2000 - Thirtynothing Read online

  ‘It’s not one eyebrow—it’s two eyebrows that meet up in the middle, that’s all.’

  ‘Looks stupid.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dig, ‘thanks a lot.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  They both stopped talking and began sucking aggressively on their cartons of drink. Dig turned to Nadine and pointed at her hands. ‘How come you’ve got no knuckles, then? How come they’re inside out?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, taking one of her little hands in his own and rubbing his thumb over the dimples in her joints, ‘the skin there goes in, instead of out. They’re not normal.’

  ‘Yes they are!’ She spread them out like starfish and gazed at them.

  ‘No, they’re not. Look at my hands.’ He splayed his long white hand open, placed it over her starfish hand and pointed out his sharp knuckles. ‘That’s what knuckles are supposed to look like.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said Nadine.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘You can come with us—if you like,’ said Dig.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Kite-flying. Me and my dad.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nadine. ‘OK, then.’

  They both sat then and stared at their touching hands, and let the warmth seep between their fingers while their cartons of drink sat on either side of them warming up in the September sun and the playground echoed around them with the sounds of a thousand other children.

  Nadine looked up at him then, into his kind, brown eyes, and decided at that moment that whatever happened in her life, she was going to marry Digby Ryan.

  FOUR

  By the time Dig and Nadine had finished breakfast it was early afternoon, and a fairly strong wind had picked up around Primrose Hill, tugging clouds across the sun and throwing dead leaves into the air.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Dig, kicking up a drift of leaves with his trainered foot. ‘Should have brought the kites.’

  ‘Should have worn trousers,’ said Nadine, clinging on to the fly-away hem of her black chiffon skirt and directing a withering look at a passing pervert admiring her thighs. ‘Can we find somewhere to sit? This skirt’s pissing me off.’

  They sat beneath an oak tree, hands in pockets, legs crossed at the ankles, and stared across the park for a while, in silence.

  Nadine turned to Dig and smiled. He looked so sweet. His thick black hair was being furrowed by the wind, flattened into random partings all over his head and sticking up here and there in bizarre little horns. There were tiny rivulets of salt water running downwards from his wind-whipped eyes, and the end of his nose had turned a rather appealing shade of pink. He wasn’t so bad looking, she supposed, smiling to herself. Quite cute, really. He was also wearing a somewhat serious, un-Dig-like expression on his face, and a couple of small creases had appeared in the area that should have been the gap between his eyebrows but was in fact just a bridge between the two. Nadine reached out to touch the little furrows with one long-nailed fingertip.

  ‘Oooh, yes,’ she said, ‘I can see the signs of ageing already.’

  ‘What?’ laughed Dig, touching the offending wrinkles.

  ‘Worry lines,’ said Nadine, threading her arm through Dig’s and resting her head on his shoulder, ‘the carefree days of your youth are over, my friend.’

  ‘You jest,’ he said, leaning his head against hers and contemplating the brilliant blue and white sky above, ‘but I think it might be true.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh God. I don’t know. It’s that girl, last night…’

  ‘What girl—Jailbait Girl?’

  ‘Which other?’

  ‘You’re not still freaking out about that, are you?’

  ‘Well—yes. I am actually. I just can’t get it out of my head. I mean, seventeen! You were still a virgin when you were seventeen…’

  ‘Well, they grow up faster these days, don’t they?’

  ‘I just feel really shitty.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she does.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘So what is the point?’

  ‘The point is…the point is…’ He turned to face her and then turned away again. ‘I don’t know what the point is. I just feel shitty, that’s all.’

  They stopped talking for a moment. Nadine didn’t know what to say. ‘Hey,’ she changed the subject, ‘what time were you born?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What time of the day were you born?’

  ‘Erm, I’m not sure,’ replied Dig, ‘but it must have been in the evening, because my folks were in the pub when my mum’s waters broke.’

  ‘Well. There you go then. You’re not thirty yet. Not officially. You’ve got another four or five hours in your twenties. So…’

  ‘What?’

