In A Dark, Dark Wood Part 6

'Jesus! Oh my G.o.d, my eyes are watering. My mascara'll be halfway down my face if I have any more.'

'Lady,' Nina said sternly, 'we are just getting started. Le- I mean, Nora next.'

'You know ...' Tom said, as I knelt at the table, 'if you want something a bit more upmarket, we could have tequila royales.'

'Tequila royales?' I watched as Nina overfilled the tiny gla.s.s, liquor splashing down and puddling on the gla.s.s tabletop. 'What's that? Champagne?'

'Possibly. But not the way I make them.' Tom dug in his trouser pocket and held up a little bag of white powder. 'Something a bit more interesting than salt?'

Christ. I glanced up at the clock. Not even eight o'clock. At this rate we'd all be climbing the walls by midnight.

'c.o.ke?' Melanie said. She folded her arms as she looked coolly across at Tom, and there was a note of distaste in her voice. 'Really? We're not students any more. Some of us are parents. I don't think pumping and dumping's going to sort that one out.'

'So don't do it,' Tom said with a shrug, but there was an edge in his voice.

'Grub's up!' The awkward pause was broken by Flo standing in the doorway, her arms trembling beneath the weight of a huge board covered with melting pizza. There was a bottle wedged under her arm. 'Can someone clear the coffee table before I deposit this little lot all over my aunt's rug?'

'Tell you what,' Clare said as she watched Nina and me make s.p.a.ce on the table, then reached over and gave Tom a salty, citrussy kiss, 'let's save it for dessert.'

'No problem,' Tom said lightly. He pushed the packet back in his pocket. 'I've no wish to force my rather expensive drugs on people who don't appreciate them.'

Melanie gave a rather thin smile and took the bottle out from Flo's arm as she slid the tray onto the table and stood up.

'Hm. Talking of Champagne ...'

'Well! It is a special occasion,' Flo said. She beamed, seemingly oblivious of the undercurrent of tension flowing between Melanie and Tom. 'Pop the cork, Mels, and I'll get the gla.s.ses.'

As Melanie peeled off the foil, Flo opened the mirrored cupboard and began rooting around. She came up, slightly flushed, clutching half a dozen flutes, just as there was a resounding 'pop!' and the cork flew through the air and bounced off the flat-screen TV.

'Whoops!' Melanie put a hand to her mouth. 'Sorry, Flo.'

'No worries,' Flo said brightly, but she checked the TV screen surrept.i.tiously as Melanie bent to pour out the Champagne, rubbing it with her sleeve as she cast a slightly hara.s.sed look over her shoulder.

We each took a gla.s.s and I tried to smile. I don't actually like Champagne it gives me a roaring headache and acid indigestion, and I don't like fizzy drinks much full stop but no one had given us the opportunity to refuse.

Flo held up her gla.s.s and turned to look round the little circle, catching all of our eyes, and then stopping, her gaze on Clare.

'Here's to a great hen weekend,' she said. 'A perfect hen weekend, for the best friend a girl could ever have. To my rock. To my BFF. To my heroine and my inspiration: Clare!'

'And James,' Clare said with a smile. 'Otherwise I can't drink. I'm not egotistical enough to toast myself.'

'Oh,' Flo said, after a slight check. 'Well I mean, I just thought ... shouldn't this weekend be just about you? I thought the whole point was to forget about the groom for a bit. But of course, if you'd prefer. To Clare, and James.'

'To Clare and James!' everyone chorused, and drank.

I drank too, feeling the bubbles fizzing acidly in my throat, making it hard to swallow.

Clare and James. Clare and James. I still couldn't believe it couldn't picture them together. Had he really changed so much in ten years?

I was still staring down into my gla.s.s when Nina nudged me in the ribs. 'Come on, are you trying to read your fortune in the dregs of the Champagne? I don't think it'll work.'

