2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Is that the sexiest woman in Kentish Town?’ said a strange male voice.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Hello, darlin’. It’s me, Phil.’

  Nadine experienced a sudden knot of tension in her stomach.

  ‘Hello…hello…are you there?’

  ‘Oh…yeah…sorry.’ Nadine let her weary body flop sideways on to the sofa. ‘So…how are you?’

  ‘Yeah. Great. Great. You?’

  ‘Not so great, actually.’

  ‘Feeling bad?’

  ‘Yeah—you could say that.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m surprised, really. All that vodka you were drinking and then—you know—what I gave you, later?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That pill.’

  ‘What pill?’

  ‘You know—I gave you a pill—when you were getting upset about things.’

  Oh yes. That E! Oh my God—she had, hadn’t she? She’d taken an E. Jesus—she was thirty years old and she’d just taken her first E. That would explain a lot of things about last night.

  ‘You might feel a bit low, today, a bit blue. Just drink a lot of coffee. Keep yourself busy.’

  God—she was so stupid. She could have killed herself. She could imagine the headlines: PHOTOGRAPHER FOUND DEAD AFTER LETHAL COCKTAIL OF ALCOHOL AND DRUGS—Police Say ‘She Was Very Stupid.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. I will…Thanks.’ She buried her face into the cushions on the sofa and closed her eyes. She was aware that the line had gone silent but was feeling too dreadful to be able to think of anything to say.

  ‘Hey, Nadine’—Phil’s voice broke the silence—‘you know something? I haven’t slept since you left. I’ve been up all night. Just thinking about you, about us…about how great we still are together.’

  Oh no, thought Nadine, oh God.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to phone you since you left. And I just wanted to say thanks, for getting in touch, for last night, for listening, for being you.’

  Nadine wanted to reciprocate his enthusiasm, to say something nice—she felt so sorry for him—but all she could manage was a weak laugh.

  ‘I meant everything I said last night, you know. I meant it.’

  What did he say? What had he said? Nadine couldn’t remember.

  ‘…You are…special. Totally.’

  Ooooh, thought Nadine, stop it.

  ‘So I…er…just wondered. What are you up to later? Thought we could, like, meet up. Or something. Yeah?’

  Nadine sat up straight. This was all a bit much, all a bit full-on for 8.30 on a Thursday morning with a raging hangover. ‘Oh well,’ she stalled, ‘later? Erm, well—the thing is, I’m off to Barcelona at the weekend so…’

  ‘Oh right, yeah. Fair enough. You’ll want an early night, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, when are you back? Maybe we could get together then?’

  ‘Back on Tuesday evening, actually.’

  ‘So—maybe late next week?’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  ‘Great. Cool,’ he said, and the line went quiet again. ‘Erm, Nadine?’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I just wanted to say to you, I’m so glad you’re back in my life. It feels like a miracle, you know, a fucking miracle.’

  Nadine managed another weak laugh.

  ‘…And next week, when I see you, I’m going to prove it to you, prove how much I care.’

  Nadine felt a sickly little butterfly start fluttering its wings inside her tummy.

  ‘I should never, ever have let you go, before. I should never have let my ego come between us the way it did. I’m older now and I’ve learned so much in life, and one thing I realize now, the most important thing I’ve learned, is that true love is what life is all about and nothing should ever, ever get in its way. And you were my true love, Nadine. I knew it then and I sure as hell know it now.’

  Nadine’s cheeks pinkened with horror.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be given a second chance with you. I wanna make it work this time, I wanna make it perfect. Yeah? So I’ll give you a ring on Tuesday, OK? And we’ll meet up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nadine, not knowing what else to say and wondering, not for the first time in her life, why it was so hard to use the word ‘no’. ‘Yes, sure.’ It wasn’t until she put the phone down that she realized her voice had gone up by about twelve octaves during the course of the conversation so that by the time she’d made her parting comments she’d sounded like Sandra Dickinson on helium.

