The Other Side of the Story (12 page)

21

11.12 Saturday morning

Jojo had just drifted back to sleep when the buzzer went. Flowers. Since she'd begun this thing with Mark she'd never got so many flowers in her life and she'd kind of gone off them; they represented broken dates, bikini lines which had been waxed for no reason, punnets of strawberries which she had to eat all on her own, so many that they gave her hives.

In her long T-shirt, she stood at the door, waiting for the flower man to come up the stairs. She lived in a fifth-floor flat in Maida Vale, in one of the redbrick apartment blocks which had originally served for married men to house their mistresses in. Although when she'd moved in she hadn't known she was going to end up as a mistress. She would have laughed, not just at the idea, but at the very word.

A huge bunch of stargazer lilies climbed the stairs. At the top, they bent over and wheezed, trying to catch their breath, then a young man appeared from behind them.

'You again,' he accused Jojo, and with a crackle of cellophane, the handover was transacted. 'Oh wait, the card.' He felt in his pocket and found the little envelope. 'He says he's sorry, he'll make it up to you.'

'Whatever happened to privacy?'

'I had to write the thing. How private can it be? Must be a bad one this time, he told them to go all out.'

'OK. Thanks.' Jojo moved inside.

'Could you stop having bust-ups? These stairs are killing me.'

Jojo closed the door, dumped the flowers in the kitchen sink and rang Becky. 'What's up?'

'Thought you were spending the day with Mark.' Becky sounded concerned.

'Change of plans. So what's up?' Her tone was cheery; she didn't want sympathy.

'Dentist,' Becky said. 'One of my fillings fell out last night, then I'm going shopping with Shayna. Want to come?'

Jojo hesitated. She had a bust, a waist and hips, the kind of body that was last fashionable in 1959. Shopping with Slinky Shayna was a bit gnarly because she frequented stores which only seemed to cater for malnourished thirteen-year-olds.

'I know,' Becky picked up on her hesitation. 'She'll make us go to Morgan. But come anyway. We'll have a laugh.'

'Sweets, I'll skip it. But I'll see you later.'

12.10
Saturday afternoon

'Shayna, your dinner party tonight? I know I blew you off but can I change my mind? Sorry about screwing your placements but I'd be glad to eat chicken nuggets at the card table with the kids.'

'Again,' Shayna said.

'Yeah, again.'

One of the side-effects of seeing a married man was having to force yourself on people at the last minute and not always being a comfortable fit.

'You shouldn't take this shit from him,' said Shayna, who took shit from no one.

'Do you hear me complaining?'

Shayna kissed her teeth. 'Chah! Anyway, no kids tonight, so you get to sit at the big table.'

'Yay.'

Shayna was Becky's childhood chum and when Jojo came to live in England, she became Jojo's pal also. She was off-the-scale fabulous. She was the first black - and female — partner at the management consultancy firm where she worked and she earned more than Brandon, her barrister husband who did
everything
she told him to. Though she'd had two children her stomach was flat and hard and her bum showed no sign of slipping off her back and towards the floor. Home was a big three-storey house in Stoke Newington which they'd bought for seven pounds fifty or some such negligible sum. They'd fixed the dry rot, the wet rot, the damp and the dodgy plumbing and restored the crumbling house to beauty — just in time for property values to start rising in that area.

And Shayna gave sophisticated dinner parties. At least they were sophisticated to begin with but she plied her guests with so much drink that by the end of the evening they were dishevelled and a lot closer to the table than they had been at the start.

2.10 Saturday afternoon, Kensington High Street

Jojo liked to shop alone - it meant she could change her mind whenever she liked without anyone getting snippy with her. See, her plan for the afternoon had been to trawl for household stuff, like nice bed linen and exotic bath oils, something she'd done
all the time
when she'd first bought her apartment twenty months ago - she'd lavished love and money on it; she'd swapped reading normal magazines for interiors ones; out of nowhere she was more interested in paint colours than nail colours; she spent more on picture frames than shoes; she'd bought a huge comfy sofa and repro Indian furniture and considered a Laz-E-Boy recliner with built-in ashtray and beer cooler until Becky advised her not to. In short, she'd experienced New Flat Madness.

