It pissed me off that I did know. It pissed me off that he still existed.
‘Yeah, I heard,’ I said. And immediately regretted saying it. He smirked a little and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
‘Jungle drums,’ he commented and tried a laugh. It didn’t take. When I didn’t respond in any way, shape or form, he gave me his most earnest expression and leaned over the handle of his trolley. He was winning. ‘It’s good to see you.’
Unfortunately for Mark, I already knew he was a liar.
‘Hmm.’ It was all I could manage. I should have got changed. Here he was, all sparkly Saturday clean, and here I was in baggy jeans, a rumpled T-shirt and Converse. I wanted to run home, wash my hair, pull out my tightest dress and my highest heels and come back with my heaviest handbag, fill it with tins of tuna and smack him really, really hard around the head with it. Instead, I utched my shopping further up my body, trying to cover my face and failing.
‘Well, it would be lovely to catch up, if you’ve got time?’ he said unconvincingly, looking anywhere but at me. I squeezed my great big bag of Mini Cheddars so hard that the plastic bag popped open with the sigh I was trying to keep inside. ‘This is weird, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a bit weird,’ I agreed. ‘But it would be weird if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it?’
‘Fair point,’ he replied, shuffling backwards in his knackered old tennis shoes. ‘It really would be good to catch up. I’m still on the same number. Text me or something.’
Tennis shoes. He played tennis. That’s where he met her.
‘Yeah,’ I nodded, trying to get my hair to move. Why couldn’t I think of anything to say? Where was my witty comeback? At least I had my hands full so I couldn’t swing for the bastard. For every second we stood there, his patronizing smile getting smaller and smaller, I got angrier and angrier until I was at full capacity. And then I remembered pissing in his shaving bag and getting on the next plane to New York. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite as bad. ‘I’ve got to go. My dad’s waiting.’
I think the last time I’d used that line on him, we were seventeen and snogging outside Karisma at three in the morning. How time flies.
‘OK.’ He reached out one very rigid hand and placed it on my shoulder for half a heartbeat before snatching it back. My eyes widened to the size of saucers and I jumped back involuntarily. ‘Anyway, give us a call.’
Refusing to respond, I staggered backwards into the freezer door, dropping my shopping and sprinting for the nearest aisle.
‘I thought you’d gone back to New York.’ My dad’s voice interrupted my heavy breathing as I peered round a rack of Kettle Chips, watching Mark standing there with his trolley, clearly embarrassed by the pile of abandoned shopping. ‘Good God, girl, you’ve been gone for ever. Where’s the pasta? Your mum’s at the till.’
I turned to face my dad, and his blue eyes softened from a crinkled smile to a wary frown. ‘Angela, what’s wrong?’
‘Can I have the car keys, please?’ I asked quietly. I was not going to cry in Waitrose. There couldn’t possibly be anything more pathetic than a girl crying in Waitrose.
‘Of course you can,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket and producing a bunch of sparkly silver lifelines. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I couldn’t find the tomatoes,’ I mumbled, wiping at my grubby face with the sleeve of my stripy T-shirt, which was pulled down over the fists I couldn’t seem to relax. ‘Or the Mini Cheddars. Or the pasta.’ The fact that we were standing in front of about twenty-five bags of Mini Cheddars dented my credibility somewhat. My dad looked at me, looked at the snack aisle and then stepped to the side to look past me. I couldn’t bring myself to see if he was still there, but my dad’s angry bear growl confirmed that he was.
‘Sod’s law,’ he said, pressing the car keys into my hand. ‘Get yourself back to the car. I’ll get your mum’s things. Do you want anything?’
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
All I wanted was to go home. And that did not mean back to my parents’ house.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Almost an hour after I’d slumped up the stairs and wrapped myself up in my childhood sheets, I was still wide awake. Cocking jet lag. I couldn’t remember when I had been more tired, but every time I closed my eyes, I just saw Mark grinning at me and that cow trying to get a good look through the car window from behind him.