  Nadine leaped to her feet, leaned down and scooped up a large armful of russet, auburn and mustard leaves. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re not too old to have a jolly good leaf fight,’ and with that she threw the leaves all over Dig’s head like oversized confetti, turned on her heel and ran away laughing.

  She ran away, as she would recollect, in an anticlockwise direction, and she would later wonder what uncontrollable forces had led her to that decision. If she’d analysed her thoughts in depth she might have found an answer. But more likely she would have found it to be no more than a random action, plucked from nothing more substantial than pure fancy.

  Because what Nadine didn’t know when she made that seemingly trivial choice was just how important it actually was. Fate had snuck up on her unawares that day on Primrose Hill and as she ran screaming with laughter across the springy grass, Dig in pursuit and closing in on her rapidly with an enormous pile of leaves in his hands and a look of vengeance about him, little did she know that fate was about leap into her path and change the course of her life for ever.

  Because, had Nadine not taken the anticlockwise route that day, had she set off in the other direction, then they would have exited the park, walked the twenty minutes to Dig’s flat, flopped on to his sofa, opened a couple of beers and watched some football, and they would never have bumped into Delilah.

  He wasn’t sure it was her at first. The hair threw him off a bit. It was a warm golden-brown instead of the five-alarm peroxide white he remembered. And the clothes were different: classic, well cut and definitely expensive. But the moment he saw her face he knew.

  It was Delilah. Delilah Lillie! He ignored the scratchiness of the leaves trapped inside his clothing and made his way to the iron railings that separated the park from the pavement. She was walking towards him on Regent’s Park Road, her hands full of carrier bags, a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. She was staring straight ahead and looked a bit stressed out. His pace quickened as she got closer.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Nadine’s voice sounded like a whisper in the distance.

  She was still very slim, small-waisted, elegant, she still walked with that sway in her hips and she was still quite jaw-droppingly beautiful.

  ‘Di-ig. Where are you going?’

  Dig ignored Nadine and carried on walking as if being irresistibly drawn towards a beam of light from an alien spaceship.

  ‘Delilah?’ he called. She didn’t hear, carried on walking.

  ‘Delilah?’ She looked around her, confused.

  ‘Delilah!’ He’d reached the iron railings now. Leaves were dropping from his clothing as he walked, falling from beneath his jacket. He didn’t notice, didn’t care. He grasped the railings with both hands as Delilah approached, a quizzical, slightly unsure expression on her face. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ he began. ‘Delilah. It is you, isn’t it?’

  Close up, she looked fantastically pretty, fresh-faced, glossy. She’d worn a lot of make–up at school and looked much younger now, bare-faced. She was looking at Dig with a combination of confusion, anticipation, concern and embarrassment. She nodded.

  ‘Dig,’ he said, placing a hand on his chest, ‘Dig Ryan.’


  Her face softened with recognition. ‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Dig Ryan! I don’t believe it!’

  ‘God, how are you? How’ve you been? It’s so good to see you.’

  ‘Yeah…yeah. I’m great, just great. How’re you?’ She was smiling widely, looking genuinely pleased to see him.

  ‘Great. I’m great, too. Shit—this is amazing! God, I mean, what’ve you been up to, what’re you doing now, where are you living?’

  Delilah indicated the iron railings that divided them.

  ‘Wait,’ said Dig, ‘wait right there. I’m coming round.’

  He skipped back across the grass to where Nadine was waiting for him. ‘Quick,’ he gestured at her, grinning like an idiot, ‘quick! It’s Delilah. Come on!’

  ‘Delilah?’ muttered Nadine, a shadow falling across her face. ‘Delilah Lillie?’

  She let the handful of leaves she’d gathered ready for a counter-offensive fall dolefully to the ground and grudgingly followed the bounding figure of Dig across the park and towards the gates.

