Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  ‘Thanks, G’ld,’ she mumbled. ‘S’great. See … soon.’ She offered him her cheek, but instead he gripped her by the shoulders and clamped his soft, rubbery lips on to hers.

  ‘Helen G’dner,’ she called out of the open window as the cab pulled away, ‘Art of Teeyessel’t. Faber. C’n lend it to you if y’ like.’ Gerald stood there, for a moment, a lonely figure. Then he waved once and turned away.

  He didn’t phone the next day. Jane didn’t mind – she was too hungover to talk. But by Saturday her searing headache had gone, leaving just a vague fog. She called Gerald’s house, but his answerphone was on. ‘He’ll ring,’ she said to herself. But he didn’t. He didn’t ring on the Saturday, or the Sunday. Nor did he return any of her calls. On the Monday she was feeling neglected and wondering what to do when she suddenly remembered her prescription. She opened the packet. Inside was something that looked like a torpedo, and a small tube of white cream. What on earth were you meant to do with it? She’d never used this stuff before. Unusually, there were no instructions. So she rang Dr Sharp.

  ‘I’m afraid Dr Sharp’s away until Wednesday,’ said the assistant. ‘If it’s not an urgent matter I suggest you write.’ So Jane got out her pad and wrote, ‘Dear Dr Sharp, by an unusual oversight my packet of thrush treatment came without any instructions. Please could you tell me whether that white torpedo thing is a pessary or a suppository? How far up should it go? And can the accompanying cream be applied directly into the vagina or not?’ There, that should do it, she thought. Then she picked up the phone, and dialled.

  ‘Gerald, it’s Jane. How are you?’ There was a momentary silence at the other end.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said cautiously. ‘But I’m … busy.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and was surprised at how disappointed she suddenly felt. ‘Well, maybe we can get together when you’re not so busy,’ she went on quickly. ‘There’s a new production of Rosenkavalier opening at the Opera House – shall I get tickets?’

  ‘No,’ he said, curtly. ‘No thanks.’

  Jane felt her face begin to flame.

  ‘I thought you liked Richard Strauss,’ she said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see it then?’

  ‘Yes. But not with you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jane felt her knees begin to shake. ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Look … let’s just call it a day, shall we?’ said Gerald, irritably. ‘There’s really not much point.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. Her hand shook. ‘Or rather, I don’t really see at all. In fact I find your present attitude rather strange. Are you cross?’ she added gently, backtracking a little. ‘Because I pushed things along a bit?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all. But I just …’ he sighed. ‘I’ve just decided that I don’t think I could feel really … passionate about you.’

  ‘Oh. Well … don’t you find me attractive?’ she enquired, fatally, her heart banging in her chest.

  ‘Um. No,’ he said brusquely. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Oh. Well then …’ she said. ‘That’s fine. Although it’s a bit of a surprise. After your bizarre behaviour in Frederick’s. But thank you for making it so clear, Gerald. Thank you very much indeed. Good bye.’ She put the phone down, then shouted, ‘WAN-KER!!!’ What a creep! What an effing weirdol What a – Christ she’d never be able to show her face in Frederick’s again! She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. How dare he, she said to herself as she slammed the cupboard door shut. How dare he say that to her after asking her out for three months. How DARE he say that to her after slobbering over her in public like that. Jane went to her writing desk and opened her pad. Right. He was going to get it now. ‘Quite unnecessary candour …’ she scribbled.’… total lack of chivalry … embarrassing performance in Frederick’s … behaviour flatly contradictory … not exactly God’s gift … no wish to meet again … Goodbye!’ Jane re-read it with immense satisfaction, addressed it to Gerald’s office, then rushed straight out to the letter box, and posted it with the note to Dr Sharp.

  ‘I am SO glad I did that,’ she said to herself as she got the tube to Channel 4 the next day. ‘Bloody weirdo. Dysfunctional bastard. He’ll be livid, but he won’t write back.’

  Two days later Jane heard the clatter of the letter box and the soft fall of envelopes on to the mat. There were three – a couple of bills, and a reply from Dr Sharp. Jane opened the oyster-coloured envelope. Puzzlement furrowed her brow. ‘Dear Jane,’ Dr Sharp had written. ‘I do hope your thrush has now cleared up with the treatment I prescribed. I was rather surprised to receive the enclosed’ – it was Jane’s letter to Gerald – ‘which you seem to have sent me in error – easily done when one’s in a rush. But I enclose it now, in case it’s important. Yours ever, Janet Sharp.’

