Wake Up Happy Every Day (21 page)

And she has to admit that Amelia and he seem to be a decent match. They laugh when they talk over each other. They bicker good-naturedly about the detail of anecdotes that involve them both and she is good-looking too in a pointy way. A tanned lustre to her skin that speaks of some exclusive tennis club. A hungry face that says ambition and no carbs after twelve on weekdays. Big lips. The Victorian lady novelists would have had her down as dangerous straight from the off.

She has interesting eyes, almost lilac in this light, and a runner’s body. Only with breasts, which most serious runners don’t have. And if it’s a puppy job it’s a good one. Subtle. And her hands are as delicate as John’s are tough. Lorna can picture them both in a deli – her pointing at jars of expensive pickles, him opening them with those big hands when they get back home. They definitely match. Complementary.

Once they’ve done John’s work they talk about films and about HBO box sets. They even talk about minor Victorian lady novelists for a while. And on the whole Lorna likes it all.

She’s always been sniffy about middle-class dinner parties but, really, what’s not to like? Good food, good conversation with handsome people with nice hands who smell of sandalwood and purposeful days. And if, yes, it does feel like she and Megan are just playing at being adult somehow – that sooner or later a real responsible member of the community will come along and tell them to tidy up and put all their toys away – maybe that’s how everyone feels, all the time. Maybe everyone is waiting for Daddy to get home and tell them off. Maybe Amelia and John feel like that too. Maybe she should ask them.

John looks thoughtful as she puts the question. ‘I think you might have a point,’ he says.

‘It would explain the appeal of the Republicans,’ Amelia says. ‘Daddy knows best so leave all the decision-making to him.’

‘Daddy being the military-industrial complex? The elite?’

‘Exactly.’

And though Lorna has started this conversation – and though she agrees with this analysis – she’s a bit buzzy and doesn’t think she has the legs for politics tonight. Especially when they are all sitting stuffed with lamb and fancy salads and crumble, and with Megan heading off to the kitchen to make Irish coffees using single malt Jamesons.

So she goes to the loo and when she comes back she tells some stories about blokes. She gives them some of her finest. The guy who, after a year of not-all-that-casual-actually dating asked her to move in with him. And his wife. The randy old poet she met at a barbeque her mum had, who asked her straight out if she’d like to fuck. And who, when she declined asked plaintively, ‘Is it because I’m old?’ To which she had to reply that yes, it probably was. At least a bit.

And there were other stories too, some about blokes weirder than this. The boy she accidentally slept with during Freshers’ week, who then sent her a poem more or less every day for three years. The freak. What was his name? Peter something? Paul?

She tells the table about deluded boys, mummy’s boys, dull boys. The boy who kept carnivorous spiders. The man who offered to sponsor her through college. He’d said he’d pay her £10,000 a year if she’d spend a weekend with him once a term and give him the full girlfriend experience.

‘That one was quite tempting actually. Ten grand and all I’d have to do would be to spend a few weekends moaning that he spent too much time on the Xbox. Though I suppose it’s just possible he might have had other ideas about what the full girlfriend experience meant.’

And they are funny stories and they all laugh lots, even Megan who has heard them all before and had even been there for some of the choicer incidents. Because, yes, there are stories that involve The Fuckweasel which Lorna tells because, yes, she was so over him. She tells the story of how she’d met him. About how it was her first week in California and she’d been in Vesuvio – the famous beatnik bar, just down from the City Lights bookstore where only tourists go now. Jez had been in there drinking draught Sierra Nevada and looking so crassly like an artist with his Jim Morrison hair. Early sexy Jim Morrison mind, not fat, bearded Jim Morrison. Jez had even been wearing leather strides for fuck’s sake.

She tells them how, drunk, she’d gone over to him and harangued him about how ridiculous it was to be doing the beat thang in Vesuvio in 2013. She tells how she’d laughed at him when he’d got huffy and said he was a proper artist actually. The real deal. And then, seeing the way she just smiled harder, how he’d shifted tack with surprising deftness and told her how right now he managed a tattoo shop, but how he was also a qualified horticulturist. And she’d tested him on the Latin names for plants, and at the end of the night when they were getting in the cab to go back to his place, she had told him, ‘Just so you know, it’s your horticultural Latin that is getting you laid. Not your ridiculous pants.’

