by Sue Margolis
“I think I got that much.”
“Yes, but in a gentle, caring, sharing way,” Hugh piped up, his face a picture of incorruptibility. “What’s up, Harms?”
“She thinks she’s got perimenopause,” Cyn said.
“Isn’t he that band leader from the sixties?” Hugh said, sitting back down. “Perry Menopause and his Tijuana Brass Band. Did Little Spanish Flea.”
“You know full well that was Herb Alpert,” Harmony replied, plonking herself down next to him and gently punching his arm. Although she pretended to get offended, she was used to Hugh’s constant teasing. Like Cyn, she knew it was his way of showing affection.
“I do? OK, so what did Perry Menopause do, then?”
“Weddings and bar mitzvahs,” Cyn said with a roll of her eyes.
“Really?”
“No. He didn’t do anything. He isn’t a person. He’s an it. You get it. At least women of a certain age get it.”
“It’s when you start getting the first symptoms of the menopause,” Harmony broke in as she rooted around in her bag for her fags. “I’ve looked it up on the Internet. Apparently they can begin ten years before everything packs up completely. Your periods become irregular, you bloat, you have sandpaper sex . . .”
“Urrgh, please. Too much information.” Hugh’s face contorted with distaste.
Harmony swiveled round to face Cyn, who was sitting in one of the armchairs. “The thing is,” she said, drawing deeply on a Marlboro Light, “I’m three weeks late and there’s no way I could be pregnant. Me and Justin haven’t done it for two months. I told him ages ago, no sex until he agrees to take me up the aisle.”
“You know, Harms,” Hugh said, “some straight men do find that sort of thing a bit kinky.”
“ ’Ewge, behave. You know perfectly well what I mean.” She looked back at Cyn. “Three years we’ve been going out. I want to get married, but he won’t even talk about it.”
“This whole Justin thing has gotten to you,” Cyn said. “It’s stress. That’s why your period’s late.”
“You reckon?”
“I’m certain. And you’ve probably been overdoing it at work.”
These days Harmony was a hairdresser, but not any old hairdresser. After she retired from modeling, she trained at Vidal Sassoon. By the midnineties she was the top stylist at the South Molton Street Salon. One day Justin, a merchant banker, came in for a haircut. Instead of tipping her, he asked her out. Three years later they were still together. Justin was also her business partner. It was only because of his financial investment that she was able to set up her own salon off High Street Kensington. The business hadn’t merely taken off, it had gone stratospheric. She was a regular on daytime TV doing hair makeovers and all the London department stores sold her hair-care products.
She and Cyn had met at the launch of another hair-care line—Victoria Beckham’s Posh Locks. Price Chandler Witty had been handling the advertising. Naturally the launch at Harrods was a major media blitz and the place was packed with press, photographers and TV crews. At one point Cyn stepped back to make way for a waiter carrying a tray of drinks and managed to collide heavily with the body behind her. There was a cry of “Bloody ’ell” in a thick Liverpool accent. Cyn swung round to see Harmony staring down at the spilled champagne, which was now soaking into her scarlet taffeta Vivienne Westwood dress. Cyn recognized her at once. “Oh, God. I am so sorry. What can I say? Please, you must send me the dry cleaning bill.”
“Oh, don’t be daft,” Harmony said with surprising jollity. “It’s only a frock. It’s not the end of the world.” Cyn said the least she could do was get her another glass of champagne. And that was it. For the next hour, the two women stood drinking champagne and chatting. Almost immediately, Harmony confessed that these events bored her rigid. “I only came,” she whispered, “because Victoria used to be a client and she sent me an invite. Plus, I need to keep an eye on what the opposition’s doing. Just between you, me and the gatepost, though, I’d much rather be at home with Coronation Street and a bottle of wine.”
“God, me, too,” Cyn said, realizing she had really taken to this un-starry, straight-talking woman. As the party began to break up, Harmony suggested they go out for Chinese. “I don’t know about you, but I could murder some sweet-and-sour pork.” Cyn said she would love to.
They loaded crispy aromatic duck onto pancakes and carried on yakking as if they’d known each other for years.
