Those were the rules, among so many others. Amanda tried to follow them, but tended to fail on an ever-downward curve.
‘What, that?’ Rachel asked. Without lifting a manicured hand from the steering wheel, she pointed at the huge wall of curved marble plonked on a stretch of extraordinarily expensive real estate in the middle of Mayfair. It was approached, humbly, by statues of a horse, a dog and possibly a carrier pigeon, though Amanda had never ventured close enough to be sure. Why would she? Why would anyone?
‘Yes, that,’ Amanda said, even though a part of her brain was already screaming warning signals. ‘They Had No Choice,’ she read, intoning the motto of the Memorial in what she felt was a pretty fair approximation of Huw Edwards. ‘Of course they had no choice! They were animals! It’s an insult to the actual men and woman, actual fathers and sons and mothers and daughters who died in war to equate them with a fucking Labrador.’
There was a silence, as Rachel and Mei exchanged a look in the front seat, and Amanda knew then that she was lost, that this might not be the last time she was invited to cram into Rachel’s car for a let’s-carpe-the unexpectedly-sunny-diem-and-have-an-impromptu-picnic/endurance-session in the park with her and Mei, but the list of invitations had definitely become finite.
Even saying ‘fucking’ (twice) had been a bit of a risk, but she’d thought she was the friend among the three of them who swore, the friend who knew how to roll a joint if required (it had not yet been required), and the friend who’d chewed through her marriage with a lack of decorum bordering on the hyena-like. Rachel and Mei were both divorced, too, though not quite so young and not quite so vigorously. It was the role they’d given her, one she’d done her best to fill.
Oh, well, sighed the voice in Amanda’s head. Fuck ’em.
Even after eight months, Amanda was still the new girl. She was a transport consultant, as were Rachel and Mei. They were three of nine women in a company of seventy-four, which had to be illegal. It wasn’t that transport was such a non-woman sort of industry necessarily (though it was a little), it’s that this particular company – Umbrello Flattery and Unwin – had a Head of Personnel (Felicity Hartford, unquestionably woman number one out of nine) who hated other women. She’d informed Amanda at her interview that Amanda was ‘at best’ the eighth most qualified applicant (of eight), but that even the elderly Umbrello Senior had begun to wonder why his newly-retired secretary had been replaced by a fashionable young man with what looked like a ‘shaft of metal, Mrs Hartford’ pierced through the skin under the back of his shirt collar. Before Mrs Hartford was ‘bored into her grave by yet another lawsuit’, Amanda would have to do.
Amanda worked in Rachel and Mei’s unit – Mrs Hartford liking to keep the women in as few groups as possible, which made it easier to fire the worst one should she wake up in the morning with the inclination to do so – and they’d taken her under their wing as a fellow young divorcee. They invited Amanda out to lunch her first day, and in those forty-five minutes Amanda had learned not only that Rachel had put the naked pictures she’d found of her ex-husband’s mistress on the memorial website of said mistress’s late mother and that Mei struggled with thrush, but also that Rachel had survived – and possibly started – a house fire in college that had killed two of her roommates and that Mei had three separate, eye-watering anecdotes about circumcised men. ‘Were they brothers?’ Amanda had laughed, a deep, gravelly, dirty laugh she might have said was her best feature, had anyone ever asked.
No one had laughed back. It had been a long eight months.
‘Can you get the picnic basket?’ Rachel asked, as she pulled her Mini into a space.
‘Sure,’ Amanda said. She always got the picnic basket.
Mei got out of the passenger side, face concentrating hard on her phone. She was tracking her infant daughter on GPS during a visitation weekend with the baby’s father. ‘That’s unbelievable,’ said Mei, who didn’t believe anything. ‘He’s taken her to Nando’s.’
‘What the fuck is in here?’ Amanda asked, gracelessly dragging the unreasonably heavy basket out of the Mini. She felt like a rhinoceros backing out of a display cabinet.
‘You know, you’re twenty-five?’ Rachel said. ‘Which is younger than us, okay, I get that, but still too old to talk like you’re on Skins?’
‘Sorry,’ Amanda grunted, as she finally got the picnic basket out of the car. Where it promptly plummeted to the ground. A puddle of wine bubbled out the basket’s bottom like a particularly expensive spring.
Rachel sighed. ‘That was like our only bottle of red?’
‘Sorry,’ Amanda said again.
Rachel said nothing, just let an awkward moment of silence pass while she waited for Mei to notice Amanda standing in the puddle of Pinot.
‘Ooooooh,’ Mei whispered, finally seeing. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Amanda always started well with friends. In primary and secondary school, in college, at the different jobs she’d had since graduating, plus of course the gang of friends that had hung around Henri. They all liked her when they first met her. Really, they did.
Things that might have been threatening in a man – her slight tallness, her slightly broad shoulders, her deep, commanding voice – were conversely disarming in a woman. Men would look at her and think ‘woman’ but also somehow ‘rugby’ and find themselves buying her a pint while asking her whether she thought that hot Dutch girl reading Economics would give them the time of day. Gay men rather liked her, which had its benefits but was also a bit like being spayed, while women seemed to cherish her at first as someone around whom they could finally be themselves, speak their minds, not feel so bound up in girly competitiveness. She was a proper mate, she was.
In this, apparently, they were mistaken.
‘Oh, look!’ said (to select one among many) her newest best friend in college, Karen, who also read Geography and also didn’t see the point of Bristol and also thought that the failure of each and every political philosophy throughout history could be boiled down to the simple, basic truth that People Are Dumb. ‘The Wizard of Oz is on!’
‘Really?’ Amanda said, flopping down on the couch beside her. They’d had a hot night out. Her best clubbing clothes were stuck to her from the evening’s sweat, her feet were killing her in these shoes – women this calcium-dense were not natural matches for high heels – and though she and Karen had danced and drunk and laughed and smoked all night, neither of them had managed to pull or even catch a boy’s eye. To be fair, Karen had a nose issue. And an eyebrow issue. And, well, a limp, but you could hardly see it while they were dancing. Still, they’d had fun. It was all very promising.
With some help from her mother and stepdad Hank – her father was paying the tuition fees and she knew he could barely afford those, so she always lied when he asked if she ever needed anything more – Amanda had just about enough to rent half a two-bedroom near the university for her final year. Karen had responded to Amanda’s notice on the college room exchange site. They’d had coffee, they’d hit it off, they’d moved in. Two weeks and no problems so far.
‘I didn’t even think they bothered showing this on TV any more,’ Karen said enthusiastically, tucking her uneven feet beneath her on the couch. She inhaled deeply, readying herself to join in on the next chorus of ‘We’re Off To See–’
‘I hate this fucking movie,’ Amanda said.
Karen choked on what could only have been the air she just breathed in. ‘You what?’ she coughed, looking like Amanda had just punched her.