After Ever After

by Rowan Coleman

  She had held Ella at arm’s length and eyed her speculatively.

  ‘I can see why you love her and everything,’ she’d said, slowly. ‘But I’ve got to tell you, mate, I just don’t see it myself.’

  We’d both laughed but I really don’t think she was joking.

  I look at Camille’s concerned face and think how my two separate best friends have gradually become closer to each other than I am to either of them. Once I was the hub on which our friendship turned. Now I feel more like a spare wheel. I don’t know if Dora has ever told Camille about her childhood in care, but I do know that Camille knows more about Dora right now than I do, and that makes me feel guilty.

  ‘But she’s all right now, going to the meetings and all,’ I say, partly to reassure myself. ‘Told me she got asked out by some really old crusty guy and she totally binned him and it was only when she got home that she realised he was a really famous sixties rock star!’

  I laugh, keen to show that I am still a part of Dora’s life. She does call me every week, but in reality our conversations are short and restless. There is really pretty much nothing that we have in common any more, except for the fact that we’ve loved each other for such a long time and need each other the way everyone in the world needs somewhere to come from and somewhere to go back to.

  ‘Oh yeah, I heard about that.’ Camille takes her eyes off the passing crowds to look at me. ‘I think she’s all right, but we thought she was all right before we knew anything, didn’t we? I mean, when I was a kid you knew if your best mate was hooked on smack. They had spots and really greasy hair and they acted like Zammo off of Grange Hill. No one tells you that they can appear, well … normal, more or less. I want to trust her, I need to, I think. She hasn’t got anyone else to show they have faith in her.’ I look studiously at my cutlery before Camille adds, ‘Well, except you, of course.’

  Suddenly something in the crowd catches her eye.

  ‘There she is!’ Camille waves wildly, half standing in her chair. I scan the crowd looking for Dora, but her transformation is so complete that she is practically standing in front of me before I see her.

  I stare at her. The black-haired bob and cut-price chic have vanished. The Dora that has approached our table has totally reinverted herself into, well, herself. Her natural blonde hair has been cut into a spiky cap, which suits her pointed chin and big green eyes. Her normally ash-white skin is slightly tanned and she is wearing a City-chic summer trouser suit that shows off her long legs.

  ‘Bloody hell, do I know you?’ I smile with delight, hugging her close, feeling her thinness sharply against the padding of my curves.

  ‘Mate!’ Dora holds me away from her and studies me. ‘You look good, glowing and everything. Lost a bit of that extra weight since I saw you last … still got those enormous breasts, mind you. Blimey, how do you get out of doorways?’

  We laugh and sit down, still holding hands. I look from Camille to Dora and feel at home.

  ‘Oooh, let’s order wine,’ I say happily. ‘I’m such a cheap date these days that I’ll be pissed after half a glass …’ I look up from the wine menu to see both Camille’s and Dora’s smiles fixed on their faces.

  ‘What?’ I ask them. They exchange glances. ‘What?’ I repeat.

  Dora screws up her mouth.

  ‘Booze, mate, not allowed booze,’ she says with a half-smile. ‘It’s the programme I’m on. I’m not allowed any addictive substances except fags and caffeine.’ Dora lights up as she says this and I cringe at my own thoughtlessness. Dora shrugs. ‘It’s cool, I’m so detoxed that I reckon my liver’s gone into shock.’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out her packet of Marlboro’s. ‘Mind you, I fully expect to croak it from lung cancer any time soon.’

  I smile uncertainly and Camille catches my eye encouragingly.

  ‘Well, then – it’s not as if I’m not used to being teetotal either.’ I look up at the waiter who has appeared at our table. ‘Two large bottles of mineral water, please.’ I look at Dora. ‘Are you allowed sparkling or are all those bubbles evil or something?’

  Dora laughs and the tension passes.

  ‘No, go for it.’ She smiles at the waiter and studies his arse as he retreats. ‘Anyway, enough about me; how’s Prince Charming? How’s the baby? Tell us about your new life in the count-ry.’ Dora enjoys exaggerating the first syllable of the word. She leans back in her chair and takes a deep drag on her cigarette.

