by Lucy Diamond
In a sudden clutch of paranoia, she wondered if the other two were discussing her right now. Were they laughing about how red-faced and pissed she was looking? Had they noticed that her make-up seemed to have melted away to nothing already, that she’d spilled salsa down her top from a particularly drippy nacho? Oh God – what if they were regretting coming to meet her, boring old Josie? Was she cramping their style?
The bathroom door creaked, and in lurched Nell. ‘I am enjoying this sooo much,’ she declared. She came over and put her arms around Josie’s neck. ‘Who would have thought it, eh, Jose? Me and you back in Camden together. We just need our poet and painter and it’ll be as if those ten years never happened.’
Josie felt faint with relief. ‘You’re not … bored, or anything, are you?’ she asked. Three beers ago she wouldn’t have said the words, but they just fell out of her now.
‘Bored?’ Nell echoed. ‘Of course I’m not bored! What are you on about?’ She elbowed Josie. ‘Are you trying to tell me something? Have I been rambling on too much about India?’
Josie shook her head, smiling. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just …’ She shrugged, feeling daft. ‘Ignore me,’ she said. ‘I can’t take my beer any more.’
Nell went into one of the loos. ‘I think I’ve had enough for the time being too,’ she called through the door. ‘Afternoon drinking wipes me right out these days.’
‘Me too,’ Josie said, thankful at the admission.
Nell came out and washed her hands. ‘It’s a bit of a time-warp this, isn’t it?’ she asked, applying some fresh lipstick. ‘Like, it’s all the same, yet not. And we’re all different too, yet kind of the same.’ She blotted her lips and threw the tissue in the bin. ‘Think I should definitely stop drinking. I’m talking rubbish, aren’t I?’
Josie shook her head. ‘No, I know what you mean,’ she said. She leaned against the cool tiled wall, trying to string the right words together. ‘Being here in Camden, I keep expecting to bump into Nick, or your ex David, or someone else we used to know. Almost as if I’ve forgotten that I don’t live here any more. And then I see you and Lisa, and you’ve both changed so much, to look at, and …’
‘Haven’t we just,’ Nell said. She peered into the mirror and pulled a face. ‘Honestly – do you really like my hair? Or were you just being kind when you said so earlier?’
Josie turned to her in surprise. ‘Of course I like it,’ she said. ‘I mean, I loved your old curls but I think it looks really cool cropped like that. Honest.’
Nell fiddled around with the strands at the front. ‘I did it after me and Gareth split,’ she confessed. ‘Because he always adored my curly hair, so it was kind of two fingers up at him.’ She snorted, her expression hardening. ‘Which is totally ridiculous because he hasn’t even seen me since, so it was all for nothing. But …’ She shrugged. ‘I feel different for it. Like I’m a new person, not the same person that he …’ She broke off and looked away. ‘Anyway, thanks for being nice about it,’ she said after a moment, and went past Josie to the door. ‘Shall we get the bill and go shopping?’
‘Yes,’ Josie said, following her. She couldn’t help wondering what Nell had been about to say. Like I’m a new person, not that same person that he …
The same person that he what? Josie mused. What had he done to her? Or was it that she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘dumped’? Nell had never been dumped by anyone, it was always she who called things off. The terminal finisher, Nell was.
That had to be it, Josie decided, sliding back into her seat and getting her purse out. Gareth had instigated the split, and Nell was in denial over it. Or something.
Camden Market was loud, hectic and bustling after the dingy calm of the bistro. The three of them made their way over the bridge that spanned the canal, past the middle-aged punks who were charging people to take their photographs. ‘Sad bastards,’ Lisa commented loudly, and Josie couldn’t help agreeing.
‘Not tempted to get a snap of yourself and that one with the green mohican, Lise?’ Nell giggled. ‘I always thought you suited green.’
‘Not snot-green like that I don’t,’ Lisa said firmly, steering them through the crowds. ‘And besides, he’s forty if he’s a day. I like my men to be a bit more professional than that.’
‘You never know,’ Josie teased, ‘he might scrub up nicely in a suit …’
Lisa rolled her eyes. ‘God! I’m not desperate, you two. Leave it out!’
‘Nobody said you were desperate!’ Nell retorted. ‘We were only having a laugh.’
