Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  ‘Is that what you suggest?’ I say.

  He reveals white teeth and murmurs, ‘I suggest your sister’s an ogre and you’re destined for better things.’

  I can’t resist a flirt and open my mouth to say, ‘Crispian you are so right, but you needn’t look so smug because by employing us you are propagating my misery,’ but from downstairs Gloria’s falsetto voice tinkles, ‘Ell-ar! I do hope you’re not chatting!’

  I wince, excuse myself, rush to the top floor, and sweep it.

  I give it some elbow and we get the Magimix account and Gloria is torn between elation and fury. She and Edith are thrilled because Crispy wants us to ‘clean his ‘ole aas’ three times a week, but she and Edith are not thrilled because Crispy specified that he wanted me to clean it because I was ‘a great scrubber’. If that’s a compliment I’m not thrilled either.

  ‘If you’ve got designs on Crispy, think again,’ says Gloria, as she clambers into the Range Rover.

  Robert – who has sat in grim glowering silence since Crispy’s ‘scrubber’ remark – looks at me. ‘You are kidding,’ he says. ‘Ella?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I reply, ‘I passed him on the stairs and he leered at me and said hello. I bet he tries it on with everyone, the postman included. Anyway, what was I meant to do, blank him?’

  I drive on to Hattie Hayter’s with Robert. He spends the entire journey scraping the dirt from under his fingernails. He has nice hands.

  ‘Too hard for gloves, are you?’ I tease, but all he says is ‘Ho ho,’ in an unamused way. When we arrive at Hattie’s he stalks into her garden without a backward glance. I feel anxious without knowing why.

  I shrug, let myself in, and start gathering the army of coffee cups stationed about the house.

  ‘Hello!’ says Hattie, as I swish on the hot tap and squirt a squiddle of Fairy Liquid into the kitchen sink.

  ‘Hattie!’ I say, jumping.

  ‘So,’ she says, leaning against the doorframe, ‘how was Radio Man? Ghastly?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not bad actually,’ I say. ‘Not as orange as I thought.’

  Hattie draws up a chair. ‘Indeed!’ she exclaims. ‘Do tell.’

  Not much to tell. But Hattie’s interested so we chat as I work. I would say that high-flying Hattie sees my mundane life as a diversion but she’s sweeter than that. Every week, she demands instalments. So every week I tell her about Crispy who also likes to chat to me as I work, and Gloria, who is spending a fortune at Michaeljohn thrice weekly, and Robert, who can’t stand Crispy, although Crispy is friendly and offers him tickets – offers all of us tickets – to his new club-night (‘MC Magimix plays deep and funky house’ – admission £10, includes ONE FREE DRINK before midnight).

  When Crispy offers, Robert says quickly, ‘Thanks, mate, but I’m away that week, I’m visiting my gran in Seattle.’

  Later in the car Gloria is triumphant and snatches away my ticket and says, ‘Don’t think you’re going, he only asked you to be polite,’ and I say narkily, ‘I wouldn’t go if you paid me, I loathe funky house, I prefer Beethoven.’

  When I say this Robert gives me a strange look. His long-lashed brown eyes seem bigger than ever. For a second he is five years old.

  Then he says shyly, ‘We could go out tonight, Ella, if you like – you know, sex, drugs, and an ice-cream eating competition?’

  He’s been so offish that I seize on his invitation like a stray dog on a scrap of chicken, and he collects me on his second-hand moped and we go to Banners in Crouch End and drink vodka martinis and eat corn bread and ice cream and laugh and lean closer and closer. It’s happened before but we’ve always pulled back.

  Not tonight though. Suddenly we’re kissing and half of me is thinking, ‘This is Robert!’ and the other half is thinking ‘This is Robert?!’ and then we ditch the moped and get a taxi and because I still live at home and we don’t fancy sneaking past Gloria and Edith we speed back to his Kilburn flat where we rip each other’s clothes off in the hallway and it’s all rather fairytale.

  Making love to Robert knocks me sideways as do the beautiful things he says. It’s wonderful but weird because I’ve known him for all this time and while I saw he was gorgeous and funny and clever he was so familiar to me I never thought of him in that way. And if I did I quashed it. But this warm summer night changes everything. It’s as if my heart is re-wired in the heat of our passion. I am shyer and awestruck in his presence, it’s like I’m born again and he feels the same.

