Leftovers (8 page)

But no: ‘should’ should be eradicated from the dictionary. (Although you see what just happened there?) ‘Should’ means you want people or situations to be a certain way. But they’re not that way at all. ‘He shouldn’t have abandoned his pregnant wife.’ But he did. ‘I shouldn’t still miss my ex.’ But I do. Weekends ‘should’ be the highlight of the week.

Yet some Saturdays when I wake up, all I can see before me is a vast stretch of time that I’m supposed to fill up with ‘stuff’. And ‘good’ stuff. Fun, meaningful, stimulating stuff. Not just lying in bed, watching DVDs, eating ice cream stuff, because that would make me a loser.

As much as I hate my day job, at least there’s always stuff to do. Stuff I’m paid to do. Pointless stuff. Soul-destroying stuff. But at least it’s stuff that I have to do
or else
there’ll be a repercussion involving immediate pain. If I stay in bed all weekend watching Ryan Gosling movies there’s no pain. In fact there’s the opposite of pain. But where will it ever get me?

I’m lucky though. I have good friends. Friends from school, from uni, from all over. Yet when I stand back and look at how our lives have turned out, it seems that I’m the only one still hanging out here on the ledge of singleness. Everyone else has been busy, busy, busy. They’ve been having babies and twins and sometimes up to three babies, though not all at once. They’ve been moving to bigger houses, moving to the country. Buying Farrow & Ball paints, building glass extensions, razing, gutting and expanding into loft space. The only thing gutted in my flat is me.

Of course they haven’t all had a smooth ride. Take Polly, who’s coming round for dinner later with our friend from school, Dalia. After Polly’s first husband walked out she spent two years bringing up her little girl Maisie on her own. But Polly would never think of herself as a leftover; she got on with life without a fuss. Maybe when you have a kid whom you have to put first then it’s easy, though it didn’t look easy.

And then she met Dave, and Dave is amazing and it didn’t bother him in the slightest that Polly wasn’t young and perfect and baggage-free. He proposed after three months, down on one knee, singing Sinatra’s ‘All of Me’, in their local curry house. The wedding’s in six weeks’ time and I cannot wait to dance away the ghost of Spencer and celebrate Polly and Dave’s union. If anyone deserves all the happiness it’s Polly. And men like Dave restore your faith in the universe. Shame there’s only one of him in the universe.

And then of course there’s Dalia: successful and gorgeous and thick as four short planks where men are concerned. ‘
Better to have loved and lost
…’ That is so entirely not true when it comes to Dalia and Mark. Honestly I think Tennyson would have developed writer’s block when faced with making sense of the on/off relationship between Dalia and that douche ‘property-developer’ (i.e. trumped-up estate agent) Mark Dawson.

Perhaps, after considerable pondering, with quill in mouth, Tennyson might have come up with the following:

‘Better to have never loved. In fact better to have stayed home watching
TOWIE
repeats than to have wasted so much time at the beck and call of an odious man-boy who tells you, through word and deed, that you’re not quite good enough for him. Where is thy self-respect, girl? The man is clearly a cock-head.’

But I don’t suppose Tennyson would have used a word like cock-head.

So yes, there are worse things than being single. And there are worse things than being alone.

The girls are coming round at 7 p.m., and even though Polly’s meant to be on a pre-wedding diet, she’s asked me to make spag bol – her favourite. Dalia is off the carbs, since Mark poked her in the thigh a few weeks ago and just shook his head. But it pains me that a paunch-laden forty-four-year-old man dares criticise my friend’s weight. She’s been shrinking ever since she met him.

So I’ll make the spag bol. And if Dalia wants to eat the bolognese sauce on broccoli instead of spaghetti, that’s up to her. But after a glass of wine she’ll probably be herself again, at least for a while. And I’ll make the brownie pudding. Then I can take some in for Sam on Monday morning.

First things first though, chores: put the laundry on, tidy the flat, do the recycling. I head to the recycling bins round the corner armed with my cardboard wine delivery box, filled with bottles. Thank goodness no one I work with lives in my area and has ever witnessed me at these bins on a Saturday morning. Every time I stand here I curse myself for not having removed the thick tape from these boxes back in my flat, and yet I never do. Because now, not only do I look like an alcoholic (six glass bottles smashing the message home) I also look like I’m drunk. I mean, like I
am currently drunk at 9 a.m.
, not just I
am a drunk
. I try to tear the tape but it won’t come off so I try to pull the box apart but it’s tougher to rip than the Yellow Pages. I stand wrestling with it like an old souse in a pub brawl. I grunt a bit, pull and shake it, then try to bash it through the slot, even though I’ve tried this twice already and I know it doesn’t quite fit. Then I jump on it, kick it, manage to tear a tiny corner off it and end up grunting again, before throwing it in despair onto the pile to the right of the bins where all the less civic-minded people simply dump their cardboard in the first place.

