2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘That girl,’ continued Nadine, ‘that girl made me miserable at school, miserable. And I know I’m a grown woman and I should have got over it by now, but I haven’t. From the second I set eyes on her on Saturday it all came flooding back. I hate her. I really, really hate her—aaargh!’ She let out a frustrated cry and flopped about petulantly on the sofa for a while.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell, Deen,’ said Pia, eyeing Nadine with concern, ‘d’you fancy him, or something?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Dig—have you got a thing about him?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Then why are you getting so worked up about him and this Delilah bird?’

  ‘I’m not getting worked up…’

  Pia shot her a hard, ‘don’t-give-me-that-bullshit’ stare.

  ‘I’m not getting worked up,’ she said again, less aggressively, ‘I just…it’s just. Oh God—I dunno. I just don’t want Dig to go out with Delilah, because I know what she’s like, and Dig’s my best mate and I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. Because I love him. That’s all.’

  ‘But how come you’ve never been bothered in the past? About Dig’s girlfriends?’

  ‘Because…’ Nadine paused and sat up straight. ‘Because…they weren’t real. Because they were pretend girlfriends.’

  ‘Because they didn’t threaten your friendship with Dig?’

  ‘Exactly! That’s exactly it!’

  ‘You have really got to sort yourself out,’ said Pia. ‘You’re a bloody disaster.’

  ‘I know,’ sniffed Nadine, ‘I know. Oh God—d’you know what I did last night?’ She groaned and told Pia about the humiliating stalking episode outside Dig’s flat.

  ‘Fucking hell, we have really got to sort this out. You are losing it—totally. There’s only one thing for it, you’ve got to win the bet. Take your mind off this Delilah tart. What was your part of the deal?’

  ‘Oh, I had to go out with someone I genuinely liked instead of someone I wanted to like.’

  ‘OK. So, who do you like?’

  ‘No one. That’s the whole problem. I don’t like anyone.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You must like someone. Everyone likes someone. What about that stylist from Him. The blond guy? He’s cute.’

  ‘David? No way. Too trendy, too vain, too pretty.’

  ‘OK—what about that guy you shot for Cosmo’s 50 Most Eligible last year, that merchant banker with the unpronounceable name. He really fancied you.’

  Nadine shook her head firmly. ‘Absolutely no way. He had a stupid accent and a horrible bottom.’

  ‘All right. How about Danny, that courier bloke who’s always flirting with you? He’s quite sexy.’

  ‘Uh-uh. No more couriers, thank you. And besides, he has that spit-build-up thing in the corners of his mouth—yuck.’

  ‘Jesus, Deen. You’re a fussy cow, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, apparently not. Apparently that’s the problem—not fussy enough. I can’t just go on looks or the fact that they fancy me. It has to be someone I can honestly imagine having a proper relationship with.’

  ‘And have you ever managed that before?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well—in the past. Have you ever been in love with someone who was right for you?’

  Good question. Nadine squinted and thought back, through rows and rows of unsuitable men, wimps and weirdos and holes that needed filling. She thought back through Maxwell and Tony and John, through Simon and Raffy and Tom, and she didn’t stop until she got to her first and only serious boyfriend, to the love of her life, the man who broke her heart.

  ‘Phil,’ she said, finally. ‘Phil was right for me.’

  Philip Rich had been everything that Dig wasn’t. He was ten years older for a start, at twenty-eight, which had seemed enormously old to Nadine at the time and had been, without a doubt, the most handsome man at Manchester Polytechnic, with intense indigo eyes and a perfect Roman nose.

  He drove a black MG Midget, he wore black-leather trousers and he had black shiny hair which was cut into a dramatic jaw-length bob. He was divorced. He arrived at college every morning carrying an aluminium briefcase and another metal-clad box full of state-of-the-art photography equipment. He was unfeasibly cool and completely unattainable and from the minute Nadine set eyes on him on her first day at poly, she knew she wanted him.

