Chapter 2 #2
Are Carrie and Brigitte and I real friends, or are we just there together on the same London life raft? I’ve asked myself this more than once of late, and I’m wondering it again now as I walk to meet them for a late-night drink in Hackney.
Carrie was the very first friend I made when I moved to London ten years ago.
The loneliness in my Kensal Green flat was at me like an insect bite back then.
London is not a city especially known for offering people a neat and ready-made social circle.
It took me a while to find not even a tribe, but a single willing tribe member.
Carrie and I bonded over two-pound pints at brilliantly scuzzy indie discos in Soho.
We smiled at each other as we danced under the lights amid the dry ice.
We were both trying to get off with a very tall boy called Rupert, until she very gallantly moved aside, fixed her eye on his less exciting mate and let me at it.
Rupert turned out to be a bust, but our friendship somehow stuck around.
In the weeks that followed, we would meet in nightclubs and look into each other’s reflections in the bathroom mirror and, under the strip lighting, we would put the world to rights, promising unending sisterhood in slurred voices.
‘When we’re older, we should buy a house together and just … pay for a really hot young nurse to take care of us,’ she told me one night, winking at me. ‘Like, y’know. Takecareofussshh.’
‘Feck that. Let’s move on to a cruise ship permanently for back-to-back holidays and spend our retirement doing karaoke and getting facials together,’ I countered.
Carrie once told me that I am the type of good-looking that sneaks up on you, after weeks and weeks and then all at once.
At the time, I was having a bewildering lack of sex for someone in their early twenties, so this information landed fairly awkwardly.
Most of the men I felt attracted to at the time preferred a doe-eyed milquetoast, and said as much.
‘I really want a girl like in that film, Amélie,’ they would say straight to my face.
My face, with its grey eyes and handsomely square jaw.
My face, framed with the sort of fluffy, frizzy hair that, if I lived in 1884, would make me a goddess. But I don’t, so it doesn’t.
‘You’re the sort of girl that guys with girlfriends will chance their arm and ask for a threesome with,’ Carrie surmised with typical beery bluntness. ‘You’re not enough for them to leave their girlfriends, but you’re sexy in a way that makes them want to know if you’ll be freaky in bed.’
‘Jesus wept, thanks for that.’
‘No, I mean it in a good way.’
Despite this lengthy dry spell where the spiders on the windowsill were getting more action than me, Carrie regards me as this effortlessly sexual being, lips forever in a post-coital throb.
I once told her, after way too many Mad Dog 20/20s had been imbibed, that a Plenty of Fish date had licked my arsehole during a weird, off-ramp moment.
The fact that I didn’t expire with shame in front of him then and there has cast me in her mind as some sort of sexual libertine.
I guess I’m not in any hurry to disabuse her of this notion.
I think of her idea of me, and that non-power, more often than I’d like.
If Carrie were to appear on Mastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
Hangover cures that work in four hours or less
Obscure eighties movies starring Shelley Long and/or Kirstie Alley
Vintage polyester dresses
The life and works of Jilly Cooper
Picking the locks on her own doors to avoid paying ￡100 to a locksmith
I thought my life was in disarray until Carrie let me into hers.
The first time I went to her bedsit in Pimlico in the near-blinding sharpness of daylight, the smell of days-old takeaway greeted us like a hyper child.
There were newspapers, foil food cartons and torn tights on every surface.
Out of the bin poked all manner of, well, intimate rubbish.
‘This is just a crash pad until I get my proper place,’ she told me time and time again, by way of explaining the takeaways and visible sanitary wear.
She eventually moved into an ex-council house way out in East Ham.
The grotty surfaces somehow seemed to dutifully follow her.
‘What happens when you take a guy back here?’ I genuinely wanted to know as my eyes took in the chaos.
‘We just go back to their place.’ She shrugged. ‘Who’d want to come all the way back to Zone Four for a blowjob?’
‘We can’t have it all figured out like you do,’ Carrie often says, referring to Johnny. Shamed as I am to say it, this appraisal of how my life looks from the outside feels nice.
Carrie was a life coach until just recently, and I’m sure she’d be the first to say that this was a bit like walking into someone’s house, telling them in painstaking detail how to load their dishwasher correctly, then going home and eating dinner from the outside bins.
There has been a career pivot of late though, and now Carrie sells aloe vera products online.
‘A pyramid scheme,’ I made the mistake of clarifying a few months ago as she subtly tried to rope me in.
‘A multilevel-marketing venture,’ she corrected me. ‘The overall message here is self-care and nourishment, not making money. It’s empowering stuff.’
There is nothing Carrie won’t do these days for an aloe vera sale.
She has swapped out bollocks like ‘Bloom with confidence. Blossom with success’ for ‘This shit will make you live forever’.
You could be in a queue at the bank, waiting at a bus stop or simply meeting her briefly in passing, and you are guaranteed to hear all about it.
She encounters a lot of rictus grins in an average day, or maybe she doesn’t even see them.
Brigitte, meanwhile, opened a Facebook account a year ago and has shown a completely different side to the girl who habitually left the Good Mixer or the Camden Palace with puke mashed into her hair.
Were Brigitte to appear on Mastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
Enid Blyton (weirdly)
Clothing with owls and/or cherries on them
The entire history of Marc Jacobs’s handbag collection
The morning-after pill
Skincare that can only ever be bought in Space NK
Brigitte also has a habit of referring to ‘girls like us’ when she wants to put herself down.