‘Yes, but … Oh never mind,’ Lisa said. Her mouth twitched as if she wanted to say something else, but she fell silent.
‘What’s everyone after today then?’ Josie asked, changing the subject. ‘Shopping-wise, I mean,’ she added quickly, in case Lisa thought she was still talking about men.
‘Summer dresses,’ Nell said, running her hand through a rack of colourful strappy numbers on a nearby stall. ‘These are nice, aren’t they?’
Josie paused to rummage through a pile of tops on a table. ‘I like this,’ she said, holding up a smocky kind of top, with a drawstring scoop neck and floaty sleeves.
Lisa wrinkled her nose. ‘Bit mumsy,’ she said dismissively, turning to a tray of sunglasses.
Josie felt her cheeks flame. Mumsy – was that Lisa putting her in her place? She tried to pretend she hadn’t heard. ‘I don’t really wear pretty things like this any more,’ she said. ‘It’s practical all the way these days. Jeans, jeans and more jeans. And boring old tops that can be washed two hundred times without falling apart.’
Lisa was trying on some sunglasses in front of a mirror and pouting at herself. ‘God, I couldn’t bear that,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get sick of it?’
Josie shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ she said. To be honest, though, she hardly thought about what she wore. She had enough to do every morning, getting the boys fed and dressed, without stopping to agonize over which outfit to put together for that day. Which was why, more often than not, she grabbed whatever was on top of the clean-washing pile.
She put the scoop-necked top back on the pile and turned away from it. Anyway, it wasn’t as if she needed to dress up like a mannequin every day, was it? She was hardly out there on the pull any more, trying to dazzle the guys with her shag-me outfits. She’d done all that and got through to the other side, husband in tow, hadn’t she?
She saw a rail of skirts in bright jewel colours and felt a wistfulness steal over her. Back when she’d been a designer, she’d worn clothes like that. Loud, look-at-me clothes. You could get away with wearing quirky, funky stuff and statement jewellery if you were a designer. In fact, she could even remember lying in bed in the mornings, not being able to throw off the duvet until she’d planned exactly which ensemble she was going to wear. It had all mattered so much then. Her clothes had defined her. She had cared.
They made their way slowly through the market, past the jewellery stalls, the painted crockery, the mosaic-framed mirrors, the decorated light-bulbs and kooky hat stalls. Nell bought some flip-flops with large pink flowers over the toe straps. Lisa bought a bottle-green vase for her sister’s birthday present. Josie bought two painted wooden dinosaurs for the boys and a retro silver clock to go in the kitchen. The boys had broken the last one with a badly aimed Frisbee that came in through the back door.
The sun had emerged from the clouds and was glinting off the canal. Josie was carrying her coat as well as her overnight bag, and suddenly felt hot and tired. ‘Anyone want coffee?’ she asked hopefully as they passed a stall.
‘Definitely,’ Nell said. She was laden with her coat and bag too, and was fanning herself with one of her new flip-flops. ‘Good idea.’
‘Could you get me a latte?’ Lisa asked, pressing a two-pound coin into Josie’s hand. She was holding her BlackBerry. ‘I’m just going to send a quick email to the States. Something’s come up.’
‘Sure,’ Josie said, rather taken aback that Lisa was still together
enough to even think about work, three beers into a sunny Saturday afternoon.
She and Nell joined the queue for coffee, as Lisa perched gingerly on a metal chair nearby and started typing. ‘So, what are your plans now?’ Josie asked Nell as they waited. ‘I mean, will you go back to Wales, or stay in London for a while? Have you left your job?’
Nell put a hand to her head as if she were going to tuck a curl behind her ear, then dropped it again. The habit clearly hadn’t quite left her. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but it was only a temporary thing. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now. My first instinct was to get a plane ticket somewhere – anywhere – just to escape for a few months and …’ Her eyes slid away from Josie. ‘You know, lick my wounds. Distract myself from my broken heart with an adventure.’ She spoke the words lightly, but there was a brittle edge to her tone. Then she smiled properly. ‘But being back in London feels fab after a year in the middle of nowhere. I quite fancy a summer here, the more I think about it.’
