by Marian Keyes
Maybe he wouldn’t need me anymore if he had fallen in love and found a soul mate—because that was what happened sometimes. How many friendships end when one of the parties fell in love? Hundreds, probably. I shouldn’t be surprised if it happened with Daniel and me.
Anyway, I had Gus. I had other friends. I would be fine.
Chapter 38
It was about six weeks later, on a Sunday night, late on Sunday night.
We had been back from the Cash’n’Curry for a while, Gus had left about an hour before. Karen, Charlotte and I were limply draped over various pieces of the living-room furniture, eating potato chips, watching TV and recuperating from the weekend. Karen suddenly sat up straight, looking as though she had come to a major decision.
“I’m having a dinner party on Friday,” she declared, “and you two and Simon and Gus are invited.”
“Gosh, thanks, Karen,” I said, nervously.
I had known she was plotting something. She’d been staring at the fire for the last half hour with a funny, determined look on her face.
“Is Daniel coming?” asked Charlotte, naïve to a fault.
Of course Daniel was coming. Daniel was the reason that Karen was having it.
“Of course Daniel is coming,” said Karen. “Daniel is the bloody reason I’m having it.”
“I see,” nodded Charlotte.
I saw too.
Karen was going to cook a very elaborate, multicourse dinner, serve it stylishly, graciously and without spilling anything on her dress or getting a red, shiny face. She would look beautiful, be witty and entertaining company, all in an attempt to show Daniel how indispensable she was to him.
“We’ll have a lovely dinner,” she said. “And you’ll all have to dress up.”
“That sounds like fun,” said Charlotte. “I can wear my cowgirl outfit.”
“Not that kind of dressing up,” said Karen in alarm. “I mean glamorous dressing up, nice dresses, jewelry, high heels.”
“I’m not sure if Gus has a nice dress,” I said.
“Ha, ha,” said Karen, unamused. “Very funny. But make sure he turns up in something decent and not in his usual Salvation Army rejects.
“And now,” continued Karen, “I’ll need, let’s say…ooh…thirty pounds from each of you now and we’ll sort out the final sum later.”
“Wha-at?” I asked, flooded with alarm.
I hadn’t been expecting that. Neither had Charlotte, judging by the way her jaw had fallen open.
Oh no! I had partied hard with Gus all weekend and I felt far too fragile to have a “discussion” with Karen.
“Yes,” she said, annoyed. “You don’t expect me to pay for all the food, do you? I’m masterminding the whole thing and I’m doing all the cooking.”
“Oh, well, fair enough,” said Charlotte, trying to sound cheerful and giving me a “let’s try and look on the bright
side of this” look. “We can’t expect her to feed us and our boyfriends out of the goodness of her heart.”
How right she was.
“Good, that’s settled,” said Karen firmly. “And I’ll need the money now, if you don’t mind.”
There was a stricken pause.
“Now,” repeated Karen.
There was a half-hearted reach for purses, followed by half-hearted excuses.
“I don’t think I have it just now.”
“Can I give you a check?”
“Will tomorrow evening be okay?”
“Honestly, Karen,” I said, “how can you possibly expect us to have any money left on a Sunday night? Especially after the weekend we’ve just had. And for that matter, why do you need it now? I don’t think the grocery store is open at ten-thirty on Sunday night.”
“Not for tonight, stupid. For tomorrow. I’ll do the shopping on the way home from work tomorrow, so I need the money now.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll all walk down to the cash machine now,” said Karen in a voice that brooked no argument.
Charlotte attempted a brave protest, but she was doomed to failure.
“But it’s raining and it’s Sunday night and I’m in my nightgown…”
“You don’t have to get dressed,” said Karen kindly.
“Thanks,” sighed Charlotte.
“Just put a coat on over your nightgown,” continued Karen. “And a pair of leggings and boots, and you’ll be fine. It’s dark, no one will see.”
“Okay,” said Charlotte, meekly.
“And both of you don’t have to go,” continued Karen.