  She’d lived with him for three years. He failed his degree and then broke off their relationship two weeks before the end of university, took the last £50 out of their supposed ‘summer travel’ piggy bank and just disappeared one Tuesday afternoon. She’d been devastated.

  ‘So, what went wrong?’ asked Pia.

  Nadine shrugged. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ she said, ‘it’s a mystery. He just took off.’

  ‘Why don’t you ring him?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Ring him. Arrange to see him.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I haven’t seen him for ten years! He’s probably married by now.’

  ‘Yes, but he might not be. He might be single and lonely.’ Pia was an eternal optimist and a hopeless romantic.

  ‘No,’ said Nadine firmly, ‘I can’t phone him. He’ll think I’m weird.’

  ‘Of course he won’t. He’ll be made up. Have you still got his number?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got his parents’ number—somewhere—I think.’

  ‘OK then—no excuses. Find it and phone them. Get his number. Meet up with him. You’ll feel so much better about this Dig and Delilah thing.’

  ‘D’you think?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Pia sternly, ‘I know.’

  FIFTEEN

  You did what?!’ Dig exclaimed loudly down the phone a few minutes later. ‘You phoned Phil? What the fuck did you phone Phil for?’

  ‘Well,’ Nadine replied sniffily, ‘why not?’

  ‘Why not! How can you say “why not?” Because he was the most self-centred, arrogant, pretentious twat I have ever met, because he belittled you and controlled you and put you down, because he used you for money and sex and everything he could get out of you.’

  ‘That is not true! He loved me! He did not use me!’

  ‘So who paid the rent for the last two years you were there? Who went out to work in a bar every night to pay the rent while he sat around on his arse moaning about how nobody understood his “art?” Who paid for his clothes and his haircuts and his poncey fucking Australian shampoo? Eh?’

  ‘He paid me back!’

  ‘He gave you a hundred quid! That’s about 5 per cent of what he owed you!’

  ‘Look, it wasn’t his fault his marriage didn’t work out, it wasn’t his fault he had to pay the woman all that alimony.’

  ‘Students? Paying alimony? Didn’t that strike you as wrong, Nadine? He was ripping you off and you were too blind and too gullible to see it! Jesus! I can’t believe you! It took you months to get over what that bastard did to you. You were like a little mouse when you got back from Manchester.’

  ‘I was not!’

  ‘Yes you were! Don’t you remember how you stopped wearing make–up, and the way you dressed, in all that baggy black stuff, and how you had no confidence whatsoever.’

  ‘God, Dig! You’re talking about nine years ago! People change, you know? Phil had a bad time at Manchester. He sounded completely different when I spoke to him on the phone, he sounded really relaxed and laid back.’

  ‘Nadine. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Why, after nine years of getting on with your life perfectly well, are you suddenly phoning up some fucked-up old wanker you used to go out with when you were nineteen?’

  ‘Exactly! That’s exactly it. I am not getting on with my life perfectly well. That’s the whole problem. As you yourself have pointed out, I’m getting on with my life perfectly unwell.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Nadine sighed. ‘Phil is the only bloke I’ve ever loved, ever cared about, and I
want to see him. That’s all there is to understand.’

  ‘Oh! I get it! This is for the bet, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘Of course it is! Why else would you suddenly decide that you just have to see some bloke you went out with ten years ago?’

  ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Nadine, sarcastically, ‘oh, I see! It’s perfectly all right for you to go off on dates with disastrous women from your past, it’s perfectly all right for you to go off with Delilah Lillie after what she did to you. It’s perfectly all right for you, but when I want to see someone who I used to be in love with, someone who hurt me, then there’s something wrong with it! You fucking hypocrite!!’

  ‘I haven’t gone off with Delilah! What are you talking about? We had dinner, that’s all. We had dinner and we went to see a band!’

  ‘And that is all I intend to do when I see Phil tonight. We’re going to have a drink together and see how it goes.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine. You go and you have a good time. But don’t expect to come crying to me when he starts pulling you apart again and you’re handing out cash left, right and centre and your self-esteem is in tatters.’

