2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  Nadine wishes that life was like a word processor, complete with Undo and Delete buttons. She wishes that the entire phone call could be erased from both their memories.

  As it is, the whole scenario is now festering away in her sub-and-not-so-subconscious like a sweaty sardine. Dig, she hopes, has by now put the episode down to some momentary hormonal aberration and forgotten all about it in his excitement about seeing Delilah—men don’t tend to dwell too much on things of this nature. But the more she thinks about it, the more her general sense of gloom and despair deepens and the more she hates herself.

  She is also hurt by what she, neurotically maybe, sees as the implicit assertion in Dig’s comments that he doesn’t like the way she dresses. ‘Delilah’s got class,’ he’d said. ‘She dresses beautifully.’ What is that supposed to mean? Is that what Dig really wants? A classy woman? Someone who buys tailored suits from Escada? Who wears navy pumps and gold jewellery? Who has expensive highlights and pearl earrings? Nadine has always seen him with someone more interesting than that, someone with a bit more character, a bit more style. Someone a bit more like herself, quite frankly.

  Nadine realizes that her own sense of style is maybe a bit…challenging, for some people’s tastes. She’s used to comments from cabbies and bus drivers and even from boyfriends, some of whom have been embarrassed by her appearance.

  As far as men are concerned, women’s clothes are a form of language, and they fall into two categories: clothes that they can understand and clothes they can’t. These categories have nothing to do with fashionability. Women’s clothes are meant either tantalizingly to camouflage their sexuality or brashly celebrate it. Anything else may as well be a foreign language.

  Nadine knows that most men find her wardrobe as easy to understand as an ancient Flemish dialect. For a start, they don’t understand why anyone who earns as much as she does would want to wear second-hand clothes or sew things herself.

  Women, on the other hand, tend to appreciate the innate sense of style with which she puts the disparate elements of her wardrobe together so that they form one definitive and pleasing look. They appreciate the charm and craftsmanship of some of her unusual pieces of vintage clothing and they love the old–fashioned femininity of the fact that Nadine gets dressed up every day of her life, providing the glamour that’s missing from their own lives. They like the fact that she does things with her hair when they can’t find the time or the inclination to bother with their own. ‘You’re so brave,’ they say. ‘I’d love to have the nerve to wear things like that.’

  Nadine has always assumed that Dig approves of her dress sense, maybe even admires it. She’s always assumed that he isn’t like other men—that he understands the language of her dress. But now it seems that he finds it as alien as every other man.

  And then there’s her flat. It’s the flat of a mad woman. Look at it. Miffy the Rabbit wallpaper and princess telephone. Flashing-neon Elvis mirror and flamenco-dancing lampstand. Leopardskin and zebra-print fake-fur cushions. Cocktail cabinet. Clarice Cliffe tea-set. Cactus fairy lights. Stuffed toys. Tack, memorabilia and other people’s junk. It’s mayhem in here, but somehow it works. They did a feature on her flat once in the Observer magazine. It’s a great flat—everyone who sees it loves it—but if she lives alone for much longer it will go too far and she will probably start collecting newspapers and dead pigeons and carrier bags full of old men’s shoes. They will have to break down her door when someone finally notices that she hasn’t been seen for a few months, and they’ll find her buried beneath an avalanche of back issues of OK magazine and weird second-hand clothes and empty fag packets. ‘Poor old thing,’ they’ll say, ‘she had a lonely life. But at least she had her junk to keep her company.’

  Oh God. Nadine is about to have a crisis.

  She puts on her negligé tonight with a sense of self-loathing. She is a hateful, gruesome, badly dressed, batty old bitch and she wants to look the part. She is tempted to rub some black eyeliner under her eyes and smudge her lipstick, drink a whole bottle of gin and start shouting at herself. She wants to be Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? all rolled into one.

  She wishes she had some curly-haired little lap-dog with a ribbon in its hair, and a Southern drawl to complete the picture. She wants to sit here all night, wallowing in her own misery and hatefulness and imagining Delilah in her ‘classy’ clothes and her expensive earrings and her huge solitaire diamond engagement ring, looking elegant and refined in some posh restaurant with lovely Dig, her Dig, wearing all his best clothes and being on his best behaviour, and making him fall in love with her all over again.

  He can’t. He can’t fall in love with someone else. He just can’t.

  Where would that leave her?

  Hot tears begin cascading down Nadine’s cheeks. She’s spiralling into a frenzied hysteria. A few days ago she was sane and normal. A few days ago she had a handsome boyfriend and a great life. A few days ago she was a free-living, happy girl with a brilliant job and a wonderful flat and a best mate who meant the world to her. Now she is a miserable, bitter and twisted old spinster with poison in her bloodstream and bad taste in clothes. She has fallen out with her best friend and fallen out with herself and she is once again the awkward, shy and frizzy-haired girl of her dim and distant youth.

  And all because of Delilah-fucking-bloody-Lillie.

  Nadine tips a cigarette from the pack on the coffee-table with the baby-blue-painted toenails of one foot and transfers it to her mouth. The cigarette falls to one side of her lips and hangs there, sluttishly.

  She lets it.

