by Clare Fisher
Surprised, he’d push the food away, and I’d climb on top of him, almost believing that I’d climbed back into the beginning of our relationship – almost.
‘Does he, like, even exist?’ Lisa said, the next time they were grilling me about Phil.
And that was it. That was the thing that pushed me over the edge: ‘Err, yeah? And you lot can meet him. He’s invited us to this exclusive party in Soho. It’s at Bella’s.’
‘Bella’s?’ Chantelle squeezed my shoulder so hard, her fake nails dug into my skin. I didn’t tell her to get off. ‘For real?’
I didn’t know what Bella’s was but it was obvious from her face that it was good. As in VIP good. ‘For real.’
‘Oh my days. Girls. We’re going to Bella’s. Oh my days!’
Lisa and Nicole exchanged a look that said: WTF is Bella’s? Then: Who cares? If Chantelle thinks it’s good then it is.
‘When is it though?’ asked Nicole.
‘Umm.’ I closed my eyes and sure enough the diary page was there. It didn’t even feel like someone else’s; it felt like mine. ‘Two Fridays’ time.’
‘Sick! I’ve got bare time to sort out a babysitter. You,’ she hugged me close, ‘are a legend.’
I smiled, even though my insides were one big frown.
How’re things with Jenny? She doesn’t mind you’re still working away?
You know, we really hate my best mate’s boyfriend. Do Jenny’s mates hate you?
What you up to this weekend?
These were the questions I got good at asking your dad. The trick was to wait until we’d drunk and eaten and fucked and pissed – then, as he walked away from the bathroom looking 100% pleased with himself, I’d pounce.
‘They’re not great, if I’m honest. But they’re not terrible. And they have been terrible. So I guess that’s a positive.’ He’d say this as we lay side by side, naked. ‘Seeing a bit less of each other helps. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that?’
If I wanted him to carry on – and if I wanted to carry on listening to him without screaming – I’d crack open whatever was left of the mini bar. Usually, it was whisky or vermouth or some other weird thing I didn’t like, but I’d down whatever it was, closing my eyes and, as far as possible, my ears, until the edges of me and of the world were blurred – like when the papers fuzz out criminals’ faces to stop you telling who they are.
‘Her friends aren’t exactly my number one fans; they don’t try to hide the fact that they think I’m a bore who stops her going out. What pisses me off is this couldn’t be further from the truth; she never wants to go out. Well, hardly ever. If there’s a night I want to go out, you can bet she does. Get her any other night, however, and she’ll start on about how she’s socially anxious – never mind if she can happily boss around sixty misbehaving kids day after day – blah blah blah, she’d rather stay in with me and Hamish . . . Just us. She says it in this baby voice, as well: just us! It drives me mad.’
I waited for him to ask about me. About my friends and their boyfriends. About the feelings I hid from everyone else. He never did.
‘This weekend? Oh, Jenny’s sister Rachel is having some birthday thing. It’s her thirtieth but you’d think it was her third, the way she’s going on about it. She’s a party planner, or some such nonsense, so she’s managed to get some swanky place in Soho, at least, she keeps saying it’s swanky – apparently celebs have been papped there and so on – but we had our office Christmas do there last year and it was, just, you know, another bar.’ He drained his glass, and I thought, maybe this is it. This is the moment he asks about me. ‘Come to think of it, we were in the basement. Yes, not the proper venue; the basement.’
I lurched to my feet. The room was spinning. I grabbed the bedpost until it stopped, then staggered across the carpet.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The bathroom. Fuck’s sake. Am I not even allowed to go to the bathroom?’ I stomped in and, for the first time, locked the door. I slammed down the loo seat and sat on it and pressed my face into my hands. I tried to cry. I couldn’t, though. Of course he still loves you. He loves you more than anyone else has ever loved you. Paranoid bitch. I unlocked the door and flopped on to the bed and hugged him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m such a bitch sometimes. It’s just . . . I love you.’
