‘Listen, you must join me for a drink. I have some amazing news about the gang which I think you will love.’
Meredith couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less than discuss ‘old times’ with Richard, someone who she had only been dimly aware of even when she ‘knew’ him.
The woman made her way through the racks of ceramics towards them. She was shouting abuse in Catalan, most of it centred around Meredith being the ‘daughter of a whore’, something which Meredith had no knowledge of either way to confirm or deny.
‘What’s that woman saying? She seems angry.’
Meredith put the pencil in her rear shorts pocket and with her other hand grabbed hold of Richard’s elbow and propelled him towards the stairs.
‘You know what the Spanish are like. It’s the heat, it makes them all crazy. Come on, let’s get that drink.’
2
Sick with boredom, Meredith compiled lists in her mind of how she could either kill Richard or herself in order to stop the one-sided conversation that she was being forced to endure.
It had seemed to make sense to drink a vermouth and then move to red wine. Meredith believed in Hemingway’s view that drinking made other people more interesting but this truism had met its match with Richard.
The more he drank, the fewer insights he made. His previous small talk seemed profound by comparison with his now alcohol-suffused conversation. Even in the late summer afternoon, La Alcoba Azul was cool and dark, lit by candles and it was one of the reasons that Meredith liked it. You could sit at the bar, or at a table in the corner, and the world wouldn’t know you existed. The barman, Jordi, was the taciturn type, a man who realised that what his customers most appreciated was the space to breathe away from the craziness of the city. In hindsight, it had been a mistake to bring Richard here as he was the opposite of everything the bar was.
His voice, now lazy due to heat and alcohol, was loud and booming. Meredith had forgotten how annoying the British public-school accent could be. It seemed alien here where she was used to low, conspiratorial whispers about politics, life and sex.
Richard had been through his repertoire of false memories, one by one, in great detail. The beach parties, which Meredith could barely remember, had in his mind been cleansed somehow of the humiliation he must have felt at being fat and on the outside. The group, who Meredith remembered as being the usual self-obsessed Eurotrash, had assumed life-changing status in Richard’s mind.
He had talked long and loudly about drugs, immediately placing him in the category of total bore, compounded by his even louder assertion, and one which made Jordi pause for a second from cleaning a glass and catch Meredith’s eye briefly, that he was now a vegan and this explained the change in his appearance. Meredith declined to add that the last time she had seen him he had been vomiting a Full Moon cocktail onto the sand behind a rock whilst simultaneously sobbing loudly about the fact that the boy he had been obsessing about had just made out with one of the girls in the group. What had been her name? A face popped into her mind, tanned, young, entitled. She would need more than that to narrow it down.
Richard was talking about someone called Daniel (she had no memory of a Daniel) who was now a big thing in the city, which was a good thing, but had a huge coke habit, which was a bad thing. Although the way Richard’s voice picked up when talking about the coke habit suggested that he was quite happy about this dark cloud attached to Daniel’s silver lining.
She let him drone on. There was just a little wine left in his glass and once it was finished, she would pour him into a cab and rejoin her life in the city. Alfonso would no doubt be on the warpath because of her vanishing act. She could rely on Jordi never to mention the fact that Richard had been calling her Nancy since they had walked into the bar.
‘You know everyone is coming here. Even Amy will be here. Well, obviously that’s the reason everyone will be here.’
Amy, the girl who had got together with Richard’s love interest back on Ko Pha-ngan. Meredith remembered her now. She hadn’t been the centre of attention back then but she had been best friends with the girl who was: Olivia. Meredith recalled them being joined at the hip.
Meredith’s involvement with them had been the usual backpacker relationship borne out of sharing the same hostel, going to the same bars and taking the same drugs. Nothing more and something that Meredith had replicated all over the world – two-week friendships that meant and signified nothing to her. But to Richard it had obviously meant something more.
‘Oh my God, they are going to be so stoked to find out you are here. They won’t believe it, I can see their faces! Here’s Richard with one of his stories again… But then no, you walk in and everyone will freak out! Here’s Nancy! You haven’t changed a bit. It will be so amazing.’
Meredith felt nauseous. She looked at the bottles of spirits at the back of the bar, rows of enchanting greens, yellows, and reds glistening in crystal brilliance. She could start ordering Orujo and get Richard very drunk. They could walk back to his hotel via Port Vell. Every year drunken guiris fell into the dock and drowned. It was an idle thought only and she would get him into a cab instead and promise to keep in touch, knowing full well that she would never speak to him again.
‘So, Amy is coming here, and Olivia also?’ asked Meredith, more as a verbal placeholder whilst she figured out what to do with this boy.
‘Oh yeah, sponsored of course, by her brands. We are all in Soho House. It’s going to be so much fun. I can’t wait for you to see them all again. Oh my God, think of the posts!’
This particular group dynamic hasn’t changed much in ten years, thought Meredith. Richard, despite the weight loss, was still just a spear carrier for Olivia and Amy.
