It was proving impossible to get anyone to take her seriously. Even the trade journalists, who’d seen every wacky product on the market, told Lizzy she was fighting a losing battle with the Happy Halo. The worst phone call of all was to the woman at one of the glossy Sunday magazines.
‘Hi?’ she said aggressively, as if Lizzy had had the nerve to ring her in the middle of a three-week beach holiday.
‘Um hi, it’s Lizzy from Haven here. How are you?’
‘Fine. What do you want?’
‘I sent you a press release this morning, and I was just calling to see if you’d like me to send you any images or samples.’
‘I get sent hundreds of press releases every day. What was it about?’
Lizzy swallowed. ‘The Happy Halo.’
‘The Happy what?’
‘The Happy Halo? It’s an amazing new product we’ve just taken on. It
looks
like a pair of really fun deelyboppers, but in fact each “bopper” has a crystal inside that sends out good vibrations through the body. It’s brilliant for cleansing dirty auras.’
Silence.
‘Each crystal has been personally blessed by this amazing shaman called, er, Shaman Ron,’ Lizzy said desperately. ‘He’s really ahead in his field …’
For a horrible moment she thought the journalist had hung up. ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
‘Loud and clear.’ The woman’s voice had sounded muffled. ‘And what sort of coverage did you see the Happy Halo getting?’
‘Well … if you were doing any fashion pieces on the next big thing in headgear …’
‘Headgear?’ the woman wheezed.
‘Yes, maybe something about looking good and healing yourself at the same time …’
There were loud shrieks of laughter down the line.
‘Am I on loudspeaker to your office?’ Lizzy asked wearily.
There was another round of hysterical laughter before the phone was finally put down on her.
‘No joy with the fashion angle?’ Antonia said breezily. ‘You’d better think up another way to pitch it then.’
To top off the humiliation, Lizzy was being made to wear a Halo in the office at all times. According to Antonia, it was to really ‘live the experience’. So far all Lizzy was experiencing was a constant feeling of motion sickness.
At least there had been no comeback from Elliot Anderson. Lizzy had done some more Google stalking and had felt mildly sick to find out he really was quite important. His family had started the prestigious Beestons private bank, which had its HQ in a huge white building just off the Strand, and was second only to the world-famous Coutts. Elliot had studied economics at Oxford, where he’d got a First and had turned down an expected career in banking to go into journalism. He’d won various plaudits for his reporting and in 2011 had been named as one of the ten most powerful people under thirty in the UK. Not the kind of person you wanted to cross swords with. All Lizzy could do was console herself with the thought he was probably far too busy and important to bother with lowly PRs like her. Hopefully by now he would have forgotten all about her email.
On Thursday night she went to meet her friends at a new cocktail club in Soho. Nic and Poppet were already sitting at a table, surrounded by a sea of Mojitos.
Poppet was moaning about the son of a family friend, who’d ‘conveniently’ turned up at her niece’s birthday party.
‘What was he like?’ Nic asked, handing Lizzy a drink.
‘He had the hands of a small child and kept quoting science facts from Professor Brian Cox.’ Poppet shuddered. ‘And he had a handkerchief.’
Lizzy tucked her iPod headphones away in her handbag. ‘What’s wrong with having a handkerchief?’
‘It’s totally gross,’ Nic said. ‘If you want to have any chance of being intimately sexual with someone, why would you empty the contents of your nose in front of them, and then keep it in your pocket? People don’t want to be reminded of other people’s orifices! I wouldn’t pick my knickers out of my arse in front of someone I fancied. It would be like holding a ringing bell over my head and saying: “Look! Look at my ginormous hungry bottom! Now imagine me taking a dump!”’
‘Eww,’ Lizzy said. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘All my parents want me to do is marry a nice Indian boy,’ Poppet sighed. ‘And all I want to do is marry Matt Damon.’
Nic pulled a face. ‘Even after
Behind the Candelabra
?’
Poppet’s obsession with Matt Damon made even One Direction fans look a bit fair-weather. She had every DVD he’d ever starred in and was probably the only person in the universe aside from Matt Damon’s mum who thought
We Bought a Zoo
would be an enduring classic. Then there was the famous time she’d booked herself on a mini break to Edinburgh after reading somewhere it was the actor’s favourite city in the UK. Unsurprisingly she hadn’t had a random romantic encounter with Matt Damon in the street, and had spent the rest of the trip in her hotel room consoling herself with the complimentary shortbread.
