2000 - Thirtynothing Read online

  And now he’s smiling at her and ferreting around his jeans pockets looking for something. He reaches into his pocket and brings out a tiny Indian pillbox encrusted with multicoloured stones. ‘You sound like you could do with a little something to lift your spirits,’ he says, pulling the lid off the tiny box.

  ‘What’s that?’ Nadine asks.

  ‘Little miracles,’ he smiles. ‘One of these, and the whole world will seem like a better place.’

  Nadine’s eyes open wide. ‘Eeeeeeeeee?’ she asks, thinking that even though that’s what it looks like, it can’t be, because Phil was always so anti-anything connected with rave culture.

  Phil nods and hands her a pill. ‘You might just want half,’ he says, ‘if it’s your first.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says ‘let me have a whole one.’ Despite having lived what she considers to be a fairly colourful life, Nadine’s never done an E before and she swallows it, gleefully and quickly and waits for it to take effect.

  Half an hour later and she doesn’t really feel any different. She’s much more stoned, that’s for certain, and much more pissed, and maybe that’s why she’s suddenly feeling so strangely drawn to Phil, suddenly feeling like she’d like to touch him, hug him, maybe even kiss him.

  ‘So, you must be very muscly now, I suppose, under that baggy top, erecting all those big, heavy marquee things.’ She pulls at the fabric of his lambswool sleeve. She’s feeling very brazen, very forward, very physical.

  He laughs. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘not really. Still as puny as ever.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not really a drug-dealer?’ she asks, jokingly, even though she’s secretly started to think that maybe he is. It would explain all these students in his flat and the abundance of strong weed and the pill she’s just swallowed.

  ‘Nah,’ he smiles. And then, suddenly and most unexpectedly, he turns and stares into her eyes and says, ‘God, Nadine, you’re so fucking beautiful.’

  Nadine chokes on her vodka. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘don’t be daft.’

  Phil shakes his head very slowly and stares at her. ‘I’m not being daft,’ he says. ‘You’re fucking gorgeous.’ He leans in towards her as he says this, so that his face is only a couple of millimetres from hers. He locks his eyes on to hers, and she starts to feel vaguely uncomfortable but strangely excited. He pulls his face away from hers unhurriedly, gently takes the spliff from between her stiff fingers, puts it to his lips, inhales deeply, inhales again and disposes of it in an empty beer can. ‘And you’ve really kept your body in good nick.’ His gaze slowly pans up and down her, eating her up.

  Nadine feels a shudder run up and down her spine in time with the rhythm of his eyes. She feels exposed and titillated at the same time. She blushes.

  ‘You’ve still got those great tits,’ he says, staring at them like they were a pair of juicy rare fillet steaks, ‘those perfect, perfect tits. Just the right size, right shape. They haven’t drooped at all. Some women’s tits start drooping, you know.’

  Any feminist leanings that Nadine may once have had desert her. She knows that she should, in all decency, slap him round the face and storm off with some rant or other about how she will not be spoken to like that by a sexist pig like him. But her ego is suffering from malnutrition and she laps up his graceless compliment like it was vintage wine. She is grateful to him for thinking that she has great tits and actually says thank you.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, smiling coyly.

  Nadine’s head is spinning; a combination of booze, spliff and too many knee-trembling compliments. Not to mention the Class A chemical currently swishing around her brain cells.

  Inside Nadine’s drug-and-alcohol-addled head, Phil is now larger than life—he is a legend. Phil has lived a big life, full of change and adversity. He has battled with depression. He has been to prison. He has lost his parents and the love of his life killed herself. His house burned down. He’s had two nervous breakdowns. He has been accepted into the homes and worlds of so many different people. He has taken risks and lived life according to his heart. He has reinvented himself and pulled himself out of the quagmire time after time. He is strong and resilient. He is brave and unpredictable.

  He is everything that Nadine is not.

  He is better than Nadine.

