I just had sex with him.
So I was steeling myself for him to tell me that this wasn’t going to last, to say he preferred the good life as averse to the girlfriend life. I suppose this wasn’t exclusive to Greg. I never trusted any man not to find someone else; to stay with me if he had another option. To not find something in me that would have him heading for the hills. That was the other reason for not thinking long-term – when someone walked out, as they invariably did, it wasn’t too big a shock. A disappointment, but nothing I hadn’t been expecting.
‘Are we OK now?’ he asked. From this close I could see how bloodshot his eyes were, how tiredness was tugging at his skin, how even his hair seemed limp.
I nodded. We were OK. I stroked hair out of his face and gazed into his Minstrel eyes. OK until the next time.
‘Can we continue where we left off before I fall asleep?’ he asked.
‘ask yourself this: would you be the person you are today without chocolate?’
chapter eighteen
impostor
‘Let’s go to Harvey Nics first,’ Jen decreed.
We’d finally, finally managed to meet up to go shopping. She’d called and begged me to meet her in town for a shopping fest on a Friday afternoon because she had a training seminar in the morning, so could I bunk off work after lunch and come shopping with her? Renée was in Cannes and Martha certainly wouldn’t grass me up so I half-heartedly agreed.
After that night last weekend when Greg walked out, I’d been forced to confront the truth about Jen and me. We’d changed. We’d become Flakes. Two things separate. That’d been obvious when I didn’t tell her about me and Greg. I had the opportunity, but didn’t. I wasn’t prone to sharing secrets, to confessing things in my heart, but Jen was usually the exception. She was the one, probably the only one, I could trust and even then I hadn’t. I’d had to finally confront the truth that we weren’t JenAndAmber any more. One word that signified the closeness of our relationship, now it was three words. Jen. And. Amber. We existed as separate entities. Jen. Amber. Sometimes the And joined us.
The other night had been an anomaly. A Twix moment – its gold and red packaging an odd patch among the yellow, gaudy vista of Flakes our lives had become.
It was like always having a Twix. Whenever you had chocolate, you had a Twix. And then, for no reason whatsoever, you decide to have something else. So you start trying new chocolates. One day you try a Mars. Then you buy a Snack. Then you get Maltesers. Then you get a Twirl. Finally, you settle on a Flake. You might not necessarily like Flake, but you know what, you’ve got into the habit of eating it, so whenever you pass a shop, whenever someone goes off on a chocolate run, you always get a Flake. Until that one day you say, ‘Actually, I’ll have a Twix,’ when someone asks if you fancy a Flake. You enjoy the Twix, it stirs up good memories as it crumbles and disintegrates over your tongue, but the next day, you go back to your diet of Flake because that’s what you’ve settled on.
That’s what it was like with me and Jen. We’d had our Twix moment – our back to being close time – the other night but were back to being Flakes.
Even when she’d met Matt we’d been close, we’d been a packet of Twix. Despite what Matt intimated about me and Jen being too close, we’d grown apart. I suspected it was because I was with Greg. Which meant I’d become a total girlfriend. Something I swore I’d never do. I had to do whatever it took to get her back in my life.
‘Harvey Nics it is,’ I agreed. Yup, anything to get her back into my life. Even if it meant going into a shop where I wouldn’t be getting a dress for £8.99.
Jen had lost weight.
Jen, who always looked like a Hollywood starlet anyway, had lost weight that she didn’t need to lose. She had always been slender, the thinner side of a size ten. She was tallish with it, had shoulder-length hair with a slight wave, curves at the breasts, stomach and hips. Not that I purposely looked. We’d lived together for four years all together during college, and many a night after our college years we’d stayed over at each other’s places, it was impossible not to see her in at least her night clothes. I knew her body – and this body had lost a lot of itself. Her stomach was practically concave: her arms were spindle-like; her breasts were swimming around her bra.
‘Have you lost weight?’ I asked to her.
‘Yup,’ Jen said happily, and spun to show me. ‘It suits me, doesn’t it?’
