by Anna Maxted
“Could you tell him,” I beg his PA, “that it’s a matter of life and death?”
“Excite me,” says Tony. He yawns for effect.
“Well,” I say, relieved to be granted the royal pardon (implicit in not having my head bitten off), “the good news is, Mel likes you but she, er, also likes a challenge, so if I were you I wouldn’t do anything ah, demonstrative for Valentine’s Day—”
“What, so she’ll turn down a weekend in Paris?”
“Er…” I am briefly stunned by this, as the most my brother has ever given a woman for Valentine’s Day is the boot.
“Ah, what I meant was, if I were you I wouldn’t do anything demonstrative for Valentine’s Day except take her to Paris for the weekend.”
“Thought so.”
“And the bad news,” I shrill, before he cuts me off, “is that I’ve lost my job and Mum wants me to start work as a till girl for a dry cleaner’s in Borehamwood.” I regale him with a pruned version of the messy tale (time is money).
Tony whistles. “Floozie,” he murmurs. “A question. We’re throwing mash at Mother, we’re gobbing off about classified information that isn’t our business, we’re getting fired by the tutu factory, and we’re hanging with managers of dodgy bands. We’re the faint breeze that grows into a hurricane. Are we, by any chance, losing it?”
I allow my gut retort time to dissolve. “As far as I know,” I reply eventually, “I’m sane.”
“Christ,” he exclaims.
“What?” I ask.
“In Catch-22 terms,” he says gravely, “that means you’re a psycho.”
My brother is speaking to me, I tell myself, as I look up the number of the Fairbush Gynecology Clinic. Even if what he says isn’t that complimentary. Still, my resolve is weakened—I feel as if a large rat has chomped through it and all that remains is a thread—and I dial the number slowly.
“Fairbush Gynecology Clinic!” tweets a receptionist who has obviously worked on her motivation and given her all to this precious line. “How may I direct your call?” (Clear diction, gentle yet searing emphasis on the “direct,” the “call” fading to a Monroe-esque coo, well-paced, unobtrusive breathing technique, altogether very convincing.)
“Oh, hello. May I speak to Dr. Vincent Miller? It’s his daughter.”
“One moment please, I’ll put you through to his assistant.”
I go through the rigmarole again, but Dr. Miller is with a client.
“Could I possibly leave a short message?”
“Sure,” says his assistant sourly, obliterating—again—the myth that Americans are polite. I can’t understand it. I am always obsequious to foreigners—I’m a lone ambassador, I’m representing my nation!
“If you could say—”
“Hold it!…Okay, go ahead.”
“If you could just say”—I grit my teeth—“that Kimberli Ann is welcome to call me anytime to discuss the issues.”
“Pardon me?”
“The issues!” I boom. “Now you say ‘Bless you!’ ”
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind,” I mumble, wondering why I continue to humiliate myself by turning out jokes a Christmas cracker would be ashamed of. “Thank you so much, ’bye.”
I have no intention of paying the slightest heed to any New Age nonsense that Kimberli Ann cares to garble, but the gesture is all and my father will be delighted. I slump in my chair and decide that blissful pink cloud or no blissful pink cloud, good intentions are an ordeal and I don’t have the strength—mental or physical—to call Saul. I picture his cheery face. I miss him, a little. He’s a gentleman. A gentleman that comfort-eats—his phrase!—like a middle-aged housewife. No. I don’t miss him at all. I ring Chris instead.
“Is there, um, any chance you’re free tonight?”
“I might be,” he replies. “Why? Slaphead blown you out?”
I titter wearily. “You know Robbie’s just a friend. Not even a friend! An acquaintance. Anyway, I thought, seeing as it’s Valentine’s Eve, I could cook you dinner.”
“Dinner?” says Chris.
I know he isn’t a great foodie—he’s skin and bone and I rarely see him eat—but he sounds positively insulted.
“Er, yes,” I say, hoping I haven’t unwittingly said something terrible in rhyming slang.
“Valentine’s Eve?” he says, his tone confirming the worst.
