The Queen of Wishful Thinking

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Lulu,’ Regina answered for her. ‘Love a bit of Lulu.’

  ‘Guinness?’ asked Gemma.

  ‘Well obviously,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘You didn’t think she meant the singer Lulu, did you?’

  Lew stopped himself barking at Charlotte for being rude.

  ‘I bartered the price down for you, didn’t I, darling?’ said Regina with smiling pride and wagged her finger whilst imparting some words of wisdom: ‘You always have to be prepared to walk away.’

  Lew couldn’t help himself asking, ‘Oh yes? When was this then?’

  ‘Thursday,’ said Regina.

  Charlotte cast him a laser-like stare.

  So it was new then. Charlotte had lied. As Lew already knew.

  ‘I have no idea about designers,’ said Gemma, shaking her head.

  ‘You don’t say.’ Gemma didn’t hear Regina mutter that to Charlotte, but Lew did.

  ‘My wife does,’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t recognise her without a dozen carrier bags in her hand.’

  ‘And I don’t recognise you without fucking love-bites on your neck,’ Regina spat, throwing an icy bucket of water over the conviviality.

  ‘Take it easy, Reg.’ Even her new best friend Charlotte winced at that.

  ‘I was only joking, so chill everyone,’ said Regina, flapping her hand and reaching for her wine glass. ‘Fernanda, we’re all finished, I think.’

  Fernanda arrived to gather up the dishes.

  ‘Fernanda is going to have plenty of babies with her husband,’ said Regina, grabbing hold of the young woman and jiggling her stomach. Fernanda laughed it off, but she looked horrified.

  ‘I wish you lots of luck, Fernanda,’ said Gemma, who looked as disturbed as Lew did by Regina’s manhandling of her.

  ‘Any development with you two on that front?’ asked Patrick, addressing Jason and Gemma.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ said Regina. ‘Have a drink and forget about having a sprog. You’re too bloody old for a start.’

  ‘No she isn’t.’ Lew stepped in. ‘Women are having babies later and later these days.’

  Regina guffawed, reaching for the decanter of wine on the table. ‘You’ll be the oldest mother in the schoolyard, Gem. Everyone will think you’re the granny.’

  Gemma’s smile of amusement looked strained.

  ‘I can’t think of anyone who will look less like a granny at the school gates,’ Patrick said with warmth and feeling.

  ‘Totally agree,’ added Lew, watching Regina drink her fully replenished glass down in one.

  ‘Steady on,’ Patrick warned his wife. She gave him a very nasty look and snatched up the decanter again.

  Fernanda delivered two plates in front of Regina and Charlotte. Mains was halibut in lobster sauce with a colourful fan of vegetables on the side of the plate.

  ‘It’s nice to hear that someone is getting attached. Everyone we know seems to be splitting up,’ said Gemma. ‘Our neighbours, two of my clients plus the cleaner at Sparkles and she’s in her late fifties. Mind you, she looks great on it. She’s got a toy-boy, dropped two stone and started wearing clothes from Top Shop.’

  ‘Good for her,’ said Patrick.

  ‘You should go down to Sparkles, Patrick,’ sneered Regina. ‘You’ll be trying to shag her next seeing as you have a penchant for older women. GILFs I think they’re called.’

  Lew felt the hairs on the back of his neck start to rise.

  ‘I read a very interesting thing in the Mail yesterday,’ Gemma said quickly, doing her best to guide conversation to a safe harbour. ‘It said that if most people were offered the chance to be truly happy, but they had to forfeit all their possessions, they wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘How can you be happy without any possessions?’ replied Charlotte, wrinkling up her nose.

  ‘Surely the point is that you are, because that would be the deal,’ said Patrick, coming to Gemma’s defence.

  ‘No one would agree to that deal though, would they?’ put in Jason, with much the same expression on his face as Charlotte had. ‘It’s just stupid.’

  ‘I think I would,’ said Patrick with some force.

  ‘You? You’re the most materialistic person I know,’ mocked Jason.

  ‘Am I now?’ Patrick threw back, locking eyes with Jason. ‘Maybe I was once upon a time but I think you might have wrested that crown from my head, Jase.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Jason laughed, but there was little amusement in it.

