2000 - Thirtynothing

  Lisa Jewell

  Thirtynothing

  2000

  Delilah could have let him down, been a disappointment after all these years. She could have been fat, or old-looking, or happily married with loads of children. She could’ve been rude or stand-offish. But she wasn’t—she was better looking than he remembered, she was obviously unhappily married, had no children and was actually much nicer than she’d ever been when they were together.

  Have you ever wondered what happened to your first love?

  Imagine bumping into your first love twelve years after you last saw her. Imagine that she’s even more beautiful than she was when she was eighteen and that you ask her out for dinner and she says yes. This is what happens to Dig Ryan on the day of his thirtieth birthday.

  Now imagine that you’re Nadine, Dig’s best friend for the last fifteen years. Imagine that Delilah was your nemesis at school and that even after twelve years, you can’t bear to be around her. You might find yourself feeling unexpectedly jealous and you might do something really childish like phoning your first love and asking him out, just to get your own back.

  This is a story about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends and what happens when you start messing with the past. It’s also a story about best friends and growing up and how sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t in the past or in the future, but right under your nose.

  ONE

  Dig woke with a start.

  The first thing he was conscious of was the taste in his mouth, a rancid coating of…what was it? Onions? Garlic? Some kind of battery-acid-type thing going on in there as well. He slowly brought a hand from beneath his duvet and cupped it around his mouth. He let out a small puff of coagulated breath and sniffed it back in. Jesus. Grim beyond belief. He clamped his mouth shut again.

  The second thing he was conscious of was his head, which appeared to have had a large shipment of ball-bearings dumped in it overnight, while his blood felt as if it had been transfused with silica and come to a grinding, desiccated halt somewhere around his temples.

  The third thing was his stomach, a solid, churning area of gas and corrosive fluids, swishing and swirling around together like a kind of miniature primordial soup. He felt a bubbling tube of gas begin to wriggle through his stomach, around his intestine and down towards his bowel. He could tell it was going to be bad when it departed his body in a hot and silent phut, and before long his airless room was ripe with the stench of yeast and garlic.

  ‘Oh, Jesus. What the fuck is that smell?’

  Which is when Dig became aware of the fourth thing.

  The girl in his bed.

  He turned his head slowly, and there she was. A girl. A girl with messy blonde hair and black stuff smudged under her eyes and bare bony shoulders and a tattoo of a sea horse on her left arm and one hand covering her mouth and nose while her face wrinkled up in distaste.

  ‘Jesus!’ The girl turned over on to her side with a disgusted flounce. She had some sort of accent, and another tattoo on her back, of a butterfly. It was very nicely done. Dig slowly manoeuvred himself up on his elbow and surveyed the girl as if she were some kind of strange sea creature which had been washed up on his bed by the tide. She looked young. Surprise surprise. About twenty, probably. And thin. Very thin indeed. Another surprise. He wondered what she was called.

  ‘Do you have any Nurofen?’ Her voice was muffled through her hand but was now recognizably Irish. Northern Irish, to be precise.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Dig’s hand found the little tablets on his bedside table, and the glass of water he’d put there last night, a sign that at some point between getting home and going to bed he’d obviously been mentally and physically functioning to some extent. Which also indicated to him that relations had more than likely been had with this small, bony girl in his bed.

  He turned to look down at the floor by his bed. Yep. There it was. A shimmery sliver of pearly latex with a neat little knot at the top. Well, that was something, at least.

  The level of traffic noise wafting through the half-opened window from Camden Road outside led Dig to believe that it was probably some considerable time after the six in the morning his head was telling him it was. He turned painfully to look at his radio alarm: 11.48 a.m. It was also hot, stiflingly hot. Strange for the middle of November.

  He passed the glass and pills to the bony girl.

  ‘Thanks.’ She gulped them down in one. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Ten to twelve.’

  ‘What! Fuck, you’re joking!’ She sprang out of bed, like a little pink whippet and began jumping into her clothes: a tiny black vest top, no bra, hard little nipples poking through, G-string, no buttocks, combat trousers, pierced belly button, trainers. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’ She heaved the curtains apart, sending Dig recoiling across the bed with one elbow over his face. She surveyed the street below.

