'Oh, poor Luke,' said Jane. 'Is he OK?'
'Not really,' said Josh irritably. 'The clumsy bastard smashed into a rock and now he's got amnesia. Can't even remember the past, let alone predict the future. You'd have thought he'd have seen it coming.'
Jane raised her eyebrows as she sat down and started to poke about her desk. In an attempt to impose some order on the chaos of her life, she had recently taken to noting down the next day's most important tasks on a Post It before she left the office the evening before. This morning, she gazed at the little primrose sticker and sighed. Top of the list was ringing Champagne.
She tried the mobile last. It ground away, unanswered. Jane had just decided to put it down when someone at the other end picked it up.
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'Yah?' barked Champagne, over what sounded like loud banging and sloshing sounds in the background.
'It's Jane. How are you?' asked Jane, trying to sound enthusiastic.
'Fine. Just got back from shooting, in fact,' honked Champagne. 'With the Sisse-Pooles in Scotland. Bloody awful.'
'Oh, I hate blood sports too,' agreed Jane, starting to scribble down the conversation for the column. 'So dreadfully cruel.'
'Hideously cruel,' Champagne agreed, much to Jane's surprise. 'Making people stagger over the moors in the peeing rain wearing clothes the colour of snot is absolutely the worst, the most inhuman thing you can do to anyone. Let's face it,' Champagne added, in the face of Jane's stunned silence, 'I'm just not an outdoor type of girl. The only hills I care about are Beverly.'
And the only kind of shoots you care about are movie ones, the only Moores you're interested are Demi and Roger and the only bags that grab you are by Prada, thought Jane, working up the theme for the new column and scribbling furiously. And we all know whose butts you're most interested in at the moment. Unless, that is, you've been poached by a loaded gun.
That, at least, was a thought worth probing. 'Who were you shooting with?' Jane asked. It didn't sound like a very O'Shaughnessy activity. Perhaps Champagne had dumped him for some vague, weatherbeaten blond lord with a faceful of broken veins, a labrador and vast tracts of Yorkshire. Tim Nice Butt Dim.
'Well, Conal, of course, who the hell do you think?' came the booming honk. Slosh, slosh went the mystery background noise. 'The Sisse-Pooles asked him along as
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well. He had a blast, actually. Haw haw haw. God, I'm
fanny.'
Jane gritted her teeth. 'How did he do?' she asked, trying to imagine the determinedly working-class O'Shaughnessy stumbling around a moor with a collection of portly patricians in plus fours.
'Only thing he shot was one of the beaters,' boomed Champagne. 'But that didn't matter. Bloke was as old as the hills anyway. Oh yes,' hollered Champagne over the noise, 'Conal had a great time. He likes a good bang as much as the next man. Haw haw haw.'
'So you're still together?' The relationship with O'Shaughnessy had now lurched past the fortnight mark. In Champagne's book, that was practically the equivalent of a diamond wedding.
'Bloody right we are,' bawled Champagne. 'More than that, we're getting married!'
Jane's pen dropped with a clatter to the floor. 'Married?' Despite being separated from the conversation by the glass wall of his office, Josh's head shot up like Apollo 9.
'Yah, Conal asked me last night,' screeched Champagne excitedly. 'At least, I
think
that's what he said. Might have said "Will you carry me" as he was a bit out of it at the time. But by the time he came round, I'd dragged him into Tiffany's. Couldn't go back on his word then!' She roared with laughter.
The banging and swishing seemed to reach a climax. Champagne's voice was now barely audible over the terrific sloshing noise, as if she was caught in a terrible storm. Jane finally decided to voice the suspicion that had been building for some time. 'Champagne,' she asked, 'are you filing your column from the shower?'
'Not exactly,' bellowed Champagne. 'I'm just test-
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driving my new whirlpool bath. It's amazing. Some of the jets do frankly thrilling things.'
Jane put down the phone feeling sick. Champagne's wedding was a nauseating prospect. Day after day, Jane realised, she would be forcibly reminded of her own single status as Champagne banged on relentlessly about what would most certainly be the Media Wedding of The Year. The only bright side to it was the fact that if her wedding was splashed all over
Hello!,
even Champagne might be able to remember something about it for the column.
