You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (60 page)

Mostly Neve tried to keep busy so she wouldn’t miss Max. She was sure Max was managing just fine without her, and when she was running laps, scrubbing floors, making contact with Lucy Keener’s old classmates from Oxford and happily imagining the moment when William clapped eyes on her for the first time in three years and murmured throatily, ‘God, Neve, when did you get so beautiful?’ she was doing just fine too.

The only time that she wasn’t fine was when it was dark and hours before her next juice and she couldn’t sleep because she was a ball of nervous energy. Then, Neve had nothing else to do but miss Max so badly that the lack of him was a tangible, physical pain.

One morning when Neve wasn’t frantically googling
Hardcore Cleanse + side effects
she even found herself on Amazon buying Max and Mandy’s WAG novels and paying the extra for next-day delivery.

She devoured
Gucci and Goals
, in one long gulp. Brandy Ballantyne wasn’t even a thinly disguised Mandy McIntyre. She
was
Mandy from the top of her
blonde head, the exact same shade as the creamiest, palest vanilla ice cream that Brandy couldn’t eat because she was lactose intolerant
, to the tips of her
French-manicured toenails, which Brandy knew was much more classy than the tarty red her friends preferred
. But it was Max’s voice she could hear in every line, his vodka-dry sense of humour shining through as Brandy got herself into all manner of amusing scrapes, from being falsely accused of shoplifting a pair of Gucci boots to running across the pitch at Old Trafford during extra time in hot pursuit of her pet Pekinese, Tiffany, in her hunt for a footballer boyfriend.

Neve read
Penalties and Prada
the next day even though she had promised Rose she’d sort through a teetering pile of Archive material. When Brandy married her star striker fiancé Damon, Neve found herself tearing up, and
Armani and AC Milan
had Neve so overwrought that she wasn’t sure she could finish it. Brandy was starting married life in Italy after Damon’s multi-million-pound transfer deal, and for all his bullshit about not believing in relationships, Max wrote about love as if it was something he’d personally experienced:
Brandy forgot about the cruel jibes of the other WAGs when she’d rocked up to the VIP box in her thigh-high, seven-inch-heeled Stella McCartney boots because there was Damon larger than life and twice as handsome on the big TV screens dotted around the stadium. The sun was glinting off the highlights in his hair and he’d stripped off his shirt so he could douse the muscled planes of his chest in water and he was smiling and looking up in the direction of the VIP box as if he could see her distress and wanted to let her know that he was on her side and always would be. He was her man and nothing else mattered
.

Unfortunately the next book in the series,
Burberry and Bootees
, wasn’t out for another few months so Neve was forced to borrow all of Celia’s back issues of
Skirt
so she could read everything that Max had ever written. She knew that she was on the fast track to indulging in all sorts of clichéd break-up behaviour like ringing Max’s phone and his BlackBerry and his landline just to hear him say cheerfully, ‘I can’t come to the phone, you know what to do after the beep,’ or pacing a well-trodden path outside his flat. She’d planned to use this down-time before William returned to mope and reflect on their break-up, but Neve had never expected to wallow this hard.

Her head had known that Max was just a trainer relationship, but it seemed as if her heart had never got that memo. Or maybe it was because Max had been her first boyfriend that she felt torn in two and Sellotaped back together. If she’d gone through these rites of passage in her teens, then she’d probably be blasé about them by now.

Like Yuri, who’d gone out with the graphic designer for two months and was only mildly annoyed that he’d turned out to be a wrong ’un.

‘Why aren’t you more upset?’ Neve demanded as they sat in the back garden on a sultry Sunday evening, ten days into her Cleanse. ‘I mean, you’ve cried at least once, haven’t you?’

Yuri shook her asymmetric fringe out of her eyes. ‘Nuh-huh! Not wasting any tears on a douchebag who couldn’t keep it in his pants for three days while I was at a skateboarding festival in Manchester.’

‘I don’t understand how you can be with someone and share beautiful, intimate moments with them and then not give a damn that it’s ended.’ Neve turned gimlet eyes on her. ‘God, Yuri, do you even have a heart?’

