by Marian Keyes
‘Snowflakes!’ Marcus declared, his eyes wide and guileless as he scanned the room. ‘They say that no two are alike.’
He let a pause build, then bellowed, ‘But how do they know?’
As people writhed with hilarity, he asked in bewilderment, ‘Have they compared each of them? Have they checked?’
Then he moved on to his next piece.
‘There was a young lady I wanted to ask out,’ Marcus told his besotted audience.
Maybe that’s me? Ashling found herself wondering.
He strolled across the stage, as if deep in thought. The overhead lights hit the hard planes of his thighs.
‘But the last time I asked a young lady for her phone number, she said “It’s in the book.” The problem was I didn’t know her name and when I asked her, she said –’ He paused and with impeccable timing went on, ‘“Oh, that’s in the book too.”’
The venue erupted, but the laughter was sympathetic and of the at-least-it’s-not-just-me type.
‘So I decided I’d act a bit cool.’ He gave a klutzy grin and everyone melted. ‘Thought I’d model myself on Austin Powers and ask the young lady to call me. So I wrote my name and number on a bit of paper and then I asked myself what would Austin Powers say.’ He closed his eyes and held his fingertips to his temples, to show that he was communing with Austin Powers. ‘And suddenly I knew. Bellez-moi!’ Marcus declared. ‘Suave, slick, sophisticated. What woman could resist? Bellez-moi!’
I’m famous. Ashling had an hysterical urge to stand up and tell everyone.
‘And guess what?’ Marcus scanned the audience with a cute, goofy expression. His connection with each person was taut. They strained towards him, full of love, as he stretched the anticipatory silence to its furthest reach, holding his public in the palm of his freckly hand. ‘She never rang!’
No doubt about it, Marcus Valentine had loser star-quality.
Lisa was out of her seat the minute he left the stage. He’d already refused to have lunch with her when Trix had rung his agent but she hoped that extreme flattery and herself in person would change his mind. Ashling watched her block him off at the edge of the stage and wondered if she should follow. She didn’t want to get too near to Marcus, in case he saw her. In case he thought… But Ted was besieged by fans and Joy had just seen Half-man-ha –… Mick talking to another woman and had gone to investigate. After sitting alone for a while longer, Ashling got up.
With curiosity, she watched Marcus watching Lisa as she did her pitch. His head was to one side and he had a perplexed quirky way of turning down his mouth that was delightful. Then Lisa stopped talking and he began. He was in the middle of something that looked very like a refusal, when his eye snagged Ashling’s and he stopped abruptly.
‘Hi,’ he mouthed, and gave her a huge smile, holding her eyes, projecting warmth. As if we have some understanding, Ashling thought uncomfortably. He thinks I came here specially to see him.
He continued talking for a short time longer, but kept sneaking looks, then touched Lisa’s arm in valediction and came over.
‘Hello again.’
‘Hello.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She paused, looked up from under her lashes and smiled. ‘I thought Macy Gray was playing.’ Fuck! she realized. I’m flirting with him.
His laugh was appreciative. ‘Did you enjoy the show?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded and did that eyelash look again.
‘Will you let me take you out for a drink sometime?’
Now that would teach her. She was like a rabbit caught in headlights, who’d bitten off more than she could chew. As it were.
I can’t fancy him just because he’s famous and admired. That would make me very shallow.
‘OK.’ Her voice had decided to go on ahead without her. ‘Call me.’
‘Your number…?’
‘You have it.’
‘Give it to me again to be on the safe side.’
Marcus began an elaborate pantomime of patting himself, vaguely seeking a pen and paper.
Luckily, Ashling had the equivalent of a small stationery cupboard in her bag. She scribbled her name and phone number on a page torn from a notebook.
‘I’ll treasure this,’ he said, folding it small and shoving it deep into the front pocket of his jeans. ‘Next to my heart,’ he promised, in a tone dense with innuendo. ‘I’m leaving now, but I’ll be in touch.’
