Chapter Three

Chapter three of Can You Smell Carrots?

December 31

 

New Year was a very big deal in the village. Everyone went in fancy dress. Mick was going as the Queen Mother’s corpse. I had lobbied for Miller and I to go as Barney and Betty Rubble, because he had Barney Rubble’s boyish looks and sunny hair and I had Betty’s dark bob. But since he’d started at the bakery he’d wanted to go as a Cornish pasty and me to go as a sausage roll. I hadn’t had time to think of another costume since I’d caught him shagging Jill in our bed the previous week.

 

Amy was in the bakery having a crisis. I hung slightly behind her, noticing how angular her shoulders looked from the back.

“I mean a three-tier wedding cake these days costs £600!” she said.

“Well can’t you have two tiers? There are only twenty of us going.” Amy had agonised over every decision about the wedding �" the venue, the ring, whether £3,000 was too much for the food: “That’s eighty pounds per person per head,” she wailed to me. I had to tell her the term was either per person OR per head. The way she said it, it sounded like everyone had more than one head. 

It was amazing enough that Amy was getting married after six years of debauched singledom. The six years had been the result of a traumatic encounter when she was 23. One night she was in a bar on her own and two guys had started chatting her up. They were both waiters. One was from Argentina and the other South Africa. The South African, Antony, was the most attractive guy she’d ever seen. He was like a male model; she could barely speak in his presence. She became very girly and silly, and then got drunk on tequila and went home with him.

“He was so tender,” she told me. “Not like a guy you have a one-night stand with. It felt right straight away, like we were boyfriend and girlfriend.” They made love twice. The first time he came too quickly, almost before he got inside her, but the second time made her head swirl. Afterwards, as they were beginning to fall asleep in each other’s arms, she asked if she’d ever see him again. He said “I don’t consider this a one-night stand.”

He never called. She went to his restaurant and waited for him, but he said he had to do something and she couldn’t come with him. She thought he was dealing drugs. He said he’d call her the next week. She never saw him again.

After that she started sleeping with men and then dumping them. Playing them at their own game. She’d never had a one night stand before and she never got over it.

“I thought he liked me,” she said. “I’ve only ever had serious boyfriends. I’ve never slept with anyone who didn’t want to see me again.”

I’d lost count of how many men she’d slept with in the last six years. She was very fussy. She had dumped a guy because she didn’t like the way he messed with the tassles on her Chinese rug. I wondered how Brett had managed to claw his way through the rigorous selection criteria. Maybe it was just a matter of numbers; Amy had just turned thirty.

I had cut out an advert from Viz to give to her, but I wasn’t sure if she had a sense of humour anymore. It seemed to have been sucked into the great black void of the wedding, into which all things now disappeared.

The advert offered everything you could possibly need for your wedding from Matalan. Ivory wedding dress, veil and train from £2, hand beaded ivory satin bodice for £1, individual Kippling wedding cakes X 6, just 67p.

 

Afterwards we went to a cafe.

Amy lit a cigarette.  “So you bought a false nose?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Not that my outfit really needs a false nose I suppose.”
“But why not, if you can?” said Amy, encouragingly. She wasn’t coming out for New Year. She and Brett were getting the last plane out and spending the night in Paris. Her outfit probably didn’t require a false nose.

After a brief pause she said, “I had another dream last night. Guess what I dreamed about.”

“I don’t know.”

“Voles.”

“Voles?”

“They were like little moles. Lots of them in a box. I was transporting them in a box from one side of a room to another and one was strutting ahead carrying a suitcase. I told it to come back, not to be so silly, but it was determined to do its own thing.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Do you think I should be worried? Have you ever read anything about voles in a dream book?”

“No, not really.”

“I’ve had horrible dreams about you in the last few weeks,” Amy said. “I dreamed you were in a boat drifting away from me. I was sure something horrible was going to happen to you and I’d never see you again.”

“Something horrible did happen to me,” I said. “I caught my boyfriend shagging another woman.”

“I knew it would. I got an ulcer from worrying.” She opened her mouth and angled it towards me so I could look.

“I can’t see anything.”

“How can you not see anything? Its huge. It’s taking over my whole mouth.”

“I can’t see it,” I said.

The waitress arrived with our two plates. Amy was having a Caesar salad with hummus, pita bread and thousand island dressing. I was having a bacon and fried egg sandwich. I lifted the top slice and looked at the bacon. It was almost black and curled at the edges, just the way I liked it.