“It was a joke,” I gabble, realizing too late that I have committed a heinous sin—I have dared suggest that tomorrow, February 14, is a special occasion. I have wielded the ax of fake romance over his innocent head and our defenseless relationship, I’ve put G-force pressure on him to translate his feelings into garish bouquets and slushy cards and soppy gifts, I’m forcing him into an (expensive) public display of how much he rates me—a display that can and will be measured against other displays, that will be judged and criticized by colleagues and friends, that will make him resent me, despise me, and dump me the following day.
“What I meant was,” I add in a rush, “it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, so don’t bother doing anything.”
I just about manage not to choke on the words.
“If you insist,” drawls Chris. “I’ll be round at eight.”
“Yes,” I mutter. “Great.”
Blast.
I am charging around the supermarket like a bull with a drawing pin in its butt, when my mobile rings.
“Hello?” I say, screeching to a halt by the endless rows of cream, double cream, single cream, extra thick single cream, clotted cream, whipping cream, sour cream…
“Natalie!” cries a voice, distinct from the majority in being friendly not furious.
“Yes?” I say, warily.
“It’s Andy. Babs told me! So I’m forgiven for whatever it was I did? Ah, Natalie, you star! One more week at my parents’ and I’d have turned into a bloke who wears a patterned sweater stained with egg and stalks the hairdressers off Coronation Street.”
“You’d have racked up a fortune in train fares,” I suggest. “You’d have spent your whole life rushing from London to Manchester.”
“You saved me,” he replies, “but I tell you—it was close! So, ah, when do you want me?”
I’ll say one thing about Barbara’s family. They’re not backward in coming forward. If I had been offered a room by me, I’d ask if I was sure it was still okay—as a courtesy if nothing else. To blithely assume that people mean what they say! It’s like swearing undying friendship with the couple you meet in the Algarve, enduring the necessary charade of exchanging addresses, promising to visit them in Huddersfield, and then, a month later when your tan has faded and you’ve forgotten they existed, receiving an insolent and overfamiliar call from two strangers, inviting themselves to stay at your home for the weekend!
“Sunday?”
“Good for me,” replies Andy. “Any particular time?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t know, uh, you say.”
“Three?”
“Yes, that sounds fine.”
“Great. And you can tell me what I’m paying and run through the house rules—no five-in-a-bed orgies, class-A drugs only, curfew eight-thirty?”
“Curfew, eight-fifteen,” I say sternly, “and strictly no more than four in a bed.”
When I hang up, I’m smiling.
Chris is not smiling. I have spent the last three hours preparing an elaborate meal: guacamole with paprika-toasted potato skins (from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat), cod wrapped in ham, with sage and onion lentils (Nigella again—the woman’s a genius), and seven-minute steamed chocolate pudding (ditto, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), the fresh coriander and lime infusing my kitchen with a glorious burst of sharp-scented sunniness, the hot crispiness of the potato jackets, so crackly and satisfying, the thick creamy green avocado pulp, the cool slippery white fish, the sweet pearly pinkness of the ham, the shiny brown lentils, such pretty colors, a delicious piece of modern art, the overpowering smell of the warm rich oozy
chocolate clinging to my senses like a vampire to a neck. I have chopped and scooped and mashed and peeled and stoned and pulped and sliced and baked and watched Chris juicily devour every bite. I’m not that hungry, so I just sip a little white wine.
But Chris is not smiling because as he scratches the last scrape of brown gluey pudding from its smooth china bowl, I tell him that Andy is moving in on Sunday. The timing isn’t wonderful but, after my discussion with Babs, I feel a little braver. Also, I now know I’m getting nothing for Valentine’s Day—and if I’m going down, I might as well go all the way.
(This opinion, I confess, is borrowed from Tony, who once sparked a debate at Black Moon Records on the topic, Which Serial Killer? Head of A&R said he’d like to be murdered in a relatively quick and painless fashion, preferably injected with morphine by a mad doctor. My brother was keen to be gorily dispatched by a more flamboyant psychopath: “I want to be clogging up drains, I want double-page investigations in Sunday newspapers…” It wasn’t a tasteful discussion, but the gist was, if you’re going, go out with a bang.)
“Who the bleedinell is Andy?” says Chris.