  ‘Where the fuck am I? Is this Tooting Broadway?’

  ‘What? No—no—Kentish Town—Camden Road.’

  ‘Oh no! Oh fucking no. I have to be in Clapham in ten minutes. Jesus! Can I get a bus from here? Where’s the Tube? D’you have a car?’

  ‘No. Five minutes that way. Yes, but it’s in for repairs.’

  ‘Oh, Christ—I’ll have to get a cab. I only have a fiver. D’you have any cash?’

  Dig peeled the last crumpled tenner from his wallet and handed it to her.

  She kissed it. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’

  ‘Yeah—I’m a waitress—shit—it’s going to be murderously busy today—look at that sunshine—but it’s only a temporary thing, y’know, part time.’

  ‘You’re a student?’ Something had come back to him from the night before.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ She was scraping her hair back into some kind of knot. The sun was playing on her and she looked quite pretty. She seemed strong and bright.

  ‘Where d’you study?’ Dig was suddenly feeling vaguely sociable, as if he might quite like to see her again.

  ‘God, you can’t remember a thing we talked about last night, can you?’ She smiled. She pulled a pair of yellow sunglasses from her rucksack and sat them on top of her head. ‘Well’—she looked pleased with herself, a little embarrassed—‘I’m at sixth-form college right now, but my tutors reckon I’ll get a place at Oxford next year—if I get my grades.’

  Grades? Grades? Jesus! ‘What—er, what grades?’ Dig rubbed at the stubble on his chin.

  ‘A Levels, of course.’

  ‘So—you’re—how old?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  Oh dear God!

  She was standing at the door now, her rucksack on her back, looking all of a sudden like a child, like a small girl wearing big girl’s clothes. She seemed to transmogrify before his eyes, her hips disappearing, her breasts deflating, her waist expanding, her hair morphing as he watched from stylish topknot to perky pigtails. Oh Jesus Christ! Seventeen!

  ‘Hey, look,’ she was saying, waving his ten-pound note at him, ‘I’ll find a way of getting this back to you—I promise. I have your number, I’ll ring you.’

  I’ll ring you. I’ll ring you! There was a child standing in his bedroom doorway, with a pierced belly button, waving his money at him and telling him she’d ring him. Jesus, what was the world coming to?

  ‘Oh, and by the way—Happy Birthday.’ She smiled at him, a nice, warm, intelligent smile, and then she was gone.

  Happy Birthday. Oh yes, Happy Birthday indeed. Thirty years old. He was thirty years old. A thirty-year-old pervert. A dirty thirty old man. A heinous, raincoat-wearing, boiled-sweet-carrying, dribbling, drooling old man.

  He’d slept with
a seventeen-year-old.

  OK, so it was the stuff of dreams, the stuff men of his age made lascivious, lustful jokes about over pints in pubs. But to have really done it, to be confronted with the reality of a seventeen-year-old in his bed. His little sister was eighteen and if he’d found out that she’d…with a man of thirty…he’d have…Well, anyway, it just didn’t feel right. Dig suddenly felt a little too old to be chasing after much younger women.

  The previous evening was starting to come back to him in dribs and drabs. Tequila slammers at Nadine’s. Opening presents. Pints at the Lady Somerset with the rest of the crowd. All piling into a cab at midnight. Some club somewhere in town. (A club? They never went to clubs any more.) More tequila. And then dancing—dancing for hours…God, he’d probably looked a right arse. And that girl, that child…Katie! That was it, that was her name—Katie—except she’d pronounced it ‘Kayday’. Dancing with her and telling her, over and over again, ‘It’s my birthday! It’s my birthday!’ And then—a curry? Shit, it must have been nearly morning by then…where the hell had they managed to find a curry at that time of night?

  And that girl, Katie, had been there. And…yes, that’s right, Nadine had started on Maxwell in the restaurant and she’d tipped her raitha into his korma for some reason or, more probably, for no reason whatsoever. Poor Maxwell. It looked like his days were numbered. And then? Well, they must have got a cab or something. He couldn’t remember anything after that.

