Carrie once told me that I am the type of good-looking that sneaks up on you, after weeks and weeks and then all at once. At the time, I was having a bewildering lack of sex for someone in their early twenties, so this information landed fairly awkwardly. Most of the men I felt attracted to at the time preferred a doe-eyed milquetoast, and said as much. ‘I really want a girl like in that film,Amélie,’ they would say straight to my face. My face, with its grey eyes and handsomely square jaw. My face, framed with the sort of fluffy, frizzy hair that, if I lived in 1884, would make me a goddess. But I don’t, so it doesn’t.
‘You’re the sort of girl that guys with girlfriends will chance their arm and ask for a threesome with,’ Carrie surmised with typical beery bluntness. ‘You’re not enough for them to leave their girlfriends, but you’re sexy in a way that makes them want to know if you’ll be freaky in bed.’
‘Jesus wept, thanks for that.’
‘No, I mean it in a good way.’
Despite this lengthy dry spell where the spiders on the windowsill were getting more action than me, Carrie regards me as this effortlessly sexual being, lips forever in a post-coital throb. I once told her, after way too many Mad Dog 20/20s had been imbibed, that a Plenty of Fish date had licked my arsehole during a weird, off-ramp moment. The fact that I didn’t expire with shame in front of him then and there has cast me in her mind as some sort of sexual libertine. I guess I’m not in any hurry to disabuse her of this notion. I think of her idea of me, and that non-power, more often than I’d like.
If Carrie were to appear onMastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
Hangover cures that work in four hours or less
Obscure eighties movies starring Shelley Long and/or Kirstie Alley
Vintage polyester dresses
The life and works of Jilly Cooper
Picking the locks on her own doors to avoid paying £100 to a locksmith
I thought my life was in disarray until Carrie let me into hers. The first time I went to her bedsit in Pimlico in the near-blinding sharpness of daylight, the smell of days-oldtakeaway greeted us like a hyper child. There were newspapers, foil food cartons and torn tights on every surface. Out of the bin poked all manner of, well,intimaterubbish. ‘This is just a crash pad until I get my proper place,’ she told me time and time again, by way of explaining the takeaways and visible sanitary wear. She eventually moved into an ex-council house way out in East Ham. The grotty surfaces somehow seemed to dutifully follow her.
‘What happens when you take a guy back here?’ I genuinely wanted to know as my eyes took in the chaos.
‘We just go back to their place.’ She shrugged. ‘Who’d want to come all the way back to Zone Four for a blowjob?’
‘We can’t have it all figured out like you do,’ Carrie often says, referring to Johnny. Shamed as I am to say it, this appraisal of how my life looks from the outside feels nice.
Carrie was a life coach until just recently, and I’m sure she’d be the first to say that this was a bit like walking into someone’s house, telling them in painstaking detail how to load their dishwasher correctly, then going home and eating dinner from the outside bins. There has been a career pivot of late though, and now Carrie sells aloe vera products online.
‘A pyramid scheme,’ I made the mistake of clarifying a few months ago as she subtly tried to rope me in.
‘A multilevel-marketing venture,’ she corrected me. ‘The overall message here is self-care and nourishment, not making money. It’s empowering stuff.’
There is nothing Carrie won’t do these days for an aloe vera sale. She has swapped out bollocks like ‘Bloom with confidence. Blossom with success’ for ‘This shit will make you live forever’. You could be in a queue at the bank, waiting at a bus stop or simply meeting her briefly in passing,and you are guaranteed to hear all about it. She encounters a lot of rictus grins in an average day, or maybe she doesn’t even see them.
Brigitte, meanwhile, opened a Facebook account a year ago and has shown a completely different side to the girl who habitually left the Good Mixer or the Camden Palace with puke mashed into her hair.
Were Brigitte to appear onMastermind, her specialist subjects would be:
Enid Blyton (weirdly)
Clothing with owls and/or cherries on them
The entire history of Marc Jacobs’s handbag collection
The morning-after pill
Skincare that can only ever be bought in Space NK
Brigitte also has a habit of referring to ‘girls like us’ when she wants to put herself down.
‘He doesn’t go for girls like us, Essie,’ she once told me of some dickhead with statement-making facial hair that was demonstrably showing her less-than-zero interest. ‘He prefers someone with a thigh gap.’
‘Get to fuck,’ I told her, bristling at this appraisal of both of us. ‘You could drive a Toyota Corolla through these thighs. Don’t drag me into it.’
‘You know what I mean though,’ she tries to clarify. ‘He’s into hotties.’