Still, when life failed, there was always food to fall back on. At lunchtime, Jane headed for the supermarket, deciding to buy herself something glamorous and comforting for supper. She headed automatically for the dairy counter, with its wealth of sinful lactocentricity. But here lurked disappointment. Disillusionment, even. Scanning the shelves, Jane couldn't help noticing the number of products that seemed to exist to mock the solitary, manless diner. Single cream, drippy and runny and the antithesis of comforting, luxurious double. Those depressing, rubbery slices of processed cheese called Singles.
Feeling self-conscious, Jane shuffled over to the more cheerful-looking Italian section, where she plumped for a big, squashy, colourful boxed pizza. Something about its improbable topping — four cheeses, pineapple, onion, olives, chicken tikka, prawns, peperoni, tomato, capers and tuna — struck her as amusing, and its mattress-like proportions looked intensely comforting. And Italians liked large ladies anyway.
Once the pizza box was in her basket, however, Jane felt racked with embarrassment. She was, she told herself, at least a stone too heavy to wander around in public carrying such a blatant statement of Intent To Consume
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Calories. Hurriedly retracing her steps, Jane slipped the pizza box back on the cooler shelf and replaced it with a nutritionally unimpeachable packet of fresh pasta. No one needed to know she intended to eat it with eggy, creamy, homemade carbonara sauce.
Having secured the bacon, Jane went into a dream by the eggs, confused by the vast variety on offer. Was barn-fresh grain-fed more or less cruel than four-grain yard-gathered? Spending so much of her time in her own dreary office building, Jane was intensely sympathetic to the plight of battery hens. She picked up a cardboard box of eggs and shoved them vaguely in the direction of her basket. Only it wasn't hers.
'Oh, I'm so sorry,' Jane gasped to the tall, dark-haired, leather-jacketed man standing right next to her. 'I seem to have put all my eggs in your basket!' She retrieved them and giggled. Tm sorry. I was miles away.' But the man did not smile back. His handsome face didn't even crease. After staring at her hard for a second or two, he walked swiftly away. Jane gazed after him. Really, people acted very oddly in supermarkets. They were the strangest places. Some, she knew, were cruising zones. Some even held singles evenings.
Rounding the corner, hoping to happen upon some garlic bread, Jane bumped into Mr Leather Jacket again. 'Sorry,' she muttered again. He stared at her even harder. Annoyance flooded her. What was his problem?
Then a thought struck her. Jane flushed deeper and redder than a beetroot. Oh Christ, she thought. He thinks I fancy him. He thought I put my eggs in his basket on purpose. It's probably accepted supermarket flirting code. Eggs probably mean something very intimate and reproductive. Christ. How embarrassing. She looked round in
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panic at the contents of the baskets around her, suspecting the existence of an entire alternative universe of shopping semiotics. What, for example, did carrots mean? Or sausages? She hardly dared think about cucumbers. And meat? Were there such things as pick-up joints?
Even more embarrassing was the fact that her advances had been rejected, even though they had been unconscious. Or had they? Had there been some subliminal attempt to attract the man in the egg section? Had she been screaming out 'Fertilise Me' as she plonked her Size Twos into his basket? They had, she remembered been free range as well.
Jane returned, shamefaced, to the office. Mercifully, the day passed without any more interruptions from Champagne. Jane's relaying of the wedding news to Josh resulted in a six-foot-plus bunch of flowers and a six-pack of Krug being whizzed round to the Lancaster double quick. Josh was evidently putting in an early bid for a place on the invitation list.
At home, Jane put the pasta on to boil and opened the low-cal tomato sauce which she had eventually bought and which promptly spattered all over her. She gazed miserably at the sauce spots staining her new white blouse. Damaged goods. Shop-soiled. She may as well face it, she was, Jane decided, starting to snivel, on the shelf, and the one marked Reduced For Quick Sale at that.
