Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (17 page)

In the space of a few hours her confidence and self-esteem had risen like mercury in a barometer, from lukewarm to red hot, as if when she slipped the shoes on, all the toxic waste that had been poisoning her had been cleansed from her system and she was flowering again. No, not again—flowering for the first time. It was a kind of madness, it had to be: a combination of an impossible yet raggedly glamorous coat and wonder shoes that gave her a persona she could step into and a fragile glimmer of that rarest of commodities, happiness. Willow felt
happy and romantic, and if that little bit of magic could bring Chloe back into her life, then who knew. Perhaps Daniel was in reach too.

Willow’s yearning to see Daniel outweighed all the practical considerations, like a near-suicidal starlet and a pregnant fifteen-year-old with a track record of causing trouble, partly because she felt that one sort of canceled the other out. She was only going for a few hours, she told herself, what was the worst that could happen?

India was under strict instructions not to let Chloe leave the flat. Chloe was under strict instructions not to let India anywhere near the windows. No one was allowed to answer any phones, send any text or socially network. Willow had secretly resolved to call Sam on the way over to Daniel’s and update him on the limited progress they had made, regarding finding out about how to have a baby adopted and getting Chloe to the doctor. She thought she’d leave out the bit about Chloe nearly decking the bitchy shopper—that bit she thought he probably didn’t need to know
quite so much
.

“Do you know, I do feel a bit glamorous?” Willow said, smoothing her hands over the newly fragrant but still rather tatty-looking coat.

“If anyone asks you how much, say fifty for a blow job, a hundred for full sex,” Chloe called, peering over the back of the sofa with a smile in her eyes.

“Is that the going rate?” Willow pretended to be shocked.

“It is for an old bag like you.”

Willow ignored her, instead taking India just outside the front door with her.

“I can still hear you, you know!” Chloe shouted.

“Yes, but I can’t see you,” Willow retorted. She looked at India’s worn and tear-eroded face. She looked thin and gaunt.

“How are you doing after your first afternoon in flatsville?”
Willow asked her. “Because I’m very aware that I’m not doing an especially good job of looking after you so far.”

“You haven’t been on round-the-clock suicide watch, you mean?” India smiled.

“Pretty much that. Victoria expects me to be here popping Valium into your mouth on demand.”

India wound a large cable-knit cardigan around her meager frame, sheltering herself from the piercing draft that rattled up the stairs to greet them. “Willow, don’t be silly. Chloe’s situation is far more pressing than mine, and you needed some time alone with her. And besides, you’ve done a great job, you’ve gotten me through today undiscovered and actually it’s nice to be distracted by mini-Madonna in there. There is just one thing . . . I’m embarrassed to say, really, but I forgot to ask you to pick up some mineral water for me. I don’t drink tap water. It’s full of chemicals, you know, and I don’t like that taste, the . . . taste you get when you brush your teeth in hotel bathrooms. It makes me gag, so I always have liters of the stuff around.” India rolled her eyes. “Listen to me, I’m such a prima donna, honestly I’ll be asking you to arrange for me to only have orange M&M’s next—actually, though, talking of food, you are rather short of vegetables. How risky would it be to ask my chef to drop off a few meals? I’m not fussy normally, but it’s my skin, you see, it can’t take processed foods. Although why I’m worrying about my skin when here I am cheerfully drinking myself to death, I don’t know.”

“Don’t do that,” Willow said. “Victoria will kill me if you die before she’d gotten a double-page spread in
Hello!
for you. I don’t think they do evening gowns and stately home photo shoots postmortem, although I’m pretty sure Victoria would do her best to book it.”

The ghost of a smile hovered around India’s lips for a moment.

“You know, she hasn’t realized that I’d probably be worth more to her dead. ‘Tragic Young Actress Dies Before Her Full Potential Can Be Reached.’ I’d be her very own James Dean.”

