interesting. Really.’ Suddenly self-conscious, Lizzie looked away and pretended to rummage in her little bag for nothing in particular.
‘I guess I’m just trying to justify my existence. If only I was a heart surgeon and could gain instant respect. You know—just add boiling water and stir gently.’
‘Hmm?’
‘For instant respect…’
‘Oh—I get it.’ Lizzie did, but only a nanosecond after she’d said that she already had. ‘Anyway, justify away. Believe me, you’ll know when I’m bored…’
Matt hesitated. He wasn’t convinced.
‘…and I’ve still got a beer and a half to go.’
Lizzie was more than happy to let someone else do all the talking. It made a nice change.
‘Well, OK, then…if you’re sure you’re sure…’
‘I’m sure I’m sure.’
‘Remember, I did warn you…’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Lizzie was impressed that he’d even stopped to think about whether she was interested or not. Her recent experience had definitely indicated this was a dying trait.
‘Right…’
Matt’s whole intonation changed as he verbally rolled up his sleeves and prepared to address Lizzie as a student of his craft. He wasn’t being patronising. Just passionate. Lizzie was mesmerised, although if she was being honest she couldn’t only credit her interest to the topic under discussion.
‘If you just think about things in a different way you can see where we were at certain times in our lives, and where we are now, by what we eat, drink, wear and by the adverts that we see around us…’
He really was very desirable. Lizzie was glad that tonight had been a G-string occasion. She always felt at her most seductive and unnervingly saucy when she was wearing one. Irrationally so, really. Until her second or third drink she usually just felt as if her knickers had ridden up and got stuck between the cheeks of her bottom.
‘…most of it’s subliminal at the time, but looking back it’s all quite clear. Look at the minimalism of the late 1990s: less was more, everything was about stripping away the excesses, getting our autonomy and power back. Natural everything. Neutral plain colours. Cotton and cashmere, not nylon and polyester. In fact very little artificial anything—a reaction to the multicoloured, additive-laden 70s and 80s. Fashions change. Who in the late 1970s and 1980s would have thought that we’d be eating rocket salad…who even knew what rocket was…?’
Matt paused for effect and she snapped out of her daydream at once. Had he been talking about salad? Impossible. Bugger. Lizzie scolded herself. She really had to learn to pay attention when people strung more than two consecutive sentences together.
Not requiring a response to his rhetorical question, Matt continued unfazed, much to Lizzie’s relief. From now on she would treat everything he said as a listening comprehension.
‘You’d have dismissed it as faddish if anyone back then had suggested that we’d be drinking cranberry juice with vodka in bars—indeed, drinking cranberry juice in Britain at all, where cranberries have traditionally been teamed with turkey at this time of year. The world is becoming a smaller place. You only have to look in your kitchen cupboards: ginger, lemon grass, chilli, vanilla pods, couscous. But these new trends are only replacing the old. In the seventies it was frozen food. If you couldn’t freeze it, it wasn’t worth eating. In the late eighties it was microwaves and ultra-convenience. With our go-getting attitudes, the revolutions in micro-technology and generally higher standards of living why would we want to have spent any more than five or ten minutes cooking? In the nineties it was back to basics. Organic and fresh was best and cooking made a comeback, as did gardening. But fashions are left behind. They’re superseded by new choices and new theories on the way we should live our lives. Who now can even remember what disk cameras and Noodle Doodles looked like? Who in the late 1990s would have even have considered wearing a brown and powder-blue acrylic tank top—unless, of course, they were doing the whole Jarvis Cocker retro thing? But then maybe I’m just bitter because powder-blue isn’t my colour…it just doesn’t do anything for my skin tone…’
Matt feigned camp and Lizzie laughed. This time she had been listening and, while she could no longer claim objectivity, it certainly was a positive departure from discussing football teams, gym attendance, holidays and other people’s heartache.
‘So is what you’re saying that nothing happens by accident? We all choose to eat things, decorate our homes in a particular way, travel to certain places, because subliminally we’ve been told to?’
‘Precisely.’ Matt briefly wondered why it had taken him so long to say exactly that.
‘Isn’t that just a little bit frightening?’
‘I suppose a little. But we’re not all clones. Free will and independent spirit will always prevail—plus a natural rebellion against the norm, which will spin off new ideas for people like me… I mean look at this…’ Matt held up his bottle ‘“Ice” beer. Colder? Maybe. Smoother? Maybe. Better? Maybe. And “Light beer”. Less sugar and more alcohol? Or only because you wouldn’t get guys asking for a Diet Budweiser?
‘And to think there I was accusing you of just writing cheeseball slogans.’
Matt smiled, ‘Well, to be fair, nine times out of ten I’ll be poring over a computer screen as the client deadline approaches, desperately trying to come up with something innovative, witty, punchy and memorable. I’m not usually contributing to or capturing a moment in time. Shaping cultural history is for politicians and pop stars. And even they are just absorbing eclectic influences. It’s pretty much impossible to have a totally new idea.’
Lizzie concentrated on draining the last of her beer from the bottle in what she hoped was possibly an attractive fashion. Matt used the moment to round up.
‘Plus, I’ve been lucky. Doors have swung open at the right times and all that. Personally, it’s been a bit lonely, but I’m not sure that you can have everything. Something has to give… Oh, God…Lizzie…. are you OK?’
Lizzie nodded and blinked back a few tears as Matt reached over and gently rubbed her back. The dregs of her lager had frustratingly slipped down the wrong way and she’d been trying not to draw attention to it, but the more she had tried to disguise her discomfort the more she had felt her chest tightening. She’d been drowning in a mouthful. She coughed a few times, restoring a clear passage for air to reach her lungs, and did her best to smile and relax. Fucking hell. Thirty-two years old and she couldn’t even swallow properly.
‘Fine.’ She rasped her response and closed her mouth just in time to stop a stray burp escaping noisily. ‘Only choking.’ She smiled at her Christmas cracker level of humour and tried to ignore the fact that she could still feel his hand on her back—even though it was holding his beer bottle now.
Matt grinned. ‘I get the message. Lecture over.’ He quickly snuck in a question, just in case Lizzie was thinking about using her near-death experience as an excuse to move on. ‘What about you? How did you get into the whole agony aunt thing?’
Whenever Lizzie wasn’t looking directly at him, he stole a glance at the whole picture. Even
