Lizzy Harrison Loses Control Read online

  ‘So you are going out with him then,’ says Ben firmly.

  ‘I am seeing him,’ I admit, attempting to clarify the terms of my fake relationship. I don’t know why I’m trying to make Ben understand the subtle difference between going out with someone (implying commitment, introduction to friends and family, future plans, calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend) and seeing someone (just hanging out and seeing where it takes you, no plans beyond next week, vehement denial of boyfriend/girlfriend status). He’s been with Jenny for so long he has no clue how it works out there these days. It wouldn’t surprise me if he asked how long Randy and I have been courting.

  ‘Look, I’m not saying you needed to make any grand announcement, Lizzy, but don’t you think you might have told us before we saw it somewhere else? Have you told Mum?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t told Mum, you lunatic, and don’t you dare even think of telling her,’ I snap.

  It’s probably the saving grace of my so-called relationship with Randy that it coincides with my mother’s annual two-month stay at an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas; however far Randy’s star has risen, he is surely not yet a household name on the subcontinent, and certainly not in an isolated ashram where five hours a day are spent in silent contemplation.

  ‘Well.’ Ben has put on his Head of the Family voice. ‘Lizzy, I’d never presume to tell you what you should be doing with your life.’ Which obviously means he is just about to. ‘But Mum has a right to know. I just hope you know what you’re doing getting involved with someone like Randy Jones.’

  I try to ignore the irony of a professional public relations PA being lectured on celebrity relationships by a garden-centre manager, because I know he feels his older brother responsibilities keenly ever since our dad died.

  ‘I do know what I’m doing, Ben, and you’re sweet to worry, but it’s all very early days. I’m just having a bit of fun – you want me to have fun, don’t you?’

  I can hear Jenny’s voice in the background again and I can just make out the words ‘drug addict’, and ‘shagger’. Ben seems to be ignoring her.

  ‘Of course I do, sis – sorry if I’m being too big-brotherly. Of course you should have your fun – just take care of yourself,’ he says, though I’m sure I can hear Jenny protesting, ‘What about Graham?’ as if Randy’s relationship with me is going to corrupt an innocent suburban two-year-old.

  But Ben persists. ‘And if it does turn more serious, you know you’re always welcome to bring him down to Guildford any time for lunch or something.’

  He sounds hesitant at his own suggestion, and I feel mean as I choke back a burst of laughter, swiftly turning it into a cough. The idea of Randy with his guy-liner and blond highwayman ponytail sitting on my brother’s World of Leather sofa surrounded by Lego and gardening magazines is too ludicrous to contemplate. I don’t think I could put poor Ben through it, even if Randy could be dragged beyond the M25 without violent protest.

  ‘Aw, thanks, bro. You know you’ll be the first to meet him if we start going out properly.’

  We say our goodbyes and I promise to visit soon, with or without my celebrity boyfriend. I feel bad lying to my brother when he’s being so sweet about everything, but I reassure myself that it’s not for long, and anyway, it’s good for him to realize I’m not always the sensible sister he imagines.

  But I don’t have time to dwell on it, as the phone barely stops ringing all morning. I get some weird messages, including a furtive voicemail from Jazmeen Marie, perma-tanned scourge of the Premiership footballer and Chinawhite attendee, asking if I’d like to meet up to ‘compare notes’ on Randy. As I don’t think mine will match hers, I delete the message without answering. And I see right through Lulu’s faked call from Hello! magazine wishing to cover my wedding (‘We’ve room for a sumptuous feature right next to a photomontage of Prince Pavlos of Greece’). She redeems herself by inviting me over for supper on Saturday night, suggesting I bring along my fiancé (she doesn’t believe a word of it). Although Randy and I are getting on much better since our big chat, I’m not ready to introduce him to anyone yet, and somehow I can’t see him sitting round the battered Formica table in Lulu and Dan’s Brixton kitchen, passing the wine back and forth and playing stupid parlour games for hours.

  I say I’ll check with him, though I have no intention of doing so. Saturday’s my night off – Randy can amuse himself.