  She wondered for a moment why this should be and then decided that it really didn’t matter.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The next morning Dig waited until he heard the door slam behind Delilah and her footsteps bouncing down the front steps before crawling out of bed and into the living room.

  Bloody hell—it was a nightmare in here. She hadn’t even opened the curtains this time. There was half a bowl of porridge encrusting on the coffee-table, half her wardrobe strewn across her bed, and Digby was shivering furiously under the radiator.

  ‘Great,’ Dig muttered under his breath.

  He strode towards the television and switched it off. Quarter to eight in the morning was no time for Johnny Vaughan, as far as he was concerned. He dragged the curtains apart and peered through the window. Delilah was standing on the other side of the road pacing back and forth and looking at her watch. Christ, she looked gorgeous. She was wearing leggings, which accentuated the shape of her fantastic legs, pristine white trainers and a huge knee-length puffa jacket. She’d put her hair up into a sort of fluffy, tufty thing on the back of her head, which bounced up and down as she walked around, giving her the look of a dressage pony. A very beautiful dressage pony.

  A cab screeched to a halt next to her, and a couple of seconds later she was gone.

  Dig scratched his chin, yawned and turned towards the kitchen, the smell of Delilah’s freshly brewed coffee luring him away from the window. He took one step forward and then recoiled in agony, clasping his knee to him and rubbing furiously at the sole of his foot.

  ‘Aaargh! Fucking shitting bollocking FUCK!’ he yelled, hopping around. He looked down and saw one of Delilah’s high-heeled shoes lying on its side. He’d trodden on the heel and it fucking hurt.

  What the fuck was Delilah’s shoe doing over here anyway? Where was the other one? Why couldn’t she keep them together? In a pair? Like a normal human being?

  Dig felt anger percolating in his chest. He picked the shoe up and hurled it across the room with a roar, and then he sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa and took a lot of deep breaths, to calm his inner rage.

  He couldn’t stand this, he really, really couldn’t bear it. He knew he was being anal, he knew other people would be able to ignore all this…this shit, all this stuff everywhere, clothes and mess and paper and dogs and fucking crystals. Other people would just think, Well, it’s not perfect, but it’s only temporary, and she’s a friend and it’s only a bit of mess. But Dig just couldn’t. It fucked his head up. He couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t relax. He couldn’t breathe, for God’s sake.

  He hobbled towards his stereo and traced his finger across the ‘B’ section of his CD collection. There was only one thing for it, only one person who could help him now.

  He reverently laid the disc in its tray, slid shut the door and pressed play. There was different music for different moments. Music to work to (Radiohead, Travis, the Manics), music to bathe to (Paul Westerberg, Paul Weller), music to cook and wash up to (Blondie, Abba, 70s compilations), music to have sex to (Portishead, Chris Isaaks, Dean Martin), music to dance to (Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and any Northern soul) and then there was music to tidy up to, and when it came to a mess of this magnitude, there was only one man for the job.

  The One and Only.

  The Godfather.

  James.

  Brown.

  Get down.

  Dig swiv
elled the volume as loud as it would go without bouncing ornaments off his shelves and set to it.

  Dig loved to tidy, he really did. It was one of his favourite occupations. But this was a bit trickier than usual because it wasn’t his stuff. It was weird, alien bits and pieces from somebody else’s life, stuff that belonged on the shelves and in the cupboards of a house he’d never visited, in a part of the country he’d never been to. And a lot of it was underwear.

  Digby still sat quaking under the radiator and watched Dig as he picked up tailored trousers, sweatshirts, jeans and cashmere jumpers and folded them painstakingly into perfect little cubes. Episode. Phase Eight. Donna Karan. Marks and Spencer. Tommy Hilfiger. He feigned disinterest in her bits of white-jersey underwear, lumping them together nonchalantly, like old rugby socks, almost as if someone might be watching him for signs of sad-old-gitness. He collected her mugs and bowls and glasses of water and put them in the kitchen sink. He rolled up the duvet and shoved it in the hall cupboard, along with the pillows. He heaved the sofabed back into its cavity, retrieved his cushions from where they lay scattered around the room, plumped them up voraciously and arranged them into a nice overlapping pattern across the sofa back.

