The Dating Detox (29 page)

‘Yeah!’ shouts Elizabeth. They high-five each other. Emma looks cheered up, but how much is from wine and Conor’s arm around the back of her chair, I’m not sure.

‘Ouch,’ says Jake.

‘You like Facebook?’ Ant says, turning to Emma.‘I’d poke you.’

Eddie looks thunderously at Ant and then to the windows, which are almost steamed up. ‘I think it’s stopped raining…’ he says, craning his neck. ‘It has! Everyone, outside! It’s too hot in here.’

We all spill onto the damp lawn outside, lighting cigarettes, talking loudly over each other and laughing at Mitch trying to
get everyone to arrange the dining room chairs outside so we can all sit down in order.

‘Come on, people! It will be funny!’ he’s shouting.

Eddie runs back inside to turn on some outside speakers that his parents specifically hooked up for their many summer parties. He puts on someone’s 80s mix, and Ray Parker Jr is singing ‘Ghostbusters’.

Everyone is pretty drunk by now, and Bloomie and I start dancing, 80s-style (jerky finger clicks and kicks, lots of shoulder action) and singing loudly (badly) along to the music.

I look over and see Jake laughing at Sam, who is jumping up and down on the spot singing with his eyes shut.

Next on the mix comes Pat Benatar rocking out to ‘Love Is A Battlefield’. Bloomie jumps on the long outside table and starts walking up and down it and miming as though it’s a stage.

And then comes one of my favourite songs of all time: Guns N’Roses, ‘Sweet Child Of Mine’.

Now, you may have the impression I have slight wallflower tendencies, because of the mantra and the nervous tummy and all that, but let me clear that up right now by telling you that when it comes to Slash, I am the air guitar queen, and nothing can stop me.

Within two seconds of the song starting, I’m on the table next to Bloomie, my air guitar down groin-level just like Slash and my head bowed in contemplation of the perfect wailing my instrument is giving me. Bloomie is Axl, singing along and leaning in to me like the perfect stage partner. As the song ends, I look up. Jake is talking to Sam and Eugene, and they’re all looking up at us occasionally and laughing. In the back of my head a little voice tells me I might cringe tomorrow at the memory of this. I ignore it.

Still holding my air guitar, I glance around. Kate is over near the window having a bad 80s dance-off with Spud, Emma is leaning against the wall of the house drinking wine and talking
to Conor and Perry, and Benoit is talking to Elizabeth and making pained, brave faces as she rubs his shoulder again. Everyone is talking and drinking and laughing. Shouts from down the other end of the garden draw my attention. Ant and Harriet are playing some form of tennis on the tennis court. I’m glad someone is finally doing something Harriet will like.

I look back to the house, as the next song starts—Billy Joel’s ‘Only The Good Die Young’. Bloomie and I glance at each other, wordlessly agree we don’t know this one well enough to perform on stage, and get down from the table.

Eugene, Sam and Jake walk over to us, clapping. We smile and bow.

‘No autographs, no press, no comment,’ I say, holding up a hand.

‘Where the groupies at?’ says Bloomie in her best imitation of an American rock star. (Not very good.)

Sam and Jake start doing what appears to be a groupie impression, and Bloomie makes them pretend to kiss her shoes. Eugene is laughing.

I smile at him. ‘I’m so glad…about you two,’ I say. It’s the wine talking slightly, but it’s true. They really seem to fit together so well.

‘Me too,’ he says. ‘I’ve never met anyone like her. She’s incredible.’ Again, a little of the wine talking there, but I know he really means it. He’s not a dork at all, I think, looking at him. He’s gentle and smart and just right for Bloomie. I hope they do get married.

Eddie and Laura run out from the kitchen carrying four bottles of different flavoured schnapps, a bottle of tequila and a bottle of Sambucca.

‘LAYBACKS!’ shouts Eddie.

Oh dear.

‘Darling…really?’ says Bloomie.

‘My party, my rules,’ says Eddie firmly.

‘Atta boy,’ says Mitch, who promptly takes Tara’s hand and walks into the house.

‘Right! Everyone! Sit down on the bench and lie your heads back on the table,’ says Laura firmly. Wow, I hope she starts taking charge at work like this.

‘Aren’t you supposed to, like, make margaritas in someone’s mouth?’ says Kate, walking over with Spud.

‘Not in Oxfordshire,’ replies Eddie. ‘Here we just drink the damn drink.’

Everyone comes over and sits down on the bench obediently, our backs to the table—I’m between Emma and Kate—and Laura scrambles up to stand on the table with one bottle of schnapps in each hand.

