by Sue Margolis
“Like what?”
“I dunno. He could be some kind of con man.”
“OK, the moment he tries to sell me a time-share apartment in Florida, I’ll ditch him.”
“All I’m saying is be careful and don’t rush into anything.”
“I won’t and I am being careful. Promise.”
Harmony took her hand. “It’s just that I love you and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I know. I love you, too.” She took a mouthful of Coke. “Hugh came with me to buy my hiking gear today. He seems to have gotten over Laurent not being gay.”
“Yeah, I phoned him this morning to check if he was OK about it. He seemed fine. Said he didn’t have time to talk because he was busy with wedding stuff and needed to keep the line free. Apparently he was waiting for some harpist woman to call him back.” While Cyn tried to imagine what “You’re the One That I Want” would sound like being played on the harp, Harmony sat staring into her vodka tonic. “I’m thinking of asking him out.”
“Who?”
“Laurent. Who else? I just think he is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. The moment he walked in, I got goose pimples all over.”
Cyn made the point that the perimenopause didn’t seem to be affecting Harmony’s libido. “By the way, have you been to the doctor yet?”
“Yeah. He did a blood test to check my hormone levels. Said he’ll phone me with the result . . . The thing is, with Laurent, it’s more than just fancying him. I mean, this is a man who put his life at risk for something he believed in. When he started talking, I could see there was a real fire in his soul. D’you know what I mean?” Cyn said she did.
A load of blokes were chanting “Inger-l’nd, Inger-l’nd” and clapping. The match was due to start in a few minutes. Cyn suggested it might be time to leave. They were gathering up their coats when Cyn spotted him in the crowd. Even though his face was painted white, with a red St. George’s Cross along its entire length and breadth, he was still clearly recognizable.
“Omigod. It’s him.”
“Who?”
“Gazza.”
“Sorry, none the wiser.”
“He’s the bloke from Droolin’ Dream. The one who thinks I’m Chelsea.”
“Bloody hell.”
Cyn explained about him fancying her. As she looked up she realized he had seen her. “Bugger, he’s coming over. OK, you have to pretend to be my girlfriend.”
“I am your girlfriend.”
“No, my lesbian girlfriend.” More rushed explanation.
“So, you be the butch one,” Cyn said, “and I’ll be the feminine one.”
“Er, hello, correct me if I’m wrong, but you are the one wearing hiking boots. I, on the other hand, have just had a French manicure and I’m wearing Voyage. I think it’s clear to the casual observer which one of us looks like the lesbianator.”
Cyn took in Harmony’s itsy-bitsy floaty dress, her hair in a pretty chignon, held in place with a diamanté comb. “I know, but you’ve got brothers who are car mechanics. You’ll be better at talking butch.”
“What do you want me to say?” Harmony was starting to panic.
“I dunno. You’ll think of something.”
They sat back down. A second later Gazza was standing in front of them. “Chel! This is amazing! Of all the bars in all the world, you had to walk into mine.” He was swaying slightly and his speech was a bit slurred. He’d clearly had a few.
“Gazza! I had no idea you lived round here.”
“Actually, I don’t. I’m just catching up with some mates who do.”
She hoped her relief wasn’t too obvious. “I tried to get you a few times today, but you weren’t answering.”
“Another team-building day,” he said, turning toward Harmony. Under the grease paint, his face was becoming one giant leer. “So, this is the little woman, eh? Chel, you are one lucky lady and I mean lucky with a capital Wrrruuurrrh.” He slurped some beer from the pint glass he was holding.
Cyn could tell Harmony was balking at being referred to as “the little woman.” Nevertheless, she stood up and shook his hand. “Watcha,” she said, in a voice that had dropped at least nineteen octaves. “I’m Harmony. How they hanging?”
Cyn was practically splitting her sides. “Harmony’s a car mechanic,” she said, praying he didn’t recognize her true identity from all her TV appearances.
Harmony, bless her, didn’t miss a beat. “That’s right.”
“Geddaway. A great-looking bird like you, I don’t believe it. You’re never a car mechanic.” Gazza was swaying so much he almost spilled his beer.
