Do You Want to Know a Secret? (6 page)

‘That’s the girl,’ she says. ‘You just wait and see, this time next year, you’ll be living the life of a Danielle Steel heroine. I have great plans for you, baby. I’ve done homework on your behalf and everything.’

I’m just thinking, bless her for taking all this so seriously, she’s so fab, when, out of nowhere, something strikes me.

‘Barbara, hope you don’t mind my asking but, how come you’re home tonight? Not like you, hon. Friday night and all that.’

‘I do have a date, I’m just running late, that’s all. With the casting director from the commercial last week, remember? Can’t even remember his name. It’s something . . . somebody Vale . . . I remember thinking whatever he’s called, it sounded like a housing estate out in the suburbs.’

‘Are you seriously telling me you’re going on a date with a guy whose name you don’t know?’

‘Honey, I’ve woken up with guys whose names I didn’t know. Besides, I don’t hold out much hope for him, he’s taking me to Bang Café, and we all know that place is just full of knickerless Ukrainian executive-stress consultants and record-pluggers. You know, one of those kips that’s like a rehearsal room for every lame pick-up line that doesn’t work on match.com.’

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to . . . my relationship coach. The woman I’m pinning all my hopes and dreams on, of ever meeting a DSM by this time next year.

Oh God, even thinking about what I’m hoping to achieve in the space of twelve short months makes me break out in a flop sweat . . . right then. Only one thing for it. I reach over to my handbag and fish out
The Law of Attraction
, which, tonne weight and all as it is, I’ve
been
toting around with me all week, dipping in and out of it whenever the need arises. Like now.

‘Before you go,’ I say. ‘I just opened the book you gave me, at random, and here’s the perfect affirmation quote for me to leave you on. Are you ready for this?’

‘Shoot.’

‘“I choose today to give myself the best life ever.”’

And she hangs up, pissing herself laughing.

Then a text message from Laura, which is never a good sign. It usually means there’s a fresh crisis with one of the kids, such as the time her youngest threw the main house phone down the loo, and her oldest brother didn’t realize and weed on it. Anyway, she asks if it’s OK if we convene at my place the following night, that her mum has agreed to babysit, and that she badly needs a night off or there’s a fair chance she’ll strangle someone, so I text back, saying grand, no worries, my house it is. Well, house slash building site would probably be more accurate.

It WILL be lovely when it’s finished, is my permanent mantra as every morning I sit gulping down cups of coffee at my washing machine, which is doubling up as a kitchen table for me at the moment. I’m not kidding, the house and renovations are costing me so much that I can’t afford proper furniture.

Well, at least, not yet.

It’s a dotey, tiny little doll’s house Victorian railway
cottage
, which was waaaay over my budget when I bought it last year, in the face of a great deal of opposition from my nearest and dearest which I can neatly summarize thus:

Dad, I should tell you, fancies himself as a great handyman, on account of a power drill we got him one Christmas, and even though he spent ages swaggering around the house with a very authoritative-looking tool belt strapped to his waist, all he really ended up doing was putting a load of Swiss cheese holes in my mother’s good IKEA occasional table. Poor Mum, every bank holiday weekend she has to put up with him strutting around, dismantling her hostess trolley and magazine stands to illustrate how badly they’re made. (‘Held together with glue, do you see? Total crap.’) Then abandoning everything and leaving a big mess all over the living-room floor the minute a Cup Final match comes on.

I do not know how my parents haven’t divorced, I really don’t.

Which, by the way, we all know right well is code for ‘small’. You know, just like when you say a guy is ‘distinguished’, it’s actually a euphemism for ‘really old and I wouldn’t go near him in a sugar rush’. Then to add insult to injury, when I did eventually move in she said, ‘I LOVE coming around to visit you, Vicky. It’s just like camping out. And I can totally sympathize. When we had the builders in a few years ago, my masseuse said she never saw me retain such tension in my shoulders. Never get a conservatory, sweetheart, it’s soooo not worth the hassle.’

