Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  Victoria Routledge

  Maura slipped her shades on as she pulled the front door shut and, as she locked it, she wondered nervously whether the dark glasses would just attract attention to her, particularly if she saw anyone she knew. That was why celebrities wore dark glasses, wasn’t it, so people would say, ‘Ooh, there’s a celebrity! Is it that one out of Coronation Street?’ An anti-disguise disguise. In the same way that Slimfast was a diet product disguised as a high-fat, ridiculously indulgent milkshake.

  She hesitated for a moment, one hand on the door-keys still rooted in the lock, the other on her shoulder bag, then decided that on a sunny day in the middle of August it wasn’t that odd to be wearing shades. No less odd than the enormous sun hat she had on to disguise her bright blonde hair, anyway.

  It was the first time in nearly a week that she’d been outside. Ignoring the remnants of her hangover banging in her ears, Maura strode quickly across the street, flinching under the blast of sun on the small amount of skin she’d risked exposing, and slung her bag in the back of her Mini. Three crisp packets and a self-help tape skittered into the footwell, joining the clutter beneath both seats. She gave the tape an evil look. And much good you were, she thought. Three weeks of in-car brainwashing, and I still have about as much internal tranquillity as Conan the Barbarian.

  With a quick check around, Maura slid into the car, with some difficulty, due to the diameter of her hat, feeling about in the back for the London A-Z. Normally she drove creatively on directional instinct, but today there were appointments to keep and she had to check where she was going, since her holiday transformation was decidedly not going to be taking place locally.

  Everything was dark behind her Ray-Bans, and then the hat kept getting in the way, and then, as she tried to bend the brim back, Maura thought she could see her friend Daniella turning into the street, so in the end, she frisbeed the hat into the back and executed the fastest three-point-turn she had done since her driving test, screeching on to the main road while she rammed a tape into the machine.

  ‘Holiday’ by Madonna.

  ‘Celebraa-aate,’ sang Maura, and then grimaced to herself.

  Once inside The Shell of Venus, Maura hovered nervously by the nail-varnish display. Beauty salons put her on edge, reminded her of all the delicate areas of feminine cultivation she tended to skip in favour of longer lie-ins and guilt-free evenings out on the razz. The same way some people dreaded hospitals for reasons of their own mortality she dreaded beauticians for reasons of her own cellulite. And also because Phil was forever telling her to stop biting her nails.

  She had chosen a salon in North London because she didn’t know anyone who lived there, and, more importantly, as far as she knew, neither did Phil. The Shell of Venus wasn’t somewhere she’d been before: she had picked it out of the Time Out Shopping Guide on the basis of its nice warm towels.

  The junior behind the reception desk seemed nice and warm too. So warm, in fact, that she put her emery board down almost immediately, and asked, ‘Can I take your, um, coat?’ refraining from the obvious question, ‘And why are you wearing a fur-lined parka in this weather?’

  Maura peeled off her anorak and handed it over. Hot, but necessary on the disguise front. Underneath, her arms looked very white and faintly clammy. She rubbed them self-consciously, until Miss Manicure ran her beautiful red nail down the appointments list and looked up with a big smile.

  ‘Is it Maureen?’

  ‘Maura. Sorry.’

  ‘The all-day pre-holiday day?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Lovely. We like to start off with the aromatherapy massage and sugar waxing, get you in the mood. Why don’t you come through to the massage suite? Debbie’s just cleaning herself up for you.’

  Oh good, thought Maura. Get the walls scraped down before the next customer, why don’t you. Nice touch.

  ‘You just take your things off and lie down there,’ invited the receptionist in buttery tones, pointing to the massage table. Maura eyed it dubiously. The last time she had lain on a bed with paper towels on it, there had been serious metallic consequences for her internal organs. And the time before that had been …

  Maura bit her lip and blinked quickly. Where was all the internal water coming from? She hadn’t been able to wear mascara for weeks.

  She made herself go through the memory. The time before that had been with Phil, who didn’t see why simple female functions should spoil their not inconsiderable fun. He had taken messy female emissions in his stride along with everything else. Blocked pipes, broken expansion bottles, post-tequila projectile vomiting, he had dealt with the lot. A model boyfriend.

