‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ Neve said, standing in the bathroom doorway and watching as Max snatched up his shaving kit and his toothbrush and his shower gel, because hers was rose-scented and too girly for them to share. ‘You’re obviously upset. I am too.’
‘There’s nothing for either of us to be upset about,’ Max said tightly. ‘You got what you wanted from our little fling and now you’re ready to move up to the big league. Congratulations.’
‘But you were happy to go along with it,’ Neve reminded Max, blocking his exit when he stepped forward, because she wasn’t going to let him leave like this. ‘You said you weren’t cut out for a real relationship. Do you still feel the same way?’
Max stared her down, nothing teasing or soft in his eyes. ‘Our little experiment has proved, once and for all, that I don’t want or need a relationship. They’re completely overrated.’ He put the fingers of one hand on her shoulder and applied enough pressure to get Neve to move out of the way. ‘I mean, what’s so fucking great about a relationship? You have to think about someone else all the time and all you get in return is regular sex. Really not worth it.’
‘You’re just saying that,’ Neve choked as Max hurried down the stairs and scooped up Keith who’d come out of the living room to see what all the fuss was about. ‘If William wasn’t back, you’d be perfectly happy to carry on as we are.’
‘Oh, would I?’ Max sneered, struggling to tuck Keith under his arm as he tried to heft the duffel bag over his shoulder and open the front door at the same time. ‘Yeah, keep telling yourself that, sweetheart, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘Why are you being like this?’ The end of her sentence was drowned out by the slam of the front door behind him.
Neve sank to the floor, knees pulled tight against her body. She didn’t know how long she sat there but when her legs began to cramp, she slowly stood up and wandered through the flat. In ten minutes, Max had managed to eradicate all signs that he’d ever been here: sat on her sofa with his feet resting on the coffee table and refused to relinquish the remote control; perched on one of her kitchen chairs drinking tiny cup after tiny cup of espresso; slept in her bed, his arms tight around her, both of them a little sweaty, a little breathless from making love.
Max was gone.
PART FOUR
I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
Chapter Thirty-six
Having a plastic tube inserted into her fundament so that approximately fifteen gallons of water could be flushed in and out of her colon really took Neve’s mind off Max marching out of her life the night before.
The only emotion that Neve could summon up was excruciating embarrassment. Or maybe it was shame? Even though the offending area was shrouded in a fluffy white towel and the colonic hydrotherapist spoke in a soothing low tone as she massaged Neve’s abdomen, they both knew that the reason she was there was the water gushing out of her bottom.
‘You might feel a slight cramping sensation over the next two hours but that’s just your colon reshaping itself,’ Neve was told, once the therapist had decided that her colon was squeaky clean, and she was back in her own clothes. ‘Did you read the information sheet?’
Neve nodded. She’d given it a cursory glance during the sleepless hours she’d spent pacing and moping and crying.
‘Well, remember not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery,’ the therapist said as she showed Neve to the door of the smart Primrose Hill townhouse, which didn’t look like the sort of place where such nefarious practices were carried out.
As Neve stepped out into the muggy heat of a hot June day, she wasn’t prepared for the head rush that made her stagger and clutch on to the wrought-iron railings for support. She stood there, blinking her eyes because the leaves on the trees looked greener and shinier, and over the roar of traffic and the sound of a piano playing from an open window, Neve was sure that she could hear the engines of the plane she could see circling in the sky above, which surely hadn’t been that blue before.
When she’d left her flat that morning, she’d felt hollow and bruised, but now she felt clean and purged, and, well, maybe still a little bruised but that was more the after-effects of the colonic rather than heartache. Neve pushed off from the railings, surprised that she had a swing in her step and a renewed sense of purpose.
Max was gone and that had always been part of the plan. And instead of obsessing about the manner in which he’d gone, she needed to remember that he’d had to go so there were no obstacles between her and William, apart from the twenty pounds she still had to lose. Neve patted her stomach, which felt flat for the first time in living memory. She’d probably already lost the five pounds she’d gained and still had another two colonics booked as part of the Cleanse; also, the therapist had said that some people lost as much as ten pounds each time.
