‘Well, the publicist is giving me another two weeks of juices at a fifty per cent discount to say sorry for the mood swings,’ Neve admitted and braced herself for the outrage that she could see Celia working up to.
‘You’re only meant to do it for two weeks,’ she reminded Neve sharply. ‘Two weeks! That was the only reason that I told you about it.’
‘The publicist says that they have clients in the States who’ve done it for much longer than that,’ Neve muttered.
‘She’s a publicist. She’s paid to tell great, fat lies. We agreed that this was just about kick-starting your metabolism again, not as a permanent replacement for solid food.’ Celia gave her sister a reproachful look. It was such a good look that it could have softened the stoniest heart, but Neve just folded her arms and stuck out her lower lip in a mutinous pout.
‘I don’t care,’ she gritted. ‘It’s my body and so what if I can’t sleep, and I’m a bit moody and yes, the brown juice smells like bongwater though I’ve never actually smelled bongwater so I’ll have to take your word for it. If this gets me into a size ten then it will be worth it.’
‘But …’
‘Dude …’
‘Shut up! I don’t want to hear it because neither of you can even imagine what it’s like to be trapped in a prison of fat and until you do, you’ve got nothing to say to me on the subject, so zip it!’
Celia zipped it for a few long moments, her lips pressed so tightly together that she looked like she might explode. Then she couldn’t contain herself any longer and opened her mouth so she could let rip. ‘You might have been a size fourteen when you were shagging Max but you were a damn sight more happy then than you are now. And I’ll tell you something else: you were a hell of a lot less spotty too!’
Chapter Thirty-seven
Neve had always thought of Celia as soft and pliable like Plasticine but she proved absolutely rigid and unbendy over the next week. She resisted all of Neve’s entreaties about her body, her choice, remained unmoved even when Neve spent an evening dragging the lawnmower round the garden, nearly amputating a couple of toes in the process, and received 247 freshly baked cheese straws on the Saturday afternoon with a blank face and an icy, ‘Thanks.’
‘I’ve had my run,’ Neve said chirpily to show she didn’t bear any grudges. ‘And before I shower, I thought I’d help you make the flat party-friendly.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Celia said without much conviction. The only time she or Yuri ever had clean glasses was when Neve refused to listen to their claims that the alcohol sterilised the germs and washed them up herself.
They worked in silence, or rather Neve ferried breakables and designer clothes and accessories to Yuri’s room, which had a lockable door, took out five black bags of rubbish, vacuumed, arranged crudités and dips on silver-foil platters and popped to the pound shop to buy more nightlights.
Meanwhile, Celia and Yuri had wardrobe crisis after wardrobe crisis, until it was seven and they were both wearing the same outfits that they’d started in: Celia in a fitted polo shirt and a pair of high-waisted denim shorts and red braces, and Yuri modelling a blue-and-white striped playsuit that looked like a Victorian swimming costume.
Neve was careful to look at them with a neutral expression on her face. Maybe when she was a size ten, she might start dressing more outlandishly, but somehow she doubted it.
‘Everything’s done,’ she said in the same bright voice she’d been using all afternoon. It was exhausting to have to keep the pep so peppy. ‘You just need to make the punch.’
‘Thanks, Neevy. You’re a total star,’ Yuri said, gazing around their lounge with wonder. ‘I never knew we had a rug under all those magazines.’
‘It was nothing,’ Neve said, looking at Celia. ‘Always happy to help out.’
Celia sighed and Neve could tell from the defeated way that her shoulders slumped that her sister couldn’t keep up the effort of being mad at her. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Really, thanks a lot. Everyone would be crunching under old pizza boxes if it hadn’t been for you.’
Neve nodded and Celia nodded back, and neither of them had to say anything else to know that Celia was still furious about the Cleanse but she wasn’t furious at Neve any more, and Neve understood the difference. ‘OK, I’m going upstairs to get changed now.’ Neve paused. ‘Cherry-print blouse, dark wash straight-leg jeans and heels?’
‘Flip-flops,’ Celia said firmly. ‘This is a house party, not a nightclub.’