For the want of something better to do, I sat up, huffed, puffed, opened my laptop and re-read the Gloss presentation. Again. After fifteen minutes of soothing stats, facts and numbers, I quickly flicked through all the other important things online − personal email, work email, Facebook, Perez Hilton, Bloomingdales.com … I was halfway through the purchase of a half-priced Theory shift dress when it all became a bit too much and a tidal wave of jet lag swept me under. As I slipped backwards against the pillows, I caught one last look at myself reflected in the screen and prayed I would wake up looking less like Jabba the Hutt on an off day.
‘Get out of bed, you lazy mare.’
My ears engaged before I could even attempt to open my eyes. Reaching out for Alex, all I felt was a cold, hard wall. The pillows felt wrong. And someone was eating pickled onion Monster Munch. I rolled over and pried open one eye to see Louisa leaning against my bedroom door in boyfriend jeans and a sky-blue T-shirt with her hair high on top of her head in a ponytail. In the blink of an eye, I was fifteen again.
‘Fuck off, I’m tired,’ I said with happiness in my voice, rolling back towards the wall. ‘Leave the crisps. I’m also starving.’
‘Good job I brought you some, then. You look shit.’
A crinkly packet landed square on my head and it was all the incentive I needed to force myself awake.
‘Sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport.’ Louisa bounded onto my bed like a golden Labrador and wrapped her arms round my neck. ‘Grace hasn’t been well and I couldn’t leave her with Tim. He’s such a wimp when she cries.’
‘And where is she now?’ I asked, returning the hug with such strength I was worried I might break her. At last, something good to come out of this trip. ‘You didn’t leave her in the car, did you? Because that’s really bad parenting.’
‘Your mum’s got her,’ she replied, breaking the hug to get back into her Monster Munch. I was relieved. I did the same. Precious, precious pickled oniony goodness. ‘I need ten minutes away. You’re safe.’
‘Safe?’ I jostled myself into a sitting position, pulling my T-shirt down over my knickers. ‘You’ve given my mum a baby when my fiancé is on his way here to meet her for the first time and you think I’m safe? Her secondary biological clock will be going batshit.’
‘Oh, yeah − fiancé.’ Lou dropped her empty crisp packet on the floor, wiped her hand on her jeans and grabbed my engagement ring. ‘Bugger me.’
This was the amazing thing about Louisa. I hadn’t set eyes on the woman for a year, and before that I’d sort of, kind of, ruined her wedding, but here we were, sitting on my bed eating snacks and talking about boys like we’d just come in from a particularly dull GCSE history revision class. Some love affairs were just destined to last a lifetime. Any friendship forged in the fires of a Take That themed birthday party was in it for the long run.
‘Yeah.’ I held my hand out in front of me, splaying my fingers wide. Before plunging them back into the Monster Munch. As I said, some love affairs were destined to last a lifetime. ‘The boy done good.’
‘He has, he has.’
She stretched her legs out across the bed and looked around the room. Presumably she was as weirded out by the fact that my mother had kept it as a shrine to my difficult teenage years as I was. Why on earth anyone would want to preserve ‘Angela: ages sixteen to eighteen’ was beyond me. At least, she had taken down all the cut-out pages from the NME that I’d actually stapled to the wall. It was embarrassing all the same.
‘Any developments on the wedding plans?’ Louisa asked. ‘Anything you need me to do?’
Obvio
usly, after immediately changing my Facebook status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘engaged’ (I’m not proud), the second thing I did after Alex proposed was to ask Jenny and Louisa to be my bridesmaids. They were my best friends − it made perfect sense. It just didn’t make a lot of logistical sense. Aside from the fact that they lived in entirely different countries, separated by a not insignificant body of water, they were very, very different people. While Jenny was, when sober, desperate to get involved in the spectacle element of the wedding – the dresses, the party, the food − Louisa wanted to know about the chair coverings, the venue, the guest list. I assumed it was experience talking on her part: she knew which parts of wedding planning would drive you insane and she knew you had to prepare for the … unexpected. Cough.
‘I’ve actually been thinking about it a bit more recently,’ I admitted, gnawing thoughtfully on a monster claw. ‘And it’s freaking me out a bit. The idea of a wedding. Of actually walking down an aisle in front of people and doing that whole bit.’
