Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy(60)
Gaah! How had Mabel got on my laptop?
Started fiddling around trying to find notes, then George said impatiently, ‘Look, while you’re looking for this stuff, why don’t we go off and read the pages and we can order in some lunch?’
‘Read the pages?’ I said, mind reeling. ‘But haven’t you already read the pages?’
I mean, we’d just been discussing the pages. WHAT was the point of me staying up all night drinking Red Bull and chewing Nicorette, if they haven’t even read the pages and—
‘We’ll see you after lunch,’ said George, and now they have all left the boardroom.
1.05 p.m. Humph. Anyway. At least I can freely scratch my head now, and google crabs and head lice and try and make some emotional peace with the fact that insect life has terminally put Roxster off me.
1.15 p.m. Just typed in ‘Are nits crabs?’ on Ask.com and was reading –
Head lice and ‘crabs’, also called pubic lice, are different things.
Head lice (usually found on the head) have longer and thinner body compared to pubic lice which have bigger and more robust bodies.
Head lice live on the head only and cannot live in the pubic region.
Crab lice live in the pubic region.
There is also a third kind of lice that lives in other hairy regions of the . . .
– when George’s assistant appeared behind me with a lunch menu before I had time to switch the screen back to Princess Bride Dress Up.
Snapped the laptop shut, ordered a Thai chicken salad and, once she’d gone – presumably to tell the entire company that I had pubic lice – emailed the crabs/lice link to Tom.
1.30 p.m. No one has come back. Starting to panic now as I am doing school pickup today. I mean, surely it was reasonable to think a meeting about ten pages would not take quite as long. Ooh, text. Roxster?
Was Tom.
<Thanks for the links. None of this is actually helping.>
Gaah! George and Damian and Imogen are all coming back.
2.45 p.m. Meeting is over and have seconds to spare to get to Infants Branch by 3.15. Cheeringly, meeting was slightly more positive after they’d read the pages, and eaten some food (you see, is exactly the same with Billy and Mabel!), except they want me to rewrite everything I’ve already rewritten because the humour is ‘not coming off the page’, and the only bit George actually wants to leave as it is is the ludicrous, For Your Eyes Only scuba-diving ending.
Of course, when they returned after lunch, I still did not have feminist notes up on screen. Instead when they gathered round they were greeted with:
Head lice and ‘crabs’, also called pubic lice, are different things . . .
Think managed to click it off before they actually read it, though they may have seen the pictures of the two kinds of lice.
Ensuing discussion was punctuated by texts from Talitha who had, of course, immediately found a Celebrity Nit Nurse in Notting Hill and was texting me a running commentary.
<Hasn’t found any yet.>
<Oh my God, I’ve got nits, though at ￡130 to clear my head I’m not sure I believe her.>
Was too polite to ask Talitha to stop texting, because felt guilty and clearly needed to support her.
Talitha texts got worse and worse.
<Celebrity nit nurse will not guarantee my head is clear because they might be nesting in the bonds in my extensions.>
<What am I going to do about blow-dry habit? Have to go on TV! Cannot even have girls on show ‘touch up’ my hair. Also what if Sergei now has nits?>
<The salon won’t take the extensions out because of the nits, so the only way is if I take them out myself with a bottle of extension oil.>
Talitha really must be in a state because normally she would never do anything to make you feel guilty. Have ruined Talitha’s life and career. And character.
Felt was the least I could do to offer to take them out for her if she comes round.
Talitha then came up with the brilliant plan of us all going to the Celebrity Nit Nurse tomorrow. ‘So at least that’s one less thing for you to worry about! And it will be a nice outing for us all! It’ll be fun!’
11 p.m. Fantastic evening taking out Talitha’s hair extensions. Was incredibly challenging, as had to rub oil into the glue bits, and pull out, then inspect for nits. Was a bit like Anne Hathaway dying of a bad haircut in Les Misérables, except more moaning and crying. We didn’t find any actual insects as the Celebrity Nit Nurse had got all of those, but we did find quite a lot of dark dots actually in the glue.
Worst is that hair extensions will cost hundreds of pounds to put in again.
‘It’s all my fault. I’ll pay for them,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, darling,’ Talitha said. ‘That’s not the point. The point is, I can’t put them back in for a week in case we missed any, because the nit cycle is a week. What am I going to do?’
She seemed suddenly to lose heart, looking at herself with nit oil smeared in her real hair. ‘Oh, good, I look a hundred years old. What is Sergei going to say? And I have to go on TV. Oh, darling, this is what I always feared would happen. I’ll get trapped on a desert island where they have no hair-extension specialist or Botox aesthetician and all my artifice will drain away.’
Trying not to think about my eighteenth-century wig theory, I pointed out that this was most unlikely to happen – no one looks at their best with their hair smeared down with hair-extension and nit oil – and washed Talitha’s hair and blow-dried it. Actually, she looked really sweet. It was all fluffy, like a little chicken.