‘Um, perhaps you’ve gone too far?’ I said, my voice full of the concern I felt for her. I hadn’t noticed until I spotted her body how ashen she looked. She’d lost that healthy glow she had when Matt moved in, now she was looking washed out. Almost like a faded version of Jen, as though someone had watered down her image. She wasn’t meant to be this thin. And if how she’d eaten – or rather not eaten – that time we’d had lunch was any indicator, she’d got to this unnatural weight by foul means. ‘Maybe you should stop now? Maybe even put on a few pounds?’
‘Is somebody a little jealous because they realise they could do with losing a few stone themselves?’ she said.
I froze. Did she . . .? Did she just . . .? If Jen didn’t like something I said she’d usually tell me to piss off. Not abuse me. Not call me . . . There was a thick black line dividing ‘Oi, piss off I’ll starve myself if I want’ abuse and ‘Hey fatty bum-bum’ abuse, and Jen had hurled herself bodily over that boundary. No woman called a friend fat. Even if you thought it, you didn’t say it to their faces.
‘What did you say?’ I replied, too shocked to be anything but shocked.
‘Nothing,’ Jen replied brightly. ‘Only joking. Matt likes me like this. [ Judging by his porn collection – Big ’n’ Bouncy; Busty Betties; and Curves Galore – she’d got the wrong end of the celery stick.] I do too. I can’t stand the thought of having excess body fat any more. It’s immoral, you know, Amber. When there are so many people who can’t afford to eat, overeating is immoral.’
Jen had deep-seated fears about food. Her mother, her unbalanced mother, would, whenever she’d been dumped by a man, go on a crash diet. It would literally involve not eating – so she’d starve Jen too. They wouldn’t have evening meals and Jen would be lucky if the crash diet started midweek because she’d have paid her school lunch money upfront. If not, she’d sometimes have to go without lunch then go to a friend’s house after school for tea. When she started getting pocket money Jen would spend it on things like bread and beans, but take it to school with her and bring it back because her mother would freak if she found it. That was what Jen’s life was like when she was young: either have her mother date some man who resented her existence, or have her mother be single and not eat.
Jen knew what it was like to starve and had been brainwashed into fearing being fat so was always very scared of eating. Until she met me. If there was one thing that I’d never gone without in my life it was food: my mother liked to cook; I loved to cook. I loved to eat. Which was why I’d never really been worried about weight. I wasn’t huge; I wasn’t a rake. I was sometimes a size twelve, sometimes a size fourteen, sometimes my top half needed a sixteen, depending on where I shopped. When Jen met me, I constantly ate around her, made her eat with me, basically made eating a non-issue. She still had her moments, usually when she’d been dumped and she’d want to go on a diet, but I coached her into eating more when she’d been chucked. Why add to your pain by denying yourself the comforts of things like chocolate? Because of that, though, we’d never been women who fretted about our weight. That’s why I’d been so worried when I saw her without her clothes on: she was doing to herself what her mother had done to the pair of them. Except she was trying to do it to me too – she was saying I was fat. I was fat.
Like the worst kind of attack, this had been unseen and it hit deep.
But, but, I stared at my reflection in the mirror, the pounds had melted off me since I’d been seeing Greg. A daily diet of sex and eating Greg-made breakfast worked like a diet and gym combo. I only knew I’d lost weigh
t because my clothes were looser. Some of the clothes I hadn’t worn in years now fit. I wasn’t to be found climbing on scales, waiting for a countdown to ideal weight. To perfection.
Maybe I should be, though. Jen’s my best mate. If she thinks I need to lose weight, then maybe I’ve been fooling myself that I’m fine the way I am.
I continued to study my reflection. My hair had started to grow at an alarming rate – when I’d started this thing with Greg, it’d been just below my cheekbones, now it was almost touching my chin. My formerly oval face had thinned down a little – there was definition in the contours of my face, particularly around my cheeks. My neck was shapely, slender, even. My shoulders were still quite broad because I was built like that, but you could see definition too. My breasts, my stomach, my thighs, my calves . . . I was all right, wasn’t I? Curvaceous, mainly because of my rather generous helping in the breast department. I’m all right, aren’t I? Curvy, contoured, shapely, round, fat, rotund, obese.
STOP IT! a voice screamed in my head. Stop it, stop it, stop it! You’re being insane.
‘You see, I think the thing is,’ Jen was saying, while I was eyeing myself up with new horror.