  He stepped back to appraise his cushions, screwing up his face as he joined James to hit a high note. Now—where to put all these beautifully folded bits of designer clothing? He spotted one of her vast suitcases in the corner, dragged it into the middle of the room and threw it open. And then he stopped in his tracks. Paper. Loads of it. Loose-leaf papers in clear plastic folders. Notebooks. Folders. Letters.

  Clues.

  Again, acting as if there might be a CCTV in operation in his flat, he pretended not to notice. Oh no, he thought to himself, I most certainly am not the sort of fellow who would snoop in other people’s possessions, thank you very much. Not me. Oh no.

  He hoped that the imaginary people watching him on their imaginary monitor were impressed by his restraint.

  He shuffled the papers around a bit to make room in the case for her clothes, and let his eyes wander across the letter that lay on the top as he put her clothing, piece by piece, into the case. It was an official-looking letter on crisp white laid.

  Dig scanned it quickly.

  Rosemary Bentall

  Clinical Psychologist

  The Old School Buildings

  Liverpool Road

  Chester

  CH21UL

  Phone: 01244555000

  Fax: 01244555129

  10th November 1999

  Mrs Delilah Biggins

  Dorrington Lodge

  Chester

  CH87LN

  Dear Delilah,

  I have been trying to phone you since you walked out of our session yesterday afternoon but your housekeeper was unable to tell me where you were.

  I am very concerned about you, Delilah, and can only hope that you haven’t carried out your threat to return to London. I understand your need to uncover the past, especially in the light of what you told me yesterday, but I really feel that this trip will not be in your best interests and could in fact be detrimental to your progress at this stage in our work together. We have both worked so hard to get to this point and leaving now will put your recovery in jeopardy.

  However, if you do insist on going ahead with your plans, then I beseech you to talk to Alex about it. He has supported you in everything over the years and shutting him out now would be unfair on both of you.

  I don’t think there is anything else I can say, except to urge you once more to heed my advice and postpone this visit until you’re stronger.

  Warm wishes,

  Dr Rosemary Bentall

  Dig closed his mouth, cleared his throat and quickly piled the rest of the clothes on top of the paperwork.

  His heart raced in rhythm to the music as he tried to go about his business, but he found it impossible to feel normal. ‘Uncover the past’? What did that mean? And what the hell was Delilah doing seeing a shrink? Delilah wasn’t mad. OK—so she was into crystals and feng shui and stuff. She was messy and disorganized and talked too much. But she wasn’t mad.

  This threw a new complexion on everything. When Delilah had told Dig that she was in London to ‘sort her head out’, he’d interpreted it as meaning that she wanted to get away from Alex. He’d thought she was here to contemplate her marriage, which was why he’d kept out of her face. But it was nothing to do with her marriage. It was to do with the past. Of which he was a part. It was his business, now. He had a right to know.

  He was about to zip up Delilah’s suitcase when he had a sudden thought. He grabbed a pen and scribbled down Dr Rosemary Bentall’s phone number. Just in case. He probably wouldn’t need it.

  But if a woman in Chester with letters after her name was worried about Delilah, then so was he.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Nadine had received a most unexpected phone call the previous day.

  From Delilah.

  It had thrown her completely, suffering, as she was, so terribly with a hangover, not to mention the guilt and anxiety and spine-chilling remorse her reckless actions of Wednesday evening were punishing her with.

  ‘Hi,’ she’d said, jauntily, ‘it’s me. Delilah’—as if they were old mates.

  ‘Oh,’ Nadine had said, ‘hi.’

  ‘Look—I was talking to Dig last night,’ she’d continued.

  Oh yes, thought Nadine, I bet you were.