‘Apple! Peach!’ shouts Laura.

‘Oh gosh, I hope we don’t have apple,’ murmurs Kate.

‘Where’s Mitch?’ says Emma. Only it sounds more like ‘wheresh mish?’ She’s hammered.

‘GO!’ shouts Laura. She pours the first two people’s open mouths full of schnapps, and then moves to the next, and the next. When she gets to me I push my tongue up to block half my mouth so it fills up quicker and I get less schnapps. (Clever, huh?)

When I’m gargled, gulped, gasped and done, I stand up and nonchalantly look around for Jake. (It’s an automatic reflex this evening, I’m more or less aware of where he is and more or less what he’s doing at all times, without even thinking about it.) And wouldn’t you know it, he’s walking over to me.

‘Did you enjoy that, Minxy?’

‘Oh, terribly much,’ I say.

Jake walks a step closer to me and reaches his hand out to my face. I look at him in alarm. He’s going to kiss me? Now? Here? In front of everyone? Then he just wipes the side of my mouth with his thumb, and puts his thumb in his mouth.

It isn’t as sexy a move as it sounds there. It’s just sort of sweet.

‘Sloppy schnapps pouring,’ he says by way of an excuse.

I’m about to say something back when it starts raining again. Like this afternoon, but it doesn’t do a gradual drizzle-drop-trickle-rain-pour-bucket-cats-and-dogs ascension of intensity this time, it just rains very, very hard, immediately. It’s the kind of rain you can actually hear.

The song playing changes from Hall & Oates ‘Maneater’ to the Jackson 5 ‘ABC’ in the same second that the rain starts, and everyone—obviously, truly drunk now—screams with delight and starts dancing in the rain. And then Conor takes a run from the other side of the lawn, drops to his knees and skids about five metres. That must hurt, but he jumps up and starts cheering himself.

And then it’s all on.

The lawn is a blur of zigzagging people skidding, sliding and skating. Eddie runs into the house and runs out with a bottle of washing up detergent and a bottle of vegetable oil. (This is probably the moment at which the party gods named the weekend ‘out of control’.) Within five minutes the lawn is a bubbling, oily mess; I’m skidding and sliding with the best of them. Conor—clearly a practised lawn slider—runs into the kitchen and returns a minute later carrying garbage bags.

‘Lawnboggan! Lawnboggan!’ is all he can say. Spud nods, grabs a garbage bag and slicks up one side with oil and detergent. He puts the oily side on the ground, sits on it and Conor bends over to push him towards the slight hill that leads down to the tennis court. As they reach the hill, Conor stops, and Spud skids down on his garbage-bag toboggan, shouting ‘WEEEE’, very butchly, all the way. Naturally, everyone else wants their own lawnboggan, too, and a good 20 minutes passes before we tire of it. Then it’s time for more laybacks, and then more lawnbogganing.

It’s still raining, we’re all absolutely soaked, there’s grass and mud everywhere, and no one seems to care.

I can see Jake, Kate and Sam stuck in a flower bed at the end of the garden, laughing helplessly. Eugene and Bloomie are in a
hedge behind a tree, snogging. And—I squint—it looks like Laura and Eddie are kissing against another tree. Elizabeth and Benoit are on the verge of snogging. Emma is serving herself and Perry more schnapps shots. Around them everyone else is sliding and laughing and falling over. All is chaos: it’s like some hedonistic frat party from an 80s movie. Any minute now a girl will accidentally-on-purpose lose her bikini top, and a geek will lose his virginity.

I need a break. I turn around and start walking towards the house.

‘Hello, princess,’ smiles Conor, the man who started it all. He’s now sitting happily on the garden table in the rain, covered in mud and grass, surveying the chaos he’s created. ‘Come here to me you, and have a little seat right here.’ Crazy Irish syntax. He flashes a perfect smile, and pats the bench next to him. Ah, now I remember. He’s rather successful with women. And knows it.

‘You really are quite the party facilitator, aren’t you?’ I say, declining the seat.

‘I have a gift for it,’ he replies. ‘And isn’t everyone having fun?’

I laugh and decide to head inside for a cigarette, as it’s raining too hard to smoke outside and the smell of a few cigarettes won’t do much damage after everything else the kitchen has been through. Kate’s also walking towards the house, so I make a smoking gesture at her. She nods and we go into the kitchen together.

We sit down at the end of the kitchen table.

‘I love smoking inside,’ Kate says happily. ‘Such a treat.’

