My Best Friend Has Issues (13 page)

She shook her head. The Silver Fox ignored me. Tentatively I gave her my hand but she only held on and squeezed. She closed her eyes again and moaned. A pink blush flushed across her chest and travelled to her face. A second or two later the guy seemed to go into spasms, his face contorting as he pushed at her in dying waves, his damp grey hair falling over his face. I liked watching his arse pushing and grinding. It was beautiful.

In refusing the undoubted skill and know-how of the Silver Fox I’d perhaps been a little hasty. Why deny myself such obvious pleasure? At the moment of their orgasm, I’d felt a fluttering. I wanted the Silver Fox to do to me what he’d just done to Chloe.

It was a freezing cold night. My breath was steaming in front of my face. I tried to make smoke rings with my breath but it didn’t work with frozen breath. I heard the noise ahead and walked towards it. I wasn’t scared, it sounded cheerful and friendly, like a dog, a puppy.

I could hardly see a thing in the thick mist. I walked with my hand out in front of me. I didn’t want to walk into a tree and give myself a black eye. ‘Here boy!’ I called. The noise got louder but no clearer. It sounded more and more like animals snuffling, and in a way it was.

They were standing against a big tree. He had his hands on her fat white thighs. She had her arms round his neck. They had loads of clothes on, bunched up round their necks and piled round their ankles but their middle bits and bums were bare. They must have been cold.

I stayed still. They hadn’t seen me.

‘C’mon baby.’

His white backside was clenching and unclenching, pushing forward, pulling back, like he was dancing. His head was facing into the tree; it looked like he was speaking to the tree. They were both swearing.

‘Oh my love. Fuck me, my love, oof, fuck me.’

‘Oof, I’m fucking you, oof, oof, I’m fucking you.’

One of her legs was hooked around him and the other was slightly bent out at the knee. Her breasts took up all of her chest, stretching down towards her waist. When he bumped forward his belly connected with them and made a slapping noise. They were grunting like pigs. That’s what they were, filthy pigs.

They couldn’t see me.

I took the long way round. Big soft steps. Silent breathing, until I was behind them, behind their tree, facing him. His eyes were shut, his face squashed, ugly. He didn’t see me move towards him.

‘Oof.’

I had a nobbly grey twig in my hand. It was sharp. He opened his eyes and saw me and closed them again quickly. But not quickly enough. He screamed. Surprised, frightened. And then he was pulling away from her, he was shoving her away and bending over. She was pulling her clothes up and around her, putting her hand on his shoulder, looking into his face, and screaming. He put his hand in front of his face.

There were five dirty glasses on the bedside cabinet on Chloe’s side of the bed. I tried not to think about them or look too closely at the contents. Orange juice had crystallised up the sides on some of them or there were grey-green islands of mould floating in what would have been iced coffee. Luckily the one she’d knocked over only had water in it, but the glass smashed on the ceramic floor into jaggy peaks.

‘Jesus!’ Chloe yelled, and then stormed off and locked the bathroom door. I heard her run a bath.

I shook my head and smiled. It was just like her to be so outraged. She was the one who’d left the glasses stacked up. She was the one who’d knocked it over. I said nothing but I was secretly satisfied, maybe now she’d clear the rest of them away. Although it was disgusting, I’d left them there to see how many accumulated before Chloe did something about it.

Apart from hanging up my clothes the day I moved in, Chloe didn’t do housekeeping. She was not domesticated. I wasn’t much better but Chloe’s slobbishness was awe-inspiring.

Neither of us had any interest in cooking. The most we did was open a packet. We snacked on cartons of gazpacho, bread, cheese, olives, chorizo, crunchy pickled garlic, freshly squeezed orange juice, yoghurt and crisps. When the munchies hit us around midnight I’d pop out and bring back falafel, kebabs or
churros
and chocolate. Some days we’d go out for a
Menu Del Dia
. We’d pick at the food and guzzle red wine,
gaseosa
and coffee. The one and only time I cooked, as a treat and to let Chloe try it, I made us both a crisps and fish finger sandwich. She didn’t like it. She said
the weather was too hot for greasy food and complained that the fishy smell made her feel sick.

