Her mobile phone, on the table in front of her, bleeps and she jabs it with a bitten-down fingernail. Daisy’s eyeliner is deftly applied, her blonde hair straightened and shiny, but her cuticles are ragged, her red nail varnish chipped and flaking. Her nails are the one chink in her perfectly polished armour. She catches me looking and clenches her fingers into fists, burying them in her lap.
“He’s a bully, Emma, pure and simple. He’s been criticising you and making you feel shit since the day you started.”
“I know, but there’s a rumour he’s going to take over the Manchester office.”
“You’ve been saying that for three years.”
“I can’t just leave.”
“Why? Because of your mum? Jesus Christ, Emma, you need to grow a pair. You’re twenty-five years old. You only get one life; do what you want. Fuck your mum.”
“Daisy!”
“What?” She tops up her glass and knocks it back. From the glazed look in her eyes, I suspect that this bottle of wine isn’t her first of the night. “Someone’s got to say it and it might as well be me. You need to stop caring about her opinion and do what you want. It’s getting boring, your obsession with what your bloody family thinks. You’ve been on about it since uni and—”
“Sorry I’ve bored you. I thought we were supposed to be friends.” I reach for my bag and stand up, but Daisy reaches across the table and grabs my wrist.
“Don’t be like that. And stop bloody apologising. Sit down, Emma.”
I perch on the edge of my seat. I can’t speak. If I do, I’ll cry, and I hate crying in public.
Daisy keeps hold of my hand. “I’m not being a bitch. I just want you to be happy, that’s all. You’ve already told me you’ve saved up enough money to stop work for three months.”
“That’s emergency money.”
“And this is an emergency. You’re miserable. Come and work with me in the pub until you get something else. Ian would take you on in a heartbeat; he loves redheads.”
“It’s dyed.”
“For God’s sake, Emma—”
Her phone vibrates on the table and the tinny sound of Rihanna and Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” cuts through the chatter and hum in the pub.
Daisy holds up a hand to me then snatches up her phone. “Leanne? You okay?” She puts a finger in one ear and frowns in concentration. “Okay. Yeah, we’ll be there. Give us fifteen minutes to grab a cab. All right? Okay. See you in a bit.”
She tucks her phone into the tiny clutch bag on the table then looks across at me. There’s concern in her blue eyes, but a sliver of excitement, too.
“That was Leanne. She’s in that new gay club, Malice, in Soho with Al. Al’s on the hunt for Simone and her new girlfriend.”
“Shit.” I clutch my bag and reach round for my coat on the back of my chair.
“You okay if we go? I know we were talking about your job but—”
“It’s fine.” I stand up. “Al needs us. Let’s grab a cab.”
We sit in silence as the taxi splashes through puddles and the bright lights of London’s West End speed past us. The streets are unusually empty, the heavy rain forcing locals and tourists into already packed pubs, their windows misty with condensation.
Daisy looks up from her phone. “You know it’s the anniversary of her brother’s death, don’t you?”
“Al’s brother?”
“Yeah. I rang her at lunchtime.”
“How was she?”
“Pissed.”
“Shit, at work?”
“No, skiving; she was in the pub.”
“She’s been doing that a lot recently.”
“Yeah, when she’s not stalking Simone,” Daisy says, and we share a look.
It’s been over a month since Al and Simone split up, but Al’s behaviour is becoming more and more erratic by the day. She’s convinced that Simone left her because she met someone else, and she’s determined to find out who it is. She spends hours on Google, looking for “clues”, and she’s created several false Facebook profiles to try to get access to Simone’s page and the pages of anyone she’s friends with. None of us had seen the split coming, not least Al, who’d been planning on proposing. She’d been saving up for months for a ring and a safari in Kenya so she could propose on an elephant ride – Simone’s favourite animal.
“Here we are, ladies,” the cab driver says over his shoulder as we pull up in front of the neon pink Malice sign.
Daisy pokes a tenner through the glass partition then opens the taxi door. “Let’s go and get Al.”
“Excuse me, darling. Thank you. Excuse me.”
Daisy elbows her way through the throng of bodies clogging up the stairs, and I follow in her wake. We’ve already squeezed our way across the dance floor on the ground level in search of Leanne and Al, but there was no sign of them. No sign of Simone, either.
“Loos!” Daisy twists back and waves her mobile phone at me as she reaches the top of the stairs then takes a left.
I struggle to push my way through the huge crowd of women drinking beer and hanging out outside the women’s loos but finally manage to make my way inside.
“Oi!” A large woman wearing a Superdry T-shirt and oversized jeans shoots out a tattooed arm to bar my way as I attempt to squeeze past her. “There’s a queue.”
“Sorry, I’m just looking for a friend.”
“Emma, in here!” A cubicle door swings open and Daisy waves at me through the gap. She pulls an apologetic face at the woman in the queue. “Sorry, we’re dealing with a crisis in here.”
“Bloody lesbians,” the woman says, “always a melodrama.”
There’s no room for me to squeeze inside the cubicle so I hover outside and poke my head around the door. Al is sitting on the loo with her head in her hands. Leanne and Daisy are pressed up against the walls either side of her. Every couple of seconds, the main door into the loos opens and pumping house music floods the entire space as women file in and out, grumbling as they squeeze past me to find an empty cubicle.
“Al, sweetie.” Daisy hitches up her dress and squats down next to her friend. “Let’s get you home.”
Al shakes her head. The hems of her jeans are wet with rainwater and the laces of one of her trainers are untied. There’s cellophane poking out from beneath the arm of her T-shirt. She’s had another tattoo but I can’t make out what it is.
Leanne catches my eye, as though noticing me for the first time. She’s dyed her fringe pink since the last time I saw her. Her sharp black bob has always looked a bit severe, but with the pink streak and her new thick-rimmed black “geek” specs dominating her thin face, she looks like she’s wearing a motorbike helmet.
She shrugs and angles her arm towards me so I can read the time on her Mickey Mouse watch. It’s midnight. She flashes her fingers at me then holds up two more. Shit, Al’s been drinking for twelve hours.
This isn’t the first time Leanne’s had to call Daisy and me to take Al home. At five foot six, fourteen stone and bull-like in temperament, it takes all four of us to manoeuvre Al anywhere, especially when she’s drunk. Simone used to manage it, but she had an advantage: Al was in love with her. She could always talk her into going home, no matter how much she’d had to drink.
Two of