Low Expectations (11 page)

Stepping out of the shower, I check my phone to see if anyone is about tonight. The evening hinges on this – I refuse to go on my own to watch Beardy for fear of looking like a lovesick groupie.

Actually, I don't think I've ever gone to any social event alone and prefer to walk around aimlessly than sit in a pub by myself if my friends are late; a frequent occurrence. The longest I've ever waited alone in public was when I languished on a park bench in Mornington Crescent drinking cheap vodka and cranberry from an Evian bottle on my eighteenth birthday. All fifteen guests managed to be at least an hour late. After forty-five minutes or so, I started to cry, which was actually quite restrained, considering a group of rude
boys had started chanting ‘Tranny' at me thirty minutes in. I haven't worn stripper shoes since.

My phone buzzes and I feel a moment of hope. Maybe I do want to go to this gig after all. It's hard to know the true state of your emotions when you spend all your free time drinking or hungover. ‘Soz doll, having din-dins with Jake and Caro tonight xx' reads Rose's text rejection.

Jake and Caro are an old married couple in their early twenties who are both very nice but seem to have stepped out of an alternative dimension in which everyone is kind and punctual, wine is sipped parsimoniously throughout dinner, swearing is vulgar and jokes are socially appropriate. The first time I met them they were throwing a vegan dinner party, to which I arrived late, tipsy and bearing a charcuterie platter. I also made the hideous faux pas of wearing a beautiful white fur coat.

Caro had looked me up and down slowly before grimacing with disapproval. Meanwhile, Jake asked in an unnaturally sonorous tone that sounded like a bad impersonation of Brian Blessed, ‘And What Was That While It Lived?'

I drunkenly tried to make light of the situation by declaring, ‘Peter Rabbit and aaall his little friends!' while maniacally stroking my fluffy collar like a cracked-out Cruella De Vil. Rose tried to defend my honour by explaining I hadn't known they were vegan (true) and the coat was vintage (false) but when I rooted around in the hall and waved
Jake's leather shoes under his nose, asking why cows don't have equal rights, the evening took a decided turn for the worse. I haven't been invited back since, to everyone's collective relief.

‘No problem my love, send my regards and spike the Quorn with some bacon for me xxx', I respond. I still haven't heard from Sarah, Julian or Annabelle, who is a definitely a long shot, being a hippy-ish childhood friend who drops off the radar only to text me back weeks or months later. She's always been flighty, but since returning from six months travelling in India she despairs of the isolation of city life and walks around swaddled in scarves, like Moses. I fear she will soon disappear back into the bowels of the Third World, never to return again.

I slip into a bathrobe from Primark, which gives me more pangs of conscience than fur ever has, though visions of slave-labour magically never assault me when I am actually at the till. I tiptoe down the narrow stairway to the kitchen hoping that Stacy and Cosmo won't join me and witness my very fetching drowned rat 'do as I help myself to a large glass of white wine, thus completing what I suspect is my reputation as a minging pisshead.

I have a separate collection of glasses to Stacy, the ‘4 for £4' set from Sainsbury's, purchased after I broke one of her black goblets doing the washing up. She nearly had my head, complaining that they had been £40 each. Of my eight Sainsbury's
glasses only two remain, cowering survivors lurking in the back of the cupboard, their comrades having met oblivion in the hands of careless drunk people, mainly me. It might be worth investing in something that doesn't shatter as soon as you look at it, but I don't feel quite ready for that level of adult responsibility.

I take a few swigs and then fill my glass up again, enjoying the warmth spreading through my veins before creeping back up the stairs to my room. If I am to go to this gig alone, as looks increasingly likely, I am going to need some Dutch courage.

My room is fairly spacious, the walls covered with inspirational research. It has good storage space, a must for the ludicrous amount of clothing I've accumulated over the years. I do a thorough pruning every year but somehow seem to end up with more unnecessary shit than ever. My new policy is to wear something down into the ground before I replace it, but it's difficult to restrain myself when window-shopping is a vital part of my degree. Luckily the majority of the things I love are too expensive to induce real temptation.