She wasn’t much for cleaning either. I had taken over watering the maria, feeding the dogs, removing their poo, sweeping up the dead roaches and putting down new powder. It was a small step to take on the basic household chores. Unlike her I had a terror of cockroaches and made a point of keeping at least the floor and kitchen surfaces clean.

Every day we saw more cockroaches in the flat. It was getting so that I wouldn’t get out of bed when it was dark. I had to put the light on and wait while they scuttled into their hiding places. Chloe said it was only temporary, because it was August. The café on the ground floor next door to Josep’s had closed for vacation for the whole month. The café’s resident cockroach population was being starved out and was having to move upwards in search of food.

‘I can hardly believe they’d climb five storeys,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Chloe with a laugh in her voice.

Her attitude to the roaches was different from mine. While I preferred to try to keep the place clean and prevent them from crawling all over us, Chloe enjoyed the hunt. Sometimes, while she was in the middle of doing something: painting or talking, she’d freeze. She’d have seen movement under the couch or the cooker and would lie in wait, crouching uncomfortably for as long as it took, twenty minutes, half an hour, until the cockroach emerged. Then she’d lay into it with a hammer or the heel of her shoe,
mashing
it to a paste. Once, when she happened to have a pallet knife in her hand, she decapitated the cockroach and watched, fascinated, while the headless part continued to writhe for a few moments.

Outside on the pavement yellow powder was laid to keep them out, like garlic to keep vampires away, but it didn’t work. They were already in the building, climbing up through the cracks in the walls. The old lady who lived downstairs, Señora Garcia, knocked the door and gave me another tin of powder, ‘
para las cucarachas
’. It was much stronger and more effective than the organic stuff we’d been using. Chloe said it was poison and refused to touch it. This left me with sole responsibility for our roach problem.

I would’ve thought that someone who had so many expensive clothes might be fastidious about grooming but Chloe rarely
bothered.
She was forever in the bath, but more as a leisure activity than for hygiene. She’d happily pull on a top that needed ironed or a skirt with the hem hanging down. Amongst other things, I’d blagged a freebie sewing kit from the Hotel Museo and offered to fix her hem, but she didn’t care.

I regularly washed my clothes and when I did I always asked if she wanted anything put in the wash. She had no regular laundry system. A week and half after she came back from Berlin her
rucksack
had still not been unpacked. It was only when she was looking for something that she eventually hauled the sour-smelling clothes out the rucksack and left them thrown around the bedroom.

‘You’re not going to wear that top, are you?’ I once asked her as we were getting dressed to go out, ‘Juegita’s been lying on it all week. It stinks of dog. You’ll never cop off smelling like that.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ she said, ‘Guys love it. They’re beasts anyway.’

The best one of all was one day, a particularly hot and humid day, we came back to the flat and as soon as we got in Chloe lifted her skirt and wheeched her pants off. She rolled them down her thighs as though they were on fire. The pants came off damp with sweat and rolled in a croissant shape.

‘Oh man, that feels soooo good,’ she laughed.

Chloe dropped the pants where they fell and strode out on to the terrace where she lifted her skirt and wafted. I could only follow and watch in stunned admiration. The pants lay there until bedtime, until my nervousness about the cockroaches got the better of me.

And it was clear Chloe wasn’t going to clear away the broken glass either. She stayed in the bath, singing. The roaches wouldn’t be interested in the glass, it might even put them off but it was still a health hazard; one of us was going to cut our feet. Even if I swept up the glass, that still left the problem of the other dirty glasses. I shivered when I thought of cockroaches coming so close to our bed.

‘It’s okay, Chloe, you can come out now,’ I shouted at the bathroom door.

