‘Morning.’ Liv paused her highlighting to take Ali in. ‘Can I just say this,’ she indicated Ali’sRuPaul’s Drag Racelevels of make-up, ‘is somewhat at odds with this.’ She waved the same hand over Ali’s grotty PJs.
‘Yeah, well.’ Ali laughed. ‘You should see what I’m up against. They all look demented.’
Liv was still watching her and Ali suddenly felt conscious of the state of her pyjamas and her unwashed hair. When had she last washed it? Dry shampoo was a wonderful thing but you could become overly reliant. The pyjamas were white cotton, or at least they had been until relatively recently. Now, however, there was a yellowish tinge to them and several ominous-looking marks of indeterminate origin and one unmistakable stain. Curry sauce. Ali shifted slightly and tried to twist the stained cuff out of view.
‘Ali, eating curry chips in bed …’ Liv ventured, her tone deliberately light ‘… is probably a sign you’re hitting rock bottom.’
Ali laughed and smoothed her hair, then, noticing her hand, which was practically two-tone, the consequences of a mildly drunken fake tan application, she crossed her arms, hiding the offending hand from Liv’s scrutiny. There should be a warning on fake tan – something like ‘don’t tan when tipsy’.
‘Don’t be crazy, I’m grand. I’m better than grand, I’m great.’
‘Are you really, Ali?’ Liv looked concerned and she was doing her ‘real-talk voice’. ‘You’ve gone deep into this stuff lately. Fake tan and things. And, like, I can understand you wanting a distraction with everything with your dad …’
‘Liv.’ Ali cut across her, smiling a little too hard – she found it tough to cope with people bringing up Miles. Just the week before, she’d run into Marcus, her dad’s old business partner, in the street near where their restaurant used to be – two years ago Mini and Marcus sold Frederick’s, formerly a Dublin institution, and it had been converted into an artisanal coffee roasters. Just seeing Marcus, a person she so closely associated with her dad, had caused the now familiar unease to erupt in her belly.
‘Gosh, Ali,’ he’d begun falteringly, ‘you look so like him.’ Ali could feel the pressure behind her eyes then and she’d felt like running. Sometimes being faced with the sadness of Miles’s vast circle of friends and acquaintances was worse than being faced with Miles himself and the horror of his decline. Even with Liv, she hardly spoke about him anymore; it was easier to pretend that nothing was wrong.
Ali tried to shrug the thoughts away. ‘I love you, Liv, and I’m fine. I’m just having breakfast!’
‘OK, OK. I just don’t get why you’re so in thrall to the tiger people. You slag them but you’re also morphing into them – you see that, right?’
Ali reminded herself not to get so defensive. Liv just didn’t get the Insta thing. It was a bit of an out from all this trouble with Miles and it was hardly hurting anyone. It was true that teenage Ali had been vehemently opposed to fake tan, but people change. What’s a bit of fake tan and filler these days? She was hardly lying about anything important – it was just what it took to even be in the running among these girls.
Ali pulled a dark slate tray from the cupboard above the microwave and set it down on top of Liv’s notes.
‘Hey!’
‘Shhh, I won’t be a sec.’ Ali clicked on the camera on her phone and began arranging rose-gold cutlery, a mason jar of some kind of oat concoction that she had made god knows how long ago and a few stems of dried lavender on the tray. ‘I don’t slag them, and I’m not morphing! It’s a game, just a fun game. Insta is a viable career now. People make the jump from Insta to TV and modelling and all kinds of things these days.’
Ali grabbed a bag of spinach from the fridge, blended a few handfuls with water in the Nutribullet and decanted it into another glass jar, then added a red-and-white striped straw from her stash in the cupboard.
‘How are you going to get from Instagram to writing, Ali?’ Liv asked.
Ignoring her, Ali carefully lined up the shot and snapped about fourteen pics. Liv observed, silently sipping her coffee, until Ali had finished and then she burst out laughing.
‘For fuck! Will you please make a fresh oat thing for tomorrow? I don’t wanna know what’s growing in here.’ Liv gingerly examined the greying concoction. ‘Surely that doesn’t look good in the pics.’
‘I can fix the colour in post.’ Ali shrugged as she tossed the green ‘juice’ down the sink, while tweaking and captioning her post:
Wednesday power proats and a green juice for NAILING this day. Hope everyone is feeling as excited as I am for the coming week. I’ve got some amazing #secretprojects in the works and loads of #werk to get through before the #Glossies launch party tomorrow night
#getyougurl #healthyaf #proteinpow #proteinpowered #DiscoverUnder10K #DublinIger #IrishInfluencers
Ali hit Post, chucked the phone on the table and returned the tray and various accoutrements to the cupboard. As Liv smoothed her notes, Ali casually nicked her coffee and finished the cup. ‘I’ll make more.’ She laughed at Liv’s outraged face. ‘So what’s on the agenda today? Any chance of a lift to coffee with Mini? She’s down at something in the RHA Gallery and I said I’d come in on my way. I can’t be arsed bringing the car – there’s never any parking at work.’ No need to tell Liv that last night’s wine was probably a bigger problem than the lack of spaces. Ali filled the kettle and began assembling her customary breakfast concoction (stale croissant stolen from the work canteen, stuffed with a few slices of cheese, crushed flat and squashed into the toaster).
Liv glared pointedly at the breakfast ritual. ‘This is why we nail through toasters,’ she remarked, accepting the new coffee Ali proffered with elaborate mock deference. ‘You’re such a messer. And, yes, I will drive you in the complete opposite direction to where I’m going because that is the dynamic that has emerged in this friendship. I’m leaving in five, though.’ She started gathering her stuff as Ali began the daily process of extracting the molten hot croissant complete with lava-like melted cheese out of the toaster, burning herself in the process.
‘Every day.’ Liv shook her head, laughing.
‘It’s hotter than the fucking surface of the sun,’ yelped Ali as she finally managed to transport it (stringing cheese still attached to the toaster) to a plate. ‘Right, meet you in the car, two minutes.’
In the car, Ali fiddled with the heat. ‘Bloody freezing. Why can’t we just make a global decision about January – just axe it altogether, something like that?’ she muttered, then noticed Liv’s glum face. ‘Is it getting to you too?’
‘I’ve got the thesis-adviser meeting,’ said Liv as she merged lanes and joined the early-morning traffic heading south across the river. She drew in a breath and continued in a doom-laden tone, ‘With Emer, like.’
‘Oooh.’ Ali bit her lower lip. ‘Is that gonna be …?’
‘Insanely awkward? Fuck, yes, it is.’ Liv gripped the wheel tightly. ‘We haven’t spoken or texted since the whole Solpadeine incident.’