Even Barbara had a go. She came to a viewing with me and grudgingly said, ‘Buy it if you want, but you’ll never get a man to move in here with you. For God’s sake, the outside is painted pink. Pink, as a colour, is a
very
well-known man-repeller. That’s a fact. Bit like a single woman with a cat. Guys tend to think you’re a total weirdo.’

See what I mean? I ignored the lot of them and bought it anyway, all swept up in the romance of owning a house with beautiful period features, bay windows, a cast-iron fireplace in the bedroom, and a lovely, bright downstairs kitchen with actual coving on the ceiling. ‘Listen to you, your trouble is you’ve seen too many Merchant Ivory movies and now you fancy yourself as Helena Bonham Carter in a tight corset, clutching your pearls, looking out the sash window,’ Laura quips at me every time I enthuse about how lovely it WILL be in about two hundred years’ time, when my builder, probably the single most useless individual in the northern hemisphere, eventually gets around to finishing the job. ‘You’ll end up selling, mark my words.’

I’m too bloody stubborn, and I’ve shelled out far too much cash at this point to swallow my pride and admit that she might actually be right. Instead, I’ve schooled myself to look on the whole renovation project as a lesson on the triumph of optimism over bitter experience – with such absolute force of will that if I could only apply the same attitude to my love life, sure I’d be laughing.

Honestly, every time I come home it’s like there’s a
fresh
disaster waiting for me with the builder, who is now a full six months behind schedule. He was to be finished at Christmas, it’s now well after Easter, and I’m still living in a building site; dust everywhere, all my stuff in boxes, and only a travel kettle in the kitchen to make the odd cuppa tea with, which I have to drink out of plastic cups because I’ve no way of washing anything.

I’m not making this up: the other night I came in to find my beautiful original wooden floor in what WILL be my elegant sitting room (trust me, even just saying it is an act of faith) completely and utterly destroyed. Builder-from-hell was supposed to sand it down for me, nice and evenly, then varnish it in a lovely dark, shiny teak; like the kind of floor you’d expect to see Fred Astaire swirling Ginger Rogers around on in a thirties black-and-white movie, at least that was my humble little vision. What I actually ended up with was the whole thing covered in lumps and bumps, not unlike the cellulite on my thighs, except all sealed in with varnish.

‘Do you like it, love?’ he asked me cheerily, seeing the ‘slapped mullet’ look on my face. ‘It’s all the go in these old houses. Gives a kind of “antique” effect. No extra charge for it now, don’t worry.’

Anyway, for better or for worse, my house/building site it is. Barbara’s flat is sadly out of the question as she shares with another ‘resting’ actress, so there’s never any
hope
of peace or privacy. Now, I love her flat and I love going around there, it’s kind of like a flashback to student days: pizza boxes and empty wine bottles everywhere, with Barbara usually wandering around the place still in her nightie at three in the afternoon watching
Oprah
. Great fun, but our Laura, hygiene fascist that she is, the woman who famously never goes anywhere without Parazone wipes in her bag, reckons she can only ever drink alcohol there, so it’ll kill whatever germs are floating around the glasses. And it’s not really fair for us to land on Laura either, mainly because, God love her, she’ll always jump at any chance she can to escape for a night. It’s rare, believe me, as she can never get babysitters, and, as she says herself, it’s hardly surprising. Any child-minder in their right mind would demand payment in gold bullion to take responsibility for her precious angels. In fact, Laura reckons pretty much every seventeen-year-old in the area has her blacklisted by now.

Right then, deep breath, here we go.

Project ‘let’s all try to get what we want out of life for a change’.

No, hate it, too self-helpy. (Please understand I just love attaching names and titles to things; it kind of comes with my job.)

Oh, I know . . .

‘The law of attraction in action.’

No, too rhymey.

Butterflies . . . something about butterflies . . .

Yes, got it.

For better or for worse, I’m calling us the Butterfly Club.

