‘Your wish my command.’ He bowed and rushed off.
Lizzy looked gratefully around the table. ‘Oh girls, I don’t think I’ve ever been so pleased to see you.’
Mr Spellman called Lizzy and her friends ‘the Three Amigos’, because as he said, ‘If one’s around you know that the other two aren’t far behind.’ Lizzy had first laid eyes on Nic in the student union at Southampton University. Nic, sporting an undercut a decade before Miley Cyrus, had been challenging the captain of the rugby first team to see who could finish a pint of Aftershock first. A fresher at the time, Nic had set a new university record while the captain of the rugby team had been rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Nic had been next door in halls to Poppet, who Lizzy had thought was some sort of secretary because she had turned up on the first day of term in a suit and carrying a briefcase. They’d all gone out for a pub crawl round the city’s dodgiest bars, where Nic had got them chucked out of three places for minesweeping drinks and Poppet had actually wet herself twice from laughing so much. From then on the three of them had been inseparable.
They might have clicked on a mental level, but physically they couldn’t have been more different. Nic was tall and broad-shouldered like a netball player. She was aggressively make-up free, unlike Poppet who bought a new MAC Lipglass virtually every week. Poppet’s real name was Anisha, but she’d got the nickname Poppet at uni because she was tiny and doll-like. Half-Indian and half-Persian, Poppet had inherited her high grooming standards from her mum, who always wore beautiful saris and red lipstick and was one of the most glamorous women Lizzy had ever met.
‘We’ve been really worried about you,’ Poppet told her. ‘I think it’s amazing you’ve actually gone to work. I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.’
‘I’m sure that will make her feel loads better,’ Nic said dryly. ‘This will all blow over,’ she told Lizzy. ‘Remember Rebecca Loos tossed off a pig, and she’s happily married and living in obscurity now.’
Giuseppe came back with the olives and Lizzy dived in. She’d already mindlessly munched her way through four breadsticks. ‘I’m meant to be on the heartbreak diet,’ she sighed. ‘My mother is right. Not only am I single, I’m going to be
obese
and single for the rest of my life.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Poppet said loyally. ‘You won’t stay single. Trust me, there will be loads of men out there, just waiting to snap you up!’
‘The bunny-boiler who got dumped on stage in a Henry VIII costume?’ Lizzy said gloomily. ‘I don’t exactly see them lining up, do you?’
She was officially damaged goods. It didn’t matter that she’d managed to have two semi-successful relationships (three if you counted Aussie Andy, although he’d been away travelling for six months of it which meant they’d only really properly gone out for four months). Her track record had been wiped out in one fell swoop. Men would see her as the praying mantis of marriage. Her picture would be held up as a warning in pubs and sports changing rooms across the land.
‘Still no word from Justin?’ Poppet ventured.
Lizzy shook her head miserably. ‘I went on Facebook earlier to de-friend him and found out he’d already done it to me.’
Poppet looked outraged. ‘He didn’t even allow you that one dignity!’
‘The guy’s a complete dickhead.’ Nic hoovered up a breadstick. ‘He drank alcopops for God’s sake. That is someone with serious issues about their sexuality.’
‘C’mon, he drank a Smirnoff Ice
once
when he was really hungover from the all-day cricket,’ Lizzy protested.
Nic looked at her strangely. ‘Why are you defending him? Justin hung you out to dry, Lizzy.’
At that moment Giuseppe appeared brandishing their garlic bread. No one spoke until he’d gone again.
‘You’re right,’ Lizzy sighed. ‘It’s just so
weird
. Justin’s Alpro Light is still in my fridge. We had tickets to go and see Professor Green. He’d already asked me to go to his Christmas party! Why make all these plans if his heart was never in it? It was like I was with the guy for six months and I never really knew him.’
‘No one knows anyone in six months,’ Nic said darkly. ‘They’re just sizing each other up and deciding whether to stay or not.’
‘Oh great, thanks!’
‘It’s better you find out now than in a few years’ time when he leaves you standing at the aisle.’ Poppet’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Meanwhile I’m left looking like a deluded fantasist.’ Lizzy picked miserably at an olive. ‘Why
didn’t
Justin want to marry me, anyway?’
‘You said you didn’t want to marry him either,’ Poppet pointed out.
