by Lisa Jewell
‘Oh’—Nadine gritted her teeth at Delilah’s cloying attempt at cuteness—‘it was from a children’s shop in Crouch End that was closing down. It wasn’t a top-selling line, apparently—couldn’t compete with Thomas the Tank Engine and Postman Pat.’
‘Incredible. Absolutely incredible…So clever the way it looks like little flowers from a distance and you can’t see it till you get close up. Magnolia’s about my limit on the home-décor front.’
Delilah loved her car, too—of course. ‘Wow. Sex on wheels. What is it?’
‘It’s an Alpha. Spider.’
‘It’s beautiful. God, you’re so lucky. Only car I’ve ever driven is my Renault Clio. It’s nice but not exactly sexy, though.’
Yeah right, thought Nadine, yawn yawn. If you got much more self-deprecating you’d cease to exist, you’d end up vanishing vaporously into the ether. Either this girl was suffering from a severe case of low self-esteem or this really was the only way she could communicate with women who weren’t as beautiful as her. Either way, it was beginning to grate on her nerves. She’d almost preferred the old-style cocky, arrogant Delilah.
Nadine was aware that she was being rather unfair on Delilah. She knew that Delilah was just trying to be friendly, trying to be a girl’s girl. But that was the problem. She just wasn’t a girl’s girl and she sounded insincere and fake. She wasn’t the cool Delilah that Nadine had known and hated at school. She was just plain irritating.
Unpeeled and bobbing up and down on the step machine, Delilah looked extraordinary—she made it look so effortless. Not a drop of sweat on her, not a hair out of place.
‘Ever used one of these before?’ puffed Nadine.
‘Nah,’ replied Delilah, sounding frighteningly un breathless.
‘What setting are you on?’ Nadine asked her.
Delilah moved her towel away from the dot-matrix screen. ‘Erm…thirteen, I think. No—fourteen.’
Fourteen! Fourteen! Nadine had almost thrown a party when, after weeks and weeks, she’d finally gone up to level ten on the step machine. ‘Uh-huh,’ she squeaked, breathlessly, ‘really.’
Nadine was desperately trying to control her urge to ask after Dig. The question was sitting, quivering, on the tip of her tongue, like a diver’s toes gripping the edge of the diving-board.
She could hear herself asking the question in her head, it echoed over and over, varying in intonation and construction, but try as she might, she just couldn’t launch the words from her mouth. She was scared her voice would suddenly crack and that tears would appear from nowhere and that right here, in the middle of this gym, in front of Delilah Lillie, of all people, she would lose control.
She couldn’t bear to ask Delilah the question because she didn’t think she’d be able to handle even the smallest hint of intimacy in her reply. It made her feel bad enough as it was to imagine that Delilah had been talking to Dig last night, having normal conversations with him, being a part of his life, while she herself—his best friend—was not even on talking terms with him. Nadine couldn’t believe how much things had changed over the last few days.
On the treadmill, Delilah ran as if being swept along by the wind through an endless, sunlit field of cornflowers and poppies, her feet not making a sound against the rubber tread, her pony-tail flying out behind her as if on a gust of summer breeze. Nadine had tried the treadmill only once and had felt so paranoid that she was going to lose her footing and go shooting off the back end and into the lap of someone doing sit-ups behind her that she’d not tried it again since.
They stood side by side on the machines that Nadine had never found a name for and so referred to as the ‘swish’ machines. Nadine always felt a little insecure on this contraption, too, gripping on to the handlebars for dear life while her legs ‘swished’ away beneath her. Delilah, she noticed, was fearlessly unattached to the machine, positively marching back and forth, her arms swinging freely at her sides. And she was on the highest ramp setting.
Delilah turned and hit Nadine with a wide, adrenalin-fuelled grin that seemed to suggest that she was actually enjoying herself, and then turned away again.
It had taken Nadine a long time to feel comfortable at the gym. She’d first joined after realizing with an overpowering sense of desolation that only a few years after finally shedding her puppy-fat she was about to experience the ill-effects of a rapidly slowing metabolism. The carefree life of one who could eat Mars Bars and burgers and cream cakes with impunity was not to be hers.