  He says he’s always adored me but was scared to say, he’s got peanuts but he’ll get rich for me, he’ll start his own business, we’ll do it together and we’ll live in a big sunny house – although he’d be happy with me in a damp hovel – and there’ll be no more housework I won’t lift a finger and he doesn’t want to go to Seatde tomorrow but he can’t disappoint his gran but he’ll phone me every day.

  So when he doesn’t ring I am surprised to say the least.

  I tell Hattie and she says ‘Don’t take any shit.’

  I think, surely, there’s got to be a reason, but I don’t have his gran’s number, and I can’t believe he hasn’t rung and three days pass and then I think, see if I care, the bloody bastard, and that’ll teach me to sleep with my friends. Life is hellish enough but Gloria and Edith make it worse as they both have their knickers in a twist about MC Magimix’s clubnight and keep snapping at me like a pair of crocodiles. Edith is hoping that Frank Butcher will be there (she has no clue) and Gloria is planning to cop off with Crispy. Denise is excited because she’s too dim to know any better.

  I tell Hattie that I’m not going; I’ll stay at home and watch Denise’s vast collection of Brookside videos to make killing myself a more attractive proposition.

  Hattie says, ‘What nonsense!’ and tells me I should get a grip and put on a frock and go to the club and dance to ‘I Will Survive’ or whatever they play in clubs these days.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to wear and can’t afford anything new,’ I tell her.

  Hattie says ‘Wait’ and disappears into a room and returns brandishing a skinny rib silver top and boodeg leather trousers. I gawp, and Hattie says, ‘Not mine, dear, my sister’s. They’ll fit you perfectly.’

  I am doing my make up thinking spiteful anti-Robert thoughts, when the phone rings.

  Gloria cries, ‘Ella, why didn’t you return to the office after Hattie’s! The accounts need to be sorted before tomorrow morning, you’ll have to work late tonight.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll pay you overtime,’ she adds.

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  She says edgily, ‘You didn’t have any plans?’

  I tell her, ‘No.’ I put down the phone and consider doing the accounts. Truth is, they do need to be done before tomorrow. And I should have done them last week. Then I think, balls. My life is mush, I’m going to party!

  There’s a massive queue for the club but I march to the front and show my ticket and am ushered inside. I am a VIP and in a shallow nihilistic sort of way it feels great. It feels even greater when I totter to the bar to buy a drink and feel warm hands on my hips and spin round and see Crispy, smile fluorescent in the strobe lights. He shouts over the bass, ‘Gloria said you weren’t coming.’ I shout back, ‘I’m supposed to be working, if she sees me I’m toast.’ Crispy takes my hand and snakes through the crush. Girls grab at his T-shirt and he unpicks them, leads me upstairs, opens a door and bows, and it’s a room full of squashy red sofas and beautiful people.

  ‘They won’t find us here, sweetheart,’ says Crispy. ‘Might I fetch you a drink?’

  I let Crispy ‘fetch’ me a drink. He does have a remarkable tan, but it is not orange. And he has great teeth and exquisite manners.

  ‘Don’t you have to DJ?’ I say.

  ‘Not till midnight,’ he says. ‘Don’t think you’ll escape from me that easily.’

  I giggle and say, ‘Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen out with your cleaning lady?’

/>   Crispy says solemnly, ‘Not when she has the face of an angel.’ I think, how naff but consider Gloria and smile anyway.

  And after that we talk about the music business. Crispy loves music but hates the business it’s so false and backbiting but he shouldn’t complain, he’s done well out of it, but anyway, that’s a yawn, what about me, why the hell am I cleaning loos for a living when I could be a model, and I say ‘Well you employ me!’ and he says, ‘If I didn’t I wouldn’t get to see you,’ and I turn pink and Crispy says, ‘Sweetheart, do you really think I need my house cleaned three times a week?’

  I’m flattered, I don’t know what to say. And then he kisses me which solves the problem.

  It feels good and it feels bad and best of all it spites my aching heart.