  And all of a sudden, through the blur of her thoughts, Nadine realizes that this is what’s been wrong with every man she’s been out with since she and Phil split up. None of them have been better than her. They’ve all been inferior—at least in her mind—and she has been unable to respect them. Weak, weak men, they seemed to follow her around. It was like she was giving out some ultrasound, audible only to men with gaps in their lives and low self-esteem.

  She’s had enough of weak men. She wants a strong man, a man like Phil. Phil isn’t perfect—he is far from perfect—he is as flawed as it is possible for a man to be. But he is strong. He is special. He’s different. He’s exciting.

  If Nadine was sober and straight and happier, if Nadine hadn’t just taken an E, she would be thinking exactly the opposite; she would probably call it a night now, start making her excuses, get her coat, order a cab, go home, because it is becoming increasingly obvious what sort of turn this evening is about to take, and there is a sensible, wise part of Nadine deep down somewhere beneath all the narcotics which knows that she shouldn’t be following this path, knows that Phil has always managed to manipulate her and control her and that if she stays now she is more or less bound to let him do it again.

  But she is not sober and she is not straight and she is not happy, so she smiles at Phil instead and thinks how much she’s enjoying herself and how she still loves him in a funny kind of way, and how, if he was to try to kiss her, she probably wouldn’t fight him off.

  As if reading her thoughts, Phil puts one hand on her shoulder and the other over her hand, and his fingers are moving over her flesh. Nadine would like to touch him, too, feel his flesh, his bones, his heartbeat through his jumper. She grabs hold of his hand and traces her fingertips over the smooth, hairless skin, skin she hasn’t touched for twelve years, skin she used to love so much—and it’s beautiful, so beautiful to be with this man, this man who she’s missed so much, who’s changed so much, who’s lived so much and who’s turned out to be so beautiful and full of kindness and warmth, and just to be able to touch him, touch him and feel the blood running through his veins, and he’s been through so much these last years, and now she wants to hold him in her arms and look after him and protect him and be even closer to him and share herself with him and have sensations with him and just to love him like she used to…

  ‘I think,’ says Phil, stroking the side of Nadine’s neck, ‘we should—go somewhere else—a bit quieter, y’know? Let’s go somewhere?’ Phil reaches out to touch her hair again. He strokes it and then brings the back of his hand down softly against her cheek. It is such a tender gesture that Nadine immediately turns to blancmange inside and knows that she has to do this, that this is what life is all about, after all, people and being with people and loving people, and that it’s not wrong, it’s all right, it’s all right, because Phil is good and Phil is beautiful and it will be beautiful and it’s the right thing to do, the most perfect thing to do, just to love someone…

  ‘I want to get to know you all over again, Nadine Kite. I want to be alone with you. Come with me.’ He holds out his hand for her.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just come with me.’

  There is something so surreal about all this, about Phil, this flat, this evening, that Nadine is starting to feel like she’s in a film or something, that none of this is really happening to her.

  She takes his hand and follows him.

  TWENTY

  Dig was trying to be chilled out but was finding it very hard. Delilah had just committed the greatest domestic crime known to man. There were many domestic crimes—not replacing the toilet roll when it was finished, not rinsing things before putting them
in the dishwasher, not putting lids back on things, not rewinding videos and not plumping up cushions—but that one, just now—leaving CDs out of their boxes—was the worst, by far. He’d tried so hard not to say anything. It had been his suggestion, after all, that she choose some music to put on. But he’d just meant for her to select one CD and put it on. Instead, she’d been completely overwhelmed by his shelves and shelves of alphabetically organized CDs and was now playing DJ, excitedly pulling one plastic case after another off the shelves. Dig lost the battle to control his neurosis.

  ‘Erm—you couldn’t put those back in their boxes, could you?’

  ‘Sure,’ replied Delilah, distractedly, pulling some shit by Vengaboys off the shelf and sticking it in the machine. She slid the Shania Twain album she’d just listened to back into its case and seemed satisfied that this act constituted a reasonable response to Dig’s request.

