Low Expectations (13 page)

‘Your boss is fit! F. I. T. And that Alice girl – phwooar!' Sarah shouts in my ear, as she bops along to the music, knocking into everyone around her so much that I fear she will create a mini mosh pit. I haven't seen Sarah this pissed in quite a while. While not a shining example of health and sobriety myself, it is concerning – there is a desperate quality behind her eyes tonight.

Between trying to prevent Sarah's lurching giving someone a black eye and my attempts to spy on Scott and Alice, I have forgotten about Beardy. That is, until I turn to the stage to find that he is staring at me intensely while singing, leading to a long moment of uncomfortable eye contact. I give a small, embarrassed wave. He really is very handsome, I think as he croons into the microphone. Even if he is wearing fringed leather trousers and a red velvet brocade vest. His beard might be nearing Rasputin territory but in the face he is much closer to a young Stalin, who, while a terrible tyrant and murderer of the first degree, was also pretty damn sexy.

Sarah interrupts my reverie by grabbing my upper arm, digging her fingernails into my flesh. Her drunken gyrating has come to an abrupt stop. Her eyes open wide and her cheeks turn an ashy grey. There can only be one of two reasons for this – she has either seen a celebrity or she is about to puke.

‘Oh shit, let's get you to the loos!' Luckily my bladder, of pea-sized proportions, has left me with a good working knowledge of pretty much every bog in EC1. I flex my elbows like an angry chicken and use them to batter my way through the crowd, dragging Sarah behind me and hoping she won't projectile on my back.

*

‘Oh God, sorry, dear. So, so sorry. I didn't have dinner. I feel like shit …' Sarah moans with her head resting against the porcelain, her legs splayed across the dirty tiles. It's amazing
how little it takes before all notions of propriety and hygiene are chucked out the window like so much garbage.

‘Hey, don't worry about it! It's fine. As far as I'm concerned, you managed not to puke on me or in front of Scott and Alice, or Beardy: that earns you a massive gold star!'

Sarah gives a weak laugh, which brings on some retching.

‘You've had a stressful night, man, it's cool.' I rub her back and smooth back her hair as the snakebite makes its unwelcome return. ‘Jesus, snakebite was a terrible idea, let's never order that again. You'll be fine, everything will be fine.'

‘I … I think I want to break up with Henry. Where's my phone?'

‘No, no, no, don't do that. Here, we'll get you cleaned up and smuggle you out. You can stay at mine – don't make any decisions tonight, yeah? We can keep this whole palaver between you, me and the toilet.'

Somehow, I manoeuvre Sarah's crumpled form through the crowd, out the door and onto the night bus home without running into anyone. The moment we are comfortably installed on the 242, Sarah regurgitates purple liquid all over the floor. It sloshes disconsolately back and forth between the aisles, a smelly rebuke for our overindulgence. After enduring the death stares, disgust and pity of the other passengers throughout the painful journey, I bundle her into my bed, where she passes out before she even hits the mattress. I manage to send off a quick text to Beardy explaining
our absence – lying, obviously – as I lie down next to her, too exhausted even to take off my makeup, a cardinal sin for the spot-prone.

My last thought before I fall asleep is, ‘I hope Scott didn't notice any of that.'

The week passed in a blur. I tried to juggle catching up with my uni work with shifts at The Newt, where Scott was largely absent. I was surprised at how much I noticed this. On the other hand, I had to screen my calls to avoid Beardy, who acquired an inexplicable, ill-timed surge of affection ever since I was so distant at his gig. While it is refreshing to feel in control of a relationship in which I had anticipated being the insecure one, I'm ashamed to admit it has also made me go off him a bit.

During the past few weeks I have become woefully behind with my sketchbook and fabric boards so I've been getting up early each morning to spend the day drawing and working on the initial pattern cutting for my collection. As with all
creative endeavours, unforeseen snags appear and everything takes longer than anticipated. Thursday's crit with my tutor was a depressing experience, as I struggled to defend the marketing figures and consumer research underpinning my designs for a new luxury womenswear brand. I have a general, vague faith that things will come out all right in the end, interspersed with moments of guilty panic and conviction of utter failure.

These anxieties add to my general trepidation as I make my way to South Kensington to have dinner with my estranged parents and Vitoria. My mother calls her The Brazilian In-Need-Of-A-Wax, due to a downy layer of light brown hair on her face that she likes to think of as a full-on beard. Once, at a disastrous dinner party before they instigated an apartheid within their friendship circles, Mum got a bit pissed and loudly suggested it would be polite of her to shave before social engagements. The fact that after this public humiliation, Vitoria has not made any depilatory facial arrangements has earned her some reluctant respect. It takes balls for a woman to own her peach fuzz.

