Quite honestly, the discovery that my new boyfriend, who I really thought might be The One, is in fact gay … well, it’s almost the least bad thing about the last couple of hours.
I said almost.
Olly has insisted on driving me all the way home, which is nice of him, because I’m feeling a bit too bruised – physically and emotionally – for the rough-and-tumble of the tube just now.
The downside, though, is more of that terrible awkwardness.
Even though – obviously – I re-dressed myself as soon as I was free from the bars, the atmosphere between us is so uncomfortable that I might as well be still wearing nothing but the Ribbony Elasticky Thing and a slick of sesame oil. We’ve sat in embarrassed silence ever since Shepherd’s Bush, and we’re over the river and stuck in a bottleneck of traffic near Wandsworth Bridge when Olly finally breaks it.
‘So. Adam Rosenfeld.’
‘Yes.’ I swallow, hard. ‘Did you know he was gay?’
‘Libby, come on. I only work with the guy. And barely even that, really. He dropped into the restaurant this afternoon for the first time in a week. I mean, I don’t remember pondering, as we pored over some thrilling spreadsheets together, what his sexual orientation might be …’
‘Fair point.’
‘And it’s not like I was looking out for anything in particular, one way or the other.’ Olly changes gear as we finally move up a little way in the traffic. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you were seeing him, Libby. You kept that one pretty close to your chest.’
I wince, inwardly, at Olly’s mere mention of my chest, given that he’s seen more of my chest this evening than I’d have liked him to do in a lifetime.
‘It was pretty recent,’ I mumble.
‘You could have mentioned something over the weekend.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops in case … well, it didn’t work out. Which has turned out to be pretty prophetic of me, really.’
‘You’re not pathetic.’
‘Prophetic,’ I say.
‘Oh … well, you might be that.’
‘Yeah, except I thought the reasons we might not work out would be because we were both too busy with our jobs, or because we didn’t like each other’s families … I never stopped to think that it might be because he was using me as a beard to hide his true identity from his Orthodox Jewish parents.’
This is based on something that Adam muttered at me, by the way, a few minutes before Bogdan and Olly and the tool kit got there: I’m really sorry, Libby … my mum and dad … it’s an Orthodox thing … they wouldn’t approve …
Which, you know, I can sympathize with. I’ve endured the disapproval of my own mother for the majority of the last thirty years. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable to drag someone else into the middle of it. Someone unwitting. Someone ignorant.
‘I’m just such an idiot,’ I say, miserably, gazing out of the window as unidentifiable bits of southwest London slide by in the gathering midsummer dusk. ‘How did I not realize he was gay? He couldn’t have made any more excuses to avoid having sex with me!’
‘He made excuses?’
‘Dozens of them.’ I never usually talk about sex with Olly, but I feel we’ve crossed that barrier tonight. Actually, not so much crossed as smashed through it. With a ten-tonne truck. ‘He was busy with work. He was tired from the gym. He had a headache … I don’t know. There were a lot of different explanations. And I fell for each and every one of them.’
‘So the … er … dressing up in … er … sexy lingerie was—’
‘My embarrassingly misguided attempt to reverse the situation.’
Olly nods. ‘Got it.’
‘I mean, what’s wrong with me,’ I go on, ‘that I have such crappy awful judgement about the entire male species?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘All right, then, maybe there’s just something wrong with men.’
‘OK, well, that’s a bit of an unfair generalization—’
‘I don’t mean you, Ol,’ I say. ‘I just mean all the others.’
‘Come on, Lib, just because it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped with Adam, and just because you had a hellish experience with a total wanker like Dillon O’Hara—’
At this moment, there’s an angry grunt from the back of the car: it’s Bogdan who, I have to confess, I’d completely forgotten was sitting back there.
He looms forward now, to jab Olly in the shoulder with a large and paint-spattered finger.
‘Do not be saying the impolite things about Dillon,’ he tells Olly. ‘Libby is not having the hellish experience with him. Libby is having the heavenly experience with him. And not just in the bedroom.’
‘Bogdan!’ I turn round and glare at him. ‘That’s none of anyone’s business!’