“I am, really.”
He wasn’t having it. “Yeah, right.” He stood there, trying to marshal his thoughts. “OK, I have an Audi that drifts to the left on a straight flat road, meaning I have to keep correcting the steering. What’s the cause?”
Harmony didn’t hesitate. “Most cars tend to drift to the left because of the natural camber of the road, but this sounds more serious. Worn out suspension bushes, I’d say.”
“Blimey, that’s exactly what the garage said. God, a beautiful sexy woman who knows about cars. What more could a fella want? You know, I’m wondering if maybe I’m a lesbian.” He came closer and looked round to check he couldn’t be overheard. “Don’t suppose, you know, you’d be interested in having a bit of a party—if you get my meaning? You know, the three of us—back at my pad in Winnersh?”
Cyn told him he’d had too much to drink. She and Harmony got up to leave.
“You see, I reckon you two would give up being lesbians once you’d experienced Gazza magic.”
“Bye, Gazza,” Cyn said. “I’ll speak to you tomorrow, when you’ve sobered up.”
“You’ll regret it if you don’t at least give it a try,” he called out after them. “I could make my ex-girlfriend come all night long. And I mean come with a capital O. Think about it.”
To give Gazza his due, he rang Cyn at work the next morning, to apologize. “Sorry, Chel, I was pissed with a capital Rat-arsed and totally out of order. Look, I hope this won’t affect our professional relationship.” When she assured him it wouldn’t, he seemed truly relieved. She was starting to feel really guilty about deceiving Gazza. He was a twonk, but an affable one, she decided. She told him that she had found a director and that she would let him know as soon as they’d set a date to start filming. “By the way,” he said, “I’ve worked out the main sell lines we need to get across in the script. I’ll e-mail them to you now.”
She decided to take the afternoon off and start work on the script at home. That way there would be nobody looking over her shoulder, asking awkward questions. Nobody would mind her leaving early. There were no meetings planned and since Brian-the-boozer Lockwood had taken over from Graham, everything had gotten rather lax.
Before she left, Luke came over and asked if she’d seen Chelsea yet and broached her drug habit. Cyn reassured him that she would speak to her soon. “At the moment, she’s still in a great deal of pain. I’m not sure she can cope with a full-scale intervention right now. But don’t worry. I will do what’s required. You can rely on it.” Luke seemed satisfied and ambled off. As she watched him go, Cyn smiled to herself. “Oh yes,” she said out loud, “you can absolutely rely on it.”
On the way home, she stopped off to pick up a Greek salad for lunch. Morris nattered away quietly in the background while she sat at the kitchen table stabbing bits of feta and reading Gazza’s e-mail on her laptop. He had listed more than a dozen selling points—essentially a load of adjectives like fresh, light, fluffy, satisfying, inexpensive and so on—which he wanted to be worked into a twenty-second script. Oh, and then there was the key point, that Low Nuts were low in fat. Gazza also wanted that mentioned at least six times.
She sat there reminding herself of the scenario: the sixties women sitting round a kitchen table complaining about their weight and how hard it is to diet. Then in comes the Audrey Hepburn look-alike wi
th the box of Low Nuts.
Once she’d finished eating, Cyn took her laptop into the living room. She decided she would be more comfortable sitting on the sofa. She plumped up some cushions and took her time arranging them against the sofa arm. When she finally sank onto the sofa, feet up, she carried on fiddling and altering the position of the cushions until she was perfectly comfortable. Only then did she reach out onto the coffee table and pick up her computer.
Laptop in place, she realized the act of stretching out had altered the position of the cushions. She reached behind her back and adjusted them yet again. “OK, right,” she said, giving a cushion one last tug, “let’s get going.” She typed: Droolin’ Dream commercial. She pressed the return key twice, indented and typed: Scene 1. She paused and added a colon. Then she linked her fingers and bent them back so that her knuckles cracked. “So, what’s my opening line? C’mon, think. Think.” Nothing. More knuckle cracking was followed by more cushion tugging. She turned her attention to the laptop and began playing with font size and trying to decide between print styles—should she go for Courier or Times New Roman? After two or three minutes she decided the only way to get her brain in gear was to make a cup of coffee.