  11

  Dinners at Lulu and Dan’s follow a standard pattern, and have done ever since they bought their flat in a terrace behind the Brixton Ritzy cinema five years ago. The first course is wine, and the second course is wine, and I have long ago learned that if I want to eat anything before nine-thirty I’d better bring it myself, so tonight I’ve arrived with a selection of toasted marcona almonds, olives and little balsamic-soaked pearl onions from the deli round the corner from Randy’s house. Randy helped me to choose them, in fact, and sent the normally charming and accommodating owner into paroxysms of agony by sticking his fingers into everything. But as Randy, for whom the grand gesture is the only gesture, bought an entire leg of Parma ham to take home, all was well in the end. Randy was surprisingly annoyed not to be invited to Dan and Lulu’s, especially as he’d not made any plans himself, but I’ve promised I’ll come back to his afterwards so we can do something public and obvious all day on Sunday, such as look meaningfully into the windows of estate agents as if hunting for a ‘love nest’.

  Lulu is still perusing a cookbook when I arrive and hand over my deli haul.

  ‘Wow, check this out – you have gone up in the world lately, Harrison. This is definitely an improvement on your usual bag of mini-poppadums.’

  I tip the baby onions into a blue and white dish that’s resting on the draining board and pass them to her.

  ‘Well, you know my hot celebrity lifestyle these days, Lulu – just everybody is eating pickled onions at the moment in glamorous North London, didn’t you know? Have you decided what we’re eating yet?’

  I pull a bottle of cava out of my bag and start picking at the foil wrapper. Lulu passes me two sturdy Ikea tumblers, the previous set of wine glasses having met a sorry end at their annual Halloween party last year.

  ‘I was thinking maybe some sort of pie,’ she replies. ‘Dan said he’d go to the market after rugby practice and pick up whatever looked good, so we’ll have to wait and see.’ She shrugs contentedly and slams the cookbook shut, pushing it along the counter to join a stack of others that are jumbled up with magazines, tea towels and what appears to be the postcard I sent them from New York in March. I pass her a fizzing glass of cava and glance up at the kitchen clock.

  I truly cannot comprehend how Lulu can bear not knowing what she’s cooking for her guest by seven o’clock. When I invite people over for supper, I know within hours of their acceptance exactly what I’ll be making (having looked through my special file of recipes cut out from magazines), and when I’ll make time to get the ingredients (red asterisk on shopping list if they require a visit to any specialist shops like the Chinese supermarkets in Soho, or the Spanish suppliers in Borough Market), and what can be prepared in advance (pudding, always). I’ve even toyed with the idea of getting one of those grown-up lady’s entertaining books where you write down what you served to people and when, so you don’t give them the same dish twice in a row. But then I remember that I am not a 1950s housewife and I get a grip.

  Lulu, on the other hand, is quite happy to freestyle it.

  I’m a bit nervous about seeing Dan as we haven’t been in touch since Randy turned up at Hyde Park, but when he bursts through the front door, weighed down with bags, he kisses me warmly on the cheek as usual. Lulu falls on the bags and pulls everything out on to the counter.

  ‘Pasta, clams, tomatoes – spaghetti alle vongole? Parsley, garlic, French bread, butter – with garlic bread? Salad? Salad . . . ?’ Dan passes her a brown paper bag that’s fallen to the floor. ‘Aha, rocket – thanks. And special-bought puddings for
afters. Brilliant. Thanks, Danny.’ She starts clattering in cupboards and drags out some saucepans, banging them heavily on to the gas hob.

  ‘Yeah, well, I was thinking Thai chicken curry, but if that’s what you think you can make with what I’ve bought, you do your best,’ Dan teases, pulling off his jumper and hanging it on a hook behind the kitchen door. Lulu rolls her eyes at me as she energetically chops onions. I’m quietly surprised to see that there’s not even a hint of the rugby shirt about Dan’s person today. The removal of his jumper has revealed a plain white T-shirt which, though you wouldn’t mistake it for high fashion, is mercifully free of the usual slogans declaring that the wearer ran the Reading Half Marathon 2004 or went On Tour for Johnno’s Stag. He looks . . . well, as if he’s made a bit of an effort. Though his hair is still as messy and sticking-up as ever. Some things never change.

  ‘Any wine on the go?’ he asks, grabbing a handful of olives from the table.

  ‘Is there any wine?’ scoffs Lulu. ‘Of course there’s wine. How else will we get Lizzy in a fit state to eat my cooking otherwise?’ She sloshes some cava into another tumbler and slams it on to the table, where Dan and I have comfortably settled to watch her cook.

