’?’
‘It’s about a serial killer who poisons people in 1950s East End London.’
‘I like gore but I prefer romances. Absolute sucker for a bodice ripper. Hey, tell your actor to be in one of those.’
‘I’ll pass it on.’ Edie got a vision of Elliot as a muddy, sweaty Heathcliff, or as Regency gentleman, buttoned up and storming on about his restrained passion, and her heart did a little patter, as she winced. Why did she send that stupid text, why …
Edie’s dad wandered out, a book under his arm, disgruntled look on his face.
‘Meg says she’s been chased out of the garden?’
Edie sat up straighter. ‘She got a taste of her own medicine, more like.’
‘Edith,’ her dad sighed slightly, ‘this never-ending civil war is unnecessary, you know. We can all rub along, if we try.’
‘Dad!’ Edie said, losing her temper, with immediate effect. ‘I didn’t do anything to chase her out of the garden, quite the opposite. I put up with her noise pollution and Margot—’ she indicated the beady-eyed septuagenarian and her Dad noticed her, for the first time, ‘fought back with some Big Band and Meg huffed off. She started it.’
‘Ah, Margot,’ her dad said. ‘Hello.’
‘Morning, Gerald.’
‘Dad,’ Edie said, unable to contain this any longer, even with an audience, ‘why do you pander to Meg, every time she has a whinge? It’s obvious she’s being stroppy and unreasonable. You make it worse by indulging her.’
‘I don’t indulge her, I merely try to understand, and not pick sides.’
‘Sometimes sides have to be picked.’ Edie loved her mild-mannered father, but felt this was a consistent failing of his, all the same. For example, she could’ve done with seeing Auntie Dawn being comprehensively told to stow it in an overhead locker the day of the funeral, though she appreciated her dad was vulnerable at the time.
‘Hear hear!’ Margot said.‘A pandered-to child is a monstrous child.’
‘This child is thirty-one and my family is my business, thank you,’ her dad said. He addresse
d Edie: ‘I give up. I renounce my role as this household’s Ban Ki-moon. May you scrap freely among yourselves and have your weapons uninspected.’
He retreated back into the house and Margot said: ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, my love. The girl needs telling.’
Edie made noises of thankfulness while wondering if Margot’s approval was a good sign or not.
‘Can I ask you a little favour?’ Margot said. Aha, Edie might’ve known. ‘Next time you go to the shops, could you pick me up some lottery tickets? Here, I’ve written my numbers down.’ Her head ducked down and reappeared, a scrap of paper clutched between magenta nails. Edie took it. ‘Mr Singh usually goes for me but he’s in Hyderabad til Wednesday week.’
‘No trouble,’ Edie said. ‘You play every week?’
‘Without fail,’ Margot said. ‘Never know when your luck might turn. Mine’s been bad so long I am due a little windfall.’
‘Has it?’
Margot disappeared and Edie thought she might’ve gone, but she reappeared after a few seconds’ delay with the necessary fag.
‘I had a nest egg, back in the day. Money from my theatre show, and I got a nice sum when Gordon and I divorced. I fell in with this absolute rotter, who convinced me to invest it in some ridiculous boondoggle …’
Edie loved Margot’s vocab.
‘And that was that. First the money flew up the spout, then he did. I was a very silly girl.’
‘Is that why you moved to Nottingham?’
Margot leaned back and tapped her fag.
‘My parents lived here for a few years when I was a child, lovely place on The Ropewalk. It’s some solicitor’s offices now. London’s very spendy, of course, and Nottingham was the only other city I felt I knew. And I had barely a bean to my name. So here I am.’ I simply chose from an A to Z. I thought Forest Fields sounded marvellously bucolic.’
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