‘What’s the story with Perry?’ I say, lighting her cigarette and then my own. We can still hear shouts outside and the iPod has moved on to Glen Frey singing ‘The Heat Is On’. Kate has a branch of some kind of plant stuck in her hair. I remove it silently and she frowns at it as though she can’t for the life of her imagine where it came from.

‘Not much,’ she shrugs. ‘He’s drinking with Emma, apparently she had a fling with a friend of his in Verbier this year so they’re mates…I still think he should be my first post-breakup kiss.’

‘What about Sam?’ I ask.

‘He’s too pissed,’ she says. ‘And he was a bit too…cuddly during the lawnbogganing when we crashed into each other.’

I start laughing. Too cuddly. Poor Sam.

‘How’s my mascara, by the way?’ asks Kate. She has mud all over her face.

‘Not too bad,’ I say, licking a napkin and fixing a streaky bit of mascara. ‘Me?’

‘Here…’ she says, doing the same for me. ‘All pretty again.’

The music outside just changed to George Michael’s ‘Faith’.

‘So. Jake?’ she says, ashing her cigarette carefully.

I shrug. ‘I don’t…We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we…’

At that moment Jake comes in to the kitchen. Thank goodness he wasn’t three seconds faster.

‘May I join you for a cigarette, please?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ we chorus, and he sits down with us.

‘Enjoying the evening, ladies?’ asks Jake, lighting his cigarette with practised precision.

‘Are you an ex-smoker?’ I reply.

He nods. ‘You have to quit at some point. For me it was 30. That’s when everything hits you and you have to grow up a bit.’

‘How dull,’ I say.

‘It is,’ he agrees.

‘Is Sam the same age as you?’ asks Kate. Outside, all the guys have started a game which seems to involve tackling each other as hard as they can. Sam is yelling at the top of his voice.

Jake starts to laugh. ‘He’s having a messy night, but yes…he’s the same age as me. He’s 32. He’s not normally the drunkest person. I think he may just be a bit carried away with the excitement of it all.’

‘He was a bit cuddly on the grass,’ says Kate disapprovingly.

‘She means gropey,’ I explain.

‘Oh, God, not really? Not groping the A-list bits?’ says Jake in a shocked tone.

‘No, it wasn’t like that…it was just…cuddly.’

‘He’s a cuddly kind of guy,’ says Jake. ‘But he’ll be mortified tomorrow if he finds out he made you uncomfortable. He’s really not like that.’

Suddenly, Emma crashes into the kitchen. She’s covered in mud and grass and is swaying slightly.

‘Shashwhereshmish?’ she says wildly.

Oh shit. ‘Oh Em, I think he’s gone to bed.’

She looks as if she might cry, but then starts convulsing and runs to the toilet off the pantry. A few seconds later follows the sound of violent vomiting. I shoot a horrified look at Jake and Kate and I run in after her.

‘Darling, just get it all out and I’ll put you to bed,’ I say. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning.’

She can’t reply, but I can hear her crying between her vomit-coughs. I pat her back as she vomits for awhile. Oh, being sad and drunk is a horrible thing.

‘I’ll look after her,’ says Elizabeth, coming in behind me. ‘She’s OK. What a bastard Mitch is.’

‘I know he seems that way, but I really don’t think he ever meant to hurt her…’ I say. ‘He’s carried a secret torch for Tara for years, and they went out years and years ago. He’s far too old for Em, anyway. She can do much better.’

Wow. That’s pretty fucking sound advice. Did I just say that?

Emma stands up and looks at me tearfully, and Elizabeth wipes the vomit off her face with toilet paper. ‘Tara’s his ex-girlfriend? Not new?’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘From years ago. But they only started even talking again really recently. So please don’t be upset about it. It’s no reflection on you.’

Emma nods tearfully, and she and Elizabeth pad back out of the kitchen and head upstairs to their rooms. I feel all motherly towards them. I hope Emma feels better.

I sit down at the table and light a new cigarette with a worldly sigh. ‘Kids today! So. Where were we…What are the A-list bits, then?’ I ask.

‘Impressive work, you should be a Samaritan,’ says Jake.

‘I am the mistress of break-ups,’ I sigh. ‘Poor Emma. She’s probably had a crush on Mitch since she was eight.’

Kate nods, and drops her cigarette into a wine bottle. ‘Right. Speaking of crushes, I’m going to find my little precioussss, then it’s time to get this first kiss over and bloody done with.’

