Chapter 5
FIVE
JUNE 2008
It was half a year before I saw Patch again, at least in the flesh, although he appeared regularly in pictures on Zara’s Facebook feed. Along with Abbie, Rowan and Kate, the five of us had added each other as friends and had arranged to meet up the following month while our boyfriends played football. Although nowhere near a fucking football pitch, obviously , Kate wrote.
And so the second meeting led to a third, and soon it was clear that the Girlfriends’ Club was a thing. I can’t remember who came up with the name first, but whoever did, it stuck, even though Andy complained that it was a classic example of reverse sexism, surely in contravention of the Equality Act, and what were we going to do next, have jam-making competitions like the Women’s frigging Institute?
Outside of the monthly meetings, I saw my new friends sporadically but increasingly frequently. Kate and I met for lunch in the City and she gave me excellent advice on dealing with a difficult colleague at work. Abbie, Rowan and I went to a French art-house film together, although none of us could understand it so we sacked it off halfway through and had a boozy brunch instead.
I went on a few more dates with Stu before mutually calling it a day after an awkward chat during which we both edged towards admitting that although we liked each other, we didn’t like each other that way – translation: didn’t like each other enough. I got promoted at work and became Executive Assistant to one of the partners. I went on holiday to Tenerife with friends and had sex with a handsome, drunk Spanish man on the beach.
Summer turned to autumn. At work, everyone was back from holiday with renewed energy and the release of the quarterly financial results led to a frenzy of additional work as everyone geared up for year-end. I was working long hours, trying to do my best for Nerine, my new boss, and was relieved that she seemed pleased with me. But it left little time for socialising – I was getting back to my flat after nine most nights (the second Wednesday of the month excepted) and often having to take work home on weekends too.
So when I received a surprise text from Zara asking if I was free the following Saturday, I read it with excitement and then doubt.
Then I made up my mind. Work could wait until Sunday. Sleep was for the weak. And Zara was in some ways the most fascinating of my new friends, with her glamorous job in fashion and her impossibly handsome boyfriend. So, without knowing what she was going to suggest, I agreed.
Naomi:
Great!
She messaged back.
Zara:
Meet me at Notting Hill Tube station, 10a.m.?
I was intrigued and puzzled, but no further details were forthcoming, so I turned up as arranged and waited for her in the street outside the station. It was a gorgeous late September day, still properly warm although the leaves on the plane trees were just beginning to turn. I was wearing a cotton skirt, denim jacket and boots – an outfit I’d dithered over for ages before realising that whatever I wore, I’d never look as effortlessly stylish as she did and so there was no point worrying about it.
Sure enough, she emerged from the Tube wearing a high-necked, sleeveless brocade mini dress, a squashy leather jacket slung over her shoulders and dark glasses obscuring most of her face. My breath misted them up when she leaned in to kiss me.
‘Hello!’ she cooed. ‘Isn’t this the best fun?’
I smiled. ‘I don’t know – you have to tell me what we’re doing first.’
‘We’re going shopping,’ she announced. ‘It’s Patch’s birthday next month and I’ve decided to have a few people round. It’s going to be a surprise – he gets back from Aberdeen that evening and he was going to stay at mine for the weekend. I’m thinking balloons, a banner with his name on – all the tacky stuff. But I’ve got nothing to wear, and I needed help.’
‘That sounds amazing. But you’ve asked the wrong person. Rowan would have been a much better personal stylist than me.’
‘I doubt even Rowan would have been up for a shopping trip with a four-week-old baby,’ Zara said. ‘Besides, I wanted you.’
Feeling a little glow of pride at having been chosen, even if I was only the second choice, I followed Zara into a vintage shop, an Aladdin’s cave of sparkling lurex, embroidered silk, velvet in jewel colours and even a few forlorn-looking furs draped over a dressmaker’s dummy at the back.
‘This place is the business.’ Zara moved over to a garment rail and began rifling through the contents. ‘When you’re buying second-hand, the trick is to always come to areas where you could never afford to live. Rich people have amazing clothes – especially the dead ones.’
I laughed. ‘How do you know whether things will fit? I mean, sizing’s changed so much. Wasn’t Marilyn Monroe a size sixteen?’
