If I Never Met You(78)

Laurie paused in confusion, and thought confusion was justified. She hoiked her cross-body bag off and dumped it by the kitchen cabinets.

‘I don’t get it. “Fake”? He did this?’

‘Yeah. He stayed last night, left before I woke up. I found it when I got up.’

‘What? Had you argued?’Emily shrugged and ran her fingertips through a matted section of her hair.

‘I dunno, kind of? He called my work superficial, blood-sucking and parasitical and I kept laughing it off and then we had the sort of sex where there’s some pushing and pulling and mild slapping.’

Laurie inwardly shuddered at sharing bodily fluids with someone both so hostile, and largely unknown.

‘What a piece of shit,’ Laurie said, exhaling in shock. ‘And what a PSYCHO. Who does this?!’

The tomatoes emanated a sinister force, as she looked at them again. You’d have to plan it, rifling through the salad in the fridge. Weighing up whether frozen peas would do the job.

‘It scared me and then I realised, I’m supposed to be scared, aren’t I?’ Emily said. ‘He’s with his friends on WhatsApp right now, taking sick pleasure in imagining me finding it, him having the last word. Hahahaha guess what I did to this stuck-up bitch. Photo attached.’

Laurie’s stomach churned.

Emily dropped on to the L-shaped sofa and covered her face with her hands.

‘The worst thing he’s right. He’s right.’

‘What? How?’

‘I am a fake.’

‘In what way are you fake?’

‘What’s not fake about me? This isn’t my hair colour,’ Emily yanked at a hank of what Laurie had learned was called balayage. ‘These aren’t my nails!’ she waved Shellacs the colour of blood at her. On her pale small hands, they looked to Laurie like the Snow White spinning wheel pin-prick.

‘And this?’ Laurie said, gesturing at their grand surroundings. ‘A figment?’

‘I’ve got a mortgage larger than the moon, Laurie, you know that. You are looking at debt. Debt with Hague Blue walls.’

‘You have a big mortgage because you have an even bigger salary because you are CEO of your own very successful business.’

‘Yeah and there’s not a day that goes by I don’t think it might topple over.’

‘That’s why you work so hard. That’s why you’re so good. You don’t take anything for granted.’

‘I’m right not to. Lost two accounts last week.’ Emily put bare feet on the edge of her coffee table and flexed her matching red toes. She was still every bit the overcaffeinated waif who buzzed around Laurie’s halls bedroom. Laurie hated her seeming so world weary. Brought low by a total tosser.

‘That’s work. That’s life. You’ll win three next week.’

‘It’s not only that though, Loz! You think I’m thin because I’m thin, right? Maybe I was, once. Now, if I’m not eating with clients or eating with you or whatever, I skip meals.’ She gestured over at a spotless kitchen. ‘It’s never seen a chopped onion. I’m not saying I have an eating disorder. I’m saying I’m thin because I work very hard at being thin and deprive myself and then pretend I don’t have to work at it. Even to you. I don’t know why. Why don’t I say, “I am thin because I try very hard to be”? Because my world runs on envy, you need to incite envy. Because I’m fake.’

‘You’re not fake!’ Laurie said, wilting a little in sympathy.

She sat down beside Emily and put her arm around her. Emily had the musky odour of the night before and it occurred to Laurie there were very few friends you could call before the shower.

‘I wouldn’t get too close, I smell like a monkey’s handbag,’ Emily said with a sniff.

‘Aye yeah you do.’ They both did the kind of weak stomach-laughing that sits right on the border with tears.

‘You’re very real, Emily. You’re dynamic and clever as hell and you never complain. Just because you don’t discuss the effort it takes, doesn’t make you fake. Would a man do that? What would your twin brother do?’

Emily smiled, wanly, at mention of an old catchphrase. At university, discussing with righteous fervour at the different treatment meted out to men, they always put it to this test – the hypothetical male twin in this man’s world, who had all the masculine advantages.

‘People will always need lawyers,’ Emily continued, voice tremulous. ‘They won’t always need what I sell. Or they won’t want it from some craggy fifty-something still cramming herself into her skinny jeans.’

‘Right, stop. What does bar man do?’

‘… Work in a bar?’

‘Right, work in a bar. There’s nothing wrong with that. But he’s what, thirty?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘You are four years older than him, Emily, you live here and you are a boss, and you depend on no one. Have you got any idea how threatening that is to the male ego, for women not to need them? Do you think it came from nowhere, Rob the thirty-two-year-old barman’s need to put you down, to break you in some way, to humiliate you?’

Laurie thought about her own working week. You were equal with these men so long as you didn’t make them feel unequal, lesser, challenged. If you stayed in your lane.