Neve felt a surge of sheer delight as she imagined losing thirty pounds in a fortnight just from having her colon deep-cleaned. She beamed at an elderly woman who gave her a wide and tottery berth, then ran all the way round the corner to where she’d chained up her bike so she could hurry home and wait for the delivery of her Hardcore Cleanse juices.
Water was a recurring theme over the next week.
Neve had to plan her days carefully to make sure that she was never more than ten minutes away from a toilet. The Hardcore Cleanse did exactly what it said on its fancy black and white packaging. She drank. She peed. She drank. She peed. She was getting through two rolls of Andrex Quilted Velvet every day.
But it wasn’t just the peeing. The euphoria was now feeling less euphoric and more manic. Happily, the Cleanse coincided with Mr Freemont’s annual fortnight in Broadstairs. This was Rose’s cue to embark on a marathon reorganisation and swab-down of the Archive. She swore it had nothing to do with dispelling the lingering stench of Mr Freemont’s BO and more to do with having the opportunity to throw out the yellowing, desiccated piles of paper that he claimed were vitally important.
Normally Neve put up a spirited defence against dumping all those files in the recyling bin, but now she was happy to work off some of her Cleanse-sponsored energy by lugging boxes outside and scrubbing down floors and surfaces with hot, soapy water. But as soon as she plunged her rubber gloves into the bucket, she’d have to stop and run to the loo. She couldn’t even pass a pond or an ornamental water feature without the power of autosuggestion working its magic on her bladder.
The other benefit of Mr Freemont’s annual holiday was that they took it in turns to have three-hour lunch-breaks and one afternoon off a week, so Neve had plenty of time to run laps around the law courts and do press-ups in the office. She didn’t dare set foot in the gym as she was pretty sure Gustav had had her membership revoked after she’d sent him a furious email formally severing their trainer/client relationship during one of her more manic episodes.
Mostly Neve tried to keep busy so she wouldn’t miss Max. She was sure Max was managing just fine without her, and when she was running laps, scrubbing floors, making contact with Lucy Keener’s old classmates from Oxford and happily imagining the moment when William clapped eyes on her for the first time in three years and murmured throatily, ‘God, Neve, when did you get so beautiful?’ she was doing just fine too.
The only time that she wasn’t fine was when it was dark and hours before her next juice and she couldn’t sleep because she was a ball of nervous energy. Then, Neve had nothing else to do but miss Max so badly that the lack of him was a tangible, physical pain.
One morning when Neve wasn’t frantically googling Hardcore Cleanse + side effects she even found herself on Amazon buying Max and Mandy’s WAG novels and paying the extra for next-day delivery.
She devoured Gucci and Goals, in one long gulp. Brandy Ballantyne wasn’t even a thinly disguised Mandy McIntyre. She was Mandy from the top of her blonde head, the exact same shade as the creamiest, palest vanilla ice cream that Brandy couldn’t eat because she was lactose intolerant, to the
tips of her French-manicured toenails, which Brandy knew was much more classy than the tarty red her friends preferred. But it was Max’s voice she could hear in every line, his vodka-dry sense of humour shining through as Brandy got herself into all manner of amusing scrapes, from being falsely accused of shoplifting a pair of Gucci boots to running across the pitch at Old Trafford during extra time in hot pursuit of her pet Pekinese, Tiffany, in her hunt for a footballer boyfriend.
Neve read Penalties and Prada the next day even though she had promised Rose she’d sort through a teetering pile of Archive material. When Brandy married her star striker fiancé Damon, Neve found herself tearing up, and Armani and AC Milan had Neve so overwrought that she wasn’t sure she could finish it. Brandy was starting married life in Italy after Damon’s multi-million-pound transfer deal, and for all his bullshit about not believing in relationships, Max wrote about love as if it was something he’d personally experienced: Brandy forgot about the cruel jibes of the other WAGs when she’d rocked up to the VIP box in her thigh-high, seven-inch-heeled Stella McCartney boots because there was Damon larger than life and twice as handsome on the big TV screens dotted around the stadium. The sun was glinting off the highlights in his hair and he’d stripped off his shirt so he could douse the muscled planes of his chest in water and he was smiling and looking up in the direction of the VIP box as if he could see her distress and wanted to let her know that he was on her side and always would be. He was her man and nothing else mattered.