  Dig sat back and sighed. His CD shelves were full of music that he didn’t like. He got it all free. Every day he came home with a handful of new CDs that he was never going to listen to. He used to consider these free CDs to be a perk of the job, but over the last couple of years British pop music had slipped tragically and dramatically into a cesspool of bland Euro-bollocks music-by-numbers, and Dig was now starting to feel that these freebies were more of an encumbrance. Steps, for Christ’s sake. B*witched. Billie. Britney Spears. How had this happened? What sort of children were we breeding?

  He winced as he heard the opening bars to ‘Boom Boom Boom Boom’ and then stared in horror at Delilah, who was jauntily bouncing up and down and humming under her breath. She couldn’t really like this sort of thing, could she?

  ‘This is great,’ she beamed at him.

  Oh dear God, thought Dig.

  ‘I’ve really lost touch with music over the years. I’ve only bought one CD this year: Robbie Williams, I’ve Been Expecting You. Which is brilliant, of course! But Alex likes jazz, on the whole. So that’s what we listen to. But this new stuff is great, isn’t it? So simple and such good tunes. Good old–fashioned pop music!’ She grinned and turned away and began rifling through Dig’s shelves to find something else dreadful to put on.

  Dig dropped his head into his hands. Nadine had been right. Delilah wasn’t the same girl he remembered from years ago. Phil Collins would have been a relief right now. The old Delilah had thrown empty beer cans at Bucks Fizz on the telly and used a selection of well-chosen swearwords to express her disgust at such blandness and unoriginality. The old Delilah had stalked around the Holy T raining disdain upon screaming Duranies, pulling posters off notice-boards and peeling stickers off desks. The old Delilah had sat on his shoulders waving a pint of snakebite in the air while they watched the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen and the Smiths at lager-soaked venues all over London.

  The new Delilah had the musical taste of a twelve-year-old girl.

  The passage of time could do cruel things to people.

  Anyway. He would give them to her. All of them. Tomorrow he would get a big cardboard box, pick every technicolored, vacuous and sterile CD off his shelves, put them in the box and give them to her. With pleasure.

  Digby was sitting at his feet staring up at him with watery eyes. He vibrated briefly and then emitted a strange little high-pitched whimper.

  God he was an ugly dog. Not cute-ugly. Not bred to be ugly, like a pug or a bulldog. Just ugly.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said quietly.

  Digby whimpered again.

  ‘Delilah. I think there’s something wrong with your dog. He keeps shivering and moaning.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Delilah, ‘he just needs to go to the toilet, that’s all. D’you mind taking him?’

  ‘Taking him? Where?’ Dig had an image in his mind of some plastic contraption in Delilah’s luggage with a seat and a lid—a little doggy-toilet.

  ‘The nearest tree would be good,’ she replied, a little sarcastically, Dig thought.

  ‘Oh. Right. OK.’ He glanced from his window and noticed that it was still raining. Great. He pulled on his leather coat and picked up an umbrella, attached Digby to his Louis Vuitton lead—pausing for a second to register the fact that the dog had a Louis Vuitton lead: good grief—and then dragged him down the stairs to the chestnut tree outside his house.

  Digby cocked his leg and then released the smallest squirt of urine that Dig had ever seen in his life.

  ‘Is that it?’ he barked at the dog. ‘Is that it? Are you telling me that you dragged me out here in the pissing rain in the middle of the night just for that? That…that dribble? I’ve seen more liquid come out of a fucking teat! Jesus.’ He sighed and began dragging the dog back towards the house, but the dog seemed to have decided that he quite liked it out there in the rain and wanted to go out walking, explore the neighbourhood.

  ‘No,’ shouted Dig, ‘we’re going in. You’ve had your lot.’

  The dog ignored him and stood his ground, looking pleadingly into Dig’s eyes.

  ‘That’s it,’ sighed Dig, ‘if you can’t behave like a grown-up, then I’m going to have to treat you like a puppy. Come here.’ He leaned down to pick Digby up and the dog scampered backwards. He bent down again and the dog moved back even further. This continued for a few seconds until they were nearly in the road, and just as Dig managed to get his hands on the animal and pick him up, a large lorry drove past and threw the entire contents of an enormous puddle all over him.

