Running in Heels (40 page)

“Would
I
like it, do you think?” I asked, after listening to her rave.

She paused. “They don't half yank you around, Nat. This way, that way, cranking your legs open and shut like a pair of bellows. At one point I said to the bloke—a young geezer, in his twenties—I said, ‘I'm telling you now, I won't be held responsible if I let one off—' ”

I interrupted. “You actually
said
that to him? You actually said it?”

“Well, what was I going to do?” she cried. “Fart in his face with no warning? It was only fair!”

“I can't believe you did that!” I squeaked. “I'm mortified.”

“Nat.” She grinned. “He'd been a masseur for ten years. He's witnessed more than a few farts!”

I shuddered. “Still. I'm horrified.”

“Ye-es.” She sighed. “That's why I can't recommend it to you, Nat. If you accidentally did a fart, even a small nontoxic one, the loss of face would be so great you'd have to kill yourself. And him. It would be the only honorable recourse.”

I put my head in my hands and laugh, a half-hysterical laugh that could turn soggy at any time. Pilates isn't entirely fart free. How will I feel when students start farting at me? Good Lord, I'd better get some practice in. The phone rings. Listlessly, I pick up the receiver. Thanks to the whirlwind exit of romance from my life, the telephone—that magical purveyor of thrills and glorious opportunity—is reduced to a humdrum business tool.

“Hello?” I say dully.

“Is that,” replies a voice, meek but unmistakable, “by any chance my old friend Nat?”

I REHEARSE IN THE BATH FOR MOMENTS LIKE
these. I could have said, “No.” And put the phone down. Or sneered, “You and your brother—are you taking it in turns?” Because it
was
like watching two little figures on a weather vane, the forecast veering from sunny to stormy, to sunny again, each figure sliding out to scold or soothe me, scold, soothe, one after the other. But when she rang I was reeling from the very obvious effects of not speaking. I wasn't about to sacrifice another soul mate to silence. I was just glad to have my friend back and I had the excellent sense to say so. She didn't call me her
best
friend, but it no longer mattered.

“It might be me,” I say gruffly, jiggling in my seat.

“This is Babs,” she adds, still in the same deferential whisper, “ringing to say I'm a complete pillock and I understand if you don't want anything to do with me ever again.”

“
Ba-abs
.” I beam. “You have no idea how much I've missed you. You're not a pillock at all, you are my very great friend, and I'm thrilled to hear from you. Where are you?”

“At home, feeling ashamed of myself. I'm a friend-beater.”

“Babs, I condone that slap. I understand it. So don't be ashamed. I was”—I search for words dramatic enough to express my stupidity, dig about, retrieve something from a long evening with Saul watching
Hamlet
—“a rash intruding fool.”

“I don't 'ave your book learnin', Miss Miller!” replies Babs. “Hey. Andy told me about Sasha.”

“As I said.” I add hastily, “Yes, actually he just, er, came by to get his stuff.”

“I think it's amazing!” cries Babs. “It was so kind of you.”

“I think so. So, er…”

“I had another talk with Si. I take back, um, quite a lot of my accusations. I'm sorry, Nat. It was all too much. Everything'd got on top of me. Except my husband. Oh hush my mouth!”

“How is Simon?” I ask. I also want to know when she last spoke to Andy. Not in the last five minutes, I suspect.

“He's good, thanks. He's all right. I believe we are
progressing
.” She says this last bit in a silly posh voice in case I should imagine she's taking herself seriously.

“So, Nat, what are you up to right now?”

“Me? Oh, working.”

“Of course you are! Sorry, why didn't you say? I'll let you get back.”

“Nonononononono, it's okay, I didn't mean it like that. Do you want to come round?”

“What, now?”

“Well, not if you're bu—”

“Don't be daft, I'm on me four-day break—I'm knackered, we had a fire yesterday, it was a shock to the system!—I've been training, now I'm sat in front of the box eating tea cakes and popping bubble wrap.”

I feel a twinge.
I
should have been training. Not the bulk-you-up
training that Babs does (circuits, weights, cycling, running).
My
kind of training: Running. Running. Running. Running.

I sidestep the irritation and say, “Tea cakes?”

“Mini-marshmallows, covered in milk chocolate, biscuit base, peel the chocolate off first?”

“I didn't think they made those anymore,” I breathe, impressed. “I used to love them!”

