2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (8 page)

“I’m not ashamed.”

She’s dying for a bit of juice to liven up her day. She would love to discover that I happened to spend part of my Thursday afternoon criminally lacerating an unknown citizen’s living-room and leaving her fish world overbowled on the floor. But she’s not getting any more out of me than is strictly necessary.

“You prowled around the back, didn’t you, when no one was looking? You found an open door and sneaked through it like a thief.”

“You’re making me out to be some sort of criminal.”

“A criminal?” she disdains. “You wouldn’t have the guts.”

“Actually,” I reply, irritation rising, “I dislodged a glass panel in her front door.”

Silence, while she beams on me full force. “Dislodged.”

“With an…implement. Only so I could reach through and open the latch.”

“Of course,” she replies. “How practical.”

Now there’s this slender guilt creeper crawling up my spine.

“I admit I don’t do that sort of thing very often.”

“Using an implement to smash your way through front doors.”

“Yes, Sylvana.”

“That’s breaking and entering, you know.”

“I don’t necessarily feel good about it.”

“You don’t.”

“In retrospect.”

Tilting her head, she looks at me like I’m a cute newborn puppy. “She doesn’t feel good about it,” she drawls. “Well, my heart bleeds for you.”

“I…I was
hammered…
”

I’m well aware that alcohol is no defence in law.

“You mean,” she corrects, “you were doing the hammering.”

“Ice-picking.” I correct her back.

Her eyes widen. “You used an ice-pick to break in?”

“Sylvana,” I blurt impatiently, “how else was I supposed to get into her house after I practically caught her in the middle of shagging my husband?”

She picks up a few more peanuts from the tops of the snacks, pops them into her gob and starts munching. “You could have tried ringing the bell,” she replies.

Why is she being such a cow?

“Julie, what you did is what the Indians used to do.”

“You’re thinking of a hatchet, Sylvana.” I sigh. “Indians didn’t use ice-picks. They didn’t inhabit de luxe apartments and drive down to the country on sunny weekends with their picnic hampers and iceboxes. The nearest north-pole analogy would be the Eskimos. Only Eskimos lived in igloos, not avenues, and besides…”

“You smashed her place up, didn’t you?”

She’s still chewing.

“What?”

“With the ice-pick.”

She gives me this rather sly look.

I laugh. “Whatever gives you that idea?”

“Admit it.”

“I will admit no such thing.”

I’m not a good liar. Have to work on it.

“I know you have a terrible temper, Julie.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“What about Ronan’s car?”

“He deserved it.”

“Of course he did. Julie, for God’s sake, you can tell me!”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Sylvana, but there’s nothing to tell.”

She stands up.

“Where are you going?”

“I get the picture,” she says, stalking into the kitchen.

“What picture?”

“You went in there with your ice-pick, determined to get even with Ronan, full of these wonderfully ambitious redecoration schemes. But once inside you chickened out and stared at a few paintings instead, and called me because you were secretly shitting a brick.”

Why do I get the feeling that she’s manipulating me? “You think I was shitting a brick?”

“It’s obvious,” she replies, her voice shrilling through the boxlike acoustics of the kitchen. “You left the house very, very quietly. And intact. The whole time thinking, God, if I get caught my law career is over.”

“You think so.”

“You probably told yourself it was Ronan’s fault, not hers, so therefore it’d be wrong to damage her property. You slunk back out of there like a rabbit.”

From the kitchen comes the crinkly sound of Sylvana removing the plastic wrapper from a cigarette box.

“You obviously think I’m some sort of angel,” I call to her, slightly hot under the collar.

“You ran out of there, all wobbly and virtuous, leaving the place like a palace.”

I can hear the metallic cling of her cigarette lighter lid. Now there is silence, now the lid is clinked shut again. She reappears at the doorway, stares at an old photo of her father hung up on the adjacent wall and scrapes a mark off it with her thumbnail.

“You think I left the place like a palace?”

“I do.”

“If you must know, you bitch, I happened to turn that woman’s living-room into downtown Baghdad.”

