by Pippa Wright
‘Urgh! Honestly, Lulu,’ I shudder, ‘you’d want to give him a good wash. Really, what is sexy about an all-pervading odour of stale fags and BO?’
‘Fwwwaawwr, I bet he’d be filthy – you’re just way too uptight, Harrison.’ Lulu is gazing off into the distance, and I can’t tell if she is contemplating her new curls in another mirror or dreaming of jumping the bones of Randy Jones.
‘Lulu, it’s not uptight to expect a man to take a shower once in a while, especially when that man likes to wear the same skintight jeans, sans underpants, for months at a time.’
I sound prim even to myself, but really, Randy Jones, heartthrob to millions, is pretty unappealing in the flesh. Even more so because he’s entirely convinced of his own gorgeousness. If a dog looked at him in the street, he’d think it fancied him. He likes to stand just a little too close to any woman under seventy (he’s not an ageist) so he can hit them with the power of his personality. Unfortunately it’s the power of his armpits I tend to notice first. You’d think that someone as obsessed with his appearance as he is (Randy being no stranger to the make-up counter) would consider washing more often, but he’s like some Elizabethan courtier who covers up his body odour with yet more perfume rather than risk his health by taking a bath. Sometimes I think his insistence on smelling like a builder after a sweaty day on site is an intentional contrast to his campness, as if the manly stench of his pits somehow cancels out his penchant for Cuban heels and eyeliner. Though if there are any doubts about his heterosexuality, the fact he’s never without a glamour model on his arm should be enough to disprove them, one busty blonde at a time.
Lulu sighs wistfully. ‘I’d still do him. Dirty jeans and stinky pits and all.’
‘Yeah, just think of the tips you’d get with that piece of first-hand information. Probably enough to cover your treatment at the clap clinic afterwards, eh?’ I snigger into my wine glass.
‘Jeez, Harrison, do you always have to take all the fun out of it? Can’t I even have a fantasy shag without you insisting that I get a virtual STD? Don’t go imposing your lifetime sex ban on me.’
Ouch. That one’s a little below the belt. The dark-haired man whose table we’re sharing looks up with raised eyebrows and then, seeing my furious face, straight back down at his paper. (Le Monde, naturellement. Fake Frenchman, I bet.)
‘It’s not been a lifetime, Lulu,’ I hiss. ‘It’s two years since I split up with Joe – doesn’t your precious breakup equation say that’s acceptable?’
Lulu is pretty strict about the fact that you can only mourn a relationship for a period of time equal to half the length of the relationship itself. It’s a useful equation for forcing you to get a grip – especially when your relationships tend to be short ones, like Lulu’s. But five years with Joe grants me a permitted mourning period of two years and six months.
‘Darling, that’s a maximum possible time for getting over a break-up, not the minimum requirement. I mean, two years? You’re practically a born-again virgin.’
‘Two years is not that long in the scheme of things, Lu,’ I hiss.
‘In the scheme of what?’ exclaims Lulu. ‘In the scheme of a convent? In the scheme of a weirdo agoraphobic who hasn’t left the house in twenty-four months? In the scheme of someone who really should be back in the saddle by now?’
Lulu’s voice is getting louder and louder, and the dark-haired man has blatantly stopped reading his paper to listen to us.
I hope that right now you’re thinking, ‘Who is this so-called best friend who’s being so mean to Lizzy?’, but I’m pretty sure that what you’re actually thinking is: ‘Two years? Twenty-four months? What the hell is wrong with this woman?’ So I’d like to take a moment to reassure you that I’m a perfectly normal thirty-three-year-old woman in all respects. I’m not morbidly obese; in fact, breaking up with Joe helped me lose about ten pounds on the tried and tested misery diet (none better), and I’ve kept it off ever since. My hair isn’t shaved into anything terrifying, it’s standard issue PR-girl highlighted blonde to my shoulders. Piercings in ears only, and I’m entirely free of tattoos. I’m five foot seven in heels and, as I’m rarely out of them, I like to think of that as my real height, despite evidence to the contrary.