Zara snorted. ‘Of course she bloody wasn’t. She was tiny. I reckon that’s a lie fat women have made up to feel better about themselves. Anyway, you can always get things altered. Seam allowances used to be so much more generous. How about this?’
She pulled something off the rack. It was a long-sleeved, short-skirted dress with a zigzag pattern in psychedelic shades of purple, yellow and green.
‘It’s… it’s quite full-on,’ I said. ‘But if anyone can carry it off, you can.’
‘Not for me, for you.’ Zara pushed it into my hands. ‘It’s original Biba, I’d lay money on it. Try it on.’
Bewildered, I followed her pointing finger to a curtained-off corner of the shop, tugged off my clothes and pulled the dress over my head. Even in the dim light, I could see that it worked. The colours made my hair look brilliant red instead of dusty copper. The bodice made my waist look tiny and the hem finished at just the right point, making my legs look endless. My freckled arms – my least favourite body part – were concealed by the sleeves.
I pushed the curtain aside and emerged to find Zara hovering outside.
‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’ I asked, beaming.
‘Off the scale,’ she said. ‘You’ll stun everyone at Patch’s party in that. My single male friends will challenge each other to a duel over you.’
‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you trying anything on?’
‘Oh, I picked up a few things.’ She showed me a bulging carrier bag. ‘Now we can go and have lunch.’
We went to a Polish café Zara knew and had pierogi, giant blinis piled with smoked salmon, fat slabs of poppyseed cheesecake and several shots of vodka each, because Zara said she wanted to try all the flavours. After about the second round, I found myself confiding in her about the dire state of my love life.
‘I mean, I’d love to settle down and have kids some time,’ I said. ‘But it feels so kind of final. I knew Stu wasn’t right for me, but how do you know who is?’
‘Isn’t that the million-dollar question?’ Zara knocked back a shot of bison grass vodka. ‘Shall we try the sour cherry next? The thing is, you’re supposed to know – like bam, fireworks etcetera, but I don’t think people really do. I certainly don’t.’
‘Do you mean Patch…’ I began. I thought of the photos I’d seen on Zara’s Facebook feed of the two of them together – gorgeous, smiling, apparently in love.
‘Patch is a lovable hunk of meat.’ She smiled wickedly. ‘And he’s so delicious to look at it’s easy to forget his other shortcomings.’
I couldn’t resist asking what those were, but she answered only obliquely.
‘Ah, I suppose no one’s perfect. But fortunately I travel so much and he’s always working away, so we have lots of time apart. Absence makes the heart grow fonder – and the fond heart wander.’
I laughed, even though I wasn’t sure what she’d said was even funny.
‘You know,’ she went on, leaning confidingly across the table to me, ‘no matter what happens with him and me, I’ll be grateful to him always, because without him I wouldn’t have met you. And Abs and Ro and Kate, of course.’
‘I feel the same about Stu. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?’
‘I guess it’s fate. I’ve never really had friends before – not close ones, anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, because I hardly tell anyone, but I grew up in care. I’m an orphan – or I was, I’m not sure how old you have to be before you stop being one. But my parents died when I was six, in a plane crash. There was no one else to take me in, so the children’s home it was.’
‘That’s awful, I’m so sorry.’ I looked at her, shocked and disbelieving. I’d always assumed that Zara, with her poise and confidence, had come from the most privileged of backgrounds.
‘It was grim at the time.’ She frowned, then broke into her usual bright smile. ‘But it made me who I am. It taught me resilience – but it also taught me to put up walls. And you’re teaching me to break them down again.’
I reached across the table and squeezed her cool, slim hand. ‘I’m glad. I’m glad we could do that for you.’
Then our conversation moved on and it was late afternoon when we eventually left, saying we’d see each other at Zara’s for Patch’s surprise party. I found myself looking forward to it, eager to understand more about the workings of this relationship that seemed so perfect on the surface but appeared to be anything but.
Then, at five o’clock in the morning on the day of the party, I pinged awake the way you do when you’ve forgotten something you ought to have remembered.
I hadn’t bought a present for Patch. It was his birthday and I’d be arriving empty-handed, apart from a bottle of fizz I’d planned to buy at an off-licence on the way, which would pretty much empty my bank account until pay day the following week.