I’m exhausted. That’s more than enough interface with the real world for one day. I return home, put Prefab Sprout loudly on the stereo in a pre-emptive move against Caspar and head to the kitchen to start making dinner. It’s barely breakfast time, I know, but the key to making a bolognese this delicious is to start as early as possible on the day you’re going to eat it. (In an ideal world, you’d make it the day before, so that the flavours can develop overnight, but work tends to get in the way.) For best results, the sauce needs to cook for at least six hours, preferably more. If you can leave it to its own devices in the oven on a very low heat for twelve hours, you’ll have the best bolognese you’ve ever eaten in your life, and I can guarantee that or your money back.

Everyone has a recipe for bolognese that they love. And in Italy, every region has a slightly different recipe. In some areas they sweat the vegetables in butter and olive oil – they insist it makes it sweeter than olive oil alone. Some people don’t even use celery, just carrot and onion as the base. Then there’s the dairy brigade who insist on cooking out the meat in milk, to help cut through the acidity of the tomatoes. Others swear that white wine, not red, is the key to perfection. And don’t even start on the subject of tomatoes. Fresh or chopped or passata or puree? All of the above, or no tomatoes at all?

Every Italian swears that theirs is the best recipe. What’s more, if you don’t make your bolognese in the same way they do, that means your father must have been dropped on his head when he was a baby and your grandmother was probably the town slut. Naturally I use my Italian grandmother’s recipe, and I know for a fact that she wasn’t the town slut. I know this because shortly after she gave birth to my mother, my grandfather ran off with the
actual
town slut, a woman by the name of Lucia Mollica, which means ‘crumb’ in Italian. Which seems fitting, as my grandmother took all of his money, along with my infant mother, and left him with just a loaf of bread in the kitchen and a note saying ‘Don’t eat it all at once’. She boarded a train, then a boat, and ended up in Glasgow, where her uncle ran a successful ice cream parlour, in which one Saturday, a year later, she met my ‘real’ grandfather. Until the day she died, whenever she saw or heard the name Lucia, Nonna would curse both her first husband and his mistress in the most lurid phrases you’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of a pensioner. (My grandfather had taught her to swear like a Glaswegian navvy, so she was pretty professional.)

Nonna’s recipe isn’t difficult but it does require two ingredients you can’t buy off the shelf: love and patience. First you have to chop your vegetables into very fine dice. And of course you can’t use a food processor, because the ghost of Nonna is watching, and she wouldn’t like it. Cook the veg in olive oil for at least half an hour, on a heat so low you have to keep checking that the gas is actually on. Then add garlic, and sweat some more. In a separate pan, dry-fry some pancetta – salty pig meat being the base for so much that is good in this world. Then in the same pan, brown some beef mince, then half the amount of pork mince again. Add it to your
soffrito
along with a bottle of passata, fresh rosemary, salt and pepper. And then the secret ingredient that truly makes this dish: an entire bottle of red wine. Pour that in, put a lid on the casserole dish and put it in the oven for the whole day, stirring every couple of hours.

This is the perfect dish for a day like today. The weather’s miserable, I’ve got nothing better to do, and I can justify not setting foot outside again with the excuse that I have to babysit the dinner. At around 4pm I rouse myself from a mid-afternoon doze and head for my A4 files of recipes. They’re the one organised thing in my flat. I’m always fiddling with recipes, and the only way that I remember these tweaks is if I’ve scrawled them on a piece of paper. Aah, here we go: chocolate brownie cheesecake bake. It’s one of the more obscene puddings in this file, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t go back for seconds. First you make the brownies, and Lord knows there are as many brownie recipes as there are Hindu deities. Normally I’d go straight to my friend Claire’s recipe, which produces the ultimate squidgy yet chunky brownie. But the brownies in this pudding need to stay in neat squares so I use a Nigel Slater recipe that is foolproof and produces a more cake-like brownie, better fit for purpose.