  Cathy Kelly

  Cathy Kelly is published around the world, with millions of books in print. A No.1 bestseller in the UK, Ireland and Australia, her trademark is warm Irish storytelling about modern life, always with an uplifting message, sense of community and strong female characters at the heart.

  She lives with her husband, their twin sons and their three dogs in County Wicklow, Ireland. She is also an Ambassador for UNICEF Ireland, raising funds and awareness for children orphaned by or living with HIV/AIDS.

  Cassandra

  Cathy Kelly

  Cassandra always had a very complicated private life. Like, incredibly complicated. We’re talking about the sort of relationship twists that would make an episode of Dallas look straightforward. All of which was a million miles away from my personal life, I might add. I am Ms Sensible to Cassandra’s Femme Fatale of Upper Posset.

  That’s where we both come from, by the way. Upper Posset. A small town, no, make that a village, in Surrey, so small that it’s not really on the map. But if it ever does get on the map, it’ll be because of Cassandra.

  We met as gangly five-year-olds in junior infants. To be accurate, I was a gangly five-year-old and Cassandra was a serious contender for the Miss Pears’ Soap contest. Blonde ringlets, blue eyes the colour of holiday-brochure swimming pools, and endearing dimples. Naturally, she’s lost the ringlets now and has gone for the sort of sleek crop with razored edges that you see in the trendier hairdressing magazines. She gets it cut in Trevor Sorbie and, needless to say, she doesn’t have to wait three months for an appointment, either. Cassandra keeps telling me I should do something different with my hair, which is exactly the same as it was when we first met twenty-three years ago, but I’ve got used to having it long and loose. I’m not cut out to be chic and, besides, long hair hides a multitude of sins.

  ‘Molly, curls are so nineties,’ Cassandra says, trying to be helpful. ‘The bed-head look would be so you. Look what it’s done for Drew Barrymore.’

  Personally, I can’t see me in the bed-head – you know, the short, messy, just-out-from-under-the-duvet look. You need cheekbones and blow-job lips to carry that off. I’d just look as if I’d spent the night sleeping in a cardboard box in a C & A doorway. Cassandra could wear it, though. She’s stunning. Doesn’t need to wear make-up, although she loves MAC and looks totally amazing when she does that heavy kohl thing which makes her resemble a Vogue cover girl when the Millennium/Barbarella vibe was hot.

  So where was I? Oh yeah, the reason I’m telling you this story. You see, it was Cassandra’s personal life that got me into this mess in the first place. Cassandra and a man, to be exact. She was always the one with more boyfriends than you could shake a stick at.

  During our college years, she had a string of besotted men hanging around her. I know, it’s weird that we went to the same college but I had my heart set on journalism in Cardiff and when Cassandra thought about it, she decided not to bother applying for that drama course and went for journalism too. I was a bit surprised because she’d never been too keen on writing but you see, Cassandra is so good with people that she’s a natural at journalism. She’s got that charm thing. People just like he
r and want to talk to her. Being glamorous and wearing sexy clothes helps, or so my mother says a bit snidely. (Mum and Cassandra have never seen eye to eye. They haven’t talked since Cassandra ended up going to our graduation dance with Ted. He’d been my date originally but there’d been a bit of a mix-up and I was quite happy going with Cassandra’s younger brother Mitch, who was good fun when he wasn’t bitching about his sister.)

  She and I shared a flat in college and spent lots of time working on assignments together. Cassandra is very clever but she loved talking to me about my opinion. She’s got an incredible mind, really.

  That time we had to write an in-depth piece about the UN and she’d been too hungover to do much research in the library, well, all I had to do was sketch in the briefest idea of the whole thing and she went on to get an A+ for it. The tutor loved my point about how giving humanitarian aid made the wealthy West feel better about itself, although he said it was a bit derivative and sounded as if I was using other people’s ideas. Men were a problem for both of us during those wonderful student days. Well, they were a problem for me because I never had one, while Cassandra’s problem was getting rid of them when she was bored.

  She likes to be a free spirit: ‘Can’t stand long-term relationships,’ she always said, usually after she had to dump some guy who’d been getting annoying. It was incredible the way men became so boring once they’d gone out with Cassandra for a few weeks. She loved partying and they couldn’t always keep up, especially close to exam time.