And now there is a pause during which Amelia fixes her with those deep lilac eyes.

‘Wow. You and Megan. What a great relationship you two have.’

Seems a bit of a conversational swerve, but she’ll go with it.

‘Yeah, we get on, don’t we Megs old bean?’

And Megan smiles briefly too as she says, ‘Yep. We’re muckers all right,’ exactly the way Dick Van Dyke might have said it in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. And Lorna raises her glass and Megan sighs but smiles again and raises hers too and they clink. No, thinks Lorna, it’s good to be grown up at last. A good thing definitely.

And Amelia smiles more, showing all the little swords of her teeth.

‘I mean if John told those kinds of stories in public about his adventures with all his former lovers . . . I mean, gee whizz. I reckon I’d be pissed.’

‘But it’s not the same, is it? I mean you and John, you’re an item. You’re married. We’re just . . .’

Lorna stops. Christ. Amelia leans forward. As Lorna remembers it later she actually flicked her tongue over her lips. John and Megan just look into their glasses. Lorna remembers something important about Irish coffee.

‘Do you know how Irish coffee was invented? It was made up on the spot by a barman at Shannon Airport when John F Kennedy was delayed there on his way from the States to Berlin. On his way to do ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’. Guy convinced him it was a local speciality. And so then it became one.’

‘Is that right?’ says John. ‘It’s not a traditional thing then? It’s not like Guinness?’

‘Guinness was brought over to Ireland by the English anyway,’ says Lorna. She wonders if she might be on the point of gabbling.

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘No straight up.’ Though to be honest, she isn’t absolutely sure about this. She knew the Guinness family were loaded and that they’d been loaded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the real Irish were starving, so that would suggest that they were English, wouldn’t it? She meets Amelia’s puzzled frown. Or is she laughing? It’s hard to tell in this grown-up dinner party light.

‘So you guys aren’t partners?’

‘Christ, no. I mean, Megan, she’s beautiful and everything, but all that wetness on my face . . . No, ta.’

‘Oh, it’s not that bad. Wetness on the face in general I mean. Not Megan’s in particular. I wouldn’t know about that. Obviously.’

This is John. Lorna feels a surge of gratitude to him. No, not a surge – it wasn’t as dramatic as that – but a flow anyway. A flow of gratitude. John trying to keep the situation light. John trying to help them through the embarrassment of this. Sweet really.

‘I feel so foolish.’ Amelia isn’t letting it lie. And she doesn’t sound like she thinks she’s been all that foolish. She sounds amused. ‘It’s just that . . . I mean . . . Megan’s always talking about you. It’s always Lorna thinks and Lorna says, and I remember when Lorna I went to Vegas, or Lorna and I are thinking of going hiking in Yosemite. And then this apartment. The way you are here. I just assumed . . .’

Lorna takes a quick look round the apartment. Tries to see it through Amelia’s eyes. It’s tidy. Understated. Chic. It comes with a neurotic cat and there are also bits of crocheting around the place, but that isn’t enough to make an apartment seem all tipping the muff is it? Perhaps it is.

‘No, mate. Megan is my bestest chum in all the world. My pal – but we don’t do owt like that. I haven’t got a Sapphic bone in my body, worse luck.’

‘Why worse luck?’ John again, cool, quiet, courteous. He just needs to get his missus under control.

‘Oh, you know. Girls. Prettier. Smarter. Nicer than boys. Not as generally rubbish.’

‘Sugar and spice and all things nice?’

‘Mostly yeah. I guess.’ She turns to Megan who is still frowning down at the table. ‘When are we going to Yosemite?’

Megan shrugs. ‘Just an idea.’

‘Well, I think it’s a great idea. I’m definitely up for that.’ And she pats her on the arm.