Have I let myself go? Do I look awful in everything? I’d bought some new gear recently. I owned three more skirts that weren’t for work. I had some nicely cut jersey tops. A pair of quite smart black, flared trousers.
Do I look awful in them? Is Greg wishing I’d drop a few more pounds? Do Martha and Renée wonder how I dare show my face in public?
‘I think Greg’s in love with me,’ Jen’s voice said as it pierced my self-assessment.
I swung to look at her. ‘What?’
‘Greg. I think he’s in love with me. That’s why he reacted so oddly to the news about Matt moving in with me. And why he’s avoiding us now.’
I couldn’t stop a laugh escaping my lips. ‘Yeah, that’ll be it,’ I scoffed. ‘Greg’s in love with you, his best friend’s girlfriend. Of course.’
Jen stopped admiring her diminished body in the mirror and looked at me with a half-piteous, half-patronising smile on her face. She turned back to the mirror then tossed her hair model-in-front-of-mirror style. She smoothed down creases in her dress, twisting slightly to check out the bones formerly known as her hips, now they were covered in pink and purple chiffon. ‘So why did he make a pass at me?’
Whoa! That was an earthquake. Probably 9.9 on the Richter Scale. Or maybe it was the Earth shifting on its axis. Or maybe it was the hells opening up and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding towards me at speed to laugh at me. ‘Ha-ha!’ they guffawed as they pointed their bony fingers at me. ‘You thought you were the one Greg wanted.’
‘Oh, I didn’t tell you about that?’ Jen said, clocking my face – contorted as it was in horror and shock – in the mirror.
My knees, my supposedly fat-bearing knees, buckled. I leant against the nearest mirror to stop myself keeling over. I folded my arms across my body to hide how much I was shaking. Let’s see, did my best mate tell me that the man who would become my boyfriend made a pass at her behind her boyfriend, his best friend’s, back? Erm, nope. Can’t say that vital bit of information was, at any point, imparted into my brain. ‘What happened?’ I asked, my voice as shaky as my knees.
‘Oh, it was silly really,’ Jen said, taking off the dress and reaching for another slip of material masquerading as clothing. ‘Eight, no, nine months ago, you know, when Matt went away to Paris for a whole month Greg came round. He said it was to return a CD and video of mine that Matt had lent him.’ Jen smirked. ‘Like I missed them. Anyway, he asked if he could have a beer and, about an hour later, we were sat on the floor watching TV and we were both pissed and Greg tried to kiss me. I laughed it off. He left not long after that.’
A shower of ice-cold recognition cascaded down on me. That was how Greg had seduced me. Lame excuse to come round . . . Sitting on the floor chatting . . . Kiss . . . Except Jen hadn’t been stupid enough to sleep with him. And, thinking about it now, when he’d been saying all those complimentary things about me the day Matt moved in, his eyes had been fixed on Jen. Oh. My. God. He was going out with me because he wanted Jen and I was the booby prize. I was the big fat booby prize.
‘Ha-ha!’ the Horsemen of the Apocalypse intoned.
How could Greg do this to me? Who had he called from the police station? Who had he come to when he’d been attacked with a knife? Who risked her job to get him out of a hotel room? Who’d held his hand during the HIV test?
I would’ve understood if he told me about Jen. All right, I wouldn’t have let him near me – I don’t ‘do’ men my friends have done or almost done or, worse, have rejected – but I still would rather have known. I thought he told me everything. That’s what I’d liked about him; that’s what repelled me about him.
‘Ready?’ Jen asked.
I glanced at her, she was back in her Whistles combination.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said. ‘You know me, I’m ever-ready.’
Greg had been here about an hour and I still hadn’t brought up him trying to seduce Jen. Instead, I slammed things around the kitchen, muttering ‘bastard’ under my breath. I then graduated to standing in front of the worktop, chopping knife in one hand, lobbing evils at his lowered head as it read a paper at the dining table.
Loose-moralled bastard.
On one such evil-lobbing excursion, Greg looked up and caught me. He double-took at the knife, obviously having flashbacks to his near decapitation at the hands of Nina. I didn’t lower the knife – I was starting to understand how she felt.