  ‘God, they’re all so thick,’ she groaned one December night when she was racing out to an Arts student bash and I was planning to stay home studying. ‘Can I borrow your notes tomorrow?’ she asked, heavily mascara’d eyes on the mirror as she adjusted the straps on her Wonderbra. ‘It’s our duty to show these brain-dead males how clever we are and how we don’t have to spend the entire month at home poring over the books.’

  There was a bit of trouble when three of her exes joined forces and sent this horrible note around campus about her, saying she was a one-woman demolition squad who ate men for breakfast, or something nasty like that. It was terrible. I’d thought they’d been lovely guys, particularly Steve, whom I’d sort of fancied myself until he clapped eyes on Cassandra. That was the one negative thing about being best friends with Cassandra: once a guy saw her, I hadn’t a chance. Not that I minded, or anything. Cassandra was special, as her dad used to tell her all the time. We couldn’t all be like that.

  ‘Beauty’s a curse, Molly,’ she insisted. ‘Everybody wants a piece of you. They don’t treat you like a person but like a beautiful object. You’re lucky not to have this problem, you don’t know how I envy you.’

  She was right, poor love. Everybody did want a piece of her. I tried to help out when I could. One time, I had to keep her current boyfriend in the kitchen so she could sneak an old flame out of the bedroom. Which is, incidentally, a bit like what’s just happened.

  I’m deputy features editor on Your Kind of Woman (YKOW) which is a middle-of-the-road women’s magazine. We both started working there on a college work placement scheme. I’d actually applied for a job on YKOW and Cassandra had applied for a job on the Independent. When she didn’t get in there, it was sheer coincidence that they had a second student vacancy in YKOW. We both stayed a year and nobody was more amazed than me when I was offered a full-time job. I mean, me, not Cassandra. Startled and thrilled, I did once pluck up the courage to ask Madeleine, the editor, why they’d hired me. I never really understood her answer: ‘Because we want someone with originality and talent, who doesn’t need to rip off other people’s ideas,’ she said.

  That’s Cassandra to a T, and she’s gorgeous too, which was always useful in our business. Not that I need a brown paper bag over my head at all times, but I’m not a patch on Cassandra with her feline beauty.

  ‘Mol, you’re one of a kind; quirky, fun … er, and you’ve got a great personality,’ she says to me when I’m feeling insecure about my looks. That was the nice thing about Cassandra, I always thought. She’s truly beautiful but she never made me feel insecure. Instead, she bolstered my confidence and used to help me buy clothes. I’m hopeless at fashion and she’s like Rachel from Friends: clothes are her hobby and Elle is her bible. She had a positive fetish about making me wear fleecy tops. Dunno why – she never wears them herself. Prefers stuff from Morgan. But Cassandra reckons I’m a fleecy-top-and-denims sort of girl. We make an odd combination: her in head-to-toe second-skin garments with Gucci shoes (her father does spoil her with an allowance), me in baggy stuff that wouldn’t look out of place down on the farm. In our flat – didn’t I mention that? We were still sharing, this time in a two-bedroomed shoe-box in Clapham – Cassandra had to have the bigger bedroom so she’d have somewhere for her two clothes rails. Every penny of her wages went on clothes and there were weeks when I don’t know how we paid the rent because she’d blown her cheque on ‘an adorable pair of boots, Moll. I simply had to have them!’

  She used to march into my office – I always felt bad that I had a tiny office with a window and she was stuck out in the freelance Siberia where everyone shared desks in that horrible hot-desking system – and beg me to borrow the fashion editor’s Karen Millen discount card for her. (She and the fashion editor had this hate:hate thing going on, so she couldn’t possibly ask herself.) Even though I felt guilty about going behind the fashion ed’s back, I could never say no. Cassandra looked perfect in Karen Millen. Nobody could wear those cobwebby, beaded dresses like she did. She was wearing one at the magazine’s birthday party when she met the publisher, Tony Milano, which was where the trouble started. Tony’s in his forties and isn’t bad-looking, in an Italian wide-boy sort of way. Not Cassandra’s type, mind you. But she fell for him big time.

  I don’t see the attraction myself. Tony may have three homes, four sports cars and several offshore accounts, but he also has three chins and no sense of style. Oh yeah, and a wife. That was the real problem. Cassandra didn’t see it as much of a problem, but I did. Still, there’s no talking to her when she’s in love. I didn’t think she was in love to be honest, but once Tony had whisked her off to St Lucia for a week and given her a Rolex, well, she never stopped talking about him. (That was only a month after the party. Normally when people say Tony’s a fast worker, I think they’re referring to his prowess as a businessman.)