‘That’s not the point.’ How could someone know that early on that they didn’t want to marry her? Was she really that repulsive first thing in the morning? Were her little idiosyncrasies really so annoying that they’d cancelled out any thoughts Justin might’ve had about proposing? What about growing together as people and learning to love each other’s imperfections? To be told ‘No thanks’ by someone who hadn’t even found out a quarter of the stuff about you was
brutal.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked despairingly. ‘Have I got a flashing sign above my head saying “FOR FUN TIMES AND MINI BREAKS ONLY”?’
‘Bollocks!’ Nic yelled in the manner that Len Goodman from
Strictly Come Dancing
shouted ‘Seven!’ ‘There’s nothing bloody wrong with you!’
‘So why didn’t he want to marry me?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly why. Guys like Justin have their perfect, boring little lives with their perfect, boring little routines. They’ll end up marrying some perfect boring girl with perfect boring shiny hair, because she won’t upset the equilibrium and make them realize how totally and absolutely
nothing
they are!’ Nic waved her glass around so violently the contents sloshed out. ‘This isn’t about Justin not wanting to marry you! It’s about the fact that deep down he knew that
you
didn’t want to marry
him
!’
‘Go Nic!’ Poppet shouted happily.
‘There are millions of bland and boring blokes like Justin.
You
on the other hand,’ Nic told Lizzy, ‘are a wonderful, unique, brilliant, warm, funny, lovely person.’
‘There’s only one Lizzy Spellman!’ Poppet chanted.
‘Don’t let that no-mark twat bring you down!’ Nic actually slapped the table.
Lizzy looked at Poppet’s sweet little face and Nic, all fierce-browed and indignant, and felt a rush of love. They were the best friends in the world. Who needed a man? Who
cared
if she was a global laughing stock when she had these two?
‘To friendship!’ Nic said.
‘And codpieces!’ Poppet cried.
Lizzy held her glass aloft. ‘To friends and codpieces!’
‘Alcopops.’ Nic looked smug. ‘Just saying.’
It turned out that Nic was right. The next day the news broke that a Lib Dem MP had been caught in a dogging circle, and a Hollywood couple had split up amidst allegations of adultery. When Lizzy cautiously peeked out of the living room curtains the reporters had gone. For now at least, the storm had blown over.
The tight knot that had been sitting in Lizzy’s chest since Saturday night suddenly loosened. She stood in front of her bedroom mirror in her dressing gown, able to think properly for the first time in ages.
The last few days had taken their toll. There were dark circles under her eyes and what appeared to be a Worzel Gummidge wig had crash-landed on her head.
Had
she lost a bit of stress-related weight? Lizzy turned sideways. If she stood in a certain way, breathed in and pushed her hips forward, her stomach did look a bit flatter.
If Lizzy had to describe herself she’d say she was Miss Average, but she didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. She was just normal: five foot five, shoe size six and generally hovering around the size twelve mark (or a size ten in GAP). Her bum and her sunny smile were probably her best assets, her wobbly belly not so much. Her corkscrew blonde curls had been the bane of her life when she was younger, but these days Lizzy just bunged on the anti-frizz and hoped for the best. Justin had always said he’d found girls with curly hair sexy, even if he had remarked once that Lizzy looked like Louis XIV after she’d got out of the shower.
Justin.
What was he up to at that very moment? It was a Wednesday, so he was probably at his early-morning Pilates class. Lizzy imagined him in his Lycra cycling shorts, quads quivering with concentration. Those quads, no longer hers to run her hands over. Never again would she start a sentence with the words: ‘My boyfriend Justin …’ She would never again catch eyes with him across a crowded pub and know it was a given that they were going home together. They would never take it in turns to stand outside a newsagent while the other one went in and bought the drinks. (Always a bottle of water for Lizzy and a Lucozade Sport for him.) Well, not unless she started dating another triathlete who was obsessed with rehydrating their electrolytes. She could go for months without bumping into her next-door neighbour.
I’ll probably never see Justin again.
She expected a new wave of anger or sadness, but all she felt was relief. Nic was right. Who
could
trust a man who drank alcopops?
