by Clare Boyd
‘I draw the line at sexy tops, Sophie.’
‘I think you should open your mind to it.’
I poured two more glasses of pink champagne and spilt a bit and wiped a bit, and replaced the bottle in the silver bucket and lit my cigarette. Harley scampered out of the trees and ran up to me with a pine cone in his mouth. He dropped it in front of me and wagged his tail, telling me he wanted me to throw it. It was his favourite game. After years of telling him off, he had learnt not to chew on them. The fetch game was our little compromise.
‘Go on then, Harley-Barley,’ I said, chucking it across the garden, watching him scrabble to get it, drop it and charge off, distracted by a bird or a rabbit.
The pleasures of the champagne and the nicotine ran through my blood. I had waited all day for this. Sophie had provided the excuse to indulge. It had become hard to hide from Charlie the amount of wine I wanted to consume most evenings. Usually I would wait for him to be asleep before relaxing into it. Tonight, I didn’t have to hide it. He was out in London at his leaving party, and Sophie and I were celebrating our lucrative collaboration with a well-known champagne brand.
Hooray! Cheers! Bottoms up! Boobs out! Well done, Sophie!
This celebration would not have pleased Charlie, who did not yet know about my new business partner. Since the news of his redundancy, I had decided to withhold the information.
‘How shall we style this bottle, then?’ Sophie asked.
I took a large gulp of the champagne, letting the bubbles tickle my brain. This felt good. Just like the old days, I was smoking and drinking and laughing, with no good reason to stop. I enjoyed the tinge of self-loathing that went with it, the knowledge that my lungs were filling with death, that my arteries were clogging with toxicity. Less and less did I mind that Sophie had suggested we sell our bodies for more followers, that the girls were watching YouTube in bed, that Charlie was at his redundancy party in London. It was fine. It was summer half-term. We were fine. I was fine. Everything was fucking fine!
‘Dunno,’ I replied.
‘Did you have any ideas?’
‘Nope,’ I said, taking in a long drag of my roll-up. Then adding, ‘Do you know the grape?’
‘For this one?’
I nodded, smiling wryly.
She hesitated, biting her lip, shooting her eyes to the sky to think. ‘Pinot…’
I hoped she would get it wrong.
‘Noir,’ she finished, triumphantly.
I slow-clapped her. ‘And?’
‘Chardonnay!’
‘You’ve done your homework.’
‘I told you I would.’
This worked for me. Personally, I couldn’t be bothered to think about wine or how to take a photograph of another bottle of alcohol. I had run out of ideas. I was dried up. If Sophie wanted this, she could have it. Perhaps that was me, done. I’ll drink it, she can post it, breasts and all.
She sighed and leant forward, eyeballing me.
‘The drive was fun,’ she said, lowering her tone.
I burnt my lips on what was left on my roll-up. ‘I still can’t believe you took the risk,’ I said, stubbing out the singed roach, beginning to roll another.
‘A police car trailed us, you know.’
The open cigarette was poised at my lips where I had licked the paper. ‘What?’
‘They weren’t interested in us, but it freaked me out. Not helped by Adam, who kept going on about it being a ghost car. It was awful, I almost had a panic attack in the middle of East Dean.’
My heart lurched. ‘A ghost car? What did he mean by that?’
‘He was talking about the engine running without the key in it.’
‘Oh, right. It’s always done that,’ I said, relaxing a little again. I flared the lighter up and burnt the twisted end of the cigarette, watching it brighten and curl, inhaling deeply.
Sophie rubbed her right palm.
‘Then Dylan sang “Scooby-Doo” all the way home, over and over.’
‘Sounds like a car ride from hell.’ In the old days, I would have laughed with Sophie about this.
‘I wished it had been us two in it, again. You know, to wipe the slate clean, reboot our mem—’ she stopped. ‘Oh, hi girls,’ she said, placing her glass down.