  ‘Hey, I love your cooking, Lulu, you nutter,’ I protest.

  ‘Ah, you think you do, Harrison, because I always ensure my guests are pissed enough in advance to be grateful for whatever I put in front of them. Serve food late enough and people will eat anything and love it. Just a little tip you won’t pick up from Nigella.’ She takes a swig of cava.

  ‘I never knew it was a conscious strategy,’ I confess, reaching for a handful of almonds to keep me going until Lulu deems I’m drunk enough to eat. ‘But it definitely works.’

  The doorbell rings and I look at Dan quizzically as Lulu rushes down the hallway. I didn’t know anyone else was joining us tonight. Dan elaborately mimes moust achetwirling, cigarette-smoking and other unidentifiable traits which leave me none the wiser until the nonsmoking and entirely moustache-free Laurent, the Le Monde-reading Frenchman from Soho, enters the room with Lulu on his arm. She seems quite sweetly smitten, blushing as he whispers in her ear before he strides across the linoleum to kiss both me and a rather surprised Dan on both cheeks. He’s clearly eaten chez Lulu before and produces a family-sized bag of Kettle Chips and a tub of taramasalata, which he dumps in the middle of the table.

  I go over to Lulu by the sink, while Laurent and Dan tuck into the crisps. ‘I meet Laurent properly at last!’ I whisper. ‘I’d begun to think he was a figment of your imagination.’

  ‘You can talk!’ says Lulu, laughing, ‘with your celebrity fiancé that none of us has ever met!’ She looks over my shoulder to smile indulgently at her new amour.

  ‘Oh, shut up. You’ll meet Randy when I’m ready. Tell me how it’s all going with Laurent? This is coming up for three weeks, right? That’s got to be a bit of a Lulu Miller record, hasn’t it?’

  Lulu tries to act casual, but she is positively radiant. ‘He’s lovely, Harrison, what more can I say? I don’t want to talk about it too much right now in case I jinx it. But I’m really happy. And see?’ She nudges me with her elbow. ‘See how life can change? You scoffed at me that night, and here we both are, loved-up with new boys. And you thought nothing was going to change.’ She looks at me intently, satisfied with her own predictive powers.

  I long to own up, to tell her that there’s nothing going on between me and Randy except in public, that I really need to talk about it with my best friend, that I haven’t changed my life at all except on the surface, but instead I reach to open the oven door so she can pull the foil-wrapped garlic bread out and swing it in a reckless arc across the kitchen and on to the table.

  ‘Ow, hot! Dig in!’

  Having spent the last few weeks pretending to be something I’m not, it feels like coming home to sit around Dan and Lulu’s battered old table on their ancient chairs that creak ominously with any sudden movement, teasing each other about the same old stories that we’ve laughed at for years. With Laurent as our audience, we battle to outdo each other with ‘do you remembers’.

  Dan is forced, yet again, to defend himself against the charge that he slept with their neighbour Mrs Whittaker, whose hedges he used to trim on summer Sundays in our youth, and who always insisted he share a jug of Pimm’s with her afterwards. Of course he didn’t sleep with her. She was about sixty, wore a cardigan that she’d knitted herself out of dog hair, and no more had carnal intentions towards Dan than she did towards the hedging shears, but it has always wound Dan up hugely to suggest that she got him drunk to take advantage of him. However, under Laurent’s approving smirk, Dan merely shrugs his shoulders and returns Laurent’s smile, implying a man-to-man understanding that Mrs Whittaker was in fact the foxy Mrs Robinson of the Guildford suburbs, and that Lulu and I are making up the dog-hair cardigan out of spite.

  Lulu can’t resist reminding me of the time I burned off my entire fringe at her and Dan’s eighteenth birthday party, and how the charred ends sprinkled gently down into the lap of Will Banwell, the upper-sixth heart throb whose lighter I’d flirtatiously asked to use to light what was probably only my fourth or fifth cigarette ever. I certainly got his attention, but the smell of burned hair put paid to any romance, not only that night but for some time afterwards: I had to wear an extremely unfashionable hair band for four long months while it grew out, and there are people in my life who still unkindly refer to me as Bjorn Borg.