I could hear the hard edge in my voice, I knew Chloe would hear it too but I was too angry to care. While I fiercely scrubbed at the crusted-on orange juice I realised that if we were going to college together this would be the way of it: me chasing round cleaning up after her.

‘I’ve swept up the glass that YOU BROKE. I’ve washed the other disgustingly manky glasses that YOU LEFT.’

‘Oh Alison, you didn’t have to do that,’ she called sweetly as she ran the hot water and topped up the bath.

I stood at the door bawling over the noise of the running water.

‘Who the fuck else was going to do it? You?’

Chloe turned off the tap but otherwise there was no reply.

I was stumped for words. I didn’t know what to do, there was nothing I could do. I heard her settle back in the bath with a
satisfied
sigh. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t hear you there, Alison, the water was running; what did you say?’

I had two choices: kick the door in and slap her about the head, or get out of the flat for a while.

Lisa and Lauren got off the bus jiggling and giggling. Chloe insisted we met them at the station. It was polite, she said. I wanted them to be blown away by how amazingly thin and fabulous I looked and spent hours drying my hair straight and doing my make-up. I was hoping Chloe might do me another of her makeovers but she was too busy planning the evening.

She couldn’t find the restaurant in the phone book so she went down there when the place opened just to be sure of getting a table. I thought she’d book Taxidermista, a place on Plaza Real. I’d seen the queues standing outside for hours but she said, ‘no, better than that.’ She went around the corner and booked Caracol, an old-fashioned tourist trap restaurant. A place with a rotisserie full of flaming chickens for a window. You couldn’t pass by on the narrow street without getting your face scorched.

By the time she’d come back she’d laid out a full itinerary. ‘I’m thinking: we’ll walk them down to Barceloneta for a couple bottles of fizz at Champaneria, back up to Gotic, bottle of panther’s milk at Josep’s, then the restaurant, then Plaza Real, then that sleazy drag queen disco, Cangrejo. And I think last stop, the beach. They’re gonna love it. Whaddaya think?’

She was obviously very pleased with herself.

‘Good plan,’ I said without enthusiasm.

‘Look at you!’ Lisa and Lauren squealed in unison as they got off the bus and threw their arms around me.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘but you look amazing!’

Lisa agreed, giggling, ‘You’ve lost tons of weight, you used to be huge. I can’t believe it, you look amazing!’

After this, the subject of my transformation was dropped. They hadn’t slimmed down, if anything they’d both put on more weight. My life and my body had changed almost beyond recognition but it wasn’t mentioned again. I was a one-minute wonder.

Lisa and Lauren wasted no time bringing me up to speed with their love lives. Due to their acceptance into Clancy’s they’d both recently disposed of their hymens. Lauren, for three and a half weeks, even had a boyfriend. I prepared my sympathetic face, sure that she was about to tell us she’d been humped and dumped, but no. She had chucked him because she felt she was too young to get tied down.

‘It’s like this,’ Lauren sagely explained, ‘why run a car when there’s so many taxis?’

She threw her head back and laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, ‘but I’ve been taking plenty of taxis!’

I laughed too and said, ‘You’re right, Lauren, why run a car when you’ve become the town bike?’

We all laughed, Lauren more than anyone. I wasn’t sure if she took it as an insult or a compliment. I didn’t care how she took it.

In the restaurant Chloe went to great and unsubtle lengths to flatter Lisa and Lauren: how lovely their Scottish accents were (she’d never mentioned mine), how funny they were when they described their
crazy
nights out at Clancy’s. She screamed and slapped the table when they said anything vaguely amusing. How great they looked: their fashion, their hair, their tan.

What the hell was she saying? They did not look great. Fashion-wise it was a case of The Devil Wears Primark. They both wore low-cut jeans over which spilled the muffin tops of their lardy hips and bellies. Lisa’s hair colour was so obviously out of a bottle, with dods of yellow blonde splodged on her head. Their tan was also out of a bottle; they had orange lines round their feet that rubbed off on their brand new white court shoes. When Lisa and Lauren went to the toilet I asked Chloe what she was playing at.

