Perfectly Ordinary People(3)
After college I got a job in journalism, working for a local rag, which seemed to suit my butterfly nature much better, and then in the nineties I went to a PR company, before ending up in the job I do today.
I’m an acquisitions editor for a minor London publisher you won’t have heard of (we’re called Impressionable – see?) and that basically means I get to read manuscripts all day while, you guessed it, wearing my pyjamas, drinking tea and thoughtfully sucking on a pencil.
My friends seem to think I’ve got the world’s cushiest job, but that’s merely because they fail to realise just how dreadful most of the dross on the slush pile is. The things I have to plough my way through . . . There are no words to describe just how bad most of it is.
As you have probably guessed, Jake and I have very different personalities. He’s a practical, methodical, rather reasonable sort of chap, while I tend towards vague, flighty and emotional. Jake, for instance, had precisely three girlfriends during college, one for each year he was there, while I was single for two years – a period I used to refer to as the Great Desert Crossing – followed by three passionate, overlapping affairs with otherwise involved men. The overlapping bit was complicated while the otherwise involved aspect surprisingly wasn’t. After these came a brief three-day love affair with a pretty holidaymaker from Tokyo called Sakura. Of the four, I’d have to admit that the one I loved the most was, without a doubt, Saky. But the sex thing . . . was . . . Look, I don’t want to go into details, so let’s just say I tried it and it wasn’t for me. Whereas sex with men . . . Well . . . Never had any problems there.
In a nutshell, my love-life was as dramatic and amorphic as Jake’s was methodical and geometric, which raises the question of how two people who share that much DNA can be so radically different. Because as everyone constantly reminds us, we look like identical twins.
What kept me sane throughout these crazy shenanigans was my friendship with touchstone Gina. Gina defines herself as flexisexual, which means that she alternates between guys (mainly) and girls (occasionally). She doesn’t, like, care about gender, yeah? She only, like, cares about the person who’s, like, inside. Obvs.
And before your mind goes there, there’s never been a hint of romance between us. If I’d been able to be with a woman, it would have been Saky, and it would have lasted for eternity. But the sex thing just wasn’t possible, and as I can’t imagine living without sex, that, pretty much, was that.
If I need a drinking buddy, Gina’s a drinking buddy, and if I want to go dancing then she’s up for it. If I’m sad and need someone to listen to my moaning then she’s the most sympathetic ear I could hope for, and if I need to shop for clothes then she’s just about to go shopping herself. The list of Gina’s strong points just goes on and on.
So other than her tiny, admittedly annoying tendency to insert the words like and obvs at random points in every sentence, she’s, obvs, like, a perfect friend.
Christmas at our place tended to be wonderful. During my teenage years I rebelled from time to time by insisting on spending Christmas at a friend’s house but it was never a patch on our Christmases because, though there might have been better-dressed participants or a video game to play, though there were sometimes more gifts – and I remember one, in particular, where the pile of gifts was so high, so obscene, that the sight of them all ploughing their way through them made me feel physically sick – they simply weren’t as much fun as Christmas back home.
The major reason for this was that at our place the drinking started before lunch, which meant that the present opening was drunken present opening, and charades meant drunken charades . . . And when you combined alcohol with the fact that Christmas rarely involved less than fifteen participants, and when you threw into the mix the genes from the Irish side of our family that make us the happiest drunks on Earth, what you got was a level of fun and mayhem that was just about impossible to beat.
Christmas at our house was, without exception, ‘good craic’ and that lasted right through until 1994, the year when everything went wrong.
Why was ’94 different? Well, to start with, Jake and I threw some random elements into the mix by inviting guests – Jake bringing new girlfriend Abby along and me, Gina. Gina’s family were spending Christmas on Bondi Beach and being a redhead who peels at the sight of a low-energy lightbulb, the only thing that Gina hates more than Australian men (ex-boyfriend, don’t ask) is sunshine. It seemed the perfect occasion for her to discover the craziness of a Solomas Christmas.
But the main thing that changed that year, the tiny element with unimagined destructive power, was a board game called Scruples.
The day got off to a promising start, Uncle Tom arriving early with a five-litre keg of Guinness and a bottle of Bushmills, and Uncle Harry with a litre of Bombay Sapphire and a six-pack of tonic water. Lucky Uncle Eirla was holidaying in Thailand, so he avoided all the drama.
Mavaughn was on fine form, wafting around in a black velvet dress and dispensing a stream of constant, unwanted advice while simultaneously sipping at her Baileys.
Newbie guests Gina and Abby were a bit wide-eyed at it all, but that threw them together in a way that a boring sit-down meal never could have, so that within an hour they’d become tipsy new best friends.
The temperature was incredibly mild that year, and the sun even shone a little, which removed the only issue that ever caused any kind of conflict in our house – the requirement to smoke out back.