2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘What happened—will you just tell me—please. I can’t bear it!’

  ‘I left a message on his answerphone.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Pia clasped her hands over her mouth. ‘You mean like Rachel did in that episode of Friends.’

  Nadine threw her a bemused look.

  ‘You know! When she went on a date with that bloke and got really drunk and phoned Ross and said “this is closure” to his answerphone and then’—she picked up on Nadine’s lack of comprehension and trailed off—‘no? Never mind. Anyway’—she brightened—‘what did you say?’

  Nadine shuddered and caught the cigarette that Pia had just thrown her. ‘Well—first time I phoned him, Delilah answered.’

  ‘Delilah? Who the fuck is Delilah?’ Pia lit her cigarette and threw the lighter to Nadine.

  Nadine sighed. ‘Delilah,’ she said, ‘remember? I told you about her last week. The Love of Dig’s Life. They were teenage sweethearts.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ nodded Pia, although Nadine knew full well she had no recollection whatsoever of the conversation.

  ‘She and Dig split up when they were eighteen and they lost touch. And now she’s back, for some unknown reason. And ever since she’s been here she’s been attached to Dig like a fucking leech. I don’t exist any more as far as Dig’s concerned. We haven’t even been talking to each other for the past week.’ She hauled herself off the floor and joined Pia on the bed, to share the empty champagne bottle she was using as an ashtray. ‘And then last night I went round there because of Phil…’

  Pia rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘Who is Phil?’

  ‘Don’t ask. No one. Nothing. Anyway, I turned up there and there was this flash meal laid out on the table—candles, music, the works. And this disgusting little dog who turns out to be—guess who?—Delilah’s dog. And then she appears, just got out of the shower, all skinny, wearing a towel this big.’ She indicated half a centimetre between finger and thumb. ‘I just lost it, you know? I suppose it was pretty immature of me but I couldn’t help it. It just really, really upset me. I ran off, got into the car, went home—all very drama-queen. But it was just—it was just—Delilah, you know? Delilah-fucking-Lillie. All over again. She gets to me, she’s under my skin, even after all these years, she’s there and I’ve tried so hard to put it all in the past, start afresh with her, but I just can’t do it. She has this effect on me. And she has this other effect on Dig. He can’t see sense while she’s around. He turns into a total spaz.’

  Pia nodded empathetically.

  ‘So when I heard her voice just now on the phone, in Dig’s flat, like she fucking owned the place, I went a bit mad. I burst into tears first—snot and everything—and then afterwards I calmed down a bit. And then…and then—oh God’—she ran her fingers through her mussed-up hair—‘I managed to convince myself that I needed to be a grown-up about all of this. I decided that the best thing to do would be to confront Delilah, talk to her, find out what her intentions were, kind of thing. So I called back—but this time there was no answer. I hung up. I was furious, convinced that they were both there, deliberately not picking up the phone. I got myself really wound up, imagining them there, looking at the phone, laughing at poor, mad Nadine.’

  ‘Room service.’

  Pia stubbed out her cigarette and grinned widely at the embarrassed young waiter who’d arrived with their coffee. ‘Gracias,’ she beamed at him as he backed nervously out of the oestrogen-rich room.

  As she lowered herself back on to the bed, her smiling, flirting face automatically rearranged itself back into its former picture of sympathetic attentiveness. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. So. I got myself more and more wound up, and before I knew it I’d picked up the phone again and—and—when the answerphone clicked on I just let rip.’

  ‘Oh God—what? What did you say?’ Pia passed her a cup of coffee.

  Nadine slurped on it gratefully. ‘I said something along the lines of ’—she cleared her throat—“‘I give up. He’s yours. Have him.’”

  Pia winced.

  ‘Oh but it gets worse,’ warned Nadine, ruefully, reddening as her words echoed in her ears, ‘it gets much worse.’

  She’d thought she was being so calm, so mature, so wise.