  Lew turned to look at poor Gemma who had meant to extinguish any flames, not throw petrol on them. He mouthed a silent, ‘you okay’ message at her. Her husband, however, wasn’t so caring.

  ‘See what you’ve started, Gemma?’ he hissed at her, sounding so much like Regina that Lew began to wonder if she was a virus.

  Gemma’s head dropped and Lew felt a sudden jab of anger. Friend or no friend, he was being a knob.

  ‘Oy,’ he warned.

  The usually jovial Jason twisted his head sharply towards Lew. ‘What do you mean, oy?’

  Patrick pulled the heat back to himself. ‘Gemma sweetheart, alas for some, happiness is a Chaput farmed crocodile bag, though obviously not for the poor doomed crocodile.’ He swivelled around on the chair so he could address his wife directly. ‘Isn’t that right, darling? So the argument for them is a paradox.’ He poured Regina a glass of water and she looked at it in disgust.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’

  ‘Water. Don’t worry, I’m pouring everyone a glass and not just singling you out.’

  Regina picked up the glass and threw the contents over her shoulder, where it splattered all over their Osborne and Little wallpaper.

  Patrick sighed despairingly. ‘For God’s sake, Regina.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ came the reply.

  Lew speared a lance of buttery asparagus, hearing a clock in his head start to count down to a full repeat of the Koh-i-Noor night, although instead of a mixed platter, Regina would start missiling baby courgettes and Jersey royal potatoes. Her eyes had started to roll; she was pissed and dangerous.

  ‘This is lovely,’ he said.

  ‘So it should be, the amount I pay Fernanda. Hey Fernanda, don’t I pay you well?’ Regina barked in the direction of the kitchen, sounding more fish-wife than society hostess.

  ‘Not enough for her to put up with you treating her like a slave,’ said Patrick out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Er . . . what was that?’ Regina rounded on him. ‘What was that, you fucking prick?’

  A surge of tension charged the air as if the room had just been plugged into an electric socket.

  Patrick wiped his brow with weary fingers ‘Regina, please just—’

  ‘Don’t you Regina me. You and your unfaithful tiny organ.’ She grinned nastily and looked around the room for allies to join in laughter with her. She found one in Jason who snorted then tried to cover it up as a cough, payback for Patrick’s recent dig at him, Lew surmised.

  ‘My organ only looks tiny when it’s playing in your bloody massive St Peter’s Basilica of a vagina,’ Patrick threw back at her. ‘Although “playing” implies pleasure and trust me, there is nothing pleasurable about fucking you.’

  His words hung in the air, echoes clinging to them. Even Regina was stunned into silence, at least for a few seconds, though it felt much longer.

  ‘What did you say?’ she said, in a Regan MacNeil Exorcist growl.

  ‘You heard,’ said Patrick, snatching his napkin from his lap and throwing it down onto the plate of fish. He stood up, gave a short burst of mirthless laughter, then shook his head. ‘I give in,’ he said. ‘I finally give in. I don’t want to be here any more.’

  His eyes swept across the table at all the people sitting around him and, before he spoke next, they came to rest on Lew, as if he knew he would be assured acceptance there.

  ‘I should have left. I should have had the balls to pack my cases and go to Marlene. I loved her. Correction,
still love her. She’s beautiful, she’s kind, considerate – and do you know how we met? Fucking swinging, that’s how. And it was her bloody idea.’ He extended an accusing finger in his wife’s direction.

  A collective gasp sounded in the short silence that followed that disclosure before Patrick carried on, not allowing Regina a millimetre of butting-in space.

  ‘Yes, folks, Snow Bloody White here, Mrs Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-enormous-gob, or so you all think, decided that our sex life wasn’t interesting enough so she signed us up to a swinging club in Leeds. I hold my hands up’ – and he did physically too – ‘I agreed to it, though not as enthusiastically as you might think because I said to her that this could all blow up in our faces and, oh boy, did it. So she ended up screwing this bloke’s brains out in one room and I ended up with his wife who had been dragged along like I was and didn’t really want to do anything. So we talked. And we talked the next time we met as well. Then the next time we kissed because she’s gorgeous but I respected her too much to try anything else. That’s how it started. She left her husband for me but I didn’t leave my wife for her because I’m one of those dicks that didn’t think I’d be really happy without possessions.’ He locked eyes with a startled Gemma and went on in a voice that was raw with feeling, ‘But I was so wrong. Things don’t make you happy, people do. Which is why I am walking out of this door now and leaving.’

