by Mina Ford
George, one deliciously pert buttock raised slightly from the Formica chair as he rummages in his bum cheek pocket for Sobranie fags, is perched opposite her. Clad in a skin-tight, ice-cream pink T-shirt, a pair of silver hipsters and a clonky pair of biker boots, he looks ashen. His eyes have sunk almost entirely into his head and he’s obviously knackered. Which is hardly surprising. It’s the first of January after all, and George is a gay man. He’ll have spent last night tripping his tits off on disco biscuits and dancing to Dana International.
‘Been up all night, have we?’ I tease him gently.
‘Does Judith Chalmers have a passport?’ he grumbles, proffering an unusually pasty cheek.
I grin at him and look across the table at Sam. He is, I have to admit, looking very slightly uncomfortable. But it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is because Janice has practically superglued herself to his side. Poor Sam. Janice has fancied him ever since I introduced them during college days. Any mention of his name in her presence has been accompanied without fail by much phwoar-ing and raising of her clenched fist in a suggestive manner. Sam is terrified of her. I don’t dare tell Janice this, but he’s been known to suggest he’d rather sleep with his grandmother. He says it’s because she looks too much like a drum majorette for his taste, though George reckons it’s more to do with the fact that Sam is a closet queen. But then George always says that about straight men. Especially when he wants to sleep with them.
George, I’m very much afraid, is a tart with a capital T.
I’ve known Sam a lot longer than the other two. Janice and George are friends from college, whereas Sam and I lived next door to one another as kids. We spent our formative years puncturing each other’s Space Hoppers and generally causing as much damage to the other’s few belongings as possible. I broke his swing ball; he hacked off Football Sindy’s legs with a Swiss Army knife. He stamped on my Buckaroo; I threw all the bits of Operation down the toilet. We were expelled from playgroup together for swinging on the chains in the boys’ toilets (at my instigation) until they broke under the strain. Sometimes, we had great fun.
And sometimes we didn’t.
When we were four I cracked his head open with a sandpit spade because my mum let him sit on her lap. Which, I thought, was absolutely fair enough. His noggin bled so much his angelic blond hair turned strawberry pink. Shocked, I forbade him to tell a soul. And like the loyal bud he’s always been, he suffered in silence. I wasn’t found out until we sat down to watch Playschool and my mum noticed the raspberry blobs rapidly appearing across the back of her wicker swing chair. Oh, I was all for sharing, as long as it wasn’t my sodding stuff that got shared. I was an only child, for Christ’s sake. I was sensitive.
Somehow, Sam and I have managed to stay friends. I suppose it helps that my mum and his dad still live in the same street, nipping in and out of each other’s houses for sherry and swapping vegetable marrows and runner bean crops as and when the fancy takes them.
Sam’s changed a bit since we were kids. Now, six feet three and with a shock of sand-blond hair which refuses to behave, no matter what expensive goop he slathers all over it, Sam throws himself with gusto into everything he does. He takes huge bites out of life as though it were a great big toffee apple. Women adore him. He says ‘Jump’, they ask ‘And would you like me to wear knickers?’ He only has to snap his fingers and they come running, frothing at the gusset. I think it must be his enthusiasm. It’s not as though he’s particularly good-looking.
OK, so there was a time when I sort of fancied him. I let him finger the strap of my trainer bra outside the cinema when we were fourteen. But that was only because he bought me a family size bag of Revels and let me eat all the Malteser ones.
Oh, and we snogged each other once at our end of A-level party. But I put that down to too much Thunderbird.
Then Janice spots me, jumping up from her chair and enveloping me in a huge, Giorgio-scented bear hug.
‘Someone smells nice.’ I squeeze her back. ‘Classy bitch.’
‘And you look brilliant,’ she tells me, even though I know I look like a big ginger pineapple.
‘Do I?’
‘Course you do. God, you’re such a lucky bitch, Katie, not having any tits.’
‘Er…thanks.’
‘S’true.’ She looks miserably down at her own chest, sticking her jaw out like us women always do when we check out our cleavages. ‘Everything I wear hangs straight from my nips and makes me look preggers.’
