Among the women, there are unflattering short fringes, tutus, patterned leggings, Miss Marple tweed skirts, Ray-Bans with coloured frames and a lot of pink hair. There is attitude aplenty, and sneering once-overs by the bucketload.
Poppy and Damian are standing at the bar, trying to get served. As soon as Poppy notices me, she shouts ‘Belles!’ and runs towards me with her arms outstretched.
I’ve come to realize, over the years, that it’s counterproductive, nay masochistic, to try to compare myself to Poppy – either physically or intellectually. We’ve been best friends since we were new girls at school at the age of ten, and were inseparable until she went up to Oxford (where she got a first in history, despite partying like there was no tomorrow), and I floundered about in the pretentious hell that was Goldsmiths. Now she’s a highly respected TV producer, and I’m still a struggling artist.
You wouldn’t guess it to look at her, though, wired off her pretty little face in black leather shorts, cream woolly over-the-knee socks and a cropped grey marl T-shirt that falls off one shoulder and just occasionally rises to reveal a glimpse of perfectly flat brown tummy that matches the expanse of perfectly smooth brown thigh between sock and short. Her long blonde hair is straight and shiny, her green eyes wide and her teeth perfect. She looks a bit like Sienna Miller, although she professes, I suspect disingenuously, to hate the comparison.
‘I can’t believe you’re so early – I didn’t think we’d see you for hours, what with the hideous traffic potential tonight,’ Poppy is babbling. She and Damian, being cooler than I could ever hope to be, live just off Hoxton Square, a mere fifteen-minute walk away from Divine Comedy.
‘Yeah, I know. The cabbie took a brilliant route up the Harrow Road and around the North Circular, avoiding the West End completely. I could have kissed him.’
‘He’d have come in his pants.’ Poppy’s Timotei prettiness and girls’-school accent soften the crudity of her words, and I laugh. ‘I mean it, Belles, you look amazing! Love, love, love the dress!’
‘Thanks! Mum’s attic,’ I grin, trying not to sound too smug.
‘Ooh, you lucky cow. Why couldn’t my mum have been a model?’
I laugh again. Poppy’s mother is an ex-Radio 4 presenter and the epitome of elegance. ‘Anyway, look at you. I can’t imagine many people being able to carry off that particular ensemble.’ I mean it: Poppy is so tiny and perfectly formed that she always manages to get away with outfits that would look absolutely hideous on most people. My pink tights would have posed her no challenge whatsoever.
Requisite compliments exchanged, we hug again and make our way back to the bar.
‘Hey, Bella.’ Damian gives me a languorous hug, one eye still on the bar. He looks handsome as ever in black jeans and a purple V-necked T-shirt that sets off his half-Indian, half-Welsh complexion a treat. Damian’s a columnist on the men’s magazine Stadium, and one of my favourite people in the world. He’s cool and funny and gorgeous, and Poppy takes him for granted rather too much, I sometimes think.
‘Hey Damian, Happy New Year!’ I cry, hugging him back.
‘Surely you’re not meant to say that till after midnight,’ says Poppy. She’s probably right, but I am thoroughly overexcited, buzzing with anticipation of what tonight may bring (or, possibly more accurately, half pissed already).
‘Oh, whatevs.’ I clock both their looks of horror. ‘Said with irony, I promise.’
‘Whatevs, shmatevs,’ says Damian. ‘What do you want to drink? I’m trying to order margaritas …’
‘Ooh, a margarita would be great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’ll get the next round.’
A momentary hush falls over the room and, as if of one accord, the sartorially bonkers revellers part like the Red Sea, heads turning to gawp at the vision of masculine beauty that has just entered the bar.
It’s Ben.
He is wearing a navy-blue velvet-collared coat, over jeans and a plain white T-shirt, which somehow manages to make all the other men in the place look both under- and overdressed. His streaky blond/brown hair flops over his long-lashed bright-blue eyes, and his perfect high-cheekboned, full-lipped face looms towards mine as he hugs me and kisses me on both cheeks. I kiss him back, hoping my hug isn’t overenthusiastic, as my boobs squash up against his chest.
‘Happy New Year, Belles!’
‘You too,’ I say, flushed and flustered. ‘Though Pops says we’re not meant to say it until after midnight.’
‘She’s always been a pretty little pedant, hasn’t she?’ says Ben, lifting Poppy above his head and pissing me off. No need to make it quite so obvious that she is so much lighter than I am.
‘You’re just in time, mate,’ says Damian, who has finally managed to catch the waitress’s eye (the other is covered with a tartan patch that matches her blue hair). ‘Margarita?’
‘Cheers, mate.’ Ben puts Poppy down and high-fives his friend. ‘Good choice.’
‘Not your first today?’ says Damian quizzically, and Ben laughs. Looking at him again, he does seem somewhat refreshed already.
‘I’ve come straight from lunch with the Homeland cast at Joe Allen’s,’ says Ben, smiling his dazzling smile. ‘Most of them are still there. Usual self-congratulatory luvvie bollocks of course, but nice to have a postmortem.’
Ben has just finished playing an Afrikaans farmer with a conscience in a painfully sincere, overlong polemic about Apartheid-torn South Africa, at the Almeida. (‘Well, that was a barrel of laughs’ was Poppy’s whispered critique to me after we all loyally turned up to the first night.)
‘So how are you all?’ Ben adds. ‘Recovered from the Christmas excesses yet?’
Poppy and Damian both start laughing.
‘Do you want to tell them, or shall I?’ says Poppy.
‘Be my guest,’ says Damian, kissing the top of her shiny blonde head.
Ben and I look at them expectantly.
‘Right. Where do I start? Umm, OK. Last night, we decided to pop down to Zigfrid for a few drinks,’ says Poppy, name-checking the Hoxton Square institution that is less than a minute’s walk from their flat. ‘So we were sitting outside, having a fag, when we got chatting to this couple.’ She pauses and Damian chuckles again. ‘They had been out with one of his clients, to whom he had been trying to sell a private jet.’
‘Cool,’ says Ben.
‘Anyway, he then told us that he’d met his wife, who was from Belarus, by the way, in a strip joint in Warsaw. She was the best pole dancer he’d ever seen, or so he told us, so he married her.’
‘Even cooler,’ says Ben, his smile widening. ‘Was she fit as fuck?’
‘Oh, only in an obvious, tarty sort of way,’ says Poppy, standing there in her black leather shorts, her long blonde hair cascading down her back.
‘The worst type of fit as fuck, then,’ says Ben, raising his eyebrows at Damian.
‘You’d kick