Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  Too many green beans. Anna supposed she should be thankful that he hadn’t said that life with her was like broad beans. That would have been unrecoverable from. Green beans could perhaps be fixed with something tiny from Agent Provocateur. Broad beans would have involved two months in the gym, a frontal lobotomy and a visit to a discreet man in Harley Street to prune the tip off her nose or whatever the prescribed treatment was to win back your man these days.

  As it was she never made it to Agent Provocateur. She couldn’t get away from her desk any lunchtime that week and so sadly by Friday she’d been rendered single. Cut adrift. Just like that. One evening in Pizza Express and many crumpled tissues down the line she’d ceased to be Anna’n’Tim and become any one of any number of casualties of that daunting statistic which dictates that there are about seventeen spare women for every man. So any woman with a man should consider herself blessed. The statistic which means that any old banker, no matter how dull his conversation or cheap his deodorant, can get a date any given night of the week and every woman, no matter how many A-levels or how immaculately highlighted her hair, has to stay at home on Friday nights hiding her Agent Provocateur under a bushel. Or a pair of Gap sweatpants, and watch comedy on BBC2. Anna was a Singleton. One of the Bridget Jones generation. She’d have to start making friends with gay men so that when she reached thirty-three she’d have a donor for the child she knew she’d never have now because she clearly couldn’t make a relationship work. Anna was alone.

  ‘Poor you.’ Laura poured Anna another glass of wine and fiddled with her wedding ring. ‘But I know you’ll be fine. You’re still young, that Internet bloke at mine and Andrew’s dinner party the other month really fancied you. Tim will realize that the grass isn’t always greener. He’ll be back,’ Laura reassured. Though somewhere in her mind she too was less than certain. She’d read this really chilling article in the Daily Mail the other day about women who had careers and everything and whose tits hadn’t even begun to sag and even they were forced to go to dating agencies, so bad was the man drought these days.

  Anna dripped tears into her wine, ‘Do you really think he will? I mean the grass isn’t really greener, is it? We were happy, you know.’

  She remembered the rosy Sunday six months ago when they’d driven to Kent and walked along the seafront and eaten Cornettos at a motorway service station on the way home. She forgot that she had spent every Sunday since cooking things out of the River Café Cookbook for when Tim came home hungry from golf. She’d forgotten that she’d had a crush on the man on her bus to work for the last six months. She’d put that down to hormonal flux. Not the fact that Tim had become as dull as a dishrag and was asleep by ten-thirty even on Saturday nights. Selective memory syndrome. Playing the Victim. She knew the phrases. She knew that their relationship had been as dead as a dodo but she was just so bloody paralysed by the fact that there was only one man for every twenty-seven women. (Last week’s Guardian. Could have been a typo, but she chose the less scenic route of the pessimist.) And so Anna ignored the flags and the signposts and the big fluorescent landing strip to Liberation From The Wrong Boyfriend and instead took to her bed. And her diary, which became fat with clichés and sadness and quotes from bad slow songs. And her friend’s kitchens where she cashed in her compassion chips that she’d been storing up throughout her relatively trouble-free five years with Tim.

  ‘You’re so skinny.’ Lucy walked up the stairs to the beauty salon behind Anna.

  ‘Misery. I’ve cried every day for the last two months. Doesn’t leave much time for eating. Sometimes I think it’ll be okay and I’ll be halfway through nibbling a prawn ball and I remember that we’ve split up. That he doesn’t love me any more, and I just want to spit the prawn ball out again.’

  ‘I should break up more often. I look like a heifer even in my fat-girl jeans at the moment.’ Lucy put her arm round Anna’s shoulders to show she didn’t mean it and ushered her into the warm face-cream scented reception of the hottest, coolest salon in town. On the wall was a photo of Gwyneth Paltrow with, ‘Thanks. Your bikini wax changed my life’ scrawled across the bottom. Anna wished she were Gwyneth with a reputation for loving and leaving before the glow faded and the men discovered what went on between waxing sessions. The days you weren’t on hot, Oscar-winning, pink-dress-wearing form. Gwyneth never stuck around long enough to become a plate of green beans. She was a spear of asparagus. Not in season long enough for a boy to tire of her. Anna had learned this if nothing else. Never take your eye off the ball. Never think that your dazzling wit is enough. Always keep up with your bikini wax.