‘You look great,’ I tell her.
And she does. Her clingy black long-sleeved T-shirt emphasises her glorious sweater-girl curves and her pancake-flat stomach. But I can tell she doesn’t really believe me.
We both blame her insecurity on the workplace. She’s got a very good job in advertising. Unfortunately, it means that she’s forced to sit next to tossers who come out with ridiculous stock phrases, like ‘Hold on, Roger, let’s get our ducks in a row on this one’, and ‘We’re not sure how this one’s going to pan out, Frank, so we’ll just have to suck it and see’. All the women who work there wear a lot of black and are so thin they haven’t got bums. Soon, they’re probably going to have to cushion the loo seats to avoid facing legal action relating to injury in the workplace. Poor old Janice works in a bum-free environment. Her surroundings are arse-lite. And the pressure to look emaciated is enormous. She’s tried every diet fad going. The Hay. Weight Watchers. The Elton John. The diet which let her eat anything she wanted, as long as she only ate one of it. Aerobics. Swimming. Trampolining. She even tried to get me to join Bums and Tums with her. Which, of course, was totally impossible. My idea of exercise is bending down to put a couple of pains au chocolat in the oven to warm through. And I’m allergic to those cheesewire leotards that slice you right up your bum.
At the moment, she’s following the advice of some diet guru or other who’s advised her against keeping any food in the house. But it’s not working too well. By bedtime, her tummy’s rumbling so much she’s frenziedly scoffing whole jars of vitamin tablets and tubes of Setlers Tums, just to keep the hunger pangs at bay.
The poor love. It’s not as though she has an eating disorder. She just wishes that she did. She spends a lot of time being pissed off that she doesn’t have the willpower to be anorexic. For her, anorexia is an impossible goal. A bit like seeing a pair of Dolce & Gabbana shoes she knows she’ll never be able to buy, even if she saves up for a decade.
‘I’m starving.’ George pulls a candy-pink fag out of the pack and examines it carefully.
‘Don’t worry,’ I assure him. ‘It doesn’t clash with your T-shirt. What about you, Sam?’ I ask as he gives me a big New Year smacker on the cheek. ‘Are you hungry? What are you having to eat, you fat bastard?’
‘At least I can put on weight if I want,’ he teases me. ‘Which means I don’t have to go around looking like a lanky ginger hockey stick.’
‘Ha ha. Come on, let’s order. I could eat a scabby donkey.’
‘I’m going to have whatever I like as well.’ Janice looks at the menu resignedly, struggling with her desire to look like a Belsen victim versus her craving for cheesy garlic doughballs, spaghetti carbonara and double chocolate ice cream.
‘Might as well,’ I encourage her.
‘Sod it,’ she agrees. ‘I can always yack it up later if I feel like it.’
She wishes.
We order mozzarella-stuffed mushrooms, well-dressed salads and enormous pizzas all round and demand a new bottle of white wine. George orders two pizzas. He feels so terrible he thinks he’s having meningitis, so he reasons he might as well. But that’s nothing new. For a start, he goes out clubbing so much he’s always completely hanging. And he’s a classic hypochondriac. He’s got a big Book of Symptoms at home, which he flicks through at random, convincing himself he’s got raging symptoms of each and every disease in it. AIDS figures weekly. As does emphysema. Last week he was absolutely positive he had deep vein thrombosis. The week
before it was CJD. And he’s had rickets and shin splints God knows how many times.
I love these lunches. Love the fact that my three best friends all get on so well. And, while we wait for the food to arrive, we chatter like sparrows, each telling the others what we’ve been up to over Christmas. Sam, lopsided baseball cap on head, tells us how much his niece loved her Wendy house. And then, bright-eyed with excitement, he rolls up the sleeves of his baggy sweatshirt and yatters about his new house. He finally moved in a week before Christmas and he can’t wait to get going on the decorating.
‘Wait till you see it, Ginge.’ He winks at me. ‘It’s fantastic. Loads of light. And when I’ve decked it all out, I’m going to use one of the upstairs bedrooms as an office.’