My favourite part of the room is on the far side, and the piece of furniture that sits underneath a large bay window. It is a twenties Art Deco dressing table I bought last year on eBay, at a reasonable enough price that I feel I can lie and pretend it was a steal. Not only does it provide natural lighting for putting my face on of a morning; it allows me to
display all the pretty products I rarely use but end up buying because I am a whore for packaging. I have at least ten perfume bottles. I almost never wear perfume. Considering my paranoia earlier tonight, however, maybe I should start.

I put on some Josephine Baker and buff a layer of powder on my face while I smoke a secret cigarette and drink my wine – the best and most classic of all stimulant combinations. People can talk smack about smoking all they want but I am convinced that if it weren't for all the paltry health concerns, everyone would be doing it.

Why is it the things I most enjoy in life seem to have the threat of eventual disease and death marching alongside them? Alcohol, tobacco, sex, transfat-laden food, walking in vertiginous heels … For even seemingly innocuous pleasures, like wearing non-organic cotton, there is a price being paid by some poor farmer being gassed by toxic pesticides. Of course, even if you do buy organic, cotton itself is environmentally questionable due to the huge reservoirs of water required to grow it. Yet synthetics are equally damaging in other ways. It's easier not to think about it and instead spend life in a cycle of mindless consumption: bad men, chemical highs and unnecessary shoes.

I belatedly remember to take the morning after pill, gulping it with my wine, which, according to Javier, is fine as long as I don't throw up in the next twenty-four hours. My phone beeps. It's Sarah – she's with Henry at The Eagle Rests,
a shitty old-man pub in Shoreditch. We originally started going there when the crowds got too much to have a conversation in the better options nearby, but have become strangely fond of its coarseness.

It can be refreshing to go to a bar that looks as if it has travelled through a time warp from the non-glamorous side of the fifties, when everywhere else you go you are inundated by the carefully curated nostalgia that seems to have gripped interior design recently. It is now 8 p.m. They are probably not going to be up for Shelter but I will do my level best to persuade them.

I teeter down the road to the pub, mildly buzzing, in some beautiful Miu Miu burgundy heels that make my ankles look like heaven and feel like hell. However, I am confident that the anaesthetizing powers of alcohol will keep me upright. I still haven't replied to Beardy, as my confidence in convincing Sarah and Henry to give up their quiet Sunday night drinks to rock along to Tin Can Bang's finest is minimal. But according to
Cosmo
(the mag not the man), men love a bit of mystery, an unattainable woman with her own life to live, right? We all know that a woman's magazine written as if its audience consists of lovelorn nymphomaniacs with a mental age of twelve would never tell a lie.

It's easy to spot them in The Eagle, which is otherwise entirely empty of customers. A bartender glares menacingly at my arrival. One of the most charming features here is
that they never fail to make you feel unwelcome. The chips are also inedible. You know you're getting older, poorer and more pathetic when this is your chosen option if you want to have drinks and a conversation for less than a tenner on a Sunday. At least there is no chance of running into Stacy. She'd rather self-immolate than put one shoe on its scuzzy old carpet.

‘Lover! My darling, come here!' Sarah looks drunk and incredibly happy to see me, almost maniacally so, while Henry is a bit pained. ‘You look fab! Very tits out tonight I see; you aren't out to seduce the barman are you!? This is my favourite desperado joint and I refuse to avoid another pub cause all my friends are slaags!'

‘Excuse me! One barman two years ago and I never live it down. He was too fit to resist … and we barely go out in Soho these days in any case.'

‘You found a fit, straight barman in Soho?' Henry feigns incredulity, his bright blue eyes crinkling in a sad, but amused, smile.

‘I know, I thought it was quite an accomplishment too, but he was Aussie, they're usually fairly reliable skirt-chasers.'