Izzy and Diana were standing in the gap of the bifold doors in their nighties, stroking Harley, who had pottered up to them without me noticing. In a panic, I threw my cigarette onto the grass, hoping it landed far enough away.
‘What are you doing, Mummy?’
My lips were numb. I puckered them up, mobilising them before I spoke. ‘What are you doing out of bed? Off you go.’
‘The iPad has run out of battery,’ Diana said, stepping forward, staring at the burning cigarette a foot away from her. Its smoke trail wound into small white loops, showing off, rebellious in the face of my failed attempt to get rid of it.
Diana did not take her eyes from the cigarette. ‘Were you smoking?’
Izzy stepped forward, also staring down at the evidence. ‘You said people die if they smoke.’
‘That’s not mine! That’s Sophie’s,’ I blurted out, wincing at Sophie.
Sophie put her finger to her lips. ‘Shush. Just a couple of puffs once a year. Don’t tell Dylan.’
Izzy gasped. ‘That’s horrible! You shouldn’t smoke. It’s really bad for you. It causes cancer.’
‘I promise never to have another one again, poppet,’ Sophie replied, very seriously.
The weight of the champagne came down on me, as though every single sip had been collected into a large bucket and dropped on top of my head.
Izzy scowled at us, picked Harley up and went back inside, but Diana had put away her outrage and her expression became inscrutable. ‘Can we watch telly?’
‘No. It’s nine thirty. Time for bed now.’
‘Please. Just one programme.’
‘No. Come on. Off to bed.’
But I didn’t move to take them to bed.
‘Just one programme, Mum, please, and we’ll go straight to bed.’
In the same way that I couldn’t fight Sophie, I could no longer fight my daughters either. In fact, I had lost all fights before I attempted to win them.
‘One more and then straight to bed, okay?’
She ran off before I could change my mind.
The early June light was almost gone. If Sophie had wanted to take a photograph of the bottle and glasses, our opportunity for sunshine had passed us by. Did I care? Not much. I didn’t care for sunshine and smiles any more. Therein lay emptiness. A grimace and a middle finger would suit me better. Unfriendly; unfriendliness to provoke some unfriending, perhaps.
‘I think it would be good if we posted both of us together drinking this,’ Sophie suggested. ‘We could get Adam to take some flattering ones for us, tomorrow maybe, in good light.’
Sophie still wanted sunshine and smiles.
‘We could use our friendship,’ she continued. ‘Like that footballer’s wife – ex-wife, now, I think – and that blonde stylist who set up that fashion blog. They look like great friends. Always smiling and laughing. It’s a really warm, feel-good feed. Look,’ she said, thrusting her phone in my face. ‘We have to sell ourselves in our posts if we want to compete with other social media influencers,’ she went on. ‘Your posts up until now have been too modest. Modesty doesn’t sell,’ she explained. ‘If we want to build a strong brand, we have to be braver.’
With indifference, I scrolled through the ex-wife of the footballer’s Instagram page, stopping at one pink and gold post in swirly cursive script: ‘Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.’ In the next post on, there was a photograph of the footballer’s ex-wife lying in a cashmere tracksuit on a white sofa next to a bunch of peonies the size of a bush. Following on from that, there was a post of the footballer’s ex-wife and her stylist friend sitting al fresco at an expensive London restaurant, head
s together, cuffed and throttled by gold chains and bleached smiles. Showing off did not come under the umbrella of kindness.
Were Sophie and I going to post about kindness, too? If we did, we wouldn’t mean it. We would post about kindness to get more followers, to make more money. The richer we were, the prettier we could be in our posts. A glass of wine sipped by a swimming pool looked better than it would by a paddling pool. A champagne flute looked better than a tin of beer. A tumbler of red wine cradled in front of a glowing firepit looked better than in the cupholder of a soggy canvas camping chair. The least sexy of the three scenarios was more representative of our lives, but it wouldn’t sell a lifestyle. Apparently, Sophie wanted lifestyle. We were going to sell the tanned cleavage and the expensive backdrop. We were going to sell sex and money. We all loved sex and money, didn’t we? Why the hell not?
