Closest Kept

1

“I bet you’re glad I forced you out this evening, huh? Those guys are gorgeous.”

Inga was touching up her sparkly eyeshadow in front of the mirror in the ladies’ toilets, trying not to dislodge her Christmas reindeer antlers as she did so. Even with the door closed, I could still hear the festive music pumping from behind the bar. With two days to go before Christmas, the city was exactly how I’d imagined it would be, packed with girls in shiny dresses and guys with mistletoe and smooth chat-up lines.

Hideous. My worst nightmare.

Which was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to come out tonight. All that glittery exuberance. The compulsion to be jolly. The complete lack of acknowledgement that, for some people, the festive season was the pits.

I’d much prefer to be at home trying to drive old memories away with a gripping book. But Inga was like a kid about Christmas, and Inga was my best friend, so here I was.

And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t got through plenty of nights like this before; I could do it again. Besides, Inga would be on her way to see her mother in Denmark tomorrow, so I’d have all the time in the world to hide out until the festivities were over. And I had to admit she was right; the guys were gorgeous, so maybe it had been worth letting Inga drag me out, after all.

Matt, the dark-haired one, was a big bear of a man you could imagine hugging. Alex was slimmer, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a body to die for, tapering from broad shoulders. We weren’t the only appreciative women in the bar—I’d seen every female eye in the place checking them out when they walked in. Which probably meant it wasn’t a good idea to spend too much time in the ladies’ cloakroom.

“So, what are we going to be tonight? Air hostesses? Chefs? Company directors?” Inga asked.

Inga and I were both artists, but she rarely wanted to tell people that because it inevitably led to lame jokes about modern art.

“Can’t we just be ourselves for once?”

“I do more waitressing than creating these days,” she said, putting her eyeshadow back in her bag, her expression momentarily bleak.

“Oh, Inga,” I started to say, but she pushed my sympathy aside.

“Look, it’s Friday night, it’s Christmas, and by some miracle I’ve got the night off. I don’t want to spend my precious time debating whether a pile of bricks or an unmade bed count as art. Or to pretend to die laughing when some dimwit who thinks he’s God’s gift to witticism makes some crack about us being piss artists, not artists.”

She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and headed for the cloakroom door. “Come on, babes,” she said, “this is just a bit of Friday night fun, okay? The blond guy—is he Alex or Matt?”

“Alex.”

“Alex is not going to get down on one knee and ask you to marry him at the end of the evening.”

I got the message straightaway. Inga liked Matt. Which was a shame, because so did I. It was predictable that Inga would like him, though. She always went for guys with brown eyes if there was a choice. With her Scandinavian heritage, she said she’d had enough blue eyes and blond hair to last her a lifetime.

“I take it you fancy Matt, then?”

She glanced back, giving me puppy-dog eyes. “D’you mind?”

I smiled, as usual unable to deny her anything. Which was the whole reason I was here, drowning in pre-Christmas celebrations instead of at home in my pyjamas in the first place wasn’t it? “No, that’s fine. Alex seems really nice.” Less complicated than Matt too. Less likely to ask me lots of questions I didn’t want to answer. Someone perfect for a casual relationship. “Though there’s no guarantee he’s into me.”

“Trust me, he’s into you. The guy could barely tear his eyes away, you amazing marine biologist, you.”

I raised my voice as we headed out of the ladies’ cloakroom into the buzz of the bar. “Oh, no, I’m not being a marine biologist again. Or a firefighter, or a trapeze artist.”

Inga smiled, pressing on through the crowd. I could see Alex and Matt waiting for us, pressed in on all sides by preening, giggling women.

“You were amazing as a trapeze artist.”

“Yeah, except for my terminal fear of heights.”

“Well, you didn’t exactly have to actually dangle upside down and swing across a big top, did you?” Inga pointed out.

“No, but I had to talk about doing it. That was enough to give me vertigo.”

We were almost back at our spot at the bar. As normal, Inga would make the decisions about how the conversation would go. I didn’t really mind. It was usually fun being in Inga’s riptide. Having to improvise and think on my feet. And it was an effective distraction from the depressing tackiness of Christmas in the city.

We’d started inventing professions for ourselves years ago after we’d met at art college, as a way of avoiding having to justify or explain what we did to people who would never understand in a million years. Somehow, it had carried on.

“There you are,” said Alex, his eyes smiling at us both, but lingering on me. “We thought something had happened to you.”

“Well, the hand dryer did look a bit threatening, didn’t it, Lily?” Inga said. “Like it might suck us right into some sort of vortex or something if we used it.”

I shivered dramatically, playing along. “Yes. We decided to drip-dry to be on the safe side.”

Matt laughed, the skin next to his eyes crinkling. I decided his eyes weren’t a straightforward brown. That, if you were going to paint them, you’d need to add some honey gold to the raw umber; maybe with a touch of burnt sienna, too, if you wanted to get the shade exactly right.

“Listen,” said Alex. “We were wondering whether you’d mind getting out of here? Going someplace quieter?”

Inga and I exchanged glances.

“Not somewhere like a dark alleyway or a deserted park,” Matt said quickly.

I saw the way Inga was looking at him and suspected she wouldn’t say no to going to either venue with him after she’d had a few more drinks.

“Where, then?” I asked.

“To a restaurant? To get a bite to eat?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Our parents have gone to a party together, and every bit of food in our houses is earmarked for Christmas.”

“You guys both still live with your parents?” Inga said disbelievingly, at the same time as I saw the boys exchanging glances—Matt’s saying, What did you say that for? And Alex’s, Whoops, sorry. It was quite sweet.

“Like I said,” Matt said, “we’ve been away travelling. Now we’re back, we’re going to get a flat together.”

“How long were you away?”

“Six months,” Matt said.

