Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

‘Gabe!’ came a screeching voice from across the room. ‘Over here.’

They looked over. It was Florence, a pained-looking woman in her late thirties with a powdered face and a deep wrinkle between her plucked eyebrows. She was, as she never seemed to tire of reminding Charlotte, one of Gabriel’s oldest and closest female friends. They had met when both were starting out as trainees at one of London’s biggest PR firms in the early nineties and, for a brief while, had shared a flat together. It was a period of time that both of them repeatedly referred to with winks and wistful shakes of the head that signified some boring private joke.

Charlotte had once spent an entire evening with both of them during which the sight of an ashtray on a hotel mantelpiece had triggered a long-ago memory of Gabriel accidentally setting alight a curtain. The two of them were in hysterical fits of giggles even though nothing about the story was particularly funny. Charlotte had found herself laughing uneasily along with the joke, aware that Florence was deliberately pressing home her advantage: this is something I know about Gabriel that you don’t, she seemed to be saying, because you will never rival me in this man’s affections.

It was Charlotte’s contention that Florence was secretly in love with Gabriel – a belief that he dismissed as ‘absurd’ any time she raised it. ‘Besides,’ he would say. ‘Who would want to sleep with Florence? It would be like shagging a man.’

Charlotte looked at her now. She was a woman who had spent her whole life maintaining a fiction of her own appearance; a woman who cultivated extreme skinniness because it would make other women jealous rather than because it suited her. Her body was straight up and down, usually clothed in black dresses accessorised with a mad bohemian twist – belts made from Caribbean calabash gourds or necklaces woven together with bright Peruvian threads – and neat flat-soled ballet pumps tipped with velvet. Tonight, she had done something odd with her hair so that it was swept back off her high forehead and tucked behind her ears, kept in place with copious hairspray so that the blonde strands looked brittle to the touch. Two veins stood out thickly from the fleshy scrag of her neck.

‘Hi, darling,’ she said, kissing Gabriel on the lips. ‘So what do you think of the photographs? Pretty grim, no?’

‘We’ve only just arrived,’ he replied, scanning the walls quickly, ‘but they don’t look too bad. I like that one.’ Gabriel pointed at an overblown black-and-white study of a series of corrugated-iron shacks.

‘Hmmm. Very misery chic.’ Florence, who had intertwined her arm with Gabriel’s during this brief exchange, smiled brightly at Charlotte as if she’d only just spotted her. ‘Hi, Charlotte. How are you?’

‘Good, thanks, good. Although I did almost fall on my face on the way in,’ she said, giggling and simultaneously kicking herself for trying to break the ice by making herself look foolish.

‘I noticed.’ Florence turned away from her and towards Gabriel. ‘How’s tricks, Gabe? Any more news on the divorce?’

Gabriel looked taken aback. ‘Oh, you know, just hammering things out.’

‘Yeah, I spoke to Maya the other day and she said it was taking a while.’

‘I didn’t know you two were in touch,’ Gabriel said, and Charlotte could see the place where his jaw twitched when he was tense.

‘Listen, I’m not just going to drop her because you have. She needs support, Gabe. She hasn’t found anyone new,’ Florence looked at Charlotte pointedly. ‘Unlike you.’

The whole evening was played out in a similar vein of extreme discomfort. The photos were dull. The company was acerbic. Every single one of Gabriel’s friends, apart from the curator, who was uncomplicatedly friendly because he was drunk, had looked at Charlotte with a guardedness that was inescapable. She felt awkward and unlikeable and far too young. She had worn thick tights and the gallery was so hot that she felt herself sweating underneath the lights, her hair frizzing up and her cheeks acquiring a slippery surface sheen. She drank too many glasses of free champagne. She felt as if her forehead were tattooed with the label ‘Other Woman’ and sensed the unspoken accusation that she was a walking cliché: a younger model, a mid-life crisis mistress. She wanted to shake everyone by the shoulders and scream at them that it wasn’t like this; it was different; something else; something more; something they could never understand.

It was a familiar resurgence: the sensation of not being good enough. Suddenly, without knowing where the image came from, Charlotte saw her father lying comatose in his hospital bed, pale and impotent, like a skinned rabbit. She shivered and then pushed the thought of him away. She did not want to think about him now.

‘You’re being too sensitive,’ Gabriel murmured in her ear. ‘Besides, it’s hard for my friends to get used to it. Maybe they’re a bit uncomfortable but it’s nothing to do with not liking you.’

‘Why do they all blame me when I’ve got nothing to do with it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you left your wife. That’s one thing. Then you got together with me. That’s a whole other event. The two are not connected. You’re the one that did the leaving and yet I’m the one who’s seen as some brazen harpy who stole you away from your idyllic Boden catalogue family life. Jesus.’ She stopped a passing canapé tray and popped a smoked salmon blini in her mouth.

‘Charlotte, I’m not going to do this here.’

‘Do what?’ she said, through an unchewed mouthful.

‘I’m not going to have this argument here in the middle of my friends.’ He glanced behind her shoulder. Charlotte turned round to follow his sightline and saw Florence looking at them meaningfully, arms crossed.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she found herself saying without really meaning to. ‘Go hang out with her and reminisce over the good old days if that’s what makes you happy. I’m leaving.’ She handed him her empty champagne glass, stalked to the cloakroom with as much dignity as she could muster and got her coat. She knew she wasn’t really angry but rather putting on a show of what anger should look like. She thought she had a right to be angry, that she should capitalise on this, and yet, beneath it all, she just felt sad.

Her mind wandered back to the phone conversation with her mother, to the thought of her childhood bedroom denuded of all that was once hers, to the realisation that nothing she could ever do would make any of it better and she hated herself for her powerlessness, for acting how she thought she should be acting rather than behaving in the way she actually felt.

And all the while, Charlotte was fervently hoping Gabriel would follow her, wrap his arms around her and tell her he was sorry. But he never came and she left without looking back.

Anne; Charlotte

They settled into an unspoken routine at the hospital so that the days slid into weeks and the weeks became something approaching permanence. They discovered that it was easy – easier than it should have been – for life to swallow up the extraordinary and weave it into normality. Shock became a sort of weariness. Terror became a numb suspension of time. The anxiety that had gripped them in the immediate aftermath of his accident transmuted into a dull, nagging sensation of having to do something. Hospital visits were no longer something to be feared, but rather an event to be got through, ticked off as part of the day’s routine.

Anne, who had never held down a permanent job, found that it was almost a relief to have something with which to fill her time other than the endless caffè lattes with Janet or the daytime soaps she pretended not to watch. There was a release, too, in not having to think of what to cook for supper. When Charles had been awake, the constant grind of coming up with a new combination of meat and vegetables had loomed over every single day, assuming grotesquely inflated proportions so that almost as soon as she woke up she would start tormenting herself with visions of lamb chops and green beans. Now, with Charles in hospital, she picked up whatever she felt like from a Tesco Express on the way home. She delighted in the oddness of her dietary whims. Once, she had eaten a packet of marinated tofu and two Braeburn apples and felt utterly content.