  I think about my new life. I get up, I look after Ella, at some point during the twenty-four hours in each day I must sleep otherwise I’d be dead by now. That’s it. I look at them, waiting expectantly, and wonder exactly how much they’d really care about Ella’s attempts at crawling, or that her hair is gradually beginning to curl or that when I sing to her she seems to hum along, if a little bit tunelessly. I know that really it won’t mean a thing to them, and I know that it’s not because they are heartless or that they don’t care. It’s just that since Ella’s birth I’ve been living in a parallel universe, like a piece from a different jigsaw puzzle that just happens to fit into their world too. If you look at the big picture as far as Dora and Camille are concerned, I don’t make any sense any more. I smile and wave the minutiae of my life away in a single gesture.

  ‘It’s great. Fergus is great. Ella is great. Everything is great really. It’s great. I’m tired, but, you know … it’s great.’ I shrug and cast about for a change of subject. ‘Camille – tell me about your hair! You said there was a story?’

  Camille claps her hand over her mouth and laughs. ‘Oh my God …’

  Ten minutes later Dora and I exchange disbelieving but unsurprised glances.

  ‘You’re joking,’ I say. ‘You’re mad. I know how much you earn and you are mad.’

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t think it’d cost that much.’ Camille shrugs. ‘I mean, I didn’t check how much it would cost but you know how you have an idea of cost in your head? I thought it’d be about eighty quid, max.’ She raises her hands with a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.

  ‘So, let me get this straight.’ Dora lights a new cigarette from an old one and then vigorously puts out the stub. ‘You told Alex that you were having this weave and that it would cost thirty quid, even though in your little world you’d decided it was going to cost you eighty quid, which you still can’t afford anyway. You go to the salon, not any salon mind, but one on the King’s Road. You go there without bothering to check the price first and then when you go to leave they charge you one hundred and sixty-five pounds. That’s one hundred and sixty-five pounds!, and you have to have it done again in six weeks?’ She downs the remnants of her water like she once would have a straight whisky. ‘I tell you, you should come to NA with me, mate. I’m sure we can get you in on the grounds that you’re addicted to spending money you don’t have.’

  Camille picks up her glass and gives a little shrug.

  ‘Well now, it would have been all right, I mean, not all right but okay, except that when I went to pay neither of my cards went through, both maxed out.’ Camille giggles. ‘So I phoned my mum but she told me if I couldn’t pay for it I had to sit right back down and have it taken out. Well obviously that wasn’t an option, and by now everyone’s looking at me and I’m trying my best not to die of embarrassment. So, in the end I had no choice. I had to phone Alex, pull him out of a meeting, explain the situation to him and get him to pay over the phone! Nightmare.’

  I laugh. Camille’s cheerfully fatalistic telling displays exactly what kind of a nightmare she thought it was, a fluffy sort of nightmare that actually qualifies as a dream. A dream boyfriend, that is.

  ‘How much does that man love you? If you were my girlfriend I’d have sacked you years ago!’ I tell her, banging my palm down on the table.

  Camille smiles ruefully.

  ‘Well, he was pretty fed up, but you know us. Nothing keeps us mad at each other for long. I think it’s because he’s away a lot, it keeps it fresh …’ She diverts her gaze to the
middle distance, gently touching her hair. ‘We sure made up good and proper that night. I tell you, this was worth every penny …’

  Dora and I exchange glances and silently mouth ‘yuck’ to each other.

  ‘I bet you hide shopping from him too, don’t you? And then bring it out a couple of weeks later and say you’ve had it ages,’ I say mischievously.

  Camille is unrepentant. ‘Yeah, of course I do! Don’t you?’ She looks from me to Dora.

  ‘No fucker to hide it from,’ Dora shrugs, happily lighting up another cigarette with the embers of the last one. ‘And anyway, it’s my money, I earn it, I’ll spend it on what I like as long as I don’t have to go to a bloke in Dalston to get it and it isn’t gonna kill me.’

  Camille and I smile uneasily. It has always been Dora’s policy to joke about her problems and sometimes, like now, I feel it’s designed more to make other people squirm than to make herself feel better.

