Turning Thirty (2 page)

I call Ginny my ‘girlfriend' but she was more accurately a girl who was also a friend who I sometimes snogged. We never actually gave what we had a name. It was more of an arrangement between us from the ages of sixteen to twenty-four. At first it wasn't even an arrangement, merely a bad habit. Fuelled by Thunderbird, a potent sweet wine that was then every teenage drinker's tipple of choice, we'd pair off together regularly at sixth-form discos, house parties, and occasionally even at our local, the Kings Arms. However, as soon as Monday morning at school arrived. Ginny and I would always, without fail, feign amnesia, dementia or just plain ignorance of such weekend couplings. This arrangement suited us both as, for a long time, I was in hot pursuit of Amanda Dixon, a girl with whom I had about as much chance of going out as Madonna during her ‘Material Girl' phase. In turn, Ginny was in hot pursuit of Nathan Spence, who was not only equally beyond her pulling power but also had a ‘reputation', which – in the most bizarre piece of feminine logic I'd come across at that tender age – served only to make him even more desirable. We were never weird about our arrangement (like a lot of odd situations the longer it was around the more normal it became) and, best of all, it never interfered with our friendship. We were friends. And we were sometimes more than friends. And that was that.

As time moved on, so did Ginny and I . . . sort of. She went off to university in Brighton and I departed to university in Hull. Over the next decade or so a steady stream of girls wandered in and out of my life. Each one, I thought, if only for a second, might be the one I'd turn thirty with. For the sake of brevity and embarrassment the list reads like this:

Girls that year:
Ruth Morrell
(a couple of weeks),
Debbie Foley
(a couple of weeks),
Estelle Thompson
(a couple of weeks) and
Anne-Marie Shakir
(a couple of weeks)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
8

Age
: Twenty

Girls that year
:
Faye Hewitt
(eight months),
Vanessa Wright
(on and off for two months)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
5

Age
: Twenty-one

Girls that year
:
Nicky Rowlands
(under a month) and
Maxine Walsh
(nine months)

Number of times got off Ginny Pascoe:
3

Age:
Twenty-two

Girls that year:
Jane Anderson
(two and a bit months) and
Chantelle Stephens
(three months)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
10 (a spectacularly bad year for self-control)

Age:
Twenty-three

Girls that year:
Harriet ‘Harry' Lane
(roughly ten months on and off)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
3

Age:
Twenty-four

Girls that year:
Natalie Hadleigh
(two months),
Siobhan Mackey
(two months) and
Jennifer Long
(two months)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
1

Age:
Twenty-five

Girls that year:
Jo Bruton
(a weekend),
Kathryn Fletcher
(nine months-ish),
Becca Caldicott
(one month)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
0 (lost contact)

Age:
Twenty-six

Girls that year:
Anna O'Hagan
(ten months),
Liz Ward-Smith
(one day),
Dani Scott
(one day),
Eve Chadwick
(a day and a half)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
0 (contact still lost)

Age:
Twenty-seven

Girls that year:
Monica Aspel
(nearly but not quite a year)

Number of times got off with Ginny Pascoe:
0 (contact all but forgotten)

Following the events I will refer to only as ‘The Monica Aspel Débâcle', and with no Ginny Pascoe around with whom to find comfort, I decided at the age of twenty-seven that enough was enough and put my name forward for a transfer from the London office of C-Tec to its New York base. After all, I told myself, a change is as good as a rest, and what I needed was a rest from women so that I could concentrate on getting my career to the level at which it should have been. After only two days in the Big Apple, however, I met Elaine Thomas, an attractive, intelligent, slightly ‘out there' twenty-year-old student at NYU, who had a passion for bad food, long telephone conversations and Englishmen. We fell in love and following a ridiculously short courtship ended up living together. Finally I allowed myself to relax because, after all this time, after all these girls, I knew which one I would be with when I was thirty.

And it wasn't Madonna.

And it wasn't Ginny Pascoe either.

It was Elaine. My Elaine. And I was happy.

Until it all fell apart.

It was a cold, wet day in late September, the day everything fell apart. I'd just come home from work to find that Elaine, as usual, was on the phone. Elaine loved the phone. It was her life. There were times when I'd get home earlier than her, which wasn't that often, and she'd come through the door talking on her mobile, wave hello and kiss me, and while still on the first call dial a second number on our land line and time the end of her first conversation to coincide, to the very second, with the beginning of the second call. I always wondered whether it was just a matter of practice or merely a fluke of nature and I actually asked her once. She flashed me her best smile and said in her most East Coast manner, the one that always made me feel like I was watching TV, ‘Bill Gates has a way with computers, Picasso had a way with a paintbrush . . . I have a way with the telephone. It's my gift to the world.'

Depositing my bag on the floor, I kissed her hello and she kissed me back, without breaking her conversation. At a loss as to what to do next, I sat down beside her on the sofa and tried to work out who she was talking to. She seemed to be doing more listening than talking, which was odd for Elaine. In the conversation she was having there were lots of I knows, and so-what-did-you-dos? and Oh-that's-awfuls, and my favourite, ‘Hey-ho', which could be translated as ‘That's life,' or ‘Whatever,' depending on the intonation of her voice. Anyway there were no clues to be had. It might've been any one of Elaine's several million friends. I waited a few minutes for her to finish, but it soon became obvious that that wouldn't be happening for quite a while so I disappeared to the kitchen to see if she'd started dinner.

The kitchen was spotless – just the way I'd left it when I'd cleaned it nine hours earlier before I went to work – and there was no sign of any culinary activity in progress. It wasn't as if I expected Elaine to cook dinner for us because she was a woman (she'd long forced me to give up that idea), no, I expected her to cook dinner for us because it was her turn today. She'd pulled a sickie from work after oversleeping that morning and she'd promised me she was going to do the weekly shop and I hoped – rather optimistically, it seemed – that she might have got in ‘something nice'.