“You have to know where to look,” replies Babs happily. “And I'm a pro. I'll bring some—I'll just bring myself, shall I? But are you
sure
I'm not disturbing your work? I know what you're like, you'll say it's fine, and all the while you'll be fretting about how to make up the time, and will it put out your gym schedule and—”

“Babs,” I say sternly, “priorities, please. I'll put the kettle on.”

I jump up to clean the flat, but it's already squeaky. Except for the coffee cups. My fingers start to itch. But I leave the cups—Babs will be so proud—and try to do a little work. But, what with the good and bad stuff squiddled up like spaghetti, there's insufficient space in my head. Andy
said
she would forgive me—good—I earn a gold star for matchmaking him and Alex—good, bad—she must assume I asked him to leave—good—when in fact he left of his own huffy accord—bad—she hated the idea of me and Andy—bad—although now I'm no longer Bitch Number One, maybe she won't mind me getting jiggy with her brother—
great
.

But then. I've got more chance of getting jiggy with the archbishop of Canterbury. I feel gloom at the thought (no offense to the archbishop). Forget him! (Andy, that is.) When the doorbell rings, I'm there. After a short, self-conscious head bobble, we hug. I'm so happy you're my friend again, I say in my head, I'm so so happy. It translates as, “Good to see you, Barbarella.” Which isn't
terrible
. Babs pushes me away.

“Natalie!” she gasps, one big grin. “Looking good!”

I run a hand through my hair, tug at my jumper sleeves, and mumble my thanks at the floor. Compliments embarrass me. Then again, Babs only gives a compliment if she means it.
Equally, if you look a fright she's happy—as I'm only too aware—to say so.

“Seriously,” she continues as I scurry into the kitchen, “you look, you look…I don't know what it is, you look less
shriveled
. I mean—”

“Thank you very much.” Babs frantically rakes her hair forward until it hides her face.

“Come out of there,” I order. “I know what you meant.” She flicks her hair back, hangs her head, and says, “The stuff I said on Sunday.”

I turn from the cupboard. “Babs. Don't. I deserved it. I'll be totally honest. When you got engaged it was the biggest shock—the second biggest shock of my life. I didn't want to lose you. When Dad left…it's muddied everything since. I know it's ridiculous. I know things change,
obviously
, I didn't want them to. To me, change means loss when often it just means…change. I suppose barging into the Pitcher & Piano to sort out your marriage made me feel necessary. And Simon was…”—I decide to be charitable—“vulnerable. I caused you a lot of misery and I apologize.”

“Nat,” Babs says. “Things do change. But, you know, deep down, you'll always be my best friend.”

My heart curls like old paper. I want to clutch my stomach and groan from my soul. I pour the kettle instead. “Yeah,” I reply. “You too.”

Babs clears her throat. “You know,” she exclaims, dragging out a chair screechingly, with zero regard for those in the basement flat. “
You've
changed. I don't just mean how you look.”

“Do you think I'm looking thin on top?”

“Well, Nat, you were never Dolly Parton, but at least if you're small people don't classify you as ‘frowsy,' and you're still too thin, but you seem to be—”

“No, Babs, that's very sweet of you, but I was talking about my hair.”

“Your hair? Oh! Er, no. You've got a fine head of hair, from where I'm standing. Or sitting. Why shouldn't you have?”

“It's been shedding. You don't think it looks sparse or—un-stable?”

“No, Nat. As hair goes, it looks reasonably sane. You eejit. So what happened?”

I jerk guiltily. “What do you mean?”

Babs tilts her chair onto two legs, and I bite back my reflex response (“don't tilt!”). “I mean,” she says, “what's happened to you all of a sudden? The place is”—she nods at the two stained coffee cups on the gleaming table—“a filth pit. And you seem more…sure of yourself. I'm not knocking it.”

“Do you think?” I reply, pleased. “I'm training myself to be a bit less tense. Gosh, I—”

“I take it back.” Babs grins. “You haven't changed at all. You still say ‘gosh.' ” She adds, “Does this mean you're going to ask if I want a yogurt with my tea?” I make a face like I'm trapped in a wind tunnel. “Did I really ever ask you that? I'm sorry. I
was
going to say did you want a biscuit?”

“You did, and I do. What sort?”

“Plain chocolate digestives?”

“Mm. Okay. Although, for future reference, I prefer the milk chocolate sort.”

“Yes,” I say. “So do I.”

Babs looks intrigued.

“That's why I got these.”

“Right,”
she says slowly, as one might say to a child who's too old to insist on his invisible friend. “Although. I'll say it, I'm impressed you got them in the first place.”

