4
‘ O kay, it’s MOJO TIME,’ says Lish, Janey’s best friend at the hospital, shoving over the dating app.
She has filled in most of it already. The problem is, Lish is a midwife, and a superb one, which means she has developed over the decades a certain way of telling you how to do stuff that you just obey without question.
It’s in the tone of voice. Mind you, as Essie is always telling her, and not as a compliment, she herself has been known to talk incredibly slowly and distinctly in order to make a point.
‘I don’t know how it happens,’ says Janey, shaking her head and diverting her attention to the laptop and the app that is absolutely guaranteed to find her missing mojo, although she’s not a hundred per cent sure she didn’t pack it off to the charity shop when she moved.
She got rid of a lot of stuff. ‘But every time I have to write down my age, I think I’m thirty-five.
I can’t help it. Inside I am absolutely thirty-five. ’
‘You look thirty-five,’ says Lish automatically.
‘ You look twenty -five,’ says Janey quickly.
‘You look like you’restill at school,’ says Lish. ‘You could sneak in and re-sit your Highers.’
‘Oh, lord, no thanks,’ says Janey, who still occasionally has anxiety dreams about her exams, even though when she sat her school exams they all had perms.
‘Well, anyway,’ Lish continues kindly, ‘stop worrying about it. Being in your fifties is cool now. Everyone is at it. J.Lo is at it. Look at Aniston. Bullock.’
‘I don’t want to look at them. They make me feel bad.’
‘Gillian Anderson?’
‘Oh, God, stop it. I’m just saying, it’s fine; I feel fine about it. I just forget, that’s all.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I just don’t know why I feel exactly the same age I was twenty years ago. Do you think everybody does?’
‘Of course,’ Lish says, nodding wisely. Nodding wisely is also an exceptional midwife skill. ‘Evolution doesn’t need you to know how old you are. By the time you’re thirty-five you’ve either reproduced the species or not. It has no more use for you. You can basically die now.’
Janey makes a long fuffing noise. ‘Can I identify as young?’
Lish glances round the cafeteria. ‘Come on. Before Milton gets here. You know he won’t approve.’
Milton the porter tries his best not to look shocked about divorces and ribald talk; however, it is more or less unavoidable where they work, in a hospital full of women, dealing with very much the pointier end of the human experience, particularly the female experience, day in, day out.
Janey really does not want a single person more to know what she’s doing, which is why they chose the special low-lit breastfeeding canteen corner the hospital built at great expense, whereupon everyone revolted about why they should have to cover up breastfeeding and started doing it in the middle of the foyer on purpose to set a good example, so hardly anyone ever goes there.
‘Okay,’ she says, pressing the button on her laptop. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘MATCHES FOR YOU’ flashes up on the screen.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Come on,’ says Lish, squishing her over. ‘Maybe Pedro Pascal is passing through and has set his parameters to local.’
Janey nods. ‘Probably.’
‘Or for sure there’ll be a stray billionaire who has left the shallow confines of the city in secret for some real people who love him just for him. Who wants to chop wood and stuff.’
‘Of course most billionaires fancy women in their fifties,’ says Janey. ‘That’s why you see them out with their middle-aged wives so much.’
Lish holds up her water bottle. ‘To Pierce Brosnan,’ she says, not for the first time, and Janey raises hers and clinks back.
‘To Pierce. And Keanu.’
‘Practically a trend,’ says Lish.
Janey blinks at the screen. Then they both put their glasses on.
‘Oh, God,’ says Janey. ‘Oh, lord.’
‘Who?’
‘That guy used to be Essie’s modern studies teacher. Mr Harris. No way. Oh, my God. She hated him so much. She says he used to pick his nose at them while he was teaching.’
‘It doesn’t say that in his profile. It says he likes gardening.’
‘NOSE-GARDENING!’
‘You can’t be too picky.’
‘Tell him that.’
Lish smiles, but moves on.
‘Is that Radge Jack?’
It is indeed the famously grumpy local groundsman.
He is posing with a dog, which obviously someone has told him is the right thing to do for a dating profile, except that the way the photograph is angled, the dog is enormous and he looks absolutely tiny, as if he’s going to ride the dog like a horse.
‘I didn’t know Jack was looking for a girlfriend,’ says Janey. ‘I thought he hated all humans. That’s how he behaves, anyway. My God, these are slim pickings. Please. Please just show me somebody I don’t know.’
‘Everyone is famous in a small town,’ says Lish. ‘And Carso is such a very, very, very small town.’
*
Amsan and Milton spot them and appear with their trays. ‘Why are you hiding over here?’ says Amsan immediately, putting down her passive-aggressively large bowl of salad and oversized Stanley water bottle. ‘Are you doing something weird like going on dating apps or something?’
‘No,’ says Janey hastily.
‘Good,’ says Amsan. ‘Because my Yasmin put a profile up on one,against my advice, and she wrote as her last line in her description, “Also I have a tail.”’
Janey is confused.
‘She just wanted to see if men read to the end of the bios or just went by the photos.’
‘And . . .?’
Lish blinks and says, ‘Don’t tell me. Not a single man asked her if she actually had a tail.’
‘Not a single one,’ says Amsan smugly, and cracks open her Tupperware as if this settles the matter.
‘Oh, God,’ says Janey. ‘This just gets worse and worse.’
‘You said—’ begins Lish.
‘I know what I said!’ says Janey. ‘That’s before I got so old!’
‘You said, in the depths of divorce misery, during which we were all extremely patient and sympathetic, you may recall . . . ’
‘I do,’ says Janey. She does.
‘ . . . that once you were properly in your new house, we could do this . . . Has Essie seen the house, by the way?’
Janey shrugged. ‘Oh, you know Essie. She’ll probably send me something expensive and tasteful.’
Lish nods sympathetically as if she understands, but she doesn’t really. Her kids still live in Carso; Willoughby is the pharmacist; Emma is expecting.
‘She never tells me anything,’ says Janey, trying to make a joke of it.
‘She talks to Al more. I am glad she’s happy.
I am. Honestly. It’s only my repulsive old neck that’s giving me all the grief.
And being fifty-five when every bit of me that isn’t the mirror is absolutely convinced I’m thirty-five. ’
‘Write that you have a tail,’ instructs Amsan. ‘Yasmin got all the no-strings guys.’
Janey groans and lets her head slip to her desk. She gets salad cream in her hair and decides it counts as a conditioning mask.