She got up, went back into the kitchen and filled up the kettle. “So, Mo,” she said, going over to the birdcage and peering in through the bars. “It’s been ages since we had a talk. How you diddling?”
“Need a leg over,” he said in a perfect imitation of Keith Geary. “Need a leg over.”
“Same ol,’ same ol’, then. I, on the other hand, have big news. I’ve met a man and I think I’m falling in love. His name’s Joe. And he is just gorgeous. And I mean gorgeous with a capital cute.” God, Gazza was getting inside her head like one of those ridiculous Christmas pop songs. “I’ve never met anybody like Joe before. He’s funny, kind and ever so cute. He kissed me last night and it was so unbearably blissful that I thought I was going to pass out. What do you think of that?” She found a piece of cucumber on the counter, which had come from her salad, and pushed it through the cage bars. “Gorgeous Joe,” he squawked. “Love Gorgeous Joe.” Then he pecked the cucumber greedily from her fingers.
Cyn took her mug of coffee back to the sofa, but try as she might, no words would come. It was odd, writing scripts usually came quite easily to her. This one was different, though. Her entire career depended on it. The upshot was, her mind had frozen.
She typed: Scene: Sixties kitchen. Three women are sitting at a Formica kitchen table. She followed this with another colon.
When the words still wouldn’t come, more displacement activities followed. These included picking at the dry skin on her bottom lip, booking an eyebrow wax and test-driving her new Sex and the City bunny vibrator—five times.
Finally she decided to have a bath. There was no point getting dressed again, so she decided to change into her pajamas. Her new hiking boots were sitting on the floor at the end of the bed. She decided to put them on for a few hours—but over thick hiking socks this time—in one last attempt to break them in.
By seven o’clock, due to frequent displacement walks around the flat, the boots were feeling much more comfortable. Scriptwise, she’d only written two lines and was struggling. When the phone rang, she couldn’t have been more grateful. She would have happily chatted away to a loan company or wrong number, just to get a few minutes’ break. But it wasn’t either of those. It was a distinctly careworn Hugh, phoning to give her a progress report on the wedding arrangements. He’d finally booked the tent, and after spending the entire day on the phone had finally found a rabbi and a priest prepared to perform a joint blessing after a civil ceremony. The bad news was, he’d made no progress with the food and entertainment. The “simple elegance” idea had lasted five minutes, it seemed. Barbara was still fixated on deep-fried ice cream and Flick was talking white stretch limos and suggesting that instead of confetti, each guest should be given a children’s tube of bubbles and a wand. “I thought it was a rather sweet idea,” Hugh said, “until she started making noises about having a steel band playing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.’ ”
Cyn had just gotten off the phone with Hugh when Harmony rang in a state of wild excitement to say she’d phoned Laurent and asked him out. “I’m picking him up in an hour. God, my heart won’t stop racing. I feel like a sixteen-year-old getting ready for her first date. I’ve already tried on a dozen outfits.” Cyn told her to have a wonderful time and ring her afterward with all the details. A few minutes later Barbara rang, equally hyped, to say did she know Harmony had asked Laurent out? Barbara couldn’t stop going on about what a lovely boy he was. Apparently, nothing was too much for him. He couldn’t do enough around the house and he’d even gotten Grandma Faye working out. “You should just see the pair of them going at it on the living room carpet.” Cyn said that really would be a sight to behold. “Oh, by the way,” Barbara said before she hung up, “your dad’s feeling a bit under the weather. He thinks he might be coming down with flu. If you ask me, those nasal tubes in that oxygen machine of his were full of germs.” Barbara didn’t seem remotely perturbed, so Cyn told her to wish Mal better and that she would phone tomorrow to see how he was.
It was well after midnight when she finished the script. In the end it wasn’t at all bad, even if she did say so herself. She’d managed to capture the right lighthearted tone, at the same time as getting in a reasonable selection of Gazza’s selling points. Of course it would probably need some last-minute rewrites when they came to filming, but for now she was happy.
