‘Get off me!’ she shrieked as Jenny and I attempted to pull her back onto the island. The river was only about knee-deep but that hadn’t stopped her getting soaking wet from head to toe.
Across the way, Roberto the Rower and the man who had shown us down the dark, dark tunnel jumped into one of the row boats, manically trying to reach the waterlogged waitress.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked as she crawled out of the water. Jenny picked up one side of her sodden kimono and tried to wring it out with a helpful smile. The waitress waved her away, Jenny ducking just in time to avoid a damp slap.
‘No, I’m not all right,’ she yelled. ‘Look at me. What the fuck were you doing on the floor?’
‘What is happening?’ The host from the front door stormed up the path, straightening his tie as he blustered onto the scene, Roberto and his gold trunks bringing up the rear.
‘We really don’t want to make a big deal about this,’ Jenny said, clearing her throat and dusting herself off as she stood up. ‘So we’ll take a round of free drinks and everything’s cool.’
The host fixed her with a steely glare the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my mother caught me sneaking in through the living room window at three a.m. after I lost my keys at Peter Jensen’s seventeenth birthday party.
‘The sanctity of the forest has been disturbed,’ he said calmly as the waitress hurled herself against Roberto’s naked chest. Out of everyone, he didn’t seem too mad about it. ‘You need to leave.’
‘You’re kicking us out?’ I replied, indignant and, more importantly, still starving. ‘You’re serving booze and charging people hundreds of dollars to play hook-a-duck in the arse end of Brooklyn and you didn’t expect anyone to fall in, ever?’
‘Angela Clark, you savage,’ Jenny breathed in my ear before turning to the waitress with a sympathetic smile. ‘We’re really super sorry.’
‘I’m not even a waitress,’ she wailed. ‘I’m an actress, this isn’t what I do. I have six thousand followers on Instagram.’
Jenny looked over her shoulder at me, impressed.
‘Wanna come to Hawaii?’ she asked as the waitress turned out her pocket and dropped a tiny goldfish back into the river.
‘Just get out before I call the cops,’ the host ordered. ‘Roberto, take them out the back.’
‘Your loss, lady.’ Jenny threw her hands up over her head and turned on her gorgeous red patent heel as we were escorted off the premises. ‘For real, I can’t give this trip away.’
‘Come on,’ I muttered, considerably less keen to make eye contact with the other diners than I had been when we arrived. Being marched through the kitchens and kicked out into a dustbin-filled alleyway was not how I’d envisioned my evening ending. ‘Dinosaur BBQ is around the corner. Let’s go and eat some proper food.’
‘OK but you owe me a hundred bucks,’ she said, curtseying at Roberto as he shrugged and then slammed the door in our faces.
‘I do?’
‘You bet me a hundred bucks that one of us would fall in the water by the end of the night,’ Jenny replied, impossibly pleased with herself. ‘And neither of us did.’
‘Hmm.’ I linked my arm through hers as we turned the corner back onto 3rd Avenue. ‘I suppose I do. Look at us, growing as people.’
She grinned and gave my arm a squeeze.
‘If you come to Hawaii, I’ll let you off?’
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘If I pay for dinner will you shut up about Hawaii?’
‘No, you’re totally coming, doll. The sooner you accept it, the better.’
At least she’d been right about one thing, I thought as we walked on, arm in arm towards a plateful of pulled pork. It had certainly been a night I’d never forget.
Light was already beginning to seep in around the curtains when someone decided to lean on their car horn right outside my bedroom window at six a.m. on Thursday morning. I hated to start my days feeling homicidal but this was the price I paid to live in New York; occasionally, people were thoughtless dicks. Presumably there were thoughtless dicks everywhere but the horn honking really seemed much more prevalent here than anywhere else I’d ever been. Whether I liked it or not, I was awake and I knew the intelligent thing to do would be to stay awake. Either Alice or my alarm would go off by seven anyway and the extra hour would be meaningless, I’d feel worse than if I got up now. But I wasn’t intelligent, I was exhausted. As I rolled over onto my side, pulling the duvet up under my chin, Alex curled around me, pressing himself into my back and giving me another bone to deal with.
‘Alex,’ I breathed into my pillow as he ran his hand under the covers, down my arm, my waist, my hip, tiptoeing his calloused fingertips across my leg and tracing circles on my thigh. ‘I’m tired.’
He didn’t say anything. Instead I felt his warm body moving against the curves of my back, his fingers sliding upwards under the edge of my shorts.
‘It’s so early,’ I mumbled, smiling into my pillow.
‘You don’t have to do anything but lie there,’ Alex replied, lifting my hair up at the nape of my neck and pressing his lips against my skin. ‘Unless that sounds really creepy and you would like to be more actively involved.’
‘That sounds like a very workable plan,’ I replied, giving in as his hand slipped between my legs.
It had been a while since this had happened. And by ‘a while’ I meant more than month. I thought I knew what tired was before I had a baby – living with Jenny was hardly a relaxing experience, after all – but this was something else entirely. Motherhood utterly consumed me, mind, body and spirit. For the first six months, every ounce of my existence had gone into Alice and now, as I tried to pull back pieces of my life, I was even more exhausted than before. No matter what the baby books said, it was almost impossible to get yourself in the mood when you were so exhausted you felt like you were in a medically induced coma every time your head hit the pillow. No matter how hot your husband might be.
‘Alex, wait,’ I whispered, my voice catching in my throat as he pulled my T-shirt up over my head and the world turned pink for a moment as I untangled myself from the fabric.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, stopping immediately.
Wrangling my T-shirt back down, I offered him my best apologetic grimace.
‘I need a wee.’
Really I had to start working on my Kegel exercises.
‘Give me two seconds,’ I said, all arms and legs as I scrambled out the bed, running to the bathroom on tiptoes. A quick wee, a rinse around with mouthwash and, bloody hell, I thought as I caught sight of myself in the mirror, maybe we’ll go for a once-over with the micellar water, given that I got approximately none of my mascara off before I went to bed. Motherhood meant multitasking and I was well into my second cleanse, sitting on the loo, when I heard Alice start.
‘No, no, no,’ I chanted, dropping pads of used cotton wool in the bin. ‘Please go back to sleep. Mummy needs to get some.’
Looking down at my shorts and knickers, a pool of pale pink fabric on the bathroom floor, I sighed. My sleeping clothes were a sad state