heard from him again. Annie still asks for him; she refers to him as ‘Mr Giggles’. One day I’ll tell her that Mr Giggles ended up being about as funny as a dose of the clap. Which, along with the terrible memory of a horrible evening, he also left me with.
Taking treatment for an STD when you have a little girl feels grim. I felt ridden and contagious and begged the bottle of antibiotics to be finished. When they were gone, I vowed never to introduce her to anyone ever again unless a) I was certain they didn’t have a wife and b) I hadn’t needed an STD test after sleeping with them.
I now hold a lot of hope for my Friday night dates. I want someone good. Someone honest, safe and fun. You never know; tonight’s guy, Al, looks OK in his picture. But first, a quick drink with my best friend Sophie.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ says Sophie, walking slowly up to me at the bar. ‘I was getting my hair done, she was taking ages then I decided I didn’t like the colour so got her to go back to … anyway, heyyyy.’
Sophie is always late, which is why I brought my Kindle.
Sophie and I are both only children. This means that we have a relationship a lot like sisters and claimed each other around the age of ten, as the people who would play that role in each other’s lives. I questioned it loads, because she drove me so crazy half the time. Then another friend at school said that if her sister wasn’t family, they would never be friends, but she loved her anyway, because that is what sisters do. That really resonated with me because I realised that if Sophie was to be the sister I never had, it was OK and normal for us to not always see eye to eye. I just had to love her, which I did and still do, because we have history – and you can’t erase that, no matter how many times someone prioritises a blow dry over spending time with you.
‘Hair looks nice,’ I say, because it does. It always does, she’s gorgeous. Skinny, blonde, perfect skin. It’s annoying, but mostly natural. Other than the hair colour.
‘Thanks. OK, can we drink champagne? I feel like I need something fizzy.’
I order two glasses but she shouts for a bottle. So there we are, sitting at a bar at 6.40 p.m. on a Friday, drinking champagne for no real reason.
‘I only have twenty minutes. I have a date with a guy called Al at seven.’ I smile a little, I have that pre-date hopeful buzz … maybe it will be a good one. But probably not.
‘God, I can’t believe you’re still dating, I can’t even imagine,’ she says. ‘Mind you, I never really dated like you do. Carl was my only ever formal date and I ended up marrying him, so it clearly works. Cheers to that!’
I still can’t accept that Sophie is married; she was so wild, almost feral. I don’t think I have ever met anyone with such a hungry attitude towards sex and partying. Her stamina for both was always fascinating to me.
‘So how is Carl?’
‘He’s good, yeah. You know, same old. Marriage is fine most of the time, as long as I don’t mention my past.’
‘Still, really?’
‘Yup, it’s the big sexy elephant in the room. I mean he doesn’t know anything of course, I’d never tell him. But he’s made all these assumptions about me, and the kinds of things I used to get up to. Annoyingly, they’re all pretty accurate.’
‘But where’s he getting it all from?’ I ask.
‘He says he can’t understand how someone who looks like me didn’t get loads of sex when I was single.’
‘OK, you know that is actually quite insulting, right?’ I say, as I realise it is insulting, but that Carl is absolutely right. Sophie got a lot of sex.
‘Yesterday, Beth Taylor, remember her from school? She tagged me in an old photo on Facebook. It’s a picture of a load of us, we were about seventeen, and in the background I’m snogging some guy. She tagged me and wrote, “This is how I remember you, Sophie. Hope you’re well.” What a fucking idiot, why would she do that?’
‘Yeah, I saw that. I thought it was funny. And I suppose most people in their forties aren’t married to people who would give them a hard time for snogging someone when they were seventeen?’
‘True. Maybe, but still. I have to be so careful. He’s just so old fashioned and I need this to work. It’s just easier if I edit my past a little. The fucking Internet means I have to be on guard all the time. Anyone could tweet me, or post a picture of me from back then. Do you remember that time we went to Ibiza, the foam party? Thank God it was just before camera phones, but what if someone had one of those disposable cameras we all used to have and stumbles across me on Facebook? There’s probably pictures of me up to all bloody sorts. Jesus, I told Carl I’d never done drugs. He’d lose his shit if he knew the kind of stuff we used to do. As it is, every time a Facebook memory comes up I break into a cold sweat!’
I drink some champagne. ‘Hey, we had fun though, didn’t we?’ I say, giving her a wink.
‘I’ll drink to that!’
I don’t know how Sophie does it, being married to someone who won’t accept her for who she is. Playing a new role, with a new past. Watching Sophie coordinate her life around hiding who she was – is? – from her husband has been such a lesson to me, in terms of what I want. There is no way I want to find someone who won’t take me for what I am. I don’t want to have to lie, or hide, or deny anything. Sophie would never admit it, but she married Carl because she partied her entire life and isn’t qualified for anything she would enjoy, so a rich city guy was the only way she’d end up in a nice house and money to buy bottles of champagne when you only have twenty minutes to drink it in, and absolutely nothing to celebrate. I’d rather be poor and lonely.
‘OK, I better go, don’t want to be late for my hot date,’ I say, stepping down off the barstool. ‘Here’s some money for the champagne.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s what this is for,’ she says, flashing Carl’s credit card. ‘Oh, and if he asks can you tell him we were with a bunch of people? It would make things easier.’
‘Sophie, we’ve been best friends since we were at primary school, does he still not like us going out together?’
‘Nope. When it’s only us he presumes we get up to bad stuff, that you’re a bad influence. Don’t look at me like that! Please, just say it was a few old faces from school. The more eyes he thinks are on me, the better he’ll think I behaved, OK?’
I sit back down.
‘It’s quite controlling, Sophie. It worries me,’ I say, forcing her to look me in the eye. She offers a little smile, then breaks away.
‘Maybe I need a bit of controlling?’ she says, sipping the champagne. ‘I can’t be left to my own devices, who knows what would happen.’ She shoots me a critical look, and I know what she means. We partied hard for most of our lives, but after I had Annie I had to stop. It became immediately clear that despite being wild myself, I was nothing compared to Sophie. Somehow, over the years I had stopped her from spiralling too far out of control. I hadn’t even realised I did it, but I took her home when she’d had too much, I dragged her out of bedrooms she shouldn’t have been in, I stopped her snorting more lines of coke than she should, prised shot glasses out of her hand. When I got pregnant, there was no one around to do that for her and we saw the danger of