‘What for?’ George’s big brown eyes glint mischievously. ‘I’d have thought you’d be needing the extra bed. Then you can get the next old slap in before the last one’s vacated. You won’t even have to wait for the sheets to cool. Just roll her into the damp patch and move on.’
‘Like you’re so chaste.’ Janice waves her cigarette around so that a big carrot of ash drops into my wine. ‘You’ve had more men than my ruddy mother. And that’s saying something.’
I feel sorry for Janice’s mum. Just because she refuses to tell Janice who her father is, we all assume she doesn’t know. Which is, more than likely, complete bollocks. And if you actually sat Janice down and asked her, she’d probably admit that she’s never seen her mum with a man. But we all prefer the slagbag story. It’s much more fun.
‘Can we get back to me?’ Sam is laughing.
‘Me now. Me now,’ I tease him.
‘Don’t you want to know why I need an office?’
‘Not really,’ I joke, lighting myself one of Janice’s fags and jabbing him in the ribs.
‘I’m going to set up my own business,’ he announces proudly.
‘What as?’ George asks. ‘A male escort?’
‘’Cept no one would have to pay him,’ I say. ‘Would they, Sam?’
‘Depends who’s offering. Obviously I might do discounts for very good friends. But you three buggers’d have to pay full whack of course, the amount of piss-taking you do. Anyway, a couple of the clients at my place have been a bit disgruntled recently and I’m sure I could persuade them to come with me. I sometimes think they’d prefer the more personal touch.’
‘Not too personal, I hope?’ Janice laughs.
Sam rolls his eyes to heaven.
‘That’s cool,’ I tell him. ‘Even if it’s a bit scarily grown-up. C’mon, you two. A toast. To Sam’s new business.’
Janice and I clink glasses enthusiastically and then George, anxious to gossip, lights yet another fag and tells us how his job on a TV culinary dating show is going. The week before Christmas a gay couple won a holiday to Martinique on the strength of their steak and kidney pie. Understandably, they were jubilant. And, at the celebration party afterwards, George managed to separate them.
‘I had one in the stationery cupboard over the staplers and took the other into the Ladies.’ He giggles naughtily. ‘Though, looking back, I think giving out my mobile number afterwards was a bit of an error.’
‘To which one?’ Janice asks.
‘Both.’ George laughs. ‘They wrote it down on separate pink Post-its. Barry found my number in Steve’s pocket and clicked. They rang me from the airport. I ruined the holiday, apparently. I mean God only knows what it had to do with me. I got all the bloody blame, obviously. I certainly don’t remember promising to be faithful to either one of them. They should have been mad at each other.’
‘Have you heard from them since?’ Sam asks.
‘No.’ George tosses his head back and exhales smoke through his nostrils like a dragon. ‘I went home for Christmas. Drank port and lemon and played Scrabble with Mum. Chucked my mobile in her fish pond.’
‘And did you tell her?’ I ask, suddenly serious. George, though aged nearly thirty and camper than Carry On Camping, still flatly refuses to tell his mother he’s gay. It’s something to do with her being elderly and he being her only child. Stupid, I call it.
‘No.’
Sam pours more wine and we all agree George is lucky not to have been sacked. Janice says she wishes she could get the sack, because she hates everyone at work so much, and I say I probably will get the sack if I don’t make a start on the article I have to finish by tomorrow morning. Then we all clink glasses again, amidst a chorus of Happy New Years. Which sets Janice off again.
‘Resolutions. Who’s got resolutions? And I don’t mean stupid, shallow ones, like more Croissants for Breakfast.’ She takes one last drag of her fag and stubs it out in the butter dish.
Croissants for Breakfast is Janice and Katie shorthand for cunnilingus, the inference being that cunnilingus doesn’t happen very often, and is therefore a lot like having croissants for breakfast instead of toast.
‘Or getting rid of your duty friends,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean that.’
‘What’s a duty friend?’ asks Sam.
‘They’re the ones who always call you,’ I tell him. ‘You never call them because you don’t give a toss if you never see them again.’
‘Exactly,’ Janice agrees. ‘But they’re always so bloody thick-skinned.’