Lizzy looked down at the plethora of cocktails in front of her. ‘Why have we got so many drinks?’
‘Happy Hour ends soon.’ Nic did a huge yawn. ‘And I can’t be arsed with going back to the bar.’
While Poppet reapplied her lip-gloss Lizzy told them all about the barbecue of shame at her parents’ and her run-in with Hayley. ‘Twat,’ was all Nic said afterwards.
Poppet zipped her make-up bag back up. ‘How are Robbie and Hayley these days?’
‘Fine, unfortunately,’ Lizzy sighed. ‘I think I can safely say she’s got Robbie firmly by the balls.’ She paused. ‘Not that I want to think about my brother’s testicles.’
‘Pops and I were having a discussion before you got here,’ Nic announced. ‘We think it’s time for you to get back in the game.’
‘Not
on
the game,’ Poppet snickered.
‘I think I’ll have to pay someone to sleep with
me
. Did you read some of the
MailOnline
comments? “Lizzy Spellman – Bridezilla in waiting!” Or how about: “She looks like she smells of ham”?’
‘Stop thinking like a victim,’ Nic told her. ‘You need to capitalize on your situation. I bet you’d get loads of hot men giving you sympathy sex.’
‘So from now on all I get is sex with guys who feel sorry for me?’
Nic ignored her. ‘You need to move on from Justin’s penis. As long as he’s the last person you’ve had sex with, the penis thread will always be there.’
The penis thread was one of Nic’s many theories about relationships. It didn’t matter how much you thought you were over a man, or even if you were the one who’d done the dumping: until you slept with someone else there would always be that invisible link between you and your ex. The first rule of a break up: the penis thread had to be severed as quickly as possible, even if you didn’t fancy the bloke you had sex with. ‘Otherwise it will always be there, lurking there in the background,’ Nic would say in a sinister tone, ‘tying you together and stopping you from moving on.’
‘How about Internet dating again?’ Poppet suggested. ‘You got a good response last time.’
‘Yeah, from 67-year-old pensioners on mobility scooters!’
‘Why don’t you and Lizzy both sign up?’ Nic picked a mint leaf out of her drink. ‘I hate to break it to you, Pops, but Jason Bourne isn’t going to come swinging through those doors for you any time soon.’
‘I’m not sure Internet dating is for me. It’s all so contrived and unromantic.’ Poppet gazed out wistfully into the street. ‘Why can’t people meet how they used to, and leave it to fate?’
‘People haven’t got time to wait for fate these days, and online dating immediately sorts out the wheat from the chaff. If you get a dud you can tell him to jog on at the click of the button.’
‘I just want to meet someone the old-fashioned way, like they do in films. Come on, Nic! Don’t you dream about meeting “The One” in the pouring rain at a bus stop?’
Nic looked horrified. ‘I wouldn’t date a man who used
public transport
.’
While Poppet would happily live in a cardboard box under London Bridge if it meant being with her One True Love, Nic had a very different view of men. In her eyes they were there on a purely functional basis: i.e. procreation, syncing new iPhones, and someone to take things to the tip. She got everything else she needed from her work and her friends.
Poppet wanted a whole football team of kids, or as she put it, ‘a netball team of daughters’. Lizzy thought she might have one, but the having-children-thing freaked her out a bit, and knowing her luck, she’d probably fall pregnant first time round with sextuplets. Nic didn’t want a family. She adhered to the mantra of her heroine, the TV historian Dr Lucy Worsley, who had once famously said that she’d been ‘educated out of normal reproductive function’. Nic said it wasn’t exactly the same, in that Lucy Worsley was uber-posh and Nic had gone to the second roughest school in Nottingham, but the sentiment was there. Having kids simply wasn’t part of her plan.
Nic’s plan was actually very simple: concentrate on her career until forty, when she would join one of those dating agencies where people had to earn over six figures, and become one half of a significant new power couple. Until then she was happy to satisfy her sexual urges by occasionally shagging one of the green bibs from her British Military Fitness class because – she was fond of saying – at least she knew they had good stamina.
It was Lizzy’s turn to go to the bar. The HMQ was quite high tonight, she reflected as she waited to get served, at least a seven out of ten. In the aftermath of ‘Girl Who Gets Jilted …’ Lizzy hadn’t even allowed herself to harbour any thoughts about the opposite sex, but there was a very cute guy next to her at the bar, wearing a T-shirt that showed off his nice arms. Rather encouragingly, he was actually smiling at her.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Having a good night?’