Unfortunately the next book in the series, Burberry and Bootees, wasn’t out for another few months so Neve was forced to borrow all of Celia’s back issues of Skirt so she could read everything that Max had ever written. She knew that she was on the fast track to indulging in all sorts of clichéd break-up behaviour like ringing Max’s phone and his BlackBerry and his landline just to hear him say cheerfully, ‘I can’t come to the phone, you know what to do after the beep,’ or pacing a well-trodden path outside his flat. She’d planned to use this down-time before William returned to mope and reflect on their break-up, but Neve had never expected to wallow this hard.
Her head had known that Max was just a trainer relationship, but it seemed as if her heart had never got that memo. Or maybe it was because Max had been her first boyfriend that she felt torn in two and Sellotaped back together. If she’d gone through these rites of passage in her teens, then she’d probably be blasé about them by now.
Like Yuri, who’d gone out with the graphic designer for two months and was only mildly annoyed that he’d turned out to be a wrong ’un.
‘Why aren’t you more upset?’ Neve demanded as they sat in the back garden on a sultry Sunday evening, ten days into her Cleanse. ‘I mean, you’ve cried at least once, haven’t you?’
Yuri shook her asymmetric fringe out of her eyes. ‘Nuh-huh! Not wasting any tears on a douchebag who couldn’t keep it in his pants for three days while I was at a skateboarding festival in Manchester.’
‘I don’t understand how you can be with someone and share beautiful, intimate moments with them and then not give a damn that it’s ended.’ Neve turned gimlet eyes on her. ‘God, Yuri, do you even have a heart?’
‘Dude, you’re getting really, really snippy again,’ Yuri told Neve.
‘I can’t help it!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Celia from the patio doors that led from her kitchen straight on to the decking in the back garden. ‘She’s due another juice. She’ll be all right once she’s choked it down, won’t you, Neevy?’
Neve nodded and tried to muster a weak, wavery smile as Celia walked towards her with her evening Cleanse and a saucer with four lemon quarters on it. ‘I will but this is not just a Cleanse withdrawal. I have genuine reasons to be in a very bad mood.’
‘Of course you do,’ Celia clucked, as she shoved the Cleanse bottle at Neve. ‘Now, for the love of God, get that down you.’
The green morning juice wasn’t so bad. It had a clean, fresh taste that only slightly resembled the washing-up liquid that her mother had once squirted in her mouth after Neve had questioned the existence of God. And she was actually acquiring a taste for her lunch Cleanse, which was neon orange and tasted of carrots and lentils. It was only her last juice of the day that was a problem because it was a brown sludge that …
‘God, that shit smells like bongwater,’ Yuri announced, squinching up her face and sliding down the wooden bench so she was as far away from it as possible.
Neve lifted the bottle to her lips and tried to ignore the fetid smell – there was really only one way to do this. She closed her eyes, tipped back her head, pinched her nostrils and tried to pour the juice straight down her throat so she could bypass her taste buds altogether. As soon as she wrenched the bottle away, Celia thrust a lemon quarter into her hand so Neve could jam it in her mouth and suck hard.
‘Just like a tequila shooter,’ Celia said proudly.
‘Brrr!’ Neve shook her head and waggled her arms, and once she was sure that the juice wasn’t going anywhere but down her alimentary canal, she stilled. She didn’t feel quite so angry any more. ‘That’s better.’
‘Speaking as someone who eats raw tuna for fun, that stuff is ungodly,’ Yuri said. ‘You cannot live on three gross drinks a day. No wonder you’re snapping all the time; your blood sugar must be in minus numbers.’