‘He doesn’t go for girls like us, Essie,’ she once told me of some dickhead with statement-making facial hair that was demonstrably showing her less-than-zero interest. ‘He prefers someone with a thigh gap.’
‘Get to fuck,’ I told her, bristling at this appraisal of both of us. ‘You could drive a Toyota Corolla through these thighs. Don’t drag me into it.’
‘You know what I mean though,’ she tries to clarify. ‘He’s into hotties.’
Much earlier on in our friendship, she’d used this to pretty unsettling effect, while we were three sheets to the wind on the good ship Bacardi Breezer.
‘It’s always going to be hard for girls like us – girls with all this baggage from the past,’ she slurred, deep in philosophical mode.
‘We’ll always find it hard to outrun our pasts.
’ Her ‘past’ meant being the only girl in her entire boarding school without a pony.
As for mine … well. She soon realized better than to say it again.
These casual assassinations aside, I like Brigitte a lot, but Facebook Brigitte is a person who is entirely at odds with the quite nice and generally sane person who sits down next to you.
Not a single thought goes through Brigitte’s mind that doesn’t end up out there on Facey for the delectation of her 253 friends.
‘Even when things are happening to me in real time, I’m still working out how I’m going to word it in a status update afterwards,’ she admitted once, over a 3 a.m. bag of chips that miraculously missed its chance for an afterlife on her Facebook wall.
There are selfies from nightclub toilets, the canteen at work, a walk in Victoria Park. And here, on a quiet weeknight in a Hackney bar, I see Brigitte’s arm extend at that familiar jaunty angle, aimed right at us. She instantly perks up, shoulders back.
‘Please don’t put that on Facebook, Bee, I’m begging you now,’ I tell her. She waves the resulting photo under my nose, just long enough to notice that I’m sweaty and spuddy and she is luminous and Hepburn-like.
‘My eyes aren’t even bloody well open in that one,’ I protest.
‘Stop it, you’re a total babe,’ she counters, fingers working a mile a minute to post it publicly before I know what’s what.
Brigitte has recently Facebook-friended her ex-boyfriend Miles, and likes every single photo that he posts of his three young children. The Vaguebooking is near-constant.
‘Sad when you let a really good thing go when ur young and stupid, only to realize that so very long after the fact, amirite?’ she posted in a status update yesterday. Miles didn’t ‘like’ the post, but several of her sort-of friends do.
In any case, my friendships with Brigitte and Carrie have endured, needing only the odd lick of paint. It’s not that we’re platonic soulmates, despite what it might look like online. More likely it’s a case of being not-lonely together, or keeping out of the jaws of the city.
When I arrive home from Hackney, Johnny is completely into, and I mean beat into, a documentary on steam trains.
‘We need to do something with this place,’ I say, my hand sweeping over the beige non-grandeur of the flat.
I always wanted to be a person who lived in a curated space full of Dyptique candles, artisanal food and things bought in art gallery gift shops.
Instead, my eyes fall on pizza boxes and tea towels that look like they’ve been to war.
‘What you mean?’ goes he.
I kick the MDF coffee table, which makes the exact sound you think it would. ‘I dunno. De-Ikea the place a bit. Or, at the very least, de-Argos it. It’s like the staffroom of a bloody insurance company in here.’
‘What with.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off the trains. I notice the statement, and the lack of question.
‘Just a nicer TV cabinet, bookshelves … I mean, look at this thing.’ I smack the black pleather sofa. ‘I saw this cool reading chair—’
‘Yeah, I mean,’ he cuts me off, rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign for money.
Neither of us wants to acknowledge the ￡12,000, an inheritance from a grand-uncle I barely knew.
It’s in my savings account, but we’ve talked about it and this is very much our money.
It has been our ‘Just in Case We Need It for a Baby’ money, but the ‘just in case’ has now changed into something else.
Neither of us will say it: buying a nicer bookcase with it would be tantamount to an admission of defeat.
‘Jesus, just buy a rug, yeah?’ Johnny says, still not taking his eyes off the trains. I stand there, not wanting the conversation to be over, but knowing anyway that it is.
The following afternoon, in dire need of some sort of existential fortifying, I sit in the nearby park and look at my own Facebook page and try to appraise what exactly it says to everyone else about me.
The profile picture is of Johnny and me, taken on a shorefront I don’t remember.
If you didn’t know us, the way our heads are positioned might make you think we fit well together.
Below it are a dozen variations of ‘gorgeous couple, swit swoo’ comments.
There’s another picture there of the Gherkin building, which I very poetically captioned ‘View on the way to work’.
There’s a photo album from the V Festival, in which Johnny and I appear to have well over a dozen friends in our company.
In truth, we fell in with a heap of randomers from Sheffield about twenty minutes before the photo was taken.
If you didn’t know Johnny, you might see the turn of his head in this photo as a cocky pose, but I know that he’s trying to evade the camera, reserved even in front of the lens of a stranger’s phone.
Only a few of us could tell you that he’d much rather be at home than there with people he doesn’t know.
Maybe you’d look at my Facebook profile and think that life has turned out exactly as it was meant to for me. But the disquiet remains. The itch. The feeling I’m not quite doing life right.