  Anna looked at the diagrams before her and hastily pointed to the one with the most hair. The heart-shaped one would have been cute if she didn’t have a doctor’s appointment booked for next Monday and the others were best left to Japanese porn stars. Anna looked apologetically at the disappointed beautician.

  ‘Just the plain old triangle for me,’ she mumbled as she lay back on the couch.

  ‘I asked for the triangle and she gave me the one called Mohicana. Can you believe it? It’s obscene. It’s like going to the loo with a stranger. Just as well I don’t have a boyfriend or he’d think I was a complete pervert.’ Anna returned to the table from the Ladies and blew the froth off her cappuccino with a splutter somewhere between mirth and horror.

  ‘You got the stripper wax.’ Lucy grinned proudly. ‘You’ll be addicted in no time. It’s incredibly erotic. Trust me.’ Anna felt like the Country Mouse in Lucy’s wake. ‘Just don’t waste it.’

  But what was she meant to do with it, Anna wondered as she pulled on her pyjama bottoms that night. She hadn’t kissed another man in five years. She’d had fantasies about Bus Man but she would never in a billion years have done anything other than run the rest of the way to work if he’d actually propositioned her. No, she’d been totally committed to Tim. And now she was totally committed to his memory. And to dreams of what could have been. And what still might be if everyone she knew was right. They all concurred that not only was the grass not greener out there in Eyes Met Across a Crowded All Bar One But She Didn’t Look Nearly So Hot When I Was Sober In Her Flat Above A Shop In Fulham The Next Morning Land but that the grass was positively mud. Tim would be back with his tail between his legs and a diamond ring in his pocket in no time. Anna lived for the day. She vacillated between the country wedding and the impromptu Chelsea Registry Office job where she’d buy her shoes from Manolo Blahnik en route and call her parents from the mobile to invite them along. Either way it meant happily ever after etc. The fact that before Tim had mentioned his car accident fantasy and the whole green beans thing she’d never had a wedding dream in her life seemed irrelevant. She’d merely been oblivious to her heart’s true desire. Which was to spend the rest of every waking moment with a man who had once bought her a bar of soap for Christmas. Who could discard what had essentially (apart from the soap) been a brilliant friendship, relationship and all-round Good Thing on the grounds that he hadn’t sampled every sweetie in the shop yet. That he might, on a good night with a few pints inside him, be able to do better. But still Anna longed for him. Yearned.

  ‘Please God just let him come back before my fabulous bikini line grows back,’ she mumbled as she climbed into bed to fill her diary with more clichés about love and marriage and how beautiful their children would be when Tim came to his senses.

  Hope took a battering a few weeks later when she called Tim about a book of hers he still had and hoped for a warm, comforting chat full of reminiscences and the drip drip of regret on his part. He was well. Yeah, fine. Definitely had been the right thing for them and all that. He was a bit busy at the moment but maybe they could meet up in a few weeks for a beer or something. Anna put the phone down and became catatonic with grief. If there was a wall to hit she’d rushed headlong into it and crumpled. This was rock bottom. The lowest. The gutter of things. But in all the clichés she filled her diary with it never occurred to her that after this moment th
e only way was up.

  Every other man looked wrong; told buttock-clenchingly embarrassing jokes; or simply wasn’t Tim. And she looked. She learned to dress the new reduced Anna in up-for-it skirts and saucy boots, and discovered a flattering thing to do with her fringe. She looked at men in a way that suggested she might want to have sex with them even if she didn’t really. And the list of men’s mobile numbers scrawled on the back of her Yellow Pages beside the phone seemed to suggest that the statistics might have lied. That perhaps there were in fact seventeen men for every woman rather than the other way around. And one night after she’d been to a Pimms-on-the-lawn vibe with some work friends she began to suspect that there might even be twenty-seven men for every woman. Anna’s success rate was high. Which in turn made her skin glow in a way that sparkly powder couldn’t. Which led to more mobile numbers and a battery of excuses on her part. Because, sadly, whilst the statistics were wrong the clichés remained. Tim had been The One For Her. He had been the milk on her cornflakes. The only one who could make her truly happy.

