Best of Friends (46 page)

“I’d love to,” she said brightly, then her face fell as she thought of Debra at home, waiting eagerly for her treat.

“But what?” prompted Simon.

“But nothing,” Lizzie replied, Joe’s words resonating in her head.
You have a life too, Mum.
“There was something I meant to do but it can wait until tomorrow.” Invitations to dinner with men she was attracted to didn’t come round every day. Debra would understand.

There were ten of them around a long table in Jimmy’s Seafood Shack, and somehow Simon had slipped into the seat beside Lizzie. When they’d got to the restaurant, she’d nipped off to the loo and done her best to tidy her unruly tortoiseshell hair without a comb, raking it out of the ponytail with her fingers. She didn’t have a scrap of make-up apart from her strawberry lip balm, an ancient phial of Miss Dior of uncertain vintage, and some mascara, but she did her best with it. Anyhow, she decided, with her cheekbones burnished with freckles from the day’s sun and a shine in her eyes from the sheer excitement of her jump, she had a healthy natural glow that suited her better than cosmetics. As a final sop to beauty, she took off her sweatshirt and wrapped it round her waist, opening a couple of buttons on her candy-striped shirt so that a hint of cleavage was visible. The
Vogue
model scouts would not stop her in the street to sign her up, but she didn’t look half bad.

Her last bit of preparation was to phone Debra. Nobody answered the house phone so she left a message there.

“Hi, Debs, sorry I’m going to be late. We’ll have to postpone our dinner until tomorrow. And if you’ve gone over to Barry’s to sort things out, just leave me a note to say so. Love you.” She left a similar message on her daughter’s mobile phone, which was switched off. Hopefully, Debra was making it up with Barry and would have had to cry off dinner anyhow.

Back in the restaurant, the proprietor himself, Jimmy, was listing the specials of the day.

The flyers interrupted him to whoop at Lizzie’s appearance.

“Nice perfume,” roared Tony, as Lizzie squeezed past him.

“Nice shirt,” said the guy sitting opposite as she wriggled into her seat, giving him an unintentional flash of creamy skin.

“Open another button.”

“Oi, you yobbos, leave her alone,” ordered Simon.

“Ignore them, they’re in their second childhoods,” a woman named Tash told Lizzie. “They don’t know how to behave with attractive women.”

“Kids, all of them,” added Lena, who sat beside Teddy. “Apart from you, darling,” she added to Teddy.

“It’s only a bit of fun,” Simon murmured in her ear, “although the perfume is nice.”

“You don’t think I should open another button, then?” Lizzie whispered back.

The answering gleam in Simon’s eyes told her that he liked the shirt too. “Not here,” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warmth of his breath against her. “Tony and Ron would have to be resuscitated if you did and I don’t want to give either of them mouth-to-mouth.”

“Simon, stop monopolising Lizzie,” Tony said grumpily. “You don’t have to annexe the only decent woman we’ve seen in months.”

“Well, thank you!” said Tash in mock offence.

“To go back over the specials for tonight,” droned the proprietor, Jimmy, who’d been standing with his pad during the whole rowdy conversation.

“Sorry, Jimmy,” said Lena.

“Yeah, sorry,” everyone chorused, not sounding a bit sorry.

Tony poured red wine into Lizzie’s glass. “Drink up,” he said. “You deserve to celebrate a five-star jump.”

“Yes,” said Simon. “Five star in every way.”

“Three cheers for Lizzie, our newest member!” announced Ron.

This was what she’d been missing, Lizzie realised with a happy lurch: the feeling of belonging, of being accepted. Here, in this disparate group, she wasn’t the divorced wife of Myles Shanahan, mother of two adults, and a woman who hadn’t had a date for over twenty-five years. She was Lizzie, a person in her own right, and she had a gorgeous man beside her, a man who seemed to think that she was attractive too.

When the taxi dropped her home at midnight, Lizzie felt a fluttering of unease because it seemed as if every light in the house was on. The unease rocketed to high anxiety when, before she’d even had the chance to find her key, the front door was flung open.

“Debra, what’s wrong?” she asked as her daughter stood, fully dressed, in the doorway like an avenging angel.

“You’re asking me!” yelled Debra. “I’m not the one who’s been gone all day without a word of explanation. Where the hell have you been?”