Confused with herself, Ashling watched him leave. Then, aware that Lisa was looking at her with amusement, she escaped to the ladies’. Where her path to the wash-basin was partially blocked by a small girl with tragic eyes who was standing in front of the mirror, renewing her eye-liner and making herself look even more tragic. As Ashling turned the tap on, the tragic girl turned to her taller friend, who was idly doing circle after circle of jammy pink lip-gloss on her mouth, and said, ‘Frances, you’ll never believe it, but that was me, you know.’
‘What was?’
‘The girl who Marcus Valentine gave that Bellez-moi note to.’
Ashling jerked violently, hooshing water down her front. No one noticed.
Frances did a slow, incredulous body-turn, her lip-gloss applicator frozen against her mouth. Her tragic friend elaborated, ‘It was last Christmas, we stood next to each other for two hours in a taxi-queue.’
‘But why didn’t you bellez him?’ Frances levered her lip-gloss wand away from her mouth and vigorously shook the tragic girl by the shoulders. ‘He’s yummy. Yummy!’
‘I just thought he was some freckly eejit.’
Frances surveyed the shorter girl for a long, thoughtful time before delivering judgement. ‘Do you know something, Linda O’Neill? You deserve your unhappiness, you really do. I’ll never feel sorry for you again.’
Ashling, still washing her hands like someone in the terminal stages of obsessive compulsive disorder, was mesmerized. She spent her entire life looking for Signs, and if this wasn’t a Sign, then she didn’t know what was. Give it a lash with Marcus Valentine, the celestial oracle was urging her. Even if he was handing out Bellez-moi notes like they were flyers, she had a good feeling about this. A very good feeling.
When Ashling re-emerged, Lisa was about to leave. Now that she’d got what she wanted, she saw no reason to hang around this low-rent club any longer.
‘Bye then, see you at work on Monday,’ Ashling said, awkwardly, not sure how chummy she should be.
Lisa wriggled through the crowds, her face satisfied. Not a bad night’s work. Seeing Marcus Valentine had convinced her that he was certainly worth pursuing. Though it wouldn’t be easy. He wasn’t half as guileless in real life. In fact, he was smart – and slippery. Lisa suspected he had no objection to writing a column per se, but that he was holding out for a quality newspaper. To combat which she could feed him some bollocks about possibly syndicating his column to Randolph Media publications worldwide.
And there was that surprise twist – he seemed to fancy Ashling. Between both women, they could launch a pincer approach. The column was as good as in the bag.
But best to move fast and get it all sewn up before he dumped Ashling. Because he would dump Ashling. Lisa knew his type of old. Catapult a nondescript man to a form of stardom and he can’t help availing himself of the extra-curricular girls.
It could get messy – Ashling seemed like one of those pathetic women who took heartbreak hard and the last thing Lisa needed at this busy time was an assistant editor going off the rails. She couldn’t understand weak people who cracked up. It was the sort of thing she’d never do. Of course, this was all based on the assumption that Ashling would go out with Marcus. Perhaps she wouldn’t, and who could blame her? In Lisa’s opinion, he was gross. Those freckles! And making a roomful of pissed people laugh did not cancel them out.
‘Lisaaa, see yaaa. Bye Lisaaa.’ The lads who’d ‘minded’ Lisa at the beginning were waving to her. ‘Bye.’ To her surprise, she smiled.
At the door,
she passed Joy, deep in argument with a man with a grey streak through the front of his long, black hair. On a wild whim Lisa whispered as she passed, ‘Russ Abbott, Hale or Pace, and you must sleep with one of them.’
Joy whirled around, but Lisa was headed for home. As she strode through the streets, she was aware that there had been something about tonight. She had felt… it had been… Suddenly she knew. Fun! It had been fun.
20
And then Lisa woke up the next morning and felt that she couldn’t go on. Just like that. She’d never felt so hopeless. Even in the terrible ugly dying days with Oliver she hadn’t felt so full of despair – back then she’d flung herself into her work, taking bitter comfort that one area of her life was still working.