She poured herself a stiff gin and tonic and felt pleasantly weak as the spirit flowed through her veins. So what if she didn't have a boyfriend. Plenty more fish in the sea, she thought encouragingly, raising the glass to the light. Even if they were probably sharks.. Or, worse, tiddlers. Even worse, plankton. She'd clearly boarded the wrong train of thought here, Jane decided, finishing the glass. And now she'd upset herself. If depression was a
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black dog, she was currently presiding over a whole kennel full.
The telephone rang. Torn between the always lurking hope that it might be Tom, and the always lurking dread that it might be Nick, Jane decided to screen the call and hovered as the answering mechanism clicked loudly on. 'Oh, Jane, it's Amanda,' floated out the serene, clear and confident tones of a woman evidently at the other end of the coping-with-life universe from Jane. Amanda? Amanda who? Surely not Amanda-from-Cambridge. Amanda-with-the-vast-house-in-Hampstead. Rich-Amanda-she-had-meant-to-get-in-touch-with-about-Tally.
Since Cambridge, Jane and Amanda had seen each other only sporadically. The last time, Jane remembered, blushing, was when she and Nick had gone round there for dinner and Nick had attacked Amanda's merchant banker husband Peter for being a running dog capitalist. His opinions, Jane toe-curlingly recalled, had gathered force if not coherence from the gallons of Veuve Cliquot that Peter had provided, and Nick had soaked up like it was going out of fashion.
'Amanda!' Jane snatched up the receiver, hoping her words didn't sound too drink-sodden. 'Just got in through the door,' she lied. 'How
are
you? Haven't heard from you for ages.' She decided not to refer to the circumstances of their last meeting.
'Nor I you,' said Amanda smoothly; she had evidently reached the same conclusion. 'Which was why I was getting in touch. I thought you and Nick might like to come round to dinner Saturday week. Should be quite run. If you can bear another tableful of City types, that is.' She gave a glassy giggle.
Jane blinked. Amid the clutter of her gin-fogged brain,
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three clear possibilities gradually emerged: Amanda was very forgiving, Amanda had lost her memory, or Amanda had a
placement
problem. The latter seemed the most likely. Two guests had obviously dropped out of her dinner party and Amanda needed bodies quickly. She must, Jane thought, be
desperate
to consider having Nick back. She obviously hadn't heard they were no longer an item.
'I'd love to, but. . .' Jane started to explain about Nick. Then she stopped. A thought had struck her. What about Tally? A big dinner party at Amanda's would be full of City bankers. Men with money. The kind of men Tally desperately needed to meet. Jane's brain fizzed. Amanda didn't need to know about Nick. Hopefully she wouldn't find out, either. Jane would simply turn up with Tally, and break the change of partner to Amanda at the last minute. Fantastic. At last she was able to do something to help her friend.
'Actually, I think that might be OK,' Jane said slowly, shoving the receiver under her chin and making jabbing-frantically-at-the-Psion movements into thin air. 'Mmm, yes. It's fine. We'd love to. About eight thirty?'
Breaking the scheme to Tally would be simple, Jane decided. She would just tell her the two of them had been invited together. She hoped she could rely on Amanda not to make it awkward.
That decided, Jane went to bed, and dreamed of Tom. As she did at least twice a week, she recalled in vivid detail as much as she could remember of their night together. Frequent reminiscence would, she hoped, like water on a garden, keep the memory green. But she was already beginning to forget exactly what he had said to her. Admittedly, there had not been much. The sex, however, she could remember perfectly. Jane was reliving a
particularly delicious moment, right down to the moans and sighs, when she realised that she was actually not asleep, but awake, and the moaning and sighing was happening directly above her head.
Jane opened her eyes wide and sat bolt upright. The moaning and sighing was more regular now, and was accompanied by rhythmic thuds. As the noises climbed the decibel scale to ecstasy, Jane realised that, in the flat above, Jarvis was apparently grinding some willing female into the shagpile.
The irony of it. Jane threw herself face down into the pillow and bit hard to prevent herself from screaming. Should she go up there and ask them to stop? Should she go up there and ask to join in? Jarvis and his partner were making so much noise now, moaning and sighing, panting and gasping, that Jane wondered what more they could actually do to mark the crucial moment. Blow a horn, perhaps? On the other hand, that was probably exactly what was happening now.