  Dig wrapped himself up in his dressing-gown and made his way to his gleaming little Ikea kitchen, where he got himself some coffee. He switched on his ionizer, lit a cigarette and let his hangover wash over him for a while, as he trawled his memory for more detail, but nothing came to him, just blurred images and fuzzy fag-ends of conversation.

  The coffee and cigarette, combined with the unimaginable gunk that had already been in his mouth when he woke up, had pushed his breath to crisis point. He absolutely had to brush his teeth.

  He stared at his reflection in the mirror as he brushed. There’s the crunch, he thought, there it is. A couple of years ago I could have had a heavy night and woken up the next morning looking like something that vaguely resembled a human being, instead of this monstrous, clammy-complexioned, open-pored, dark-shadowed, grey-skinned sack of old bones that’s staring back at me from my bathroom mirror. But now I’m thirty, and although I still have youth ahead of me, I have left the greatest part of it behind me, and my body is no longer on my side, will no longer collude in my systematic abuse of it. My body is asking for a break, and my punishment for not giving it a break is to make me look this hideous in the mornings.

  Still, he thought, he didn’t have much to complain about as he entered his fourth decade. He had a great social life and friends he’d known for years. He was liked and respected by nearly everyone he came into contact with. He could pull pretty girls; he owned his own flat—OK, so it was small and noisy and it was up three flights of stairs, but it was his; he had the job of his dreams working as an A&R manager for a small record label in Camden—all right, so it was poor pay for long hours and very little success, but he loved it. Unlike most men he knew of his age, he still had all his hair and a pretty firm stomach. His family lived just round the corner so he got to see his precious mum at least once or twice a week. And now he was thirty.

  Thirty wasn’t so bad.

  Yeah. Thirty was fine.

  Actually, it wasn’t that different to twenty-nine.

  TWO

  Nadine rolled sideways towards Maxwell and let his big, bear-like arms wrap her up in a sleepy embrace. His neck smelled sweetly musty, and traces of last night’s aftershave lingered on his skin. She could feel the hairs on his chest rubbing against her breasts and his resting heartbeat echoing through her ribcage.

  The sun was streaming through the yellow and red sari silk draped over her bedroom windows and the calming sounds of outside activity floated over her bed like a summer breeze: a dog barking, a child discussing his plans for the day with his mother, car engines starting, front doors opening and closing.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Ooh, yes please.’

  Maxwell pulled his huge frame from the bed, squeezed himself into Nadine’s much-too-small red-silk robe and gently padded off towards the kitchen. Nadine stretched herself out in the newly spacious bed and smiled as she heard Maxwell performing his usual clattering pillage of the kitchen drawers and cupboards, unable even after three months to lay his hands on teaspoons, mugs and teabags without first exploring every possible location.

  She clicked on the radio and listened to the homely babble of Radio Five Live presenters for a while, and suddenly realized that despite the traces of a headache lingering around her temples, a vaguely nauseous sensation emanating from her stomach and the slightly embarrassing memory of yet another scene with Maxwell in the restaurant last night, she was feeling quite inexplicably, deliriously happy. It was a Saturday morning, the sun was shining, there was a man in the kitchen making her tea, and she had no plans whatsoever for the rest of the day. Maxwell wasn’t usually here at the weekend. She’d only seen him last night because it was Dig’s birthday and Dig liked Maxwell and had insisted that she invite him. She wasn’t used to waking up with a man on a Saturday morning. It was nice. They could do couply things: they could go for a walk, or go out for lunch somewhere and read the papers. Or they could just stay in bed all day, watch the telly, eat bacon sandwiches, chat and have sex.

  This, she decided, was one of those moments, one of those utterly perfect moments in life, which you absolutely had to draw into your lungs and hold there and absorb every drop of, because that was what life was all about. If you expected eternal happiness, then you missed the essence of life that was contained in moments like this.

  ‘There you go,’ said Maxwell, gently placing steaming mugs of tea on the bedside table—mugs, Nadine noticed, that she never used, her emergency mugs, ugly ones her mother had given her, decorated with insipid roses fading defeatedly after ten years of washing-up and kept at the back of the cupboard, mugs that only someone with no sense of design or aesthetics would have pulled from her cupboard when presented with a selection of at least twenty more attractive mugs. She felt a sudden burst of irritation and her little happiness bubble exploded over her head. Why couldn’t he be perfect? Was that too much to ask?