‘Relax honey, no need to get jealous.’ She put her arm around me and whispered, ‘You still my bitch.’

I shrugged her off.

‘It’s called
winning their confidence
,’ she said.

She had done that all right. She had them eating out of her hand. She kept them topped up with booze and insisted on paying for everything.

‘You’re our guests tonight, ladies,’ she told them. ‘Alison and I are picking up the tab. No argument, we invite you, it’s the
tradition
here in Catalunya.’

Chloe was pouring the charm on by the bucketload. Except that, although we passed close by our apartment twice, Chloe never mentioned it. I wanted Lisa and Lauren to see where I was living, the luxury I had grown accustomed to, but Chloe left them to drag their suitcases all around town, the plastic wheels on the cobbled streets clacking like trains on a track.

I liked that sound. Sometimes from our terrace above I could hear tourists’ suitcases in the street, arriving or leaving. It always made me feel sorry for them. Their time here was limited; sooner or later they had to go home. At least as Lisa and Lauren dragged their matching pink Primark suitcases around I knew they’d soon be gone. Their flight was at seven the next morning. Now that they could report back to Cumbernauld on how slim and gorgeous I was, they had fulfilled their function. I couldn’t wait to be rid of them.

Lisa and Lauren put up a show of reluctance but they greedily accepted everything they were offered. The next time they went to the toilet, Chloe went with them and all three came back giggling, sniffing and wiping their noses. Chloe passed me the coke for a solo mission but where was the fun in that?

In Plaza Real Chloe left us, Lisa and Lauren oohing and aahing at the antics of the busking acrobats, while she spoke to a young guy. She shook his hand and although the police were standing not five feet away I had a good idea what had happened. When we got to Cangrejo, my suspicions were confirmed. Chloe produced pills. Without saying anything to the others she handed me a pill and we both swigged from a bottle of water. Lisa and Lauren were curious and asked Chloe to give them one.

‘Well ladies, if you’re sure you can handle it,’ she laughed.

They laughed too. We all laughed and as Chloe handed over the water bottle I noticed that the pills Lisa and Lauren were throwing back were different from the ones we’d just necked.

The difference showed up pretty quickly.

We’d only been dancing twenty minutes or so when Lisa and Lauren started to go gaga.

‘What did you give them?’ I asked Chloe.

‘Ketamine.’

I’d never tried ketamine but I couldn’t believe the effect it had. Lisa and Lauren were still smiling but they had gone floppy and began stumbling around.

‘Let’s get them outta here,’ said Chloe. ‘Lauren, you forgot your suitcase,’ she reminded her.

Lisa and Lauren, staggering from the drink and the coke and the ketamine, held their suitcase handles and each other and giggled uncontrollably. ‘This is the best night out we’ve ever had,’ said Lisa, kissing me and pulling me into their girly huddle.

We picked up a taxi on La Rambla.

‘Get in the taxi,’ I barked at them.

They did as they were told in their awkward bendy way. It was like being in charge of two toddlers. We spoke about them as though they weren’t there, they were too monged to even be offended.

‘Let’s take ‘em to the beach,’ said Chloe.

‘No, let’s just send them to the airport,’ I remonstrated. The ecstasy I’d taken had kicked in and it always made me speak my mind. ‘I don’t want you to be friends with them. You’re my friend, Chloe. Their flight leaves in three hours anyway, they can sober up before they get on the plane. I’m sick of them. I don’t want them missing their flight.’

‘Who wants a party on the beach?’ Chloe asked.

‘Woohooo, midnight swim!’ yelled Lisa.

‘Skinny dipping!’ yelled Lauren, and started to pull her top off.

‘Chloe, please, let’s just get rid of them, they’re no fun now anyway.’

‘You think?’ asked Chloe.

She looked Lauren and Lisa up and down as though they were sides of beef.

‘Nah,’ she said, ‘the fun’s just starting. Let the partying begin!’