‘Oh good,’ Josie said warmly. She loved the thought of Nell being closer at hand. ‘Well, if you want somewhere to stay, come to ours any time. You don’t even need to ring, just turn up. There’ll always be a bed for you.’ She rushed on before Nell could say no. ‘I mean, I know we don’t live in London, just boring suburbia, but it’s commutable if you’re working and …’ She stopped herself as they reached the front of the queue. ‘You know what I’m saying. Any time.’
‘Cheers,’ Nell said, smiling at her. ‘I might just do that.’
The boys had floated up into Josie’s head periodically throughout the afternoon, but as abstracts largely, in the back of her mind, rather than for any particular reason. It was only on the bus rumbling towards Lisa’s house that she realized the time – almost four o’clock – and had a pang of missing them. Almost their entire day had gone by now, without her. That had hardly ever happened before.
Lisa and Nell were chatting about something in the seats in front, and Josie couldn’t resist pulling out her mobile, just to see how her boys were doing without her. She pressed the home number – the one number she hardly ever dialled because she was so rarely away – and listened to the burr of the ring-tone. Ring-ring, ring-ring …
She could imagine their white phone on the corner table in the living room, its aerial crooked and stuck together with gaffer tape where one of the boys had bent it, falling on it in a fight. Ring-ring, ring-ring …
What would she be interrupting? she wondered with a little smile. Maybe Pete had got the pirate stuff out and they’d been immersed in a long, bloodthirsty game all afternoon. Maybe they were watching Star Wars together, deaf to the shrill of the phone, as Luke Skywalker grappled with Darth Vader. Or perhaps they were out in the garden being knights and dragons, and Pete was having to pelt through the house to get to the phone, a ridiculously small helmet still jammed on his head …
Her own voice spoke to her.
‘You have reached Josie, Pete, Toby and Sam. We can’t take your call right now, so leave us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks. Bye!’
She turned away from the woman next to her and spoke, hunching over her phone. ‘Hiya, it’s me,’ she said, smiling again as she imagined them listening to her words sometime later. ‘Hope you’re all having a lovely day together. Been thinking about you loads. I’ll try you again before bedtime, OK? Love you. Bye.’
She clicked the line dead and dropped the phone into her bag. She couldn’t help wondering where they were. It was odd, not knowing, not being in the loop. Had Pete taken them out to the park all day, perhaps? Or to the cinema? They’d be having a brilliant time together anyway, she was sure. She should have done this before – given them their own space, the three of them, to do boys’ stuff without her.
They got off the bus at the end of St Paul’s Road, a long curving street lined with genteel three-storey Victorian houses.
‘This way,’ Lisa said, leading them along. ‘Not far, promise.’
‘Thank God for that,’ Nell said. ‘My arms are about to drop off with all this stuff.’
‘See that silver Merc up there?’ Lisa asked, pointing ahead. ‘Well …’
‘Is it yours?’ Josie gulped. She knew Lisa was flying high at work, but she hadn’t known she was flying that high.
Lisa shook her head. ‘In my dreams,’ she said. ‘It’s Roger’s. He’s my neighbour. No, I was about to say, my house is just there, near the Merc.’ She laughed. ‘My car’s that really badly parked Honda.’
Right, thought Josie as they walked past it a few moments later. That brand spanking new baby-blue Honda must be the one then. O-k-a-a-ay. Lisa clearly was raking it in these days. She really had turned into alpha-minx of the pack while Josie hadn’t been looking.
Nell let out a long whistle as Lisa stopped in front of a house with a black-painted door. ‘Is this all yours?’ she asked. ‘The whole house?’
Lisa nodded. ‘Yep,’ she said proudly. ‘The whole shebang. Come in and have a look.’
‘Wow,’ Josie blurted out as she followed Nell and Lisa up the front steps and into the hall. ‘Wow, Lisa. This is so …’ She swallowed, not able to think of a suitable superlative. The hall was long and wide, laid with the original Victorian floor tiles – small black and white squares in a checked pattern. The walls were painted a warm cream, and there was a huge gilt-edged mirror on one side and an antique console table with elegant curving legs on the other. ‘So gorgeous,’ she said, with a sigh of envy.
‘Just dump your stuff and I’ll put the kettle on,’ Lisa said. ‘There’s a cloakroom under the stairs for your coats,’ she added, walking along the hall in front of them.
