Page 31 of Don't You Forget About Me
Exasperated: ‘Yes.’ Even the child’s pissed off I’m here.
‘That one looks very smart. Who’s he? Or she?’
Milo actually screws up his face in the effort of pandering to my inane intrusions.
‘PAPLOO!’
‘Paploo! I like his scarf.’
Milo mutters: ‘Head dress.’
Esther appears with a flute of blush-coloured cava for me. Looking at it, I have a moment’s reflexive twinge of ‘oh God no’, swiftly followed by ‘actually go on, oh God yes’.
‘So how was last night?’ she says, peering closer. ‘Did you manage to behave yourself?’
Esther looks like me facially, otherwise she’s leaner and smaller chested, with layered, short I-have-a-busy-life hair. She boasts various skills I do not possess. How to audit tax returns. How to make a proper béchamel for a lasagne. How to exercise restraint. I know that any detailed chat about last night will end badly, as I’m still feeling too raw to bat on a proper inquisition, but luckily I have the perfect news to distract her – if she massively disliked Tony, I’m reasonably sure that she positively detested Robin.
‘It was fine, thank you. The bigger news, really, is that immediately after my sacking from That’s Amore!, Robin and I broke up.’
‘Oh,’ Esther says, eyes widening, and hesitates, before deciding she’s going to sit down with the other glass of cava she’s holding. ‘What happened?’
‘I … er …’ On the one hand, it irks me to confirm her suspicions about him. On the other, if I want to be close with my sister, shutting her out isn’t going to achieve it. Plus, I can never resist an anecdote. ‘I caught him …’ I rub the side of my nose and look towards Milo. ‘… With his Double-U Eye Ell Ell Why in a lady.’
Esther gasps and grabs at her Tiffany padlock necklace, running the pendant up and down the chain. ‘Caught him? As in you were there?’
‘On premises and with a clear view of the stage,’ I say, taking a bracing swig of cava. ‘I would say dress circle. He gave me a key to his flat and obviously I was unexpectedly not working my shift.’
‘Oh my God. I literally don’t know what I’d do if I could … if I walkedinon it.’
‘Neither did I. I shouted a lot. It was his personal assistant, Louisa.’
‘Ugh. And he’d told you he was out of town?’
I open my mouth to say ‘No, why do you say that?’ then recall my fib about why he wasn’t going to be here today and hastily turn it into: ‘… Uh? Yeah.’
‘I’d say I’m surprised but he didn’t seem the most reliable of people. Something of a loose cannon. Cracking jokes about drug-taking in front of Mum and Geoff, honestly.’
‘Mmmm.’ That was selfish.
And that’s it really: above all, Robin was morbidly selfish. I stare at the column of bubbles whizzing upwards in my glass, and my half chipped off aqua nail polish.
‘I couldn’t tell how serious you were about Robin.’
‘I don’t think I could tell either. I wasn’t, I guess. I was happy to see where it went, and here we are.’
Esther checks that Milo’s engrossed in his plastic figurines, and says, quietly:
‘I know you and your feminist friends would flay me for this, and yes it’s old fashioned, but I don’t think sleeping with anyone on the first night, before you’ve got to know them, is setting you up for success.’
I groan. A previous unwise disclosure, made for the same reasons as this one.
‘Look at me like that if you want!’ Esther says. ‘It’s a hard fact of life, no one appreciates what comes too easily to them, whether you’re male or female. You didn’t want him to treat you like another disposable groupie. And yet …’
She gazes at me, trying to work me out.
My sister has a completely warped idea of my sex life. She thinks I am at the forefront of liberation, that I have one-night stands as often and as with as little thought as she gets a Caffè Nero. I’ve never bothered to correct her, to explain I’ve only been with the boyfriends she knows about. I’m not completely sure why. She thinks I haven’t found anyone worthwhile because I’m so unserious. I would rather she thinks of me as unserious, than tragic.
‘I don’t think holding out was here or there with Robin. He pulled the wholedoesn’t believe in being faithful to one personthing, like he thinks he’s in the Sixties. We were merely ships, passing in the shite.’