The thing was that Lisa didn’t really hold with depression as a concept. Depression was a feeling other people got when their lives were insufficiently fabulous. Same as loneliness. Or sadness. But if you had enough nice shoes and ate in enough amazing restaurants and had been promoted over someone who deserved it more than you, there was no need to feel bad.
That was the theory, in any case. But as she lay in bed she was shocked by the extent of her depression. She blamed the curtains and the plethora of pine – it was enough to send any style-conscious person over the edge. She hated the stillness beyond the gauzy light of the room. Fucking garden, she thought savagely. What she wanted was the purr of taxis, the slamming of car doors, the sounds of well-dressed people coming and going. She wanted life outside her window. She had a hangover from the night before – she’d lost count of the number of white wines she’d had and ensuring that every second drink is a mineral water tends to lose its benefit when you’re on your twentieth round. She blamed that Joy.
But the real hangover was emotional. She’d enjoyed herself, had fun, and something had been triggered by the high-spiritedness of the night before, because she just couldn’t stop thinking about Oliver. She’d been doing so well until now. Always managing to block out thoughts of him in the last – she let herself count back – nearly five months. In fact, once she wasn’t resisting thinking about it, she actually knew how many days it had been. One hundred and forty-five. It’s easy to keep track when someone chooses New Year’s Day to leave you.
Not that she’d done much to persuade him to stay. Too proud. And too pragmatic – she’d decided that their differences were irreconcilable. There were some things that she wouldn’t – couldn’t – back down on.
But on this terrible morning, all she could remember were the nice bits, the early days, bubbling with hope and love-to-be.
She’d been working at Chic, and Oliver was a fashion photographer. On the Way Up. He’d bounce gracefully into the office, his little dreads flying, usually carrying an enormous kit-bag, his bulging shoulder dwarfing it. Even when he was late for an appointment with the editor – in fact, especially when – he’d always stop for a chat with Lisa.
‘How was New York?’ she asked, in one conversation.
‘Rubbish. I hate it.’
‘Oh, really?’ Everyone else seemed to love it, but Oliver never bought into the received wisdom.
‘And did you photo any supermodels while you were there?’
‘Oh, yes. Lots.’
‘Yeah? Dish the dirt then, what’s Naomi like?’
‘Great sense of humour.’
‘And Kate?’
‘Oh, Kate is very special.’
Though Lisa was disappointed that he didn’t share insider stories of tantrums and heroin taking, the fact that he was impressed by no one impressed her very much.
Even before you saw him, you always knew when he was in the office. He was perpetually surrounded by commotion – complaining that they’d screwed up his expenses, protesting that they’d printed his beloved shots on too-cheap paper, arguing and laughing energetically. His voice was deep and would have been chocolatey-seductive, except he was too vibrant. When he laughed in public, people always turned to look. If they weren’t already looking, that is. The beauty of his big hard body coupled so incongruously with his rippling grace was bamboozling. When he used to come into the office, Lisa would study him discreetly. ‘Black’ was the wrong word, she used to think. It was far more complex and subtle than that. Everything gleamed – his skin, his teeth, his hair. Not to mention sweat on the editor’s brow. What sort of fuss was he going to kick up today?
Though he was still making a name for himself, he was honest, opinionated and difficult. He never crawled to anyone and when people pissed him off he let them know. It was this confidence, as much as his beauty, that made Lisa decide she wanted him. That his star was very much in the ascendant didn’t hurt either, of course.
Since she’d first started going out with boys, Lisa had always dated strategically. She just wasn’t the type of girl who went out with an insurance clerk. Not that it ever felt quite that cold-blooded. She never made herself go out with a well-connected man whom she didn’t like. Hardly ever, anyway. But she had to admit there were men whom she’d fancied that she knew she’d never take seriously: a charmingly grave court clerk by the name of Frederick; Dave, the sweetest plumber; and – the most unsuitable of all – a sparky petty criminal called Baz. (At least that was the name he told Lisa, but there was no guarantee it was his real one.)
Occasionally she allowed herself a little treat, and had a quick fling with one of these gorgeous no-hopers, but never made the mistake of thinking there was any future in them. They were human Milky Ways – the man you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite.