‘Bloody hell, Lise,’ Nell said. ‘I feel like I’m messing up your house just standing in it!’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Lisa’s voice floated back to them. ‘Come down to the kitchen and tell me what you want to drink.’
Josie unlatched the cloakroom door and hung her coat on a peg. There was a selection of Lisa’s coats and shoes in there, with several hooks still empty. Josie found herself thinking of her own coat rack, with the boys’ green winter Parkas on it, plus their navy-blue raincoats and a variety of hooded tops for warm days, all fighting for space with her and Pete’s things. That’s the pay-off, she was ashamed to find herself thinking. Lisa’s got a nice house, but she doesn’t share it with family. Not like me.
She shoved the thought out of her head as quickly as it had popped up. That was a horrible thing to think. ‘I am so jealous of this house,’ she confessed to Nell in a whisper.
‘Tell me about it,’ Nell said. She hung her coat on a peg, kicked off her boots and shut the door. ‘How do you think it happened?’ she asked as she and Josie walked to the kitchen. ‘I mean, we all started off the same, didn’t we? Fresh out of college, with our rubbish boyfriends, bad haircuts and crappy temping jobs. And now look at us.’
‘Exactly,’ Josie said. ‘Wow, Lise. If I had this kitchen, I would just live in it, I think.’
The kitchen was long and wide, and stretched down to French windows at the far end, through which Josie could see a decent-sized garden. The walls were whitewashed and had a rough, country look to them, as if they were really the walls of a farmhouse in Provence. The large windows were hung with cheerful striped roller blinds, with slate tiles on the sills. The units looked like solid oak, and were topped with black granite work surfaces. Everything shone like a Flash advert – the espresso machine, the chrome juicer, the silver Alessi kettle …
‘No, I mean, you as well, Jose,’ Nell was saying. ‘You’re a success story too, with your man and two kids and nice home. And Lisa’s shot off the scale in career terms, with—’
‘Hardly,’ Lisa said, filling the kettle with water.
‘Darlin’, compared to me, you are in the outer stratosphere,’ Nell told her bluntly. ‘And here I am, having started in the same place as you two and look at me! I’m homeless, jobless, boyfriendless …’ Nell pulled a fa
ce. ‘What am I doing wrong?’
‘Nothing!’ Josie said indignantly. ‘Hello? Reality check! You’ve been all over the world, seen tons of amazing things, had loads of adventures … Nell! Not many people have had even half the exciting times you’ve had. And you’ve got no strings! You’re free! Nobody’s holding you back from doing whatever you want to do!’
Josie stopped abruptly, aware of the note of yearning in her voice.
‘I know that,’ Nell said, perching on the edge of the table. ‘And it’s good, being free, but it’s just … Well, I think I’m doing all right, but as soon as I compare myself to you two …’
‘Don’t even go there,’ Lisa said. ‘Yeah, so I’ve got a nice house and car, and can buy whatever I want to right now, but I’ve slogged in the City for years. I’ve worked late nights, weekends, I’ve dealt with shit from all the blokes there every single day. I’ve put everything on hold – family, friends, men, babies, all the rest of it – to climb the greasy pole. And take it from me, there have been plenty of times over the last few years when I’ve had a postcard from you, barefoot in Bali or Bolivia or Brazil or wherever, and I’ve thought exactly the same thing: What am I doing? Why aren’t I seeing the world like Nell, or having babies like Josie, or …’ She put the kettle down suddenly, and took a breath. ‘Maybe I should open some wine,’ she said. ‘This is all getting a bit serious.’
‘Maybe you should,’ Josie agreed. She was trying to catch Nell’s eye but Nell was staring out into the garden.
‘I just don’t know what to do now,’ Nell confessed, her blue eyes far away. ‘At least you two have some kind of game plan. You can see where it’s all going next in your lives. Me, I haven’t got a clue. Not a fucking clue.’
‘But that’s not so bad, is it?’ Lisa said, opening a cupboard door and squatting in front of rack upon rack of wine bottles. She pulled one out and considered it, then pushed it back in and selected another. ‘Red all right for everyone? This should be a good vintage. And would you really have it any other way, Nell? You’d hate my life. You’d resign from my job within seconds.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘And it’s all very well having a nice house but you have to keep up the mortgage payments. Which, let me tell you, are a ball and chain in themselves.’