At that moment a new resolve took hold. Lizzy eyeballed her reflection in that way people did in films at life-changing moments. She was a Spellman! Spellmans didn’t lie around feeling sorry for themselves! She would rise like a phoenix from the ashes and start juicing in the mornings, and go on to meet the man of her dreams, while Justin would get dumped by a boring girl with shiny hair and spend the rest of his life in mourning. Ceremoniously pouring her ex-boyfriend’s Alpro Light down the sink, Lizzy went to get ready for work.
Haven PR was situated in a converted townhouse just off Fulham Broadway. Antonia had worked in HR until she’d suffered some sort of breakdown and jetted off to an ashram in India where she’d famously had twenty-one colonics in twenty-one days and experienced a spiritual rebirth. On returning home she’d dumped her first husband and announced she was setting up a holistic PR agency. Antonia now lived round the corner from the office with her second husband, a young German called Erik, and their thunderous-of-thigh toddler daughter, Christiana.
Lizzy had been working for a large corporate agency when she’d first met Antonia at a product launch. Admittedly not entirely sober after three glasses of white wine on an empty stomach, Antonia’s outlook had struck a chord with Lizzy. Restless in her current job, the idea of working in a smaller agency with proper client contact had really appealed to Lizzy. Antonia obviously had a real vision of where she wanted Haven PR to go.
It wasn’t until Lizzy actually started her new job that she had realized Antonia was expecting
her
to make that vision come true.
Lizzy’s official job title was account manager, but she also found herself dealing with the finance, budgets and staff contracts because the account director, whose job it was to oversee those things, had been signed off with long-term stress. Posh people, Lizzy had realized, treated work as something they went to when they felt like it, which wasn’t very often. Having apparently witnessed the dawn of time in India, Antonia now put all her faith in the universe. ‘Don’t blow a gasket,’ she’d trill when she’d only been in for half a day that week and Lizzy was about to spontaneously combust trying to hold everything together. ‘The planets will give you all the answers.’
Despite the chaotic way Haven PR was run and the fact that she hadn’t had an appraisal in eighteen months, Lizzy couldn’t see herself doing any other job. She’d gone into PR because she believed in people’s dreams. There was nothing better than seeing something come to fruition after months of blood, sweat and the odd tear. PR could be unpredictable and frustrating, but Lizzy loved the challenge.
Unfortunately, as time went on and Lizzy seemed to be running Haven almost single-handedly, it was becoming more, not less, of a challenge.
Even one day off had produced a catastrophic build-up in Lizzy’s inbox. It was doubtful she’d ever be able to even go to the toilet again.
The leggy beauty on the opposite desk had been on her blinged-up iPhone for the past twenty minutes. It clearly wasn’t a work conversation because Lizzy had just heard her ask someone to get some pills for a party.
‘Bianca?’
She waved a pair of neon-yellow nails at Lizzy. ‘Be with you in a minute, sweets.’
Bianca was Haven’s account executive, and fresh out of a degree at Bristol University. Generously, she managed to fit her job at Haven around her social life and various modelling assignments.
‘Seriously, darl, tell her to fuck off. The girl’s a skank. You know what Damo said when he took her to Monaco.’
‘What did you want, sweets?’ she asked Lizzy a full ten minutes later.
‘Have you done the mail-out yet?’ Sending out a mass email to journalists about new products was an integral part of the job.
‘I was just about to.’
‘Can you make it a priority please?’ Lizzy asked nicely.
Bianca flashed a megawatt smile. ‘Coming right up.’
Lizzy watched her assistant pick up her phone and read a new text message. Bianca was so laid-back she was practically dead. She’d barely batted an eyelash over Lizzy’s YouTube trauma. Bianca’s sister had done a season on
Made in Chelsea
and Bianca her-self had made a brief cameo when she’d thrown a glass of champagne in someone’s face on a yacht in Hvar.
‘Bianca?’
‘Yes, sweets?’
‘The mail-out!’
Bianca was saved from certain death by hole-punch as Lizzy’s landline started ringing. As usual the Baxters were punctual to the second for their weekly conference call.
Brian Baxter and his wife Debbie were Lizzy’s clients and the brains behind Man Down, a herbal tonic for the ill and exhausted modern male. Or man flu, as it was more commonly known. Thanks to Lizzy’s heroic promotion in the trade press, Holland & Barrett had just started stocking the range. Not that the Baxters were about to let Lizzy rest on her laurels.