Harmony chain-smoked and talked about her family. “Me dad buggered off when I was seven and our mam raised five of us kids on her own in a crappy council flat on one of the worst estates in Liverpool.” She drew deeply on her cigarette. “But since I opened the business I’ve been able to buy her a bungalow and a little car. It’s just my way of saying thank you. And I help me brothers and sisters, too. I took ’em all to Florida last year. I’ll never forget the look on our mam’s face when I showed her the plane tickets. Totally made up, she was.” For a few seconds she sat staring off into the distance. Cyn could see her eyes were filling up. “So,” she said eventually, flicking ash into the ashtray, “how did you end up with a daft name like Cynthia? It’s almost as bad as mine.” This was typical Harmony. She never avoided saying what was on her mind. “You see,” she went on, not giving Cyn a chance to reply, “I was named after the make of my dad’s electric guitar. I was baby number two and our mam said it was his turn to choose the name. Apparently he was sitting strumming his guitar at the time and that was that. If he’d been holding a pint glass, I’d have probably ended up being called Special Brew. Special Brew Milhandra O’Farrell.” She laughed a hoarse, throaty laugh and lit another fag.
Cyn explained that her name was also music related. Her father had been a mad Lennon fan since the sixties. When Barbara got pregnant, Mal insisted that if the baby was a boy, they should call it John. When a girl arrived, he considered naming her Yoko.
“Omigod!” Harmony roared. “Yoko Fishbein! I love it.”
“Yeah, but my mum didn’t, so they compromised on Cynthia. Then two years later my brother came along and they named him John, but we call him Jonny.”
Harmony asked her if she liked her name. Cyn said the Fishbein bit had never bothered her, even though half the family had changed it to Fisher. “Anyway, there were loads of other Jewish kids at school with far weirder names. A boy called Benny Lipschitz took the heat off me by taking most of the flak.” She said her first name hadn’t bothered her either until she was about eight or nine. Then she’d started hating it. Even though she was too young to articulate it, at some primal, instinctive level she knew that Kate, Sophie and Amy represented sexy, while Cynthia equalled prissy, spinsterish, anally retentive librarian. It wasn’t until she was sixteen that she realized Cyn—the name her friends always called her—had a certain raw, streetwise edginess to it. “So, I went off to Camden Market with my friend Jude from school and we became punks. I bought this ripped black leather jacket, got my eyebrow pierced and my hair spiked and sprayed Day-Glo pink. From then on I started hiding out in my frilly pink princess bedroom playing The Stranglers at full blast. Mum and Dad went mad.”
They left the restaurant well after midnight, swapped phone numbers and that was it. They had been friends ever since.
Cyn hadn’t been sure how Harmony would hit it off with Hugh, but there had been an instant spark. Hugh adored Harmony’s ballsiness, that she said precisely what was on her mind and refused to be intimidated by his posh background. Within five minutes of meeting Hugh, she was accusing him of being a toffee-nosed, chinless toff. (In fact he had a perfectly well-formed chin.) He called her a chippy proletarian. The more they drank, the more they insulted each other, but Cyn could see they were loving it. Hugh didn’t have a truly snobbish bone in his body and the working-class chip on Harmony’s shoulder was an act more than anything else.
Hugh came back with a bottle of beer and handed it to Harmony. “Get this down you. You’ll feel better.”
“Ta, ’Ewge.” Cyn said there was pizza left if she fancied some.
“God, no. I can’t go eating pizza now. I can feel this whole lack of estrogen thing is already making me put on weight.” She patted her nonexistent stomach.
“But you’re as thin as a reed,” Cyn said.
“Yeah, right. Oliver Reed.”
Hugh looked thoughtful. “Look, I know I’ve been taking the piss, but seriously, Justin will come round, you know.” Harmony shook her head. “We were up all last night, talking. The bank has offered him a job in Dubai. He said we could carry on as we are—you know, seeing each other two or three times a week—or he could take the job. I told him to take it.”
“Do you really mean it?” Hugh asked. She said she did. “Deep down I knew it was never going to work. I mean he’s an earth sign. I’m a water sign. Together we just made mud.” She gave a soft laugh.
“What about his investment in the business?” Hugh said.
“My accountant says I can afford to buy him out.”
