PROLOGUE
Thursday 18 April 2013
2.30 p.m. Talitha just called, talking in that urgent, ‘let’s-be-discreet-but-wildly-overdramatic’ voice she always has. ‘Darling, I just want to let you know that it’s my sixtieth on the 24th of May. I’m not SAYING it’s my sixtieth, obviously. And keep it quiet because I’m not asking everyone. I just wanted you to keep the date free.’
I panicked. ‘That would be great!’ I gushed unconvincingly.
‘Bridget. You absolutely can’t not come.’
‘Well, the thing is . . .’
‘What?’
‘It’s Roxster’s thirtieth birthday that night.’
Silence at the end of the phone.
‘I mean, we probably won’t still be together by then, but, if we are, it would be . . .’ I tailed off.
‘I’ve just put “no children” on the invites.’
‘He’ll be thirty by then!’ I said indignantly.
‘I’m just teasing, darling. Of course you must bring your toy boy. I’ll get a bouncy castle! Back on air. Mustrunloveyoubye!’
Tried to turn on telly to see if Talitha had indeed, as so often, been calling me live on air during a film clip. Jabbed confusedly at buttons like a monkey with a mobile phone. Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why? Suspect designed by thirteen-year-old technogeeks, competing with each other from sordid bedrooms, leaving everyone else thinking they’re the only person in the world who doesn’t understand what the buttons are for, thus wreaking psychological damage on a massive, global scale.
Threw remotes petulantly onto sofa, at which TV randomly burst into life, showing Talitha looking immaculate, one leg sexily crossed over the other, interviewing the dark-haired Liverpool footballer who has the anger-management/biting problem. He looked as if he wanted to bite Talitha, though for rather different reasons than on the pitch.
Right. No need for panic – will simply assess pros and cons of Roxster/Talitha party issue in calm and mature manner:
PROS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY
*It would be terrible not to go to Talitha’s. She has been my friend since our
Sit Up Britain
days, when she was an impossibly glamorous newsreader and I was an impossibly incompetent reporter.
*It would be quite funny to take Roxster, and also smug-making, because the thirtieth/sixtieth birthday thing would stop all that patronizing pitying-of-single-women-‘of-a-certain-age’ thing, like they’re terminally stuck with their singleness, whereas single men of that age are snapped up before they’ve had time to draw up the divorce papers. And Roxster is so gorgeous and peach-like, thereby somehow denying reality of ageing process on self.
CONS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY
*Roxster is his own man, and would doubtless take exception to being treated as some sort of comedy, or anti-ageing device.
*Crucially, it might put Roxster off me, to be surrounded by
old people at sixtieth birthday party, and make some sort of completely unnecessary point about how old I am though of course am MUCH younger than Talitha. And frankly, I refuse to believe how old I actually am. As Oscar Wilde says, thirty-five is the perfect age for a woman, so much so that many women have decided to adopt it for the rest of their lives.
*Roxster is probably having his own party with young people squeezed onto his balcony, barbecuing and listening to 70s disco music with ironic ‘retro’ amusement, and is thinking at this moment how to avoid asking me to the party in case his friends find out he is going out with a woman literally old enough to be his mother. Actually, possibly, technically, with the advancement of puberty due to hormones in milk these days – grandmother. Oh God. Why did mind think such a thought?
3.10 p.m. Gaaah! Have got to pick up Mabel in twenty minutes and have not got rice cakes ready. Gaah. Telephone.
‘I have Brian Katzenberg for you.’
My new agent! Actual agent. But I would be BEYOND late for Mabel if I stopped and talked.
‘Can I call Brian back later?’ I trilled, trying to smear pretend-butter onto the rice cakes, stick them together and put them in a Ziploc with one hand.
‘It’s about your spec script.’
‘Just . . . in . . . a meeting!’ How could I be in a meeting, and yet talking on the phone saying I’m in a meeting? People’s assistants are meant to say they’re in a meeting, not the person themself, who is supposed to be unable to say anything because they’re in the meeting.
Set off on school run, feeling, now, desperate to call back and find out what the call was about. Brian has so far sent it to two production companies, both of whom have turned it down. But now maybe a fish has bitten at the fish hook?
Fought overwhelming urge to ring Brian back claiming ‘meeting’ had come to an abrupt end, but decided far more important to be on time for Mabel: and that’s the sort of caring, prioritizing mother I am.
4.30 p.m. School run was even more chaos than usual: like Where’s Wally? picture of millions of lollipop ladies, babies in prams, white-van men having standoffs with over-educated SUV mums, a man cycling with a double bass strapped to his back, and earth mothers on bicycles with tin boxes full of children in the front. Entire road was gridlocked. Suddenly, a frantic woman came running along yelling, ‘Go back, go BACK! Come ON! Nobody is HELPING HERE!’
Realizing there had been a terrible accident, I, and everyone else, started rearing their cars crazily onto pavement and into gardens to make way for Emergency Services. Once road was clear, peered gingerly ahead for the ambulance/bloodbath. But there was not an ambulance, just a very fancy woman, flouncing into a black Porsche, then roaring furiously along the newly cleared road, a smug be-uniformed small child next to her in the front seat.