I suggested another alternative. ‘How about posting this, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”?’
‘Don’t be so sour. It’s just the way of the world now, Naomi,’ she tutted, twisting a blonde straggle of hair, adding, ‘The quicker we jump on the bandwagon the better.’
I heard Harley bark. A few minutes later, Charlie appeared.
‘Hi,’ he said, hovering behind me.
‘You’re home early,’ I said, twisting round, almost falling off the bench.
Instead of feeling caught out, or embarrassed by my drunkenness, I felt bold and insubordinate. For better or worse, Charlie, eh? I thought. Can you handle me now?
‘It finished earlier than I thought. It was a depressing affair.’
‘No kidding,’ I snorted. ‘Come and join us. We were just talking about sex and money.’
I allowed the tight, bunched-up feeling in my brain to unclench. The hostile persona, that I had spent a lifetime concealing, was out and proud. This was authenticity: brashness and belligerence and self-destructiveness, from deep, deep down inside me, this felt right, bad, true. Truer than the well-behaved success story I projected outwards. Inwards, nasty grubs had been burrowing for years, rippling and swelling, and they seemed to be coming up for air, crawling out of my head, flopping out of my ears and nostrils and mouth. Unpleasant, faceless and unexplained. But part of me.
Charlie said, ‘Sex and money? I’m afraid I’ve nothing to offer on either front.’ He waved at Sophie vaguely. ‘Hi, Sophie.’
‘We were talking business, actually,’ Sophie corrected.
My brain spun. ‘She’s giving me some ideas.’
‘That’s kind of you.’
‘It’s not kindness,’ Sophie frowned. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘I was going to tell you…’ I began.
Sophie completed my sentence. ‘We’ve gone into business together.’
It was too dark to tell how his features would have changed in reaction to this news, but I heard how his voice dropped an octave. ‘When did this happen?’
‘A few weeks ago,’ Sophie said, standing up. ‘Anyway, it’s late. And it seems you two have some stuff to catch up on. I’ll leave you to it.’
She would leave us to it. Leave us to another argument. There had been too many to count over the last few weeks. They kicked off at the smallest problem and often escalated into full-blown rows. Mostly about money. After one particularly unpleasant one about Harley’s dog insurance – Charlie had wanted inferior cover for a cheaper monthly outgoing – I had apologised to Diana and Izzy for ‘shouting at Daddy’, as though it was a joke, as though this was just what mummies did, trying to diminish the implications of our fighting, explaining away the constant flow of bad feeling that shot out at each other on a regular basis.
* * *
Charlie and I were toing and froing from the garden to the dishwasher, clearing away the mess.
‘Why were the girls still up when I got back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I slurred.
‘And they were on their iPads.’
‘Sorry. I know. It’s really bad.’
‘You’re drunk,’ he said, which depressed me with its lack of originality. He didn’t know what else to do with my lack of fight.
‘I am. Very drunk.’
I dropped a mug, which seemed to prove the point, but it didn’t break.
We both stared down at the blue mug that had missed the dishwasher. I didn’t want to pick it up.
‘When were you going to tell me about Sophie?’
I pushed at the mug with my toe. ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
His salt-and-pepper hair and his tortoiseshell glasses were symbols of a distinguished man, older than his years, wiser perhaps. Possibly more distinguished than he felt. He wanted to be. He showed quiet strength. But if I looked beyond what he gave to me, right into those muddy green eyes, behind the good sense and even temper, I wondered if I had failed to see his deeper vulnerabilities. He had not offered them up to me before, insisting that his parents, whom we visited in Cornwall every year, were as functioning and happy as they seemed. I had never questioned this. There were the usual stresses at work and the frustrations of family life and endless worries about money, but he had never hinted at any deeper dissatisfactions, never mentioned anxiety or depression before. But maybe I had never looked properly. Why had I never looked properly?