Then it all settled down, she started buying
Harpers&Queen
again — until she started seeing Mark. As they never really went out, her flat had become love-nest central and buying things like scented candles and Egyptian cotton sheets made her feel more in control.

But this afternoon suddenly she saw no point buying another pair of sheets — his wife and family were not going to disappear — and she had enough scratchy 'sexy' underwear to open her own shop, so she exercised the prerogative of the lone shopper and Changed her Mind. Bed linen was toast and clothes were the thing. Ten minutes in Barkers and she'd found a pair of trousers, so pricey that she yelped at the tag.

'Something wrong, madam?' An assistant shimmered from nowhere.

Jojo laughed in embarrassment. 'No wonder you say Americans are loud. This is the price, right? Like, not the style number?'

'They're beautiful on. Why don't you try them?'

Jojo looked at the assistant's namebadge, 'But Wendy, that's just what they'll be expecting.'

She should have walked away quickly, sprinting down the escalator and out into the safety of the street. Instead she followed Wendy to a changing room and with the whizz of a zip became taller, flat-stomached, long-legged and curvy-hipped.

'They're perfect,' Wendy observed.

Jojo sighed, did a quick survey of her finances, knew she shouldn't, and said, 'What the hell? You take your chances where you find them.'

She changed back into her own clothes and handed over the trousers. 'Do they come in any other colours? No? OK, now I'm really going to scare you — do you have any more of the same?'

'Perhaps, but wouldn't you like to try something different?'

Jojo shook her head. 'I do this a lot. They laugh at me, but the thing is, with my shape, when you find something that fits well, you go for it, you know? Once I bought five identical bras. They were five different colours but like my friend Shayna said they were still the same bra.'

Still talking, Jojo followed Wendy to the till. 'My cousin Becky does the same as me, could be it's a family thing. Except sometimes Becky is so embarrassed that she pretends to the assistant that the extra ones are for her sisters. And she hasn't got any sisters.'

Wendy studied the screen, checking the stock list for an extra pair.

'But could be I'm embarrassed too,' Jojo admitted. 'Else why am I telling you all this?'

Wendy continued clicking and said nothing. She was a shop girl, not a psycho-bloody-analyst. She wasn't paid enough for this.

8.15 Saturday evening

When Jojo arrived, Shayna was flitting around in a tight white ensemble that displayed three inches of shining mahogany stomach and plying people with a killer rum-based concoction. 'My own recipe. I call it Life Support Machine.'

The guests were a mix of opinionated know-alls from Brandon's work, go-getters from Shayna's and a couple of right-on neighbours. Then there were old friends like Becky and Andy.

Jojo accepted a drink, said hi to the others and realized — with a little shock - that she was already just the teensiest bit bored.

The dining room was lit by the flickering of fat wax candles, casting shadows on the distempered white walls. On the gleaming cabinets stood fashionable flower arrangements - twigs and stuff. Nothing so gauche as petals.

'When I grow up,' Becky said, 'I want to be Shayna.'

'Mmm,' said Jojo.
Not exactly bored. But I'd prefer to be with Mark
.

Her world had shrunk — no matter who she was with, she'd prefer to be with Mark. That's what happened when you fell in love — you only want to see
them
.

And it had taken her all of five seconds to notice that everyone else was two-by-two: Shayna had obedient Brandon, Becky had Andy — it was like the Ark. But because Mark was married she was in a twilight zone where she was neither single nor paired off.

Yikes. This is not a good way to think.

Suddenly Becky was toe-to-toe in front of Jojo. She leant even closer and exhaled a big 'Hah!' right into her face. 'Does my breath smell OK?'

Earlier in the day her dentist had told her that her gums were slightly receding, that an electric toothbrush would take care of the problem, but Becky — who was anxious about the state of her teeth at the best of times — was afraid she was in the grip of full-blown gingivitis.

'Smells fine. What does Andy think?'

'He's so used to me that he wouldn't notice if I swallowed a skunk.'

Another pang. Would she and Mark ever have the chance to get so used to each other that he wouldn't notice if she swallowed a skunk?

Then she noticed the long darkwood dining table: it was set with twelve antique Weeping Willow plates, twelve handmade silver cudery sets, twelve Murano wine glasses — and one plastic Teletubbies bowl, a Bob the Builder beaker and a Peter Rabbit knife and fork. Jojo's place. Shayna was making a point.