“We’ll know when she figures that out; she’ll send you round a bottle of vodka and a value pack of Tylenol,” Willow reassured her. “Shall I stay in? I think I’ve got Trival Pursuit somewhere. We can play that, I can pop over to the all-night deli and buy you some frozen peas and make you a risotto, dairy free—it will take your mind off everything.”

“No, no, I don’t want to take my mind off everything.” India shook her head, her slender fingers making dents as she held tightly on to herself. “I want to dwell on it, I want to feel it, feel the pain, understand why this happened, how it happened. It’s not just me, my mum and dad are under siege from a pack of journalists who are waving nearly topless photos of me in their faces. They’re knocking on my neighbors’ doors, asking them what I was like at school, when I lost my virginity, if anyone knows my ex-boyfriends or has a photo of me in a bikini!”

“How do you know?” Willow asked her, anxiously. “How do you know that?”

“Oh, I phoned an old friend while you were at the dry cleaner’s.”

“India, you know you’re not supposed to speak to anyone. Did you tell this friend where you were?”

“Yes, but don’t worry, I can trust her.”

“Fuck. You’d better hope so.” Chloe really had made her take her eye off the ball. Victoria would string her up and then sack her if she knew India had been talking to anyone.

“Not everybody is evil, you know,” India said, tears springing suddenly into her eyes. “Don’t tell me that my oldest friend would betray me, because I couldn’t take it. I’m already ripped in two, guts pouring out all over the place, heart smashed to smithereens. And that’s even before I get to thinking about
my career being over even before it began. All I ever wanted to do was act. I never, never wanted
this
. . . .” India set her jaw. “Look, go out, have a break from the waifs and strays. You deserve it. I don’t really do frozen veg anyway, maybe tomorrow you could pop into an organic market.”

Willow hesitated. “Okay, if you’re sure. . . . Look, for what it’s worth, this part doesn’t go on forever, it only feels like it.”

“And then?” India asked.

“Then, well, then I go into a sort of free fall. I pretend I’m someone else and I . . .” Willow hesitated. “I fall. It usually ends up horribly messy and with an expensive cab fare home, but it takes my mind off things.”

“What things?” India asked, her eyes locked on Willow’s in the moment of stillness.

Willow’s eyes dropped under her scrutiny. “Oh, you know, my job, my fat thighs, my lack of a man in my life, all your usual sad middle-aged-woman crap. Stuff you will never have to worry about. Look, I’m going to leave you to your slough of despond. What sort of a dreadful bitch am I, trying to cheer you up with competitive board games and frozen peas?”

“A fucking witch!” Chloe called from inside. Willow and India exchanged a look.

“Is it wrong that I like her being here?” India whispered. “It’s nice to have a companion in my misery.”

“Well, if you get sick of the companionship you can always get into my bed and watch TV in there. There are some emergency cupcakes in the bedside drawers.”

“I’ll be fine, as long as there are emergency cupcakes, I’ll be fine,” India reassured her. “And what about you?”

“Me?” Willow looked confused.

“Will you be free-falling tonight?” India asked her softly. Willow shook her head.

“No, not tonight. I need to come home and make sure you
haven’t overdosed on buttercream, and that the one in there hasn’t got herself pregnant again.”

“Ha fucking ha,” Chloe called.

“Are you sure you will be all right?”

“Fine,” India reassured her. “Totally fine.”

Willow knew even as she swished down the stairs and out into the damp chill of the evening that that last statement would come back to haunt her, but she couldn’t resist spending time with Daniel, no matter what might happen. Her lack of willpower always had been her downfall.

The communal front door to Daniel’s flat was unlatched when she arrived, a habit that Daniel persisted in, despite the protestations of his neighbors, who weren’t quite so keen on random passersby dropping in, but as Daniel had explained to the Petersons, who owned the ground floor, he was either always far too drunk or far too hungover to be up and down those stairs like a butler. Willow had felt sorry for the Petersons, who were both too polite and too Swedish to take the matter any further, but it didn’t stop her from loving Daniel’s belligerence, his insistence that the world was there for his enjoyment entirely.