I love you. Those three massive tiny words rolled out of my mouth. I waited for something to happen, e.g. for the lights to fade or for a happy soundtrack to start up. Instead, he hugged me to his armpit, kissed the top of my head and told me I was cute. Cute. Great. He got love. I got cute.
‘Ouch!’ He leaped out of my grip. ‘Fuck.’ He was rubbing his belly, where there were three deep red crescents imprinted on his skin; I must’ve been digging my nails into him, but the weird thing was, I didn’t even feel it. ‘This better be gone by the time I get home. Fuck.’
Then he stomped to the bathroom and locked the door. I heard the shower turn on.
He doesn’t love me.
Yes he does.
No, he doesn’t.
I could’ve lain there fighting with myself all night. Well, I didn’t. I dived into his case and before there was time to ask any questions, like was this really a good idea or would it just make everything worse, his ring was in my palm and then it was stuffed in my bag.
‘You mean,’ said Erika, when I told her this, ‘you put it in your bag. You stole it.’
‘Obviously, yeah.’
‘It’s just the way you said it: it was stuffed in my bag. Like it happened by magic. Like it wasn’t your responsibility.’
Her words turned my face red. She was right. So I said it again: ‘OK, I stole his wedding ring.’ There. I’d done it. And it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined; it was just one small part of me, and owning up had shrunk it. New space was opening inside of me – space for new and better things.
Erika nodded, but her eyes reminded me I’d have way bigger things to own up to before long.
12. Telling the truth in club toilets
A few nights after the night I stole the ring was the night of Rachel’s party. The night Chantelle had got a special babysitter for. The night we’d been chatting about for weeks. Butterflies flip-flopped around my stomach every time she brought it up: ‘We ain’t been out in Central in TIME and we ain’t never been to no VIP place before.’
‘Is that the place where thingy and thing from X Factor got off?’ said Nicole.
‘Don’t matter,’ said Chantelle, pinching my arm. ‘Thanks to this legend here, this ain’t gonna be no normal night out.’
Looking at Chantelle looking at me, I had this weird ‘all your life flashing before your eyes’ moment – well, all your nights out flashing before your eyes.
Normal nights out happened however often Chantelle could fix the rota so we’d all get the same night off at once. We’d start at Chantelle’s, slurping vodka through curly straws with titchy plastic versions of Peppa Pig clinging to them. If there was a friend of a cousin Chantelle wanted to chat up, we’d go to ’Spoon’s. Sometimes the friend was there; usually he wasn’t. When Nicole once got so pissed she ended up saying, ‘Hey, Chantelle, how come we always come here to see these guys but they’re never here? Or if they are you don’t even talk to them?’ Chantelle chucked the bottom of someone else’s beer all over her face, then gave her the evils for a whole week.
On the nights we were too pissed or pissed-off to stand up, or when she failed to guilt-trip her half-sister or her ex-step-sister to babysit, we’d stay on her balcony so long, laughing and chatting shit and laughing some more about the shit that we were chatting and placing bets on which celebrities were in the planes that occasionally slid across the sky, that eventually Jayden would poke his little head out of the balcony window and say, ‘Mum, your noise is all breaking into my dreams, please shut up,’ and we’d squeal and say how cute he was, and Chantelle would lift him up, and even though he’d be squirming, you could tell he loved it, and Cha
ntelle, the look on her face, well, it was a look you didn’t see the rest of the time; it was enough to make anyone want to be a mum; it was love so pure it could sober you up, however many vodkas in, no matter how loudly the sky screamed that it was already tomorrow.
On the nights we did make it out, oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. We’d get to the strip of grass outside her block, and the BMX boys might or might not whistle at us, and if they did, it would be up to Chantelle to either kiss her teeth and shake her chest and do her best what-you-looking-at face or – and the rest of us would hold our breath while waiting to see which or it would be – she’d wiggle her bum in their faces, yelling, ‘You want some of this?’ And when they grinned, she’d say, ‘You must be kidding!’ Then she’d grab their BMXs and refuse to give them back until they gave us some weed or some coke or whatever the Big Men had stuffed down their baggy boxers that night. We’d skin up, snort or swallow whatever they gave over, and unless Chantelle was off on one about that thing the boy’s big brothers once did or didn’t do under the table in science class in Year 8 or was it Year 9, we’d stumble towards Streatham High Road.