My grudging admiration deepened the other day when, to my horror, I tried to wipe off what I thought to be a brush bristle on the side of my face only to find that it was attached. I've always had one long blonde witch's hair under my chin that pops up overnight every six months and is mysteriously an inch long, but felt a blinding dismay when it occurred to
me that they are becoming more numerous and migrating higher.

Walking into the restaurant, a chic French bistro where a bottle of water costs £6, I see that my mother is already sitting down with what I hope is her first glass of wine. Her tall frame is wrapped up in a fox-fur stole and one of her legs, in three-quarter-length black trousers and ballet pumps, jumps up and down underneath the table impatiently. With thick dark hair tied up in a chignon and large expressive brown eyes, she has the air of a latter-day Audrey Hepburn, if Audrey Hepburn was permanently irritable.

As befits a woman who will do anything to counteract the ageing process aside from giving up smoking, drinking or refined sugars, she has had a few minor nips, tucks, peels and injectables along the way. Publicly, she insists to whoever will listen that she would never go under the knife. Privately, she justifies this hypocrisy with the logic that ‘It's only cosmetic surgery if you are under general anaesthetic, darling.' Luckily she has managed, through good bone structure and an excellent surgeon, to avoid the deflated-balloon-pulled-over-a-skull appearance that has befallen a few of her friends. She looks like a natural, strikingly well-preserved older woman.

Despite this, she is perpetually dissatisfied with her appearance, due to the fact that she was such a beauty in her youth. As the French proverb goes, ‘Old age is the revenge of the ugly ones.' Occasionally she congratulates me that I have made the
most of myself with this backhanded compliment: ‘You are a pretty girl, but you can't rely on just your looks to get by. In the long run, that is far more useful than stopping traffic'. She then usually bemoans the fact that she no longer stops traffic and recounts for the millionth time the story of how she once rejected David Bowie in the late seventies.

‘Hey Mum! You look great,' I say, as she stands to her full height, five foot ten in flats, to peck at my cheeks. I am a few inches taller in my stacked platforms and the good posture that she instilled in me from a young age, for which I must be grateful. She gave me three mantras with which to conquer life: ‘Tall and hunched never gets asked to lunch', ‘Tall and thin gets the diamond ring' and of course ‘Chips are for poor people'. She pulls back, holding my shoulders steady and looking into my face, perturbed.

‘Darling, have you been drinking too much recently? Your face is puffy.'

‘Er, not since the weekend. I think it's just the curse of the baby face.' I put one hand to my cheek self-consciously and try to comfort myself with the hope that my cheekbones might emerge gloriously in my thirties, if I manage not to drown them under a sea of fat. I fail to understand why ageing celebrities willingly stuff themselves with fillers to create the chipmunk silhouette that is my bête noire.

‘Yes, you get that from your father. He is getting rather jowly these days,' she sniffs, sitting back down and taking a
sip of wine. ‘He's got quite fat since he's taken up with Her, you know, she doesn't take very good care of his diet. She might well be hoping to bring on a heart attack.'

‘I fail to see how that would benefit her, seeing as they aren't married,' I say idly, as I take my seat. Mum stiffens and I immediately regret voicing the thought. It had occurred to me that a marriage announcement might be in the works tonight but I've been hoping it will be something with less emotional fallout.

She pauses, then says firmly, ‘If he hasn't asked her by now, I very much doubt he will. It would have lent their whole affair some gravitas at the time, but she's still nothing but a live-in girlfriend. It's been six years now – that ship has sailed. If a man doesn't propose after a year of living together, Georgie, darling, just be aware that you are his maid and whore, convenient but nothing more.'

‘Mum, that rhymed. How poetic.' I grin weakly to dispel the tension and am rewarded with a smile and a roll of the eyes.

‘I know, I know, old Mummy spouting off her antiquated ideas again with only one failed cliché of a marriage behind her to lend her any credence. Just because something isn't fashionable to say these days, darling, doesn't make it any less true. The world has not changed in the last fifty years as much as you think. Men and women have a dynamic that's been
worked out over tens of thousands of years. A few women running around sporting underarm hair, claiming to be proud of their sagging bosoms changes nothing.'

‘That's a ridiculous way to view feminism! Without those women neither of us would be able to direct our lives autonomously. We'd be dependent upon a man's signature to even get a loan or a mortgage.'

‘Yes, but we are both still dependent on your father to pay the bills. And what is a bank loan or a mortgage but begging money off a Big Daddy with no emotional ties and no qualms about throwing you in prison if you are in debt? Furthermore, if you do manage to succeed you need to pay the money back.'

‘That is the nature of a loan, Mum. Plus, I'm pretty sure the whole bankruptcy option put an end to debtor's prison; you should read less Dickens. But we are seriously not having this conversation. What about all the other things – like the right to be independent, to work, to vote?' I say, in between munching on a heavenly piece of warm black olive and walnut bread and ordering a glass of white wine.

