cheekbones!’
‘Admittedly, your cheekbones have rather … vanished.’ She puts her sunglasses back on, avoiding my glare. ‘But honestly, it isn’t that bad! In fact …’ She puts her own (perfectly-coiffed) head on one side, doing a performance of Woman Appreciating Other Woman’s Haircut that wouldn’t win her so much as a TV Quick award, let alone a Best Actress Oscar. ‘Mmm … yes … do you know, now that I’m growing used to it, I think it’s actually quite fetching!’
‘You said I needed a bigger hat!’
‘Yes, but I always think there’s no look that can’t be improved with a lovely big hat! Hubert,’ she adds, meaningfully, ‘would agree with me.’
‘Oh, no. You can’t just fob me off with bloody Hubert again. And I can’t wear a hat every day for the next two months, until this grows out!’
‘Well, then you can wear that fabulous necklace you were holding earlier. That would soon draw attention away from your hair! Maybe with a headscarf at the same time, though, for good measure. Headscarves are simply wonderful! Terribly ch …’ She stops, obviously realizing that I might not be too keen to hear the word ‘chic’ again any time in, say, the next fifty years. ‘I wear them all the time!’
‘Yes, but if I wear one, I won’t look like you, I’ll look like ET in that scene on the flying bicycle …’
And then I stop.
Because it’s just occurred to me.
I’m hallucinating this whole thing, aren’t I?
And if I’m hallucinating Audrey Hepburn, then I’m also hallucinating the havoc she’s just wreaked on my hair.
I feel relief flood through me – relief that after all the shitty things that have happened to me today, at least I don’t really look like a startled toilet brush.
And instantly, hallucination or no hallucination, I feel bad for shouting at Audrey.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry, too. My hairdressing skills might be a little rustier than I thought.’
‘It’s fine. There’s no need to apologize.’ I crouch down to pick up my hat from where I’ve dropped it on the floor beside the sofa. ‘I’ll get a proper hairdresser to cut it for real tomorrow and at least now I’ll know to ignore them if they start trying to talk me into a fringe …’
I straighten up with the hat in my hand.
But Audrey Hepburn isn’t standing across the other side of the Chesterfield any more.
I’m alone in my apartment, once again.
Bright daylight streaming in through the skylight is the first thing that wakes me up.
The second thing is the most appalling smell.
It’s not the Chesterfield.
What I mean is, it’s not only the Chesterfield, despite the fact I’ve been asleep with my head wedged into the back of one of its doggy-smelling cushions all night. It’s something even worse, something pungent and eye-watering …
Yesterday’s cheese.
Oh, God, yesterday’s cheese.
The Brie de Meaux, the Fourme d’Ambert, and the specially aged Comté. Oh, and the mystery goat’s cheese from Le Marathon. I forgot to give them to Olly and I’ve left them, by mistake, out of the fridge all night. Sitting in that broad shaft of sunlight that woke me up, and that’s probably been pouring through the skylight for at least an hour now.
I scramble off the sofa, pull my T-shirt up over my nose and mouth in the fruitless hope that it might take the edge off the pong, and delve into one of my boxes for a plastic bag I can scrape the cheeses into.
God, what an awful shame. All that gorgeous cheese, gone to waste. And I didn’t even get to see Olly’s face when I gave him the mystery cheese. Didn’t get to try it with him, our eyes closed in fierce concentration, as we tried to work out whether or not it was exactly the same taste and texture as the one we devoured on the Eurostar ten years ago.
I press the bag down to get the air out of it, knot it tightly (to discourage the Brie from making a break for freedom) and head for the door. There must be a rubbish bin area round the back of Bogdan’s takeaway where I can dispose of it.
As I open the door, though, I’m distracted from the smell of the cheese by the fact that there’s an enormous builder’s bum on the landing.
Attached to an enormous builder, that is: a man in low-slung paint-spattered jeans and – slightly unusually – a fuchsia-pink T-shirt, kneeling on the landing with his head in the bathroom doorway, fiddling with the plumbing at the back of the bidet.
He turns round when he hears me (or, more likely, when he smells me).
‘Good morning,’ he says, in a heavy Russian (Moldovan?) accent. ‘Am Bogdan.’
‘You’re not Bogdan.’
Because Bogdan is fiftyish, and moustachioed, and more than just a little sinister. Whereas this bloke is twentyish, and clean-shaven, and looks as if he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. As well as the whole fuchsia T-shirt thing, which sets him apart from the besuited Bogdan in more ways than one.
‘Bogdan is my father.’
‘Ohhhhhh … so you’re Bogdan, Son of Bogdan,’ I say, aware that I’m talking like one of the space crew from The Time Guardians when they encounter yet another episode’s worth of aliens.
‘Am Bogdan, Son of Bogdan,’ he agrees. ‘Am here for finishing off bathroom. Have fitted extracting fan. Will be putting up mirror’ – he nods at a full-length mirror, propped against the wall beside him – ‘on back of door. Right now am fixing bidet.’
‘Right. The thing is, um, Bogdan, that I don’t really need the bidet fixing. What I’d really, really like – and I have already mentioned this to your father, in fact – is for the partition wall in my flat to be taken down.’
‘Am not able to do this,’ he says, with a mournful shake of the head. ‘Am however happy,’ he adds (which is interesting as he doesn’t look ‘happy’ to be doing anything at all) ‘to be looking at problem with drain.’
‘I don’t think there is a problem with drain.’
‘Then what is smell?’
‘Oh, that!’ I wave the cheese bag at him. ‘I stupidly left some cheese out overnight, and … shit, sorry!’
My waving arm has caught the full-length mirror by the corner, tipping it sideways for a moment, until Bogdan, Son of Bogdan, with surprisingly lightning reflexes for one so large,