“Just out with some friends,” said Lizzie, trying hard to sound sober. She felt giggly after all the wine they’d consumed in the restaurant—at least five glasses, and she wasn’t used to drinking that much.

She’d had such a lovely day and such a wonderful evening, and now Debra was glaring at her with undisguised fury.

“Out?” Debra yelled. “And what about me, stuck at home waiting for you?”

Lizzie made the fatal mistake of laughing. She couldn’t help herself. It was just that Debra looked so stern and this was such a bizarre reversal of the normal roles. She was the mother, Debra was the daughter, and yet it was Debra yelling at her for staying out late. It was funny …

The giggling really finished Debra off. “How dare you stand there and laugh at me?” she said with rage. “I’ve been worried out of my mind about you.” Lizzie plonked herself down on the chair in the hall and let her little bum bag drop to the floor.

“I phoned your mobile and left a message. Didn’t you get it?”

“I got it all right,” screeched Debra, still at the same earpiercing volume. “But I wanted to talk to you. We were supposed to be going out together tonight. Didn’t you think about that? And I’ve been in such a state about Barry.”

“Oh, Debra,” sighed Lizzie, the giggles turning to remorse in an instant, “I’m so sorry. I was just having some fun with some new friends of mine and the parachute jump had gone so well and we just wanted to celebrate—”

“Parachute jump?”

Lizzie hadn’t thought Debra could shout any louder but, somehow, she managed to. Lizzie was sure the people next door could hear.

“What parachute jump? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, gosh,” said Lizzie slowly, “I’d been meaning to tell you about it but I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure I could go through with it.” She hiccuped, earning herself another furious glare from her daughter.

“You mean you did a parachute jump?” demanded Debra, the disdain in her voice making it clear she thought parachute jumps were anti-social behaviour on a par with skinny dipping in public places. “At your age?”

Lizzie nodded tearfully. Suddenly she didn’t feel like the brave woman anymore, the woman who was going to work her way through that “Things to Do Before You’re Thirty” list with style and brio. She felt like a stupid forty-nine-year-old woman who thought she could reclaim her lost youth by jumping out of a plane.

“It was for charity,” she muttered. “I thought it would be a nice tribute to Sally to raise money for breast cancer in her name, that’s all. And a parachute jump is a good way of doing it because people are impressed and I would make lots of money.”

“But at
your
age,” Debra said.

“You can parachute jump at any age,” protested Lizzie.

“Well, I’m sure they say that,” her daughter said with a sniff, “but they don’t really mean it. They don’t want older people like you jumping, do they?”

Utterly deflated, Lizzie stared down at her cleavage and the extra buttons she’d opened in a vain attempt to look sexy. Who had she been kidding?

“No, I suppose they don’t,” she said miserably. Maybe she’d imagined what a wonderful evening it had been: maybe all the other parachute jumpers had been secretly laughing at her, this older divorced woman hoping to start a new life and make new friends with all the cool skydivers. She must have been crazy to think she could fit in or that Simon really liked her. Maybe he was secretly laughing at her too. In a flash, all the joy of the day was gone and Lizzie felt miserable, old and tired. Not to mention a little bit drunk.

“And you actually jumped?” asked Debra finally.

Lizzie nodded. “Yes, I did.”

Just half an hour earlier, she’d been so proud of her jump, so proud that she hadn’t been too terrified or chickened out when she was sitting in the tiny plane thousands of feet above the ground. She didn’t feel very proud now. Debra had needed her and Lizzie had let her beloved daughter down.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, desperately trying not to slur her words. She knew that would only enrage Debra more. “We can go out tomorrow night, if you like—”

“No, thank you very much. I’m sorry if I’m such a burden on you,” snapped Debra. “I won’t intrude on your precious social life again. I thought you’d be glad to have me staying here with you, getting you out of the house. But seeing as I’m not welcome after all I won’t stay a minute longer.” Debra picked up her handbag from the hall table. “I’m going over to see Dad. I need to know I’ve still got one normal parent who isn’t trying to recapture their lost youth!”

Triumphant after delivering her parting shot, she marched out of the front door, leaving Lizzie feeling thoroughly miserable and guilty. It wasn’t bad enough that she felt like a useless mother, now Debra was going to race over to Myles’s house and tell him the news too.