'Just thinking,' I said with an attempt at a smile. Nina raised her eyebrows, and I thought for one stomach-churning moment that she was going to say something, one of her infamously blunt remarks that left you grazed and wincing.

But before she could speak, Flo clapped her hands and said, 'Don't hold back guys! Pizza time!'

Nina took a plate and helped herself to pizza. I did too. The meat pizzas were covered in cheap pepperoni that was leaking a chemical-smelling red oil all over the board, but after my run I was hungry. I took a piece of pepperoni, and a piece of spinach and mushroom, and then loaded up my plate with the charred pitta and houmous.

'Guys, use napkins if you need to, I don't want to get oil on the rug,' Flo said, hovering around as the others began to dig in. 'Oh, and make sure you leave the veggie slices for Tom, please?'

'Flops,' Clare put a hand on her shoulder, 'I'm sure it's fine. There's no way Tom can eat all those slices. Plus there's more in the freezer if we run out.'

'I know,' Flo said. Her face was red and she pushed her hair impatiently back into its clip. There was pizza sauce on her silver top. 'But it's a matter of principle. If people want the veggie option they should order it. I've got no patience with people who hog the veggie meals just because they don't fancy the meat choice. It just means the veggie guests go without!'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Look, I took a piece of the mushroom. Do you want me to put it back?'

'Well, no,' Flo said irritably. 'It's probably got pepperoni all over it now.'

For a second I thought about pointing out that there was already pepperoni oil over the whole lot, and that maybe if she was that bothered she should have put them on separate boards, but instead I bit my tongue.

'It's fine,' Tom said. He'd stacked up his plate with three pieces of mushroom pizza and a big dollop of houmous. 'This'll do me, honestly. If I eat any more Gary'll have me doing pull-ups from here to Christmas.'

'Who's Gary?' Flo said. She took a piece of pepperoni and sat on the sofa. 'I thought your other half was called Bruce?'

'Gary's my personal trainer.' Tom looked down at his washboard stomach rather complacently. 'He has an uphill job, poor love.'

'You have a personal trainer?' Flo looked deeply impressed.

'Darling, anyone who's anyone has a personal trainer.'

'I don't,' Nina said flatly. She stuffed a slice of pizza into her mouth and spoke around it, her voice m.u.f.fled. 'I jus' go to the gym and work out. I don't need some tool yelling at me while I do it. Well-' she did a heroic swallow '-I do, that's what I've got my iPod for. But I like to be able to put the tool on shuffle if the refrain gets monotonous.'

'Come on!' Tom was laughing. 'I can't be the only one here, surely! Nora, what about you? You don't look like you suffer from writer's a.r.s.e.'

'Me?' I looked up from my pizza, startled at being suddenly in the headlight beam of everyone's attention. 'No! I don't even have a gym membership, I just run. The only tools I have yelling at me are the kids in Victoria Park.'

'Clare, then?' Tom pleaded. 'Melanie? Come on! Someone back me up here. It's a perfectly normal thing!'

'I have a trainer,' Clare admitted. 'But-' she held up her hand as Tom started to crow -' only because I needed to lose a few pounds to get into my wedding dress!'

'I never understand why people do that.' Nina took another bite of pizza. There was pepperoni oil dribbling down her chin and she caught it with her tongue before continuing. 'Buy a dress two sizes too small, I mean. After all, presumably the dude proposed to you when you were a lard-a.r.s.e.'

'Scuse me!' Clare had started laughing, but there was something a bit brittle about her tone. 'I was not a lard-a.r.s.e! And it wasn't about James, although he has a trainer too, I might add. It was about me wanting to look my best on the day.'

'So only thin people look good?'

'That's not what I said!'

'Well, you said "your best" equals you minus two dress sizes-'

'Minus a few pounds,' Clare put in hotly. 'You said two dress sizes. Anyway, you can talk! You're skinny as a rake!'

'By accident,' Nina said loftily, 'not design. I'm not size-ist. Ask Jess.'