While the brownies are in the oven I make the cheesecake base – full-fat Philadelphia, mascarpone and vanilla, whipped together and poured onto a base of crushed dark chocolate digestives mixed with melted better. That’s my favourite part of the whole process – spreading the biscuit base out into the tray with a spatula, like it’s wet sand. The brownies come out of the top oven and in goes the cheesecake for forty minutes, then the heat goes off and the cheesecake stays in the oven to cool and set. I give the bolognese a quick stir, then head back to the sofa for another little lie-down. I can’t wait to be an old lady when all this mid-afternoon snoozing will be deemed socially acceptable.

The girls are due at 7 p.m. so at 6.30 p.m. I open a bottle of wine and start drinking – I might as well air the wine before they get here.

Polly’s the first to arrive at 7 p.m. on the dot.

‘You look amazing!’ I say, as I open the door and give her a hug.

‘D’you think?’ she says, handing me a bottle of Prosecco.

‘You’re glowing.’

‘Really? I’ve been on the Perricone, lots of oily fish. I feel like a penguin.’

‘And your hair totally suits you longer.’

She reaches up and touches her neck. ‘I’m growing it for the wedding. You don’t think I’m too old for long hair, do you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re thirty-six. You didn’t drive by the way, did you?’ Polly, Dave and Maisie now live in a small village near Marlow in Buckinghamshire. It’s only forty minutes by car, but if she’s driving that means I’m drinking alone, which isn’t good for anyone.

‘My one night out and you think I’m drinking Evian? Dave gave me a lift in and I’ll get a cab back. Is that smell what I think it is?’

I nod.

‘How long has it been on for?’ she says.

I check my watch. ‘Just over eight hours.’

‘I cannot wait, I’ve been looking forward to this all week! Will you email me the recipe? I want to make it for Dave.’

‘I’ve got some copies of it, I gave one to Terry the other day,’ I say, retrieving the recipe file I’d just returned to the hall cupboard.

‘I’m so sick of eating mackerel,’ she calls out from the kitchen. ‘Shall we start this Prosecco or wait for Dalia?’

‘
He who hesitates
… plus, it’ll help the crisps go down more easily,’ I say, opening a packet of Kettle Chips.

And it’s just as well we don’t wait for Dalia. Because twenty minutes later she sends me a text apologising profusely saying she can’t make it, and she’ll make it up to me another time, promise, kiss kiss.

‘Look at this,’ I say to Polly, showing her my phone. ‘She doesn’t even bother making excuses any more because she knows we won’t believe them.’

‘At least she’s got the decency not to pretend she has a migraine, I suppose,’ says Polly, handing the phone back to me and shaking her head.

‘You would think she would at least pick up the phone rather than just text,’ I say. ‘It’s rude.’

‘Mark’s probably there with her and she can’t bear to drag herself away from his side for twenty seconds.’

‘Do you reckon the sex is as good as she makes out it is?’ I say. ‘I’ve always thought Mark looked like the sort of man who would be entirely about his penis and not much else.’

‘Me too!’ she says. ‘But apparently it’s so amazing she says it’s like a drug.’

‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Well none of the drugs I’ve ever taken turned round and asked me if I wanted Botox for my birthday. Did she tell you about that?’

Polly nods. ‘She’s incapable of being on her own, though,’ she says. ‘She’d rather have someone than no one. I just wish that someone wasn’t him.’

‘I keep on telling her a man isn’t the be all and end all.’

‘That man’s just the end all,’ she says.

‘Let’s not talk about it, it’ll just make me angry, and I’ve had a bad enough week as it is … Ooh, although I did meet a man.’

‘A man?’ says Polly. ‘An actual real live man?’

‘Hang on, I’ll just put the pasta on and then I can tell you all about it.’

Two bowls of pasta, two bottles of wine and two helpings of cake later, I’m trying to remember all the reasons why I think Jeff is going to be my new boyfriend.

‘And he noticed those earrings I bought in New York, the five-dollar ones from Old Navy that actually look quite expensive.’

‘The moonstone ones?’

‘Yes, and he actually knows what a moonstone is, but he’s definitely not gay because he went out with another girl called Susie … with three Is … oh, and then he said that this chocolate sponge was my namecake, like namesake, because it’s like a Suzy Q apparently. Isn’t that funny? He’s funny as well as handsome … and he used to live in New York and he’s learning Spanish, and we like the same films, and he loves food!’