Meredith wondered about her own life. Had she changed since she knew this group? Ten years had added some physical changes, despite what Richard said, but what about her character? She tried very hard to change, to grow and understand more about herself and the world and she thought she had, but meeting someone like Richard made her question her assumptions. Richard, no doubt, thought he had changed, and physically he had, but Meredith suspected in every other way he was just an amplified version of those character traits he had demonstrated ten years ago.
‘Her brands?’
Richard looked up perkily from his drink. His eyes were now as red as his face. ‘Oh my God, yeah. You know Amy is massive now?’
Meredith shook her head. She didn’t know anything about Amy or the rest of them and had never wanted to know anything. ‘For all I know you guys are still on that beach partying hard.’
Richard put his hands to his cheeks. ‘Oh my God, you haven’t heard, where have you been?’
Richard was clearly the type who liked to be the first to give news. Meredith stored this nugget of information. One way in which she had changed from the girl ten years ago was that she read people better. It helped her understand and improve herself.
Meredith gave Richard half a smile and cocked her head to one side. This made people want to please her and believe that she liked them.
Richard nodded. ‘You always were the quiet one.’
She kept the smile in place despite wanting to scream, You don’t know me! You never knew me! You never will know me!
‘Old Nancy, I can’t tell if you are teasing me or not but assuming you’ve not been on social media for the last ten years, which we both know isn’t true…’
It sort of was.
‘…then you’ve only missed out on the rise of our Amy as one of Europe’s most well-known fashion vloggers and influencers. Amy is everywhere. She’s a one-person industry.’ Richard slurred the last syllable and Meredith nodded at Jordi, who filled up his glass.
Richard continued, ‘She has the magic million on Instagram.’
Meredith could tell that she was supposed to be impressed so she let out a low whistle.
‘And this has made her rich? She was doing well enough back in the good old days as I reca
ll.’
Richard nodded and took a large slurp of his red wine. ‘This is good stuff.’
It wasn’t. On the off-chance she would be stuck with the bill – and given she currently didn’t have enough to contribute to the monthly rent she owed on her shared apartment, because even anarchism needs rules to make sure someone bought garbanzos – she had taken the precaution of telling Jordi in Catalan that her friend was already drunk so the ‘house’ would do. He kept it in a white plastic container in the back and decanted it into a bottle before serving.
‘Oh yeah, she is like’ – he splayed his hands on the bar – ‘huge. Daddy helped, of course, pictures in paradise or with supercars don’t come cheap, especially if your “selfies” are taken by a professional photographer! But fair’s fair. She is the face of her face and she spreads the love around.’ He raised his glass. ‘And that’s why I’m here and meeting you right now. To Amy!’
Meredith raised her glass. She recalled a drunken, drugged evening on a Ko Pha-ngan beach and Amy making a clumsy attempt to kiss her. Nancy/Meredith had observed almost as though it wasn’t her being kissed. She had politely told Amy that she wasn’t attracted to women, which wasn’t always true, and there hadn’t been any awkwardness. But maybe there was something to be said for rejoining the orbit of someone successful and wealthy.
Perhaps she shouldn’t pour Richard into a cab. Maybe it was worth drinking some more and talking about the old times until their mythology became the basis for something else entirely. Meredith smiled at Richard and asked him to tell her all about Amy and her business.
3
Meredith flopped down onto the bed and lay there crushed by the heavy heat and still air. Her fan wasn’t in her room which meant that one of her flatmates had probably borrowed it to help their stoned afternoon slumbers. She couldn’t be bothered going to find it as this might mean having to engage one of them in some sort of mind-numbing small talk.
It didn’t make you sweat lying still but she was sure her blood was thickening and slowing, pooling in her muscles and making it impossible to move or to sleep. She dug into her pocket and pulled out her mobile phone. Meredith had always avoided social media. She briefly had a Twitter account in a false name which she used for searching her other name to see if it received any mentions concerning her father’s demise, but after a few years of checking in, she had stopped using it.
She quickly downloaded the Instagram app and set up an account using an anonymous email account. She used a free random image from Shutterstock and named the account ‘XYZ45X’.
She had no intention of posting anything but she wanted to use it to lurk and see exactly what Amy had been doing that had made her so successful.
Amy’s profile was easy to find and, at first, Meredith couldn’t see what was so special about it. Why had it attracted so many followers, 1.3 million at the current count? It seemed indistinguishable from all the other profiles of attractive young women in their twenties posting pictures of themselves posing in front of the pyramids, capturing the setting sun between their forefinger and thumb, looking impossibly glamorous on Mount Kilimanjaro and splayed around various hotel pools. But the more Meredith scrolled through the images the more she began to see a narrative.
There were images of Dylan (Amy’s boyfriend, she learned from the posts) and Amy holding hands or having a romantic dinner.
This would be immediately followed by an image of Richard falling into a pool or off a banana boat. He was the fool of the group, the court jester.
Then there was Olivia. The photographs of her were always stagier and more serious. She would be looking out across the bay of Naples for example, wistfully contemplating Vesuvius and, just in case you were in any doubt about this, the caption would tell you ‘Olivia wistfully contemplates love and Vesuvius’. Olivia was the elder, wiser stateswoman of the group, its head not its heart, and the message that Meredith took – but she was sure it was not the intended message – was that she was the tragic counterpoint to the joy and success of Amy.