  Which obviously means that I have to let Laurent know about the time that Lulu, after being bought numerous champagne cocktails by a rich banker she was dating at the time, fell off a bar stool in Claridge’s in a micro-minidress, landing with her legs in the air and nothing but a tiny thong between her and the packed room. However, Laurent is far too interested in exactly what kind of thong it was (leopardskin) to see the funny side. It really must be love.

  Once we’ve finished our tiramisu (Lulu’s right – I can hardly remember what the spaghetti tasted like. I just was so glad to see it I scraped my plate clean), Lulu stacks the empty plates in a pile by the sink and produces a pad of paper and four pens.

  ‘Oh God, no,’ groans Dan, covering his face with his hands. ‘Tell me we’re not playing Person Most Likely.’ He looks out from between his fingers, but of course he knows the answer.

  ‘It’s that or the Hat Game, Dan,’ says Lulu. ‘Come on, you know we always play Person Most Likely after supper when Lizzy comes round.’

  ‘Personne Most Likely?’ asks Laurent, looking apprehensive, as well he might. This is a game that has ruined relationships, spawned new ones, caused people to be ‘off speakers’ for months. And one of the best games I know.

  ‘The rules,’ announces Lulu officiously, though Dan and I know them by heart. ‘Each player is given five pieces of paper. On each piece of paper they write down a sentence beginning “Person Most Likely to . . . ” and then they complete that sentence.’

  ‘With what? I don’t understand,’ says Laurent, looking baffled, as most novices do. Oh, the poor innocent. ‘With whatever you like, darling,’ says Lulu, reaching over to caress his cheek. ‘If you were thinking of me, for example, you might write “Person Most Likely to make Laurent a very happy man tonight”. But then, you see, you might regret that. Because when you have completed your five pieces of paper, they are all dropped into this hat.’ She waves a red beret in his direction. ‘Chose this one in your honour, darling.’ She clears a space amongst the wine glasses and empty bottles and drops the beret in the middle of the table.

  ‘They go . . . in the beret?’ asks Laurent.

  ‘Yup – in the beret they go, we mix them up, and then everyone takes out five,’ explains Lulu. ‘And then you read the five you’ve picked out, and here’s where it gets interesting: you allocate them to the person you think is best described there.’ Laurent looks confused.

  ‘But what if I get the ones I write myself?’ asks Laurent – a rookie question.


  ‘You still have to hand them out,’ says Lulu firmly.

  ‘And what if they’re ones that are about me?’ he asks. Aha – a quick learner, I see.

  ‘Then you can give them to yourself. And when all the pieces of paper have been allocated, we go round the table and read them out loud.’

  ‘Hmm, sounds fine,’ says Laurent confidently. Poor lamb. He has no idea.

  This is the game in which Dan’s horrible university girlfriend Pearl became so enraged on receiving ‘Person Most Likely to lose their temper playing this game’ that she dumped Dan that night (thereby proving Lulu’s point, though obviously she never confessed to writing it). This is the game in which my cousin, on receiving ‘Person Most Likely to have an affair’, burst into tears in front of her husband and asked how we all knew. We didn’t. Till then. So we try to tread a little more carefully these days, but that really depends on the company.

  The first round is innocuous stuff: Person Most Likely to wear a string of onions around their neck (Laurent), Person Most Likely to have their wedding featured in OK! magazine (me), Person Most Likely to engage in french kissing (Lulu), Person Most Likely to get naked with fourteen men at once (Dan, in the showers after rugby, you understand, though it could easily have been Lulu at one time). It’s all fun and games, and we stop for a moment as Dan reaches up to the cupboard behind him for a bottle of amaretto while Lulu brews up a pot of coffee to lull us into the belief that we’re sobering up.

  Laurent is leaning back in his chair with his arm slung around the back of Lulu’s, his thumb slowly caressing the back of the seat as if she were still sitting there. His eyes follow her about the room. Lulu’s pretending not to notice, but every movement is slightly exaggerated: the opening of the fridge door seems to require a seductive bend, even the picking up of the tea towel involves a flirtatious wiggle of the hips. Dan and I roll our eyes at each other as he pours the amber-coloured liqueur into shot glasses, but Lulu and Laurent are in their own world and don’t notice.