She moves around to another photograph, this time of her father as a young man, together with his first wife. “Yes, yes,” she drones, bored. “Of course you did.”

So I explain to Sylvana that I behaved like the Terminator in a china shop with no exit doors.

There’s a slight gap, then she asks me to explain myself.

My friend was never one for obscure allusions. Abstractions have the effect of making her eyeballs roll uphill. She loves the explicit, the vivid. In short, Sylvana worships concrete.

“For example,” I clarify, putting my head back down on the armrest, “I put a hole through the television with my foot.”

During a brief, shocked intermission in our dialogue, I do a little more boasting about all the wonderful and various activities I pursued in Nicole’s living-room. I can hear Sylvana’s shoes walk across the room towards me. We are now once more in eye contact.

“You
didn’t
,” she says, her voice tainted by the merest whiff of admiration.

“Well, yes, I did,” I reply with a rejoining whiff of pride. “I most certainly did.”

Now a deadly silence reigns in the room, interrupted only by the puffy sounds of her smoking as she stands there and quietly observes me. To shock her even further I confess that I also smashed her fish tank.

Dare I say it, but I’m beginning to enjoy myself.

“You could go to jail for that,” she says, her suspicious look slowly returning.

“Stop exaggerating,” says I, although I’ve a sneaky suspicion that that’s exactly where people like me are put. “Sylvana, stop looking at me like that. I was smashed out of my brains! I didn’t intend to do it, I just…”

“That’s right: someone forced you to do it at gunpoint.”

“It wasn’t like that…”

“No. You
chose
to go. You enjoyed yourself. You had a ball.”

This is an inquisition. Sylvana is interrogating me. Why is she being such a cow? “Well, now that you mention it, yes, I did have a ball.”

“Julie, you axe your way into a total stranger’s house in the middle of the afternoon and you proceed to smash up her living-room…” her face is a monument to incredulity “…and you stand here and tell me you had
fun?
”

I don’t have to lie here and take this. “Yes, I had fun. It was
brilliant
fun. It was sheer one hundred per cent quality enjoyment. I was blissfully happy during that minute of my life.”

She smirks at me. “But I thought you felt
bad
about it?”

I stand up. I walk straight out into her octagonal turquoise Ottoman empire hallway. “I’m going home. I’ll call you some time.”

I stop at the huge mirror with the thick grey metal frame where there stands a glass bowl full of bright-red tulips. I take one good look at myself.

This is what a jilted wife must look like: horrible.

No one understands what I am going through. You’d have expected Sylvana of all people to have some sympathy. But no.

As I open the door I’m hearing this strange panting noise.

I turn round.

I can see her through the door sitting on the edge of the couch, in a kind of convulsion. At first I’m curious about whether she has a medical condition she’s kept to herself, but after a while I realize she’s laughing at me.

She tries to stand up. She steadies herself on the armrest and totters through the sitting-room door and over to me. “You’re brilliant,” she says.

“W-what?”

“I never thought you’d have the guts to do anything like that.”

“You didn’t?” says I, confused.

She gives me a sudden hug. She’s giggling into my ear now like a crisp, deafening loudspeaker. I find myself deflating into a sigh of foolish relief.

“You should have seen yourself just now,” she says. “You looked furious.”

She’s hugging me, but I’m still very cross.

“I’d have done the same myself,” she cackles, “or worse.”

“You’re a bitch, Sylvana.”

“I know. Look, we’ll write them a letter of apology. I’ll compose it. “Dear Madam, we regret to inform you that on the recent occasion of the vandalization of your abode we made a slight error of judgement and we do hope that you will accept our humblest apologies…””

Sylvana is doing the theatrical bit now. I fold my arms and stare at the door latch.

“‘…and in particular, we regret the destruction of your lovely fish tank, but, given the serious danger of carnivorous behaviour, we felt at the time that we had no other alternative.’”

I refuse to smile, although I can feel myself softening.

“‘But this is in no way to detract from the utter sorrow we feel that where once you had a drinks cabinet you now have a pile of glass.’”

“Don’t forget the summer alcohol collection,” I point out.