  Delilah Lillie

  Every school had a Delilah Lillie. They were usually blonde, they were always pretty and they were invariably the coolest girl in the school. Delilah Lillie was Debbie Harry, Leslie Ash and Kim Wilde all rolled into one. She had breasts before anyone else and a mop of thick bleached-blonde hair which hung over her eyes like flaxen curtains. She was moody and chewed gum and made her school uniform look sexy. She wore too much black eyeliner, and scuffed stilettos. All the boys wanted to go out with her and all the girls wanted to be her because she was so cool.

  She was a woman.

  Nadine could remember Delilah’s first day at school as if it were yesterday. The corridors and classrooms of the Holy Trinity Convent School for Boys and Girls had been rumbling with the rumours all day. There was a new girl in 4H and she was really cool. Her name was Delilah. She’d been expelled from her last school for, among many suggested misdemeanours, getting pregnant, sniffing glue, beating up the headmistress, having sex in the showers, setting fire to the stationery cupboard and stealing the caretaker’s car. She lived on the Gospel Oak Estate, the roughest estate in Kentish Town, and her dad was a burglar. She used to go out with Suggs from Madness and she’d slept with everyone in the sixth form of her last school. She sold drugs for a living and if you looked very closely you could see the track marks on her arms. She was a junky, a criminal, a slag and a hard-nut. And she was sexy as hell.

  Dig and Nadine sat on the grass outside the science block on their first afternoon back at school. They were fourteen years old. At Dig’s feet was his constant companion, a folded and battered copy of the NME, and pinned to the lapel of his red blazer was a new badge. It was shaped like a pork-pie hat and it said Ska For Ever. He had a big spot on his chin.

  Nadine was wearing a baggy red school jumper, her thumbs emerging from tatty holes in the sleeves, and her tie was slung slovenly around her neck. Her frizzy copper hair was held back from her face with a green chiffon scarf and there were traces of mascara clinging to her pale eyelashes, mascara, Dig noticed, which hadn’t been there last term.

  Nadine had grown nearly four inches in the previous year and she was taller than Dig. Her limbs had stretched into her puppy fat and her knuckles were now the right way round. Dig had filled out a little and grown another inch or two but his eyebrows still joined forces in the middle and his hair still emerged from his scalp like dense black velour.

  Dig ’n’ Deen, that’s what everyone at school called them, because they were inseparable. You never saw one without the other. They occupied a quiet and comfortable position within the school hierarchy—too studious to be cool but too cool to be drips. No one gave them any hassle, but then no one particularly made an effort to befriend them either. Which was fine with them. They lived in a cosy world of study, John Peel, back-combed hair and kite-flying.

  Nadine hadn’t forgotten the pledge she’d made to herself at eleven years old, and if you were to feel around under her mattress you would find her most secret diary, the one she fills with her deepest and darkest thoughts and desires. It is an old school exercise book and it is decorated on the front and the back with doodles—practice signatures, in fact, all loops and hearts and twirls. All of them say the same thing: Nadine Ryan. Because even though they’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, even though they’ve never even kissed each other, she is going to marry him.

  Dig ’n’ Deen are going to live on Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town in a big house with shutters and marble floors. Their bed will be a huge pine one with a fluffy white duvet and the sun will shine on to it every morning. They will have parties in their big house every Saturday night, and on Sundays they’ll pick up Dig’s dad in their powder-blue E-type Jag and take him kite-flying on Primrose Hill. They will have four children—Sam, Ben, Emily and Alicia—and they will be incredibly happy.

  It’s not that Nadine has a crush on Dig or anything, it’s just that she can’t imagine anyone else marrying him and not being allowed to see him any more. One day they will be man and wife, but for now she is happy just to be his best friend.

  ‘What have you got on Thursday mornings?’ Nadine asked Dig, running her finger horizontally across her brand-new timetable.

  ‘Erm…erm…erm…’ He trailed off.

  ‘Di-ig.’ Nadine tutted and glanced up at Dig from her timetable, following his strange, glassy gaze with her eyes. He was staring across the grass to the netball courts, where a huddle of boys from the fifth form were jostling each other and play-fighting, vying for the attention of a tall girl with white-blonde hair, an awful lot of earrings and a very tight skirt.

