I have no choice but to turn my own stereo on to drown out the noises. I whack on Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ so loudly that the bass totally distorts, and then have to sit in the bedroom so that it doesn’t deafen me. Ah, Adele – I do love you though. This song! It’s so painful and sad and so true! How is it possible that you could read my mind? How did you manage to write a song that speaks so entirely of my feelings about Jake? Well, more or less. I mean, I’m not happy that he’s moved on, of course. But I do think about turning up on his doorstep rather a lot. I wonder what would happen if I did …
I’m in the middle of a fantasy about turning up at Jake’s flat and him turning round and telling me he’s never stopped loving me, he thinks about me every day too, and he totally doesn’t like or even fancy his new girlfriend when my doorbell rings. No. It couldn’t be … Jake? Oh my God, oh my God. I pull my dressing gown on over my pyjamas and run to the door.
The opposite of Jake: Caspar from upstairs, wearing a too-tight Abercrombie t-shirt and looking pink in the face. What the hell is he doing here? I pop into the living room to turn the stereo down, then go back and open the door an inch.
‘Caspar,’ I say. ‘Been a while.’
‘Yes, listen, your music? Could you not have it on so loud?’
‘My music? It’s not on particularly loud,’ I say, congratulating myself for turning it down before I opened the door.
‘Well, it was a minute ago.’
‘Your ears must be too sensitive,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that what you always say to me?’
‘It was audible in every room of my flat.’
‘That’s because you chose to put in wooden floors which reverb,’ I say.
‘Could you turn it down a bit? My girlfriend’s feeling a bit queasy.’
Not surprised, I would too if I was your girlfriend. Hang on a minute: girlfriend? Since when do you have an actual girlfriend? And queasy? How does he think I feel when I have to listen to him cough up phlegm and do … sex things – the cheek of it.
‘Caspar: if you lay down some carpet, you won’t have to listen to my music and more to the point I won’t have to listen to you.’
‘You’re being unreasonable,’ he says.
‘Carpets, Caspar – they are your friend,’ I say, and slam the door, feeling irritation rise up in me. How on earth has this man – the least attractive in North London – managed to find himself a proper relationship while I remain single, consoling myself with mouldy bananas? I know life isn’t fair, but this really is not fair. I mean, I am now literally the last single person left in the world. Apart from Rebecca. But she’s got another date with the Hawksmoor barman this week and no doubt she’ll actually make it work this time and then it’ll just be me.
I’m tempted to go straight back to bed, pull the duvet over my head and hibernate till Monday morning, but then remember that I have a dress to buy. And banana bread to eat … Forty minutes still to go. OK, I shall be productive and find something to do with three-quarters of a roast chicken, some old caraway seeds and honey. I’m sure there’ll be some inspiration online …
I type the ingredients into Google but can’t find anything appealing. There are loads of tagines if it’s only chicken and honey you need a home for, and various central European dishes with just chicken and caraway. But nothing that uses all three. Hmm, I’ll sacrifice the honey and go for a chicken goulash – any excuse for sour cream. And then later in the week I could use the remaining sour cream as an excuse for fajitas! Done. Mind you, I don’t like this chicken goulash recipe much. It’s quite basic and it uses margarine. Maybe if I used olive oil instead … And I could add sweet paprika as well as smoked – not least because I love that gorgeous red and yellow tin it comes in. I’ll chuck in some mushrooms too. Stroganoff and goulash must be related, I bet they’re cousins … And I bet creamy, slightly smoky chicken and mushrooms would work amazingly in a pie too, with a puff pastry top … I grab a piece of paper and start writing down ideas, but then find myself side-tracked searching for fajita recipes, then flights to Mexico and then swimsuits for pear-shapes.
The oven timer goes off. I whisk out the banana bread and spoon a large portion into a bowl and pour some cream over the top. Thank goodness for the soothing properties of sugar and fat and bourbon. Calmer now, I get dressed. No point putting on make-up, it’s a waste on a day like today. Instead I hide behind sunglasses and head out to find that killer dress.