The thing about Streatham High Road is, all the things that make it bad when you’re sober – it’s long, it’s straight, and no matter how far you walk down it, you never get away from the same mix of chicken shops, charity shops, pawn shops and shops without names that are forever closing down, broken up by the occasional Polish deli or Sainsbury’s Local and, of course, the Odeon – make it the best place to be when you’re fucked. You walk, you roll, you stumble, but you don’t get lost, you don’t get scared; you either know where you are or you think you know where you are. Either way, you keep going in the same direction until you get to wherever it is you’re going, i.e. Wetherspoon’s.
‘So, what you gonna wear?’ Chantelle jabbed me in the ribs.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What?’ She shook her head at me. ‘Sometimes I don’t get you. You got ass and everything now, besides – well, you got a bit. I’ve got something special but, it’s, like, top secret.’
‘Ooh, what is it? Tell us!’
I didn’t pretend to be interested in what Chantelle was going to wear; I couldn’t. I was bricking it. Proper bricking it. I wanted to suggest we go to ’Spoon’s instead. I wanted to tell them everything. I wanted Phil to tell me that he wanted me. He wanted me more than the life he was trying to escape from. But the moment I started to think about all this, I felt like I was going to throw up.
If there’s something you want to forget, London – especially central London – is the best place to do it; wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you can bet whatever is or isn’t in your bank account, you’re never more than a metre away from someone or something a hell of a lot weirder. Like a pigeon munching an iPod headphone. Or a kid shouting at his mum about quantum physics while the mum is asking her pug with the designer waistcoat did the lady in the dog spa really give you a shampoo? A lanky boy in his Tippex-splattered school blazer spitting out the dirtiest most craziest rap you ever heard. An old man mumbling something about the Bible, or about God, or the devil, or, what, what’s this, is he talking now about Primark? Walking through central London, you breathe and – along with the taxi fumes and the skyscraper shadows and the ding-ting-ting of the tourist bike rickshaws and the gurning gargoyles that stare down from the tops of buildings – you inhale all these people and, with any luck, you forget you’re you.
Unless, that is, you’re with Chantelle: ‘Selfie-time!’
We took selfies outside Leicester Square tube station and selfies in the square itself. After three attempts, we got one with a sprayed-silver human statue behind us; he was scratching his nose, and Chantelle wanted to get another one, but I said to keep it. What I didn’t say was that I needed this evidence that not everyone was the thing they were supposed to be.
Chantelle kept stopping in shop windows to check herself out. She was wearing this lime green jumpsuit that was too bright, too tight and – partly because her boobs looked likely to pop out of it at any moment, partly because, even though she was the last kind of woman you’d see in a magazine, she looked amazing – people kept stopping to check her out as she checked out herself. ‘Does it make my bum look massive in a good way or a bad way?’ she’d ask. ‘Good way!’ Lisa and Nicole would yell, and she’d grin. ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought. Just checking, though.’ I laughed and nodded and said the things they expected me to say. But the butterflies and the bad thoughts and the constant checking and wanting to check my phone to see if your dad had called about the wedding ring, they clouded around me. I kept noticing the way other people stared at us – this group of German or French tourists in Converse and Eastpak backpacks strapped to their front, and a little blonde girl in a puffy dress, in particular. One of the Eastpak and Converse girls even took a photo of Chantelle looking at her arse, then ran off giggling. Chantelle didn’t notice – she was too busy thinking about herself – but my hands twitched with anger. We only lived a few tube stops away, after all. Did we have less right to be here than anyone else?
‘Häagen-Dazs café! Oh my days. Oh my days, I’ve been wanting to go here for TIME.’
‘So let’s go.’
Chantelle wrinkled her nose. ‘It costs like a tenner for a lick of ice cream though.’