  ‘What about you, Kits? Now you’re a lady of leisure, do you have to account for every penny to Prince Charming?’

  I laugh it off, squirming from the truth.

  ‘No, don’t be mad. We share things. I mean, I’m not earning at the moment but I will be soon, when Ella’s a bit bigger maybe … Fergus and I have agreed,’ I lie. In fact we have disagreed about it heartily for the last six months. I want to work, not because I want to escape my baby but because I need to; it’s part of me. I’ve always had to look after myself before; a virtual orphan as a child, I dragged myself up.

  And that’s the problem. Fergus is obsessed by his mission to make sure that for the first time in my life I don’t have to worry about anything at all. When we first got together it sounded like a dream come true. In fact, the more protective he became the more vulnerable I let myself be. But now I find that I miss getting out there and making a contribution to my world that I can see in hard cash.

  Fergus is certain that I’m trying to put a brave face on it and that really I just want to be looked after. And I do, but I want to look after him too. We haven’t had a stand-up row about it, it’s just that every time I bring it up, he puts his arms around me, kisses me on the top of my head and tells me everything’s fine, and it is. But what I don’t think he sees, what I don’t think he realises, is that I feel as if I’m fading from the world, gradually becoming invisible as what used to be me seeps into other people lives.

  As much as I love being with Ella, there will be a time when I need to detach myself from the background hum of our lives and be visible in the world as myself again, as an individual, and I’m fairly sure it doesn’t mean I’m a bad mother or a selfish person. I just need to be a person, an occasional individual person, and Fergus can’t see that – not yet.

  I find myself nodding like one of those dogs in the back of a car and I force my neck to a standstill. ‘It’s cool. I don’t feel like the little woman or anything,’ I say out loud. ‘You know Fergus: the world’s sweetest bloke.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Camille agrees. ‘And the world’s fittest bloke. I tell you, I’d let Alex support me any day of the week.’ Her eyes sparkle as she says it.

  ‘You already do!’ Dora says and we all laugh. Camille glows, and not for the first time in my life I wonder how she stays as much in the first flush of love as if she and Alex had met only yesterday.

  ‘Dors!’

  All three of us turn our heads sharply as two other women enter the room. I squirm uncomfortably in my chair. It’s one thing to feel big and frumpy with your two best mates, it’s another thing entirely when unknown thin people arrive on the scene. They don’t know that I too used to be thin and that I’ve recently had a baby. They’ll think that I’ve always been fat! I suck in my stomach, although it makes no impression, hidden as it is under the voluminous shirt, and I can feel the solid folds that were left behind after Ella’s eviction.

  ‘Oh, all right!’ Dora raises her cigarette in greeting and turns back to me, lowering her voice. ‘That’s Alice and Karina. Really her name’s Karen but she’s moved to Ladbroke Grove and gone all West London. Alice is a trustafarian, spent all of Daddy’s cash on cocaine. He’s cut off her allowance and now she has to model to pay her rent, poor cow.’

  Dora’s smile is paper-thin. ‘Karina is a PR exec, vodka. Her enlightened company forced her to attend NA after she threw up on the CEO’s desk during a board meeting. Personally I think they’re both lightweights, but knowing them helps me keep sight of the big picture.’ Dora’s smile widens as her new friends approach the table.

  ‘Ladies, how are we?’ she says with a rarely seen charm she reserves only for people she doesn’t like much. I smile at them nervously. Alice looks like she’s been San-Tropezed from head to foot, her skin a tawny gold and her hair streaked with blonde. Karina’s perfectly straight brown hair falls exactly to her shoulder-line and grazes the tops of her rounded shoulders. Why don’t they look like shit? I’ve been off any kind of toxic substance, including peanut butter, for over a year and I look like shit. Where’s the justice?

  ‘And this is Kits.’

  Dora introduces me and I haul myself back into the moment. I sit back in my chair certain that surely I, the married one with the baby and the lovely home, should have the moral high ground over three ex-addicts – four if you include Camille’s kamikaze flirtation with credit – but for some reason I feel as if these walking wounded have left me standing out in the cold, excluded from their fascinating complex of ‘issues’.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Karina says matter-of-factly as she slips into a chair. ‘I saw Julian last night and … we finally did it!’

