Holly wandered into the lounge and through the kitchen, looking towards the small roof-terrace where Bella was smoking. Seeing her flatmate, she thought again how fine the line was between fancy dress and Bella’s style preferences. A slave to vintage, Bella was dressed head to toe in fifties housewife chic, from the red and white polka-dot apron pinching in at her waist, to the Routemaster-red lips and heels.
‘We have wine!’ declared a triumphant Holly, opening the bottle and popping it onto the kitchen table to let it breathe. Then she bent down to the speakers, turned down the insanely loud Ella, and headed outside, kissing Bella on the cheek. She stood on the terrace and took in the staggering view of North London trees and rooftops, remembering again why they’d chosen to live at the top of so many flights of stairs.
‘Sorry, it took forever to get here from zone twenty. We’ve left you to do all the dinner. Can we help now?’
‘Oh, crap!’ Bella stubbed out her cigarette and headed back into the kitchen where some pots were just starting to bubble over. Next to the hob there was a cavalcade of crumbs, empty tofu packaging, stray lentils and shards of purple sprouting broccoli. Bella began stirring the lentils with one hand while applying mascara with the other, using the kitchen window as a mirror.
‘No, it’s all under control. Just open some wine. Who’s this friend of yours that’s coming over again?’
‘Olivia. We were in halls together at university. She’s down in London this weekend,’ Holly said, attempting to fold napkins in a way that didn’t look entirely eighties. ‘She stayed up in Manchester after graduation, which is why we don’t see that much of each other. That, and she’s been mummified in a relationship for the last seven years. But apparently they’ve just broken up, so…’ Holly looked at Bella to make sure she was paying attention, ‘…so she’s probably going to be a little fragile right now,’ she warned just as the doorbell rang.
‘Liv!’ she squealed into the intercom. ‘Hey love. Come on up.’
Some moments later, Olivia Mahoney appeared under the curved archway next to the kitchen. Unlike Holly and Lawrence, who had both emerged from the stairs looking like they’d just been traversing the Pennines, Olivia was barely out of breath.
‘Hello!’ she sang, with a smile that made everyone stop what they were doing. Olivia had always been disarmingly stylish, but today she appeared to have actually been curated by Dolce & Gabbana themselves – if her freshly straightened mahogany hair and immaculate shift dress that perfectly highlighted her curves – were anything to go by. In short, this was not the look of a recent refugee from Dumped Ville, Tennessee.
‘Holly! It’s been so long! Oh my days, you look so healthy!’ she said, going in for a hug.
‘Thanks,’ Holly smiled, wondering mid-hug whether to take this as a compliment, or some sort of backhanded suggestion of weight gain.
‘I’m so sorry to hear about you and Ross,’ Holly lamented as she squeezed her tight, ‘how are you coping?’
‘Oh! I’m fine, really,’ Olivia said, disentangling herself, ‘actually, I’m sort of loving all this free time I’ve got now. And it’s given me a great excuse to move back to London. Didsbury is lovely and all, but it can be a bit provincial.’
‘Liv,’ Holly said, ‘this is the lovely Bella, one of my flatmates. We met when we temped together at a bleak call-centre after uni.’
Bella took Liv’s hand and shuddered. ‘Oh God, don’t remind me! “Good afternoon, may I speak with the named home-owner?”’ she said in her best admin nasal. ‘“Are you entirely happy with your current broadband provider?” Aaaahh! Kill me now!’ she yelled, curtailing her skit at the sight of Olivia’s muddled expression.
Meanwhile Lawrence had wandered in. Apparently in some kind of hunger trance, he walked towards the fridge, opened it and leaned in to study the contents.
‘And this is Lawrence,’ Holly said, sounding apologetic. ‘We’ll be eating soon, Lawrence.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ Lawrence said, shutting the fridge and turning to face Olivia. ‘Sorry to hear about your break-up and all.’
‘Oh, thanks, but as I was just saying to Hol, I’m fine about it, really. We’d definitely reached the end of the line,’ she said, blinking while running through a word-perfect speech about all the benefits of being single – and how her newfound free time meant she could now take up all the things she’d secretly been craving. Just as she was immersed in the virtues of learning your way round the stock market, Bella inserted a glass of wine into her hands a little too forcefully.
‘So Liv, tell me to shut up if you’d rather not go there, but what happened?’ Holly said. ‘Last I remember, you and Ross were really happy?’
Olivia inspected her nails. Sensing a girl chat brewing, Lawrence grabbed his bag of tobacco and retreated to the terrace.
Olivia sighed. ‘All right. I’ll talk about it – for five minutes, max – then we’ll move on to something more interesting!’ She took a large sip of wine. ‘So, as you may recall, Ross is something of a computer boffin. Sorry, was,’ she added a beat later, remembering with a jolt he belonged to her past tense now.
‘Geeks can be hot though,’ Bella said, ‘what did he do for a living?’
Olivia smirked. ‘If you really want to know, he was a “Backend Developer”.’
Bella snorted. ‘That’s never a real job title.’
‘I’m afraid it is. I think it means he does coding for websites. But don’t quote me.’
A mobile phone on the table began to flash and vibrate, and Olivia’s skin tone turned a few pantones lighter.
‘Is it he?’ Bella asked, leaning forwards. She picked up the mobile and examined the flashing photo. Then she looked at Olivia and grinned. ‘Wait, that’s your Ross?’
Olivia nodded.
‘Well, he can backend develop me, anytime…’
‘Bella!’ screeched Holly, elbowing her in the ribs.
Olivia gave a knowing smile. ‘He’s all yours,’ she said, retrieving the phone and cancelling the call. She put it back into her bag and for a nanosecond looked wistful.
‘You’re not going to talk to him?’ Holly asked.
Olivia shook her head; her eyes belying more grief than she perhaps wanted them to. ‘No. When it’s over, it’s over,’ she said as the phone made a loud beep from within her bag. ‘Stick a fork in it, I say.’
‘You’re not even going to see what that is? He’s probably left a voicemail?’ Holly said.
‘Nah.’
No surprises there, Holly reasoned, remembering how at university they’d always joked that Olivia must have been having a cheeky manicure the day God was dishing out the batches of needy female hormones. Which went some way to explaining why the last time Holly had seen her, Olivia had declared herself in the midst of a ‘friendship audit’. Although Holly had been spared this time around, Olivia’s plan had been to prune away anyone peripheral, Facebook or otherwise, that she hadn’t seen in a year. One by one, she had called up each unsuspecting friend for a fond farewell, in the hope that streamlining her social life would have a Zenifying effect. Now that Olivia was newly single, Holly couldn’t help wondering whether she might be regretting the mass cull.
‘So you were telling us what happened?’ Bella said.
Olivia rolled her eyes like a child being told she had to eat her peas before any pudding. ‘All right then. Just quickly. So, as you know, he was a bit of a computer nerd – which was sexy in the beginning. You know, he had a proper geek-chic thing going on. But then he went freelance,