‘ All right, that’s it!’ Greg said, snapping shut the paper and getting to his feet. ‘You’ve been off with me since I got here, slamming things around, muttering. What’s wrong – and don’t say nothing because we both know there is something wrong.’ He’d tried to kiss me when he’d walked in earlier, but I’d shrugged him off saying I’d start dinner. We usually ate late on a Friday because his ‘hello’ kiss would invariably end in the bedroom. The local takeaway people often delivered food to either me or Greg wrapped up in my dressing gown, postcoital and ravenous. Not tonight, though. Tonight I was cooking without his help because I wasn’t having sex with him. Not tonight. Not ever again.
I surveyed him. Him, the man I was never having sex with again. EVER. Tall, good-looking, bastard. BASTARD. I had an urge to throw the knife, right at his big pass-at-friendmaking head.
‘And put the knife down,’ he said.
I suddenly saw the ridiculousness of the situation. Him unaware that I was aware of his crime. Me unaware how terrified he was of the implement in my hand. I laughed. From the cement-like sickness that had been lining the bottom of my stomach for hours, I laughed. It was born of cement so was heavy and stony and plummeted the second it left my mouth. Even though it was one of the scariest sounds to ever come out of my mouth, I kept making it. Laughing like cement until Greg, nervously, started to laugh, his eyes fixed on the knife. We laughed like that for quite a long time, considering how humourless the sound was.
‘So, remember that time you made a pass at Jen?’ I said.
The laugh choked in his throat as his face drained of all colour and his hands started to tremble. It wasn’t a lie, then. Wasn’t something Jen had imagined, which was the hope I’d been clinging to since leaving Harvey Nics five hours ago. It’d really happened: he’d tried it on with Jen. ‘Is that what she told you?’ he asked, a tremor vibrating in his voice. I’d only ever seen him this shaken once before – the night he was almost decapitated.
‘Noooo, she didn’t tell me that, it came to me in a dream. I’m psychic, don’t you know.’
His eyes strayed to the knife. ‘It was all a misunderstanding.’
‘What, you misunderstood that you’re not supposed to make passes at your best friend’s girlfriend?’
‘She called me that time Matt went away for a month, said she wanted me to drop round her CD and video I’d borrowed. I was drunk already s
o I couldn’t drive and had to get a bus and train and then another bus there.’ He talked quickly, like a man talking for his life, which he was. ‘She offered me a beer, which I needed after that journey. I stayed, watched TV and drank the beer. And then she stroked my cheek, said she was trying to get dirt off my face. I thought I’d better go then, so went to kiss her goodnight as she’d asked me to and that’s when she tried to kiss me properly. I laughed it off, so did she and I left not long after that.’
I stood stock-still, replaying the story. Stories. Two stories out of one event. Two versions of the same night. Both stories were essentially the same, the returning of the CD and video. The drinking of beer. The attempted kiss. The laughing it off. But each element of similarity had a crucial difference. Who initiated the going round? Who asked for or offered the beer? Who attempted to kiss who properly? Who was laughing it off and who was gutted because their seduction attempt didn’t work?
Basically, one of them tried it on with the other and failed. One of them was lying scum who forgot about the boundaries of friendship and sex. And who, out of Jen and Greg, was the most likely to do that, eh?
‘That’s not how Jen tells it,’ I said, the knife handle growing slippy in my sweaty palm.
‘Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? She’s just moved in with Matt.’
‘And you’ve just started screwing her best mate.’
‘What?! No, I’ve started going out with her best mate, thank you. Anyway, you know that when I’ve done something like that I admit it.’
‘Do you fancy Jen?’ I asked outright. I had to know.
His eyes rested on me.
‘Look.’ I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you did. It’s understandable, she’s bloody gorgeous. I haven’t met a man yet who doesn’t fancy her. I’d rather know now, though. Now. Not sometime down the line when, you know, we’ve been together a while and I walk in, find you two at it and you say, “It’s something I had to do because I’ve always fancied her.” That’d kill me. So, just tell me. I won’t mind. I won’t be angry.’ I’ll be that unnamed feeling beyond anger. I’ll be on that plane of emotion that’ll make anger look like someone raising an eyebrow. ‘Honest.’