Totally forgetting her plan to drink a pint of water and take a couple of painkillers to ward off the inevitable hangover, Lizzie went upstairs to her bedroom. Clambering into bed without so much as brushing her teeth or taking off her mascara, she fell into a heavy, miserable sleep.

She paid for it all the next morning. At five past eight Lizzie was lying in bed, knowing that she had to get up for work. But her head ached so much that she just didn’t know how she was going to face another day—a Monday, worse luck. Just five more minutes in bed and she’d be ready … Then the phone rang. Was it always that loud? she wondered as the shrill noise beat a tattoo in her skull.

“Morning, Lizzie,” said her ex-husband’s voice. “How’s your head?”

Lizzie felt about an inch tall. “Oh, don’t you start, please,” she begged. Who knew what Debra had told her father the previous night?

Myles always stuck up for Debra—she was his darling little daughter, after all. Even when she dropped out of nursing, Myles wouldn’t hear a word said against her. He’d be annoyed that Lizzie hadn’t been with Debra in her hour of need. She waited for the lecture and wished she had the energy to tell Myles where to get off. But no lecture was forthcoming.

“I suppose you know Debra’s here,” Myles said heavily.

“She said she was going to see you last night,” Lizzie replied, and instantly went into apologetic mode. “It’s all my fault because she and I were supposed to go out and then something came up—”

“You don’t have to apologise or explain to me, Lizzie,” said Myles quickly. “You’re your own boss, you’re entitled to your own life. I’m just phoning to say what the hell are we going to do with Debra?”

If he’d said what the hell are we going to do about the situation in the Middle East, Lizzie couldn’t have been more surprised. For once, Myles didn’t sound like the doting daddy prepared to do anything to pacify his twenty-three-year-old daughter. He sounded—what was it exactly?—yes, irritated. That was it. He sounded irritated.

“She just landed here last night in floods of tears and Sabine was over and we were watching the new James Bond film, and suddenly, there’s Debra in hysterics. I didn’t know what to do,” Myles said. “She bawled her eyes out and said it was all your fault and that she wasn’t going back to stay with you ever again, that she hated you just as much as she hated Barry. Oh, Lizzie, it was a nightmare.”

Despite the thumping pain in her head, Lizzie couldn’t suppress a grin.

“But I thought Debra and Sabine got on so well,” she said wickedly.

“They do,” acknowledged Myles, “but not when Debra’s in floods of tears and won’t listen to reason. I didn’t even know she’d left Barry. I can’t believe she did. To think of the money we spent on that wedding and now—after what? A month, two months?—it’s all over. I was never so shocked in my whole life. Why didn’t you tell me, Lizzie?”

“It wasn’t my place to tell you,” said Lizzie. She sat up in bed to see if her head could take going vertical. Woozy definitely, but not too much pain. “To be honest, I thought the argument with Barry was just a storm in a tea cup and it would all blow over. But Joe thinks it might be more serious than that. That’s why I feel a bit guilty about leaving her last night,” Lizzie admitted. “Joe seems to think that the marriage was doomed from the start. Did you know that Barry had to be begged to turn up at the church that day?”

From the silence at the other end of the phone, it was clear that Myles had no idea. Well, it was hardly what any parent would expect. They’d spent every penny they possessed—and some belonging to the bank—giving their only daughter the most incredible day of her life, so to hear afterwards that the wedding had the prospective longevity of long-life milk was a bit of a shock. For some reason, the leaking kitchen roof came into Lizzie’s head. Myles wasn’t made of money either. He was probably thinking exactly the same thing she was, imagining what he could have done with the money if it hadn’t been gobbled up by Debra’s princess dress, hundreds of exquisite roses and a huge reception.

And now he was stuck with a distraught daughter sleeping on his couch or probably borrowing his bed, knowing Myles.

Suddenly, Lizzie felt sorry for him. For all the fact that Myles had found a new life for himself, he still wasn’t able to escape the old one.

“What are we going to do about Debra, then?” asked Myles pitifully.

“Where is she now?” Lizzie enquired.

“Still asleep,” Myles said. “You know how hard it is to get her up in the morning. I just can’t wake her. And I don’t know if she’s going to work or what. And Sabine and I are going to the theatre tonight, so I don’t know what she’s going to do then. And what about Barry and the new house and everything …?” His voice trailed off.