It had been anathema to her at first, lining up at these soulless machines to walk up and down or cycle on the spot for forty-five minutes or so feeling utterly ridiculous and thinking, Is this what God intended? Is this what two hundred million years of evolution have boiled down to? Me—paying a hundred quid a month to run on the spot in a stupid outfit?
But she’d got used to it eventually, it had become just another part of her routine, and she no longer thought about it. Felt almost at home in this peculiar place, in fact. She knew the form, could programme any of these machines in two or three deft button configurations, no longer felt embarrassed doing her stretches in front of other people, looked positively cool at the water fountains, had it all down pat.
But now, accompanied by Delilah, she was feeling like a graceless, lumpen novice again.
‘God—I enjoyed that,’ said Delilah, joyfully, after effortlessly executing 150 sit-ups in the manner of a US marine in training, and leaping down the stairs towards the changing rooms. Nadine followed behind, her legs wobbling slightly as a result of her efforts to keep pace with Delilah’s work-out.
‘Yeah. Me too,’ said Nadine, her leaden, exhausted voice suggesting anything but.
In the changing room Delilah began to remove her barely damp clothes with the confidence of one who has nothing to hide: no bumps, no lumps, no ripples, no hairs.
Yup, thought Nadine, as she glanced at a startlingly naked Delilah, she was that sort of clotted-cream colour all over, and she was definitely a natural blonde, and she did have the body of a finely tuned race horse and her bottom did stand up all by itself.
She hoped sincerely that Delilah got down on her hands and knees every morning when she woke up and thanked God for what he’d chosen to give her.
Over a cup of coffee in the gym’s café, Delilah seemed less nervous and eager to please than she’d been earlier, and Nadine was surprised by how easy-going and pleasant she was—she’d always been so sullen and moody at school. Nadine couldn’t recall ever seeing her smiling in those days. But now she was almost enjoying the conversation. They’d been talking generally about keeping fit, healthy eating, giving up smoking—which Delilah was having trouble with and which Nadine had been meaning to get around to for the last ten years—and the shock of turning thirty.
‘And of course,’ said Nadine, ‘the scariest thing about turning thirty is that you’re running out of time to defer the baby issue, aren’t you? You know, for years and years you’ve said that you’ll have kids before you’re thirty—that seems reasonable enough—and then you turn twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and suddenly you’re thinking, hold on a sec, not sure if I’m ready quite yet, maybe when I’m thirty-two. Then you turn thirty and realize that you’re no more ready for it than you were ten years ago—less ready, if anything, and you start wondering if you’ll ever actually be ready.’ She stopped stirring her sugar lump into her coffee and looked up at Delilah. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
Delilah smiled and shrugged. ‘Haven’t really given it that much thought,’ she said, which struck Nadine as very odd. Thirty-year-old women who hadn’t given the baby issue much thought simply didn’t exist as far as she was concerned.
‘Oh, come on, Delilah,’ she snorted, ‘you’ve been married for ten years. You must have at least talked about it?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Alex—his business is his life. I don’t think there’s any room for a child.’
‘Yeah, but what about you? Don’t you want kids?
’
Delilah was turning Nadine’s lighter over and over between her fingers and staring at the top of the table. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose so. One day. I just feel too…selfish right now. I feel I’ve got too much to sacrifice. Do you know what I mean?’
Nadine nodded enthusiastically. She knew exactly what she meant. ‘I sometimes wish that I’d done it when I was younger. Got it out of the way when I was eighteen. My kid would have been in school by the time I was twenty-four and I could have caught up with my life then, without being deafened by the sound of my biological clock nagging at me.’ She laughed. ‘Don’t you ever wish you’d done it when you were younger?’
Delilah laughed, too. ‘Not really,’ she shrugged. And then she glanced at her watch. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly ten! Look, Deen. I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to dash.’ She was collecting her belongings to her, her puffa, her bag, her scarf.
