Pearl
Let’s do it. Let’s run away together.
Shelley is poised to add her message when Joel appears in the doorway, a vision of still-wet hairy legs in a Muji waffle dressing gown. No, not a dressing gown. He’s told her off about calling it that. ‘Makes me sound like I live at your care home,’ he’d retorted. ‘It’s arobe.’
‘What’s for dinner?’ he asks now.
Shelley blinks at him, still clutching her wine glass. ‘I don’t know,’ she replies.
Joel looks at her expectantly, as if she doesn’t knownow, but at any moment will come up with several options. Shelley just sits there, drinking wine.
‘Well,isthere anything?’ he prompts her.
She places her almost empty glass on the table. No,how was your day?No,any news about the redundancies?He knows she’s been worried, that it’s all been bubbling away these past few weeks, the staff room humming with rumours and huddled conversations. At least, she’s been telling him. Sometimes it feels like talking to a brick.
‘I don’t know, Joel,’ she replies.
This seems to confuse him. ‘You don’t know?’ Then, as if he’s only just noticed: ‘Drinking already?’
She looks at him; this tall, good-looking and confident man, on whom she’d nurtured a crush from the moment she started working at the magazine. He’d already been out with Petra and Charlotte, and probably some others in the office that she and her friends didn’t know about. Then finally, one evening, he and Shelley had ended up sitting together on the coach back to London after an office day out in Margate. There’d been a lot of drinking that day.
‘I’ve always fancied you,’ he told her. ‘I think you’re amazing.’ Ridiculously, she’d assumed she was too low down in the food chain to warrant attention from the loud and glamorous art director. She wasn’t in the fashion, features or art departments. Not one of the creative team who came up with the brilliant ideas that made the magazine such a success. She didn’t interview pop stars or choose cover models or direct fashion shoots. She was just the editor’s PA, and Joel had never paid much attention to her before.
‘Yes, Iamdrinking,’ she announces now, necking the rest of her wine before adding, ‘And no, I have no idea what we’re eating tonight.’ Then she turns away from him, blocking his waffle-swathed form from her vision as she types:
Shelley
Girls I’m definitely up for this trip. Friday through to Christmas Eve. No one’ll miss us will they? I know I could drop dead right here and Joel and kids would step over my rotting corpse. So let’s book flights.
8
FIVE DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS
The plane climbs through a thick duvet of cloud, emerging into clear blue above. On a paint chart it would be almosttooblue, too intense to live with. But way up here it is perfect, a world away from bathroom hoggers and grumpy teenagers and the looming spectre of in-laws. Shelley, Lena and Pearl are installed in row twenty-one, as excitable as teenagers on a school trip, while still a little stunned that they are doing this. So close to Christmas too; it feels reckless and perhaps a little mad. They had bagged cheap flights to Glasgow and will pick up a hire car at the airport. It has all seemed ridiculously easy to arrange.
The bright winter sun has burnt off the three friends’ grievances even before drinks are served. Now Lena thanks the flight attendant as she hands her a wine, and looks at Pearl and Shelley. ‘This feels like a dream,’ she announces.
Pearl laughs. ‘It really does. So what was the reaction at home?’
‘Tommy was all for it,’ Lena replies. ‘Thought it was a great idea. Even offered to pay for my flight, as an extra Christmas treat, but I wouldn’t let him.’
‘He must feel bad about his parents descending for Christmas,’ Shelley remarks.
‘Oh, he does, definitely.’ She grins. ‘But I’ll be ready for them after this. So how was your lot?’
Shelley smiles. ‘The kids were all, “Yeah okay Mum.” You’d think I’d just said I was going upstairs. And Joel thought I was joking. Then it was, “You’re seriously going to leave us here with everything to deal with?”’
‘So he’s finally noticed Christmas is happening?’ Pearl teases.
‘Yep, that woke him up a bit. Started on about there being so much to do – as if Christmas is normally thrown together in the last few days. But it’s virtually all done,’ she adds firmly. ‘I mean, everything apart from dropping off cards to the neighbours and picking up the turkey and wrapping the last of the presents. And they’re for his mum and dad. That’s not too much to deal with, is it?’
‘Of course it’s not,’ Lena asserts.
‘It’s just, he hates wrapping, says he can’t manage the corners?—’
‘This isexactlywhy you should be here with us,’ Pearl announces.
‘Yeah.’ Shelley nods firmly. ‘But he did keep asking if I was “all right”…’