I haven’t treated myself to a dress for such a long time. Why bother? I never go anywhere remotely fancy, other than the work Christmas party. And with budget cutting the NMN party’s been downgraded from champagne cocktails at a trendy East London members’ club with bowling alley, to beer and house wine at our local Wetherspoon’s.
But this is Polly’s wedding! An epic celebration deserves a new outfit. I head over to Primrose Hill to one of those chi-chi boutiques you always see mentioned in the glossies. I’m willing to spend up to a hundred and fifty quid. Well preferably no more than a hundred, but a hundred and fifty if it’s an absolutely amazing dress.
I walk into the shop and immediately feel like a tramp. What is it about the smell of these expensive candles that automatically makes me feel ungroomed? My nails aren’t manicured, my hair could definitely do with a trim, my eyebrows need shaping. All this inadequacy just from an overpriced candle? Still, why should I be intimidated by melting wax? Or for that matter by those two assistants who just looked straight through me as if I’m wearing an invisibility cloak. Can’t they tell that this invisibility cloak is new season Gucci?
I flick through the rack of clothes, each dress on a hanger separated by a good thirty centimetres. I can barely see what’s in my wardrobe at home, all my clothes are crammed together like it’s rush hour. Even the act of touching some of these clothes makes me feel like my fingers are dirty.
That’s a lovely dress … who’s that by … Phillip Lim … I’ve heard of him. Such pretty detailing at the neck, that’d be perfect. Oh. Ouch. Maybe not. Seven hundred quid? It’s only cotton. When did everything get quite so expensive? (I’m sounding more like my mother every day.)
Ah, now the sales assistant is paying me some attention! But not good attention. No, a very blatant type of scrutiny. As if she suspects I’m about to do a Winona. So insulting! Don’t fret, love, I’m not going to forget to pay. But now she’s given me this look I feel I have to try something on, to prove that I’m not casing the joint. I’m not trying on anything that costs seven hundred pounds though. There must be something more reasonable … Five hundred and fifty … Eight hundred and ninety! … Ah, here we are – Day Birger et Mikkelsen. Two hundred and thirty quid, that’s more like it. I have no intention of buying it of course, but I nod to myself as if I do, and head to try it on.
There is a girl in her twenties with long brown shiny hair, standing in the entrance to the changing room, the curtain held open by her friend. She stands there in black lace underwear and I find myself transfixed by the top of her thigh, where her leg meets her bottom. I try not to stare, but I find it impossible. Her body is amazing. Her thigh is so smooth and golden, and her bottom entirely pert and small but round. Her friend gazes on enviously too.
One of the assistants comes over, laden with clothes on hangers, and starts fawning over this girl as if she were Madonna.
‘Katia darling, try this piece with the sequins,’ says the assistant. ‘It’s totally you.’
The girl slips on the black sequinned dress and twirls at her own reflection. She tips her head to the side, then scoops up her long silky hair on top of her head, pauses, then shakes it down again in a shimmy. She pulls at the back of the dress and sighs. ‘The eight’s too big,’ she says. The eight’s too big. A phrase I have never said. A phrase I will never say.
‘It’s swimming on you. We’ll see if there’s a six, Petra! A six!’ she barks, at her colleague. ‘And try the Carven and the Rodarte pieces,’ she says, holding up two equally beautiful dresses.
She slips on one of them, a tiny tomato-red silk slip with a lace trim at the bottom, and poses in the mirror, hand on one hip, one leg turned out to the side.
‘You look amazing in everything,’ says her friend.
‘Yeah,’ says the girl, her voice a stranger to doubt. She stands gazing at herself with her hands pressing down on her non-existent belly, then moves her palms onto her hip bones. She turns sideways and looks at herself over her own shoulder in the mirror.
‘Stunning …’ says the assistant. ‘There isn’t a six downstairs in the sequins, but we’ll get one in for you mid-week. Is Wednesday OK?’
‘Sure,’ says the girl.
‘Great.’ She pauses for the perfect moment. ‘Shall we start ringing you up then?’