  And right up until the very last second she hadn’t believed it could be true. She didn’t even know what she was doing here in the office at eleven-thirty. The small drinks party had finished hours ago and the flotsam of conversation had drifted away along the corridors, out into the street to nearby restaurants and down into the tube station. Only Anna and someone from marketing called Simon remained behind. She picked at the white plastic cups, lifting their rims with her teeth until she had a small graveyard of cups on the desk beside her. Simon sat on the desk and folded a memo about the staff rounders game into ever smaller pieces.

  And even as he leaned over to kiss her. As he broke off his sentence about how he’d lived in New Orleans for two years to bend down to kiss her on the swivel chair. Even as he did this she had no idea whether she fancied him or not, or how she got here. She wasn’t even drunk. Her last cup of white wine had been at least an hour ago and yet her hands were touching the back of his head and she was kissing him. Still not sure why. And it was different. As she put her hand to his cheek it wasn’t sharp like Tim’s but soft, and his hair was shorter. And the earlobes weren’t the familiar ones she’d fiddled with every lazy morning for as far back as her memory could take her. But though it wasn’t Tim it wasn’t bad. She knew the moves. Took his fingers in her mouth as his hand slipped under her T-shirt. Smelled his skin and didn’t have to run from the room. In fact she wanted to stay. Anna was kissing Simon. She’d never kissed a Simon before. Hadn’t kissed a man with black hair since she was seventeen. But it was all right.

  The next morning as she sat in bed chewing her pen the clichés crowded her head. She picked up the ringing phone.

  ‘Anna, it’s Lucy. What happened last night? You stayed late.’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’ Anna lay back on the pillow ready for a long one. ‘He’s nice. I mean, I don’t know. It’s different.’ She thought about it and smiled. ‘But it’s not serious. I mean, I’m not ready for anything like that. I mean, I’m still heartbroken and stuff.’

  ‘Just one thing. Did he smell nice?’ Lucy asked. Anna thought back to the fluorescent lighting of the office. The way he’d kissed her in the lift on the way down to reception at midnight. The taste of him.

  ‘Yeah. He did.’ She smiled to herself.

  After she’d put the phone down on Lucy. After Lucy had asked whether she’d made the most of her bikini wax. After Anna had told her that she hadn’t but that she had come home with her bra in her handbag. After they’d made a lot of noise and laughed a lot, Anna picked up her pen. Reached for a cliché.

  ‘Splitting up with Tim was the best thing that ever happened,’ she scrawled.

  Polly Samson

  Polly Samson’s most recent novel is The Kindness, published by Bloomsbury. She is the author of two highly acclaimed story collections and her first novel, Out of the Picture, which was shortlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award. Her most recent linked story collection, Perfect Lives, was a Sunday Times Fiction Choice of the Year and was read on BBC Radio 4. She has been shortlisted for the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize and The Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She recently wrote the introduction to Daphne du Maurier's The Doll: Short Stories. She has written lyrics for three bestselling albums and was a Costa Book Awards judge in 2007. Polly Samson lives in Brighton and her website is pollysamson.com.

  The Itch

  Polly Samson

  He has his back to me while I tell him about my day: the fresh Cornish crab I bought at the fish shop for our supper, lunch with my mother at Peter Jones. ‘It’s got worse,’ I say. ‘Her hands shake so badly she spilt soup in her lap.’ The hem of his jacket is down, the light catches a spidery thread hanging there and I wonder, has he always looked out of the window when I talk? There’s nothing much to see outside. Just the lawn, still striped from his weekend mowing, and next door’s cat asleep on the wall.

  ‘Lucky for you the crab’s already dead,’ I point out as I chop purple shallots on a board. His hand strays across the table to last Saturday’s Telegraph Sport.

  ‘I hate the thought of them screaming,’ I say.

  ‘It’s only air escaping,’ he says, glancing at a racing page that I feel sure he must already have committed to heart.