'Oh for crying out loud.' Clare put her plate down on the table. 'Look, I happen to think that I personally look better nearer a size ten than a size twelve. OK? It's nothing to do with anyone else.'

'Nina,' Flo said warningly. But Nina was in full flow, nodding earnestly and playing up to Tom's snickered laughter behind his hand, and Melanie's half-hidden smirk.

'Yeah, I get it,' she was saying. 'It's nothing to do with ridiculous Western idealisation of anorexic models and the constant portrayal of stick-thin waifs in the media. In fact-'

'Nina!' Flo said again, more angrily this time. She stood up, banging her plate down, and Nina looked up, startled, mid-sentence.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You heard me. I don't know what your problem is, but leave it, OK? This is Clare's night, and I will not have you picking a fight.'

'Who's picking fights? I'm not the one throwing plates around,' Nina said coolly. 'What a shame, when you were so keen to take care of your aunt's things.'

We all followed the direction of her gaze, and saw the crack across the plate Flo had smacked onto the coffee table. For a second I had the image of a goaded bull, about to charge.

'Look!' Flo said furiously, and the room went quite still, pizza slices suspended in mid-air, gla.s.ses half-sipped, waiting for the explosion to happen.

'It's OK,' Clare said into the tense pause. She put her hand out, pulling Flo back to sit beside her and laughing. 'Honestly. It's just Nina's sense of humour. You'll get used to her. She's not having a go at me. Much.'

'Yeah,' Nina said. She nodded, completely straight-faced. 'I'm sorry. I just think the cripplingly unrealistic body expectations of women are hilarious.'

Flo looked at Nina for a long moment, and then back at Clare, her face uncertain. Then she gave a short laugh. It was not terribly convincing.

'Come on,' Tom broke into the silence that followed. 'This party is not nearly drunk and disorderly enough for my liking. Who's up for the next shot?' He looked around the group, and his eye fell on me. A wicked grin spread across his tanned face. 'Nora, you're looking far too sober. You never did have that pre-dinner shot.'

I groaned. But Nina was nodding vigorously and pushing the full shot-gla.s.s at me, and Tom was holding out the lime wedge and salt shaker. There was nothing for it. Best just to get it over with, like medicine.

Tom shook the salt into the crook of my wrist, and I licked it off, grabbed the shot from Nina and gulped it back, and then s.n.a.t.c.hed the chunk of lime from Tom's hand. The juice exploded between my teeth, even as the tequila ran hot down the inside of my gullet. I waited for a moment, gasping and gritting my teeth against the taste, and then a familiar warmth began to spread through my capillaries, something loosening at the edge of my vision, a certain blunting of reality.

Perhaps this weekend would be a whole lot better slightly drunk.

I realised they were all looking at me, waiting for something. The shot-gla.s.s was still in my hand. 'Done!' I banged it down onto the table, and dropped the lime peel onto my empty plate. 'Who's next?'

'Make it a royale?' Tom enquired, archly. He held up the white bag.

Clare nudged me in the ribs. 'Come on, for old time's sake, yeah? Remember our first line?'

I did, though I was pretty sure it hadn't been c.o.ke. Ground-up aspirin more like, and I hadn't really wanted to do it even then. I'd just followed Clare, sheep-like, afraid of being left behind.

'We'll do it together,' Clare told him. 'Cut one for Nina too; she partakes, don't you, doctor?'

'You know doctors,' Nina said with a dry smile. 'Notorious self-medicators.'

Tom knelt at the corner of the gla.s.s coffee table with his credit card and the bag of powder, and we all watched as he ceremoniously poured and chopped and separated the powder into four neat lines. Then he looked up and raised his eyebrows enquiringly. 'I'm a.s.suming Mel pump-n-dump Cho, will not be joining us, but what about you, Florence hostess-with-the-mostess Clay?'