In the end, in desperation, I decided to make a mix CD from the year from he was born. It felt personal – too personal, maybe, more than something like a bottle of aftershave would have been – but I was skint and I couldn’t think of anything better. His Facebook profile told me it was 1985, and when I started googling I was pleased to find loads of familiar tunes from that year, songs my mother had played to me in the car while she drove me to swimming and ballet when I was a child, which I still had on my iPod because – in spite of their gloomy content – they made me happy. Soon, I had a properly gothic compilation going: The Smiths, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jesus and Mary Chain and loads more.
When I’d finished that, I spent two hours getting ready and got the Tube to Zara’s flat. The door to the balcony was open to the late summer evening, fairy lights were strung everywhere and with Zara’s fashionable friends standing around sipping champagne, I felt like I’d stepped into the pages of Tatler magazine. When Zara saw me, she rushed over and folded me into a CK One-scented embrace, taking my bottle of supermarket fizz like it was vintage Veuve Clicquot and handing me a glass of something that I thought might actually be the real thing.
‘You look so stunning, Naomi. Love you in that dress – we did good work.’
‘You look incredible too.’ It was true – but then Zara always looked incredible.
‘You’re the first of the Girlfriends’ Club to get here,’ she said. ‘Let me introduce you to some fun people.’
She did – whisking me round the room inserting me into groups of her old uni friends, Patch’s old uni friends, women who worked with her in fashion. Soon after, Rowan, Paul, Abbie, Matt, Kate and Andy arrived, and to my relief I found myself enclosed in a chattering, laughing, champagne-drinking group of my own.
‘So where is the birthday boy, anyway?’ Abbie asked.
‘Probably decided to dodge the whole thing and go to the pub,’ Andy replied. ‘Surprise parties are the ultimate double-edged sword.’
‘Why do you think that?’ I asked.
‘They’re all about the surpriser, not the surprisee.’ Over time, I’d learned to expect these off-the-cuff, yet seemingly deeply considered observations from Andy. ‘Has anyone asked Patrick if he likes surprises? Clearly not, because that would have spoiled the surprise.’
‘So this way, Zara gets to look like a genius surpriser, and if Patch doesn’t like it he just has to suck it up,’ concluded Kate. ‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘Oh come on,’ argued Rowan. ‘You two are so cynical. Maybe Zara just wants to do something nice for her boyfriend.’
‘Trust me,’ Andy said, ‘when you’ve been round the block as many times as I have, petal, you’ll have learned that the Zaras of this world never “just” want to do anything for anyone.’
But before I could ask Andy what he meant, the longed-for ring of the doorbell sounded.
‘Quiet, everyone!’ Zara hissed over the chorus of voices and clink of glasses. ‘He’s here! Everyone hide.’
Somehow, with much giggling and jostling, everyone did.
‘Wait until you hear me say happy birthday,’ Zara commanded in a whisper, then I heard the click of her heels on the parquet floor as she hurried to open the door.
‘Hey,’ she said, almost purring, ‘how was the journey?’
‘Shit,’ Patch said. ‘Hot as hell and took forever.’
‘Well, you made it,’ Zara soothed. ‘Welcome back. And happy birthday.’
There was a moment of silence, then the rustling of many bodies and the shuffle of many feet all awkwardly moving together, then the first voice called out, ‘Happy birthday!’ and another added, ‘Surprise!’ and soon everyone was shouting at once, crowding round Patch and Zara to share in his amazement and her achievement. Patch looked tired – as he would after two weeks of long, physical days doing whatever engineers did on North Sea oil rigs – and a bit scruffy, as he would after a seven-hour train journey.
His jaw was shadowed with stubble and there were shadows under his eyes, too. His faded grey T-shirt was creased and I could see a darker triangle of sweat on the back of it. His hair looked like he’d showered that morning and just left it, without putting on styling products or whatever he normally did – it was sticking out at the sides and the fringe wasn’t lying smoothly over his forehead.
Not so delicious to look at now , I thought, wondering if Zara thought the same and if she was reminded of his other shortcomings, whatever those were.