  She bit her lip harder and squeezed her eyes into a squint to stop the tear sneaking out. Bloody hell. The arrogance of the man. Even randomly associating himself with her periods.

  ‘Maura! I’m Debbie!’

  She swung round, images of Phil all sweaty and glinty still hovering in the back of her mind, and saw a round-faced woman in white overalls bearing down on her with a big Australian grin. Maura shook herself and put on her co-operative client expression. This had been going on for weeks now. She had to get a grip. And if anyone could make her get a grip, surely this brisk au pair of a woman could. Maura looked at her strong brisk Australian hands. A grip like a gorilla.

  ‘Hop up!’ said Debbie, patting the paper towels.

  She gave a weak smile. When she saw it in the mirrors lining the tiny room even she had to admit it was a pathetic imitation of her usual grin. A Stars in Their Eyes imitation.

  Maura pulled off her things without looking at herself or Debbie and hoisted her protesting body on to the table. It was a relief to feel the towels (warm, as advertised!) settle on her back, and even more of a relief that Debbie didn’t start talking until her strong brisk hands had massaged Maura into yielding semiconsciousness.

  Phil began to subside into the background again. What kind of man wanted to have sex during her period anyway? Freak. And paper towels. What did he think it was, Animal Hospital?

  Debbie soothed and smoothed all the crossness from her back. Small meteors spun in Maura’s closed eyelids.

  ‘I’m now putting some stones on your back to refresh your chakras,’ said Debbie cheerfully.

  Maura felt three round drops of coolness settle on her spine, and the clenched feelings she had been carrying in her lower intestine suddenly fell away, through her stomach, through the table, through to the floor. She almost leapt up in surprise, wanting to clutch them back. They had been quite reassuring.

  ‘You’re in for the full monty today then?’

  ‘Oh, er, yes.’ Maura was temporarily too distracted by the unexpected lightness in her stomach to be shy. ‘Waxing, fake tanning, highlights, the lot.’

  ‘Going somewhere nice?’

  ‘Er …’ Maura debated with herself. What was the best thing to say? Yes? No? Come clean?

  Before she could make up her mind she felt a stabbing pain in her coccyx that made her yelp out loud. When she twisted herself up on to one elbow to see if Debbie had ripped her spine out of her back like a half-eaten trout, Maura only saw Debbie applying her thumbs to a point currently marked out with four hot pebbles.

  ‘You’ve a lot of tinsion in this area,’ said Debbie. There was reproach in her voice, and disapproval very apparent in her fingers. ‘Have you been aht on the lash much recently?’

  ‘No!’ Maura began defensively, but then as Debbie added another stone, changed that to, ‘Oh God, yes, all right.’ These days her body wasn’t a temple so much as a lock-up garage – any old rubbish went in, and as long as the doors still shut she didn’t care.

  ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

  ‘You could call it tha-aa-aa-aa-aa-aat!’

  Debbie increased the pressure on her coccyx.

  ‘Ah dear.’

  Maura clenched her lips against the pain. What did you call your ex getting married on the spur of the moment to someone you’d never met? Or, to
rewind a bit, what did you call finding out that your ‘Blood Still Fresh Under The Nails’ ex had announced his engagement while you were in Dublin on a training course – and you’d only found out because you were flicking through a day-old abandoned Times on the tube back from Heathrow?

  That’s ‘Boyfriend Trouble’?

  Right.

  ‘Can you go easy on my spine, please?’ asked Maura weakly. ‘I need to walk out of this salon later.’

  ‘Not until I’ve got all this striss’ – Debbie gave her knots a fifth hot stone and a tweak – ‘might out. OK?’

  Maura sank her forehead back on to the warm towels. Even if beauticians did initially have to suffer femininity at its least attractive, there had to be some job satisfaction from watching the improvement emerge under your own hands – in fact, she would make a perfect case study, being well on for a total transformation. Maybe Debbie could start on her mind once her back was stress-free. Although that might take a little longer.

  No one had met lovely, ideal Ruth, but that hadn’t stopped all Maura’s friends offering the usual range of advice, from ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’ (which is what she wanted to hear) to ‘Sometimes love at first sight does happen, doesn’t it? And you were always going on about how he wasn’t really right for you, now, come on, weren’t you?’ Which she didn’t want to hear at all.