‘Here,’ said Nadine, picking up her car keys and getting to her feet, ‘let me give you a lift home—your cousin’s place isn’t far from the studio.’
‘Oh. No. Really, thanks. I’ll be fine walking. I’d like to walk,’ she smiled tightly and threw her bag over her shoulder. ‘Really.’
‘If you’re sure?’
She nodded effusively. ‘Yeah—there’s some things I need to do, you know, on the way home. But thanks. And thanks for this’—she indicated the gym—‘maybe we could do this again?’
Nadine nodded and smiled and thought, ‘Yeah—maybe.’
‘Actually, Nadine,’ said Delilah, sliding her hold-all off her shoulder and putting her hands on the table, ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you. I’m not…um…I’m not here just for the sake of my bottom, actually.’ Nadine saw her take a deep breath. She was nervous.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Nadine, apprehensively.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I wanted to talk to you, really. There was something I wanted to say to you.’
Nadine sat down and put her car keys back on the table.
‘I know you don’t really like me, Nadine and I know that you see me as some sort of threat to your friendship with Dig. But that’s not why I’m here—honestly. There’s nothing going on between Dig and me and there never will be. I’ve always liked you, Nadine. I was a bit in awe of you at school and maybe that sometimes came across as rudeness, but I suppose I was just jealous of you. You were so clever and so cool and you had everything going for you. I used to want to be you, you know, and if I was ever mean to you it was only because I was scared of you. I never meant to come between you and Dig then, and I really, really don’t want to come between you again now. I hate it that you’re not speaking.
‘Dig’s so stubborn,’ continued Delilah, ‘and he’s not going to call you even though I can tell he’s desperate to. And I know you’re just as stubborn as him. But please. Call him,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t waste any more time, Nadine. Life’s too short. Make up. Be friends. You two need each other, you two were made for each other. You two,’ she said pointedly, ‘should be together.’
And with that highly overdramatic and perfectly ludicrous closing comment, she disappeared, leaving behind her a cloud of her unidentifiable morning-dew perfume and an atmosphere of sadness and confusion.
TWENTY-SIX
The arsehole driver of the Porsche 911 in front of him finally ran out of water. Dig felt like he’d been here for ever, parked behind him, watching him circle round and round his precious extra inch of manhood, squirting at it mincily with the water jet-spray like he was the only man in the history of the world who’d ever owned a Porsche.
Dig watched him drying his hands distastefully on a piece of paper towel pulled from a barrel attached to the wall, and just when Dig thought he was finally going to get into his car and drive away, he began circling it again, eagle-eyed, with a soft cloth in his hand, rubbing meticulously at various points on the paintwork.
He was taking his time. He could see Dig waiting behind him, but he wasn’t going to let that unsettle him. Because he was a Porsche driver and in the evolutionary scale of car ownership he was the boss, Dig, in his silver G-reg Honda Civic was just Monkey-Boy to him, a lower form of life.
Finally, the man in the Porsche lowered himself into his car, fiddled around with his stereo a bit, adjusted his wing mirrors electronically and drove away, apparently quite pleased with himself. Dig sighed and moved his car forward towards the jet-spray.
Dig had been driving home from work tonight, Digby vibrating nervously in the passenger seat next to him, when he’d stopped to fill up at the petrol station on Oval Road and had had a sudden and unprecedented urge to wash his car. This had never happened to him before—especially not at one of those manual jet-spray jobs where you actually had to get out of your car.
Despite his domestic fastidiousness, Dig operated a complete set of double standards when it came to his car. The inside of his car resembled Notting Hill the morning after the carnival, strewn with fast-food packaging and empty cans, the outside festooned with monochromatic bird-shits and tear-drops of sticky red sap.
The reason he kept his flat so clean and his car so dirty was simple. He loved his flat and he hated his car. Hated it. He’d had to fork out another £150 on Monday morning to get it fixed—the fifth time in six years he’d had major problems with it. He’d already paid for the car twice over in maintenance alone. And it wasn’t even a car he’d ever actually wanted. It was a car he’d somehow ended up with. But tonight, strangely, he felt warmly disposed towards his car. Tonight he decided that maybe if he treated his car a little more nicely then his car might treat him a little more fairly.
