‘Having a good time, pumpkin pie chicken thing?’
I struggled to escape. ‘Mm hmm …’
He ignored this blatant message of despair and started to tickle me.
‘Come on, come dance with me.’
Perhaps the evening could be salvaged after all. However, my image of a romantic smoochy dance-floor show of togetherness in which I could show everyone (well, that poxy brother of Fraser’s) what a successful character I was lasted about two seconds, till I remembered that Alex was one of the world’s all-time worst dancers. He counted out the beat, wrongly, while bouncing from foot to foot. Not only this, but he was so pissed that he got distracted and forgot who he was dancing with, so that he was bouncing around the room like Tigger before he takes his medicine, while I was left bopping along on my own, like a girl in a Human League video. I checked the clock and it was only midnight.
Cursing the fact that I didn’t go with the feeling ill thing twenty minutes ago when I could still have caught the tube, I leaned over and, gently but firmly, grabbed Alex’s attention.
‘I’m going home.’ I smiled sweetly.
‘What?’
It was impossible to hear a damn thing.
‘I’M GOING HOME! I’M HAVING A SHIT TIME AND I’M GOING HOME!’ I hollered, exactly as the music stopped, and everyone turned around to play ‘Spot the Harpy’. I flinched, tried a half-hearted grin, and decided to scram.
‘Thanks, Amanda, it was wonderful, lovely to chat, speak to you soon, bye!’ For once, I was the one doing my socializing on the run.
Heading out the door, an extremely puzzled and drunk Alex staggering behind me, I practically bumped into Fraser, who’d been saying goodnight to guests.
He looked at me for a second, quizzically. Fuck it. I wasn’t going to remind him yet again how insignificant I’d been in his life.
Alex scrunched warily ahead down the gravel drive. Of course, the pre-booked taxis wouldn’t turn up for hours yet, so it was a mile-long walk down the drive, then out into fucking Fulham to try and catch a black cab on a wet Saturday night just after pub chucking-out time.
‘Melanie?’ I heard behind me as I stomped off.
I turned round. He was wearing the same kilt as Angus, but with a less porcine effect, and his curly hair had fallen over his eyes from dancing. I resisted the urge to run up and give him a huge hug and rub him painfully on the head to show him how pleased I was to see him again.
‘Hi,’ I said, coolly. ‘Ehm … great party.’
‘I suppose. Yes. Yes, it was. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you on the phone.’
So, bring it up again whydoncha?
‘Oh, no, I didn’t recognize you either,’ I stuttered.
That’s why I shouted out ‘Frase!’
‘Well, I suppose it’s been a while.’
‘Yes, it has.’
‘So, I’ll see you around then.’
The beautiful grounds were quiet. Silhouetted against the big house, taller but less of the long streak of piss he used to be, Fraser looked both extremely familiar and, now, extremely foreign to me.
‘No doubt.’ Scintillating.
‘C’mon, darling!’ hollered Alex, sounding a bit worried. I smiled weakly at Fraser and followed him down the path. After being hustled out of the building, he wasn’t sure whether or not he’d done anything wrong – and neither was I. After all, who was I cross at? Him? His friends? My parents, for not being better off? My parents’ distant ancestors, for not being friends with the king? I could see his fuddled brain trying to work it out. Fortunately, he plumped for the former, to be on the safe side.
‘Are you OK?’
I had to work out my strategy quickly. What I wanted to say was:
‘No, I hate your friends because they’re all horrible to me. Well, they’re not even horrible, they just ignore me because I didn’t go to the right school and have a crap name, so actually I’m jealous more than actual dislike, but I don’t like it, waaaaaaah.’
Being an independent nineties girl with her own opinions, though, what I actually said was:
‘Yes, gorgeous, I just couldn’t wait to get you home – I had to get you out of there somehow.’ And I added a girlish giggle for effect.
As the blazing golden lights of the illuminated mansion dimmed behind the trees and I looked at my big, strong, placated, slightly wobbly man, I felt better again.
We spent a wonderful Sunday morning in bed the next day, ‘nursing’ his hangover. Then – after he saw I wasn’t too interested in dissecting what a fantastic night it had been, ‘particularly the bit when Barfield stuck the napkin up his arse, ha ha ha!’ – he went out to see his mates.
I lolled around with the papers all day.
Back late, he barged in loudly, waking Linda, probably, and certainly me. After bouncing around the kitchen looking for something to eat (I never seemed to have any food in the house after my first week of being a show-off chef, so God knows what he found, although Linda was looking, if anything, even more fucked off these days, so it might have been that. You’d think she’d like having a man around the house – God knows, I did), he came in, sat on the end of the bed, kissed me squarely on the nose and announced, ‘Hey, guess what! I’ve found a flat! Or rather, I’ve found my old flat – Charlie’s forgiven me and I’m moving back in with him!’
I sat up. I hadn’t rationally thought about it, but now he’d told me, I realized that I had planned our future out, after all, in my head. We would go find a room together somewhere nice, and eventually get our own place, once he had this music company job. Or we would both stay where we were – Linda wouldn’t mind. Perhaps she’d even move out – oh no, she couldn’t, it was her flat. Either way, I hadn’t seen us being apart so soon, nor the decision so gleefully made on his part. Despite it being only two weeks, waking up next to him every day already felt a necessity of my life, something I didn’t want to do without.
‘Ermm, great!’ I said casually. ‘So, is Charlie still living in …?’ As if Charlie and I had had tons of in-depth chats about our personal lives.
‘Fulham, yeah. It’s a great flat.’
‘But it’s bloody miles away! And it’s in West London … you hate West London!’
‘Well, I can’t stay here pestering you for ever, can I?’
Actually, that’s exactly what I’d been planning on.
I pouted prettily, in what I hoped was an appealing manner. ‘I wouldn’t mind.’
He looked at me and ruffled my hair again. But not as enthusiastically as before.
‘It’ll be fine. You’re still my favourite pumpkin, aren’t you?’ I was. We dived under the bedsheets. End of matter. Well, apart from when I got up to get a glass of water at three o’clock in the morning and found myself inexplicably staring at my reflection in the kitchen window and starting to cry. I went back to bed and tried to forget all about it, clinging on to him in the night.
Fran popped by on Monday evening before we went to the pub.
‘Enjoy the party then?’
‘Ha ha. You were missed.’
‘Yes, only by you and Alex’s ghastly mate Charlie, who seems