Her real relationships were with a different calibre of men. A dynamic magazine executive – it was this romance which led to her getting her first job on Sweet Sixteen. An Angry Young Man novelist, who ditched her rather nastily, and whose novels she subsequently ensured got vitriolic reviews (which made him even angrier than he already was). A controversial music journalist, whom she was mad about until he discovered acid jazz and grew a goatee.
Oliver straddled the two categories of men. He was beautiful enough to belong in the first, but talented and stylish enough to hold his own in the second.
With every visit that Oliver made to Chic, the connection with Lisa intensified. She knew he liked and respected her, that their attraction was much, much more than physical. In those far-off days, not everyone she worked with hated her, but the more she became Oliver’s favourite, the more she became Most Loathed Colleague.
Especially after she began doing special favours for him. When she tracked down four missing transparencies, Oliver had good-humouredly blasted the rest of Chic. ‘Listen up, you lot of useless tossers, this lady here is a genius. Why can’t the rest of you be like her?’
At that, a disgusted glance shot around the office like an electric current. Lisa may well have found the missing transparencies, but she’d done bugger all else for the previous two days.
Lisa had been vaguely aware that Oliver had had a girlfriend, but it came as no surprise when the news broke that he was once again single. She knew she was next in line. Though they flirted like mad with each other, they were never coy. Their solidarity was so obvious, it would have been disingenuous to deny it.
So obvious was it that Flicka Dupont (assistant features editor), Edwina Harris (fashion junior) and Marina Booth (health and beauty editor) hatched a plot to cut her out of her share of a basket of free John Frieda shampoos, on the basis that she was getting enough perks.
The expected day finally dawned when Oliver showed up at Chic, made straight for Lisa and said, ‘Babes, can I take you for a drink on Friday night?’
She hesitated, about to play hard to get, then thought better of it. With a shaky laugh she exhaled, ‘OK.’
‘You were going to make me suffer, weren’t you?’ he exclaimed.
‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded solemnly.
They both screamed with laughter so loud that, three desks away, Flicka Dupont muttered, ‘Please!’ and had to twiddle her finger in her ear to dislodge the rin
ging.
Flicka later sniffed to Edwina, ‘I don’t envy her.’
‘Gosh, neither do I!’
‘He’s a loose cannon.’
‘A pain in the bum,’ Edwina agreed.
They plunged into silence.
‘I’d quite like to have sex with him though,’ Flicka eventually admitted.
‘Would you really?’ Edwina had never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.
On the appointed Friday night, Oliver and Lisa went for a drink. Then he took her for dinner, where they had such fun that afterwards they went to a club and danced for hours. At three a.m. they went to his flat and had breathless, long-awaited sex, before snatching a few hours’ sleep. The following morning they awoke in each other’s arms. They spent the rest of the day in bed, talking, dozing and intermittently savaging each other with passion.
That evening, sated, they voluptuously rose from their lovers’ nest and Oliver took Lisa to a fairly crappy French restaurant, its only virtue that it was walking distance. Lit by red candles stuck in wine bottles, they fed each other tasteless mussels and tough coq au vin.
‘It’s the most delicious food I’ve ever tasted.’ Lisa licked her fingers and gazed across the table at him.
On the way home, they got swept up into an Armenian wedding that was being held in the local church hall. ‘Come, come,’ an expansive man invited, as they drifted past. ‘Celebrate my son’s happiness.’
‘But…’ Lisa protested. This was no way for a style warrior such as herself to spend Saturday night! What if someone she knew saw her?
But Oliver said easily, ‘Why not? Come on, Lees, might be fun.’
Drinks were pressed into their hands, and they sat in a bubble of dream-like ease as all around, young and old in embroidered, flouncy peasant clothes, danced strange polka-like jigs to shrill, speedy bazouki-style music. An old woman with a headscarf and a thick accent pinched Lisa’s cheek affectionately, smiled from Oliver to her and said, ‘In laff. So in laff.’