‘Dude, you’re getting really, really snippy again,’ Yuri told Neve.

‘I can’t help it!’

‘It’s all right,’ said Celia from the patio doors that led from her kitchen straight on to the decking in the back garden. ‘She’s due another juice. She’ll be all right once she’s choked it down, won’t you, Neevy?’

Neve nodded and tried to muster a weak, wavery smile as Celia walked towards her with her evening Cleanse and a saucer with four lemon quarters on it. ‘I will but this is not just a Cleanse withdrawal. I have genuine reasons to be in a very bad mood.’

‘Of course you do,’ Celia clucked, as she shoved the Cleanse bottle at Neve. ‘Now, for the love of God, get that down you.’

The green morning juice wasn’t so bad. It had a clean, fresh taste that only slightly resembled the washing-up liquid that her mother had once squirted in her mouth after Neve had questioned the existence of God. And she was actually acquiring a taste for her lunch Cleanse, which was neon orange and tasted of carrots and lentils. It was only her last juice of the day that was a problem because it was a brown sludge that …

‘God, that shit smells like bongwater,’ Yuri announced, squinching up her face and sliding down the wooden bench so she was as far away from it as possible.

Neve lifted the bottle to her lips and tried to ignore the fetid smell – there was really only one way to do this. She closed her eyes, tipped back her head, pinched her nostrils and tried to pour the juice straight down her throat so she could bypass her taste buds altogether. As soon as she wrenched the bottle away, Celia thrust a lemon quarter into her hand so Neve could jam it in her mouth and suck hard.

‘Just like a tequila shooter,’ Celia said proudly.

‘Brrr!’ Neve shook her head and waggled her arms, and once she was sure that the juice wasn’t going anywhere but down her alimentary canal, she stilled. She didn’t feel quite so angry any more. ‘That’s better.’

‘Speaking as someone who eats raw tuna for fun, that stuff is ungodly,’ Yuri said. ‘You cannot live on three gross drinks a day. No wonder you’re snapping all the time; your blood sugar must be in minus numbers.’

‘The juices are giving me a daily intake of a thousand calories and I’m allowed to eat two small portions of raw veggies.’

‘Big whoop.’ Yuri eyed Neve up and down. ‘You look thinner. How much have you lost?’

‘I don’t know,’ Neve replied, because she was too scared to get on the scales and discover that the Cleansing and the colonics and the constant peeing had all been in vain. ‘But I can take my jeans off by stepping on the hem and waiting for them to slide down.’

‘Maybe it’s time to invest in a new pair?’ Celia suggested excitedly. ‘I’ve got a discount card for this great denim boutique in Hoxton and you can try on the True Religion jeans I’ve been coveting for years but can’t buy because my arse is too flat.’

‘I’m not buying any clothes until I’m in a size ten,’ Neve said firmly. She stretched her arms above her head. ‘Do you want me to wash your kitchen floor again? Or I could clean your bathroom, if you’d rather.’

‘You in a good mood now?’ Yuri asked slyly.

She was definitely getting there. ‘Why? What do you want?’

‘A birthday party on Saturday in this very garden,’ Yuri said. ‘And I can’t make any promises that I’ll clear everyone out and turn the music down at eleven o’clock sharp.’

‘I don’t mind, but Charlotte might have something to say about it,’ Neve said, angling a glance up at the first-floor windows even though she’d heard Charlotte and Dougie go out earlier.

‘Dougie’s putting her on a plane for Ibiza as we speak,’ Celia informed her smugly. ‘As if Charlotte and her chavvy friends need to spend a week making themselves even more orange.’

‘A whole week?’ Neve clasped her hands together in prayer. ‘Thank you, God.’ Charlotte and her broom had been delighted that Max was no longer around so they could make up for lost time by banging on the ceiling every five minutes.

‘You can invite some friends if you like,’ Yuri offered magnanimously. ‘But no one over the age of thirty-five and definitely not that Gustav.’

‘Who phoned me earlier today and wanted to discuss staging an intervention on you,’ Celia revealed. ‘And no, I didn’t say you were on a brutal regime of stinky drinks and colonics. Oh, that reminds me, will it be triggery for you if we ask you to make some cheese straws?’