She made herself some Marmite toast and hot chocolate, which she took back to the sofa. When she’d finished, she picked up the script, intending to give it a final read-through, but she could barely keep her eyes open. She had just begun to nod off, when the phone rang again. She gave a start and reached onto the floor for the phone.
“Cyn, it’s me, Harms. You awake?”
“Not really,” Cyn said blearily.
“Great, ’cos I just had to ring like I promised and tell you I had the most fantastic evening with Laurent.” If it was possible, she sounded even higher than she’d sounded a few hours ago. “He wouldn’t let me pay for anything. Of course he’s got practically no money, so we ended up taking this long romantic walk by the river, eating hot dogs and putting the world to rights. Cyn, he is a truly good man. A real visionary. He’s got all these amazing ideas about how to make the world a better place . . .”
“Harms, that’s wonderful, but I’ve been working all evening and I really am . . .”
“I mean, you want to hear him on fuel emissions and global warming.”
“I’m sure it’s fascinating. The thing is . . .”
“And famine. He says it’s not so much financial aid countries like Ethiopia need, as education in modern farming methods.”
“So they say . . .”
“And he thinks religion is one of the major causes of all the hatred and misery in the world. You know, the idea of my team being better than your team. I’d never thought of it like that.”
“It’s a good point, but . . .”
“He is dead brainy. I reckon he could give Hugh a run for his money. God, Cyn, men with brains are just so sexy, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely . . .”
“Oh, and to top it off, he’s also the most brilliant kisser. Bloody hell, I think I might be in love. Anyway, look, don’t be offended, I’d love to stay up yakking, but I really need to hit the sack.”
“It’s OK, Harms, I’m not remotely offended. Night, night.”
Cyn put down the phone. She did her best to get herself up off the sofa, but her legs simply refused to engage with her brain. Instead she rearranged the cushions one last time and fell asleep. She was still wearing her hiking boots.
Chapter 14
In her dream, the intermittent buzzing sound was coming from a chain saw being wielded by Mr. Levinson from downstairs. For some reason he had gone crazy and was in the street carrying o
ut a ferocious attack on a twenty-foot mountain of Droolin’ Dream Low Nuts. With every long, piercing buzz, Mr. Levinson wrought more carnage. Huge, gleaming gobbets of strawberry jam spurted onto the pavement, hedges and car windscreens. In the distance a police officer was crouched behind the open door of his patrol car, megaphone in hand. “Sir,” he called out, “step aside from the doughnuts.”
Slowly, Cyn started to come to. In the space of a couple of seconds she realized that the buzzing was coming from the intercom, Joe was downstairs, it had to be half past seven and she had overslept. “Oh, God, no. Bloody hell.” She leapt off the sofa, making her head go all swimmy because she’d gotten up too quickly and ran to the intercom. “Hi, Joe, come on up,” she said, pressing the door release. She looked in the hall mirror and tried to flatten her psycho morning hair, but it was having none of it.
“I am so, so sorry I’m not ready,” she started to gabble as she let him in. “I was working late last night on the script for the Droolin’ Dream commercial and I overslept.”
“That’s OK,” he said brightly. “We’ve got plenty of time.” As he kissed her on the lips a goose pimple shiver went up her back. This was caused by sexual excitement, tinged with the fear that her early morning breath might have been less than sweet.
She thought he looked unbelievably sexy in his khaki parka, black scarf and well-worn hiking boots (and not remotely wholesome—at least not in the meat-paste-sandwiches-and-birdsong-records sense). By contrast she was standing there in her ancient brushed cotton floral pajamas with a question mark over her breath, feeling about as sexy as Granny Clampett. “Let me just jump in the shower. I’ll be ten minutes.”
“Don’t panic. Honest, we’ll be fine. By the way, the boots look great. I’d never have thought of teaming them with pajamas.”
She looked down at her feet and felt herself turn crimson. “Ah, yes . . . the boots.” She’d already told him she owned loads of hiking gear, so she could hardly say she was breaking them in. “I, er . . . I slept in them . . .” And why had she slept in them? In case of a sudden middle-of-the-night trekking emergency? “I slept in them to save time. That’s it. Always takes me ages to get them on.”