Chapter 2
I’m last to arrive as usual. There they are, already comfortably installed at our favourite corner table. Janice, picking at the olives and filling the ashtray with tab ends coated in her trademark Harlot Scarlet lippy. Janice is absolutely my best girlfriend, because she’s VGV, which in Katie-speak stands for Very Good Value. Almost eight inches shorter than me, she has boobs like beach balls, more curves than spaghetti junction and a mass of bubble curls the colour of lemon drops, which she wears as big as humanly possible in an effort to make her look taller. Janice is brilliant fun, expects little entertainment in return and, despite the fact that she’d probably describe herself, somewhat annoyingly, as having ‘bags of personality’ and can be bloody bossy and a bit muff before mate-ish sometimes, I love her to bits because she’ll do absolutely anything for a laugh.
George, one deliciously pert buttock raised slightly from the Formica chair as he rummages in his bum cheek pocket for Sobranie fags, is perched opposite her. Clad in a skin-tight, ice-cream pink T-shirt, a pair of silver hipsters and a clonky pair of biker boots, he looks ashen. His eyes have sunk almost entirely into his head and he’s obviously knackered. Which is hardly surprising. It’s the first of January after all, and George is a gay man. He’ll have spent last night tripping his tits off on disco biscuits and dancing to Dana International.
‘Been up all night, have we?’ I tease him gently.
‘Does Judith Chalmers have a passport?’ he grumbles, proffering an unusually pasty cheek.
I grin at him and look across the table at Sam. He is, I have to admit, looking very slightly uncomfortable. But it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is because Janice has practically superglued herself to his side. Poor Sam. Janice has fancied him ever since I introduced them during college days. Any mention of his name in her presence has been accompanied without fail by much phwoar-ing and raising of her clenched fist in a suggestive manner. Sam is terrified of her. I don’t dare tell Janice this, but he’s been known to suggest he’d rather sleep with his grandmother. He says it’s because she looks too much like a drum majorette for his taste, though George reckons it’s more to do with the fact that Sam is a closet queen. But then George always says that about straight men. Especially when he wants to sleep with them.
George, I’m very much afraid, is a tart with a capital T.
I’ve known Sam a lot longer than the other two. Janice and George are friends from college, whereas Sam and I lived next door to one another as kids. We spent our formative years puncturing each other’s Space Hoppers and generally causing as much damage to the other’s few belongings as possible. I broke his swing ball; he hacked off Football Sindy’s legs with a Swiss Army knife. He stamped on my Buckaroo; I threw all the bits of Operation down the toilet. We were expelled from playgroup together for swinging on the chains in the boys’ toilets (at my instigation) until they broke under the strain. Sometimes, we had great fun.
And sometimes we didn’t.
When we were four I cracked his head open with a sandpit spade because my mum let him sit on her lap. Which, I thought, was absolutely fair enough. His noggin bled so much his angelic blond hair turned strawberry pink. Shocked, I forbade him to tell a soul. And like the loyal bud he’s always been, he suffered in silence. I wasn’t found out until we sat down to watch Playschool and my mum noticed the raspberry blobs rapidly appearing across the back of her wicker swing chair. Oh, I was all for sharing, as long as it wasn’t my sodding stuff that got shared. I was an only child, for Christ’s sake. I was sensitive.
Somehow, Sam and I have managed to stay friends. I suppose it helps that my mum and his dad still live in the same street, nipping in and out of each other’s houses for sherry and swapping vegetable marrows and runner bean crops as and when the fancy takes them.
Sam’s changed a bit since we were kids. Now, six feet three and with a shock of sand-blond hair which refuses to behave, no matter what expensive goop he slathers all over it, Sam throws himself with gusto into everything he does. He takes huge bites out of life as though it were a great big toffee apple. Women adore him. He says ‘Jump’, they ask ‘And would you like me to wear knickers?’ He only has to snap his fingers and they come running, frothing at the gusset. I think it must be his enthusiasm. It’s not as though he’s particularly good-looking.
OK, so there was a time when I sort of fancied him. I let him finger the strap of my trainer bra outside the cinema when we were fourteen. But that was only because he bought me a family size bag of Revels and let me eat all the Malteser ones.