I take the dress I’m holding and hang it back up on the rack, but I’m too nosy to walk out just yet, so instead I hover near the till pretending to look at the overpriced necklaces that all have pistols or birds on them. I catch sight of my reflection in an ornate Venetian mirror on the wall. I really shouldn’t leave home without make-up on any more – I’m too old. These dark, almost purple circles under my eyes never seem to shift. And I have these deepening frown lines above my brows that now seem permanent, not just when I’m frowning at work …
‘I can’t decide whether to head to New York in May for six months, maybe write a screenplay,’ says the girl to her friend. ‘Ray-Ray’s got a place in the Hamptons so we could go there at weekends. Or I could go to Brazil, maybe Ecuador …’
‘Ladies, sorry to interrupt,’ says the assistant, ‘but that’s coming in at one-seven with your discount. Shall I bill as usual?’
‘Yeah,’ says the girl, sounding suddenly bored. ‘What time’s Roka?’ she says to her friend. ‘Do I have time for a massage?’
The girls leave the shop, laden with bags. For some reason the whole incident has left me miserable. That girl has triggered a horribly jealous reaction in me. Maybe it’s the fact that she doesn’t have to work? Just like Leyla, she’s probably got rich parents who bankroll her every whim. Wouldn’t that be nice, not having to work? But actually I’d be bored. Well, after a few years of doing nothing I’m sure I’d be bored.
Maybe it was her figure? She had the sort of body that you’re either born with or you’re not. And I’m not. Still, I thought I’d more or less made peace with my body over the years. It’s not perfect, but it does the things it’s supposed to. Though these last few years it’s started sagging and wrinkling and even developing age spots. I had only just stopped hating it and now I have to start hating it all over again, but in different ways.
Actually I think it’s simple. She’s young and rich and beautiful and has her whole life ahead of her. She can still afford to make a thousand mistakes. Time is on her side, and it isn’t on mine.
I come away feeling so disheartened that my legs subconsciously walk me over to Melrose and Morgan where I buy myself a consolatory pear and frangipane tart. Ridiculous, I think, as I bite into the crumbly sweet pastry. You’re thirty-six, not ninety-six. Besides I don’t even need a new dress anyway. I have that lovely jade one from Anthropologie that I wore for the last wedding I went to. It’ll do just fine, more than fine – it’s a perfectly good dress … Oh, sorry – ‘piece’. And I don’t wear it nearly enough. It’s not like there are going to be any single men at the wedding anyway.
When I get home the flat still has a faint smell of golden warm banana bread, but it is being drowned out by something toxic coming down from Caspar’s flat. No doubt he’s laying on a mackerel fest to avenge our earlier argument …
I go into the kitchen and wrap a thick slice of the banana bread in foil for Sam for the morning. I consider taking some over to Marjorie but I can’t handle a further downer this weekend. Instead I wrap up two more chunks, one for her and one for Terry, and pop them down to him. He can give it to her tomorrow when he’s doing his rounds. Cowardly I know, but it’s better than nothing.
I go to bed early. I didn’t think I’d ever find myself looking forward to a Monday at NMN merely because it meant that the weekend was finally over. Just as I turn the lights out my phone goes off – a text. I wonder if it’s Dalia apologising for yesterday … Maybe it’s Jeff? Please let it be Jeff from Fletchers … Urgh. Bloody hell – it’s from Fletchers alright, but it’s their marketing round-robin, announcing twenty per cent off sandwiches tomorrow. I don’t even subscribe to these texts, but they send them to me anyway. I delete it in a rage, and am about to turn my phone off when it beeps again. What now, twenty per cent off plastic bags too? Leave me alone!
But no! It’s from that guy I met in the pub last week. I’d almost forgotten about him. ‘Fancy dinner this week? Seb.’
About time too …
w/c 26 March
Status report:
Get scripts & sell scripts – URGENT
Get Jeff to ask me out
Wednesday
Things are beginning to look up. I have a date on Sunday night with Seb at a gastropub in Camden. He’s texted me several times already. His texts are quite amusing, if a little long, though he does seem to text quite late at night. And so far this week I have had eight emails from Jeff Nichols – and it’s only Wednesday. Some of his emails are just sweet and chatty and about food:
‘Do you know what is smaller than a petit-four?’ he wrote.
‘A petit-two?’ I replied, wondering if he was trying to make a joke.
