‘But maybe house prices shot up after the film? Maybe Notting Hill used to be like Hackney?’ Bella posed, desperately still wanting to believe.
‘Hey, you know what would be fun?’ Holly began, her eyes on Lawrence. ‘We should make a tongue-in-cheek mash-up of all the Curtis films, where the characters live in properties which actually correspond to their income. So, let’s see… Will Thacker would live in an ex local authority one-bed in Kensal Rise, with a Juliet balcony at best.’
Lawrence laughed. ‘Yes! And we’d replace all the friendly cabbies and romantic Routemasters with those charmless new buses with grumpy drivers that refuse to stop for you.’
‘We’ll have it raining the whole time! And we’ll call it Stamford Hill!’
‘Perfect! And Love Actually could be – Dumped Actually,’ Lawrence said, smirking.
‘Or, Shat on from a Great Height, Actually!’ Holly added, and they both fell about laughing.
‘Yeah, yeah. Whatevs,’ Bella said. ‘So. Anyone for Four Weddings? Oldie but a goodie?’
Holly began to realise she and Lawrence were outnumbered. An hour and twenty minutes later, she was feeling her usual bout of nausea at the scene where Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell kiss in the rain, when she noticed Lawrence’s eyelids closing out of the corner of her eye, his wine glass hanging off his fingers at a precarious angle. In slow motion, she saw his fingers relax and the glass slip, sending Shiraz cascading to the floor. As everyone leapt up to try and stem the tide with a whole roll of extra-quilted kitchen roll, Holly reached a conclusion. It was time to take Lawrence to a place where other people were not.
Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom and smiled. Once again Lawrence lay on top of her bed, eyes closed, with all his clothes on. His muddy Adidas trainers hung off the edge of the bed. A trickle of drool was slowly wandering from his lips and onto her freshly laundered pillowcase.
‘Lawry…’ she said, peeling off her clothes and hopping into bed beside him. She kissed him on the back of his neck, noticing that, as ever, he smelled very strongly of unwashed hair. She told herself this was sexy and manly, and not that Lawrence was a disciple of the ‘your hair starts to clean itself after a while’ gospel of hair care.
She began unlacing his shoes, rolling down his jeans and unbuttoning his shirt.
‘Hey, I’m fine,’ he said, as though bidding his manservant off duty.
‘Oi,’ she said, resorting to prodding.
After a few more inaudible grunts that sounded like ‘No… sleeping…’, he turned his back to face the wall and resumed snoring. Following a couple more failed attempts at erotic coercion via the means of spooning and shiatsu, Holly gave up and turned around so they could do that less talked about but equally popular sexual position – the back-to-back ‘we’re in a strop’ position, where they remained for some time. Occasionally, their bare bottoms made contact, but they quickly moved apart on impact as though electrically repelled.
An hour later, she felt someone kissing the back of her neck.
‘Hey. I miss you.’
‘I’m right next to you,’ she said, but she knew what he meant.
She felt his arms tighten around her. She turned to face him and they shared a slow, sleepy kiss.
‘Meet me somewhere?’ he said when they stopped. ‘Old Havana?’ His eyes closed again, his last words dispatched.
Holding his head to her chest, she closed her eyes and thought of vintage motor cars, cigars and salsa dancers and everything else they knew about the city they planned to visit together. She attempted to teleport herself there, to join him in his sleep-world. This wasn’t a low-budget version of Inception; it was a game they’d invented when they first got together. It had been one of those nights where they’d laid together talking and cuddling all night, amazed at having found each other and wondering how other couples ever got any sleep. This had been their way to make parting for sleep just that bit easier: to pretend they would meet in their dreams.
Sometimes it didn’t work so well. Tonight in particular, there was heavy congestion on the teleporting highway. Five hours later, Holly was staring vacantly at the ceiling, listening to the busy traffic noises of Holloway, not Havana. She closed her eyes as she heard the recycling van belting out its one-hit wonder, ‘Stand Clear. Vehicle reversing’. Sometimes the traffic was so unfeasibly loud that she had to check her mattress wasn’t actually in the middle of the road.
After a while, she became aware of how spectacularly un-tired she was, and lay watching Lawrence snoring blissfully away. Attempting to locate some inner yogic calm, she tuned in to the rise and fall of her boyfriend’s snores. Loud to soft. Heavy breathing to quiet breathing, then back to blissful silence. Another chorus of heavy breathing, a guttural snort, then back to more quiet breathing. Holly listened to this on a loop for hours, wondering when she’d first become an insomniac. Gradually, the room stopped being so dark, and Lawrence’s snoring solo found some backing singers in the baby blackbirds outside her window.
Two hours later, she switched off her alarm and wanted to weep at the time. She stared down at Lawrence sleeping and whispered, ‘Lawry, I’ve got to go. See you later.’
A freckly and toned forearm emerged from under the covers, attempting to pull her back into the warm, feathery world under the duvet. Half asleep, he planted kisses on her cheeks, moving down to her neck.
‘Hey, I’ve got to go to work,’ she said as he drew her further inside and pulled the duvet high above their heads. He tucked it round them, so they were hidden from the world, in their own dimly lit universe. And then she remembered. When things were good with Lawrence, there was nowhere she’d rather be than under the duvet with him. Hiding from responsibility, from pretending to be a grown-up.
‘Stay.’
‘I can’t. It’s only my second week!’ she said as he planted kisses on her stomach. She pulled in her non-existent abdominal muscles. ‘I’ve got to try and be in early as I don’t think my new boss is terribly impressed with me. My first episode ended up over length, when I forgot to allow for the extra ad-breaks they have on Sky!’
Lawrence looked at Holly, his eyes hazy with sleep. ‘But you can’t go – I’ll miss you too much.’
‘But I need to try and make a better impression.’ Mustering all her willpower, she lifted the lid on their private universe, letting the cold air to their faces. It was a wrench, but slowly she untangled herself from the covers and peeled herself out of bed. She kissed him goodbye, feeling a tinge of pain.
‘I love you,’ mumbled Lawrence through slumber, his eyes closed.
‘Love you too.’
‘Love you three,’ he said as he sank into sleep.
Holly smiled and tucked in the covers around him so he was all sealed up and no cold air could sneak in. She stood watching him sleep; his brown curls splayed out over the pillow, his long eyelashes twitching as he dreamed. She thought how adorable he looked, all wrapped up like a lanky, stubbly bundle of cute. He was exasperating at times, yes, but Lawrence-on-form was so full of life that she struggled to imagine a world without him.
In a way, knowing it was hard to leave him gave her a kind of comfort. Maybe Shakespeare was onto something with that whole ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’ thing. Sweet because somehow it made it OK that they were still together – that even five years in, it still hurt a little bit to say goodbye. Yeah, we’re all right, Holly told herself as she tiptoed out the room and down the hallway. Then quietly, she snuck through the front door and went to work.
‘OK, that’s