‘Yes thanks,’ she smiled back. ‘How about you?’
‘Pretty good. Who are you here with?’
Lizzy waved vaguely. ‘Just some mates.’
They continued to make a bit of small talk.
This is what flirting feels like
, Lizzy thought joyously. Nice Arms picked up his drinks and gave her a wink. ‘I’d love to stand here chatting but I’d better get back to my girlfriend. Have a good night with your friends.’
It might have been a non-starter but Lizzy returned to the table feeling considerably brighter. Maybe she wasn’t a complete write-off after all.
Nic had her iPad out on the table. ‘Let’s get you signed up for some Internet dating. If
that
doesn’t work then we’ll just put you on a swingers’ site.’
They started running through the options.
‘
Guardian
Soulmates?’ Poppet suggested.
‘A bit pretentious,’ Lizzy said. ‘They always ride fixed-gear bikes and read books by people I’ve never heard of.’
‘My Single Friend?’
‘What century are you in, Pops?’ Nic said incredulously. ‘No one uses that any more.’
‘OK then, Plenty of Fish?’
‘Married men and perverts.’ Nic didn’t elaborate on how she’d arrived at this theory. ‘Tinder’s good if you want fast, meaningless sex.’
‘Tinder is just one massive selfie-off,’ Lizzy said. ‘Everyone’s showing off their six-packs and that’s just the girls.’
Nic picked up her phone. ‘Oh God, what does Simon want
now
?’
Simon Hargreaves was Nic’s demanding boss, who she spent half her life on the phone to. ‘I’ll have to take this. Carry on without me.’
‘How about Muddy Matches?’ Poppet suggested after Nic had gone outside. ‘You might meet a lonely earl and go and live in his castle!’
She broke off. A dreamy look had come over her face. Lizzy turned round to see a couple at the next table kissing, locked away in their own private world. The man was cradling the woman’s face in his hands.
‘That is so hot,’ Poppet sighed. She was obsessed with men holding women’s faces in their hands when they kissed them after Matt Damon had done it with his love interest in
The Bourne Identity
.
Lizzy gave her a nudge. ‘We can’t sit round watching people kissing! We look like a pair of freaks!’
‘Why do you have to turn a beautiful thing into something sordid? We watch people kiss in films and perfume adverts, don’t we?’
Nic returned five minutes later in an ebullient mood. ‘How are we doing?’
‘We’ve got it down to two sites.’
‘Great! Now all you have to do is write your profile.’ She handed Lizzy the iPad.
‘I have no idea what to put.’
‘Big yourself up, baby!’
‘I can’t, I’m English.’
Poppet had a suggestion. ‘Why don’t you pretend you’re writing a press release? Think of yourself as this amazing product that has just come on to the market and you have to convince
everyone
to try you out.’
Lizzy stared at the screen. ‘Everything I think of makes me sound like a twat.’
‘How about fun-loving and bubbly?’
Nic shook her head. ‘Blokes read that as “fucking annoying and needy”.’
‘How about sociable?’ Lizzy said. ‘You can’t go wrong with that.’
‘You may as well write: “Thinks vodka for breakfast is taking it easy.”’
‘You write it then, Nicola! Actually, scrap that, you’ll probably end up attracting me the next Josef Fritzl.’
Poppet went and bought another round of drinks to try and release Lizzy’s writer’s block. After fifteen minutes of writing and deleting, she decided to go for a list approach and keep it short and sweet.
Blonde hair, green eyes, penchant for the absurd. I like dark rum, Italian food, crime fiction, London, boisterous dogs that charge through people’s picnics and good conversation. Lover of popular culture. Dangerous on a Boris Bike. Would like to meet a funny, easy-going chap, who knows his ‘their’ from his ‘they’re’. If you are proficient in large moth removal, this is also valued highly.
‘Perfect,’ Poppet said. ‘Funny, but not too funny, remember men like being the funny ones. And you got the helpless damsel in distress bit in at the end.’
They chose a picture of Lizzy in the park from the previous summer, where Poppet said Lizzy’s eyes looked nice, and in which Nic said she was showing off ‘just the right amount of tit’, and put it up. Afterwards Lizzy’s brain hurt as if she’d just sat a major exam.