By eleven o’clock, the Scoins from next door had complained about the noise three times and all four members of a minor indie band had turned up, so the party could be considered a rousing success.
Celia and Yuri’s friends were an intimidating bunch of fashion and design types who had distressed haircuts, distressed clothes and liked music that hurt when you listened to it. They were all perfectly pleasant to Neve, because being Celia’s sister gave her an automatic pass, but she could see their eyes sliding away from her after a couple of minutes of polite conversation. Her cherry-print blouse, straight-leg jeans (which were now baggier and saggier than her ‘just around the house’ jeans) and Primark flip-flops just didn’t cut it.
Neve sat on the stairs with Philip and Rose. Chloe and her boyfriend had long since been sucked into the noisy throng of people in the ground-floor flat and this way Neve could prevent anyone from gaining access to the top two floors. She wasn’t particularly bothered about Dougie’s flat, especially as his contribution to the party was four cans of Budweiser, but she wasn’t having anyone fornicating on her landing. Besides, from her vantage point on the stairs she could race up to her flat to use the loo, whenever nature called. Which it did, with alarming frequency.
‘And ever since I told Clive that I couldn’t have his toxic presence in my life any more, he’s been absolutely devoted,’ Philip was saying with a fond smile. ‘It really worked, Neve.’
‘You have to treat them mean to keep them keen,’ Rose sniffed, pulling her shoulders back and adjusting the neckline of her sparkly gold dress so her cleavage was better displayed. One of Yuri’s skateboarder pals kept wandering into the hall to exchange lingering smiles with Rose, even though he was at least half her age, and Neve had a feeling that her friend wouldn’t be getting the night bus back to Bayswater on her own.
‘I didn’t tell you to dump him so he’d have a nasty shock and start being nice to you. I said it because he’s a vile, evil toad of a man,’ she reminded Philip crossly. She was long overdue her third, bracken-scented juice, but she’d promised Yuri she’d drink it as late as possible so she’d be even-tempered just as the pubs emptied out and the party really started kicking off.
‘You’re a regular ray of sunshine these days, Neevy,’ Rose said. ‘It’s not your juices, it’s giving up meat. I’ve never met a happy vegetarian.’
‘I’ve been vegetarian for fifteen years,’ Philip said peevishly and they started bickering about the pros and cons of a vegetarian diet as they did once a week on average. Neve had heard it all before: Hitler was a vegetarian and Philip couldn’t be that dedicated because he’d eaten two pigs in blankets at the Archive Christmas party three years before.
She looked at her watch. It was just after eleven and she really should have her juice before she knocked her colleagues’ heads together. Neve had one hand on Philip’s shoulder as a prelude to standing up when Max walked through the open front door.
Neve felt her body give a quick jerk of joyful recognition because it had been almost two weeks since she’d last seen him. Max was tanned a deep golden brown, which accentuated his cheekbones and made his tousled hair look lighter. He was wearing his nicest jeans, the ones he called his Sunday best, which hugged his long legs, and a rumpled blue and red plaid shirt. And he was grinning, eyes twinkling, until he looked up and saw Neve at the top of the stairs, neither sitting nor standing, but crouching awkwardly somewhere in between.
She didn’t know how Max could do it, but by the time
she’d blinked the grin had thinned and he was sneering at her. That was when Neve noticed that he was holding hands with a tiny blonde girl with delicate everything; the gentle sweep of her eyebrows, her perfect, tip-tilted nose and lips that looked like a sodding rosebud. Lips that were whispering something in Max’s ear as she stood on tiptoe so Neve had a clear view of her perfect, bare legs in short-shorts and perky little breasts straining against her white wife-beater. Neve was forced to acknowledge the painful truth that she could glug down Hardcore Cleanse juices from here until kingdom come and she’d never be tiny and sylph-like and a slip of a girl that men would want to protect and cherish, in the way that Max was doing; he had his arm curled around the girl’s minuscule waist in case a stiff breeze knocked her over.
