Authors: Rowan Coleman
The thought of lunching with the ladies reminds me of my recently forgotten and now radically dishevelled personal appearance. In fact, since Ella I’ve been so involved in her that I’ve even forgotten I’ve got one.
A quick inspection in my make-up mirror reveals facial mayhem, but I manage to fix it up pretty good with one of Ella’s baby wipes and I reapply as much mascara as I am able to between the rhythmic judders of the carriage. I brush my sweat-damp hair out and briefly toy with the idea of tucking my loose shirt in. I might have risked it, but when your two best friends are both a size ten there’s really not much point in kidding yourself. I sigh and anxiously wish that at some point in the last few months I had broken my rule about not shopping for new clothes until I’m thin again, and gone and bought something to wear that isn’t so last millennium, especially as all the signs suggest that I may
never
be as thin as I once was again and I wasn’t even thin when I was thin. Oh God, I don’t know what I’m talking about either.
But I do know that I’ll have to show up to lunch with two of the capital’s most stylish (if in Dora’s case a little
avant garde
) occupants looking like the Michelin man in a voluminous red (
red!
) silk shirt that Fergus’s mother bought me after the birth. (‘Nice and roomy, dear.’) I run my fingers through my hair and tell myself that my friends won’t care what I look like, even though I know that even the best of girlfriends are always ever so slightly chuffed at outdoing their mates on the clothes front.
Gradually the green-grey rush of the countryside loses out against the crowded graveyards and trackside factories that precede the grimy and ragged lace edge of the city as it unfurls its skirts in greeting. I press my face against the glass, waiting for the sign that says ‘Euston 1 Mile’, and resist the urge to kiss the glass as I finally come home again with a rush of relief. This is it, this is where I will feel like myself again. Where I can be me.
Camille has offered to meet me at the station, and although I know everywhere north of the river like the back of my hand I’ve accepted her offer, grateful for her tactful acknowledgement of my general lack of practice with the world and, more importantly, other adults that aren’t my husband. I tap my foot impatiently as the train crawls the last few metres of the journey into the platform and wait at the door pressing the ‘Open’ button beside it long before the train finally comes to a halt. When I step off the train the last lingering fragments of any apprehension I had are sucked out of me by the vacuum of London air, thick with the carbon monoxide I have missed so badly.
I practically run to the ticket gate. I would run, but as my body is now in a permanent state of exhaustion, a speedy and ungainly hobble is all that I can manage, pressing my forearm over my chest in an ill-fated attempt to stop my breasts wobbling and the catch on my nursing bra from coming undone. I feel it click open and I am forced to stick my hand inside my shirt and do it up as I walk along, looking as if I am giving myself a good fondle.
Good as her word, Camille stands just beyond the ticket barrier dressed in a long jade-green shift dress, wearing a pair of low-heeled mules with silk flowers at the toes. As I take in her outfit, followed by her new weave, which is short, flicky and foxy, I begin to slow down. Even on my best shirt Ella has left a shadow of regurgitated milk and my sandals are thick black flat ones with a Velcro fastening that has curled up at the end. My jeans bite into my waist and my hair hasn’t been styled since the day I got married. I feel like Cinderella covered in ashes, only
after
the ever after bit.
Camille spots me and furiously waves both arms. I marshal my smile and go to her, trying to remember that in real life I’m a happy and confident person, the hub of our little family trio.
‘Babe! Babe!’ she shouts eagerly and I find my practice smile melting into an expression of genuine pleasure.
‘Oh my God!’ she yells, flinging her arms around me. ‘You look fantastic! Are you sure you had a baby?’
I laugh and hold her tight.
‘You are very sweet,’ I say. ‘But you are lying, I look like a dog.
You
on the other hand look amazing. Look at your hair!’ I turn her this way and that as she flutters her lashes for me and flicks her flicky bits. ‘My God, Alex must think he’s died and gone to heaven!’
Camille bites her lip and looks a bit sheepish.
‘Well, there’s a bit of a story there. Come on, I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the restaurant.’
Twenty minutes later we’re sitting at the open-fronted door of Cava, a little Spanish place in the City, near to where Dora works and not far from Fergus’s offices. I wonder about going to see him later and surprising him and I have to force myself not to picture him taking his secretary over the desk in between memos.