Cyn and Hugh came and sat next to her on the sofa. Hugh put his head on her shoulder. Cyn squeezed her hand. “It’ll be all right,” Cyn said. “You’ve got us.” “Thanks, guys,” she said. Then she perked up and said she wanted to talk about something less depressing. Hugh changed the subject back to Chelsea.
“Whadda cow,” Harmony said after she’d heard the story. “You know, where I come from, if a woman does the dirty on you, you make blinkin’ sure she gets what’s coming to her.”
“Hmm, that would be one approach,” Hugh came back, “though not one I would necessarily endorse. Holloway Prison isn’t really at its best this time of year.”
“Er, hello,” Cyn butted in, “can I say something here? Look, I don’t know yet if she even did it on purpose. I can’t go blasting in, accusing her. I will talk to her, though.”
“You just make sure you get to the bottom of it,” Harmony giggled.
“Oh, God, no more arse jokes, please,” Cyn groaned.
“Well, you have to admit,” Harmony said, “it is quite funny.”
As Cyn cleared away the plates and pizza remains, Harmony noticed Hugh’s screenplay lying on the coffee table.
“My Brother, My Blood, My Life by Hugh Thorpe Duff,” she read aloud. “Wow, hev-ee.” Hugh gave her an outline of the plot.
“You’re kidding me,” Harmony said with a confused, slightly nervous laugh. She was looking at Cyn, who was standing by the door violently shaking her head and motioning her to shut up. “This is a windup, right?”
“I’m absolutely serious,” he said, looking exceedingly put-out. “My Brother, My Blood, My Life is a classic example of film noir.” He looked over at Cyn. “And Cyn loves it—don’t you, Cyn?”
“I think it’s very powerful,” Cyn said diplomatically.
“I’m sorry,” Harmony said, putting an affectionate hand on Hugh’s knee. “Look, maybe it was daft trying it out on me. What do I know? We didn’t have too many art house cinemas where I grew up. We didn’t even have TV until I was ten. If we wanted to watch something we went to visit our washing at the Laundromat.”
Cyn took the plates out to the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher. When she came back Hugh was trying to educate Harmony in the loftier aspects of film noir.
“But I just find it so depressing and boring. No offense, ’Ewge, but it isn’t me. I’m more of a chick-flick girl.” She jumped up, went over to Cyn’s video shelf and ran her finger along the line of boxes. “Wow, I didn’t know you had this,” she said pulling out a copy of Working Girl. “It’s my all-time favorite film. Why don’t we put it on? I love the way Melanie Griffith kicks that Sigourney Weaver’s tight little arse after she steals her idea.”
Hugh let out a sigh. “Christ, I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
Cyn looked at her watch and realized she was due at her group in twenty minutes. “OK, guys, I’ve got to go. Stay and watch a vid if you want to.”
“You sure?” Harmony said.
“No problem. There’s more beer in the fridge. See ya.” As she stood in the hall putting on her coat, she could hear them still discussing the film.
“Oh, come on, ’Ewge,” Harmony was pleading, “I know it’s a bit plebeian and not some black-and-white Japanese thing with subtitles, but can’t we just chill out for a bit?”
“I’m perfectly happy to chill out,” he replied evenly. “I like a bit of escapism as much as the next person. But chick flicks are just so tedious and idiotic.”
“But you’re gay. Gay blokes are supposed to love chick flicks.”
“You’re right,” Hugh said, his sarcasm rising, “and we can watch it with me in a tank top, giving myself a leg, chest and back wax while at the same time whipping up a pomegranate mousse and arranging a vase of calla lilies. Ooh, why not go the whole hog and have a Judy Garland CD playing in the background?”
“Oh, for Chrissake, ’Ewge, get down from your blinkin’ high horse, will you? You know I didn’t mean anything.”
“I’m not remotely on my high horse.”
“Yes, you are. In fact your horse is so high I’m surprised you haven’t got altitude sickness. Anyway, I want to watch the film.”
“Well, I don’t.” Hugh’s arms were folded in childish defiance.
“OK,” Harmony said, “there’s only one way to settle this. Arm wrestling. Whoever wins gets their way.”
“Right, you’re on.”
As Cyn opened the front door, she could hear an occasional deep, primal grunt coming from the living room.
