her bottom lip. That old three button trick, she was thinking. The slimy bastard.
‘You know, Carrie,’ she said sweetly. ‘You’re still so beautiful. You’re still the biggest lily in the pond. You’re still floating on the surface and bright enough to catch the attention of any insect or amphibian that might just happen to be passing.’ She paused. ‘Even a heron,’ she added, as an afterthought.
Carrie scrabbled in her sports bag. She grabbed her purse, opened it, took out a twenty-pound note to pay the barman for the bottles of wine.
‘My treat,’ Sydney interjected.
Carrie paid him anyway. She was about to shut her purse but then paused and delved inside it.
‘Look,’ she said, her voice trembling, holding aloft a blue card.
Sydney put out her hand. ‘What is it?’
‘Our season ticket to the ballet. We went every week. It was one of those routines . . .’
‘Well,’ Sydney took the ticket and perused it, ‘you shall go to the ball, Cinders.’
‘What?’
‘You and me. We’ll go together. When is it?’
‘Wednesday.’
Sydney handed the card back. ‘Fine.’
As it turned out, Sydney couldn’t make it. She rang Carrie at the last minute. Carrie answered the phone wrapped up in a towel, pink from a hot bath.
‘What? You can’t make it?’
‘But I want you to go, anyway. Find someone else.’
‘There is no one else. It doesn’t matter, though. I wasn’t really in the mood myself.’
‘Carrie, you’ve got to go. Alone if needs be. It’s the principle of the thing.’
‘I know, but it’s just . . .’
‘What?’
‘It’s kind of like a regular box and we share it with some other people and if I go alone . . .’
‘So? That’s great. It means you won’t feel entirely isolated, which is ideal.’
‘And then there’s this fat old man called Heinz who’s always there. A complete bore. We really hate him.’
‘Heinz?’
‘Yes. Jack always found him such a pain. We even tried to get a transfer . . .’
‘Bollocks. Just go. Ignore him. What’s the ballet?’
‘Petrushka.’
‘Yip!’
‘I’ve seen it before. It’s not one of my particular favourites.’
‘Go anyway. You’ve got to start forging your own path, Carrie. You’ll thank me after. Honestly.’
She’d made a special effort, with her hair and her make-up. She was wearing a dress that she’d bought for the previous Christmas. It was a glittery burgundy colour. Her lips matched. The box was empty when she arrived. She felt stupid. She sat down.
After five minutes, a couple she knew only to say hello to arrived and took their seats. They smiled and nodded at Carrie. She did the same in return. She then paged through her programme and pretended that she wasn’t overhearing their conversation about the kind of conseratory they should build on to the back of their house. He wanted a big one that could fit a table to seat at least six. She wanted a small, bright retreat full of orchids and tomato plants.
Carrie kept reading and re-reading the names of the principal dancers. The orchestra’s preparatory honking and parping jangled in her throat and with her nerves. She closed her eyes. I will count to ten. One, two, three, four . . .
‘Ooof! Here we go, here we go!’
Heinz, squeezing his way over to his seat, pushing his considerable bulk between the two rows of chairs.
‘Oi! Hup! There we are.’
Carrie opened her eyes and stared at him. He had a box of chocolate brazils in one hand and a bulging Selfridges bag in the other, which he almost, but couldn’t quite, fit into the gap between his knees and the front of the box.
Carrie’s gut rumbled her antipathy. He smelled, always – as Jack had noted on many an occasion – of wine gums and Deep Heat. An old smell. He must have been in his eighties, wore a grey-brown toupee and weighed in, she guessed, like a prize bull, at around three hundred and twenty pounds.
Carrie converted this weight into stone and then back again to occupy herself.
Heinz nodded at her. She nodded back. He always wore a sludge-coloured bow tie. It hung like a shiny little brown turd, poised under his chin.
Heinz endeavoured, with a great harrumphing, to find adequate room by his knees for his bag. ‘Uh-oh! Uh-oh!’
Carrie gritted her teeth.
‘If you haven’t room for your shopping, this chair is empty.’ She indicated Jack’s empty seat which separated them.
‘Empty? Really? That lovely man of yours isn’t with you tonight? Empty, you say?’ He wheezed as he spoke, like an asthmatic Persian feline, which made his German accent even more pronounced.
You’d think, Carrie speculated, that a wheeze would take the hard edges off a German accent, but you’d be wrong to think so.
‘Would you mind’ – close to her ear – ‘if I sat next to you and put my bag on the other seat?’
My God! Carrie thought, fixing her eyes on the stage curtains and breathing a sigh of relief at their preliminary twitchings.
‘Brazil?’
Ten minutes in, Heinz was whispering to her.
‘What?’
‘Brazil? Go on. Have one.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Go on!’
‘No. I don’t actually like brazils. Nuts give me hives.’
Heinz closed the box and rested it on his lap.
During the intermission, Heinz regaled Carrie with tales about the relative exclusivity of the Turner and Booker prizes. He liked the opera, it turned out, especially Mozart. He found camomile tea to be excellent for sleeplessness. He was a widower of seven years.
Carrie noticed how the box’s other regulars smiled at her sympathetically whenever they caught her eye. It was odd, really, because actually, with increased acquaintance, Heinz wasn’t all that bad. In fact, if anything, he’d made her the centre of attention in the box. The focus, the axis. She felt