‘I've never voted in my life, darling, really most constituencies are fixed Tory or Labour, there is no point in going to all the bother. But you know I'm not talking about all that. I'm talking about the lies we women tell ourselves in the hopes that we can have a career, then marriage, then babies, all without any help or something falling apart. Trust me,
darling, if you want to be happy, find a good man, get married and have some sweet little children. Then you can open a nice shop on his coin when they go to school.'

She finishes her glass of wine and signals to the waiter for another, looking more relaxed and slightly smug. What appears to me to be a tragic indictment of the pervasive inferiority of women, she finds a strange comfort in, possibly because it makes her feel that we are all hurtling towards the same miserable destiny.

These reflections are interrupted by the arrival of my father and Vitoria, who clatters over to the table, a gazelle in Louboutin wedges, wearing a clingy vest that suggests that at least their news isn't pregnancy. With her girlish frame clad in white skinny jeans, set off by poker-straight hair parted down the middle and minimal makeup, the difference in their ages is striking. My father was a very good-looking man in his prime and still sports a mostly full, if grey, head of hair. Though he has retained his dashing dress sense into his late fifties, he is looking more tired and flabby than ever before. It worries me.

‘Dad! Lovely to see you. Vitoria, hey. You look well,' I mumble as we all greet each other with two kisses on the cheeks. Mum sits down abruptly afterwards, takes up a roll and bites into it viciously.

‘You are wearing a very beautiful fur, Polly,' Vitoria compliments Mum politely, who makes a point of chewing her
bread so slowly before answering that it is insulting. She is very talented at taking a simple physical gesture and imbuing it with a subtle malice that is apparent to women but usually invisible to men. She doesn't have many female friends.

‘Thank you, Vitoria. Edward bought it for me in Paris. How long ago was that? Seven years now? That was a beautiful holiday, wasn't it? The George V, that lovely evening at the Opera …'

‘Er, yes, it was. It was. Do you know what you're going to order?' Dad blusters. ‘I'm going to get the steak tartare. It's fantastic here, Vitoria, you should try it. No, no thank you, Polly, I'm not drinking tonight.'

Dad gave up drinking quite a few years ago, without much fanfare or drama, but still insists on saying he's ‘not drinking tonight' every time someone offers him a glass, which Mum always does. It's one of those irritating ritual charades performed by people who have known each other for far longer than they might have chosen to, that somehow demonstrates that they care.

Though the undercurrent is prickly, the fact that Mum, Dad and I have dozens of these rituals, while Vitoria is involved in none, unconsciously delineates who has more shared experience and history. They create an unpleasant labyrinth of inclusion and exclusion amongst (ex-)families, but I suppose they are inevitable within any group of people who through an accident of love, fate, or simply sperm, are
inextricably tied together for formal occasions till death do them part.

‘Dad, so, what's going on, are you okay? What do you need to talk to us about?'

‘Edward, the Pouilly-Fumé is really quite excellent, I don't know why you won't try some, it's really too boring of you.'

‘For God's sake, Polly, will you stop banging on about the bloody wine. I've had quite a day and I'd like to enjoy my supper. I've been thinking about the steak tartare since lunch. After we've ordered I'll tell you why I've asked you to come here today. It's nothing to get too alarmed about.'

‘Edward, you should really order seafood or something lighter, too much red meat at your age will be the death of you,' Mum sniffs. ‘You aren't looking your best you know, dear, you look positively fat, not to mention grey. Ashen. You are perfectly fat and ashen. You should really consider your health, for your daughter's sake if for no one else.'

‘Well, Polly, it may be too late for that already,' Dad says abruptly. There is a pause as this sinks in around the table. My heart skips a beat, recommencing at a startling pace as my insides twist with a leaden dread. ‘I probably have cancer. And I'm damn well getting the steak tartare.'

‘
Meu amor
, that is not kind.' Vitoria gently places her hand over my father's at the table and turns her limpid eyes on my mother, who is, for once, speechless. ‘He found a big lump on his
bolas
.'

‘W-when was this?' Mum looks as if she is in a daze and all the blood from her face has drained down to her décolletage, where it forms an angry red rash.

‘
Bonsoir
, Mesdames et Monsieur, would you like to hear the specialities of the kitchen?' Our overly enthusiastic young waiter has taken the grave hush at our table for bored silence and has bounded in to save the day. Mum is usually either rudely confrontational or embarrassingly flirtatious with anyone in the service industries, so to see her submit quietly to the long list of specials, never taking her eyes off my father, is disturbing.

‘I'll have the steak tartare and a side of spinach.' Dad's voice is jarringly loud and deeper than usual, his tone rebellious, as if he could scare off the threat of death with a ringing baritone in a show of virility.

As the waiter looks at me expectantly, I numbly stare down at the menu, my eyes unfocussed. I can't remember any of the specials he has just recounted, so I respond on autopilot, asking for the pumpkin soup.