Willow pushed the door open and breathed in. There was something about the scent of Daniel’s place that she loved, not just his flat but the whole building. Perhaps it was the scent of polished wood, or the musty dried flowers rattling around in a vase that stood on a table just inside the door. Either way, it reminded her of the period just after Daniel had moved here, a short while after she and Sam and split up. Willow had spent a lot of time here then, most of a cold, wet February and all of an unforgiving March, helping Daniel, who had gone away on an extended shoot somewhere warm, to unpack, waiting for various things to be delivered or for workmen to connect
or disconnect something or other. She’d unpacked and put away his surprisingly large collection of clothes and shoes, many of which she’d never seen him wear, some still with tags on, a symptom of flirting with the fashion industry, she supposed. Occasionally, she’d pull out something that had once belonged to some woman who had passed through his life, and even made a little collection, which she had tipped into a drawer, taping a label on it that read
Trophies
. She unpacked all of his pictures and photos, hung them on the wall in the spots she judged most fitting and even organized and then reorganized his kitchen cupboards, whiling away her evening cooking meals and freezing them for him, an occupation that amused her all the more because she’d always hated to cook, finding it utterly boring. It was just that at that point in her life, boredom was a welcome refuge, thinking about tablespoons of this and half teaspoons of that was so much better than thinking about the wreck of her life that was waiting for her outside Daniel’s front door. Willow hadn’t dwelled back then on exactly what she was doing hiding away in Daniel’s new flat. At the time, she’d only known that being there was better than being in her own place, the place where she was officially alone and single, divorced and childless, where the remnants of the normal life she had attempted and failed at so spectacularly were still taped up in boxes. Sorting out someone else’s life, if only their possessions, was exactly the kind of methodical escapism she’d needed from the mess she had churned up for herself. It had not been a happy time, but it was one of relative peace, when Willow had lulled herself almost into another existence entirely.

And then the night before Daniel was due to fly home, she realized exactly what she’d done. He asked her to check in on his place from time to time and she’d gone obsessive psycho-stalker on his arse. She’d organized his pants. She’d bought
him scented candles and a special earthenware jar just for balsamic vinegar . . . all she needed was a bunny to boil and the scenario would be complete. Horrified, Willow imagined the look on Daniel’s face when he walked back into his flat to find it had been taken over by his very own imaginary wife, and she had scrambled out of bed and took a very suspect-looking minicab over to Daniel’s place in the dead of night. During the hours that remained before he was due back, she repacked his clothes, taped everything she could back up in bubble wrap, reboxed his kitchenware, and finally, threw out all her frozen meals in the bins in the alley out back. She even scattered the contents of the trophy drawer randomly through the trash bags of clothes that she had restuffed, hoping he wouldn’t notice that nothing was exactly like he left it.

For two or three days after his return, Willow had been worried sick, bracing herself for the tirade of justifiable anger Daniel was bound to unleash upon her eventually. But when he did call, he hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Everything okay, at the flat?” she asked him hesitantly.

“What? Oh yeah, thanks for hooking the phone up. Everything’s still packed but I’ll probably leave it that way for a least another couple of months. Hey, I should have gotten you to unpack everything for me or, you know what, I might throw it all away and start again, who needs stuff, right? Anyway, I bought you back a Toblerone.”

Willow should have been, and to a great extent was, relieved that her intrusion had gone unnoticed, but she also realized two things. She realized exactly how she felt about Daniel Fayre, that what had started out a diversion and had grown into a friendship had very quickly become much more for her. She also realized that there was something wrong with her, something even more wrong than metaphorical bunny boiling. All those things she had done for Daniel while he’d
been away were things that she’d never done for her husband, or even for herself. Her own possessions
were
still in trash bags and boxes. All the love and care she was able to lavish on an absent person became impossible in real life. In real life, Willow just wasn’t capable of loving anyone, at least not well enough to make them happy. It was then, after leaving Sam’s flat while Chloe was at school, after secretly living in Daniel’s place in some bizarre fantasy, that Willow had been forced to acknowledge that she was broken, and more than that, she was fairly sure she was unfixable.