She stalks out of the kitchen purposefully and Jake turns to me.

‘What on earth is she talking about? She’s kissing a…what, a hobbit?’

I explain briefly about Kate’s recent break-up and decision that the first person she kisses will be Perry.

‘That’s a shame. I think Sam has a bit of a thing for her…’ says Jake. ‘And Perry, really? He’s so…young. He should be with one of the twins.’

‘We like them young,’ I say airily, dropping my cigarette into the wine bottle. I suddenly remember that I am covered in mud. It’s starting to crust and I’m freezing. I ought to go upstairs and change, but I really don’t feel like leaving this table. Ever.

‘Do you,’ he says, grinning at me. I grin back. I’ve forgotten what he’s just said. We’re sitting in an empty kitchen, at a food-and-wine-strewn kitchen table, mess everywhere…but the only thing I can see in sharp, perfect vision is Jake. Mud-covered, impossibly desirable, crinkly-eyed Jake. Everything else is fuzzy. (This could, of course, be the drink.)

The song ends, finishing the 80s playlist, and everyone outside is too drunk and busy creating chaos to notice. Apart from the odd scream and shout, and the sound of the rain, the kitchen is almost completely silent.

Gosh, you could cut the sexual tension in here with…some kind of cutting instrument. Hmm…Huh? What—oh dear, my mind is wandering…I can’t stop looking and smiling at Jake who is looking and smiling at me and we’re looking and smiling at each other and it’s very…tingly and nice.

‘Come hither, please,’ he says, leaning forward over the table.

‘You’re so masterful…’ I sigh mockingly, but—I told you I like being bossed around charmingly—I lean my head towards him.

This is the best bit. This is the five seconds when you know, without doubt, that you’re about to kiss someone for the first time, and you’re not sure what it’ll be like, but you’re pretty sure it’s going to be great, and you’re smiling at them, and they’re smiling at you, and it’s just…the best bit. The anticipation is sometimes better than the kiss, in fact.

Not this time.

Because the kiss doesn’t happen. With a crash, Tory storms into the room and I snap my head back just in time. She stomps through the kitchen without acknowledging either of us and goes straight out the door to the garden.

Jake and I look at each other. That was weird.

I’m hoping that we’re about to pick up where we left off, when with a stompy huff, Fraser marches in after her.

‘Oh, hullo, chaps,’ says Fraser, looking surprised to see us. ‘Haven’t seen Tory, have you?’

‘She’s outside,’ I say, hoping he’s going to follow her.

‘Good. I’ll hide here with you two, then,’ he says, ambling over to the table. Jake turns back to me and makes a what-the-fuck face that Fraser can’t see, then turns back.

‘Trouble in paradise, Fraser?’

‘Uh, yes…can I have a fag? Cheers. Yes, she is very, um, demanding. And I was trying to talk to her the whole time, trying to well, end things, but she wouldn’t listen. And then after she’d…’ He pauses, exhales his cigarette smoke, and looks embarrassed.

‘Had her wicked way with you?’ I suggest, taking two more cigarettes from the packet, lighting them and handing one to Jake.

‘Yes, after that, she said she was sick of me, and wanted to break up. And I said, that’s what I’ve been trying to say, if you’d just listen rather than ordering me about like a sergeant bloody major. And she put her knickers back on and stormed out.’

I make a sympathetic face at Fraser, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see Jake holding his hand up to his mouth, hiding silent mirth. I start to giggle, and try to cover it with a cough. Jake is then completely unable to hide it anymore and collapses loudly in laughter, and I immediately follow.

Fraser, after looking perplexed for a second, starts laughing too and saying, in between guffaws: ‘Well, I can see how that’s…quite
amusing, and I said to her “You don’t have to take it like that”, but you know, she always knows how she wants to, uh, take it…’

‘Fraser!’ I exclaim. ‘You smut-monster. Don’t be so rude about your girlfriend.’

‘Ex-girlfriend,’ he says. ‘Definitely ex…’

Eddie walks into the room holding hands with Laura. ‘We’ve run out of layback juice,’ he says.

Sam staggers in almost immediately after them, looking nearly cross-eyed.

‘Where’s Kate?’ he says with a light slur, before ambling to the other end of the table and crashing into a chair.

‘What’s going on here then?’ says Eddie. ‘Tory just came outside and made a beeline for the tennis courts…where I have a feeling a game of strip tennis is being played with Ant and Harriet, watched by Neil.’

Jake and I look at each other and start laughing again.