  TEN

  Half an hour after their arrival at the painful ex Dig and Delilah have relocated to an Indian restaurant a few doors down the road. The mausoleum atmosphere they could just about handle, the lack of choice they could have lived with, the empty table was not too much of a problem and the strange waitress was almost endearing.

  But when she’d approached them bearing two steaming bowls of slightly grey soup, all afloat with what looked like bits of brain tissue, and told them that it was menudo, a very famous Spanish soup made with tripe, and then hastened to assure them after registering their apprehension that it was made using only the best tripe, the honeycomb tripe from the animal’s second stomach chamber, and that chef was the most renowned offal chef currently working in London—didn’t they know? Isn’t that why they’d come?—they’d decided to cut their losses and run.

  She’d tried to persuade them to stay and then the chef had emerged from the kitchen looking horribly anxious and tried to tempt them with descriptions of the high-quality baby-calf sweetbreads he employed in his famous Veal Soufflé, the glutinous succulence of his Twice-Cooked Smoked Pig-Foot Stew, and the wonderfully coarse texture of his signature Corned Tongue Hash. He knew, he pleaded with them, that most people were scared of offal, but that if they were only to try these things once in their lives, then it should be here, tonight, now. Please…

  Dig liked to think of himself as an adventurous eater, but he was happy to be a coward on this occasion. So the two of them had collected their coats, apologized profusely to the waitress and the chef and spilled gratefully on to the pavement outside the restaurant, grimacing and laughing at each other as they contemplated their lucky escape.

  In the Indian they chatted away over a pile of poppadams and a particularly good selection of chutneys. Dig was thoroughly enjoying himself. It was so long since he’d done this—taken a woman out to dinner, conversed with someone he didn’t see every week of his life. He was so used to the young girls he met and slept with and went to parties and bars with, talking crap and messing about and playing the big man. This was different. This was serious. This was special.

  ‘God…you know, Alex would have loved that place,’ Delilah was saying, in her strange new voice, all Benson & Hedges and Bombay Sapphire, polo matches and shopping trips to New Yor
k. ‘He loves offal—all those horrid bits—kidneys and livers and brains and things. Thank God he can get all that sort of stuff cooked for him at his restaurants, otherwise I’d be expected to do it.’

  It was strange for Dig to hear Delilah talking like this, using words like ‘horrid’. Delilah had customized her Kentish Town accent with new bits and pieces of pronunciation and intonation, accent and inflection picked up from her time mixing in another society, far removed from her own. Her voice had retained its gravelly hoarseness and some of its lost ends of words but had also acquired a polished sparkle and a soft northern lilt. She sounded unbelievably sexy.

  ‘Thanks for tonight,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate it.’

  ‘Oh—God—it’s nothing. Sorry it’s all been such a disaster.’

  ‘Not at all—it’s been great. And so good to see you. It’s hard to know what to expect when you haven’t seen people for so long—whether you’ll still have anything in common or not. I’ve thought about you so often over the years, wondered what you were up to, where you were.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ began Dig in trepidation. ‘I thought about you, too. Wondered about you.’

  ‘Really!’ smiled Delilah. ‘And what exactly did you wonder?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, seriously, ‘I suppose, really, I worried, more than wondered. I was worried about you.’

  The smile fell from Delilah’s face. She fiddled awkwardly with her napkin and deftly changed the subject. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I could probably have guessed that this is what your life would be like now. Music biz. Still living in the area, not too far from your mum, eh?’ She smiled wickedly. ‘And I think I could have guessed that you wouldn’t have settled down yet. You always used to say that you didn’t want kids till you were forty, till you owned your own record label—d’you remember?’

  Dig smiled wryly. ‘Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? I was going to be a millionaire and we were going to go off and live on a tropical island somewhere. I was going to be the next Richard Branson.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she laughed, ‘you were, weren’t you? I was going to sit on the beach all day drinking cocktails and waiting for you to return from your yachting trip. How hysterical!’ Her laughter turned into a nostalgic smile and she looked into Dig’s eyes, suddenly serious. ‘God, we were great together, weren’t we? Invincible. Dig and Delilah! We thought we could do anything. We thought we’d change the world one day. It’s funny, when I first started at the Holy T, there were all these good-looking boys hanging around me all the time, Rob Dennis, Mark Barr, Tony whatsisname, all the fifth-formers, but I used to see you and Nadine wandering about together, always studying and looking so serious and so full of secrets. You had all that weird hair and knew so much about music, and Nadine had her big ginger quiff and holey jumpers and the two of you looked so cool. I was so jealous of you two. I wanted to be like you. I worshipped the ground you walked on…’

  Dig choked on a fragment of poppadam. How had his life changed so dramatically? How come when he was a spotty fourteen-year-old geek he’d had women like Delilah ‘worshipping the ground he walked on’, and now he was reduced to chasing around after teenage girls like some pathetic middle-aged man?

  ‘I remember our first date. I was so nervous, but you were so nice to me. You listened to me. I wasn’t used to that in those days. You gave me so much confidence in myself…you shaped my life in a funny kind of way. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for you. Isn’t that weird?’