“‘And we would like to offer our condolences in respect of your summer alcohol collection, and over the fact that we are unable to provide compensation for the entirety of aforesaid damage and hence you will not require our address, but we will unhesitatingly remember you in our prayers.’”

We’re both laughing now – crying – into each other’s hair.

When we’ve calmed down a little and are ensconced on the couch again, Sylvana picks up the plate of goat’s cheese and peanut snacks and puts it on her lap, and we start eating ravenously. After a fair amount of rude noshing, she turns away and stares out of the window for some time. She only ever does this when there’s something bothering her big time.

“Julie, you can’t go back with him,” she says, eventually.

I just look down.

“Do you agree?”

“Maybe.”

“Why don’t you move in with me?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Thanks, but not just yet.”

She gives me this crooked look, like I’m extraordinarily naive even to consider staying with Ronan after what he did. But I refuse to be Sylvana’s filofax. I will not lie here and listen to her reorganize my life. Some good old-fashioned solace, that’s all that’s needed.

“So what are you going to do?” she says, munching peanuts.

“Let’s drop this topic.”

“I won’t let you destroy yourself.”

“I’m fine.”

“I can’t respect women who turn themselves into victims.”

“You never liked Ronan anyway.”

She tweaks her left eyebrow sardonically. “Funny that you’re asking me to like him at this time.”

“He does happen to be my husband.”

“Not for long, I predict.”

“
Sylvana, I don’t want to hear any more, is that okay by you?
”

My face is roughly four millimetres away from her nose at this point. I can feel her nasal breeze wafting against my upper lip. The aggravation is tugging away at my gut like a row of meat hooks.

In a smooth movement Sylvana closes both eyes and turns away from me like I don’t exist. “Fine.” She shrugs indifferently, blowing smoke out of the far corner of her mouth.

Sylvana is more stubborn than rubber. She really despises Ronan. She thinks he’s pretentious and self-opinionated. Civil on the surface but secretly spiteful. I’ll never forget the time she told him at a party, while contemptuously crunching crisps between her tiny, perfect teeth: “There’s something distinctly unlikeable about you.”

The one thing that would crown Sylvana’s pleasure (and my pain) is for me to give him such a hard flying boot in the arse that he’ll land in Antarctica and run out of heating oil. She has always wanted Ronan to be an adulterer. Why? Because then, she thinks, I’ll kick him out.

Now, she figures, is her golden opportunity. “I believe in telling the harsh truth, Julie,” she says after a while. “I know his type. Too many of my friends have refused to listen to me in the past. And then when I turn out to be right, do they thank you? Not on your life, they drop you. A cigarette?”

Saying nothing, I accept one from her and she lights me up.

“I just want to wait,” I tell her.

“For what?”

“And see.”

“Oh, right, wait until some blinding virtue you never knew he had comes and smacks you in the face?”

“Sylvana, is this code for get lost? Because if you want, I’ll go.”

I’m sitting forward on the edge of my seat now, glaring at her.

“Have it your way,” she replies with indifference.

“I happen to love him. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine.”

I take a long drag of my cigarette, then exhale a bucket-load of smoke at her. “My marriage happens to be important to me.”

“Great.”

“In fact,” I continue, those meat hooks of aggravation still clutching my gut, “it’s so important to me that I might even consider forgetting Ronan’s little flirtation.”

She takes the trouble actually to look in my direction. “I know you’re only joking.”

“I’m not joking, Sylvana,” I reply, standing up. “Anyway, I have to go home now.”

“Julie, for God’s sake, don’t do anything rash…”

She stands up herself. I feel like I’m on a roll.

“We both know what men are like,” I tell her. “When it comes to sex, they get a bit hysterical.”

“But…”

“He was just fooling around while I was away.”

She stares at me as if I’ve completely lost it. “You don’t really believe that.”

“Why not?” I inquire, walking away.

She follows me into the hall. I pull on my jacket.

“Julie, they were sunbathing together!”

“So?”

“She sketched him on a sketch pad – 
nude
.”

“They say that can be quite erotic.”

I open the front door.

“Julie, this is more than just a three-night stand. They slept in your bed, for chrissake!”