I’ve had dry periods before – who hasn’t? But even for me, this is a record. And in contrast to Lulu’s love life, it looks even worse. Lulu is in and out of relationships as often as she changes her hair. People who don’t know her – well, okay, women who don’t know her well – are inclined to think of her as a bit of a slapper, but she’d be horrified to know it. In fact she’s the most romantic person I know. Each new man is The One, every encounter a dazzling adventure, even if it only lasts a few weeks. And it only ever does last a few weeks. I am in awe of her faith in love and possibility and hope. But right now she’s pissing me off.
‘Lulu, I wish I was more like you,’ I say, and I mean it. Sort of. ‘But I’m just not. You can hardly pop out for a pint of milk without meeting someone new and wonderful. My life is different. It’s complicated.’
She snorts as she pours more wine. ‘Complicated how, Harrison? You’re single, you’re gorgeous, you’re smart and funny. You’re in need of a shag. Why exactly is this complicated?’
‘I don’t meet new people like you do, Lulu, really I don’t. They don’t come into my salon and sit in my chair and tell me about their love lives and ask me out on dates. I don’t live with my twin brother and meet all of his friends every five minutes. I work in an office full of women! I live alone! But I’m trying! It’s not my fault I haven’t met the right man yet.’
And it’s not. It just seemed that at the moment when all of my friends finally settled down, Joe and I split up. And almost overnight my carefree twenty-something existence of rocking up to weddings every weekend and hitting festivals in vast groups suddenly turned into an endless round of christenings and birthday parties for the under-fives. Don’t get me wrong – like I said, I love children; but it just seems wrong that the last time I got kissed by a male of the species he was two years old and covered in strawberry ice cream.
Suddenly Lulu lunges across the leather banquette and grabs my handbag. She shoves her hand in and grabs my baby-blue Smythson diary (a gift from Camilla) and brandishes it above her head triumphantly. My stomach lurches. Don’t worry, it’s not a confessional deep-thoughts sort of diary – as if I’d keep one of those in the first place, let alone carry it around in public. We’re talking a day-planner here – but I’m still not sure I want my weekly schedule to be held to account so publicly.
‘Right, let me seeeee,’ says Lulu, opening it at random. ‘Spinsters’ Social Club on Wednesdays?’ She flicks through the diary. ‘Yup, I knew it! You’ve actually put this in your diary as a date for the entire year. Already. It’s June, Harrison.’
‘Of course I have!’ I protest, ‘We do meet every Wednesday – we have for ever. Why wouldn’t I put it in my diary?’
‘Because –’ Lulu thumps the table a little too vigorously. How many glasses has she had now? ‘Because you haven’t even considered the possibility that anything in your life might actually change. I mean, where might you be in six months? Where might I be?’
‘Lulu, don’t get hysterical – you’re my best friend, I’m making time for you in my diary because I want to see you. Why’s that weird?’
‘It’s weird because – ’ She thumps the table again. Oh dear, she’s definitely hit her four-glasses-plus ranting stride now. ‘Because you’ve also put in your Monday night yoga class to the end of the year, your Tuesday night babysitting, and your Thursday night Italian lessons. What kind of a control freak are you?’
The dark-haired man has now given up any pretence of reading the paper, Lulu looks at him for back-up and waves the diary in his direction. ‘I ask you, is this normal?’
‘Eet ees a leetle strawnge,’ he says with a Gallic shrug – a real one. Either he’s truly a Frenchman or he’s doing a very good impression o
f one.
‘When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, Monsieur,’ I snap, turning back to Lulu, who’s beaming at him gratefully, glad to have an ally in the annihilation of my life. ‘So I have a full life, Lulu – I’m busy, I’m out there, I’m trying to meet people. Can’t you see that?’
‘No you’re not. This isn’t a diary, it’s an activity chart. You’re filling your life with stupid classes and meetings because you’re scared of opening yourself up to randomness, to any encounter you’re not in charge of.’ Lulu flicks the diary shut and throws it on to the table. I snatch it back before our French interloper can pick it up.
‘Oh fuck off, Mrs Freud,’ I say, trying to defend myself. ‘I could meet a man at yoga – there are quite a few good-looking men in that Monday-night class, I’ll have you know.’
