“Humble beginnings,” he grinned when I teased him about it. “Some things you never forget. I can work a dishwasher, too.
And
I can cook.” He threw me a probing look, brow furrowed, before he added, “There are quite a lot of little things you don’t know about me yet, my sweet. You know the big stuff, but you never had a chance to find out the everyday matters.”
He said it lightly but I took his point. However, I simply smiled sweetly and let it pass. This wasn’t the time or the place.
By the time I emerged from the bathroom, clean and slightly pink, Dan had deposited a pair of his pajamas on my bed for me. Much too big, of course, but there was something extremely comforting about snuggling into a pair of laundered, oversized men’s pajamas. Even if they were slightly unexpected. In days gone by, Dan had worn silky designers or even slept completely without. This pair was weird. They were thick cotton pajamas in a red-and-green tartan pattern. Quite unlike Dan, in fact. Still, they were soft and smelled fresh, and I was very, very tired. I crawled under the duvet and was asleep before I could put the lights out or reflect further on Dan’s pajama aberration.
Barely six hours later, there we were again outside my flat in Tooting, bleary-eyed and quite unable to take in the scale of devastation.
“Structurally unsound” and “uninhabitable” were the two words that lodged in my brain out of Fire Officer Thomson’s assessment. He and his crew had investigated the flat closely earlier that morning and concluded that a faulty connection in one of the sockets had short-circuited, creating that massive flash flame that we had seen and igniting the cables under the plaster, eventually causing carpets and curtains to catch fire, and so on.
I was still taking all of that in when another fireman handed me a rather large, very soggy bag.
“What’s this?” I wondered out loud.
“These are the clothes and a few other things that we salvaged from your bedroom this morning,” he explained. “I’m afraid everything else has been destroyed either by fire or water. Oh, and most of the kitchen is still intact,” he added cheerfully, “but I figured you’d probably not be wanting your crockery just yet.”
“Err, no,” I concurred weakly, regarding the bag in my hand. So that was it. That was all that was left of my stuff. I swallowed hard.
“Chin up,” advised the fireman. “No one got hurt, and everything else is replaceable.”
“Um, yes,” I mumbled uncertainly. “I suppose it is.”
So we returned to Dan’s house, where I set about instructing my insurance to send somebody out to complete a claims assessment, where I rang Mum and Dad to let them know what had happened, and where I sent out a text to all my friends to make sure they were all okay. Afterwards, Dan helped me hammer out a rudimentary strategy for hiring builders to fix the flat, and then he took me for a walk in the park.
We didn’t talk much because there wasn’t much to say. I hadn’t fully comprehended what had happened to my life yet. I
knew
, but I couldn’t seem to understand.
Dan was brilliant. Bearing in mind our history, he was careful not to create any ambiguous moments. There was no innuendo, just all-out, full-on friendship. He invited Rachel and Jordan over that evening for dinner; this time Jordan turned up, but I didn’t get a chance to find out why he hadn’t made it the previous night.
And suddenly, Sunday was over, somehow, and on Monday morning I had to go to work. Taking a different route to a different Tube station, walking past different coffee shops and different newspaper vendors. How very odd and unexpected life could be.
It turned out to be slightly surreal, sharing a house with a rock star. Our lives seemed to move on different planes, and in more ways than one. When we were alone together, we made a careful point of being just friends. Meanwhile, every morning at six thirty, I would trundle down to the kitchen to find the remains of Dan’s entertaining from the previous night cluttering up the kitchen surfaces. Mostly there would be glasses and bottles, frequently accompanied by takeaway cartons and used plates. Very occasionally, there was evidence of rudimentary cooking using a disproportionate amount of pots and accessories which would also languish in the sink.
Dan would be fast asleep, blissfully unaware of my early morning work-drone existence and leaving the tidying up to Jenny, the housekeeper, who would arrive at about nine o’clock. Incidentally, I fell into the habit of adding my breakfast dishes to the general debris, thus granting myself an extra ten minutes to lounge around watching breakfast television before heading out to work at seven thirty. Sharing a house with Dan certainly had some perks.
Jenny also took over my laundry and my ironing without asking and without comment. I didn’t have to lift a finger by way of cleaning or hoovering, and so I led a very relaxed existence for a few weeks. Apart, of course, from all the stress of trying to get the insurance to settle my claim, which had risen to quite an astronomical sum. Also, keeping on top of the builders restoring my flat proved quite a challenge, until Dan suggested appointing a project manager and adding the cost to the insurance claim. The latest estimate was that it would be three to four weeks before I could move back in.
So in the interim I stayed at Dan’s, and I was getting dangerously used to my cushy lifestyle there. The only fly in the ointment was that, after the first few days, I barely saw him. I gathered Tuscq was working on a new album, but sometimes he was clearly just “out.” I made a point of not asking where he went or what he did on those occasions, and he made a point of not telling.
When he
wasn’t
out, he would often bring home a random woman. His conquests were all attractive models with perfect figures, generous endowments in the chest region, and near-identical faces done up with artful makeup. Somehow, though, they never seemed to make Dan happy.
That
bothered me intensely.
Without meaning to, I started mildly discomfiting Dan’s lady-friends at every opportunity. Once I posed as Dan’s long-suffering wife, and one time, when Rachel stayed over, we pretended that we were all part of one happy love-in. And so it went on until…until George changed everything.
George had had the privilege of staying for three nights in a row. Having emptied the fridge of any vegetable matter in greens and oranges, having consumed all of my bread even though she was on a strict no-carbs diet, and also having liberally made use of my Orient shower cream without asking, George tried to make friends. Presumably, she figured that buttering up the incumbent resident would improve her chances of hanging on. Anyway, she couldn’t have got off to a worse start when she called me—
“Sadie!”