“He’s Babs’s brother. It’s purely a business decision,” I bleat, quaking inwardly. “He’s only staying for a couple of months. Until his lodgers move out,” I add. “He’s got a flat in Pimlico. He’s all right, just a bit dull. Thing is, I need the money, and I—I owed Babs a favor.”
“Right,” says Chris tonelessly. He shoves away his bowl, and sparks up a cigarette. He doesn’t offer me the packet, so, fumblingly, I light one of my own.
“So what’s this geezer do?”
“I’m not sure. He used to be in finance.”
Chris snorts. His subtext is easily legible as “capitalist pig.”
“You…we…we went to his birthday party at that Mexican place, the karaoke, remember?”
Chris expels a disdainful jet of smoke.
I tap my ash into my silver Takashimaya ashtray and consider reneging on my offer to Andy. I don’t want to upset Chris, but nor do I want to offend Babs. I am about to apologize for my thoughtlessness, when Chris rises from his chair and declares, “Gotta go.”
“You’re going?”
“Your point?” he says in a tone that would wither a forest.
“No, no,” I stammer, “nothing.”
“Know this, princess,” he snaps, on his way out, “I won’t be messed with. Capisce?”
No one has ever said “capisce” to me before, and in a silly middle-class way I feel quite glamorous. Which isn’t to say that I don’t sit at the table and mope at my clunky tactlessness and wasted cooking and pointless effort and the certain gloom of a barren Valentine’s Day and my inability to do anything right and my knack of upsetting people and being shouted at and walked out on.
But when, at ten past midnight, I stop grizzling, it occurs to me that this is the first time a nongeek has ever accused me of “messing” with him. And, soggy as I am, I can’t help taking a little pride in that.
19
I SET MY ALARM EARLY FOR VALENTINE’S DAY, BUT when it starts shrieking at seven I’m already awake. I couldn’t sleep after Kimberli Ann called, at 1:10 A.M., to discuss my issues.
Kimberli Ann is actually intelligent, but she is interested only in herself and how the world relates to her, and that makes her stupid. She imagines she has empathy but can only see things her way. She won’t help you because she cares about you, but because she wants to spread the word of Kimberli Ann. (She certainly converted my father.) She will get what she wants eventually—a film deal—because that’s all she cares about. She isn’t brilliant but she’s good enough.
Anyhow, I lay in bed, limp and puffy-eyed, and we had an interesting chat. Though, I suspect, not quite the chat my father had envisaged. Kimberli Ann was blown away to hear about my weight loss, but from what “Vinny” (gik!) said, my situation was “subclinical,” more a “lifestyle disorder,” like, I was this tall and so many pounds, so in point of fact I was a “cheeseball anorexic,” I wasn’t thin enough to be rushed to hospital and force-fed a calorific dinner by experts.
Right? Er, right. So if I wanted to shape up, Kimberli Ann had the skinny on how. I shouldn’t fast. That’s way unhealthy, she informed me. The body loves to store fat when it’s fasting. It’s like you’re stranded on a desert island so like, your metabolism slows and you gain fat. Had I heard of fat blockers? Like, they block the absorption of dietary fat. Pop one of these babies and I could eat candy, cookies, I could sin all day. Okay, I might need the bathroom without warning, I might experience gas with discharge, oily spotting, fatty stools with an orange coloration, and an inability to control my bowels but hell, I sure wouldn’t have to control my sugar budget!
Having relieved herself of this wisdom (and heaven knows what else) she tells me to get a good night’s sleep, as lack of sleep is considered to be a factor in the current obesity epidemic in the United States.
I think this is a joke, but the eerie possibility that it might be true keeps me bolt awake till morning. Despite feeling like molten lead has been poured in my ear during the night, when the alarm shrills, I’m pleased to get up. I conclude it’s good to have options—isn’t that what democracy is all about—but that fat blockers are for people devoid of willpower. I have enough challenges, I don’t wish to welcome orange pooh to the fray.
Besides. Today I keep my promise to Babs. I will eat enough to keep my hair on. Hence the alarm call. I faff around getting dressed, delaying the point at which I have to sit down at the table. I set out my plate, my Caffeine Queen mug, and remove a slice of bread from the freezer.