  We don’t stop kissing until midnight strikes and Crispy yells, ‘Shit!’

  He lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it and says, ‘I’ll call you!’ and I think ‘Yeah right,’ but I am all of a flutter with alcohol and lust, and I am that dizzied up I take a cab straight to the office and sit there in leather trousers and silver top and do the accounts and fall into bed at 5 a.m. and when the alarm wakes me two hours later I rise like a zombie, wash my face, and sleepwalk into work.

  Gloria is in a foul mood because Crispy arrived at the club at nine-fifty, disappeared at ten, and re-appeared at twelve-o-two but that was no sodding use because he was spinning discs and out of reach, but she can’t take it out on me because when she snarls, ‘Where are the accounts?!’ I reply, ‘On your desk,’ and there’s no quibbling with that.

  I think I’m safe but I sneak out to get a sandwich and when I return Gloria is sniffling and wiping her bony nose with a purple tissue and Denise is subdued and Edith grabs me by the wrist and yanks me into the corridor and hisses, ‘What the ‘ell are you playin’ at!’

  I twist out of her grasp and say, ‘I beg your pardon!’ and Edith says, ‘You knew ‘e was spoken for! ‘E was Gloria’s route to easy street! Don’ come the innocent with me, jus’ tell me why Crispy ‘as called this office three times in the last arf hour askin’ to speak to you!’ Hm.

  I tell my stepmother that last week while I was doing his bathroom Cripsy mentioned that he was looking for an Art Deco set of taps, and did I know anywhere. I said I did and I’d get back to him and that, of course, is why he’s calling. I know Edith doesn’t believe me and when I spin the same story to Gloria she shoots me the nastiest look I’ve ever seen apart from on a warthog with indigestion at London Zoo.

  Then she says, ‘Give me the number of the tap shop and I’ll get back to Crispy for you.’ I make up a number on the spot then excuse myself because I’m due at Hattie’s. I want to call Crispy but I don’t dare.

  But in the end it doesn’t matter because the next day Gloria and Edith go to Ascot and Denise goes to the dentist and I’m shuffling papers round the office and the phone rings and the receptionist is so excited she can hardly speak but I have a famous visitor and can she send him up?

  I feel hot and I know it’s not because of the summer sun it’s lust and defiance and I check in the mirror that my nose isn’t shiny and scrabble around Denise’s dusty desk where I find a mint and I crunch it up and Crispy walks through the door holding the biggest bunch of lilies you ever saw and I can tell they’re from a swanky florist and he says, ‘Doesn’t your sister ever pass on messages?’ and drops the lilies on a chair.

  He’s wearing tight trousers and a tight T-shirt which is not the sort of get-up I go for on a man – Robert is a loose-fitted kind of bloke – but who cares about pale absent Robert when I have Crispy who is tanned and tantalizing, if tight-trousered. I feel briefly evil because four days ago Robert and I were forever and he so seemed to mean it. I believed him because I know Robert and he doesn’t lie, and although Hattie might say ‘If you and Robert were meant to be it would have happened sooner,’ I think that some people grow to love one another and I don’t think that sort of love is inferior to snap, bang love but then Robert isn’t here and Crispy is.

  Our office has lax security, by which I mean no cameras, so when Crispy bends me over a desk I don’t worry about being caught, although the prude in me thinks that this isn’t the most romantic position for a first bonk – I think of Robert wanting to gaze into my eyes but I banish the thought – although I do wonder because Crispy is so charming, I would have expected the missionary but the slut in me thinks just give it to me, baby, oh yes that feels good and it keeps feeling good until Robert walks in and walks right out again and I wriggle out from under Crispy and run after Robert but he’s gone.

  When Denise returns from the dentist she is surprised to see me crying in the road and when I tell her she says that of course Robert rang me from Seatde, he rang the office and our home, didn’t Gloria tell me? Robert rang distraught to say his gran had had a stroke and he’d try and call when he could but it would be difficult. Denise says the third time he rang she took the call and wrote it all down but Gloria said she’d pass on Robert’s message which was, ‘I know you’ll understand and wait for me.’ When she tells me this my heart crumples like an old tissue.