  She didn’t want to hear, either, about how Ruth and Phil had met on the long weekend he’d taken in Cornwall to get over their final, messy break-up, or how, while she had been at their flat separating their CDs into His’n’Hers memories, each individual one of which had torn through her like labour pains, he had been wandering hand-in-hand over Bodmin Moor marvelling at lovely, practical Ruth’s semi-professional rallying career, and no doubt laughing heartily at her range of camshaft quips.

  But if Maura was being honest with herself, as she thought she might as well now all else had failed, things hadn’t been going brilliantly with Phil in their last six months together. Her mother, who was Irish and given to dishing out lengthy proverbs during Maura’s infrequent phone calls to Oughterard (infrequent mainly due to the exorbitant cost of suffering surreal extended metaphors long distance), had reminded her that Love was Like a Field of Kale, which needed Constant Hoeing and Tending or else All Would Go Rotten. Which was fine.

  The way Maura saw it, if she and Phil were only talking about what kind of loo paper to get, and had slipped into the habit of wearing pyjamas all year round, then that was just letting the field lie fallow for a while, wasn’t it? Things would get better as a direct result of doing precisely nothing. Wasn’t that a direct extension of the Old Irish Relationship Field Metaphor?

  Apparently not. Her mother hadn’t mentioned the bit about your field getting repossessed by the tenant farmer and leased out to someone else. Someone with their own motorized combine-harvester.

  ‘What are we doing first then?’ enquired Debbie in a brisk voice. Maura realized that all the stones had come off her back. ‘Waxing or tanning?’

  ‘Well, waxing, I’d have thought,’ she replied, caught off-guard by a direct question, rather than a ‘Going anywhere nice?’ meaningless banter opener. ‘Else won’t you just wax my tan off?’

  ‘Right answer!’ There was an ominous clack of pebbles above her head. ‘Like to make sure you’re still awake!’

  Still alive, more like.

  Maura hoisted herself on to one elbow and heard all the discs in her back crack back into place. Debbie might have Hands from Hell, but she felt undeniably loosened up all over. Just thinking about Phil and Ruth’s wedding for more than ten minutes without breaking out into a sweat was a step forward.

  ‘Right-o, the full wax, is it?’ Debbie was slopping a spatula round a basin full of warm cement while looking at the pale forest of hair on Maura’s legs with some relish.

  ‘Just the lower legs and, um, bikini line.’ Not that there was any real point in the bikini wax, but presumably even German women had their pubes stripped back before wearing a bikini in public. And she was meant to be wearing one. Right at this very moment.

  As Maura hoisted her knickers into the appropriate Brazilian position, she reflected bitterly that she’d never have guessed six months ago that having her pubic hair yanked out would be a preferable alternative to thinking about Phil and marriage in the same sentence.

  Debbie waxed, smoothed, made small briskly consoling noises, and then anointed Maura’s legs with fake tan, while Maura reclined like a slightly uncomfortable marrow and listened to the sinister whale music being pumped through the treatment room.

  She thought of Cyprus. The lovely hotel. The beaches. The ancient ruins. It had been much easier to do it this way. Phil had always accused her of having the fighting spirit of a hedgehog. But, Maura bristled on the waxing table, she had her pride – what was left anyway. And, on balance, this apparently extravagant option was considerably cheaper than the mission to outdress every other woman in Chelsea Registry Office, including the bride. (No aisles for Ruth. Phil could never be doing with all that God malarky.)

  Maura wondered mawkishly what Ruth would be wearing. Normally, with her boundless imagination and vast capacity for guilt-trips, Maura was very good at tormenting herself with this kind of speculation, but since she had no idea what Ruth looked like (except she would almost certainly be small – since Phil liked a girl he could tuck under his arm and carry home – and very practical, in a Home Front/Top Gear kind of way, since she was not, and blonde, because he was disturbingly specific about what he found sexy), she found herself thinking more about what Phil would be wearing tomorrow.

  A David Beckham frock coat, probably.

  Tomorrow.

  Maura gulped. Water boiled up her throat.

  ‘There! All done!’ declared Debbie in the nick of time, with a final swipe at Maura’s ankle. ‘You can now move on to Stige Four in the Coiffure Suite!’