Dora is late. Camille checks her watch and anxiously searches the passing crowd of super-thin straight-haired girls in tiny-waisted skirts, looking for our friend.
‘Don’t worry, Cam, I’ll spot her no trouble in this lot. She’ll be the one in the latex rubber catsuit,’ I grin, looking forward to seeing Dora’s latest incarnation.
Camille raises an eyebrow.
‘I think you’ll be more shocked by her latest transformation than any of the previous ones,’ she says half to herself as she scans the crowd. ‘I offered to call for her, but she said no, she had to finish some stuff up before she left for lunch. I do trust her, you know that I do, but it’s just that, well, Dora pretty much defines flaky, doesn’t she? Who ever knows what Dora will do?’
I nod. Neither of us wants to talk about her when she isn’t there, but both of us are thinking the same thing.
I was just going into labour when Dora was going into intensive care. Although I knew nothing about it until a couple of days later, it seems that Dora was on the brink of exiting this world for ever just as Ella entered it, but Dora was lucky.
It seems wrong to think of her as lucky, but in reality it was Dora’s ready access to the cash that got her into this trouble that saved her. If she had been your average addict mugging people for mobile phones or prostituting herself, the chances are she would have been dead or dying before she got into a rehabilitation programme. At least she had enough credit on her gold card to allow Camille to book her into a private unit called the Abbey, and the sheer trauma of the experience was mildly alleviated by a fleeting friendship with a model and soap actor. She was there for twelve weeks. In the last few months since she’d come back into the world I’d seen her only once, when she came to see Ella for the first time. Her blonde roots had shown an inch thick through her black hair dye and her natural slimness was painfully accentuated. Despite that, though, she’d seemed happy, and we had talked for the first time in months the way we used to. Dora and me against the world. It was Dora who taught me how to fight the inevitability of fate, and I was grateful and glad to see that once again she was engaged in that fight too.
She had held Ella at arm’s length and eyed her speculatively.
‘I can see why
you
love her and everything,’ she’d said, slowly. ‘But I’ve got to tell you, mate, I just don’t see it myself.’
We’d both laughed but I really don’t think she was joking.
I look at Camille’s concerned face and think how my two separate best friends have gradually become closer to each other than I am to either of them. Once I was the hub on which our friendship turned. Now I feel more like a spare wheel. I don’t know if Dora has ever told Camille about her childhood in care, but I do know that Camille knows more about Dora right now than I do, and that makes me feel guilty.
‘But she’s all right now, going to the meetings and all,’ I say, partly to reassure myself. ‘Told me she got asked out by some really old crusty guy and she totally binned him and it was only when she got home that she realised he was a really famous sixties rock star!’
I laugh, keen to show that I am still a part of Dora’s life. She does call me every week, but in reality our conversations are short and restless. There is really pretty much nothing that we have in common any more, except for the fact that we’ve loved each other for such a long time and need each other the way everyone in the world needs somewhere to come from and somewhere to go back to.
‘Oh yeah, I heard about that.’ Camille takes her eyes off the passing crowds to look at me. ‘I think she’s all right, but we thought she was all right before we knew anything, didn’t we? I mean, when I was a kid you knew if your best mate was hooked on smack. They had spots and really greasy hair and they acted like Zammo off of
Grange Hill
. No one tells you that they can appear, well … normal, more or less. I want to trust her, I need to, I think. She hasn’t got anyone else to show they have faith in her.’ I look studiously at my cutlery before Camille adds, ‘Well, except you, of course.’
Suddenly something in the crowd catches her eye.
‘There she is!’ Camille waves wildly, half standing in her chair. I scan the crowd looking for Dora, but her transformation is so complete that she is practically standing in front of me before I see her.
I stare at her. The black-haired bob and cut-price chic have vanished. The Dora that has approached our table has totally reinverted herself into, well, herself. Her natural blonde hair has been cut into a spiky cap, which suits her pointed chin and big green eyes. Her normally ash-white skin is slightly tanned and she is wearing a City-chic summer trouser suit that shows off her long legs.
‘Bloody hell, do I know you?’ I smile with delight, hugging her close, feeling her thinness sharply against the padding of my curves.
‘Mate!’ Dora holds me away from her and studies me. ‘You look good, glowing and everything. Lost a bit of that extra weight since I saw you last … still got those enormous breasts, mind you. Blimey, how do you get out of doorways?’