‘The juices are giving me a daily intake of a thousand calories and I’m allowed to eat two small portions of raw veggies.’
‘Big whoop.’ Yuri eyed Neve up and down. ‘You look thinner. How much have you lost?’
‘I don’t know,’ Neve replied, because she was too scared to get on the scales and discover that the Cleansing and the colonics and the constant peeing had all been in vain. ‘But I can take my jeans off by stepping on the hem and waiting for them to slide down.’
‘Maybe it’s time to invest in a new pair?’ Celia suggested excitedly. ‘I’ve got a discount card for this great denim boutique in Hoxton and you can try on the True Religion jeans I’ve been coveting for years but can’t buy because my arse is too flat.’
‘I’m not buying any clothes until I’m in a size ten,’ Neve said firmly. She stretched her arms above her head. ‘Do you want me to wash your kitchen floor again? Or I could clean your bathroom, if you’d rather.’
‘You in a good mood now?’ Yuri asked slyly.
She was definitely getting there. ‘Why? What do you want?’
‘A birthday party on Saturday in this very garden,’ Yuri said. ‘And I can’t make any promises that I’ll clear everyone out and turn the music down at eleven o’clock sharp.’
‘I don’t mind, but Charlotte might have something to say about it,’ Neve said, angling a glance up at the first-floor windows even though she’d heard Charlotte and Dougie go out earlier.
‘Dougie’s putting her on a plane for Ibiza as we speak,’ Celia informed her smugly. ‘As if Charlotte and her chavvy friends need to spend a week making themselves even more orange.’
‘A whole week?’ Neve clasped her hands together in prayer. ‘Thank you, God.’ Charlotte and her broom had been delighted that Max was no longer around so they could make up for lost time by banging on the ceiling every five minutes.
‘You can invite some friends if you like,’ Yuri offered magnanimously. ‘But no one over the age of thirty-five and definitely not that Gustav.’
‘Who phoned me earlier today and wanted to discuss staging an intervention on you,’ Celia revealed. ‘And no, I didn’t say you were on a brutal regime of stinky drinks and colonics. Oh, that reminds me, will it be triggery for you if we ask you to make some cheese straws?’
‘Not triggery at all.’ For the first time in her life, even when she’d had swine flu, Neve had absolutely no appetite. ‘Are you inviting anyone from the office, Seels?’
‘Only the assistants and the interns that I really like, and Gracie said she might pop along, but everyone else is far too up themselves for a party in a north London garde
n.’
‘Have you invited him?’ Even with her blood sugar temporarily restored, Neve couldn’t trust herself to say Max’s name, because even thinking it in her head was usually enough to bring the gloom crashing down on her.
‘After what he did to you? Of course I didn’t! And no, I don’t know how he is, because he’s in LA just like he was the last ten times that you asked me,’ Celia said. ‘I promise you the party will be a Max-free zone.’
Which was a good thing, although Neve’s heart refused to accept that and it had perked up just a little at the thought of seeing Max again. Maybe even walking over to him and touching his arm, so they could drift to the quiet corner of the garden which the dog roses were trying to colonise, and talk things out, becoming friends again. ‘You can invite him if you like,’ Neve said, and she knew that she didn’t sound even a little bit casual, more like utterly desperate. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘He’s dead to me,’ Celia snapped. ‘Apart from when I’m at work and I have to do what he says because he has “Editor” in his job title.’ She squeezed Neve’s knee. ‘You could invite Willy McWordy, if you like.’
‘He’s still roadtripping and I really don’t want our reunion to happen when there’s a chance that one of your friends will be throwing up in the flowerbeds,’ Neve said. ‘And I’m not a size ten so I can’t see him just yet.’
‘You’re going to be finished with your suicidal detox programme before the party, right?’ Yuri wanted to know. ‘Because I love you tons, but I can’t have you glaring into the vodka punch. It will kill the vibe.’
Celia looked pointedly at Yuri, who shrugged. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘You’ve only got another three days, haven’t you?’