But Patch was certainly putting on a brave face. After the initial, What the fuck just happened? moment, he was laughing and shaking his head, rueful at how thoroughly he’d been surprised. He’d accepted a beer from someone. He had his arm round Zara’s waist and was giving the right answers to all her questions – no, he’d had no idea she was planning this. Yes, it was totally amazing. Around me, the party seemed to be gathering pace. Zara was handing around plates of food – ‘Oh God, I didn’t cook it myself! I called in a favour from the caterer we use for work events’ – some people had drifted out on to the balcony to smoke and others were kneeling around the coffee table while someone tipped white powder out of a Ziploc bag.
I saw Andy glance in their direction, then break away from us to join the group. Kate took a step after him, then changed her mind, sighed and turned back to us, her smile a frozen facsimile of what it had been before.
There was no sign of Patch.
Without really thinking about it, I went towards the door that had to lead to the bathroom, turned the handle and pushed it open.
And there he was.
Not having a wee, thank God – if I’d walked in on him doing that I’d have been mortified. He was standing at the basin, splashing water on to his face, his long dark fringe dripping, his shirt on the floor at his feet.
‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry,’ I gasped.
‘No worries, at least I’m decent. Give me a second, I’ll just – would you mind passing me that towel?’
‘Sure.’ I handed it over. ‘Don’t mind me, I can come back. I was just?—’
I broke off. Patch was towelling his face, his arms flexed, and the beauty and power of his body took my breath away. His back and chest were sculpted like he was made of marble. A kite shape of dark hair began at his throat, spanned his nipples and trailed down to the waistline of his jeans. His abs were so defined they cast shadows on his skin.
Okay, Zara , I thought, I’d look past shortcomings too, for that.
‘I’m Patrick, by the way,’ he said, ‘in case you hadn’t guessed. But everyone calls me?—’
Embarrassed for him as well as for myself, I said, ‘I know. We met a few months back – pub after football? I’m Naomi.’
‘Of course. I’m so sorry – I should have remembered. I thought you looked familiar – your hair…’
‘That’s okay. And happy birthday. I brought you a thing.’ The home-made CD felt foolish now, almost inappropriate given he hadn’t even remembered meeting me. But I’d mentioned it now, so it was too late to change my mind. I fumbled in my bag and took out the gift, wrapped in paper with birthday cakes printed on it. ‘It’s a mix CD. I’m not fourteen, I promise.’
He laughed. ‘I can see that. Hey, I really am sorry I forgot your name. It’s just – this is a lot, you know. All these people.’
‘I’m not great with crowds either. Forget my own name, never mind some random who I met months ago.’
‘You’re not a random.’ He smiled the smile I remembered from before, which made me feel like I was being bathed in sunlight. ‘And I should open your present.’
‘It’s a bit daft,’ I apologised. ‘I didn’t know what else to get you.’
‘The man who has everything, right?’ He unpeeled the sticky tape and took out the case, on which I’d carefully hand-written the names of all the tracks. ‘Oh my God. This is seriously cool.’
‘You like alternative music?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Love it. You know when you’re a teenager and you feel like no one understands you?—’
‘Especially not your mum and dad?’ I smiled, imagining a surly boy with oversized hands and feet.
‘Exactly. And then you discover Morrissey and Marr and you’re like?—’
‘I’ve found my people?’
‘Just like that. I even went vegetarian after I listened to Meat Is Murder for the first time. Think it lasted all of four weeks.’
I laughed. ‘Are you serious? Me too. Then my mum took to cooking sausages for breakfast on Saturdays and?—’
‘Game over?’ He smiled, holding the box closer to decipher my handwriting. ‘Ah, you’ve got Just Like Honey on here. And When Love Breaks Down . Awesome.’
‘I would never have guessed. I’d have thought you were more into… I don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘Bruce Springsteen, I guess. Or Bon Jovi. Something more… blokey, maybe.’
He laughed. ‘Not me. I like the dark stuff.’
He grinned and sang a couple of lines from She Sells Sanctuary . His voice was another surprise – a perfectly pitched tenor.
Or maybe the acoustics in Zara’s bathroom were just off the scale.
‘Well, I’m glad you like it,’ I said, smiling. ‘You can pretend you’re a kid again when you listen to it, only without the angst.’
My words were light, but I was surprised how pleased I was – almost moved.
‘I really do. Thank you. Now, I guess I should let you…’
‘Sure.’
We stood together for a moment, the bathroom suddenly feeling even smaller than it had before. Then he edged past me and left, the CD cradled in both his hands like it was something precious.