Your dad’s ring was tucked up in my flat, under my pillow, but his money was right there in my purse. ‘It’s on me,’ I said, waving the twenties in their faces. The only time I’d held that much cash was when I was counting it out for Dale. But I didn’t have to hand it over this time; it was mine now, to spend how I wanted.
‘Did your boyfriend give that to you?’ said Nicole.
I nodded.
‘You’re SO lucky. I wish I’d get a boyfriend who was rich. My last one moaned when he had to buy me a drink in ’Spoon’s.’
‘Come on, then.’ I marched towards the queue.
Lisa and Nicole started to follow, then they saw that Chantelle was still, arms crossed, eyebrows raised.
‘What?’ I said, staring into the window of Häagen-Dazs, as I knew without looking that her face said, what is this BS?
‘We ain’t your fucking charity project, that’s all.’
‘Ah, Chantelle.’ Lisa gave her a little hug. ‘It’s not charity. She doesn’t even have a collection bucket or anything like that. Besides, we’ve eaten out your freezer enough times.’
In the corner of my eye, I saw the beginning of a smile. ‘True.’
After queuing so long Nicole almost wet herself – ‘Someone left an extra large Diet Coke in Screen Two: it’s not my fault!’ – we slid into our very own fake-leather booth. The fake-leather was lilac; it reminded me of grandmas.
‘What should we choose?’ Chantelle frowned over the menu like it was an exam.
‘Anything you want,’ I said.
‘I want the chocolate sundae de luxe. No. The banana split special. Nah. The Belgian chocolate surprise. Ah, I don’t know!’ Chantelle slammed the menu shut and crossed her arms.
‘I’m sure,’ said Lisa delicately, ‘they’ll all be good.’
‘Why don’t we get all the ones you said and share?’ I suggested.
Chantelle gave me a look like maybe I wasn’t so bad after all. ‘All right.’
At last, we ordered. For once, no one had anything to say; we just leaned our heads against the fake-leather and stared at each other and at all the people outside the window and at the people in the café eating ice cream with long spoons. Something weird was going on, and it wasn’t until the waiter swooped two sundaes and two platters down on our table that I clocked what it was: we were nervous. We didn’t know how to act so far from our normal places.
The ice cream changed all that. ‘Fuck me, that’s good. That’s better than my best fuck.’
‘Better than a Magnum.’
‘Fuck Magnums.’
‘Häagen-Dazs selfie. Come on.’
We were squeezing into
the frame when my phone buzzed.
‘Beth! You ruined it.’
I ran out of the café, not caring if I’d ruined the selfie because things were already ruined and this call was going to make it a lot harder to pretend otherwise.
‘Where is it?’ Your dad’s voice was cold and hard, like the iron railings I leaned up against while we spoke.
‘I’m great, thanks,’ I said. ‘And how about you?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Bethany, grow up.’
The coldness from the railings was seeping through my skin. Seeping right through to my bones.
‘You can talk,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Seriously, Bethany. Where are you? Just tell me and I’ll get a cab over. We had . . . We had a really bad fight this afternoon.’
‘Oh?’ Maybe he was going to leave her. Maybe he was going to drive over and stay with me for ever.
‘We both had the day off, and we were having quite a nice time, we were about to . . . But anyway. The point is she noticed and then I noticed . . . And I need it back. I need it back right now. I’ve got a party to go to tonight and if I’m not wearing it, I . . . I don’t know what will happen. She thinks I’m looking for it at work.’
It had been raining; Leicester Square was a carpet of soggy flyers and leaflets and the ShortList and the London Evening Standard and some other free paper no one wanted to read. The spray-painted human ‘statues’ kept peeking up at the sky, begging it not to betray them.
‘Well, I can’t give it to you now.’
‘Bethany. That’s not an option.’
‘I’ll give it back, but not tonight. Come round mine tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? I can’t. Look, Bethany, this has got to –’
‘You come to mine tomorrow at seven or you don’t get it back.’
‘Beth –’
‘Or I’ll flush it down the loo right now.’
I heard him punching something. ‘Fine. If that’s how it’s going to be. Fine. Text me your address.’ Then he hung up.