  ‘And he mentioned that you go to the gym regularly.’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  Delilah wondered whether Nadine would mind if she came to the gym with her, because, in her own highly amusing words, she was starting to feel really fat. Apparently she used to go running every day in the countryside and she was missing the exercise—oh, and the reason she didn’t want to go jogging in London was because she felt self-conscious about her ‘wobbly bottom’.

  If there was one thing more annoying than a naturally thin girl, it was a naturally thin girl who went on about being fat all the time.

  So Nadine had had approximately one and a half seconds to form a reply and because she was incapable of using the word ‘no’, the only alternative had been to say, ‘Of course, great, no problem—that would be lovely.’

  She had no one to blame but herself.

  Delilah arrived at Nadine’s flat on Friday morning on the dot of eight o’clock. Nadine had managed to forget about this arrangement until half past seven and had consequently spent the last half an hour frantically running around her flat trying to clear up, defumigate and make herself look beautiful all at the same time.

  When the doorbell rang at eight o’clock she’d achieved none of the above. She had been unable to find any of her sexy, expensive, shiny Lycra gym things, those tight purple, black and red things that skimmed gleamingly over her body, sucking her in and making her look like a Gladiator, and instead had had to throw on her baggy old grey things with the holes in them that made her look like a dumpy housewife with low self-esteem who doesn’t know that her husband is shagging his secretary.

  She’d attempted to put her hair up in some sort of jaunty, sporty-looking pony-tail thing and had ended up with this strange cottage-loaf-type structure on her head that looked like it might be housing a pair of chaffinches. And, in an attempt to rid her flat of the stench of three weeks’ worth of Marlboro Light emissions (the last time she’d opened a window), she’d actually managed to smash the kitchen window. Actually broken the fucking thing. No idea how. And there was now a force-ten icy gale wailing through the angry-looking hole. She’d taped a carrier bag over it, to no great effect, and given that she didn’t have time to phone a glazier, was just hoping and praying that the burglars in her area weren’t quick-witted enough to break in in the hour or so she’d be out of the house.

  She opened the door breathlessly and was greeted, unsurprisingly, by a vision of female perfection. There she was, her golden hair scraped back immaculately into a sleek pony-tail, her body encased in a s
imple pair of black cotton leggings, black vest top and an enormous, all-enveloping black puffa jacket which made her look like a fragile little doll. Pah! Her skin was glowing like she’d already been for a two-mile jog, and she was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Hi! I’m not late, am I?’ she oozed.

  ‘No…no’—Nadine suddenly realized she had left her fag hanging out of her mouth and quickly transferred it to her fingers—‘no…not at all. Come in.’

  Nadine wasn’t a flake. Not usually. She wasn’t one of those girls who couldn’t get out of the front door without laddering her tights or who couldn’t cook a lasagne without setting the house on fire. She was usually pretty cool and poised. So why was she now falling apart at the seams just because of the mere presence, the sheer existence of a girl called Delilah Lillie? It was pathetic. If this was any other girl, literally any other girl, she would have just said, ‘Come in, excuse the mess, sorry about the fag smell, and don’t I look dreadful.’ So why did she feel this overwhelming need to be perfect for Delilah?

  ‘Wow,’ said Delilah, as she moved through Nadine’s cluttered hallway, ‘what an incredible place. I love what you’ve done to the walls.’ She was running her fingers across the rose-pink foil. ‘Where did you get this stuff from?’

  ‘It’s sweet wrapping. I found a big box of it in one of the studios upstairs from mine when they moved out. It was a fucking nightmare to put up.’

  ‘Amazing,’ sighed Delilah, ‘you’ve got such an imagination. I would never have thought of something like that. So original.’

  Oh God. She was doing that thing again, that self-effacing, you’re-so-much-better-than-crappy-little-old-me bollocks.

  ‘Oh my God! That’s so cute!’ said Delilah, eyeing up the tiny motifs on Nadine’s wallpaper in the living room. ‘It’s Miffy the Rabbit, isn’t it?’ She put her index fingers to her upper lip and crossed them over each other, into an X, and then giggled. ‘I used to love Miffy the Rabbit. Where did you get it?’