Lizzy Harrison Loses Control (14 page)

‘You can talk!’ says Lulu, laughing, ‘with your celebrity fiancé that none of us has ever met!’ She looks over my shoulder to smile indulgently at her new amour.

‘Oh, shut up. You’ll meet Randy when I’m ready. Tell me how it’s all going with Laurent? This is coming up for three weeks, right? That’s got to be a bit of a Lulu Miller record, hasn’t it?’

Lulu tries to act casual, but she is positively radiant. ‘He’s lovely, Harrison, what more can I say? I don’t want to talk about it too much right now in case I jinx it. But I’m really happy. And see?’ She nudges me with her elbow. ‘See how life can change? You scoffed at me that night, and here we both are, loved-up with new boys. And you thought nothing was going to change.’ She looks at me intently, satisfied with her own predictive powers.

I long to own up, to tell her that there’s nothing going on between me and Randy except in public, that I really need to talk about it with my best friend, that I haven’t changed my life at all except on the surface, but instead I reach to open the oven door so she can pull the foil-wrapped garlic bread out and swing it in a reckless arc across the kitchen and on to the table.

‘Ow, hot! Dig in!’

Having spent the last few weeks pretending to be something I’m not, it feels like coming home to sit around Dan and Lulu’s battered old table on their ancient chairs that creak ominously with any sudden movement, teasing each other about the same old stories that we’ve laughed at for years. With Laurent as our audience, we battle to outdo each other with ‘do you remembers’.

Dan is forced, yet again, to defend himself against the charge that he slept with their neighbour Mrs Whittaker, whose hedges he used to trim on summer Sundays in our youth, and who always insisted he share a jug of Pimm’s with her afterwards. Of course he didn’t sleep with her. She was about sixty, wore a cardigan that she’d knitted herself out of dog hair, and no more had carnal intentions towards Dan than she did towards the hedging shears, but it has always wound Dan up hugely to suggest that she got him drunk to take advantage of him. However, under Laurent’s approving smirk, Dan merely shrugs his shoulders and returns Laurent’s smile, implying a man-to-man understanding that Mrs Whittaker was in fact the foxy Mrs Robinson of the Guildford suburbs, and that Lulu and I are making up the dog-hair cardigan out of spite.

Lulu can’t resist reminding me of the time I burned off my entire fringe at her and Dan’s eighteenth birthday party, and how the charred ends sprinkled gently down into the lap of Will Banwell, the upper-sixth heart throb whose lighter I’d flirtatiously asked to use to light what was probably only my fourth or fifth cigarette ever. I certainly got his attention, but the smell of burned hair put paid to any romance, not only that night but for some time afterwards: I had to wear an extremely unfashionable hair band for four long months while it grew out, and there are people in my life who still unkindly refer to me as Bjorn Borg.

Which obviously means that I have to let Laurent know about the time that Lulu, after being bought numerous champagne cocktails by a rich banker she was dating at the time, fell off a bar stool in Claridge’s in a micro-minidress, landing with her legs in the air and nothing but a tiny thong between her and the packed room. However, Laurent is far too interested in exactly what kind of thong it was (leopardskin) to see the funny side. It really must be love.

Once we’ve finished our tiramisu (Lulu’s right – I can hardly remember what the spaghetti tasted like. I just was so glad to see it I scraped my plate clean), Lulu stacks the empty plates in a pile by the sink and produces a pad of paper and four pens.

‘Oh God, no,’ groans Dan, covering his face with his hands. ‘Tell me we’re not playing Person Most Likely.’ He looks out from between his fingers, but of course he knows the answer.

‘It’s that or the Hat Game, Dan,’ says Lulu. ‘Come on, you know we
always
play Person Most Likely after supper when Lizzy comes round.’

‘Personne Most Likely?’ asks Laurent, looking apprehensive, as well he might. This is a game that has ruined relationships, spawned new ones, caused people to be ‘off speakers’ for months. And one of the best games I know.

‘The rules,’ announces Lulu officiously, though Dan and I know them by heart. ‘Each player is given five pieces of paper. On each piece of paper they write down a sentence beginning “Person Most Likely to . . . ” and then they complete that sentence.’