‘Is being the business of mine,’ Bogdan mutters, darkly, ‘when am hearing the untrue things about the people I am liking.’
(Bogdan is being slightly disingenuous here. He didn’t so much like Dillon as nurse a colossal, simmering, unrequited passion for him, in a tragic, balalaika-accompanied, Moldovan sort of way. Many was the time, in the course of those few heady months with Dillon, that I half expected to open my suitcase in some glamorous hotel room only to find Bogdan stowed away amongst my shoes and my tops and my sexy underwear, all ready to clamber out and hang on Dillon’s every word for the duration of our dirty weekend. I got so paranoid that I even stopped taking the big suitcase, and started cramming everything I might need into the smaller of my two canvas holdalls instead.)
‘My mistake, Bogdan,’ Olly returns, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘There’s obviously nothing at all hellish about being abandoned in Miami the day before a major hurricane, with no passport and no credit cards.’
‘Being abandoned in the Miami the day before the major hurricane with no passport and no credit cards,’ Bogdan echoes, ‘by Dillon O’Hara.’
Olly actually takes his eyes off the road for a moment to turn round and stare at Bogdan.
‘I’m sorry … you’re saying that this is some sort of privilege?’
‘Am saying,’ Bogdan says, in the overly patient tone of one who’s decided he’s talking to a complete imbecile, ‘that Libby is being lucky to be involved with man as handsome and charming and funny and—’
‘And coke-addled,’ Olly interrupts, ‘and womanizing—’
‘OK, that’s enough!’ I hold up a hand. ‘Look, I’m incredibly grateful to you both for coming and getting me out of a tight spot – literally – but can we just stop talking about Dillon O’Hara for the rest of the journey?’
‘It would make me a happy man,’ Olly announces, ‘if I never had to so much as hear his name again for the rest of my livelong days.’
Which puts Bogdan into a right old grump, because he inflicts a wounded silence on us all until Olly drops him at the top of his road in Balham a few minutes later. And then thumps on Olly’s window just before we drive off and yells, ‘Dillon O’Hara!’, petulantly, through the glass.
‘Probably not a good idea,’ I say, a moment later, ‘to have made your painter and decorator quite so angry with you four days before your big restaurant opening.’
‘Oh, he’ll be all right. Besides, everything’s on track over there.’
‘Really? Because I feel really awful, Ol, about accidentally dragging him – and you – away from the place this evening …’
‘Honestly, Lib, don’t worry about it. Like I say, we’re right on schedule. And I know you’d do the same for me.’
‘If you got your head stuck in between some iron railings at your secretly lesbian girlfriend’s house while wearing skimpy undies and having cooking oils rubbed on you by a famous television actor?’
‘In that exact scenario,’ Olly says, solemnly, ‘I know you’d leg it across town with your sharpest hacksaw and your trustiest blowtorch.’
‘Well, that’s what friendship is all about,’ I say.
&nb
sp; Olly falls silent for a moment, which is a pity as I’d thought we were well on the road to it All Being OK between us again, until he suddenly swerves on to the other side of the road, and into the drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of it.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he says, ‘but I’m absolutely bloody starving. Would a Big Mac hit the spot?’
Which just begs the eternal question: why in God’s name is Olly still single? I mean, this is a man who can seemingly anticipate a woman’s desires, and then meet them, before the woman has even had the chance to realize they exist. Apart from those blasted yogurt-covered raisins, I’ve starved myself all day (in order, pointlessly, to look my best in the Ribbony Elasticky Thing), and a Big Mac would not only hit the spot, it would smack it with a great big thwunking bull’s-eye.
And confirmed foodie though he is, Olly has a bit of a habit of taking me for random McDonald’s. In fact, this very drive-through is the one we stopped off at several months ago, after he’d picked me up from the Paddington Express on the way home from that trip to Miami with Dillon. I think Olly must remember this too, because we’ve only just driven off from the pick-up window, and I’m only just opening my mouth to wrap it around my burger, when Olly opens his mouth to say, ‘Thing is, Lib, I thought you’d said you were steering well clear of men for a while. After the way things went with …’ He stops himself, just in time, to add a Noraesque, ‘you know who.’