  I left Crispy to pull up his tight trousers and I ran home and called Robert to explain but he couldn’t forgive me. He couldn’t forgive that casual lust, it was too cruel, it changed me for him, irreparably. I wasn’t the woman he thought I was. I cried and begged but I understood because five days is hardly much time to wait for love, not when you’ve waited for seven years, so what was left for me but to do the thing that would most spite Gloria?

  If you don’t believe in happy ever after, Crispy isn’t a bad person to be with. He’s sweet if self-satisfied, but our sex life isn’t up to much. Whenever he tries it on I see Robert walking in and the pain on his face takes me back all those years to when he first tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Ah, excuse me, but you’re treading on my toe.’

  Sheila O’Flanagan

  Sheila O’Flanagan is the international number one best-selling author of twenty novels and three collections of short stories. Her books have been translated into over 20 languages. Sheila is a winner of the Eason’s Popular Irish Fiction Award, the Tatler Woman of the Year award for Fiction and the Irish Post Fiction Award. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Sheila had a very successful career in the financial services industry. She has been director of Badminton Ireland and the Irish Sports Council. She is currently a board member of Fighting Words and an Ambassador on behalf of the Women’s Fund: Community Foundation for Ireland. Sheila lives with her husband in Dublin.

  Storm Clouds

  Sheila O’Flanagan

  I hadn’t intended to go to France in July with Cleo and Frankie. And I certainly hadn’t intended to go to France with Cleo, Frankie and twenty adolescent schoolgirls. I’d had other plans – specifically, an all-inclusive resort in Barbados with Mike, my husband, for an uninterrupted fortnight of sun and sand and sex.

  Which would have been a pretty amazing holiday, actually, because somehow we didn’t have time for sex in our marriage any more. We didn’t seem to have time for anything other than falling, exhausted, into bed and dropping off to sleep immediately. In fact it was Mike who used to fall, exhausted, into bed while I lay beside him listening to his snores and wondering why he’d married me in the first place.

  I don’t know how it happened. I thought we loved each other. And love was supposed to conquer everything, even twelve-hour working days with no time to phone, or cancelled nights out because Mike was involved in some urgent project or other in the graphic art company where he worked. I tried to be understanding – after all I was a trained aromatherapist and I was supposed to understand stress – but I simply ended up more and more stressed myself. So I started to grumble at him and then he’d moan at me and it all just got worse and worse.

  Shortly before we were due to go to Barbados things came to a head. We had an argument about something really stupid, like him leaving wet soap in the sink, and I screamed and yelle
d at him that he treated me like his goddamned slave and that he was only in the house when it suited and that I wasn’t putting up with it any more.

  ‘Don’t, then,’ he said calmly. He was always calm. It drove me nuts.

  I looked at him in shock.

  ‘If you hate me that much,’ said Mike, ‘then leave.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Leave,’ said Mike. ‘I make you unhappy. I don’t care about you. I don’t bring you flowers. Honestly, Paula, if that’s how you value love …’

  ‘It’s not,’ I said fiercely. ‘It’s not about flowers it’s about – everything!’

  He shrugged. He was always like that when we had an argument. He’d be calm and reasonable and he wouldn’t argue back. Suddenly, I saw our lives stretching forward like this forever. Mike with his dreams. Me with mine. And neither of us giving an inch because I was tired of being the one that always tried to make things better.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I will leave. I’ll leave and I’ll have a better life and I won’t even think about you any more.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Mike.

  And I left.

  People who talk about divorce as being the scourge of modern society are talking about people like Mike and me. They’d say we should have sat down and worked things out, but there wasn’t any point. He wouldn’t listen and I was tired of trying. I had to get out before I went crazy.

  ‘Of course you did,’ said Cleo loyally.

  We sat in the kitchen of the house she shared with Frankie and Kevin. Cleo, Frankie and I had gone to school together. We’d shared the house in Harold’s Cross together too, before I married Mike. Kevin had taken the spare room when I left. He’d been our platonic male friend through our teenage years and he was still our platonic male friend.

  I pulled the kitchen chair closer to the window so that the evening sun could warm the back of my shoulders. I’d felt cold ever since I’d left Mike.