‘With what? I don’t understand,’ says Laurent, looking baffled, as most novices do. Oh, the poor innocent. ‘With whatever you like, darling,’ says Lulu, reaching over to caress his cheek. ‘If you were thinking of me, for example, you might write “Person Most Likely to make Laurent a very happy man tonight”. But then, you see, you might regret that. Because when you have completed your five pieces of paper, they are all dropped into this hat.’ She waves a red beret in his direction. ‘Chose this one in your honour, darling.’ She clears a space amongst the wine glasses and empty bottles and drops the beret in the middle of the table.

‘They go . . . in the beret?’ asks Laurent.

‘Yup – in the beret they go, we mix them up, and then everyone takes out five,’ explains Lulu. ‘And then you read the five you’ve picked out, and here’s where it gets interesting: you allocate them to the person you think is best described there.’ Laurent looks confused.

‘But what if I get the ones I write myself?’ asks Laurent – a rookie question.

‘You still have to hand them out,’ says Lulu firmly.

‘And what if they’re ones that are about me?’ he asks. Aha – a quick learner, I see.

‘Then you can give them to yourself. And when all the pieces of paper have been allocated, we go round the table and read them out loud.’

‘Hmm, sounds fine,’ says Laurent confidently. Poor lamb. He has no idea.

This is the game in which Dan’s horrible university girlfriend Pearl became so enraged on receiving ‘Person Most Likely to lose their temper playing this game’ that she dumped Dan that night (thereby proving Lulu’s point, though obviously she never confessed to writing it). This is the game in which my cousin, on receiving ‘Person Most Likely to have an affair’, burst into tears in front of her husband and asked how we all knew. We didn’t. Till then. So we try to tread a little more carefully these days, but that really depends on the company.

The first round is innocuous stuff: Person Most Likely to wear a string of onions around their neck (Laurent), Person Most Likely to have their wedding featured in
OK!
magazine (me), Person Most Likely to engage in french kissing (Lulu), Person Most Likely to get naked with fourteen men at once (Dan, in the showers after rugby, you understand, though it could easily have been Lulu at one time). It’s all fun and games, and we stop for a moment as Dan reaches up to the cupboard behind him for a bottle of amaretto while Lulu brews up a pot of coffee to lull us into the belief that we’re sobering up.

Laurent is leaning back in his chair with his arm slung around the back of Lulu’s, his thumb slowly caressing the back of the seat as if she were still sitting there. His eyes follow her about the room. Lulu’s pretending not to notice, but every movement is slightly exaggerated: the opening of the fridge door seems to require a seductive bend, even the picking up of the tea towel involves a flirtatious wiggle of the hips. Dan and I roll our eyes at each other as he pours the amber-coloured liqueur into shot glasses, but Lulu and Laurent are in their own world and don’t notice.

Lulu dumps a dented silver coffee pot on the table and unsteadily pours out four coffees in between repeatedly pushing Laurent’s hand off her knee. ‘Really, Laurent! Down, boy – we haven’t even got on to round two.’

‘We have to play this again?’ asks Laurent, looking mournfully into Lulu’s eyes and manoeuvring his hand a little further up her leg.

‘Of course we do, darling,’ says Lulu briskly. ‘This was just the warm-up.’

As the opener to the second round, Dan gets labelled Person Most Likely to die alone, and blames Laurent for writing it – that loopy French writing is such a giveaway to anyone who’s ever been on a French exchange trip. If you ask me, it’s the person who gave it to him who deserves the blame, but that was me, so I’m not going to volunteer that one. I could hardly give it to either one of the happy couple, could I? And it’s a little too close to the bone for me to give it to myself.

‘Die alone? Right – so you all think I’m destined to end up in a dodgy bedsit eating baked beans that I’ve heated up on my one-bar electric heater. Thanks very much.’ Dan looks properly upset, which is ironic because, of the three of us, he’s the only one who’s moved almost seamlessly from long-term relationship to long-term relationship. First there was elegant Eleanor from the year above Dan, who hung out on the side of the rugby pitch with Lulu and me when we were at school but was far too disdainful to actually speak to us. Then Pearl, his university girlfriend, beautiful and bossy, who treated him like a lapdog until her fate was sealed during this very game. We all adored Bella, who he broke up with just a year ago, but after two years without any sign of a commitment from him, she gave him an ultimatum and he chose singledom over matrimony. Lulu and I can’t understand why he’s still on his own. He certainly gets plenty of offers, but apart from a few short flings he seems determined to stay a bachelor.