‘I was,’ I say, attractively spraying a bit of gherkin out of my mouth on to the dashboard. ‘That was the plan. It honestly, truly was. But then …’
‘Then what?’ Olly takes a bite out of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese I’m holding out for him, so that he can eat without taking his hands off the steering wheel. ‘Adam Rosenfeld bowled you over? Lavished you with his beard-seeking attentions? Made you feel like the only woman in the world?’
All of a sudden, I can’t swallow my own bite of Big Mac.
Not because it’s chewy, and lukewarm, and tastes faintly of marinaded cardboard (though, obviously, it being a Big Mac, it’s all of these things). But because Olly has hit a nerve.
A very raw one.
‘Yes,’ I mumble.
‘I … oh, Jesus, Libby … I was joking! Or trying to … About Adam, and his being not remotely interested in women, and—’
‘Sure. But the awful thing is, it’s all true.’ I’m making an absolutely colossal effort not to cry and, though I’m succeeding for the moment, it’s not looking particularly good for the immediate future. ‘I did like the fact that he made me feel so special. After D … after You Know Who, and always feeling like just one of many. So many. I mean, you know those scenes in horror movies, where all of a sudden the defences break, and all the flesh-eating zombies come flooding over the walls?’
‘Er … yes … I’m just not quite sure how that description relates to your romantic life. Unless things were much, much more experimental with Dillon than I’d given him credit for.’
I don’t point out that Olly has just used Dillon’s name.
‘I just felt overrun. Threatened. Engulfed. That one of me was never going to be enough to see off the raging hordes of them.’
Because, more than anything else, more than the excessive drinking and the coke habit, more even than the carelessness of abandoning me in Miami as a hurricane approached from across the Gulf of Mexico, this was the reason why it would never have worked out with Dillon: the fact that I was never going to be enough for him; the fact that I was always, always going to play second-best to the excitement of chasing the next woman, and the next woman, and the next.
‘And it was nice with Adam,’ I go on, ‘because I never felt that he was interested in any other woman. But that was because – obviously – he really was not interested in any other woman. Not because he was so caught-up-crazy about me.’
And then there’s a seriously awkward silence, while I gulp back tears, and try not to sniff, and shove the Quarter Pounder in Olly’s direction so many times, to give myself something to do, that the poor guy is probably about to choke on the sheer amount of it he’s being forced to inhale. He’s game enough, though, to keep on manfully chewing his way through the thing until we stop at a long red light just past Tooting Broadway, when he takes the burger from my hand and puts it down on the seat in between us.
‘Libby—’ he begins.
‘So! The restaurant!’ I blurt, before he can say anything way, way too nice, too Olly-like, and have me howling all over him before the light has even turned amber. ‘Nearly finished, you say? I can’t wait to see it! It’s been weeks!’
‘Yes, but … look, I feel awful about upsetting you, and—’
‘Now, you must let me know exactly what I can do to help out,’ I go on. ‘I know Nora and Tash have signed their evenings away for the next week, but I’d really like to do whatever I can, too.’
‘That would be fantastic. But Libby—’
‘I mean, I may not be a dab hand with a hammer or anything, but if you need boxes unpacked, or waiters’ uniforms ironed—’
‘Libby. Please. Just let me say this, OK?’ Olly takes a deep breath. ‘You should never feel like you’re being engulfed by flesh-eating zombies. You deserve someone who makes you feel the opposite of that. Whatever that is. Like … well, like you’re the flesh-eating zombie. The only flesh-eating zombie.’
It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
Which is why it’s good timing that we’re pulling up outside my building on Colliers Wood High Street, because it’s so very nice a thing to have said, and in such a gentle, sincere tone, too, that the self-pity is in danger of taking hold again, and I’d much rather hop out of the car while I still have a shred of dignity intact.
‘Libby, wait,’ Olly says, turning to me as I open the door and start to get out. ‘I haven’t said … quite what I wanted to say.’
‘Don’t worry, Ol. You’ve made me feel so much better.’