  ‘Have him,’ she’d said, trembling, a hastily lit and illicit cigarette shaking between her fingers. ‘He’s yours. I’ve had ten years to do something about it and I didn’t, so I guess it’s fair enough. I’m not going to let you get to me any more—oh no—I’m moving on, Delilah and you’re welcome to him. Have him, wind him round your finger for a while and then dump him again. See if I care. Break his little heart again. It’s not my problem any more. I’m done. I’m through. Goodbye.’

  She’d put the phone down then, her heart thumping loudly under her viscose dress and before she’d even had a chance to think about what she’d just done, she’d had another thought and was picking up the phone again and dialling.

  She’d stubbed her cigarette out viciously as she waited for Dig’s bloody stupid James Bond message to finish. She was on a roll now and couldn’t stomach delays and time-wasting.

  ‘And,’ she’d said, hysterically, after the beep, ‘another thing. This is a message for you, Dig. I lied!’ she’d cried, adrenalin almost leaking from her ears, ‘I lied when I said I didn’t want you. OK? L-I-E-D. Because I did. I did want you, actually. And I always have and I still do. And—and—I’m drunk. I’m very, very, very drunk. I’m plastered. And I’ve been thinking about things and thinking about your things, you know, your willy, mainly, and your flat and your sofa and Ikea and bits of lint on the carpet and I miss them all and I miss you and I lied. Just so long as you know that I lied. Have a good life. Bye. I’ll always love you. Bye.’

  And then she’d hung up—and then again and then again as the blessed phone refused to sit in its cradle. She remembered feeling quite pleased at the time, quite pleased with the way it had gone. ‘That’s that sorted, then,’ she’d thought to herself, her mouth set hard and her hands still shaking. She’d lit another cigarette, opened her mini-bar, made some kind of hellish cocktail from brandy, gin and San Miguel, knocked it back, been to the bathroom, thrown it up and then collapsed on the bed into a stuporous and immediate sleep.

  ‘Oh shitting hell, Deen,’ tutted Pia, shaking her head from side to side, her eyes like saucers. ‘Shitting bloody hell. You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?’

  Nadine nodded heavily and collapsed backwards on to the bed. ‘This is—awful. This is the most awful, awful thing. Just awful…’

  ‘Did you mean all that, then? All that stuff about wanting him?’

  Nadine nodded. And then shook her head. And then nodded again. ‘Oh God. I don’t know. This is all too much. I can’t deal with it. My head hurts.’

  ‘You know something, Deen. If all that was true, then it’s good, you know? It’s good that you said it. Life’s too short and you’re not getting any younger and at least this way you’ll know. You’ll know one way or the other. And I wouldn’t get too worked up about this Delilah chick. It’s like…it’s like—’ her face lit up suddenly—‘it’s like Dawson’s Creek! You know—Joey not realizing how she really felt about Dawson until glam Jen came along with all her New York sophistication. But Dawson wasn’t really into Jen, not really. She was just a fantasy. But she was also the catalyst for both of them to wake up and see that they really wanted each other. Except they split up—but then, they are only sixteen, I suppose. Even though you wouldn’t think it, the way they talk to each other…’

  Nadine eyed Pia with disbelief. ‘You watch way too much television,’ she sighed disparagingly, ‘and besides. This isn’t television. This is real life. My life. And I’ve just fucked it up.’

  Pia shook her head sagely. ‘Television is life. And life is television.’

  ‘Well, your life is, obviously,’ snorted Nadine, wondering at the shallowness of the youth of today.

  ‘No. Everyone’s lives.
And I’ll bet you that by the time we get back to London, Delilah will be gone and you’ll see Dig and you’ll kiss, and it’ll be Ross and Rachel and Joey and Dawson and Harry and Sally all rolled into one. I mean—Delilah—honestly. There is no way Dig could end up with someone called Delilah. It just wouldn’t happen. It’s not real life.’

  Nadine wanted Pia to go now. The conversation was getting unbelievably silly, and her head hurt, and she just wanted to lie there for a while on her own, torturing herself with word-perfect recollections of the messages she’d left on Dig’s answerphone. She clutched her face as she remembered what she’d said about his willy.

  Oh God.