  He turned to Regina who, for the first time in her life, was mute and addressed her directly. ‘I do not love you. I’ve no doubt you’ll rip up my suits and smash my watches but I do not fucking care.’ Then he walked out of the door and in his wake the room was sucked into a vacuum of silence for a long, long moment as if they had all witnessed a nuclear bomb land in their midst and were waiting for the ensuing shockwave to hit them. Then the moment of fallout occurred and all hell broke loose. Regina turned into a monster from Doctor Who, lashing out her arms, spitting, vomiting a string of f and c words as Charlotte tried to comfort her. Jason started darting around the room as if he should be doing something but didn’t know quite what. Fernanda busied herself with a cloth, dabbing the wall and picking up everything that Regina started to throw around. Only Gemma was inanimate and sat glued to her chair, eyes wide as a petrified deer’s.

  ‘Was that all my fault, Lew?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely not, Gem, don’t even think that.’ It should have been her husband comforting her, but he was buzzing to and fro like Roadrunner. ‘I’m going to find Patrick.’

  Lew hurried down the long hallway and caught up with him at the front door, just as he was putting on a jacket and loading his pocket with keys and his wallet from the hallstand drawer.

  ‘Patrick, are you all right, mate?’

  Patrick turned around and it was the oddest thing, but he looked ten years younger than he had five minutes ago.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve been this good in years, Lew,’ he replied. ‘Thanks.’ And he smiled gratefully, his eyes glistening with emotion.

  ‘Thanks?’ Lew asked, confused. ‘What for?’

  ‘For this. For just following me to the door to see if I’m all right. It means a lot.’

  Lew felt the heavy weight of Patrick’s hand coming to rest on his shoulder and he thought, as if he had received some psychic message from the contact, this is a man so starved of kindness that he doesn’t know what to do with it when he receives any. Then Patrick pulled him into a hug and slapped his back hard, trying to masculinise the tender gesture. When he pulled away his cheeks were wet.

  ‘Look after yourself, Pat,’ said Lew.

  ‘I will. And you. Life’s too short to struggle on when you know you’re in the wrong place. See you around. Keep in touch with me. Please.’

  And before Lew could say that of course he would, Patrick, like a hirsute Elvis, had left the building.

  Chapter 39

  After Patrick had left, Lew returned to the dining room to find Fernanda racing around with a sweeping brush and Jason flapping because he had tried to pick up some broken glass and half-slashed his wrist in the attempt. Charlotte had transferred her attentions to him to try and stop the blood and Gemma had taken over trying to stop Regina hyperventilating; but she pushed Gemma rudely away because she didn’t want to calm down, she wanted to scream then cry then tell everyone again how small her husband’s penis was, how much of an arsehole he was and how much she hated him, all on a continuous loop. Lew tried to stop her drinking more wine and received a string of abuse for it. After half an hour he was tired and bored by Regina’s floorshow and so was mightily relieved when the wind dropped behind her vitriolic sails because she had exhausted herself. Charlotte decided to stay with Regina in the hope of preventing her destroying their house and doing things she might regret like cut holes in everything of Patrick’s that had a crotch; although knowing Regina, she wouldn’t regret that at all. Charlotte insisted that Lew go home, especially as he was so obviously in the Patrick camp, so Lew rang a taxi home and shared it with Jason and Gemma. It would be a bit of a round-the-houses trip because they lived at opposite ends of town, but taxis were thin on the ground at that time on a Saturday night. Gemma looked beat. It hadn’t been a pleasant evening for any of them, but Lew thought she’d had a particularly rough deal.

  When the taxi arrived, Lew presumed that Jason would have got into the back to be with his wife, but instead he hopped into the front seat and started talking to the driver about something car-related. Cars and money and the spending of it was all he seemed to have in his conversational repertoire at the moment.

  ‘Bet you wished you’d stayed in and watched a film,’ Lew said, nudging Gemma’s arm.