And then they talk more about men and women and the differences between them, and Amelia is all women are so bitchy with each other and Lorna is all speak for yourself love, but she doesn’t quite put it like that. And John says how all his best friends are women and Amelia agrees a bit too enthusiastically about how he gets on really well with women and how great it is that he can be manly but with like this really open feminine side. And how liberating it is that there were other women he can talk to about emotional stuff, you know?

Yeah, right.

Then they count all the units of alcohol they’ve drunk and Amelia and John seem very chuffed with themselves when they decide that it comes to something like thirty-two.

‘That’s like,’ Amelia counts on her slim, pointy fingers, ‘that’s like eight units each. Wow.’ And she giggles. And it sounds wrong somehow. Lorna is pretty sure she isn’t one of life’s natural gigglers. Then she says, ‘We’ll suffer for this in the morning.’

And Lorna thinks of the time, not that long ago, back in West Yorkshire, when eight units was what they’d have before they started the real drinking. Eight units – which is only just over a bottle of ordinary Chardonnay after all – was just a pre-drink drink then. A livener. A sharpener or two. What they had just to get the party started. The good old days.

But then there is a taxi downstairs and there are hugs and air-kisses in the hallway and Amelia telling Megan not to be late on Monday and finally – finally – they are gone and Lorna can turn to Megan and say, ‘Well, your boss. Do you think she knows John’s playing away? Because he so clearly is.’

But Megan just sighs. ‘She’s all right.’

There is a little debate about whether to leave the clearing up but neither of them wants to face the dishes in the morning, so they carry crockery and glasses from table to sink. They rinse plates. They finish off the crumble, and then rinse those dishes too. They argue gently over how best to load the dishwasher. Megan wins as usual, so she does that while Lorna takes out the trash.

It’s still warm in the parking lot and the rumble of distant freeway traffic is comforting. She has a cheeky rollie and thinks about how strange it is that she’s standing in California, living with Megan. If her friends from wild, wet West Yorkshire could see her now, standing in a car park in Berkeley. But somehow she can’t imagine their voices just at this minute. Just can’t conjure up their faces.

When she gets back in the apartment she finds that Megan is still doing stuff with the dishwasher, making minor adjustments that will ensure maximum ergonomic efficiency or something.

Lorna says, ‘Christ. No wonder smelly Melly thinks we’re pioneers of gay marriage. No one is more married than us.’

Megan doesn’t say anything, just carries on moving bowls and plates around. So Lorna adds, ‘It’s nice though. I like being married to you.’ And she goes over to the dishwasher. She puts her arms around Megan from behind and kisses her on her cool cheek, which is how she discovers that Megan is crying. Despite everything Lorna has Megan’s wetness on her face after all, but she has the good sense not to say this.

She moves away a couple of steps and Megan turns to face her.

‘Don’t say anything. I’m just being an idiot.’

‘A little bit tired and emotional, huh? The Johns and the Amelias of this world will do that to a person.’

‘Something like that. I’ll see you in the morning, ’kay.’

‘Yeah. And I really am up for Yosemite. Hiking, camping, being eaten by grizzlies. The whole thing.’

Megan smiles weakly. ‘Yeah. Well, we’ll see.’

Twenty-three

NICKY

The new hair. There is a piece of architecture Linwood can’t do for me, something not even Jesus can sort. And that is my hair. Hair has to be a whole separate team.

Imagine a TV ad that is all science bit – that’s these guys. They talk like an Open University programme. Three of them, all deftly coiffured, of course, trumpeting their equations with the warm voice of God.

Nate, Valerie and Don. Or, rather, Dr Nate, Dr Valerie and Dr Don because though they are friendly and informal and everything, they do also want us to know that they are doctorates in the follicular sciences. They spend a busy couple of hours with us, not only explaining their pricing structure but CAT-scanning my head with some hand-held implement. They use lasers to measure the nature and speed of the erosion taking place along my hairline. They take DNA swabs, as well as blood and follicle samples in order to form the basis for a considered judgement on the best way forward. They are thorough. They talk through the Norwood scale which is to baldness what the Beaufort scale is to wind speed.