When they sat down to eat Shayna, point made, took the Teletubbies bowl for herself and passed Jojo a Weeping Willow plate piled high with down-home food: jerk chicken, rice'n'peas, Johnny cakes. Jojo took a deep breath, then tucked in.

'Good Christ,' said the man beside her. Ambrose was his name — some guy from Brandon's work. 'You can really put it away.'

'It's food,' Jojo said. 'What am I supposed to do with it? Weave baskets?'

The man watched another mouthful of food disappear into Jojo's mouth and breathed, 'Blimey,' loud enough for everyone to hear.

Jojo hunched lower over her plate. What a prince. Some men just took exception to her - her appetite? her height? — something, anyway. But knowing they were assholes didn't mean it didn't get to her.

'Jojo never diets,' Shayna said proudly.

Well, she'd tried it once when she was seventeen and didn't even last a day.

'That's obvious.'

'Ambrose, apologize, for God's sake!' exclaimed the woman opposite. She was so thin she was almost transparent and Jojo deduced she was Ambrose's girl.

'For what? I simply endorsed a fact.'

'Fucking barristers.' Shayna closed her eyes.

Unabashed, Ambrose nodded at Skeletor. 'Look at Cecily. She eats nothing and she's well fit.'

One way of putting it, Jojo thought, wondering when Skeletor had last had a period.

'I'm really sorry,' Cecily apologized across the table. 'He's not normally so rude.'

'Hey, no need
for
you
to apologize.' Jojo smiled through her upset. This moron wasn't worth causing a scene over.

'He's an idiot. Please ignore him.' Cecily was very taken with Jojo; she'd been watching her since she'd arrived. Jojo was a big girl — bigger than Cecily could imagine being in her worst Makesers-filled nightmares — but she was gorgeous. Luscious and ripe in those fabulous black trousers and clingy burgundy top, her decolletage and shoulders satin-smooth and luminous. (Actually thanks to pearlescent body lotion, Jojo would have happily told her if she'd asked.)

But it was the way Jojo seemed so comfortable in her own skin that most entranced Cecily. To the point where she'd wondered tentatively about cancelling her gym membership. Even — dammit! — eating whatever she wanted. If it worked for this Jojo, couldn't it work for her?

Occasionally this happened to women around Jojo. While they were with her, they saw through the advertising industry's lies and believed that size didn't matter, that it was intangibles like
joie de vivre
and confidence that counted. But then they went home and discovered, to their great disappointment, that they weren't Jojo Harvey and couldn't understand why they'd felt what they'd felt at the time.

11.45 Saturday evening

When the first of the noisy drunken discussions about politics began, Jojo thought, Right! That's enough. Suddenly she couldn't bear being with people who weren't Mark and just wanted out. She always seemed to be the first to leave things these days.

Shayna and Brandon tried to make her wait while they rang a taxi, warning her that the area hadn't upped and come so much that she'd be safe wandering through it on a Saturday night, but she wanted to be gone. A trapped panicky feeling grew until amid a flurry of hugs and kisses she was finally permitted to leave. Out on the silent road, she gulped in lungfuls of lovely, cold night air, then saw the yellow light of an approaching cab. Yay!

Half an hour later she arrived in her silent flat, poured herself a glass of merlot, switched on the TV at the foot of her bed and got under the duvet to watch her video about meerkats in the Kalahari. Olga Fisher had lent it to her. Olga Fisher was one of Lipman Haigh's seven partners — the only woman — and she and Jojo shared a mutual fondness for wildlife programmes. Everyone else laughed at them about it, so they swapped their David Attenborough videos as furtively as if they were pornography.

Olga was in her late forties, single, wore pearls and elegantly draped scarves and because she negotiated good terms for her authors she was known as a ballbreaker. If she were a man, Jojo thought scornfully, they'd simply call her 'a great agent'. She wondered if they called her a ballbreaker too. Probably. Assholes.

She settled into bed and chuckled as a macho meerkat, keeping lookout high in a tree — paws on hips, eyes on the middle distance — lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, where he picked himself up and dusted himself off, looking dreadfully embarrassed. He glared at the camera, like Robbie Williams facing down the paparazzi.