  How could she have said that? How could she have mentioned Dig’s willy? Nadine had never even seen Dig’s willy. It threw the entire dynamic of their friendship, their relationship, inside out. It changed everything. She could have covered up everything else she’d said, made out she was just being drunkenly overemotional. She could have got away with all the other stuff—but not that. Not the willy thing.

  It was all over now. Things were never going to be the same again.

  FORTY

  A sense of madness descended upon Dig as he drove towards Nadine’s.

  That message. It can’t have been real. It just can’t have. Must have been some kind of joke. There was just no way—no way.

  ‘Did you put her up to this?’ he’d asked Delilah after the stunned silence that had followed the end of the second message. Delilah had just shaken her head, numbly.

  ‘Do you promise?’ he’d asked desperately.

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ she’d snapped. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. I’ve had slightly more important things to worry about the last few days than constructing some kind of elaborate practical joke. I told you. It’s what I’ve been telling you all along. That’s all. It’s the truth and now you’re actually going to have to do something about it. I’ll put the kettle on,’ she’d sighed, stroking his arm, ‘you’d better give her a ring.’ She’d looked horribly tired and Dig had felt guilty, inadvertently dragging her through yet another emotional quagmire after the day she’d had.

  He’d phoned Nadine after he’d recovered from the initial shock and had been more than a little surprised to find that she was having a party. He couldn’t believe that she hadn’t invited him. Some girl whose voice he didn’t recognize had answered the phone, and there’d been loud music in the background. He’d said, ‘Is Nadine there?’, and she’d said, ‘I dunno, I dunno. Hold on.’ She’d sounded very drunk, and when he was still holding on nearly three minutes later he’d hung up and attempted to watch the telly, instead, intending to deal with it in the morning. No point discussing it with her now, he’d thought, she’ll be too pissed. Better to wait until tomorrow, until we’ve both had a chance to think about this, much better to wait. But waiting had, of course, been impossible. This had to be talked about now. It was too weird and too scary. It was madness.

  She couldn’t really have said that thing, could she? That thing about his willy. He must have misheard it.

  It was a clear night for once as Dig drove in a daze towards Gordon House Road. A Saturday night, he reminded himself, the night when he and Nadine would usually be in a pub somewhere, either locally or in town, either with friends or just the two of them, either single or with current partners. They would be getting their last round in about now, a curry would be imminent. The world would be a simple place, full of warm friendship and deep affection and unspoken feelings of love and togetherness all wrapped up in a lovely, lagery blur. Nadine would be wearing some outrageous dress or other that she’d picked up earlier in the week from a second-hand shop, and wherever they were, her loud laughter and loud clothes, her vociferousness and her humour would light the place up, even the dingiest corner of the dingiest pub. There’d usually be some bloke sitting next to her, some sad idiot, shell-shocked by his extraordinary companion, amazed that someone like her had ever agreed to go out with someone like him, his face inert with nervous delight.

  Could that incredible, bright, flamboyant and utterly unattainable woman, that self-contained, self-assured, and infuriatingly independent woman really be the same one who’d left that hysterical message on his answerphone, the same one who claimed to have been thinking about his willy? Nadine? Thinking about his willy? Maybe she was on drugs. Maybe someone at this party of hers had slipped her a little something. Yes, he decided, turning left into her road, that was the only explanation. Nadine was on drugs.

  He could hear the music pounding from her flat even before he’d got out of his car—which was another worrying thing. Nadine had never had a party at her flat before. She’d had parties, but she’d always hired rooms and studios and restaurants because she couldn’t bear the thought of her lovely, mad, overstuffed, piled-up, spilling-over, bright and colourful flat being trashed by a load of drunken friends who she’d feel too guilty to shout at. Dig felt a little uneasy concern rising in his chest.

  It took a few minutes for someone to come to the door. Dig watched the smudged blur of a human form making its way to the internal front door through the thick opaque glass. Looked like a bloke. Dig cleared his throat and breathed in deeply, trying to quieten his thumping heart. He felt suddenly and overwhelmingly awkward. What was he going to say once he was face to face with Nadine? What the hell was he going to say? He’d been in such a rush to get round here that he’d hardly given a thought to what would happen once he was here.