‘That’s only natural,’ Louisa shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have got through it if it wasn’t for you. It was the best day of my life. Before I had Grace, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I agreed.
‘But at the same time, it was absolutely the most stressful. And that was before you hulked out and broke my husband’s hand. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t go half as crazy. Just small, simple, close friends. Nothing else.’
‘Are you trying to tell me you’re getting divorced?’ I asked through the trauma of finishing my crisps.
‘There are days, babe, there are days,’ she sighed. ‘But no. I’ll stick it out a bit longer.’
As a testament to just how well she knew me, Louise pulled a third bag of Monster Munch out of her handbag. ‘One’s never enough.’
‘Imagine living in a world with no pickled onion crisps of any kind,’ I said, diving in. ‘Actually, imagine living in a world with no salt and vinegar crisps. It’s a wonder to me that America has done as well as it has, honestly. I wouldn’t have made it through university without salt and vinegar Hula Hoops.’
‘You’re the one who wants to live there,’ she replied. ‘These are the choices we make, Angela Clark.’
‘There are a few things that make up for it,’ I acknowledged. ‘Brunch, Buffalo Wings, Combos, Lucky Charms. And, oh God, the pizza.’
‘And there was me thinking you might mention your fiancé.’
‘Well, obviously.’
We sat in silence for a while, inhaling the snacks. It was only when I’d scoffed the entire bag that I realized I hadn’t actually eaten solids since New York. Entirely unnatural. Although my only real food option was my mum’s cooking, so maybe I could stick it out the entire week.
‘So, do you think you’ll ever move back?’ Louisa’s voice was impressively breezy, but I could tell she’d been building up to this one. ‘Long term, you know?’
‘I really haven’t thought about it.’ I crossed my legs and pulled a pillow into my lap. Looking at the dirty grey smudges on the white linen, I could only imagine what a state my face must be in. Bless Louisa for not mentioning it. ‘I was so worried I would have to come back when my visa was revoked that I literally put it to the back of my mind and locked the door.’
‘Alex hasn’t mentioned it?’ Her breeziness faltered. ‘When you got engaged, he didn’t bring it up?’
‘No.’
‘I would have thought you’d have talked about all those things. When you would get married, where you would live, kids. I would have thought it was a bigger issue for you than most couples.’
‘Why?’ I took as subtle a sniff of myself as possible. Dear God I needed a shower. ‘Am I missing something?’
‘No.’ Louisa rested her hand on top of mine and squeezed gently. ‘It’s just that you’re English. Maybe you’d want to move back to England. Where your friends and family are. I would think he’d take that into account, that you both would.’
Hmm. Alex and I hadn’t discussed where we would end up living. But then we rarely discussed where we were going to eat dinner at night before we left the house.
‘It’s just stuff you have to think about,’ she said, leaning back against the wall. ‘Tim and I had to go through it all when we got engaged. He wanted to go and live in Australia for a while, but we agreed we wanted to get pregnant before I was thirty, so we put that on hold. What are you going to do when you get pregnant? Where are you going to live?’
‘Tim wanted to live in Australia?’ I pulled a face. ‘But he gets sunburnt walking out to the car.’
‘I’m just saying you have to think about these things. Before you have a baby.’
‘Tea?’ My mum clattered through the bedroom door carrying two steaming mugs. She smiled lovingly at my best friend before frowning at me and picking up the three empty crisp packets from the bed. ‘Are you staying for dinner, Louisa?’
‘Um, I’m not sure, I’ve got to get Grace into the bath,’ she hedged.
‘We’re having fish and chips. I’m sending David out for them in a minute, so just let me know,’ she added.
‘Oh, actually, it’s only six, isn’t it?’ Louisa brightened. The promise of deep-fried food was almost as exciting as the idea of not having to eat my mum’s over-boiled slop. It seemed almost impossible that she had spent forty years cooking dinner every day and had only got worse. Not that I cooked. Ever. There were too many different Mexican restaurants for me to try before I put anything in the oven. God bless America. ‘I’ll just feed her and then she’ll go down for an hour anyway.’
‘I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I cannot believe you have a baby,’ I said, jumping up off the bed as soon as my mum had vanished and opening up my suitcase. ‘How is that possible?’