“Lucy, give your card to Charlotte and tell her your PIN number.”
“You mean you’re not coming?” I said faintly.
“Lucy, honestly at times you can be so dumb. Why would I need to go?”
“But, I thought…”
“You didn’t think, that’s your problem. Anyway, Charlotte is going, there’s no need for you to go.”
I didn’t bother getting annoyed with her. One of the features of successful apartment sharing is the ability to let other people act completely horrible from time to time. So that when you feel like behaving like an Antichrist, they’ll return the favour.
“I can’t let Charlotte go alone,” I said.
“You’re damn right. Charlotte isn’t going alone,” called Charlotte from her bedroom.
Karen shrugged. “If you’re going to be noble about it…”
I put on my coat over my pyjamas and tucked my pajama bottoms into my boots.
“My umbrella’s in the hall,” sang Karen.
“You can stick your umbrella where the sun doesn’t shine,” I said from the safety of the far side of the closed front door.
Of course, another feature of successful apartment sharing is recognizing an opportunity to let off steam.
Charlotte and I battled through the rain to the bank.
“Bitch!” said Charlotte.
“She’s not a bitch,” I said grimly.
“Isn’t she?” asked Charlotte, sounding surprised.
“No! She’s a fucking bitch,” I corrected.
Charlotte stamped along through the puddles. “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!” she shouted.
A man out walking his dog crossed the road when he saw this pair of foul-mouthed lunatics, marching along, the frills of Charlotte’s pink nightgown flouncing wildly beneath her coat with each stride she took, the legs of my powder-blue pyjamas flapping in the wind.
“I hope she gets the clap from Daniel,” I said. “Or herpes, or genital warts or something really horrible.”
“Or crabs,” agreed Charlotte, viciously. “And I hope she gets pregnant. And the next time Daniel is over, I’m going to walk around the apartment with no clothes on, so that he can see that I’ve got bigger tits than her. She’d hate that, the bossy old bitch.”
“Do!” I said fervently. “In fact, you should try to seduce him.”
“Yes,” she agreed, enthusiastically. “I’d love to.”
“In fact, you should try and have sex with him in her bed, if you could possibly manage it,” I suggested with malicious pleasure.
“Great idea!” squealed Charlotte.
“And then tell her that he said that she was no good in bed and that you were much better.”
“I don’t know, though,” said Charlotte doubtfully. “It might not be that easy, you know, he seems to really like her. Why don’t you try?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you’d have a better chance,” she said. “I think Daniel has a soft spot for you.”
“Maybe he does,” I said gloomily. “But this is sex we’re talking about, Charlotte. It’s no good if Daniel’s spot for me is soft.”
We both laughed and felt better. Except that it made me think of Daniel—Daniel, who was barely speaking to me. Or maybe I was barely speaking to Daniel. Something odd was going on, at any rate.
We got the money and returned home, wet and resentful, and handed it over to Kar
en in surly fashion.
“So where can I stick my umbrella?” she asked archly, from her supine position on the couch.
I reddened with embarrassment. But when I looked at her she was grinning.
I laughed, the tension dispelled.
“I’m going to bed. Good night,” I said.
“Good night,” called Karen to my back. “Oh and, Lucy, I’ll need you and Charlotte to be here on Thursday night for the cleaning and the preparations.”
I paused in the doorway and realized that another feature of successful apartment sharing is the ability to imagine your roommate being beaten on the head with a stick.
“Okay,” I mumbled, without turning around.
I spent the night fantasizing about putting all Karen’s clothes in black trash bags and leaving them out for the garbage men.
On Thursday night, the Night of the Long Preparations, I thought I had died and gone to hell.
Karen had decided to prepare most of the food the night before, so that on the actual night of the dinner she would have very little to do, other than look beautiful and cool and calm and in control.
Except that Karen was so nervous and so determined to impress Daniel that she seemed to be more—how would I put it?—difficult, than usual. She had always been dynamic and strong-willed, but there was a fine line between being dynamic and strong-willed and being a bossy bitch. Karen seemed to have successfully made that leap.
