Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

‘I’m joking with you,’ Life said directly to Adam. ‘I’m an auditor.’

I pursed my lips and tried not to smile; I knew it was a direct reference to the first time we’d met and I’d told him I felt my life was being audited. I think it was a subconscious move but Life put his arm around the back of my chair in a protective way – but it could have been read differently, which is how I think Adam took it, because he was looking at me as if I was the most disgusting piece of shit he’d ever seen.

‘That’s what we needed to do,’ Lisa said suddenly, hand on belly again. ‘Paperwork. Did you sign those forms?’ She looked at David.

‘No, I forgot.’

‘I left them on the kitchen counter beside the phone so that you wouldn’t miss them.’

‘And I didn’t miss them, I saw them, I just forgot to sign them.’

Lisa’s face reddened.

‘We’ll do it when we get home,’ David said calmly. ‘It’s Saturday anyway, not much we can do.’

‘It was fucking Friday yesterday when I told you to sign them,’ she snapped.

David looked at Jamie wearily.

‘So Blake is home,’ Jamie said, lifting the mood.

My ears perked up but as usual I was self-conscious about my reactions to anything that concerned him so I put my head into my menu and pretended to read. I read Soup of the day thirteen times again.

‘Cosmo, do you know Blake?’ he asked.

‘Blake.’ Life looked at me and my heart was thudding.

‘Yes, Blake, the poor innocent man she cruelly dumped like the femme fatale she is,’ Chantelle joked. ‘And we’ll never let her forget about it.’

I shrugged, nonchalantly.

‘Honestly, I think all women should deal with break-ups like you, Lucy,’ Lisa said. ‘My God, remember what I was like?’

Everybody groaned as they collectively remembered the drama of Lisa’s late-night tearful phone calls, the never wanting to be alone, the endless battles to convince her that she was not having a heart attack – that while painful, it was just her heart hurting. Jamie smiled fondly, presumably at the memory of them being together and not the bitter break up which ensued. He and Lisa shared a look. David shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

‘Well, you have to be positive about it, don’t you,’ I said, trying to give them a confident smile but feeling like my lips were trembling inside. ‘At least we split before the property market collapsed and made a good profit.’ Which I’d spent. ‘We’d never sell that apartment now.’

They looked at me.

‘I loved that apartment,’ Chantelle said sadly.

I did too. ‘It was always too hot,’ I said dismissively. I thought of Blake walking around the rooms with no clothes on after I’d pumped up all the heat deliberately. He was always too hot, and like a furnace in bed. I looked at the menu. Hot soup of the day. Hot, hot, hot.

‘I’ve never met him,’ Life said to Adam, who was still waiting for a response.

‘He’s a cool guy,’ Adam said.

‘Of course he is. You’re his best friend.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘May I take your orders, please?’ The waiter arrived in the nick of time. It sounded like ‘ ordairs plez’, as though all his training had been taken from an episode of Allo, Allo.

I learned a lot about Blake during that dinner, such as that his last show was going to be airing this week and he was home for the remainder of the summer; he had opened an outdoor sports activity and adventure centre in, wait for it, Bastardstown, Co. Wexford, something we’d talked about doing together. He was doing everything we’d talked about doing together, only without me. I looked into the menu again and blinked a dozen times. Soup of the day, soup of the day, soup of the day.

‘You guys talked about opening that together, didn’t you,’ Adam said.

‘Eh, yeah,’ I said, blasé, eyes scanning the menu. ‘Maybe I should sue him for stealing my idea.’ The others smiled, apart from Adam of course, and then Lisa started ordering, in her new bossy tone, changing all the dishes to suit her dietary needs. The waiter, slightly nervously, had to excuse himself from the table to see if the chef would do as she wished. Moments later the chef himself came out to join us at the table. He really was French and very politely informed her that he couldn’t do the goat’s cheese pastry without the goat’s cheese because then it would just be pastry and he already had the goat’s cheese wrapped in it.

‘Fine,’ Lisa snapped, her face heating up again. ‘I’ll have bread.’ She clapped the menu shut. ‘Just a plate of bread, please, because that’s all I can eat here, only I can’t because there are nuts in it and I can’t eat nuts.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David said, red-faced, ‘She’s very tired.’

‘Don’t apologise on my behalf, thank you very much.’ She moved awkwardly in her seat. ‘It has less to do with being tired and more to do with these fucking chairs which are so uncomfortable.’ Then she started crying. ‘Shit,’ she squeaked. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve something in my eye.’ Her voice finished at an octave higher than a chipmunk.

‘Lees,’ Jamie said softly, pointing at the menu, ‘look, they’ve got roasted peppers on the side. You love them. Why don’t you order them?’

David looked at Jamie, a little bit annoyed.

‘Oh my God,’ Lisa smiled at Jamie, ‘remember them?’

‘Yeah,’ Jamie laughed, ‘that’s why I mentioned them.’

I’m sure David was picturing them having sex on a bed of roasted red peppers when the reality was probably that they had both gone to a restaurant and eaten a lot of peppers one day like the naughty divils they were.

‘Okay,’ Lisa sighed and opened the menu again.

We all turned away from the conversation while the chef lowered himself to his knees and patiently went through the menu with Lisa to see what he could and couldn’t do for her.

‘So where are you staying?’ Chantelle asked Life. She hadn’t started coming on to him yet, partly because she was only on her second glass of red wine and partly because she wasn’t yet sure if we were together.

‘I’m staying with Lucy,’ he replied and I tried really hard not to look at Adam’s face.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘We’re never allowed in Lucy’s place, it’s like a big secret or something. You’ve seen the inside, tell us, what are we missing?’

I laughed. ‘Ah, come on, I’m not hiding anything.’

‘Porn?’ Jamie asked once the chef had left, ‘It’s porn, isn’t it? Because I’m thinking she has a penchant for magazines and she leaves them lying around.’

‘No, it has to be more exciting than that.’ Chantelle moved in closer. ‘Tell me there’s someone chained up inside because that’s what I’ve been imagining for the past three years.’

I laughed at them. Jamie winked.

‘She was hiding someone anyway,’ Adam said, reaching for a piece of bread. Again nobody noticed his comment. I know that they all heard it, I just didn’t understand why they didn’t hear it the same way as I did. But maybe Life did.

‘What was that?’ he asked, and then I wished he hadn’t noticed because I didn’t like his tone. It was the same tone Blake would use before we ended up getting into a ridiculous fight with some guy at a bar who was looking at me the wrong way. And Adam was rising to it because Adam had been looking for me to take that tone ever since Blake and I split up.

‘Ah, come on, how long have you guys known each other? Forever? I’m guessing that’s a couple of years at least, isn’t it? And as far as I can remember Lucy was with Blake a couple of years back.’ He was keeping his tone light, a small smile on his face, but you could see the anger beneath, steaming from his flared nostrils.