  ‘I can assure you, I won’t!’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Fine!’

  Oh dear. The conversation was unravelling at an alarming rate of knots. For the second time in less than a week, Dig and Nadine were having an argument that they couldn’t joke their way out of.

  ‘I’m going now,’ said Dig, brusquely, after a short, tense silence, ‘I’m really busy.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ sniffed Nadine, ‘I happen to be rather busy, too.’

  ‘See you?’ he ventured, unenthusiastically.

  ‘Yeah. See you,’ she returned with a corresponding lack of enthusiasm. She took the receiver from her ear and was about to replace it when she decided she had one last thing to say. ‘Oh,’ she began, ‘by the way. I’m not stupid, you know? You don’t need to lie to me, about you and Delilah. I know everything about you and Delilah. So don’t give me all that “just good friends” bullshit, OK, because it won’t wash.’

  And with that she forcefully and noisily dropped the receiver back on to its cradle, threw herself down on to her studio sofa and started crying again.

  Dig forcefully and noisily dropped the receiver back on to its cradle, lit a cigarette and sighed deeply. Jesus, he thought to himself, what the fuck is going on here? I mean, will someone please tell me what the fuck is happening?

  He’d phoned Nadine to make things up with her, to patch over their argument of Monday, and instead things had ended up a hundred times worse.

  Phil?

  Philip Rich?

  How could it be possible that this awful character was re-entering his life after so many years?

  Dig hadn’t liked many of Nadine’s boyfriends over the years but there’d been none he’d disliked as heartily as Philip Rich. Philip Rich with his ridiculous shiny bob and effeminate leather trousers. Philip Rich with his long words and condescending manner. Philip Rich with all his supposed good taste and maturity and sophistication. Philip Rich who’d morphed into Philip Poor so suspiciously quickly.

  Philip Rich who’d picked up his tender, teenage heart with hairless, careless hands and snapped it clean in two.

  The Worst Weekend…Ever

  Nadine had been in Manchester nearly two months and Dig was in a bad way, still reeling from the emotional punch in the stomach she’d dealt him after their day in the park.

  He wrote to her nearly every day. He sent her letters and comical postcards; he sent her promo copies of new singles, and posters and stickers and T–shirts, all freebies from his new job. He tried to keep things light-hearted, pretend that he was only interested in the so-called friendship he’d conjured up so desperately on Nadine’s doorstep that night, pretend that he was too busy being successful and indispensable in his exciting job to have time to think about what had happened between the two of them on that September weekend.

  Which was, of course, completely and utterly not true.

  The truth was, that Dig Ryan had fallen madly, passionately and devotedly in love with Nadine Kite.

  He dreamed of her at night. He wrote songs for her by day. He pinned up the Holy T class photo by his bed and kissed Nadine’s fuzzy-haired image good-night before he went to sleep. He kept dried blades of grass from their day on Primrose Hill in a paper bag in his drawer.

  Nadine wrote back occasionally, not as often as he, and after seven weeks, three days and fourteen hours of this façade, Dig felt that strong enough foundations had been laid for him to suggest a weekend visit to Manchester, without scaring her away. She put him off at first, but eventually they organized a date, and it was all he could think about for the week before he went.

  So, here he was, as he’d imagined himself so many times, clutching his weekend bag, striding purposefully up the concourse at Euston station towards the train that was to bear him Nadine-wards, to the land of see-through dresses and radiant skin, spring-water laughs and silken mouths. She’d moved out of digs and into a flat now, and he presumed that he’d be bunged on to some kind of sofa and treated like a kid brother, but he didn’t care. Just to be there would be enough, actually to be in Nadine’s flat.

  Nadine’s flat. It sounded like poetry to Dig. He had images of it in his mind, images of voiley, floaty things and joss sticks, coloured muslins, embroidered throws and dried flowers, Water Lilies posters on the walls and loads of green-packaged Body Shop stuff in the bathroom.