Chapter 3
Since the drive to therapy would take about twenty minutes, Cyn decided to phone her mum back as she’d promised. Of course now Barbara couldn’t remember the other thing she’d wanted to talk to Cyn about.
“There was definitely another reason I called. Now what was it? Oh, yes, I was talking to your cousin Miriam, you know—who got married last year while you were away. Anyway, she just had a baby boy. So sensible to get married and have a baby while you’re still in your twenties.”
Gawd. Cyn could practically read the sign. Welcome to Lectureville. Population: you.
“Mum, please. I’m thirty-two. Hardly any of my friends are married. I know you think my ovaries are shriveling as we speak, but I do have plenty of time.” Cyn screwed up her face. She knew precisely what was coming and had started to mouth the next part of her mother’s speech before she had even gotten going.
“OK, maybe at thirty-two your biological clock isn’t exactly going tick-tock, but it’s certainly going tick. And it’s been ages since you finished with that nice Mark.”
“No it hasn’t, it’s been three months.” Actually it had been three months, two weeks and five days. Three and a half months since she’d last had sex. If she carried on like this, pretty soon she would be qualified to go to the Vatican and hold master classes in celibacy. Of course she wasn’t about to admit to Barbara that she was missing having a man in her life. She and Grandma Faye would only get busy setting her up on blind dates with the grandsons and nephews of the women in Faye’s bridge club.
“Like I said, ages. Anyway,” Barbara went on, “it wasn’t your biological clock I wanted to talk to you about.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. I just wanted to ask you if you agree with me that it’s in poor taste for Miriam to serve miniature frankfurters at the baby’s circumcision.”
Cyn giggled. “It’s up to her.”
“OK, I’ll get straight on to her mother and suggest Miriam has a rethink.”
“Mum, that’s not what I said.”
“Oh, by the way, I bumped into Sylvia Goldman the other day—you know, from the synagogue Ladies’ Guild. Turns out her daughter is your age and not married. Anyway she’s frozen some of her eggs. Sylvia promised she’d get her to ring you with the name of her gynecologist.”
For a while Cyn had been wondering what she was going to bring up at her therapy session. Now she had something: why she seemed
incapable of getting her mother off her case.
“So what are you doing tonight?” Barbara asked. Cyn had blurted it out before she had time to think. “I’m on my way to therapy.”
“Darling, I really don’t understand all this therapy nonsense. You’re the sanest person I know. Why do you need therapy? I mean, it’s not like you’re mad. Not like your late Aunty Millie, God rest her soul. Your dad took her to see a therapist once because she had suicidal tendencies.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, but I think the therapist made her pay in advance.” She giggled at her joke. “Seriously, though, is it me? Is it something I’ve done? Or your dad? You hate us because we called you Cynthia, don’t you? It was all your dad’s fault. Never forget that it was me who saved you from being called Yoko.”
“Mum, it’s nothing to do with my name.” One day she would discuss how Barbara’s cancer affected her, but she wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t want to hurt her—after all, her mother had been the one with the illness, the one who thought she was going to die. And even though Barbara had been clear of the disease for over twenty years, Cyn didn’t doubt that at the back of her mind, she still worried about the cancer returning. “I just find it hard to be assertive sometimes and therapy helps.”
“Of course, you get that from me. I’ve always been a bit of a shrinking violet.”
Cyn smiled to herself. Her mother was many things. Neither shrinking nor violet was among them.
The traffic was unusually heavy and Cyn arrived a few minutes late. There were no parking spaces outside Veronica’s house, so Cyn was forced to park around the corner. This was no bad thing she decided because it meant that when everybody left after the session, nobody would notice the Anusol ad.
Veronica always left the front door on the latch on group therapy nights so that clients could let themselves in. Cyn stepped into the hall and opened the door to Veronica’s large white office. There were four people plus Veronica sitting in a circle on hard black Ikea chairs. Cyn slipped in silently, hoping she looked sufficiently apologetic, and took the nearest empty seat. The woman who had been speaking broke off and looked up at Cyn. “Sorry I’m late,” Cyn whispered. “Traffic. Please, carry on.” The woman gave her a small smile. “I was just saying that sometimes I just don’t know who I am. I’m still really struggling with this whole identity crisis thing.”