‘Laura, can you do that thing we talked about?’ says Eddie, standing up and going to the kitchen counter. He gets a large pair of scissors out of a drawer and brandishes them excitedly.

‘Yes!’ she squeaks delightedly, running over and kneeling beside him. She starts cutting his filthy, mud-encrusted jeans off at just below crotch-level, making him a tiny pair of jeans shorts.

‘See? See? Don’t I have good legs?’ says Eddie to her, pirouetting and flexing his calves happily.

She nods. ‘Yes! Really nice.’

Eddie looks over at us all staring at him open-mouthed (except Sam, who has fallen asleep up the other end of the table), looks at his two jeans legs lying dead on the floor and shrugs. ‘They were never going to recover from all that mud anyway. And I was finding it really hard to walk.’

‘I want jeans shorts too!’ exclaims Fraser.

Laura starts cutting his jeans into shorts, with Eddie supervising.

I look back at Jake. These guys aren’t leaving for ages.

‘Didn’t you say you saw some gin and, uh, cooking sherry in the pantry earlier?’ says Jake to me, raising an eyebrow.

‘I did…? Oh. Yes, I did. Here, I’ll show you where it is,’ I say.

I get up, and followed by Jake, walk over to the pantry. Eddie, Laura and Fraser are still talking about jeans shorts, and don’t even seem to notice. Soft snores from Sam confirm he won’t be cuddling anyone again tonight.

The second we get inside the door of the pantry, I quickly turn around and look up at him. We’re standing so close that I can almost feel the warmth of his body. My heart is thumping inside my chest and I feel shivery with nerves or cold or mud—I’m not sure which. For two long seconds, the delicious anticipation from earlier is heightened about four hundred million times. Then he leans forward and we kiss.

Now, I’m not going to go into detail about the kissing. You’ve kissed someone. You know it’s one of the best things in the world, especially when you’re doing it with someone with strong, warm lips, long arms he’s wrapping around you, and your kissing instincts are perfectly synchronised. Just the right amount of tongue, pressure, mouth-openness, interspersed with the odd chin, jaw, lip and ear-nibble. And that’s what we have.

After a few minutes of said perfect kissing Jake leans back and grins at me. Rule 8 is smashed to smithereenies.

‘About fucking time,’ he says.

‘I think you should know that I’m only kissing you because of the fish puns,’ I say. ‘If you hadn’t come up with “Shakin’ that bass”, I’d be playing strip tennis with Ant, right now.’

‘Shh, Minxy…’ he says, and starts kissing me again, pulling me further into the pantry. For the next few minutes I just think about kissing him, and get lost in the pleasure of putting my hands in his hair—softer than I’d have thought—and feeling his back, neck and arms. (Oh, stop giggling at the back. When you’ve been thinking about kissing someone as much as I’ve been thinking about kissing him, you do the same thing, I’m sure.)

‘What tomfoolery is going on in there?’ calls Eddie. ‘How long does it take to find fucking cooking sherry?’

‘We’re just climbing up to reach it!’ calls back Jake.

Then (as you would, too, if you were kissing someone really hot in a pantry) we start getting a bit more passionate, pushing each other against the shelves. Quite roughly, actually. It stops being passionate almost immediately, of course, and becomes funny, yet still—don’t judge me on this—kind of sexy. The amusing snogging/shoving goes on for a few minutes, till he pushes me one too many times against the shelf behind me and it collapses, sending rice and flour and icing sugar and brown sugar and spices and a large long jar of dry linguini clattering to the floor. I gasp with horror, and after a three-second pause we both start laughing so hard that we can’t actually get any sound out.

The ground is heaped with high mountains of multi-coloured powders. Maple syrup is dripping slowly down one mountain. Linguini is making its own little pick-up sticks game.

Fraser, Eddie and Laura open the door to the pantry.

‘Christ,’ says Eddie. ‘That’s a first.’

‘We can clean it!’ I exclaim. ‘There’s a dustbuster somewhere in the kitchen!’

‘That thing died seven years ago,’ says Eddie. ‘Holy shit, what a mess.’ He seems, unsurprisingly, to be freaking slightly about the pantry. I wonder what he’ll do when he realises what has happened to the garden. And his jeans.

‘Right…what about a broom?’ says Jake. I look at him covered in mud and grass and flour, and start cackling helplessly at the idea that a broom will help. He turns to mock-frown at me and I quieten myself with difficulty. I have those hysterical giggle-hiccups that you get sometimes.

‘We’ll get someone in to look at this tomorrow,’ says Jake decisively.