Rose and Philip were still negotiating the finer points of vegetarianism, not even realising that Neve’s world had stopped. Max raised his eyebrows in greeting but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to – his smug smile said it all for him.
Then, thank God, Max and his delicate nymph were slipping into Celia and Yuri’s flat and Neve was freed from her paralysis to stumble up the stairs to the sanctuary of her own rooms.
She didn’t cry, which was a minor miracle. But she felt like crying and never stopping. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said out loud. ‘Max is free to see whoever he wants and you have no right to be jealous or upset because he’s not The One and that’s why you let him go. William is The One.’
Giving herself a stern talking-to didn’t do much good. Neve could feel her bottom lip quivering and the first tear start to trickle down her face. She wiped it away impatiently. No wonder she was so emotional. The juice would make everything better.
It didn’t – mainly because Neve had forgotten to have a lemon quarter to hand. Eyes watering, she reached for the fruit bowl, but had to stop and retch for what felt like for ever. There was no time to even cut a lemon in half; Neve jammed the whole fruit into her mouth and bit down hard.
It suddenly struck Neve just how ridiculous her life had become when she was standing in her kitchen sucking on a lemon so she wouldn’t throw up her evening meal, which had come from the empty bottle standing on her kitchen counter, while downstairs her former lover was entwined around a girl who probably weighed ninety pounds dripping wet.
And just what was her former lover doing here anyway?
Rather than going back downstairs the way she’d come and risk bumping into Max and that girl again, Neve opened her kitchen door and raced down the rickety metal stairs to the garden, nearly breaking her neck as she fell over entwined couples.
It was easy to spot Celia; she was a head taller than all the other girls and her legs gleamed ghostly white in the darkness, which was illuminated by the flickering tealights that Neve had lugged back from the pound shop.
‘Seels!’ Neve shouted while there was still half a garden between them. Celia’s head turned in her direction. ‘Why is he here?’ Neve panted. ‘Why did you invite him?’
‘Why did I invite who?’ Celia asked.
‘Max! He’s here with some skinny girl who’s wearing a pair of shorts that are so tiny, she might just as well have turned up in her knickers!’
Celia looked down at her own short-shorts, but decided she wasn’t going to go there. ‘I didn’t invite him, Neevy, I swear,’ she said earnestly. ‘How dare he gatecrash our party? Do you want me to throw him out?’
Neve contemplated having to spend the rest of the party skulking in her flat rather than risk running into Max. Or worse, having to brazen it out and pretend that she wasn’t bothered. But then she thought about Celia turning up for work on Monday and probably getting an official warning for throwing the Editor-at-Large out of her house. ‘Well, I suppose it’s OK, but feel free to accidentally spill something over him.’
‘I will,’ Celia muttered, running a hand through her already dishevelled hair. She seemed preoccupied and Neve was just about to ask her if everything was all right, when she spotted Dougie standing right behind Celia – and from his tense face and Celia’s distraction, she realised she’d barged into the middle of something.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ Dougie said too quickly. He was already moving past Celia, who shot out a hand and grabbed his arm.
‘Not so fast, dickweed!’ she told him. ‘Guess what he was doing, Neve?’
It could have been any one of a number of things. ‘What?’
‘Look, Seels, this is none of your business …’
‘He was sucking face with one of Yuri’s friends,’ Celia burst out, eyes wide with an outrage that Neve completely shared.
‘You weren’t?’ Neve gasped. ‘But you’re married!’
Dougie threw his head back and made a sound that was half growl, half groan. ‘So? Both of you hate Charlie, so don’t start acting like you care about her feelings.’
‘Still doesn’t give you the right to perv on my mates.’
‘Did I mention that you’re married?’ Neve pointed out again. And she didn’t care about Charlotte; in fact, she hoped that she’d get swept away by a freak tidal wave while she was in Ibiza, but Neve was still angry on her behalf. It had to be another weird side-effect of the Cleanse. ‘You made vows, solemn vows, to be faithful and she’s been gone for no time at all and already you’re hitting on other women like she doesn’t mean anything to you at all. You’re sullying all the special moments you’ve shared together. You should be ashamed of yourself!’
