Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

‘You planned all that, didn’t you?’ I asked to the dark empty room.

‘Planned what?’

‘You deliberately went in and told Edna the truth in a way that would make me come up with the idea to tell the truth myself.’

‘Sounds like you’re analysing everything too much, Lucy.’

‘Am I right?’

Silence.

‘Yes.’

‘What else are you planning?’

He never answered me. It was just as well.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I regretted arranging with Melanie to meet the following night. Not just because Life had kept me awake all night with his snoring but because the night out with her was one giant bullet that I had been trying to dodge for a long time. In order to make up for leaving dinner early the previous week I’d promised I’d go to Melanie’s next set in Dublin. It happened to be Friday in the coolest club in the city, for that month at least. It was so cool it didn’t even have a name, which meant that everybody called it the Club on Henrietta Street with No Name, which was ironic. It was a private club, or at least it had been renovated and marketed with the intention of being a private club, but with its extortionate charges – most likely stemming from the bill for the hundreds of gas heaters placed outside to fool Irish people into thinking and feeling like they were not in inner-city Dublin but in fact West Hollywood – mixed with the times we were living in it meant that it was letting anybody in. Anybody they considered pretty and fabulous during the weekend, that was, and then mid-week just any ugly person at all to cover paying staff wages. Tonight was Friday, which meant they were going for pretty and fabulous which didn’t hold much luck for my life. I’d heard the grumbles that it wasn’t as busy as it used to be – one hundred fewer people on a Friday – which the grumblers surmised was a sign of the times. I thought that was ironic because it was more a sign of the times that a club with no name, situated in what used to be one of the worst slums in Europe – where people were housed in tenements in Georgian buildings that the rich had moved out of to live in the suburbs, where up to fifteen people shared one room, with up to one hundred people with all kinds of diseases living in one building with one toilet in the back garden where livestock lived – was more accurately the sign of the times.

I rang the buzzer on the large red door and waited for a small section of it to open and a dwarf to step outside. That didn’t happen. The entire door was opened by a bald man dressed in black who resembled a bowling ball, and treated entries as though he were Prince Charming and the female arrivals were simply for him alone to pluck his princess before his evil father married him off to an ogre. He might have been happy with my appearance but unfortunately he didn’t like the look of my life, which was ironic because that was the nature of club life; you weren’t supposed to bring your lives with you. You were supposed to leave them at home in the cluttered bathroom beside the hairspray and the fake tan and all the other condiments that went into making you feel like someone else.

The bowling ball stared at my life with a face like he’d just eaten shit. Life reached for his inside pocket again for the piece of paper that gave him access to all areas in my life.

‘Don’t,’ I said, holding my hand up to stop him.

‘Why not?’

‘Not here.’ I looked at the security guy. ‘Could you please get Melanie Sahakyan for us?’

‘Who?’

‘DJ Darkness. We’re guests of hers.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Lucy Silchester.’

‘And what’s his name?’

‘Cosmo Brown,’ Life said loudly and I didn’t need to turn around to know that he felt this was hilarious.

‘His name isn’t on the list. It should be a plus-one.’

‘It’s not a plus-one here.’ He spoke as if the clipboard alone revealed the mysteries of the world. I wondered what the clipboard would say about the Mayan 2012 beliefs, or if it wasn’t on the list it didn’t count. He studied my life. Life didn’t much care, he leaned on the glossy black railings where impoverished children with dirty faces had once climbed, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle that was taking place.

‘There must be a misunderstanding. Could you please get Melanie?’

‘I have to close the door. You can wait in here, he has to wait outside.’

I sighed. ‘I’ll wait here.’

On looks, I could get into the club. With my life, I couldn’t. It was a cruel, cruel world. As groups passed us by and I heard snippets of their conversations before they entered the club I wondered whether, if everyone was to be judged in that way, the club would be completely empty. And that would be a sign of the times. Five minutes later the door swung open and Melanie stood there in a black handkerchief dress with bangles all the way up her tanned arms to her elbows; her hair was swept back in a high pony-tail and her cheekbones were ebony and shiny as though she were an Egyptian princess.

‘Lucy!’ She held her arms open to hug me. I turned so that when we hugged she was facing sideways and not over my shoulder and staring at my life. ‘Who else is with you?’ I pushed past her into the entrance, revealing my life to her. Life followed me inside. Melanie gave him the quick once-over, so quick only I would notice her thick lashes move up and down. Life didn’t notice, he was busy taking off his crumpled suit jacket to hand to the woman at the cloakroom, which was a line of golden muscular arms sticking out of a wall. She hooked his coat over the protruding middle finger of the arm. What a statement. He rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and he looked much better but nothing like the golden muscular arms.

‘You’re a secretive little thing,’ Melanie said to me.

‘It’s not like that, really, at all,’ I shuddered.

‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed. ‘Hello, I’m Melanie,’ and she held out her bangled arm.

Life gave her a megawatt smile. ‘Hi, Melanie, nice to meet you in the flesh, I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Cosmo Brown.’

‘Cool name,’ she laughed. ‘Isn’t that …?’

‘Yes, from the film. He’s never been here before and he’s really excited so come on already, show us around!’ I pretended to be excited and Melanie got excited by my excitement and hotfooted it out of there. Everywhere we went all the men stopped and stared at Melanie, which was a shame for them because they were barking up the wrong tree. This had been a blessing for me because ever since she had come out at the age of sixteen and men discovered she wasn’t only not interested but not even open to negotiation, they turned to me, which I didn’t mind as I had a minimal amount of pride, and even less as a teen.

The club so far had been designed in the theme of the four elements of life; finally we reached a closed door, which had the number five on it. Life looked at me questioningly.

‘The fifth element,’ I explained.

‘Which is … love?’

‘Romantic,’ Melanie said. ‘But no.’ She pushed open the door and gave him a cheeky wink. ‘It’s alcohol.’ And in a giant champagne glass posed a burlesque dancer with nipple tassles and no other clothes that I could see, unless the fabric in question had disappeared into the cracks. I expected Melanie to start DJing immediately so that no more questions could be asked, or if they were it could be the usual mouthing and lip-read one-word answers to shoot-the-breeze questions, but it was early yet and her set didn’t begin until after twelve so we sat around a table and Melanie examined my life.