Chapter Five
Jameela Jamil is truly blessed
One happy day I got IDed in Sainsbury’s while buying a bottle of Primitivo. ‘What?!’ I snorted with ill-concealed delight when the assistant came over and asked me for my driving licence. ‘I’m nearly 50!’ I wasn’t, of course, I was only about forty-three, I just added that for a bit of drama. The shine was taken off the experience quite quickly when the assistant, who was a young man of about twenty-three, asked me to take off my sunglasses, which I was wearing indoors after trying the new Socket To Me™ rejuvenating eye treatment the day before (mainly because of the name). When I did remove them, he immediately said ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine’. I mean COME ON, take a second to have a look, it can’t be so instantly obvious? I comforted myself with the fact that from behind, my outfit must have looked particularly youthful even if the top half of my face didn’t. I also prayed that one day such a thing would happen again – but when I wasn’t wearing sunglasses.
It never has. But today, as I stand in the self-serve checkout queue, it occurs to me that if I get this WULT® treatment, maybe it will. I wonder what the assistant will think then, when they see my date of birth, so very comfortably in the 1970s, on my driving licence? I guess for the moment, with WULT® not available to the public, I’ll have to explain why I look so young. Something about ‘drinking plenty of water’, ‘good genes’ or ‘always wearing an SPF’, like celebrities who’ve had tons of work done. I’ve always wanted to tell the same lies as famous people.
I’ve been researching Yuvana Labs ever since I got home from the Halloween party and for someone who has become quite theexpert at googling over the years (must add that to my CV), I am disappointed by how little I’ve been able to uncover. There seems to be a ‘Dr M’ involved, and also someone called Professor B, but Yuvana isn’t registered with Companies House, and I can’t find an address either. I hope they’re not dodgy, but I’m sure if Merlyn is involved they won’t be. I’ll ask her when I speak to her – she said she was going to give me a couple of days to think about it.
The person in front of me appears to have never used a self-serve checkout before, or indeed money. My phone ringing is a welcome distraction.
‘Yo, mofo.’
‘Hi Nandy…’
‘You okay? You sound a bit… weird?’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I say. ‘I’m whispering because I’m in Sainsbury’s. I also had a rough night. The baby next door. Oh, and crazy dreams. And peeing every hour. Getting older sucks.’
‘Doesn’t it just? You should get some bloody HRT and some of that vag cream I was telling you about. At least ifthatwarms up again you can stop peeing all the time and even get some action. That’ll put a smile on your face. Even if it’s DIY action. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.’ Nandy cackles down the phone.
‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ I’m slightly self-conscious having this conversation in a supermarket. Although I do spare a thought at this moment for my Goop Ultraplush Self-Heating G-Spot Vibrator (#gifted), which is living out its life somewhere at the back of my pants drawer. Probably not what Gwyneth Paltrow had in mind for it.
‘Okay, well… I won’t keep you if you’re busy perimenopausing,’ says Nandy. ‘Just wanted to see what the latest was with Merl. Did she give you a commission?’
‘Yeah… kind of.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Well, it’s more like a treatment thing to trial forLuscious. A facial.’ I decide now might be as good a time as any to gently introduce the concept.
‘NOICE. Something super posh, I’m sure. It’s Merlyn after all. She’s got such a soft spot for you.’
‘She’s just kind.’
‘To you, more than anyone.’
‘Yeah, I suppose… I wonder why that is.’ I feel like we’re going off topic.
‘I think you remind her of her daughter, I’m sure she told me that once. Or someone did. You know, the daughter she doesn’t talk to who went to live in Canada or something. Anyway, so it’s posh, the treatment?’
‘Really posh. Could be a gamechanger.’
‘Hark at you. Well, as long as you get to write a punny headline for it I’m sure you’ll be fine. Right, better go, I’m on theMetrofeatures desk this week. I just popped out for some Bonjela. Living the dream, my friend, living the fucking dream.’
‘Aren’t we all…’ I mutter as I watch the person in front of me try to find ‘Cheese Twist’ on the bakery menu, and stop short of shouting ‘IT’S NEXT TO THE CINNAMON WHIRL!’
I should have told Nandy about WULT®, I suppose. It isn’t lying though, just withholding information… Not that I’m keen on that either. The only people I don’t mind lying to are editors, about whether a feature I haven’t even started yet is ‘nearly finished!’. Speaking to Nandy, it makes me realise I’m too embarrassed to tell the truth. She has a way of being brutally honest about everything – not to be mean, but just because she is one of the most down-to-earth people you could ever meet.
When Nandy started atBeautique, I had already been there a few months. I watched her from across the office on her first day, in her low rise bootcut jeans, chain belt, baker boy cap. I didn’t just want to be friends with her because she was like a cool Asian Kate Moss with a Birmingham accent; I wanted to be friends with her because she looked like she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. Being around Nandy made me feel like I cared a tiny bit less too – as though little particles of Nandy’s sparkling nonchalance settled on me, making me feel like a bolder version of myself.
She’s an only child, and her mother Anu died when she was eighteen. As Nandy puts it, ‘a fucking inconvenient age to lose a parent’. Her father was broken, and has never really mended. So, Nandy just ploughs on, swearing, laughing, holding it all together – for her father, for the memory of Anu, for her husband, Ash, and the kids and, quite often, for me too. She told me once that if she stopped for a second and thought about it all –reallythought about it – she’d find she had thirty years of tears to catch up on, and ‘nobody has time for that bollocks’.
She’s the only London friend I have who comes over to Wiltshire to see me, and the only one who really cared when I left. She loyally treks across the city from Leytonstone to get the train at Paddington, armed with a bag of weed and obscure ingredients like asafoetida to make curries in my kitchen using Anu’s old recipes. We talk and talk and laugh and eat. Once, not long after Father Pells died, we got really stoned and were so immersed in a David Attenborough documentary about toucans we decided to take notes.
The next day we walked all the way through the fields to Lacock and read the ramblings out loud, snorting hysterically as we stomped along in our inappropriate shoes – Nandy: cowboy boots, me: FitFlops(#gifted). Amongst other incomprehensible nonsense, I’d written that ‘toucans cannot chew’, as if this wouldbe an important piece of knowledge to remember, and also that ‘they are NOT (underlined about five times) graceful in the sky’. I’d also put ‘ungraceful’ in brackets after this as though to make it extra clear. Then in Nandy’s handwriting it said, ‘THEY HAVE A DARK SIDE’, although neither of us could remember what that was.
Then last night’s mixed vegetable sambar (followed by a cheese board, obvs) came back to haunt Nandy and she had to go and shit behind a tree. I was laughing so much my cheeks hurt for days – it was the first time I’d laughed since my father’s funeral five weeks before. And now I feel like I’m not being honest, and Nandy isn’t here with that wonderful big sisterliness. But I’ll tell her soon. I’m pretty sure she’s going to be delighted for me.