Of course I didn’t react.
“Yoo—hoo, Sadie,
hello
!” she warbled, sounding vaguely like a songbird in distress.
I looked up from my book.
“Are you talking to me?” I inquired.
“Sure am,” she issued with a total lack of concern. “You must be the lovely Sadie. Dan’s told me all about you.”
I heaved a sigh. “Has he, now?”
“Yeah, like how you’re just staying for a while and how you’re definitely moving out and how you’re totally like not into him and how—”
I had to stop her in mid flow.
“Yup, that would be me. Except my name’s not Sadie.”
“Not Sadie?” she echoed.
“No. Definitely not.”
“Are you sure?”
I snorted into my tea cup. “Quite sure, darling. And you must be…” Now it was my turn. She opened her mouth to answer, but I got in there first. Not in her mouth, of course. I spoke first, was what I meant.
“No, let me guess. You must be…” I regarded her critically as if to get a clue from her appearance.
“Candy,” I offered.
She shook her head, looking offended. I ploughed on.
“Crystal.” Another shake of head.
“Teela…? LaLa…?” More shakes of head, with mouth opening and closing, ready to speak. I was faster.
“Barbie? Nala? Babsie? Shelley? Brie? Davinia?” I was on a real roll here, with no idea where all these names were coming from.
“Arabella-Georgiana,” she interrupted me suddenly at top volume. “My name is Arabella-Georgiana.”
I stared, wide-eyed. The words left my mouth before I could stop them. “Do people really call you that?”
To my great surprise, she burst into tears and sat down heavily at the kitchen table. I felt bad. After all, it wasn’t her fault that her parents had saddled her with an impossible combination of names. I sat down next to her. What to do? I couldn’t really hug her, I didn’t even know her.
“I’m sorry,” I offered eventually, when she had calmed down enough to be able to hear me. “That was really rude. I’m sorry, really.”
When I didn’t get a reaction, I decided to dig my hole deeper. “It’s a pretty name, really…” I continued. “It’s just…well, a little unexpected.”
She snorted and signaled for me to pass her a tissue to blow her nose.
Harrumph!
My goodness, that girl could blow. I blushed at the inadvertent innuendo as my mind imagined her… No, no, no, I didn’t want to go there. Arabella-Georgiana wiped at her eyes, smearing mascara all over her face and suddenly looking really vulnerable.
“My friends call me George,” she hiccupped eventually. “Anyway, it’s not you teasing me about my name that’s upset me.” She paused. “Has…has Dan really had all those women…?” she asked, then hastily turned down the tone of her question. “I mean, not
had
had…well, obviously that, too…but, what I meant is, is he really bringing back so many others?”
I flinched at “others.” Not a good sign.
I heaved another big sigh, but spoke much more gently.
“I made all those names up, George, because I don’t really meet Dan’s conquests most of the time. But…” I stopped to see how she was taking this in so far. “Yes, he does bring home quite a lot of different ladies…”
She looked crestfallen. I took pity on her. “Look, it’s just how he is. He can’t help himself. I think he’s looking for something but he doesn’t even know what it is.”
She hiccupped again, looking waif-like and forlorn.
“I’m fairly sure that he hasn’t made you any promises of any kind…has he?” I suddenly had this awful thought he might have forgotten himself. When
I
first met him, he had been absolutely, brutally honest with me.
I’m bad news,
he had said.
I love to have sex, but I’m not in love with you
. That was his default mode when he took someone to bed. Or at least, it used to be. Obviously, there was always the possibility that he might develop feelings for someone; he was only a man, after all. He had nearly believed that he loved me, back then.
Nearly
.
“No,” George acknowledged, abruptly cutting into my ruminations, “no, he hasn’t. He told me he was bad news…but I thought…” She petered out.
Bless her.
Suddenly, she fixed me with a surprisingly inquisitive stare with those red-rimmed, black-ringed eyes of hers. “How do you cope with it all?”
I gave a start. “What, who—me?”
“Yes, you. I mean, after all, you live here. You must be…pretty serious about him?”
I burst out laughing. “Oh my gosh, no. I was, at one time. A long time ago. But I knew that he would always seek out other women, and so I broke it off. We’ve stayed friends though, as cheesy as that sounds. I’m only staying here while my flat is being redecorated.”
She looked a question mark at me.
“It burned down. On my birthday. While I was having a party.”
“No
,” George breathed, “really? How awful for you.” She was momentarily distracted from her own misery. Abruptly, something clicked, and she looked at me with recognition.
“I knew I almost had it right. It’s not Sadie, it’s
Sophie
, right?” I nodded my head, astounded at the sudden insight.
“I knew I’d seen your picture before. You were engaged to Dan a couple of years back, right? And you dumped him?” I cringed at the stark summation of events, but yes, I acknowledged, that was me.
“Wow.” George was awestruck. “Wow,” she repeated. “I don’t know if I could have let him go.”
Oh dear. She was
still
stuck on him. I sidestepped her comment by focusing on her own predicament.
“Honey,” I said as gently as I could. “You should let him go.
Now
. He’s not yours, not anyone’s. You’ll get hurt. He might ring you tomorrow, you might go out again, you might even come back here another night. But…the day after, it’ll be somebody new. Trust me.”
So, I had turned from model-baiting to model-counseling. Perhaps I wasn’t such a mean person after all. George sat at the kitchen table like in a dream, and Dan—as always deploying impeccable timing—chose that precise moment to walk in.
“Hello, my two favorite ladies in the whole wide world,” he joked, not even remotely perturbed by George’s destroyed appearance. “Lovely to see you having a cozy chat.”
George looked at him with confusion.
“Is it true you don’t love me?” she asked abruptly, in a voice that was only ever so slightly wobbly. Dan shot me a look. I shook my head.