‘No, a mignardise. Just been to a seminar on bite-sized snacks. Good word, isn’t it?’
And then some of his messages are ragingly flirtatious – in my opinion at least.
‘Wish you worked with me, that’d be fun. Can’t you apply for a job as my sous-chef??’
However, none of them has brought me any closer to a date. For example, this latest one:
‘Having a day from hell! Sexy Chick pizza now has no actual chicken, just re-shaped chicken-flavoured pieces. Do you ever think about running away from it all? Have you ever been to Costa Rica? I think you would love it. I can imagine you, sitting in the shade wearing a large hat, sipping a tropical cocktail.’
Suggestive, surely? Does he imagine sitting in the shade next to me? Surely that’s the sub-text. I’m currently at my desk pondering how to reply and move things on when Robbie’s PA, Alexis, calls.
‘He wants to see you,’ she says. ‘But hurry up, he’s due in Creative Autopsy in five.’
I rush up to his office where I find him sitting behind his cherrywood desk lining up three small amber glass bottles of Bach Rescue Remedy in a line to the right of his notepad.
‘Blossom,’ he says, looking up suddenly. ‘Isn’t that an amazing word?’
Not as amazing as ‘script’ or ‘here are your mega-strategic urgent scripts’ …
‘Hear the resonance,’ he says. ‘Blossom, blossom, blossom. Melodic. Extraordinary. I can lose myself in words for hours, like Rothko in paint.’ He smiles at me. He has one of those rare faces that is less attractive when he smiles – all gums.
‘Have the team shown you scripts yet?’ I say.
Robbie turns his head to study his bookshelf on which are stacked rows of awards – Perspex squares, bronze statuettes, yellow D&AD pencils. He nods his head at all fourteen of them individually, then turns back to me.
‘Susie: do you know how long the Sistine Chapel took to paint?’
I do actually! Because it’s a Trivial Pursuit question, and I have a brother who memorised every answer on every card when we were kids so that no one else could ever win. Robbie is about to tell me but foolishly I can’t keep my mouth shut.
‘Just over four years,’ I say.
His smile falters. ‘OK. Ergo …’
Please don’t tell me you’re heading in that direction …
‘… Da Vinci didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel in seven days, so please don’t expect Karly and Nick to give you the scripts by Friday,’ he says.
On one level of course Robbie is entirely cor
rect. Da Vinci did not paint the Sistine Chapel in seven days. In fact he did not paint it in four years. He did not paint it all; Michelangelo did. I sit, still as a statue, as the urge to point this out sweeps over me, then eventually passes. To be fair, if it wasn’t for my brother becoming obsessed as a kid with the Ninja Turtles, and giving me those lurid slippers with Michelangelo Ninja Turtle on them that I still wear, I would not have retained this fact.
I contemplate what it must be like to make statements like Doggett just has with a straight face. I mean, why stop at the Sistine Chapel? Why not compare the agency’s latest leaflet for haemorrhoid cream to Hamlet while you’re down there?
‘The thing is …’ I say, getting out my timing plan on the basis that he will be entirely disinterested in facts or my problems but at least it will move us away from the whole Karly-and-Nick-are-genii conversation … ‘Scripts are urgent. We’re going to be late otherwise. The airdate’s in six weeks and there’s really no fat in this timing plan.’
‘Don’t make your problems into my problems. Work around it.’
‘The airdate is fixed,’ I say. ‘When I briefed this in, the team were clear they could deliver on time …’
‘Things change,’ he says. ‘Karly now has a medical condition that needs to be addressed.’
I’d hardly call getting a B cup bumped to a D cup a medical condition. Then again, Robbie probably doesn’t know that I know about this. Of course I do! Sam told me about it jubilantly last week: ‘It’s Dr Redfern, same surgeon who did Robbie’s eyelids! When he’s doing a boob job he goes in under the muscle, minimal scarring. You can be back at your desk the next day,’ he’d said, putting me right off my chicken schnitzel sandwich.
‘Karly’s in today though,’ I say. ‘They must have done the bulk of the work already?’
‘Do you think she needs harassing at a time like this?’ he says.
‘Can’t Nick take me through the work? Devron will go mental if we don’t show him something this week.’
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