I squirm. Even at my worst I always bought biscuits. Only I never ate them. I'd squirrel them away at the top of the larder in the tin box. They were there to urge on other people, or for me to stare at or sniff. Like a parent sniffing the clothes of a dead child. How did I get like that?

“I lost control,” I say teasingly. “As prescribed. I went mad in the shop.”

Babs nods. “I'm impressed. I'm not messing about. I really am. So whose”—tap tap tap—“is this man-size silver ring? Um, are you, er, back with Chris?”

“Oh no!” I cry, “I'd forgotten about him. No, it's Saul's, if you can believe that.”

“
Saul's?
” she yells. “What! Why haven't you told me?”

“You and I haven't been speaking,” I remind her. “And it's not what you think. I did not have sex with that man. He decided to get in touch to teach me a lesson, show off his hot new body, honed and toned, starting from the day we broke up. In fact, now I come to think of it, he must have run straight from the Oxo Tower to the gym and stayed there.”

Babs looks stunned. “Saul? God, that's so sly! Still—shows how much he cared. You
are
telling me the truth, though? You didn't fall for it, did you?”

“It's okay. It didn't work. Because the hot new body remains attached to Saul's personality.”

“Poor Saul,” purrs Babs. “So how is the young fogey? God, that's another thing I feel bad about. Urging you to stick with Bowcock.”

I glance at her, surprised. “Did you…did you
know
you were doing it?”

Babs dunks her digestive in her tea (my toes curl instinctively—once she performed an independent laboratory experiment to discover how many milk chocolate digestives you can drown in a standard tea before it turns into a semisolid, poor man's tiramisu; conclusion: ten and a half). Then she says, “Not until I thought about it. I sort of realized that it mattered a bit
too
much to me that you stayed with sensible Saul. I think it had something to do with feeling defensive about getting married. It's difficult when you're the first. Sorry,” she adds.

“Forget it. How is it with Si, really? You don't have to tell me if it's private.”

She waves this notion away, smiles—acknowledging
something
—and says, “It's getting better. Slowly. It's not great. No one tells you, marriage is different. Even if you've been living together, which we weren't, it's emotionally, psychologically different. I know that sounds like a crock, but it is. The adjustment is huge. Not for me so much—I know what I want, I always have, I've never been that bothered with what other people think—but Si is, he's less confident in himself, in his decisions. He's still—and I'd say this to his face—
young
in that sense. He admits it. Which is progress in itself. It's funny, Nat. You think you're getting on great, you think you can talk about everything, you think your relationship is solid, you're feeling pretty smug, and then—this
gulf
opens, you realize there's this huge rotting problem that you've both expertly ignored to the extent that you no longer really believe it's there. And then, out of the blue, you're both of you standing on the brink. You try and approach the problem but you can't—every time you tiptoe toward discussion, try and keep it little, it blows up big, it's like taking a match to an oil refinery. It's the most frightening thing, Nat. It makes you feel so helpless. It's the worst feeling. I'm not used to it.”

“How,” I say haltingly, “does Simon feel? Does he know what he's done to you? Is he serious about making it work?”

Babs forces a smile and her eyes crinkle. “He knows what he's done, and he is sorry. I know he loves me. He's trying. It's still hard for him. I think he's got to get used to it, to see that I'm not stopping him from doing
much
. He's still his own person, he can do a lot of what he likes. All that shit is drummed in until they believe it—‘the nagging wife.' It feeds the fear of men like Si, till they interpret every word you say—including ‘pass the salt'—as nagging. And the losers in his office—who haven't matured beyond twelve and think that having any feeling for a woman other than ‘whoa, babe' is, hilariously enough, ‘gay'—they goad him with it, they make it worse. I know what they're like. I used to work with them! It's like school.”

“Have you said this to Simon?”

“I gave him earache. I've tried to say that if
they
were happy with themselves, they wouldn't care what Si does, they'd accept it. It's just that because they're so weak, a choice of lifestyle that's different to theirs is a threat to them, it forces them to question their sad, loserish lives. That's why they're so vicious about him getting hitched. They're scared. I've tried to make him see that they have the problem, not him.”

“And does he?”

“Half. He's taken it on board. But he insists they're happy. With their drug problems, drink problems, personality disorders, et cetera.” Babs manages a feeble grin. Then she adds, “But I did say one thing that seemed to hit.”

“Oh?”

“I lost patience. I just said, ‘Look, it's not the
law
. You don't have to be married to me. No one's making you. You don't have to be here, it's your choice. You chose to be with me because we are—were good together.' I think he thought I was about to leave him. It made him sit up.”