Chapter 11 Jules “Somebody That I Used to Know”
Jules
“Somebody That I Used to Know”
It’s Monday morning and town is quiet. After a long-overdue utensil and pan haul in the Cook shop, I nip into Tribeca, where I fall in love with—and impulse buy—an Isabel Marant frilly little blouse. Just because…well, why the hell not?
My good mood only starts to diminish when the bloody ?koda won’t start in the car park. I have to borrow jump leads from a man in a white van who sucks air through his teeth, shakes his head, and tells me that the ignition system looks “a bit fucked.”
I calculate how much money’s left from the Carpe Diem windfall, but after paying off my credit card, there’s not nearly enough for a new car. Besides, how would I explain a new car to Adam? And would he even want one? He’s so attached to this piece of shit.
I quash down the feelings of guilt and the horrible sense that I’ve cheated, reminding myself that it’s not like what I’ve done has affected Adam. Or the kids.
At home, I gently wash my prized new pans, noting how terribly shabby they make the rest of the kitchen look.
Then I open my laptop, hoping that Darius has sent the confirmation email about the dinner on Thursday, with an idea of the kind of food his clients are expecting.
He said French classics, but that’s a pretty broad remit.
Worse is him expecting me to talk to his clients, when I’m only on a pathetic five-day streak of Duolingo French.
Which means I’m going to be exposed as the terrible fraud I am.
It’s all my own fault, because, technically, I should be fluent.
I did go to “live like a local” in Paris when I was eighteen, or at least that’s what I told my mum.
What I actually spent most of my time doing was getting smashed with my English mates and shagging a ne’er-do-well barman called Pierre.
I can see now that I was swept up in the fantasy of being in Paris with a lover, but I still should’ve been using my springy young brain to actually learn French when I had the chance.
It’s too hard now.
There’s a miserable “Whaa, whaa, whaaaa” noise as I fail the next Duolingo level.
“Bollocks,” I curse, momentarily distracted by a distant growling sound, but determined to conquer Duo’s latest challenge of asking a ticket inspector what time the next train for Avignon arrives.
Next thing, Darius is knocking on the glass of the back door.
“Hey. Only me,” he says, pushing it open.
I stand up, guiltily shutting the laptop, and just like when he unexpectedly turned up the Sunday before last, I feel immediately flustered.
We don’t have “popper-inners,” except for Doodles, and he’s used to finding us in our natural habitat—or “shabbytat,” as Adam likes to call it—and he’s usually in a cloud of vape and hardly even notices the clothes I’m in, let alone our crumb-covered surfaces.
If I’d known Darius was coming, I’d have zhuzhed the place up a bit.
Is it a culture thing in California, that you can just turn up unannounced?
Or did Darius get so used to coming to this house when he was a kid that he feels the same best-mate rights still apply?
“I thought it might be easier to drop this off,” he says, holding up something in his hand.
“Right,” I say, as he dips his head and kisses me on both cheeks. He smells of that same expensive cologne he had on at his party. He’s so groomed. So polished.
He hands me a yellow card. On the top, there’s a posh line illustration of a beautiful chateau, with an avenue of plane trees leading up to it, and an embossed gold crest below with the words Le Manoir inscribed beneath several gold stars.
“I saved this from one of the places Sujane—she’s the chief potential investor—took me to outside Paris when I last went over.”
“Thanks,” I manage, scanning down the menu gastronomique and trying, haltingly, to read the words. Cromesquis de foie gras à la truffe et céleri… bloody hell. Galettes andouille de Guémené fumée… what the actual…? Confit d’oignons, oeuf biologique en cocotte…
Jesus. I can safely say that I have zero idea what any of these dishes are.
Darius presses his hands together in supplication. “Jules, I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to do this.”
“Uh,” I stall. “Why exactly do you need investors, anyway?” I ask, because he’s rich as Croesus, right?
“Why risk your own money when you can risk somebody else’s instead?” He smiles, easy with that word risk in a way Adam never could be in a million years. “It’s just part of my plan.”
“Plan?”
“World domination,” he jokes, sticking his little finger to the corner of his mouth like Mini-Me in Austin Powers. “Ping me the menu you decide on later today and then we’ll be all set for Thursday.”
Today? I’m meant to come up with a menu to rival this epicurean gobbledygook in mere hours?
“Uh-huh.”
There’s a pause. I should ask him if he wants tea, but I don’t. I’m too freaked out by what he’s just said.