Lulu looks at me with pity. ‘Harrison, I’ve been to yoga classes. I’m here to tell you, darling, that you deserve better than some earnest wispy-bearded youth who’s a bit too much in touch with his feminine side. And besides, you hate the smell of patchouli oil.’
She has a point.
‘Don’t you see, darling, that this isn’t normal?’
‘Lulu, it’s perfectly normal. I don’t see why you’re picking my life to bits like this. I like my life just fine the way it is.’
‘Do you, though?’ says Lulu, leaning across the table with sudden urgency. ‘Do you? Because I’ve been thinking for a while that these Spinsters’ Social Club evenings aren’t doing us any good at all. I mean, do you really want to be meeting up every Wednesday for ever and ever to discuss being single?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then we need to do something about it, Harrison. And when I say we, I mean you.’ Lulu pushes the table away and stands up, holding her glass above her head for emphasis. And spills a bit of rosé on the white shirt of the Le Monde-reader, but he doesn’t seem to object; indeed he’s looking at Lulu with frank admiration. ‘Because it’s time we got you a man, Lizzy Harrison!’
‘Thanks for telling the whole bar, Lulu,’ I hiss, pulling her back into her seat before the group of curious businessmen behind us get any ideas. ‘What exactly do you want me to do about it? Start hanging out in bars on my own, talking to strangers?’
‘That,’ says Lulu, sitting up sharply, curls bobbing, ‘is not a bad place to start.’
‘Oh, honestly,’ I scoff. ‘I’m not going to go out on the pull on my own like a low-rent prozzie. What do you take me for?’
‘You’d never be low-rent, darling,’ says Lulu, patting my hand reassuringly as if I’m genuinely concerned about where I’d fit in in the hierarchy of prostitution. ‘You’d be high-class all the way, but the point stands. You do need to talk to strangers, to loosen up a little, and you’re never going to do that if you’re always in your safe little groups for yoga or Italian or any of the other things you’re filling that stupid diary with.’
‘It’s not about safety,’ I protest as Lulu fills my glass again. How many have we had now? ‘I’m just doing things I like.’
‘That’s what you think,’ says Lulu, her words of great wisdom only slightly slurred. ‘But I know that you’re stuck in a rut, and I’m here to get you out of it. You need to loosen up, Harrison, take a few chances, let go a little!’
She rises to her feet once more. ‘Elizabeth Harriet Harrison – ’ more gesturing and wine-sloshing, but our neighbour is too interested to object – ‘you are going to take my advice and learn to lose control!’
The Frenchman looks at her rapturously. Clearly she speaks of what she knows, as there isn’t a great deal of control to her movements right now.
And then she falls off her chair into his lap.
4
I wake at five a.m. with the dry-mouthed morning horrors.
In my twenties I would routinely complain about hangovers as I scoffed a bacon sandwich and conducted a party post-mortem with my housemates, a slight ache in my temples and possibly a little queasiness in my stomach – nothing that couldn’t be cured with a cup of tea, and a medicinal ginger beer if things got really bad. But my thirties are different. I woke on the morning after my thirtieth birthday party with an absolute conviction that I was the worst person in the world. Everything I had ever done was a disaster. Everything I would ever do would be appalling. I knew, without entirely remembering what I had done, that I had completely embarrassed myself at my own birthday party. Hadn’t I insisted on making a speech, even when Joe had tried to tell me I was too drunk? Hadn’t I actually cried at some point during said speech (the details of why were escaping me)? Hadn’t I then insisted on dancing on a table for two hours? Hadn’t I fallen off? What else had I done? No doubt all of my friends were ringing each other to laugh about me and to arrange to meet up later, without me, to laugh some more. The fear of it pinned me to my pillow like a two-hundred-pound weight. Luckily Joe had been next to me in bed that morning, bleary-eyed and sleepy and not at all bothered by my horrors.
‘It’s just hangover paranoia, Lizzy,’ he’d mumbled into his pillow, throwing a reassuring arm around me. ‘Everyone gets it – just go back to sleep. You were fine, you were fun. Why shouldn’t you get pissed at your own birthday party?’