He aimed the spray at the side panels and watched with satisfaction as layers of grime and goo began to fall away and a fresh new skin of shiny silver revealed itself. It symbolized, he realized in an uncharacteristic moment of philosophical reflection, the way he himself was feeling today.
He’d had a revelation today, at work—in fact, he’d had a series of revelations, and washing his car was just the start. A new Dig was going to be born tonight.
After the disastrous start to his unplanned cohabitation with Delilah, after the dreadful scene with Digby the other morning, and the puking up and the mess everywhere and disorganized towel rotas, Dig wanted to bring some class to the situation.
Delilah, in her Chester palace, was probably accustomed to eating her evening meal at a dining table. She was used to large rooms and open spaces, fresh air and privacy. She probably had her own en-suite bathroom. She wasn’t accustomed to living in cramped quarters, eating off her lap and tidying up after herself. She had a housekeeper, for God’s sake.
Despite Delilah’s ignominious start in life, she had always exuded a kind of star quality and it was easier for Dig to imagine her living in neo-Georgian splendour than living as she had done on the Gospel Oak estate, among dirty nappies, empty beer cans, bawling, snot-nosed infants and overflowing ashtrays. Delilah belonged in her huge six-bedroomed, feng-shui-ed house with its ruffles and valances, its conservatory and water feature in the garden, she was born to be pampered and spoiled. She didn’t belong on his sofabed. It was all wrong.
So tonight he was going to do everything he could to make his lifestyle compare favourably with Delilah’s life in Chester. Why? Because, as inconvenient and uncomfortable as it was sharing his tiny flat with Delilah, as much as he hated her mess and her mood swings, her crystals and her dog, he wanted her to stay.
Not necessarily in his flat, but in London.
He didn’t want her to turn around to him and say, ‘This sucks, London sucks, your flat sucks, I’m going home.’ Because it felt very suspiciously to Dig like he was falling in love with Delilah.
Yes, he knew: he knew exactly what Nadine would think of that, he knew that he shouldn’t, he knew it was probably a huge mistake, but he couldn’t help it. She was just so…so unutterably delicious. The smell of her, like fresh laundry and damp grass, the feel of her, like marshma
llows and satin, and the sight of her, that extraordinary hair which you could almost see your reflection in, those lips, those legs, those duck-egg-blue eyes…
But it was more than all that. It was her vulnerability more than anything that made Dig love her—or want to love her. She was like a lost little girl, all alone in the world, full of secrets and pain. He wanted to help her, protect her, look after her. Reading that letter from her shrink had unleashed a whole new set of emotions within him. He’d looked up ‘clinical psychologist’ on the Internet at work this morning, trying to find out more about what they did, and it sounded like they were pretty serious shit. It was more than just ‘my father never hugged me’ kind of stuff. Clinical psychologists, it seemed, tried to mend broken people.
Dig’s water allocation ran out and he replaced the jet-spray in its holder. He got back into his car, gave the increasingly quivering Digby a reassuring chuck under the chin and drove towards the vacuum machine.
Far from putting Dig off Delilah, finding out that she was a fruitloop had intensified his feelings for her. It made her more real, more attainable in a way, like finding out that she was more than just the coolest girl in school, finding the soft spots that she’d let only him see, was what had made him fall in love with her all those years ago. People with weaknesses made Dig feel strong in the same way that small women made him feel big.
Since reading that letter, Dig had been consumed by an overwhelming desire for intimacy. He missed the way he’d been in his youth, he missed the time in his life when he’d been carefree and careless with his heart, when he’d been capable of falling helplessly and hopelessly in love. He’d been such a soft-hearted romantic when he was young, his heart on his sleeve and his emotions on a plate. And since he’d first set eyes on Delilah, last Saturday, he had begun to experience similar sensations again. It was incredibly exciting to discover that he was still capable of feeling this way.