  ‘He says I’m not to wear the Rolex to the office,’ she swooned in our messy sitting room, trying on lots of different outfits to see which ones had the shortest sleeves and would therefore reveal the most expanse of slender, tanned, Rolex-encrusted wrist. ‘But nobody will notice, will they, Moll?’

  I said that I thought they might but Cassandra was determined to have her own way and anyway, I was busy trying to organize an interview with Neil Morten, this gorgeous young rock musician who’d just been on the cover of Q, so I left her alone. Big mistake.

  Two weeks after Cassandra had got the Rolex, the editor called me into her office at lunchtime and launched into this speech about how I was a talented journalist but as naive as hell and needed to cop on pronto or I’d end up in serious trouble thanks to that ‘scheming bitch of a friend of yours. Who isn’t much of a friend, if you really want to know,’ Madeleine finished up.

  I goggled at her. ‘You mean Cassandra?’ I said, startled.

  ‘Jesus, Molly, will you ever wake up?’ screamed Madeleine. ‘Of course I mean Cassandra. She rides around on your coat-tails, steals all your ideas, does her best to get your job when your back is turned and is now ruining your career thanks to her affair with the publisher.’

  I goggled a bit more. I wanted to get her to explain but I couldn’t, could I? I mean, Cassandra was my best friend. She’d been my best friend for years, since we’d been five. She cared for me and we’d done everything together. It was my job to stand up for her, like I’d been doing for years. I couldn’t stop now.

  ‘I think that’s most unfair, Madeleine,’ I said pointedly. ‘
She’s my best friend and I can’t listen to you say terrible things about her–’

  ‘Have it your way,’ Madeleine interrupted wearily and went back to her cottage cheese and crispbread. Everyone in the magazine was always on a diet except me. I am ‘sickeningly thin’, as Cassandra puts it, and can consume vast quantities of just about anything I like and not put on weight.

  I went home early because I felt unsettled and also because the next day I was bringing Neil Morten to The Ivy for lunch to interview him and I wanted to be prepared. I mean, I know it was a bit daft to bother putting on fake tan and applying all-night conditioner just for an interview with a guy who is so devastatingly handsome he could probably date all the current Miss World hopefuls. But you know, a girl can dream. I’d invested in this soft-as-kitten-fur vermilion cashmere cardigan that made my hair look dark and lustrous, and even gave me a bit of cleavage because it was so clingy. But when I went looking for it the next morning, the cardigan had disappeared from my drawer, along with my new feather necklace and the gel-filled bra which was the only item of lingerie I’d ever owned that made me look bigger than a 32A.

  ‘Sorry, Moll, knew you wouldn’t mind me whipping these,’ went the note scrawled in Cassandra’s trademark gold handwriting. I did mind but there was no point crying over spilt milk. It’d have to be my boring old black suit. Again. I tried not to think about Cassandra as I sat in the taxi on the way to The Ivy. It was uncanny how people had loved her to bits in college and how everyone at work disliked her. Well, not everybody liked her in college, but most people did, surely? So why did Madeleine and the fashion editor and, actually, most of the rest of the YKOW staff loathe her and slam their office doors when she strode along the corridors in the mood to chat? And what exactly had Madeleine been trying to warn me about?

  Neil Morten was just as gorgeous as he looked on the cover of both Q and his new album. Tall, lanky, with straw-coloured hair, blond stubble, greeny-grey eyes like Pernod with water added, and this sweet, almost anxious smile that lit up his face. In the flesh, he was even better than I’d expected and we just … well, this is going to sound stupid, but we got on like a house on fire. Most of the time you interview famous people and they talk to you as if you’re a tape recorder without a real person attached. They emote, get all their charming little anecdotes out, tell you how much they loved working on the album/movie/soap show and then they’re gone. You’re a part of the process and they don’t really notice you as a member of the same species, never mind as a proper human being. But Neil talked to me as if we were on a date and as if he’d seriously consider going out with me. He was funny, charming and very normal. By dessert, we were finishing each other’s sentences and talking so fast we were running out of breath. The interview hadn’t even happened. It was simply two people talking nineteen to the dozen, laughing and smiling, falling in love, practically. I was, anyway. Falling in love.