  The Coiffure Suite, was, as Maura had correctly guessed as she shuffled through in her robe, the hairdressing salon bit of The Shell of Venus.

  She arranged herself in the chair and flipped idly through an old issue of Hair Now, hoping that the stylist would be as content as Debbie had been with minimal conversation and a surprising reluctance to talk about the fabulous holiday she’d booked.

  Her gaze fell on a hair-colouring feature called, predictably, ‘Red Alert’ and Maura wondered whether she should go the whole hog and turn ginger.

  No, she thought, smacks too much of Ditched but Defiant.

  Whereas I am Ditched, but …

  But …?

  ‘Hello, Maura, I’m Carys, your stylist, and what are we doing today? Low-maintenance holiday look?’

  A weighted car slipmat was slung round her shoulders from behind.

  Maura stared at their reflections in the mirror. Carys (small, dark, magazine definition of Petite) was already combing out the knots in her shoulder-length blonde hair. Maura had developed her own new style since Phil moved his life out of the flat: nervously twisting strands into knots before it dried, creating an attractive Crusty Mermaid effect.

  As Carys combed and made hairdresser small talk about split ends, Maura’s hair fell about her face in softer sheets, making her eyes, still fixed on her mirror image, look bigger and sadder and younger beneath, especially without her eyeliner. Debbie had whipped all her make-up off and thrown in a quick facial before her fake tan. With the emphasis on ‘thrown in’. Maura’s face was still tingling.

  She looked choir-girlish.

  I don’t look like me, thought Maura unexpectedly, swiftly followed by, Why do bloody salons have mirrors all over the place? Just when you really don’t want to see yourself?

  ‘Going somewhere nice?’ Tug, tug, tug.

  ‘Um, yes, Cyprus.’ Maura carried on flipping through Hair Now, feeling guilty. Normally she liked chatting to hairdressers, but this time she couldn’t trust herself to stay on topic and there was precious little in her head that didn’t relate in som
e way to Phil.

  ‘Ooh, gorgeous. Self-catering or package?’

  ‘Um, self-catering,’ said Maura. A small stone of tension began to roll around again in her stomach. Debbie hadn’t completely destoned her, then.

  ‘Gorgeous food you can get out there. Markets, mainly. Been there before?’

  ‘No, look, um, I …’ Politeness won over irritation. Just. ‘I’m a bit nervous about flying, actually, so I don’t really want to talk about it.’ She attempted a quick ‘nervous but brave’ smile.

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘No offence, but you’ve got a lot of split ends, if you don’t mind me saying.’ Carys held up a flaky strand in the mirror. ‘Have you been suffering from stress recently?’

  Maura felt like a pig being prodded in a pen. What were they? Beauticians or psychologists in here?

  ‘Yes, I am stressed,’ she said dangerously. ‘My boyfriend, or rather, my ex-boyfriend, has had a whirlwind romance and is getting married tomorrow morning. He’s only just got round to reclaiming his electric blanket from our ex-love-nest in Vauxhall, though by all accounts, his divan is hot enough to fry eggs on. I haven’t even met his lovely new wifie-to-be, but I know I hate her. OK?’

  Carys, to her credit, looked deeply sympathetic in the mirror.

  Maura wished she could bite her tongue once in a while.

  ‘Well, a half-hour with some olive oil would make all the difference,’ suggested Carys tactfully.

  ‘Um, right, so, all I want done today,’ said Maura, feeling she should try to regain what little dignity she still had before the highlighting foils came out, ‘is, basically–’ how to phrase this? ‘– for you to give my hair a pre-holiday boost. Sort of as though I’d been in the sun for about a week?’

  Carys picked up a hank of hair. ‘You’re very blonde already.’ Pause. Faint impression of regret at the state of her hair. ‘So maybe some highlights, not too many, bit of a trim to make it curl at the ends?’

  ‘Excellent.’ Maura swallowed. Her usual holiday look was: dried out by sun, greenish-tinged highlights due to chlorine/sea-salt, general lankness due to excessive external and internal application of dodgy cocktails. And she knew Carys knew. Hairdressers could pick these things up just by waving their hands over your head.