  I blink as Dora screams enthusiastically and reaches across the table to hug Karina’s modest shoulders with one arm, extending her lit cigarette over the ashtray with the other. Even Camille seems to know what they’re talking about.

  ‘Soooo?’ Dora plonks back into her chair. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Please,’ Alice rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t encourage her. I’ve heard every single detail on the tube along with half of London …’

  Karina grins smugly.

  ‘Put it this way, I haven’t felt this sore since my first session of advanced yoga.’ She points her cigarette at her feet and then back to her face. ‘These toes were behind these ears only last night!’ The explosion of laughter washes over me and retreats without sweeping me up in its exuberance.

  I brush my hair off my shoulder and lean forward into the conversation.

  ‘So you’ve got stubble rash where you can’t see, have you?’

  Karina smiles fleetingly in my direction and rushes on as if I’m not there. As I listen to her exploits, to Dora’s sweetly sarcastic commentary and Camille’s enthusiastic giggles, I feel jealous, far away and jealous. This used to be me. I used to be Karina, the one who rushed in with the tales of terrible boyfriends and stupid sex. I used to be the person who had my friends in fits of hysteria as I told them about my latest conquest. I used to be the one constantly fluttering like a butterfly, excited and flushed by the promise and the hope of new love. At last Fergus had fulfilled that promise and had ended once and for all that constant edginess, that eternal waiting – yet somehow I miss it. Somehow I thought I could come back up to London and, abracadabra!, I’d still be the same person I was before Fergus and Ella. Somehow, I thought that everything that had changed in my life wouldn’t matter any more, not to the real me, not to my closest friends. But it does. In a flash of understanding, I realise I’m not me any more. I’m not me in my big house and posh kitchen in Berkhamsted, and I’m not even me in a London café with my best friends. I’m not me any more. Karina is, and she’s not even very good at it.

  ‘Are we ordering food?’ I say clumsily over the conversation so that I look rude and, what’s more, greedy. The waiter has returned to our table about eight times since Alice and Karina have arrived but so far has been unable to get a word in.

  ‘Oh, God. Food!’ Karina giggles. ‘I always forget food.’

  Dora throws me a look
, rolling her eyes, and says, ‘Yes, Christ, I’m starving. Bring it on. Kits, what do you fancy?’

  I’ve already decided on a spinach and ricotta lasagne, but before I can order, Alice, who has been trying not to stare at my breasts for the last few minutes, interrupts me.

  ‘Um, Katie, is it? Sorry to butt in, it’s just I think that … well, are you leaking?’

  I stare at her for a beat and then down at my shirt. A dark wet flower has blossomed over my left breast and a companion patch is just coming into bud over my right. The waiter politely excuses himself once again and I close my eyes in shame. I had felt them begin to feel a little heavy, but I never imagined that this would happen. It was time for Ella’s last feed about an hour ago, but as I haven’t been anywhere without her in six months I’d forgotten this could happen. I am soaked through and I have nothing to change into. I can feel the heat radiating from my face and I bite back tears.

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. Oh fuck. Look … Oh God, I’d better go …’ I push my chair away from the table and stand up, for once yearning for the invisibility that usually stalks me.

  ‘Don’t be mad,’ Dora says, catching my hand. ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the loo and we can stick your boobs under the dryer.’

  She smiles encouragingly but I shake my head and the threatened tears begin to run down my cheeks.

  ‘No, it’ll just stain, I’d better go.’

  Dora holds on to my hand, looking at me, silently asking me not to leave. I am acutely aware of Karina and Alice staring at me as if I am the fucked-up one.

  ‘Please, Dora. I want to go,’ I say in a low voice, and she releases my hand, unable to hide her disappointment.

  Camille picks up her bag. ‘I’ll go with her,’ she says to Dora.

  ‘No!’ I shout, making her jump and stare at me, her eyes wide with surprise. I lower my voice. ‘No, I’ll be fine. I can look after myself, okay. I’m fine. I just need to go. I’ll call you both …’