She had decided that Charlotte and I would do the actual hands-on preparation and she, herself, would be more in
the role of an Artistic Director, overseeing us, advising, guiding and managing us.
In other words, if there were potatoes to be peeled, she had no intention of doing them.
Charlotte and I were barely in the door from work before she set about organizing us.
“You,” she shouted at Charlotte, pointing a pen and reading from a list, “are on carrot, pepper, zucchini, and eggplant preparation; coriander and lemon grass soup; and asparagus soufflé duty.”
“And you,” she shouted at me, “are on duchesse potato, kiwi fruit purée, cranberry jelly, whipped cream, stuffing mushroom and Viennese cookie duty.”
Charlotte and I were terrified. We had barely heard of most of these things, let alone knew how to cook them. Charlotte’s culinary specialty was toast, mine was pasta, and anytime we tried to make anything more complicated than that, we ended in tears and fights and recriminations. Outside incineration, inner rawness, raised voices, hurt feelings, spillages and slippages. You can’t make an omelet without breaking legs—or at least I had certainly never managed it.
That evening the kitchen was a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The circle where sinners were tormented with fruit and vegetables. All four rings and the oven were in constant use, steam billowing, lids rattling and hopping, water boiling over. There were mounds of grapes, asparagus, cauliflower, potatoes, carrots and kiwi fruit everywhere. The heat was intense and Charlotte and I were the colour of tomatoes. Karen wasn’t.
There was no room for anything, because Karen had made us move the kitchen table into the living room.
“Just put them down over there. No, no, not on the meringue base, for Christ’s sake!” she screeched, when I had to empty the fridge of its normal contents to make room for the twenty or thirty desserts she seemed to be expecting us to make.
Everywhere there was food. On the top of the fridge, on the draining board, most of the floor was covered in bowls of pork that was marinating and gelatin that was setting and garlic bread that was wrapped in tinfoil. I was afraid to move my foot half an inch in case I ended up ankle-deep in olive oil, red wine, juniper, vanilla, cumin and “Karen’s secret ingredient” marinade. And as far as I could see Karen’s secret ingredient was nothing other than ordinary brown sugar. I was itching to slap her.
I peeled fourteen million potatoes. I sliced seventeen thousand kiwi fruit. Then I chopped them. And then I had to shove them through a sieve—whatever that was all about. I skinned my knuckles carrying the kitchen table down the hall. I cut my thumb when I sliced the fruit. Chili got into the cut. Karen said I should be more careful, that she didn’t want blood in the food.
Every so often she came around and “jokingly inspected” what we were doing and, even though I knew it was ridiculous, I felt nervous. She was like a sergeant-major examining the young soldiers on parade.
“No, no, no,” she said, and to my disbelief, she rapped me on the knuckles with a wooden spoon! “That’s not the way to peel potatoes. You’re taking half the potato off with the skin. It’s wasteful, Lucy.”
“Fuck off with the wooden spoon,” I said angrily, wishing my peeler was a knife.
The bossy bitch had gone too far and the wooden spoon had hurt.
“Oooooh, we are grouchy this evening,” she laughed. “You’ll have to learn how to accept constructive criticism, Lucy. You’ll never succeed with that attitude.”
I could taste fury in my mouth. But I was trying—I had to understand that she was crazy about a man. Even if he was Daniel. It wasn’t my place to judge.
“And what on earth is this?” she demanded. She had moved on to where Charlotte was peeling carrots, and held up a carrot from the “done” pile.
“It’s a carrot,” said Charlotte. Surly. Defensive.
“What kind of a carrot?” asked Karen slowly and meaningfully.
“A peeled carrot.”
“A peeled carrot!” said Karen in triumph. “A peeled carrot, she tells me. Might I just ask you, Lucy Sullivan, does this carrot look peeled to you?”
“Yes,” I said loyally.
