Ralph's Party
Page 31
Right now, he was going to bed …
Jem and Ralph stood at the top of the basement steps and watched the full moon for a while.
‘It was a full moon the night I first came to see the flat, you know?’ said Jem, her arm tucked firmly around Ralph’s waist.
‘Oh, yeah?’ he murmured happily, dropping a kiss on to the top of Jem’s bedraggled head. Weird stuff always happens on full-moon nights, doesn’t it? People behave strangely, act differently.’
They certainly do!’
They fell quiet for a moment, contemplating the unbelievable sequence of events that had occurred that night.
‘D’you remember,’ asked Jem, suddenly, ‘d’you remember when I first came to see the flat? You were on the phone, to Claudia, you didn’t even look at me!’
‘Ah, but what I bet you don’t know is that seconds before you arrived, I’d been sitting on the sofa – there’ – he indicated the sofa through the window – ‘sitting there, waiting for this mysterious girl called Jem to arrive and … smoking a cigarette. So, you see, it was me all along. The man on the sofa, the man of your dreams! Maybe you’d have realized sooner if fucking Claudia hadn’t phoned at that precise moment …’
‘And if you’d bought peonies! And hadn’t worn those disgusting longjohns! And …’
‘OK!’ laughed Ralph, squeezing Jem to him, ‘you’re right! Destiny moves in mysterious ways, doesn’t it?’
‘You know Smith will probably make us move out, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. Well. We’ll deal with that when it happens. I know a lovely little place on Cable Street!’
They started to walk down the steps and then Ralph stopped abruptly and turned to face Jem. ‘Wait!’ he exclaimed, beaming. ‘Wait! I’ve had an idea. Just stand there and don’t move until I tell you! OK?’ He leapt down the steps two at a time and disappeared through the front door, letting it close behind him.
Jem stood on the steps, uncertainly, shivering a bit in the cold wind and wondering what the hell Ralph was playing at.
A moment later, she noticed a light shining from the living-room window and turned to look down.
A man was sitting on the sofa. A long plume of pink-tinged smoke hovered above his head. He had a slender neck and an oval skull covered in short black hair that ended in a sweet triangle of stubble at the nape of his neck. Jem shuddered. It was her dream. Exactly! And then she smiled, a huge, belly-achey, involuntary smile. The man on the sofa turned slightly in his seat. He looked at Jem and shared her smile.
And then Jem lifted the hem of her rose-printed dress with one small fist and ran down the steps, her heels echoing on the concrete, pushed open the front door, and the living-room door, grabbed hold of her destiny, threw him down on the sofa and kissed the living daylights out of him.
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Katy, Sarah and Nic, for reading as I wrote, chapter by chapter, month by month, and being unfailingly positive, constructive and enthusiastic. And thank you, Yasmin, for putting me up to this in the first place and continuing to encourage and inspire me throughout. I truly couldn’t have done this without you. And lastly, thank you, Jascha, for not knowing anything about contemporary women’s fiction but for being a great boyfriend and taking a risk anyway. Thanks for paying the bills, paying for dinner, buying me a computer and keeping a roof over my head. What a man!
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Published in Penguin Books 1999
Copyright © Lisa Jewell, 1999
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ISBN: 978-0-141-91617-0