on your face except that dreary smoky eye that’s been done to death …’
‘Hands off my sister, darling,’ says Max lazily. But Paolo’s incredibly handsome, with liquid brown eyes, skin the colour of butterscotch and full, pouty pink lips, so Max doesn’t reprimand him nearly as much as I’d like, and I just stand there feeling foolish.
‘You look lovely!’ mouths Plump Alison at me from across the table, and I smile back at her gratefully.
Skinny Alison bangs a glass with her fork. Look at me! Look at me!
‘Order! Order!’ She waits until the table is silent before announcing, in her strident tones, ‘We weren’t going to say anything until the New Year, but I just can’t wait to tell you all.’ She smugly slides an arm around Andy’s broad shoulders and flashes me a triumphant glance, which leaves me utterly at a loss. I mean, I hardly know the woman: what the fuck has she got against me? ‘Andy proposed to me this afternoon. We’re getting married!’
‘Oh, wow!’
‘Congratulations!’
‘When’s the big day?’
Blah, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam, as Alison pulls a diamond ring out of her tuxedo pocket and slides it onto her long, skinny finger. Everybody gets up to hug them both and Alison sits there lapping up the compliments.
‘Blah, blah … my wedding … blah, blah … my dress … blah, blah … my flowers …’ I really cannot stand any more of her self-aggrandizing crap, so I pat Andy on the shoulder and say, ‘Congratulations. What wonderful news.’
‘Thanks.’ He smiles up at me through his glasses again. ‘It seemed the right thing to do. We’ve been together since Cambridge.’
Wow. Romantic.
‘Oh yes. Of course.’ I don’t really know what else to say to this, so shout across at my brother. ‘Got to pop upstairs and see some more mates, Max! See you later guys!’
‘Later, Bella,’ they chorus, and I skip out of the door as fast as my undirectional black opaque legs will carry me.
The top floor of Divine Comedy is normally ‘members only’, but tonight is guest-list-only, anyway, so it’s a free-for-all.
‘Bella!’ Mark lumbers towards me. He is the art director on Damian’s magazine and big and butch and macho. Possibly the least evolved human being I have ever met, Mark takes great pleasure in offending as many people as he possibly can. ‘Humourless dykes need a damn good shafting’ is one of his stock-in-trade phrases. He is annoyingly sexy, though, with his shaved head, crooked smile and body straight off the cover of Men’s Health.
‘Hey, Mark, happy New Year!’ I allow myself to be swept up in his brawny arms, enjoying being made to feel like a dainty little thing for once.
‘Hi, I’m Suki,’ says the very young girl he’s with, who has long peroxide hair, dip-dyed pink, and a sullen attitude. ‘So how do you know Marky?’
‘Oh, friend of a friend – we’ve known each other for ages,’ I say airily. ‘How do you?’
‘We met each other last night,’ Mark says quickly.
‘Realized we were kindred spirits,’ the girl pouts, shoving her lip ring out and putting a proprietorial little hand on Mark’s enormous thigh.
‘Oh, how lovely,’ I say, as I am actually quite nice, and want people to be happy and in love with one another (as long as it’s not dull Rupert with his new paramour – thanks for that titbit, Alison). ‘So what do you do?’
‘I’m a fashion blogger?’
‘Wow, great,’ I say, trying to sound as if I mean it. ‘How did you get into that?’
The girl looks at me with the utmost disdain. ‘It’s easy. You set up a blog. Online, you know? Internet?’
How old does she think I am?
‘Uh, yep, I understand about the internet.’ Mark is kicking my shin now. ‘I even have a Facebook page.’
‘I’m so like over Facebook, so 2005,’ Suki, who’d have been barely out of nappies in 2005, sniggers. ‘It’s all about the tweets now. Do you tweet?’ She looks at me consideringly for a second. ‘Nah, I don’t suppose you do.’
Annoyingly, she’s right. I don’t tweet, mainly because I spend far too much time procrastinating on Facebook as it is, and can’t see myself ever getting any work done were I to sign up to Twitter. But it’s also because I’m quite shy deep down, and the idea of putting myself out there, to be jeered at and shouted down by thousands of strangers, doesn’t really appeal in the slightest. One of my friends recently tweeted a joke that somebody took the wrong way, and the backlash was horrendous. No, I need to develop a far thicker skin than I have now before I even consider it.
‘There’s this huge great house near where I live,’ Suki is saying to Mark. ‘Well, it’s like two or three bedrooms, and there’s this old couple just, like, rattling around in it. So selfish. They don’t need all that space. They should be giving it to people like me and my mates, who could use the space so, like, creatively? We have this anti-fascist, anti-conformist collective, where we all, like, let our thoughts flow, like, artistically?’
‘And what do these mates of yours do?’ I ask.
‘That is such a conformist question. We don’t do – we just be.’
We be? I imagine the West Country yokel impression was unintentional.
‘Don’t you think old people worked hard for their big houses, Suki?’ I say, cross now. ‘And don’t you think old people, with their aches and pains, need nice, comfortable places to live?’ Jesus! I shake my head in disbelief. ‘You seriously believe they should – what? – just hand over their properties to you and your mates, who are young and healthy, and have probably never done a proper day’s work in your lives?’
‘Ooh, get her, Daily Mail reader.’ Suki winks at Mark.
‘Just as a matter of interest, where do you live at the moment, Suki?’ I ask, incensed. OK, the ‘never done a proper day’s work in your lives’ comment possibly did sound a bit Daily Mail, but I only meant because they’re not old enough. Whatever.
Suki looks sulky and Mark starts to laugh, quietly, to himself.
‘With my mum and dad, but that’s only because capitalism has made it impossible for me to get on the property ladder.’
I laugh out loud. Does the idiot realize what she’s just said?
‘OK, a couple of things. Firstly, most people are not “on the property ladder” at the age of nineteen or whatever you are. Really, what on earth makes you think you should be? Secondly, “the property ladder” wouldn’t exist without capitalism.’ She looks at me blankly. ‘Thirdly, if you moved out, wouldn’t your mum and dad be those “old people rattling round that big house” that you propose putting out on the streets?’
Mark looks at me pleadingly