‘You sound disappointed,'

‘I was, I hate Australian accents on men. But he looked just like someone I used to fancy on
Home and Away
years ago, so it wasn't a total loss.'

‘The Dog And Three Bowls was a terrible loss to me, that
was when it was at its peak! Remember, darling, that's where we met.' Sarah plants a drunken kiss on Henry's face, running a hand through his curly brown locks. He looks away, wincing slightly. ‘Oh don't be such a wet blanket, are you still upset?'

‘Is something wrong?' I take a seat warily, suddenly sure that I am intruding. As usual, it is some painful discussion that Sarah wants to avoid and Henry wants to deal with. I've been a bystander/pawn to their arguments before and it is rarely pretty.

‘Oh, Henry's brother's wedding is in six months in Ireland and he wants me to book tickets and a hotel and buy a dress and all that bloody bollocks now. I don't see why I have to agree to go to an expensive foreign wedding anyway, it's so selfish. It's not like they live in Dublin, you know, they live in Wandsworth.'

‘Fiona's whole family live there and her mum's disabled, you can't expect them to trek over to Wandsworth just for your convenience! It's my only brother and it's one weekend, I fail to see how you can't afford it.' I have never seen Henry quite so heated. My spidey sense tells me that Tin Can Bang will have to wait.

‘For God's sake! Can we talk about this later? Stop pressurizing me, it's months away! We can decide later.' Sarah glares at him and then with a rapid about face turns to me, smiling. ‘Do you want some vino? I'll go get an extra glass.'

As she marches to the bar, Henry necks the last of his drink and hurriedly puts on a big lumberjack coat, his jerky movements as he does so pulling up his sweater, showing a length of tanned stomach. Sarah has started speaking of him in such disparaging tones of late that it's easy to forget that he's very attractive, as well as very nice. I hope she won't regret whatever trouble she's started brewing.

‘Try to talk some sense into her, if you can. She's so fucking stubborn.' Henry shakes his head, looks as if he's about to speak again, then shuts his mouth. ‘Take care, Georgie. See you later.'

Sarah comes back just as the door swings shut behind him, both relieved and frustrated to find him gone. Sitting down with a thump, she pours both our glasses up to the brim.

‘Argh! That man! It's killing me. I still love him, I think, but I just can't see six months ahead! I'm not a fucking clairvoyant! If I were I wouldn't be in fucking advertising – I'd be in fucking finance! And we'd all be fucking rich and not drinking in this shithole.'

I take a gulp of wine with some trepidation, but she deflates.

‘So, you really think it might end? He still seems to adore you, you know.'

‘I know, I know. God knows why, I've been such a bitch to him lately. It's just … six months! I can afford to go if we do go but I can't afford a write-off on that scale, you know? And
his brother hates me anyway, it's not like I'll be missed if we are still together.'

‘His brother hates you? Why?' I say, trying to sound surprised, though I have an inkling as to why that might be.

‘He thinks Henry can do better. Or if not better, kinder, probably. Their mum is a bloody saint, and so is Fiona and I'm the loud, odd one out, who doesn't cook or iron his pants or wait up for Henry with a glass of bloody Horlicks or whatever it is they expect me to do.' She laughs hard, presumably at the thought of ironing.

‘Do you think he realizes what the real issue is?' Poor Henry. It's always sad to see a relationship in its death throes when you genuinely like the other person involved. Still, I'm Sarah's friend first. Although I can express my perspective on the situation, it is ultimately my duty to support her in her choices. Who ever really acts on good advice? Generally speaking, the more perspicacious the counsel, the more swiftly it is dismissed.

‘What, the countdown to the end? I have no idea. It must have crossed his mind. But I don't even know if I really want to end it myself.' Sarah smiles with a wry self-loathing. ‘I think he thinks I'm just a crazy woman and this is one of my fits of pique. I don't know if it'll ever be resolved. He's too nice and I'm too scared.'