“We went all over,” Alex added. “Working as we went to pay our way. It’s been a blast.”

I bet it had. World travel was what me and Inga had always said we’d do. But so far we’d managed only a couple of package holidays. I was jealous as hell. And eager to hear more. Somewhere quieter where we didn’t have to shout to be heard sounded fantastic. Even though Inga and I had scarfed a giant pizza before we’d set off tonight and I wasn’t in the least bit hungry.

“Well,” said Inga, taking Matt’s arm, “let’s go, then. And by the way, I predict you’ll find an amazing flat somewhere high up, with city views.”

“Oh, you can predict the future, then, can you?”

Inga nodded. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re both fortune tellers.”

Oh, wow. This was going to be fun. And at least it would be a distraction from the relentless festive cheer.

Ten minutes later, after a brisk walk along frostbite-inducing streets, we were in an Italian restaurant waiting for Alex’s and Matt’s pasta and mine and Inga’s strawberry ice cream to arrive. Inga had hold of Matt’s hand across the table and was pretending to read his palm. She’d gone all trance-like—a spookily accurate re-creation of Madame Rosa, a fortune teller who we’d both consulted on a weekend break to the seaside in the summer.

I hadn’t wanted my fortune told at all, because if there was the smallest chance of finding out that your future was going to be as bleak as your past, why would you? But Inga wouldn’t go in unless I did, and suddenly a consultation with Madame Rosa seemed to have become the whole reason she’d wanted to go to Brighton. So, not wanting our weekend to be soured, I’d reluctantly agreed.

Inga went first, while I sat cynically at the back of the booth, listening to Madame Rosa as she told Inga she would find hidden jewels in her life. That something would happen that would feel like a disaster, but which would actually turn out to be a miracle. For months afterwards, I asked her whether her disaster had happened yet.

If Madame Rosa had told me I’d find hidden jewels, I’d have questioned her further, cynical about her talents or not. “ Do you see me ever finding my family? ” I might have asked. But she didn’t say anything like that to me. She said I’d have to work hard to get what I wanted from life—something I could have told her myself. My life had never been easy: living in hostels, working several different jobs to fund my higher education. Why should things be any different in the future? Especially as I was set on being an artist. Artists always had to work hard to get anywhere.

In the restaurant, Inga was throwing everything into her fortune-telling role. I hoped she wouldn’t go as far as doing the eyelid-fluttering thing Madame Rosa had done. It had been a bit scary, and definitely unpleasant, to keep seeing the whites of her eyes.

Matt was smiling, enjoying being the focus of Inga’s attention. It wasn’t difficult to predict his immediate future. The waitress who’d taken our order could probably do it. Matt was going to eat his pasta, drink his wine, laugh at Inga’s jokes, then take her home to make passionate love to her. All while getting his head round the fact that his fortune teller slept in a room that was a shrine to surrealist art and there was a doll’s head pierced by a thorny stick looking at him from Inga’s dressing table.

I sensed that he wouldn’t care about such eccentricities, though, because he seemed pretty smitten. I wondered whether Inga could tell that, whether she minded. Whether she was, for once, contemplating more than just a one-night encounter. I’d never known Inga to have a serious relationship since we’d first met.

“D’you want to read my palm?” Alex asked me, holding out his hand, palm upwards.

“I don’t read hands,” I said. “I’m a tarot card kind of girl.”

I wasn’t, not really. I didn’t believe in fortune telling at all, or any other kind of fairy tale. But I did at least like the illustrations on tarot cards, and I liked to try to keep an element of truth in my story when Inga and I invented our professions.

“Tarot cards, eh?” said Alex, not withdrawing his hand, his eyes devouring mine. They really were very blue.

“Yes. And I only use a pack I designed myself.”

“You designed a pack of tarot cards?”

I did. As part of an art project. I used them in a giant mixed-media painting about fates that was currently taking up space behind my sofa, along with eight or nine other paintings.

“You must be an artist as well as a fortune teller, then,” Alex said, and I felt Inga looking at me and knew she’d be frowning. Don’t give the game away!

I kept my tone casual. “I guess so.”

Alex picked up his beer. “Matt and I had our fortunes told when we were in China. Not with tarot cards, though. She used these sticks. What were they called, Matt?”

“ Kau chim sticks.”

“What did she tell you?” I asked, but Inga said something to Matt, reclaiming his attention, so it was just Alex who answered.

“That one day I would meet a dark-haired girl with green eyes who would change my life.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Was the fortune teller really as corny as that?”

He smiled, a cute lopsided smile, like a little boy. “How can it be corny if it’s true?”

The waitress brought our order, effectively ending the fortune-telling chat. For around thirty seconds there was only the sound of the grating pepper mill and the boys’ deep appreciation of their food. Then a family came into the restaurant—a family, at nine o’clock on a Friday night. The little boy was wearing a Santa hat and a giant badge that proclaimed he was four today, so perhaps it was a birthday treat. Either that, or the parents were at their wits’ end, searching for a distraction, because the boy’s little sister was crying her head off in her buggy.

The sound went straight to my gut the way it always did when I heard a distressed child, making me think of my sister crying helplessly in the middle of the night.

Inga was glaring in their direction. “Great. I predict an end to our peaceful meal,” she said under her breath.

“They’ll settle down when they get pizza,” Matt said easily. Then, “So, what do you girls really do for a living?”

Distracted by the crying, I let Inga answer. Saw her look mock offended. “Are you accusing us of lying to you about being fortune tellers?”

Matt grinned. “Er, yeah.”

Inga put a hand to her chest. “I’m wounded to the heart. No, to the soul.”

Alex laughed.

I found my voice again. “We’re artists. That is, when we’re not waitressing, serving in shops, cleaning, or doing practically anything except childminding.”