  ‘Yeah—who is it?’ rumbled a hoarse male voice on the entry phone.

  ‘It’s Dig,’ he shouted back, ‘who’s that?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s Dig,’ he yelled, this time through the letter-box.

  ‘Dig! Little Dig! Cool. Fucking excellent!’ He could hear various locks and chains being undone and then the door slowly opened. A very thin, gaunt man with a mop of dirty hair and a threadbare lambswool sweater on shuffled out into the hallway. He was barefoot against the mosaic terracotta tiling in the communal hall and was holding in one hand a can of Kestrel and half a mangy-looking spliff. He was grinning so much that Dig could see his gums. He had terrible teeth. And he was limping.

  As he opened the front door he placed his hands on Dig’s shoulders and grinned at him even more. ‘Looking good, Dig, looking really good. Fuck, man, it’s great to see you.’

  He enveloped Dig in a minor hug then, and Dig was almost knocked out by the smell of fags and booze and unwashed hair. Jesus Christ, who was this person? It was only as the man released him from the hug and pulled back to appraise him that Dig realized who it was. He hadn’t recognized him because he’d been smiling, and he’d never seen him smiling so genuinely before.

  ‘Phil?’ he said, uncertainly.

  ‘Come in, man, come in. I tell you—it’s fucking blinding in there.’ He began limping across the tiled flooring again, towards the door.

  Dig followed him, suspiciously. Phil? What was Phil doing here? And what the hell had happened to him in the last ten years? He looked terrible—ravaged, ill and half destroyed. There was nothing left to remind Dig of that shiny, pretentious, leather-trousered tosser he’d first encountered all those years ago, except maybe the shape of his jaw and the line of his nose. But these once-defining features were lost now in a network of sharp angles and deep crevasses that looked like they’d been carved into his face by a psychopath.

  As they entered Nadine’s pink-foil-wrapped hallway Dig stopped in his tracks. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right. These weren’t Nadine’s friends. They were all far too young. There was a girl sitting on Nadine’s art deco cabinet, the one she’d picked up off a skip in Highgate one night after a party and had made Dig help her carry all the way home. It had taken them two and a half hours and they’d had to keep stopping every minute or so to put it down because it weighed a ton and was cutting into their hands. Dig had resented every minute of it and complained the whole way, but he’d had a soft spot for it since, feeling that al
though it was Nadine’s cabinet it was for ever a part of him. And now there was a girl he didn’t know sitting on it, sitting on a pile of Nadine’s precious magazines, swinging her fat-trainered feet back and forth and hitting the shiny walnut of the cabinet clunk clunk clunk. She had several facial piercings and was drinking Ernest & Julio Chardonnay from the bottle. She threw Dig a disinterested look as he walked past her and knocked back another mouthful. There was a bloke sitting at her feet on the floor, also multi-pierced and flicking through a copy of Red magazine. He was tapping his feet manically, to the beat of some kind of unidentifiable dance music emanating very loudly from Nadine’s living room.

  Dig followed Phil’s skinny, limping figure towards the living room, stepping over the man on the floor, and began scanning the flat for any sign of Nadine. He saw a nugget of ash drop from the end of Phil’s spliff, and rubbed it into the dark-green carpet with the sole of his foot as he passed over it, tutting under his breath at Phil’s lack of respect for other people’s carpets. He was starting to make a little sense of the situation now. These were obviously Phil’s friends. Nadine had thrown a party and invited Phil and he’d invited some of his mates, and it explained entirely why Nadine hadn’t invited him—quite apart from the fact that they weren’t on speaking terms: because she knew he didn’t like Phil.

  Poor Nadine he thought to himself. She must be hating this. I bet she’s wishing she’d never even suggested the idea now. And I bet she’s wishing she’d never got in touch with Phil again, out of the blue—he’s not exactly heart-throb material any more. And all this weirdness here might go some way to explaining her bizarre telephone messages.

  Dig tapped Phil on the shoulder and shouted into his ear. ‘Just going to get myself a drink,’ he said, indicating the kitchen at the top of the hallway. He suddenly realized that there was no way he’d be able to face Nadine without at least a glass of wine.