‘They steadfastly refuse to fuck off,’ I explain. ‘The only way to really get rid of them is to have them killed.’
‘I mean,’ Janice lights another cigarette and gulps more wine, ‘we should all think of something really life-changing we’d like to do this year.’
‘Like what?’ I ask. It’s OK for her. She has a proper career. So does Sam. The PR company he works for is probably one of the top three in the country. Even George has a better job than me. And he doesn’t need one. He has a trust fund that’ll keep him in DKNY knickers for the rest of his life. But his work as a researcher on the TV show—Ready Steady Shag, Can Shag, Will Shag, something like that—means he gets to meet lots of people to have sex with. Which he likes. Hence the Steve and Barry story. He picks off the cream of the gay contestants, ruts them senseless over the urinals then drops them like a hot shit sandwich. He doesn’t even seem to actually do any real work, judging by the number of emails he sends me on a daily basis.
Mind you, neither do I.
I have a crap job. I just drift through life expecting that one day I’ll find out what I want to do for a living.
It hasn’t happened yet.
‘Do you want to hear what mine is then?’ Janice asks. ‘Or not.’
‘Not,’ George says.
‘Yes we do,’ I say. ‘Don’t we? Sam?’
‘Yes.’
Janice takes a deep breath, puts both hands palms down on the table and looks at us intently.
‘This year,’ she breathes, ‘I’m marrying a rich man.’
‘How do you know?’ George asks.
‘Because I’m going to have a bloody good try,’ she says. ‘That’s how I know. I’ve had enough of pissing about with men my own age.’
‘You mean the kind who boast about how many pints they can neck in a session and spend their spare time fantasising about shagging Lara Croft and lighting their farts?’ I say.
‘Exactly.’
‘That counts you out then, Sam.’ I giggle.
Am I imagining it, or is that a flicker of relief I see pass across his face?
‘Don’t worry.’ Janice slaps him playfully on the knee. ‘I’m going older this time. ’S the only way. I’m going for gold.’
‘Old gold,’ I say thoughtfully.
‘I don’t even care about looks,’ Janice drivels on. ‘Although I don’t want a fat one. Or a ginger.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Sorry, Katie. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
‘I’m interested in finance, not romance,’ she carries on. ‘It’s hello hard cash, goodbye hard cock from now on in. You can’t have it all. These days, you have to look at a relationship as an alternative P
EP. Or a TESSA.’ She giggles. ‘Transferring Expenditure to Someone else’s Savings Account.’
Sam looks shocked. As well he might. Janice is just like him and George. Known for working her way through men like a fly through shit. She needs regular and varied sex like I need fags, chocolate and beauty products in nice packaging. Her last three boyfriends have dumped her because they’ve caught her boffing someone else. How on earth is she going to stay faithful to one man? Particularly one who’s old enough to be her father.
‘You’re not going to go really old?’ George looks worried. ‘Not, like, incontinence and dribbling?’
‘I might.’
‘Jesus.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘That is soooooo Jerry Springer.’
‘Sod off.’ Janice nudges Sam. ‘What about you, Sammo? Any resolutions? Apart from becoming your own boss?’
‘I don’t know.’ Sam looks embarrassed. ‘I’m thirty this year. Perhaps it’s time to settle down with that special person.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I snort. ‘Likely! If we saved the condom from everyone you’ve humped and dumped, we’d have enough rubber to bungee jump from the top of Canary Wharf. Don’t pretend you want to change now. You couldn’t if you tried.’
‘What happened to Pilaff?’ asks George.
‘Pia,’ Sam corrects him.
‘Poor Paella,’ I say. ‘He dumped her.’
‘She dumped me, actually,’ he says.
‘Only because you made it quite clear the contents of her knickers no longer interested you,’ I say.
Pia was just one more in a long, very thin line of Sam’s silly bits of fluff. She lasted three months, and I hated her with a passion. Partly because she was gamine and chic and really suited short hair, whereas I am none of the above, but also because she would keep on insisting she came from Tenerife. Which, as I’ve tried to tell Sam, time and time again, is nigh on bloody impossible. You don’t come from Tenerife, for fuck’s sake. It’s a holiday destination.