“What’s with all the tapes and CDs?” he says, nodding at the two open boxes that arrived this morning.
“Oh, um.” I can’t help blushing, feeling somehow caught out, because these are all the new tapes and CDs Adam has managed to source for us to make new playlist recordings with. “Just some stuff Adam ordered for, er, some old-school recording project of his he’s nerding out on.”
“Huh,” Darius considers, like Adam’s quirkiness needs no further explanation. “I guess he’s not around?” he then asks.
“No. He’s at work. I didn’t even see him this morning. He plays volleyball first thing.”
“Ah,” Darius says, with a knowing nod. “With Meredith, ‘the babe.’ ”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Yeah, those two seem thick as thieves,” he says.
A horrible feeling settles in the pit of my stomach. What’s he saying? Or implying? That there’s something going on between Adam and Meredith?
But Adam is…just my Adam, right? I’ve always known he’s mine.
That he’ll be faithful, even when he goes off gallivanting on his bike.
Even when he’s hanging out on volleyball courts with her.
Besides, for the last fifteen years, we’ve joked that he’s much more interested in his own body than anyone else’s.
Only my mind now fills with the image of Meredith sitting on Adam’s shoulders at the pool party, both of them flexing their toned muscles after whuppin’ our arses at volleyball, and how unbearably competitive they were.
In fact, that was one of the reasons Adam and I argued on the way home that night.
The night he discovered the machine.
—
I stand at the kitchen sink, watching Groucho Barx expertly piddling along the weeds next to the shed. Why didn’t I ever do a proper French cooking course? Even after I got back from Paris? I had my chances. Like that time at the Foodies Festival when Chef Marcel was doing that demo.
And suddenly, a thought hits me like a bolt in the chest.
No, I can’t…
I definitely can’t…
Yet…as if propelled by a higher force, a minute later, I’m turning on the flickering light in the shed and staring at all the gym equipment Adam has bought over the years, stuff we can’t really afford, even though most of it is secondhand.
I start furtively rifling through the tapes and CDs, telling myself that I’m due this.
All that time he’s been cycling up mountains and I was stuck looking after the kids, when I could have been polishing my own skill set.
I’m also lucky enough to know exactly what I’m looking for.
As if by magic, here it is in my hand: a CD in a case with See You Later xx May 2012 written on it in Adam’s handwriting.
The exact day of the food festival I was thinking about, which just happened to be on Adam’s birthday, a day he unfailingly always made a mixtape or CD on each year as a joke, because of the one year I forgot.
Tucked inside there’s further proof this should get me where I need to go—a receipt from the Brighton Foodies Festival that year.
Not giving myself a moment to back out, I slide the CD into the machine and quickly press “Play” and “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye starts throbbing out—
***
…with a final tumbling, churning, twisting spin…I’m flipped back out into 2012…into my forty-year-old body.
And I’m exactly where I hoped I’d be, on a blisteringly hot bank holiday Monday on the half-mile stretch of mowed Hove Lawns running parallel to the beach, which has been taken over for the weekend by the Foodies Festival.
More importantly, it is exactly when I hoped it’d be. Mid-afternoon and just over half an hour before Chef Marcel’s demo in the cookery tent starts.
We’re by the entrance. Me—or rather, Young Me—and Ngozi.
She’s wearing a flowery green-and-orange wide-legged satin jumpsuit with a matching scarf tied around her large Afro.
Isa and Isaac, her twins, are with us. Isa is small and pretty, the spitting image of Ngozi, and I can already see the fashionista she’ll become.
Isaac—tall with geeky glasses, looking like he wishes the ground would swallow him up—is possibly already pondering the maths-y questions that’ll earn him a first at Oxford in a few years.
One of Jules’s recent memories informs me that Liam is already off into the festival with Max, but we linger near where Nelly has set up a stand with an appeal for the famine in Somalia with a few other kids from school, although they seem to have abandoned her to man it alone.
My heart jolts at the sight of Nelly’s earnest face, her curly hair held back by an Alice band, but Young Jules can only see the alarming posters of potbellied children covered in flies with skeleton legs and is worrying that Nelly’s strategy of guilt-tripping people will backfire.
She’s taken the famine to heart in a way that’s left Jules feeling guilty and slightly ashamed over how little she’s motivated to do herself.
“Why don’t you come into the festival with us and have some fun? Someone said Zoella’s here,” Jules says temptingly.