She wondered what this supporting role had done to Olivia. She had always been the leader of the group and this relegation to Amy’s foil could not have been easy.
She read more, the hours passing by in an enviable kaleidoscope of a dream life, tropical islands, perfect skin, and fantasy-inducing filters, and for those hours Meredith felt she was there with them, not lying on an old mattress in a shared apartment with no air conditioning that stank of the weed being smoked by her younger flatmates.
It was intoxicating and although she could distinguish the dream world presented online from the life that the group actually had, there was also the fact that they did travel to these places, they did stay in the best hotels and eat in the restaurants that Meredith could only dream of eating in, and they were living a lifestyle that placed hers in the shade, not that this was too difficult to achieve. And, all this with no discernible talent – other than posting thousands of images that told you less about their real personalities than a five-minute conversation. Yet Meredith could see why people could become so invested in them. It was the same thing that she felt: this could be her, it should be her… and now she could see a way in which it might be her.
Richard had taken her phone number and promised he would be in touch when Amy arrived in town so that they could all meet up and have ‘a wonderful reunion’. She had received a text that morning inviting her to a party at their hotel later that evening and she had decided she would go. It was clear that their life in ‘The Squad’, as they called themselves on Instagram, was better in every way than hers. They had improved their lives and Meredith admitted to herself that she was envious. This would change.
Amy had liked her once and Meredith had ignored her. This time she wouldn’t ignore her. She would become Amy’s friend.
Meredith examined herself in the cracked mirror that Inga kept propped up in the corner of her room. She was aware that she was considered attractive and not a day went by without someone, usually a man but not always, going out of their way to strike up a conversation or ask for her cell phone number.
But she did not consider herself pretty. She was conscious of the asymmetry of her nose, caused a long time ago by the flailing hand of her father, which gave her face a look of, to quote one of the kids who had bullied her at school, ‘a Picasso painting’.
She was not vain by nature or choice but today was different. Her appearance would require thought. Meredith’s normal attire for Barcelona summers was flip-flops, shorts and T-shirt, working on the basis that all of this would be covered in sweat and city grime within an hour of the sun rising. But not tonight. Tonight, she needed to strike a balance, a way of signalling she was wealthy but by wearing clothes that would look, to an observer that she was poor. She had seen this look worn by the people who queued outside the flagship stores of Gucci, Chanel, Fendi, and Valentino, along Passeig de Gràcia, and understood its meaning.
For Meredith, the problem was her lack of such clothes. Which was why she turned to Inga, one of her roommates in the run-down apartment she shared with three others. Inga, five years younger than Meredith, was obsessed with her phone, fashion and money, and was the only person who Meredith knew with access to such clothes. This was, perversely, due to her lack of the third in her triumvirate of obsessions, money. This lack had driven Inga to become adept at shoplifting clothes from the highest of high-end stores in Barcelona and before that, Stockholm, from where she had recently relocated due to ‘work issues’ – namely, the Swedish police issuing a warrant for her arrest.
‘What do you think of this?’ Inga held up what looked like a pile of rags.
Meredith shrugged. She was reliant on Inga’s expertise in this field. Meredith understood the value of delegating detail to those who lived and breathed such ephemera. It was always the detail where the greatest decisions on trust would be made. This was one of the things that Meredith understood was different in the way she saw other people. She observed suc
h details but immediately distrusted them, seeing them as camouflage disguising an individual’s true nature. She tried not to look bored and instead let out a ‘wow!’ as she could see that it was what Inga was waiting for.
‘Ja, I know, right? I got it last week from Stella McCartney. Remember I told you about the security guard and how I flirted with him whilst holding the dress right under his big dumb Spanish eyes?’
Meredith recalled a previous evening when she had forced herself to eat in the lounge, observing the unwritten rules of shared living. She had listened to the various, self-serving stories revolving around travelling and drugs, when people could be bothered glancing up from their phones and talking, and now she did recall Inga mentioning something about stealing a dress, but given all Inga’s stories were about stealing a dress she could not say whether it was specific to this dress.
‘Oh my gosh yes, that was so cool. Honestly, I don’t know how you do it. You’re so clever!’
She knew exactly how Inga did it. It was based on low wages and low expectations. Low wages for the guard who couldn’t be bothered looking beyond the pretty girl talking to him and breaking the monotony of his day, and low expectations on behalf of Inga, who at twenty-seven should be looking beyond shoplifting as a career. Meredith was aware of the inherent hypocrisy in her view, but in fairness, there were extenuating circumstances in her lifestyle choices, and in any event, consistency of thought and action had always been amongst the most tedious of qualities in her view. Much better to do and think what you want, regardless of external and internal critics.
Meredith raised her slender arms and let Inga drop the rags over her head whereupon something remarkable happened as they floated down and around her body. They transformed into a beautiful dress that clung gently to her hips and waist, accentuating her figure, while seeming to almost hover lightly from the rest of her body. It made Meredith think of Cinderella’s dress and struck the perfect balance between wealth and poverty porn. It was perfect.
How to Kill Your Friends Page 2