He was right, of course, but when the evil fears have you in their grasp, it’s hard to be rational. And now that I live on my own, there’s no warm body to prod awake for a promise that I’m not awful. And the fear of still being alone two years after Joe left is threatening to send me into another tailspin. I try to rationalize with my hung-over self. I am not a bad person. I may have got drunk, but I am far too uptight to have got up to anything really regrettable. As Lulu always says: ‘Did you throw up on the kindly driver who was trying to wake you up at the last stop on the night bus? No, you did not. Did you get thrown out of a bar for having sex in the toilets? No, you did not. Did you flash your boobs at Gordon Ramsay while dining in one of his restaurants? No. Have I done those things when drunk? Yes, I have, and I am not an awful person either. So get a grip.’
Thank God for Lulu, I think. She always makes me feel better about myself. Except . . . hang on, yesterday night is beginning to come back to me.
We moved on to a third bottle of rosé, I remember that bit. And Lulu insisted she was going to change my life by making me lose control or something. And (ouch, my head – shouldn’t have tried sitting up) I seem to recall that I actually agreed to it. Such is the power of wine on an empty stomach. Then we staggered out of the bar, and I must have been really drunk by then because for some reason I keep thinking there were three of us at this point. I have a vague memory of slipping down some black metal steps to land at the feet of a vast (and vastly unimpressed) doorman at a karaoke bar on Poland Street. I look under the duvet at my right thigh. Oh yes: manoeuvre verified by an array of delightful bruises. I remember he refused to let us in, my gymnastic display notwithstanding. From there it’s getting blurry, so I resort to the last-ditch tactic of the truly obliterated of memory – reconstructing one’s evening via receipts. My handbag is on the floor by the side of my bed and I reach gingerly down for my purse. Contents: three twenties and a flurry of receipts.
Cashpoint at 11.30 – £100. Ah yes – the stage in the evening when one feels generous and loaded, no matter that it’s the week before payday.
One receipt from Kettner’s at midnight – a bottle of champagne? What were we celebrating?
One taxi receipt. Thank God I retained enough self-preservation to get home safely.
And one scrunched-up cocktail napkin wedged right down at the bottom of my bag. I unfold it and smooth it out on my pillow. Large, loopy handwriting – mine, I realize, with a combination of surprise and foreboding – spells out:
I, Lizzy Harrison, do hereby agree with Lulu Miller that I need to lose control in future. Because I am way too uptight lately, and Lulu knows what is best for me.
On closer inspection, that last line is in Lulu’s handwriting.
It’s followed by my scrawle
d signature, slightly blotched by . . . champagne? Tears? And is accompanied by scratchier writing in a different hand at the bottom:
Witnessed by: Laurent Martin.
Laurent Who?
The Frenchman from the bar? The Le Monde-reader whose lap Lulu fell into? How did he end up in Kettner’s with us? Try as I might, I can’t remember the very end of the evening. But hangover or no hangover, my morning routine is too firmly ingrained for me to deviate far from it, and I force myself out of bed. The early waking means I can get ahead of myself. Admittedly, my morning run is more a gentle stagger around Peckham Rye. With frequent stops. My usual egg-white omelette ends up being a bit closer to a fried egg sandwich. But I’m at my usual spot at the station on time, even if it’s taken a bottle of ginger beer to ensure I can get on the train without feeling sick.
And I’m still at my desk at eight-thirty. But this morning Camilla’s to-do list comes second to emailing Lulu with one word.
From: Lizzy Harrison
To: Lulu Miller
Laurent?
As her salon doesn’t open until eleven and she spends most of her time on her feet instead of longing for distraction at a desk, Lulu is a rubbish email correspondent, so I’m not expecting an answer from her until much later in the morning. But her BlackBerry must be on as I get a reply straightaway.
From: Lulu Miller
To: Lizzy Harrison
Honh-hi-honh. He’s still here, darling. Will call you later.
Au revoir.
At nine-thirty Camilla sweeps in, mobile clamped between ear and shoulder, on the phone to the nursery once again. ‘His violin? I’m so sorry, Mrs Paton – I realized as soon as I got to the office. I’ll get it to you straightaway. Thank you so much for letting me know.’