“Even one piece of toast is better than crispbread,” Babs said yesterday. “Crispbread is bulked-up air, there’s nothing to it.”
Funnily enough, this didn’t put me off it. But “whole-grain bread is busting with hair vitamins” encouraged me to make the leap. A scrape of butter. A scrape of Marmite. I eat as slowly as a snail with its jaw wired, but I eat.
My heart bops all the while and I feel my stomach recoil at the assault. Chew. Chew. Chew. Chew. Swallow. The toast sticks dryly in my throat, and scratches on the way down. I sip water but the pain remains. My weak, useless hair. Other women lose weight and their hair doesn’t fall out. Typical. I even fail at dieting. My eyes start to prickle and I feel heavy, like a sodden wash-cloth. I stare into the mud of my thick black coffee. The cheat’s laxative. I drink it, and a wispy blond hair falls onto the table’s white surface. I’ve got nowhere to go today, why did I even get up? Suddenly I am pulling yanking tearing at my hair, panting, vicious, ouch, impotence.
I unclench my fists and inspect them, listlessly. Eleven hairs. Oh genius, Natalie. The kitchen scissors are in the drawer, why not hack off the rest? I speed to the bathroom mirror to inspect the damage, carefully lifting and parting sections of my hair, like a chimpanzee hunting for nits. I blur my vision to avoid sight of my blotchy face so, not surprisingly, I don’t spot any bald patches.
“You gibbon,” I tell myself. Then I step on the scales. Exactly the same. I try not to smile, but the satisfaction ripples through me. I smooth my jumper, splash my burning cheeks with cool water, destroy all evidence of my bizzarre autotussle—I must have looked like a woman with a bee in her ear—and walk to the news agent. Before the postman can disappoint me.
Hair, hair, glorious hair, I think, squeezing my knuckles. I am still breathing hard, like a claustrophobic spelunker. At least I don’t have to suffer the tube—all those other women, bouncing glossy shampoo ads the lot of them, all grinning like death masks in smug expectation of the fat bouquets that await them at the office. (Rigorously trained men always send their bouquets to the office, there’s no point otherwise.) I need to speak to Babs, I need to be reassured. She’ll be home from her shift at 9:30-ish. The toast sits inside me like a lump of metal. I feel dragged forward by it, my belly—ugh, vile swelly word—has become a bowling ball. To accommodate its bulk I need to walk with a stoop.
I
buy The Telegraph—Julietta smiles mournfully from the front page—and a new pen. I wander aimlessly up and down Primrose Hill High Street for an hour, trying to enjoy the freedom of fecklessness, then slouch home again. That heartless postman hasn’t delivered my mail. I’m wondering whether to call the sorting office, when my phone rings.
“Natalie? Frannie.”
I jump and hold the phone like a rotting banana, between a finger and thumb, a safe distance from my ear.
“Frannie,” I croak, “how are things? How did you know—”
“They said you no longer worked at the GL Ballet. I presume you left of your own accord?”
“Of course!”
“I’m stunned. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I am tempted to bang my head against the wall in case I’m dreaming. Backhanded, yes, barbed, undoubtedly, but was that…a compliment?
“So, Natalie. What are you wearing for Babs and Si’s dinner party tomorrow?”
What? That burst of humanity was brief. First, what I wear has as much relevance to Frannie as it does to an Albanian refugee. Second, Frannie regards appearance queries as demeaning to both parties (in the same way that she objects to women who claim a dependency on chocolate: “Men like it as much and eat more of it than women, they just don’t make such a big deal of it!”). And third, Frannie would join the Baywatch fan club before asking my advice on, say, any subject in the universe.
Babs and Simon are having a party and I am not invited! The thoughts stampede. Did Frannie ask who else was coming? Or did Babs tell Frannie to keep it secret? Did Babs forget to ask me? Did Simon ask her not to? Was it because Babs objects to Chris? And why am I left out when I bit the frigging bullet and asked her big smug brother to stay in my flat? Is he invited? Did I offend her yesterday? How can I answer Frannie’s question without conceding match point?