  I slice cleanly through tomatoes and wonder if it’s possible that he no longer thinks about other times; that for all he cares to remember we might never have cooked together or bought live crabs from a Cornish fisherman. It’s unfair really, isn’t it? There are things that I would like to forget but I can’t and then there are happy memories that I cling to, with a real effort, like squinting at a Picasso to see the face behind the abstraction.

  The tomatoes then were from the little shop in the Cornish village and were more knobbly than the slippery supermarket ones I’ve just cut. The knives in the cottage were blunter too: seeds splurged from the gashes I made in the tomato skins and spilt on to the breadboard like spawn. We cobbled together our supper to the sound of a tinny transistor radio, Johnny Walker’s hits from the seventies: ‘Play that Funky Music’, and Boney M, and songs about summer and love from Grease. We danced around each other in that unknown kitchen, lost in the moment, as though fate were our choreographer and Venus a puppeteer pulling our strings. Alan rubbed garlic on to toast, heaped the tomatoes on top and added swirls of olive oil. I swung washed green salad in a tea towel above my head, allowing drops to splatter violently in wet stripes against the window and walls and to fall on to us like rain; he pulled the cork from the wine and wiped debris from inside the neck with his finger. ‘Mamma Mia, Here I go again …’ We mimed the songs into stainless steel salt and pepper shakers: ‘My, my, how can I resist you …’ We leant towards each other until our shoulders touched, really, we did …

  ‘Do you remember?’ I say, but he’s already dialling a number. He’s standing with his back to me, the telephone cradled between his shoulder and ear, a file from the office scattering papers on to the dresser before him. ‘Hello, so sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you earlier today. Now, about those prices …’

  I hum to myself. I remember.

  How bright we were. Not just younger. Everything around us was more brilliantly coloured and we moved through life on lighter feet. Dancing indeed! Funny that I can remember more about our time in Portreath than I can about, say, last weekend. Was it roast beef or roast chicken? I have no idea. But I can picture us in that cottage right down to the jam jar of sea pinks on the table and if I stand here now and lick my hand it reminds me of Al’s skin and him lying on the sand.

  It was supposed to have been crab supper then too: a pair of them, the size of ornamental fans scuttered across the cottage floor on stiletto claws when the fisherman tipped them from his sack and I screamed at their lollypop eyes.

  ‘Well, of course they’re looking at you,’ laughed Al, my boyfriend, as my husband Alan then was. ‘How can you possibly expect them not to?’

  Petroc the fisherman licked his
cold-sores with a fat tongue, nodded his agreement. Up and down went his head while his eyes popped at me until I was more afraid of him than the crabs.

  ‘Thank you, very much,’ said my husband-to-be noticing my panic and ushering him away from where I stood. He held open the door: ‘Tell me, what do we owe you?’

  One of the crabs lay half-heartedly inspecting its claw under the table, the other was manoeuvring itself along the skirting board, scraping and rattling like a clockwork toy. I tried to stop my hands shaking as I set water to boil in the large tin pan. The letting agent had pointed to it in the scullery, said it was what all the visitors used when they bought from the crabman who would surely come calling. He never missed a sale when the cottage was rented, apparently. ‘Likes to grab an eyeful of the lady visitors, does old Petroc,’ the agent had told Alan, jerking his thumb to where I stood looking out at the sea through the kitchen window.

  I left Al to watch over the water while I walked down to the shop by the beach huts for salad. I took much longer than necessary; stopping to talk to a dog, reading the labels on bottles of sauce, choosing new shoelaces. The impending death of the crabs hung over me, pressing down on me like a lid; I wanted to be neither executioner nor accomplice. By the time I forced myself back into the kitchen, the pan was trembling as steam made a cymbal of the lid, clanging away and starting the crabs up again in clipping tangos across the stone flags. Al looked at me, his brows high, a question. ‘No way,’ I said, dumping the paper bags on to the work surface. ‘I’m not doing it.’ I had my hand on the door through to the other room, I could smell the blood and guts of the fishing boat, probably from the sack that Petroc had left on the floor, and I thought how strange it was that I’d always known that smell as fear.