‘But I made you cry.’
‘The merest of sniffles. And if it hadn’t been for you, Olly, I’d have been howling the entire city down by now.’
‘Over Adam Rosenfeld? Don’t. He’s not worth it.’
‘Thanks,’ I tell him. ‘I love you loads. I’ll give you a call in the morning, OK? And you can tell me whatever you need me to do for you this week, and I’ll be right there.’
‘Thanks, Lib. I appreciate that.’
Ever the gentleman, he waits until I’ve got the door to my building open and am on my way inside before pulling off into the traffic on Colliers Wood High Street.
Living above one of the takeaways owned by my landlord, Bogdan Senior, has introduced me to some interesting smells over the last year. The muggy pong of frying fish. The eye-watering tang of chicken vindaloo (at least, I can only hope that it was chicken). The greasy miasma of deep-pan, stuffed-crust pizza.
But tonight, as I go up the four flights of stairs to my top-floor flat, the main smell I’m getting is … well, I have to be honest, it’s a lot more floral than the ones I’ve endured before.
I didn’t notice, as I came in the outer door, if Bogdan Senior has transformed BOGDANZ HOUSE OF PANCAKEZ, as it was when I left home earlier, into another sort of eatery instead; but there’s no takeaway food I can think of that smells like a rose garden at midnight. I don’t even think it’s Moldovan food, which I’m admittedly not all that familiar with, because Bogdan has cooked Moldovan food for me – just once – and as far as I could tell it mostly revolved around doing ingenious things with pork rind and cabbage.
Anyway, I’m too tired to wonder exactly where the smell is coming from. I simply carry on dragging my weary legs up the stairs, put my key in my own front door, and fumble for the light switch as I walk through it.
Oh, Jesus Lord Almighty.
There’s a dead polar bear on my Chesterfield sofa.
At least, I can only assume it’s dead, because surely otherwise it would have reared its head the moment
I put the light on and roared at me.
Which probably isn’t the thing to be wondering about. Probably the more normal thing to be wondering is: how the hell has a polar bear stolen into a fourth-floor flat in Colliers Wood, and come to expire on an overstuffed sofa?
‘Hey … who turned that light on?’
I let out a scream. Because the dead polar bear is talking.
And moving, and shifting, and – oh, God – shedding its white, furry coat …
… to reveal that it isn’t, in fact, a polar bear at all.
It’s Marilyn Monroe.
Naked – stark naked – now that the white fur coat she was wrapped in has slid all the way down to the floor.
She stares at me.
I stare at her.
And now she screams. And draws back her hand, and throws whatever she’s holding in it at me.
It’s a cocktail shaker. I have previous experience of taking a cocktail shaker to the face, so, despite my shock at what’s going on, I somehow manage to leap nimbly to the side. The cocktail shaker zings past me, clatters into the wall and falls at my feet without causing me any damage.
‘Who are you?’ she gasps, reaching down and seizing the white fur coat, and clutching it to herself. (Rather half-heartedly clutching it to herself; I can still see plenty of creamy-white flesh and – even though I’m trying not to stare – more than a hint of nipple.) ‘Don’t you know it’s rude not to knock?’
‘It’s my flat.’
‘Huh?’
‘My apartment. I live here. I … you’re Marilyn,’ I blurt, blinking my eyes as I truly take in the sight before me. The mussed-up hair; the sleepy eyes; the wide mouth, glossy with exactly the right shade of vermilion lipstick. ‘Marilyn Monroe.’
‘You know who I am?’ Her voice is little-girly, breathy, just the way it sounds in her movies. ‘And you know my new name and everything?’
‘Yes, obviously, I—’
‘Do you think it works?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The name. Marilyn Monroe.’ She’s leaning forward on the sofa, now, eagerly awaiting my opinion. ‘I kinda helped them come up with it at the studio, because the boys at school used to call me the Mmmmm Girl. And when I told the studio that, they tossed it around a little and came up with Mmmmarilyn Mmmmmonroe … catchy, don’t you think?’
A Night In With Marilyn Monroe Page 7