  ‘For God’s sake, Maxwell,’ she bristled, waspishly, ‘why do you always have to choose the ugliest mugs in the kitchen?’

  ‘Eh?’ Maxwell looked stumped, and Nadine felt flooded with disdain, at the precise moment she should have felt guilt.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed,’ she continued, ‘that when I make the tea I always use those Deco mugs or the Simpsons mugs or the South Park mugs. You know—the nice mugs? Haven’t you noticed that I never, ever use these mugs?’ She pointed at them in disgust.

  Maxwell shrugged and shook his head. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked sadly.

  ‘Huh! Exactly! That’s exactly it! If you don’t know what’s wrong with these mugs then there is no point in having this conversation.’ Nadine knew she was being unreasonable but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Do you want me to change them?’ he offered.

  Nadine jumped out of the bed in exasperation and gesticulated angrily. ‘No, Maxwell. I don’t want you to change them, I just want you not to have chosen them in the first place. I want you to be as unspeakably repulsed by these mugs as I am. I want you to look at these mugs and feel a deep sense of pity for the men and women of…of’—she picked up a mug and read the inscription on the bottom—‘of Lichfield Pottery, Staffs, who were actually paid to paint these disgusting flowers on to the sides of these disgusting objects and who probably think they’re highly talented artists. That’s what I want, Maxwell.’

  Maxwell’s kind face crumpled up with the strain of comprehension, and Nadine could see that he was trying, he really was trying to understand what she was saying to him and this annoyed her even more. S
he was being a complete bitch and a real man would have told her to shut the fuck up. But he wasn’t a real man, and he had actually picked up one of the mugs and was now turning it around and around in his hand, gazing at it from every possible angle, his face a picture of studious contemplation.

  ‘Mmmm,’ he said, ‘I suppose it is a bit plain. A bit old–fashioned…’

  ‘Oh, put it down, for Christ’s sake!’ she fumed. ‘Put the fucking mug down.’

  The badly chosen mugs, taken in isolation, were not, evidently, a big deal, but set in the context of their three-month-old relationship they were yet another sign that Maxwell was the Wrong Boyfriend. She’d been trying to convince herself for three months that it could work, that despite the differences between them, despite his penchant for brightly coloured designer menswear, his infatuation with Celine Dion, his unflappable demeanour and his unfeasibly good manners, despite his home being ten miles away from hers, just outside Dagenham in Essex, and despite the fact that he was a courier and she was a photographer who earned five times as much as him, she could make it work. Because Maxwell was as nice a bloke as you could ever hope to meet and Nadine felt that she deserved a nice bloke. But nice blokes aren’t necessarily perfect blokes and Nadine was sorry for her pettiness and intolerance, but she couldn’t, just couldn’t, abide the differences between herself and Maxwell for another moment.

  ‘Nadine,’ Maxwell was saying, softly, ‘I’m not really sure…could you explain to me why you’re getting so wound up about a pair of mugs?’

  Nadine appreciated that this was a fair question. ‘Oh God, Maxwell. It’s not just the mugs. It’s not the mugs. It’s everything. It’s us. It’s me…this just isn’t working…’ Nadine listened to the words echoing in her head and thought how hollow they sounded. She wondered how many times in her life she’d used the same words before. ‘It’s me,’ she always said, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’

  And it was true. It was always her. She hadn’t been dumped since she was twenty-one. It had been fine when she was younger, going out with unsuitable men, because all her friends were going out with unsuitable men, too. They’d all get together and compare horror stories, revel in the imperfections of each other’s ill-advised relationships, bond over mutual disdain for the inferior sex. That’s what you do when you’re in your twenties. But then, gradually, one by one, all her friends had found decent men, good men, and splintered off. And now, in her thirtieth year, Nadine found herself hanging around, like the Queen of Spades in a game of Old Maid. The game was over, the rest of the pack was in pairs, but she was still playing. And until a few weeks ago, she’d still been enjoying it.