‘Oh, don’t take it all to heart, Danny,’ says Lulu. ‘You know how these lovely Frenchmen get all existential when they’ve been drinking.’

Laurent nods solemnly at Dan from across the table. ‘We all die alone. In the end, each of us dies alone. There is no together at the end.’

‘Yeah, great – cheery stuff, Laurent,’ says Dan, somewhat mollified.

‘Now, time for Lizzy to read her next one out,’ says Lulu, swiftly changing the subject before the evening turns horribly maudlin.

I obediently pick up the piece of paper in front of me to read, ‘Person Most Likely to need to lose control. Oh, very funny, Laurent – thanks for that.’ His swirly continental letters have given him away again. Although that doesn’t mean he’s the one who gave it to me.

‘Ha! Well, we’ve established that you’ve already done that, thanks to a certain celebrity shagger,’ laughs Lulu triumphantly, chucking Laurent under the chin. ‘You’re quite hopelessly out of date, my gorgeous darling – Lizzy is quite the reformed character.’

‘Who says you need to lose control?’ asks Dan, looking confused. ‘Is this about Randy Jones?’

‘Of course it is, Danny,’ says Lulu, launching into a wildly exaggerated description of the night on which she met Laurent, who happily chips in with his thoughts.

‘And then Lizzy agrees with Lulu that she needs to lose control a bit more, to allow life to happen to her, you know? To take some risks. To not live by the rules all the time, to experience what is, rather than what should be,’ Laurent finishes. I see what Lulu means about the drunken existentialism.

‘Riiiight,’ says Dan, looking dubious. ‘And you agreed with this, Lizzy?’

‘
Mais oui
, she signed a promise and I witnessed it,’ says Laurent with a shrug.

‘Well, that explains a lot,’ says Dan, pouring out another round of shots. ‘I might have known that Lizzy wouldn’t even think of going out with Randy Jones unless my sister put her up to it.’ He grins at me across the table as if we’re sharing a tremendous joke.

‘Er, what exactly do you mean?’ I demand. ‘My relationship with Randy has nothing to do with Lulu’s ridiculous challenge. It’s a complete coincidence, despite what Lulu might say.’

‘Sorry, darling,’ says Lulu, blowing me a kiss across the table. ‘I was just excited for you. I didn’t mean to take the credit for your lovely new man.’

‘Oh, come off it,’ says Dan, laughing. ‘He’s not exactly your type, is he? I mean, Lizzy Harrison and the Shagger of the Millennium? There’s no way you’d get involved with him if it weren’t to prove a point.’

‘Are you saying you think I’m too boring for someone like Randy?’ I say crossly. ‘Well, cheers, Dan – that’s really good to know.’

I’m not about to defend my fake boyfriend, but it seems my relationship with him is bringing to the surface the way people really see me. And I’m not sure I like it. First my brother thinks I’m too sensible to date Randy Jones, and now rugby-shirted style-vacuum Dan is getting on board the Lizzy-Harrison-Is-A-Bore bandwagon.

‘I mean it as a compliment!’ protests Dan. ‘You’re just . . . I mean, you’re just really
together,
aren’t you? Like, everything about you is all calm and ordered and . . . clean, and – well, that’s not Randy at all, is it?’

‘Clean?! You think it’s a compliment to say I’m clean and ordered? You make me sound like a nurse or something,’ I storm, feeling unaccountably furious. ‘Let me tell you that Randy is just the man for me, and do you know why? Because despite what you all seem to think, I am perfectly capable of being a bit wild and crazy. Because despite what you think, I am not boring or sensible or . . . or . . .
clean
.’

My voice has risen far too high and loud, and when I stop speaking there is a long silence during which Dan won’t look at me and Laurent looks imploringly at Lulu.

‘Well, let’s not take this too far. After all, you
are
clean, darling,’ says Lulu, sounding practical. ‘Don’t go denying good hygiene for the sake of making a point. And you know Danny doesn’t mean you’re boring. As if he could possibly think that. Do you, Dan?’