We laugh and sit down, still holding hands. I look from Camille to Dora and feel at home.
‘Oooh, let’s order wine,’ I say happily. ‘I’m such a cheap date these days that I’ll be pissed after half a glass …’ I look up from the wine menu to see both Camille’s and Dora’s smiles fixed on their faces.
‘What?’ I ask them. They exchange glances. ‘What?’ I repeat.
Dora screws up her mouth.
‘Booze, mate, not allowed booze,’ she says with a half-smile. ‘It’s the programme I’m on. I’m not allowed
any
addictive substances except fags and caffeine.’ Dora lights up as she says this and I cringe at my own thoughtlessness. Dora shrugs. ‘It’s cool, I’m so detoxed that I reckon my liver’s gone into shock.’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out her packet of Marlboro’s. ‘Mind you, I fully expect to croak it from lung cancer any time soon.’
I smile uncertainly and Camille catches my eye encouragingly.
‘Well, then – it’s not as if I’m not used to being teetotal either.’ I look up at the waiter who has appeared at our table. ‘Two large bottles of mineral water, please.’ I look at Dora. ‘Are you allowed sparkling or are all those bubbles evil or something?’
Dora laughs and the tension passes.
‘No, go for it.’ She smiles at the waiter and studies his arse as he retreats. ‘Anyway, enough about me; how’s Prince Charming? How’s the baby? Tell us about your new life in the
count
-ry.’ Dora enjoys exaggerating the first syllable of the word. She leans back in her chair and takes a deep drag on her cigarette.
I think about my new life. I get up, I look after Ella, at some point during the twenty-four hours in each day I must sleep otherwise I’d be dead by now. That’s it. I look at them, waiting expectantly, and wonder exactly how much they’d really care about Ella’s attempts at crawling, or that her hair is gradually beginning to curl or that when I sing to her she seems to hum along, if a little bit tunelessly. I know that really it won’t mean a thing to them, and I know that it’s not because they are heartless or that they don’t care. It’s just that since Ella’s birth I’ve been living in a parallel universe, like a piece from a different jigsaw puzzle that just happens to fit into their world too. If you look at the big picture as far as Dora and Camille are concerned, I don’t make any sense any more. I smile and wave the minutiae of my life away in a single gesture.
‘It’s great. Fergus is great. Ella is great. Everything is great really. It’s great. I’m tired, but, you know … it’s great.’ I shrug and cast about for a change of subject. ‘Camille – tell me about your hair! You said there was a story?’
Camille claps her hand over her mouth and laughs. ‘Oh my God …’
Ten minutes later Dora and I exchange disbelieving but unsurprised glances.
‘You’re joking,’ I say. ‘You’re mad. I know how much you earn and you are mad.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t think it’d cost that much.’ Camille shrugs. ‘I mean, I didn’t check how much it would cost but you know how you have an idea of cost in your head? I thought it’d be about eighty quid, max.’ She raises her hands with a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.
‘So, let me get this straight.’ Dora lights a new cigarette from an old one and then vigorously puts out the stub. ‘You told Alex that you were having this weave and that it would cost thirty quid, even though in your little world you’d decided it was going to cost you eighty quid, which you still can’t afford anyway. You go to the salon, not any salon mind, but one on the King’s Road. You go there without bothering to check the price first and then when you go to leave they charge you one hundred and sixty-five pounds. That’s
one hundred and sixty-five pounds
!, and you have to have it done again in six weeks?’ She downs the remnants of her water like she once would have a straight whisky. ‘I tell you, you should come to NA with me, mate. I’m sure we can get you in on the grounds that you’re addicted to spending money you don’t have.’
Camille picks up her glass and gives a little shrug.
‘Well now, it would have been all right, I mean, not all right but okay, except that when I went to pay neither of my cards went through, both maxed out.’ Camille giggles. ‘So I phoned my mum but she told me if I couldn’t pay for it I had to sit right back down and have it taken out. Well obviously that wasn’t an option, and by now everyone’s looking at me and I’m trying my best not to die of embarrassment. So, in the end I had no choice. I had to phone Alex, pull him out of a meeting, explain the situation to him and get him to pay over the phone! Nightmare.’