“Oh no, it does not! If this is a peeled carrot it’s a very badly peeled one. Start again, Charlotte, and get it right this time.”
“Knock it off, Karen,” I blurted out, too angry to care. “We’re doing you a favour.”
“Excuse me?” said Karen archly. “But run that one by me again—you’re doing me a favour? I think not, Lucy. But, by all means stop if you want, just don’t expect a place set at the table for Gus and yourself tomorrow night.”
That shut me up.
Gus had been very excited when I had told him about the dinner, especially the dressing up part. He’d be bitterly disappointed if he couldn’t come. So I swallowed my rage. Another instalment on my road to ulcerdom.
“I’m having a glass of wine,” I said, angrily, reaching for one of the bottles that were in the fridge. “How about you, Charlotte?”
“No, you are not!” declared Karen. They’re for tomorrow ni—Oh go ahead. I’ll have one while you’re at it.”
On and on into the night we worked, peeling, scraping, slicing, grating, stuffing, whipping, piping, baking.
We did so much work that Karen was almost grateful, but only for about two seconds.
“Thanks, both of you,” she said, bending down to take something out of the oven.
“Sorry?” I asked, so tired that I thought I was hearing things.
“I said ‘thanks’,” she said. “You’re both very goo…Oh Christ! Move, move,” she yelled, kicking me out of the way, throwing down a tray of what must have been the Viennese cookies, sending them skittering into the bowl of ratatouille. “I’m burned to a crisp!” she gasped. “These bloody oven gloves are useless.”
I finally got to bed at about two o’clock, my hands raw and cut, stinking of garlic and Drambuie. My prize nail, that I’d nurtured since it was tiny, was snagged and broken.
Chapter 39
It was a good thing I got a seat on the tube the next morning, because I was so tired that I would have lain down on the floor otherwise. Charlotte and I spent our journey wearily discussing how much of a stupid bitch we thought Karen was.
“I mean, who does she think she is?” asked Charlotte, yawning.
“Exactly!” I yawned back, slumped in my seat. I noticed that my shoes were filthy and scuffed and that made me feel depressed. I sat up straight so that I wouldn’t see them, but then I had to lo
ok at the horrible man in a suit, sitting opposite me, who had his eyes trained on Charlotte’s breasts, his eyes glazing with lust every time she yawned and her chest expanded. I wanted to hit him, to batter him around the head and neck with his Daily Mail.
I thought I had better close my eyes for the rest of the journey, it was safer.
“And it won’t last with Karen and Daniel,” declared Charlotte, uncertainly. “He’ll get sick of her.”
“Ummm,” I agreed, opening my eyes for a moment. I clamped them shut again, but not before I had seen an ad on the wall asking for donations for animals that had been mistreated, and a heart-rending picture of a skinny, miserable-looking dog.
It was almost a relief to get to work, where I had to endure taunts from Meredia and Megan who insisted that I’d been out drinking the night before.
“I haven’t,” I protested feebly.
“Course you have,” snorted Megan. “Just look at you.”
The moment I put my key in the door on Friday evening, Karen was in the hall. She had taken Friday afternoon off work so that she could get her hair done and clean the apartment. She immediately set about organizing me.
“Wash yourself and get dressed now, Lucy. I need to run through the arrangements with you.”
In fairness to her, the place looked beautiful.
There were fresh flowers everywhere. She had laid a crisp white tablecloth on the nasty Formica kitchen table and placed an exquisite candelabra, with eight red candles, in the middle of it.
“I didn’t know we had that candelabra,” I said, thinking how nice it would look in my bedroom.
“We don’t,” she said shortly. “I borrowed it.”
While I was in the bathroom she hammered on the door and shouted, “I’ve put clean towels on the rail, don’t even think of using them.”
It was eight o’clock. The three of us were ready.
The table was laid, the candles were lit, the lights turned down low, the white wine was in the fridge, the red wine was opened and ready in the kitchen, and pots and pans and containers of food stood on the stove, poised.