‘Well, I’m not!’ Dougie suddenly roared, and Neve saw a crowd of people gathering to witness the Slaters going at it, which was a family tradition they usually kept behind closed doors. ‘You two hate her – well, try being married to her and see how long you last!’
He pushed past them, knocking Neve into Celia as he went, and when Celia’s arms tried to close around her, Neve frantically wriggled free. She couldn’t bear to be touched right then.
‘He’s despicable,’ Neve ranted. ‘Behaving like that when he’s married, even if I do hate Charlotte.’
‘I know you do. I do too,’ Celia said carefully. ‘Are you sure this isn’t more about Max and those lame diet drinks, which I haven’t even got the energy to get on your case about.’
‘I wish I’d just concentrated on losing weight and hadn’t got side-tracked with all that rubbish about pancake relationships, because Max was just a waste of time and effort.’ Neve tossed back her hair angrily. ‘He can go out with whomever he likes. I am so over him!’
‘Neevy – I hear what you’re saying.’ Celia was looking over Neve’s head and frowning. ‘Can we talk about this later? Go upstairs and drink a shake or something, and don’t let Yuri see that you’ve gone all dark side again.’
Neve’s journey back up the fire escape was even more perilous when it was hard to see where she was going with a red mist swirling in front of her eyes.
Why were men so predictable in such an unpredictable way? Just when you thought you had them figured out, they’d pull some sneaky, low-down move, which made you see them in a new, highly unflattering light.
It wasn’t enough that Dougie had married Charlotte. Now he had to go and cheat on her too, so she’d have even more reasons to make Neve’s life an utter, living hell.
Even William was driving her to distraction as she tormented herself wondering about his big, important question that he hadn’t asked her because it was impossible for them to be on the same continental shelf at a mutually convenient time.
And then there was Max, Neve thought, as she wrenched open her kitchen door. Turning up with Miss Hot Pants just so he could rub Neve’s nose in the fact that he was used to a far higher calibre of girl in his bed.
‘God, I hate them all!’ she shouted, snatching up her empty juice bottle and hurling it across the kitchen where it collided with her corkboard and dislodged half a dozen flyers. ‘Bloody, bloody hell!’
‘Still not using the f-word, then?’ said an amused voice – and there was Max stand
ing in the doorway.
Neve’s first thought was that it was a pity that she’d already flung the only suitable missile she’d had to hand because throwing it at Max would have been much more satisfying.
And her second thought was: ‘How did you get in here?’ she demanded, hands on hips.
Max held up her spare key because he’d left so abruptly that they’d never had time to hand back door keys or change locks or any of that stuff which would have ensured that Max wasn’t currently standing in her kitchen uninvited.
‘You should have knocked.’
‘I did knock – there was no reply,’ Max said calmly, as if her furious voice and squinty-eyed scowl weren’t affecting him in the slightest.
‘So you thought you’d just come barging in, did you?’ Neve advanced, hand outstretched. ‘Give me the key and then you can go back to the party that you weren’t invited to and find the little blonde you came with.’
She had to be looking pretty terrifying at that moment, red-faced and vibrating with rage, but Max stood his ground and didn’t even flinch when Neve was near enough to jab her finger at his chest.
‘Don’t do that, Neevy,’ he said equably. ‘It’s kind of rude. Anyway, my therapist said I should try to re-establish an open, honest dialogue with you and that the way a relationship ends is just as—’
‘Oh, she did, did she? So you just turn up here uninvited, with some waifish girl who’s everything I’m not?’
‘Jane’s a friend. A happily married friend whose husband works with Yuri and followed us in once he’d had a chance to go to the offy.’
Neve snorted in derision; a much snottier snort than she would have liked. ‘Do you always hold hands with your friends’ wives?’ As soon as the words came hurtling out of her mouth, Neve wanted to take them back. As it was, she couldn’t really blame Max for staring at her so disdainfully.
‘So now you’re an expert in holding hands, are you? Anyway, I thought you’d be wrapped round Mr California.’ Max turned his head so he could look out into the hall. ‘Where is he?’