‘Not triggery at all.’ For the first time in her life, even when she’d had swine flu, Neve had absolutely no appetite. ‘Are you inviting anyone from the office, Seels?’

‘Only the assistants and the interns that I really like, and Gracie said she might pop along, but everyone else is far too up themselves for a party in a north London garden.’

‘Have you invited
him?
’ Even with her blood sugar temporarily restored, Neve couldn’t trust herself to say Max’s name, because even thinking it in her head was usually enough to bring the gloom crashing down on her.

‘After what he did to you? Of course I didn’t! And no, I don’t know how he is, because he’s in LA just like he was the last ten times that you asked me,’ Celia said. ‘I promise you the party will be a Max-free zone.’

Which was a good thing, although Neve’s heart refused to accept that and it had perked up just a little at the thought of seeing Max again. Maybe even walking over to him and touching his arm, so they could drift to the quiet corner of the garden which the dog roses were trying to colonise, and talk things out, becoming friends again. ‘You can invite him if you like,’ Neve said, and she knew that she didn’t sound even a little bit casual, more like utterly desperate. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘He’s dead to me,’ Celia snapped. ‘Apart from when I’m at work and I have to do what he says because he has “Editor” in his job title.’ She squeezed Neve’s knee. ‘You could invite Willy McWordy, if you like.’

‘He’s still roadtripping and I really don’t want our reunion to happen when there’s a chance that one of your friends will be throwing up in the flowerbeds,’ Neve said. ‘And I’m not a size ten so I can’t see him just yet.’

‘You’re going to be finished with your suicidal detox programme before the party, right?’ Yuri wanted to know. ‘Because I love you tons, but I can’t have you glaring into the vodka punch. It will kill the vibe.’

Celia looked pointedly at Yuri, who shrugged. ‘I’m just saying.’

‘You’ve only got another three days, haven’t you?’

‘Well, the publicist is giving me another two weeks of juices at a fifty per cent discount to say sorry for the mood swings,’ Neve admitted and braced herself for the outrage that she could see Celia working up to.

‘You’re only meant to do it for two weeks,’ she reminded Neve sharply. ‘Two weeks! That was the only reason that I told you about it.’

‘The publicist says that they have clients in the States who’ve done it for much longer than that,’ Neve muttered.

‘She’s a publicist. She’s paid to tell great, fat lies. We agreed that this was just about kick-starting your metabolism again, not as a permanent replacement for solid food.’ Celia gave her sister a reproachful look. It was such a good look that it could have softened the stoniest heart, but Neve just folded her arms and stuck out her lower lip in a mutinous pout.

‘I don’t care,’ she gritted. ‘It’s my body and so what if I can’t sleep, and I’m a bit moody and yes, the brown juice smells like bongwater though I’ve never actually smelled bongwater so I’ll have to take your word for it. If this gets me into a size ten then it will be worth it.’

‘But …’

‘Dude …’

‘Shut up! I don’t want to hear it because neither of you can even imagine what it’s like to be trapped in a prison of
fat
and until you do, you’ve got nothing to say to me on the subject, so zip it!’

Celia zipped it for a few long moments, her lips pressed so tightly together that she looked like she might explode. Then she couldn’t contain herself any longer and opened her mouth so she could let rip. ‘You might have been a size fourteen when you were shagging Max but you were a damn sight more happy then than you are now. And I’ll tell you something else: you were a hell of a lot less spotty too!’

Neve had always thought of Celia as soft and pliable like Plasticine but she proved absolutely rigid and unbendy over the next week. She resisted all of Neve’s entreaties about her body, her choice, remained unmoved even when Neve spent an evening dragging the lawnmower round the garden, nearly amputating a couple of toes in the process, and received 247 freshly baked cheese straws on the Saturday afternoon with a blank face and an icy, ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ve had my run,’ Neve said chirpily to show she didn’t bear any grudges. ‘And before I shower, I thought I’d help you make the flat party-friendly.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Celia said without much conviction. The only time she or Yuri ever had clean glasses was when Neve refused to listen to their claims that the alcohol sterilised the germs and washed them up herself.