  Dig nodded. It was weird. It was very weird. He’d never really thought about it before, but it was true. Parents expended so much energy worrying about the effect that their own actions and decisions would have on the development of their offspring when it seemed that your character was determined, on the whole, by your peers. It was friends who formed you: your first mate, your first girlfriend, your first party, your first day at school, your experiences away from home. Personalities, on the whole, were formed in the playground.

  Delilah, Dig suddenly realized, was an enormous part of him.

  Getting the most beautiful girl in the school, the girl everyone wanted, and feeling the jealousy and respect of every boy around him had filled him with an unshakeable confidence in his ability to attract women, despite not being conventionally attractive. If it hadn’t been for Delilah, he would have probably left school with his virginity intact and ended up marrying the first girl who’d let him sleep with her just in case no one else ever let him again. He still had that confidence all these years later, and he owed it to Delilah.

  ‘So,’ he said, nervously, ‘tell me about Alex.’

  Delilah looked slightly surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. What’s he like? How did you meet him? What went wrong? That kind of thing. Unless…you don’t want to…’

  Delilah shook her head affirmatively. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s OK. It’s fine.’ She took a deep breath, and a warm smile spread across her face. ‘I met him on Primrose Hill. He was a business studies student. I was…I fell over. He picked me up and took me to Casualty.’

  ‘Were you hurt?’

  ‘No—well, not really—just a cut, some stitches. It was nothing.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Not long after you and I split up. I was eighteen. He was twenty-two. And so tall and so handsome. Here—look.’ She grinned and began poking around in her handbag. She pulled out her purse and took a photo from it. ‘This is Alex.’

  Dig took the photo from her fingers and studied it. A black-haired man wearing a DJ and bow-tie. He looked like Pierce Brosnan. God. Dig gulped and handed it back.

  Delilah slid it back into her purse and continued. ‘Even though we were so different and came from such completely different backgrounds, we connected immediately. He was so strong and so together. Exactly what I needed.’

  Dig felt the expression of interest freeze on to his features.

  ‘Things were really tough for me around that time, and he became my best friend. There was no romance. But then he graduated and his father offered to set him up in business back in Cheshire, gave him the premises for his first restaurant.’

  ‘So you went to live with him?’

  ‘Not immediately. I had things to sort out down here. But we kept in touch and when his restaurant opened he offered me a job and a room above.’

  ‘And what was that like?’

  Delilah shrugged. ‘Weird,’ she said, ‘I’d never been out of London before that, and I’d never really worked. I was incredibly lonely and it was really hard work. I nearly came home, but there was nothing to come back to and I couldn’t let Alex down. So I stuck it out. And besides, I think I’d already fallen in love with him by then.’

  ‘So, what er…what was the arrangement then, with you and Alex?’

  ‘What? You mean sleeping-wise?’

  Dig nodded. A rude question, he knew, but he just couldn’t help it.

  ‘Well, there wasn’t one. We were just friends and colleagues. He was my boss. Until my twentieth birthday, that is.’ She smiled warmly at what was obviously a treasured memory. ‘It was so unexpected. I’d started to worry that I was just a pet project to Alex, a little urchin he’d picked up off the streets of London who’d scrubbed up nicely and kept him company. You know, some sort of Pygmalion scenario. There was never any indication that he had any sort of amorous feelings towards me. But on that night, my birthday, Alex had arranged a big dinner for me at the restaurant, all my favourite foods, candles, music, presents. He made a real fuss. And then he started saying things like how much he loved having me around, how I’d improved the quality of his life, how just knowing that I was there in my little room above the restaurant made him sleep easier. He said I was his “missing half”, that he couldn’t imagine his life without me.

  ‘And then he got down on one knee and pulled out a little box with this’—she pointed at the rock on her finger—‘in it. And he asked me to marry him!’


  ‘And you said yes?’

  ‘On the spot. There and then. The minute he said it—“Will you marry me?”—I just knew that it was the right thing to do. It was perfect.’

  ‘So. When did you, er…you know? You and Alex. When did you first…?’

  ‘Sleep together? Oh, our wedding night. Not until our wedding night, believe it or not!’

  Dig tried to look unfazed. ‘And…how was that?’

  ‘What—you mean—?’

  ‘No…no. I mean. Not in detail. Just generally. Waiting until your wedding night. Was it a mistake? Was it OK?’

  Delilah smiled tightly and screwed up her napkin between her hands. ‘Well, you know,’ she said, ‘the first time’s never anything to write letters home about really, is it? And I, well, let’s put it this way, sex isn’t really a priority for me these days.’ She laughed. Dig felt slightly shocked. ‘You look shocked,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t be. I’m just not a very sexual person any more. I am working on it, mind you, but right now—well…it’s just something that has to be done.’

  ‘Do you…well, do you still sleep together?’ Dig was embarrassed asking Delilah about her personal life, but the picture she was painting of herself as an asexual loner just didn’t fit in with his memories of her.

  Delilah laughed, ironically. ‘High days and holidays,’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Special occasions. We sleep together on special occasions. Anniversaries, birthdays, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And that’s enough for you?!’

  Delilah raised her eyebrows. ‘More than enough!’