In search of evidence of shopping endeavours, I checked all the kitchen cupboards. There was nothing that could be construed as ‘something nice', save a bag of pasta twirls, a jar of Marmite my mum had posted to me and two slices of bread so stale that when I accidentally dropped them on the kitchen counter they snapped into pieces. Even a cup of tea was out of the question because the PG Tips tea-bags Mum had also sent (along with the Marmite and a video-tape of two weeks' worth of
EastEnders
) had run out and I absolutely refused to drink any other brand.

Ravenous beyond belief, I returned to the living room chewing a pasta twirl and lodged myself beside my girlfriend once more. She immediately picked up the remote control, pressed the on button and pointed her deftly manicured finger in the TV's direction as if to say, ‘Look, pretty lights!' or, more accurately, ‘I'll be off the phone in an hour, amuse yourself.' I ignored her suggestion and bounced up and down on the sofa to annoy her: I didn't want the TV – I wanted her attention and some food. She wasn't having any of it, of course, and did her best to ignore
me
. So I stood up, as if heading towards the window that overlooked our street and pretended to faint before I got there. Lying still on the carpet, barely breathing, I waited patiently for her to respond to her dutiful boyfriend's lack of consciousness. After what felt like several minutes, in which she'd failed to pause for breath let alone end the conversation, I carefully opened an eye but she spotted me immediately and laughed.

‘Who is it?' I mouthed silently, from my position on the floor.

‘Your mom,' she mouthed back. ‘Are you in?'

I shook my head violently mouthing, ‘Not in,' repeatedly. It wasn't that I didn't like my mum. I liked her a lot. I loved her even. But with her these days, with me so far from home, there really was no such thing as a quick chat and as I'd already called her this morning at work I reasoned I'd paid my dues. Anyway, I really was hungry now so I mouthed at Elaine, ‘Where's my dinner?'

She raised her left eyebrow suggestively, as if to say, ‘Ask me for dinner, will you? We'll see about that!' and then she narrowed her eyes like some sort of mischievous imp and said down the line, ‘I think I hear Matt coming in, Cynthia,' then paused, waiting for my response, which was to hand her both the menu for the nearest takeaway pizzeria and my credit card.

‘No, it wasn't Matt after all,' said Elaine sweetly, into the phone, while miming the swiping of my credit card through an imaginary card reader. ‘I must be hearing things. Well, I must be going, Cynthia. I think I hear the door buzzer. ‘Bye.' She moved to put the phone down but was forced to stop half-way as my mother was still talking. ‘No, I don't think it'll be Matt, Cynthia,' she said patiently. ‘He's been such a good boy recently that I actually let him have his own keys.' With that she hung up.

‘You're such a baby, Matt,' she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I don't know why you couldn't have suggested getting a takeaway in the first place.'

‘It was your turn to cook,' I protested. ‘You do know what “your turn” means, don't you?'

‘Yes, well . . .' she began, but her retort faded away as she picked up the delivery menu and scanned through it. ‘It looks like it's going to be my turn to call the pizza place, doesn't it?' She continued to scan the menu, and every now and again she mouthed the name of a pizza as if rolling the word around her tongue was an experience similar to eating it.

‘I'm sure your mom knew I was lying,' she said, her finger hovering above a Hawaiian Meat Feast. ‘The last thing in the world I need is for her to not like me. You know how important it is that everyone likes me. I can't sleep if I know there's someone thinking bad thoughts about me – even in England.' She flopped back against the sofa then swivelled round to lay her head on my lap. ‘That has got to be the last time I ever lie to Mrs B.'

‘Sure,' I responded. ‘Just as long as you remember your words of wisdom next time Mama and Papa Thomas ring and you want me to pretend you're in the shower.'

‘Well said, my good man,' said Elaine, adopting a pitiful English accent. ‘I'll lie for you and you lie for me, that's the deal. But remember, if we get struck down by lightning for lying to our parents in years to come, we'll only have ourselves to blame.'

‘How long were you on the phone to her anyway?'

‘She was only going to talk for about five minutes because of the cost. So I called her back,' she thought for a moment, ‘so all in all that would be about half an hour.'

She rolled her eyes again.

‘Do you know how much that'll cost?'

‘It's only money, Matt. You're meant to spend it. If you didn't spend it, it wouldn't be money. It would be just pieces of paper that
you
never did anything with.'

‘You really believe that, don't you?'

‘Every word,' she said, and smiled angelically.

There was no point in arguing with Elaine on this one. At the best of times she had only the most tenuous grasp of the principle of not spending every single dollar she earned, and even then she ignored it.

‘What were you two talking about?' I asked.

‘Girl stuff.'

‘What kind of girl stuff? She wasn't asking you when we're having kids again, was she?' My mum had really been trying to bond with Elaine because she'd made up her mind that she might be the one to give her grandchildren. ‘Tell me she wasn't.'

Elaine laughed. ‘Nothing so sinister. She just wanted to ask me what you were doing for your thirtieth. And if you're going to spend it in the UK.'

‘It's not until the end of March!'

‘We girls like to prepare.'

‘So what did you say?'

‘I said you didn't know.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She said you should give it some thought.'

‘What did you say about my coming home?'

‘I said I'd talk you into it because I'd like to see the place you call home for myself. See where you grew up, meet your old school friends, it'd be fun.'

‘Hmm,' I said dismissively, even though I quite liked the idea of visiting home for a while. ‘What did she say?'

‘She said that we can come any time. Oh, and that I should get you to call back.'