‘Well, I’m worried now, anyway,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ Again, I said sorry, but I wasn’t sure that I felt any emotions of any sort strongly enough to be really sorry. I wanted to roll another cigarette.
‘I never see that dimple these days,’ he sighed.
I shrugged, ‘Anything else?’
He frowned. ‘What has got into you lately?’
I picked up the blue mug. ‘Nothing’s got into me.’
‘I’m imagining it, am I?’
‘You have been under a lot of strain at work,’ I replied facetiously.
I closed the dishwasher, pressed the program and the start button and went into the laundry room, where there were piles of dirty clothes to sort. In the absence of a cigarette, which I could not smoke in front of Charlie, I had to find something to do with my hands. Harley scampered out of the small, stuffy room, and Charlie followed me in.
‘I’m sorry, Naomi, but you can’t put this on me.’
Three piles. One for the bright colours. One for the whites. One for the dark. A red t-shirt, a pink skirt, a turquoise blouse in one pile. A white towel, a white pillowcase, a white pair of pants in the other. Order.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ I said.
‘You can tell me what the fuck is going on.’
I flinched, throwing a single black sock onto the white pile. He never swore. ‘Don’t swear at me,’ I said, moving the black sock into the darks.
‘One minute you don’t trust Sophie with the girls, and the next you’re going into business with her. Forgive me if I’m finding this hard to get my head around.’
‘She has some good ideas.’
‘And that’s enough, is it? What about the way she behaved at your wine-tasting evening? Have you forgotten what she was like?’
‘She’s stopped drinking.’
‘For how long? A few weeks?’
I had not yet concocted the lies to justify the partnership with Sophie. I had to think on my feet.
‘She’s my best friend.’
‘She wasn’t when she took the girls to Brighton.’
‘I was being paranoid. You were right.’
‘I can’t keep up. You need to back out of whatever it is you’ve decided on.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ I said, getting the sleeves of an inside-out white shirt tangled as I tried to turn it back the right way.
‘Please don’t tell me it’s already official.’
‘Yes. It is.’ The shirt missed the pile of whites when I balled it up and threw it too hard.
‘What kind of deal did you give her?’
‘Fifty-fifty, basically. It was just a case of registe
ring a new partner for self-assessment and informing HMRC. Mike handled it.’
‘Mike? Mike Klein?’
‘Yes. Our accountant. Mike.’
‘Wow. That is… I don’t know what that is… that is total and utter madness.’
‘Stop worrying. She’s ambitious for us.’
‘She’s ambitious for her.’
‘I wanted to do it for her.’
He screwed his eyes closed and opened them again, like he wanted to see something – or someone – new. ‘It’s charity now?’
‘She deserves it. She’s been an incredible friend.’
‘Incredible enough to sign half your business away to? When she has nothing to offer?’
‘Yes. Actually.’
‘What is it that I’m missing? I’ve been hearing for years about what a brilliant friend she is to you, and I like her, too, clearly, but why do you give her so much leeway? From what I’ve seen, she’s not the greatest friend, if I’m frank. Apart from when she took the girls to Brighton – which you had some strange aversion to, perversely – she hasn’t done anything for you or the kids in all the years I’ve known you. Ever, to my knowledge… In fact, you spend your life rallying around—’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I interrupted. He was talking too much in his slow, deep, good sense voice, with his asides and bracketed add-ons, and I felt the pressure building inside me as he went on and on. I needed him to stop.
‘Try me,’ he said.
‘I can’t explain it.’
Chaos. A pair of green pants. A pair of black boxers. A white vest. Order.
He let out an exasperated groan. ‘We can’t afford to give away half of what we have for no gain, not now, Naomi. You’ll have to find a way of getting out of it. I’ll talk to Mike.’
I spun around. ‘No! Don’t you dare!’
His eyebrows rose, but he spoke quietly, ‘Why not?’
I turned back to my three piles. ‘It’s my business. I can do what I like with it.’
A black pair of leggings. A yellow sweatshirt. Two white hand towels.
‘Even if me and the kids suffer?’
