We settled down at a corner table, ordered a bottle of wine, and Emily launched into the story of her life since we’d last seen each other. She refused to talk about her writing – ‘Don’t mention the war,’ she’d groaned, and instead told me about her love life. The dates she’d gone on with the gay man who insisted he wasn’t and the straight man who insisted he was gay. She was a great raconteur, with impeccable attention to detail. No broad brushstrokes. Gripping stuff.
She always seemed to do a lot more talking than me. But then again she had a lot more to talk about. By the time we were finally up to speed on her life we’d almost finished our second bottle of wine.
‘Now you,’ she ordered. ‘What’s the story with the rabbits?’ She frowned. ‘And what does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?’
I sighed and began my sorry tale, then through the throng spotted my sister Claire.
‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed. Then she saw Emily and understood. She spent a bit of time chatting to us, then noticed the people she was meant to be meeting, so off she went. No sooner was she out of earshot than Emily muttered darkly, ‘Oh yeah? You go on off and have a nice time with the people at the BIGGER table.’
She looked at me levelly – or so I thought at the time, but clearly we were just swaying in time with each other. ‘I’ve taken agin your sister… And,’ she appended grandly, ‘her friends.’
I looked over at the table that Claire had just joined. At her arrival it had blown up with laughter and talk. I was pierced with a peculiar sense of exclusion. ‘I’ve taken against them too!’
‘You haven’t taken against them.’
Hadn’t I?
Emily leant her head back and tipped the last of her wine down her throat. ‘You’ve taken agin them.’
Fair enough. I’d taken agin them.
We managed to procure another bottle of wine, then decided to go somewhere else, where the people weren’t quite so annoying. As we beat our way out, we passed Claire and her friends.
‘We’re leaving now,’ Emily said haughtily. ‘No thanks to you.’
Cryptic, I know, but at the time it made perfect sense.
In the hotel lobby, by the front door, we decided to have a little dance before we left. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but we were both agreed that it was a good one. We actually put our handbags down and had a brief dance around them before cackling off into the night. To this day I can still see the astonished expressions of the three considerably more sober men standing near us.
Outside, we hailed a taxi and asked – demanded, more likely – to be taken to Grafton Street. Within seconds we’d taken agin the driver, paranoid that he was taking the long and lucrative way round.
‘You can’t turn right on that bridge,’ he defended himself.
‘Sure,’ Emily scorned. ‘You can’t swizz me, I live here,’ she lied aggressively. ‘I’m not a tourist.’
Then she poked me with her small, sharp elbow and giggled hoarsely, ‘Maggie, look.’ She opened wide her handbag – like a dentist trying to reach the furthest molars – where, in amongst her LV wallet (fake) and Prada make-up bag (real), nestled one of the ashtrays from the hotel. If I remembered correctly it had carried a price tag of thirty pounds.
‘Where did you get that?!’
A rhetorical question. When Emily is under stress she nicks things and I hate it. Why can’t she be more like me? My way of dealing with stress is to get an outbreak of eczema on my right arm. I’m not saying it’s pleasant but at least you can’t get arrested for it.
‘Stop stealing things,’ I scowled, low and fierce. ‘Sometime you’ll get caught and you’ll be in terrible trouble!’
But answer came there none, because she was berating the driver again.
We went to a nightclub that we were really far too old for and had a great time taking agin more people – the doorman, who didn’t summon us to the top of the queue quickly enough for Emily’s liking, barmen who didn’t serve us instantly, sundry merry-makers who didn’t leap to their feet and give us their seats as soon as they saw us.
Basically, we had a blast, and the following day Garv was not unsympathetic. He speedily vacated the bathroom when I had to vomit, and stood patiently on the landing, his face covered in shaving cream, his razor in his hand.
By six that evening I was well enough to talk, so I rang Emily. I was quite giddy – almost proud of our wild behaviour the night before, but Emily sounded subdued.
‘Did we dance around our handbags in the Hayman?’ she asked.
‘We did.’
‘Do you know?’ she said fake-casually. ‘I have a horrible feeling there was no dance-floor.’
‘Never mind no dance-floor,’ I exclaimed. ‘There was no music. And wasn’t it great the way we took agin all those people?’
Emily made a funny noise. A whimper crossed with a groan. ‘Don’t tell me I was taking against people.’
‘Agin,’ I corrected. ‘We took agin people. It was great.’
‘Oh God.’
I picked up the phone. ‘Emily?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I croaked. ‘I just think I’ve a touch of the flu.’
‘Your mum says you’ve split up with Garv.’
‘Oh… yeah.’
‘And that you’ve lost your job.’
‘Yes,’ I sighed, ‘I have.’
‘But… ‘She sounded both astonished and helpless, ‘I’ve been e-mailing you at work. Whoever has taken over from you will have got the finer details of Brett and his penis enlargement.’
I managed to say, ‘Sorry. I haven’t really been in touch with anyone.’
A silence while static hopped and blew on the line. I knew she was dying to ask questions, but she satisfied herself with, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘I’m fine.’
More static. ‘Look,’ she said slowly, ‘if you’re not working and… stuff, why don’t you just hop on a plane and come out here for a while?’
‘What’s out there?’
‘Sunshine,’ she cajoled. ‘Fat-free Pringles, me!
It was a measure of how far gone I was that I suspected she didn’t mean it. That she was only saying it because she felt she had to, that it was what a good friend should say. But all the same, something sparked in my deadness. Los Angeles. City of Angels. I wanted to go.