  It seemed she had a flatmate of some sort, who she referred to in her letters as ‘Phil’—he was probably gay—but hopefully he’d be out a lot and he and Nadine could hang out together in her jasmine-scented living room, listening to all the records he’d brought up with him from Electrogram and smoking the hash he’d gone to so much trouble acquiring from a bloke with gold teeth in Ealing Broadway.

  Dig was prepared to accept that there was unlikely to be any kissing this weekend. Nadine was more than likely still going to be in her ‘independent woman’ phase and he didn’t want to rush things. All he could do for now was develop the intimacy between them. The rest, despite everything his surging, raging hormones were trying so hard to tell him, could wait till later.

  He resisted the urge to buy Nadine a bunch of flowers as he dismounted his train at Piccadilly and instead bought her a bag of Cola Bottles and a stupid lighter with ‘Welcome to Manchester—Britain’s Second City’ on it and thought to himself how glad he was to have had the good fortune to have been born in Britain’s first city. He’d made an arrangement to meet Nadine outside, by the taxi rank, and as he emerged from the train station he looked around him for a fountain of auburn hair flecked with gold and an elusive shimmer of translucent cotton.

  He was therefore more than a little surprised when he turned around to see Nadine, her beautiful hair chopped off into a severe bob at her chin, dressed entirely in black and wearing a vicious slash of red lipstick across her mouth. She looked very pale and very thin and very trendy.

  She was nervous with him as they sat in the back of the taxi on the way to her flat. She kept talking about this Phil character and how much she hoped Dig would like him and how he shouldn’t be put off by his manner—he could be a bit abrupt with people sometimes—and how he was very interested to meet Dig as he hadn’t met any of her London friends yet and Dig was thinking, all right, all right, what’s the big deal, it’s you I’ve come to see, not your bender flatmate. But instead he smiled reassuringly and said that he was looking forward to meeting him, too, and he was sure they’d get on fine, and Nadine had looked disproportionately relieved to hear him say so.

  Dig should have twigged when she started saying things like ‘I don’t know how much we’ll be able to do this weekend, we haven’t got much money at the moment’ and ‘there’s a vegetarian café around the corner from us where we go for breakfast sometimes’ but he didn’t. He certainly should have twigged
when she referred to ‘our bedroom’, but he didn’t. When he looked back on the whole episode the following day, he would wonder at his own stupidity and never again would he snort sceptically at those ‘cross wires’ comedy sketches on the telly when two people manage to discuss entirely different topics together without either of them realizing it.

  Dig’s first sense that something was afoot came as he crossed the threshold into Nadine’s flat. It was horrible. Not that this fact aroused any suspicion in itself. But it was absolutely horrible. It was on the second floor of a discoloured thirties block, built above a parade of shops, with bucket-shaped concrete balconies attached to the front and paint peeling off the walls in enormous flaps. The flat itself had no central heating and was wretchedly furnished with the sort of furniture more usually associated with skips outside buildings and house-clearance sales. Many of the aluminium-framed windows were cracked or missing entirely and patched over with gungy layers of mud-coloured parcel tape.

  Far from the feminine bouquet of jasmine and white musk and Body Shop peppermint foot lotion that Dig had expected to encounter, the flat smelled overpoweringly and depressingly of damp and mildew. No attempt had been made to personalize it or to camouflage its ugliness, other than the rows of rather pretentious and badly composed black and white photographs in Clip-frames which hung on nearly every wall in the flat.

  ‘We’re going to decorate it next term, when we’ve both got a bit more money,’ said Nadine, hanging her black nylon bomber jacket from a hook in the hallway and leading Dig towards a door at the bottom of the corridor.

  This time the ‘we’ reference resonated a little more unambiguously and Dig began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. He tucked his hair behind his ears self-consciously as Nadine pushed open the door, and attempted to flatten his fringe on to his forehead.

  The door creaked open slowly and somewhat dramatically and there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking a stinking Gauloise and reading the Guardian was the most enormous arsehole Dig had ever set eyes on. On a bleak November morning, in a dank and overcast flat, this man was wearing sunglasses.