I looked across at Flo. Her face was very pink, as if she'd drunk considerably more than the one gla.s.s of Champagne I'd seen in her hand.

'Guys,' she said stiffly, 'I'm ... I'm not very happy with this. I mean, it's my aunt's house. What if-'

'Oh Flops!' Clare gave her a kiss and put her hand over her mouth, stopping her protests. 'Don't be ridiculous. Don't have any if you don't want to, but I really don't think your aunt's going to rock up here with her sniffer dogs and start taking names.'

Flo shook her head, and pulled herself out of Clare's arm to start clearing plates. Melanie got up too.

'I'll help you,' she said pointedly.

'All the more for those who do!' Tom said with slightly aggressive cheerfulness. He rolled up a ten-pound note and snorted up his line, wiping his nose and rubbing the grains on his gums. 'Clare?'

Clare knelt and did the same with a practised swiftness that made me wonder how often she did this. She stood up, swayed slightly, and then laughed. 'Christ, I can't be high already. Must be the tequila! Nina?' She held out the tenner. Nina made a face.

'Thanks but no thanks! Palm that snot-rag off on some unsuspecting shop a.s.sistant. I'll use my own, thanks.' She ripped a strip off the cover of the Vogue Living that was lying on the hearth, and snorted up the third line. I winced, looking at the butchered cover, and hoping Flo wouldn't notice when she came back.

'Nora?'

I sighed. It was true that I'd done my first line with Clare. It had also been one of my last. Don't get me wrong, I smoked and drank and did various other drugs at college. But I never really enjoyed cocaine. It never did much for me.

Now I felt like an absurd caricature as I knelt awkwardly on the rug and let Nina vandalise Vogue Living a bit more. It felt like a scene from a bad horror movie just before the slasher comes in and starts stabbing people. All we needed was a couple of kids making out in the pool-house to be the first victims.

I snorted up the line and stood up, feeling the blood rush away from my head, and my nose and the back of my mouth grow numb and strange.

I was too old for this. It was never really me, even back at school. I'd only gone along with Clare because I was too weak-willed to say no. I remembered, as if through a haze, James holding forth about the hypocrisy of it all: 'They make me laugh, doing sponsored fasts for Oxfam and protesting about Nestle, and then funnelling their pocket money off to Columbian drug barons. t.o.s.s.e.rs. Can't they see the irony? Give me a nice bit of home-grown weed any day.'

I sank back on the sofa and shut my eyes, feeling the tequila, Champagne and c.o.ke mixing in my veins. All evening I had been trying to connect the boy I'd known with the Clare of today, and this only brought into sharp focus the strangeness of it all. Had he really changed that much? Did they sit in their London flat, snorting up, side by side, and did he think of what he'd said when he was sixteen and reflect on the irony of it, the irony that he was now one of those t.o.s.s.e.rs he'd laughed at all those years ago?

The picture hurt, like an old half-healed wound griping unexpectedly.

'Lee?' I heard Clare's voice as if through a haze, and opened my eyes reluctantly. 'Lee! Come on focus, girl! You're not drunk already, are you?'

'No, I'm not.' I sat up, rubbing my face. I had to get through this. There was no way out now, except forwards. 'I'm not nearly drunk enough, in fact. Where's the tequila?'

9.

'I HAVE NEVER ...' Clare was sprawled across the sofa with her feet on Tom's lap and the firelight playing off her hair. She was holding a shot-gla.s.s in one hand and a piece of lime in the other, balancing them as if weighing up her options. 'I have never ... joined the mile-high club.'

There was a silence around the circle and a burst of laughter from Flo. Then, very slowly, with a wry expression, Tom raised his shot-gla.s.s.

'Cheers, darling!' He downed it in one, then sucked the lime, making a face.

'Oh you and Bruce!' Clare said. Her voice hovered between a sneer and a laugh, but it was fairly good-natured. 'You probably did it in first cla.s.s!'