  ‘Oh God, I need a piss,’ said Jason loudly, to the driver. ‘Can you stop for a minute?’

  The driver pulled around the corner so that Jason could race out and empty his bladder behind a row of hedges.

  Gemma leaned close to Lew to impart her next words. ‘Do you want me to let you into a secret, Lew? I’ve never really liked Regina. I’m almost glad this evening happened because it’s given me the excuse not to see her again.’

  Lew smiled. ‘Want to know a secret – me too.’

  ‘She looks down on me,’ confided Gemma. ‘I couldn’t give a toss about handbags and I don’t know a Vivienne Westwood from a Clint Eastwood. I was only ever of any interest because I’m Jason’s plus one. Another man for her to flirt with.’

  ‘Well I hope you don’t think that’s how we see you,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not,’ tutted Gemma. ‘I liked Patrick though. Even if he did have a habit of talking to my chest.’ She chuckled. ‘I hope he does find some happiness with Marlene.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Lew. And he did.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Gemma giggled. ‘Swinging eh? Who’d have thought?’ She gave him a poke in the rib. ‘Fancy it, Lew? Let’s do swapsies.’

  Lew chuckled. ‘Anytime, Gem.’

  Gemma blew out her cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t wish Jason on my worst enemy at the moment, never mind my best friend.’

  In all the years Lew had known Gemma, he had never heard her say anything derogatory about her husband so something was obviously on her mind. And as she hadn’t drunk any alcohol, it couldn’t be blamed for easing the passage of her concerns into the open air.

  ‘What’s up, lovely?’

  Gemma’s head was bowed. ‘He’s changed, Lew. He snaps at me all the time, I don’t feel good enough for him any more.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot,’ Lew stepped in.

  ‘And he’s gone all metrosexual. He doesn’t buy his underpants from Asda any more. Forty-five quid for two pairs of Calvin Kleins. And his toiletry shelf is bigger than mine.’

  ‘He’s taking some pride in himself, Gem, that’s all,’ said Lew. ‘Nothing wrong with that.’

  But Gemma wasn’t listening. ‘And . . . it’s like he wants to outdo everyone all of a sudden. He was never like that when we had no money but now he’s obsessed with being the b
est wage-earner, having the flashiest car. He’s even looking around for another house. We could never afford one as big as Patrick’s but he wants one bigger than yours and those were his actual words.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lew. That didn’t sound like the Jason he knew. ‘Maybe he’s nest-building, Gem. Maybe he wants to give the baby the best he can when he comes. Or she.’

  Gemma humphed. ‘Well look out for the shepherds and wise men because I think you have to have sex to have babies, unless I’ve got that wrong.’

  The taxi driver in the front started fiddling with the radio buttons and whistling, embarrassed.

  ‘I lied when I said we were at it like rabbits, in case you haven’t guessed. Twice in three months. It’s even crossed my mind that he’s—’

  She cut off her words as Jason threw open the car door, loudly declared, ‘That’s better,’ and the taxi set off again.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that,’ Gemma said after a while.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly, Gem. I’ll have forgotten by the morning anyway,’ said Lew, though he wouldn’t have.

  ‘Who does the maintenance for your taxis?’ Jason asked the driver and they began a discussion about MOTs.

  ‘The other reason I don’t like Regina is that she’s taken my friend away from me,’ Gemma said for Lew’s ears only. ‘I barely see Charlotte now. I can’t remember the last time we went for a coffee.’

  Lew winced inside. Should he tell Gemma why his wife was avoiding her?

  ‘I rang Charlotte a couple of weeks ago, you know, Lew,’ Gemma went on. ‘I needed to buy an outfit so I thought we could go shopping in Leeds and have lunch and a catch-up but she said she had to stay in all day and wait for something to be delivered for you. So I nipped to Meadowhall by myself because it was nearer and she was there, with Regina, having lunch in House of Fraser. I never told her I saw her, but it really hurt me, Lew.’

  She looked hurt too; her brown eyes were shiny with gathering tears. ‘It would be nice to have my friend back. I miss her. God, listen to me, I sound like a thirteen-year-old kid.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ He should tell Gemma. ‘I totally understand.’