  Dig stood for a second, in shock, water rolling down his face from his hair, and his trousers sticking heavily to his legs.

  ‘Oh,’ he muttered, ‘for fuck’s sake.’

  When he returned to the flat Delilah had moved away from the CD player, having left every single CD out of its case and strewn around the place, and was now busily unpacking, chucking items of clothing and undergarments randomly around the room. She spun round when she heard the front door go.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re back. Did he go all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Dig, dripping on to the floor and waiting for some sort of sympathetic comment from her about his dramatic state of wetness.

  Instead, Delilah turned her attention immediately to Digby and began petting him furiously. ‘Good boy,’ she squeaked in some kind of strange, other-worldly voice, ‘’oos a good boy then? Did ’oo do a wee-wee for your uncle Dig, did you? Good boy!’ And then she went back to her haphazard unpacking.

  Dig watched her fiddling around in a small black-suede pouch. She emptied four glistening crystals into the palm of her hand and rubbed them gently with a thumb. They were attached to lengths of thread. She got to her feet and began placing them carefully in the four corners of the room.

  Dig watched her with bemusement.

  ‘Crystals,’ she said, illuminatingly. ‘Room Pattern Crystals. They create an energy field which projects positive vibrations, removes all negativity and strengthens your energies every day.’

  ‘Aaaah,’ said Dig, nodding and feeling that sense of nervous anxiety he always experienced whenever anyone started talking about ‘alternative’ stuff. It was the same sense of tension that seized him when people started talking about God as if he was more than just a vague notion or a mild swearword.

  ‘White jade,’ she said, pointing out a stone. ‘Said to help direct energies to their most advantageous outlet, help filter out distraction and aid in solution-oriented thinking. Which is just what I need.

  ‘Peridot’—she indicated another—‘helps connect us to our destinies and attain spiritual truth. Emerald—said to give wisdom so that the possessor is motivated to give love and wisdom to others. Aquamarine—a great healer. It helps you to understand difficult situations from a love-filled viewpoint.

  ‘And this one,’ she said, sombrely, reaching enticingly into her still-damp blouse and pulling out a shard of something prismatic and luminescent, ‘this one I wear next to my heart. Mother-of-pearl. This stone is a great protector. It’s meant to represent a mother’s love.’ She stared meanin
gfully at the stone and caressed it between her fingertips.

  Dig didn’t know what to say, and the room fell silent. He watched her tuck the stone sadly back inside her bra and gulped.

  Delilah sighed and pulled her hair back from her face. ‘I wouldn’t mind turning in now, Dig, if that’s all right with you? It’s been kind of a long day.’

  Dig looked at his watch. It was ten past ten. He didn’t usually go to bed until at least midnight. He didn’t have a television in his room. He hadn’t even begun to digest his curry yet. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do. ‘Er—yeah—sure. I’ll get the sofabed up for you.’

  Shit, he thought as he made up the bed for her—without even a glimmer of an offer of help—I’m going to have to read a book. What a nightmare. He’d been reading The Beach for the last six months and was still only on page 85. He used it as a coaster for his morning cup of coffee, mainly. Dig wasn’t one of life’s great readers.

  ‘Right,’ he said, scratching his head, ‘I’ll see you in the morning. You know where everything is, don’t you? Do you need me to wake you up tomorrow morning or anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Delilah, smiling, ‘no. I’ll just get up when you get up.’ She walked towards him and placed her hands on his arms. ‘Thank you, Dig. Thank you so much. This is so kind of you. I just…I…er—oh, just thank you! You’re lovely, you really are.’

  She grabbed him then, and squeezed him to her in a bear-hug, and Dig thought, excellent, and lifted himself on to his tiptoes to match her height. He squeezed her back and buried his face into her cool, silky hair and breathed in that smell, that morning-dew fragrance. Oh Jesus, he thought, oh Delilah. You have no idea what you do to me. You are so fucking beautiful and so fucking sexy and I just want to drag you into my bedroom right now and lick every inch of you and fuck you senseless.