  ‘Aaaah,’ said Nadine, sucking the end of a pencil, ‘that must be Delilah Lillie.’

  Dig remained rigid and speechless, staring at the glamorous figure across the grass, his jaw hanging ever so slightly open.

  ‘She doesn’t look like a junky to me,’ said Nadine casually, surveying her through her eyelashes, ‘she’s incredibly pretty.’

  Dig gulped and nodded. He opened his mouth to say something but his still-breaking voice cracked and he cleared his throat. ‘She…she…she looks like Leslie Ash in Quadrophenia, ’ he finally managed to squeak.

  Quadrophenia was Dig’s favourite film of all time and enough people had told Dig that he looked a bit like Phil Daniels for him to have developed a deep affinity with his character in the film. And now there was a girl in the playground, a girl just over there, in fact, a few metres away, who looked just like Leslie Ash, Phil Daniel’s, and therefore Dig’s, dream woman.

  Nadine glanced across at her friend and saw the passion glimmering in his eyes, the longing oozing from his pores and the pain already piercing his soul as he looked at something he wanted so much but had already decided he could never have.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ he whispered, a blush rising from his frayed shirt-collar to his hairline and his ears. ‘She is absolutely beautiful.’

  And that was when Nadine knew. That was the moment that Nadine knew that things were never going to be the same again.

  All the legends that had accompanied Delilah to the Holy Trinity were proven unfounded within those first six weeks of term. She wasn’t a drug addict, she wasn’t a dealer, her father wasn’t a burglar and she hadn’t been expelled from her last school. She had simply moved from south to north London and been put into a new school. She did, though, live on the Gospel Oak Estate, and she had apparently been out with Suggs’s little brother, although only for two weeks. She also proved herself to be a fairly conscientious student who turned up for lessons on time, managed to hand in her homework nine times out of ten and wore her uniform very nearly within the guidelines set down by the school. This lack of sociopathic behaviour did nothing to dent her reputation as the coolest girl in school, however, and she still found herself surrounded wherever she went by swarms of buzzing boys and fussed over by shorter, plainer girls hoping that a little of her magnetism might rub off on them.


  Nadine had been right. Things weren’t the same between her and Dig after that first day of term. All Dig’s priorities changed. Now everything was a constant reference to Delilah. He and Nadine would walk around the school grounds together, apparently aimlessly, but Nadine knew that they were Delilah-hunting, she knew that the moment Dig heard the sound of Delilah’s gravelly voice echoing around a corner they would suddenly slow down and Dig would start walking differently and talking to Nadine in a really loud voice about something they hadn’t been discussing before, usually something to do with music. He would walk past Delilah and stare resolutely ahead, avoiding her gaze.

  Dig and Nadine’s friendship ended one rainy Tuesday afternoon, just before the end of the first term.

  They were sitting together in the canteen, munching on soggy chips and pasty pasta and speed-reading their set pieces from Animal Farm for English Lit that afternoon when they became aware of a sallow boy from 3G called Desmond hovering over their table. They looked up questioningly.

  ‘Here,’ he said, dragging a grubby finger across his nostrils, ‘are you Dig Ryan?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just thought you might want to know that there’s a rumour going around’—he looked around shiftily—‘about you.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Dig, folding the corner of the page and putting his book down.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Desmond, ‘about you and Delilah Lillie.’

  Dig’s eyebrow shot off his forehead and nearly landed on the back of his neck. ‘Oh yeah,’ he managed, coolly, ‘and what’s that then?’

  ‘Apparently, she’s been going around saying that she thinks you’re really cool. She says she wants to talk to you. She says she likes your attitude. She says you’ve got cha…cha…char…charisma?’

  Nadine nodded at Desmond to indicate that he’d found the right word, and he continued. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I just thought you ought to know, you know, what she’s been saying and’—he stuck one grimy hand out awkwardly and offered it to Dig to shake—‘I just wanted to say congratulations, like. You must be made up.’