Now all we have to figure out is how in God’s name we’re going to completely and utterly do a three-sixty on each other’s lives. Within one year.

Gulp.

Chapter Four

The Butterfly’s first meeting. April
.

LAURA ARRIVES BANG
on the dot of eight, and I’m not a bit surprised as this is a woman whose punctuality is the stuff of legend. For God’s sake, even all four of her kids arrived promptly on their due dates – but as Barbara pointed out at the time, they were probably all too scared of her not to. (Unpunctuality is considered the ultimate war crime chez Laura, and the corresponding punishment is reserved only for the boldest of the bold:
NO TELLY
.)

Anyway, born mammy/candidate for canonization that she is, she arrives bringing a full bag of limes for the margaritas, plus a cocktail shaker, plus crisps and dips and other assorted yummy things. As usual, she’s thought of everything. Honestly, if I were a fella, I’d marry her in the morning. No question.

‘I knew you and Barbara wouldn’t have bothered to
eat
today,’ she says, as we air-kiss in my filthy, dusty hallway, which WILL be lovely when it’s finished. (Trust me, the more I keep repeating this like a mantra, the more I actually start to believe it myself.)

‘Angel from on high,’ I say, leading her inside and down the bockity, narrow, uneven staircase to the kitchen, stepping over boxes of tiles and grouting as we go.

‘Dearest, please understand I mean no rudeness by this question,’ she says. ‘But what has your builder actually achieved since I was last here? If you don’t mind me saying, the place, if possible, actually looks worse.’

‘Well, emm . . . my new fridge arrived,’ I say, a bit defensively, pointing to it, palm outstretched, a bit like a game-show hostess. ‘And I do have electricity. And the loo now flushes properly and all.’

God, I sound just like my granny when she used to tell us about the happiest day of her life. It wasn’t her wedding day, or even when her kids and grandkids were born, no: it was the day she got her first indoor toilet installed. In 1952.

Laura opens the fridge, sees that the builder has stuffed it full of his own things: Jaffa Cakes, bagels, full fat butter and, for some bizarre reason, last Thursday’s
Daily Star
, conveniently opened at the racing page.

She pulls out an ancient jar of peanut butter and shoots me one of her knowing glares. Put it this way, if
you
were a crime lord handcuffed in the dock and she looked at the court jury like that, you’d know instantly that you were a goner.

‘Is there a section in
The Guinness Book of Records
for the longest time an unopened jar of peanut butter has been kept for no apparent reason?’

‘I know, I know . . .’

‘Vicky, only say the word and you can move in with me any time. Now my house may not exactly be the Ritz Carlton, but if you could endure my darling cherubs, we’d love to have you. At least it would be hygienic.’

‘Honey, I really appreciate the offer, but at least this way I can keep an eye on Bob the Builder and . . .’

I’m saved from having to make further excuses by the doorbell and Laura’s phone ringing simultaneously. Not that I don’t appreciate her lovely offer, but I absolutely know that if I had to live under the same roof as her kids for a prolonged period of time, I’d end up either: a) an alcoholic; or b) on eight milligrams of Valium a day.

Note to self: never in my most drunken moment
ever
reveal to Laura that, while I love her kids and on a one-to-one basis am well able for them, the four together can be a bit . . . well, let’s just say challenging.

I leave her to her call and race upstairs to let Barbara in.

‘Hey, hon, how was your date?’ I say as we hug, and I lead her inside. I’m really delighted she’s here. Barbara’s probably the one person I’m never ashamed of the state of my house in front of. Mainly because her flat is, if anything, worse.

‘Eughh, not a keeper,’ says Barbara, ‘not by the longest of long shots. You should have seen him. The eyes were so cold and dead, it was like sharing a bowl of pasta with Nosferatu.’

‘Sure as hell beats what I did last night, i.e., worked. Came home. Tried to figure out what the hell Useless Builder had done all day. Slept.’

‘Exactly what I’m here to sort out. Where’s Laura?’