‘So, first your waters break, and then you spend twenty-four hours screaming at the man you love as a far too big living thing squeezes its way out of your vagina, and then—’
‘Yeah, I know the logistics.’ I cut her off, trying not to feel sick. ‘I just can’t believe you − you, Louisa − have a baby. Is she even downstairs? Does she even exist?’
On cue, something on the lower level of the house let out an ungodly roar.
‘Yeah, she’s real,’ Louisa nodded without flinching. ‘And if you can believe it, that’s a happy sound.’
‘Holy shit,’ I whispered. ‘Is it an alien?’
‘I thought she was something from Alien when she was coming out,’ she said as she curled up on the bed, rested her head on her arms and watched me unpack. ‘You won’t be able to cope.’
‘I totally won’t,’ I said, still trying not to feel sick. ‘No interest in it. At all.’
‘In having kids?’ Lou reached over the edge of the bed and started pulling things out of my suitcase and oohing approval. Or not, in the case of my pattered DVF wrap dress. That put that out of the running for my Gloss presentation then. ‘Since when?’
‘I didn’t say I wasn’t having kids,’ I grumbled, shaking out a very creased blue silk Tibi dress. I was going to have to iron. Or at least my mum was. ‘I just don’t have any interest in the actual physical having of them. Why haven’t we evolved past that yet? Why can’t they just put me under, pop it out and wake me up when it’s been washed and dressed?’
Louisa had a very peculiar ‘not amused’ look on her face.
‘We haven’t talked about it.’ I threw the dress over the back of a chair by my dresser and moved on to my T-shirts. And by my T-shirts, I meant the band T-shirts I’d acquired from Alex and all the lovely kitteny soft Splendid tees I’d nicked from Erin and Jenny’s office. ‘We’ve literally just got engaged. I’m not going to ask him when he’s planning to knock me up.’
She looked away and bit on an already chewed-down fingernail.
‘And neither are you,’ I commanded.
‘Fine.’ She went back to pulling stuff out of my case, purring over a pair of Gucci sandals. My post-Vegas treat. I settled back
against the chair for a moment and took a better look at my bestie. It wasn’t just her fingernails that were suffering. Her ponytail was covering up some pretty dodgy dark blonde roots and someone had been hitting the Batiste pretty hard. Of course there were baby-induced dark circles, and no, she wouldn’t be slipping back into that twenty-four-inch-waist wedding dress again any time soon, but that was to be expected. What made me uncomfortable was seeing bright and shiny Louisa look so faded and tired. As if she was even less interested in having a baby than I had been five minutes earlier. Which was to say not interested at all.
‘Really, Lou, it’s not on my agenda right now.’ I took my prized McQueen clutch, a January sale steal, from her hands and placed it on the dresser. ‘Don’t worry about me. Or Alex. Or our future awesome babies. They’re going to be fine.’
‘There’s just so much to think about,’ she sighed. ‘I couldn’t even start to prepare you. It’s not just the baby − it’s being pregnant, it’s buying everything, it’s trying to get ready for something you could never ever get ready for. The way it changes your body, your relationship and, oh God, the sleep.’ She stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. ‘And more than anything else, it’s giving up silly, selfish stuff because it’s not about you any more.’
‘Silly selfish stuff?’ I didn’t think I wanted to hear the rest of this sentence.
‘Running off to New York? Popping into LA for work, to Paris, to Vegas.’ She pulled on the end of her ponytail, reading my mind. ‘I haven’t even got time to go to the hairdresser.’
‘It’s not like I would do those things if I had a baby,’ I said, trying really hard not to be offended. ‘But just because we’re getting married doesn’t mean we’re going to have a kid straightaway. We’ve got stuff we want to do first. Alex has this record to tour, I have the magazine to launch. We haven’t even set a date yet, remember?’
‘I recall,’ she said, ploughing headfirst into my underwear. ‘I just think it’s best to know these things before he puts a ring on your finger. Another ring,’ she added when I held up my hand. ‘What are you going to do when he wants to go off on tour and you’re at home with a teething baby and no one to help? I won’t be there. Your mum won’t be there. His family don’t live in New York, do they?’