“Are you getting over Miller yet?” Amy asked me, starting to pull her pita bread into shreds.

“Hardly. It’s only been a week.”

“I know, but you weren’t exactly love’s young dream from the beginning.” It was true. We’d been sleeping in separate beds at two months. At one point Miller hadn’t spoken to me for a week because I refused to wear a Rotherham United away strip when we were having sex. He wanted us to get married wearing animal costumes.  For Christmas we had bought each other identical cards with the words falling in love is easy; staying in love is the hard part written on them. It spoke volumes about the state of our relationship.

The clock on the wall bonged 3pm. A Chinese man with peroxide walked past my chair and sneezed softly, as if he was allergic to me. I must have had a very negative aura.

I pulled some brown straggly bits from the edge of my fried egg.  “You know, I think it takes a degree of confidence to be with someone,” I said, looking at the table. “To be physical or even just talk to someone one to one and have to be interesting. Right now I have to coax my self-esteem up from the floor every time I get up in the morning.”

“Don’t give up. It’ll happen for you one day,” Amy said, manoeuvring her pita towards her open mouth. “You never know when you’re going to meet the one. It could happen tomorrow!”

“But I don’t even believe in the one! Haven’t you heard the saying? A woman over thirty is more likely to get hit by an A bomb than find a man these days.”

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, egg dripping down my chin. “But someone did.”

“What the hell’s an A bomb anyway? This is not 1948.”
”Alright then a nuclear warhead if you’re going to be fussy about it.”

Amy cocked her head and looked at me as if to say “now now, that’s not the attitude, is it?”

“There are no guarantees these days,” I said, leaning eagerly towards her across the table. This was an issue I felt passionately about since my latest relationship debacle. “My mum’s best friend is 60 and she’s never met the one. And if she did meet the one, she messed it up, just like I do.” In fact, she’d gone so long without sex her hymen had started to grow back.  “If you believe in fate, do you really think what it has in store for her is to be childless and alone? I don’t know how you can go on believing in ‘the one’ when so many people don’t meet the right person, or are unhappy in their marriage or get divorced.”
“Well don’t you believe Brett is my one?”
It was an impossible question. I could hardly say no, I think you’re happy now but give it five years and you’ll be humping the gardener whilst he does his secretary.

“Of course I do. But there are no guarantees that it happens for everyone.”

“I used to think that way,” she said. “You remember, I couldn’t stay interested in one guy for five minutes.” It was true. She’d dumped one guy because she didn’t like the way his mouth moved when he said the word ‘puma.’

 “Do you remember the first time a guy lay on top of you?” I said, smiling. “I thought this isn’t sex, its crushing. I had to say to him, “I’m very sorry, but I can never do this again’.” 

“That’s probably cos you were shagging an eight foot viking,” said Amy, popping a tomato in the shape of a flower into her mouth. Her first boyfriend was so small he’d been nicknamed Elf. Probably he’d thought she was crushing him.

Amy was a sex maniac. If she went six weeks without coitus she became grumpy and agitated like a junkie going through detox. Most of the time before Brett, she wouldn’t let herself go that long, she’d just go out and grab someone. Her first experience was in a lavish hotel in the South of France. Mine was on a slab of concrete outside a caravan in Llandudno. He was a 6ft7 virgin pro-golfer from Copenhagen. Or “wirgin” as he put it. He was only 17 to my 18 and clearly under pressure from his friends to lose it.  We played pool in a seedy bar and he insisted on playing left-handed to give me a chance. When this didn’t work he played left-handed and with his right arm behind his back. He still beat me. I wasn’t very good at pool.

His penis felt like a particularly long, thin sausage, similar to the kind commonly found in a hotdog. I said “is it in yet?” and afterwards, “Was that it?” When we returned to the minivan he had blood on his shirt. I’d be surprised if he ever had sex again.

 

I saw Amy to the departure gate and was drizzled on half-heartedly all the way home.  Mick the cab driver swept past me and honked (or rather his taxi did) but I wanted to walk and be miserable.  Even after listening to Amy drone endlessly about the minutiae of the wedding arrangements, I still couldn’t really believe she was doing it. I half believed that one day she’d suddenly call me and say “of course I’m not getting married! Don’t be so ridiculous! It was just a little fad, like when I wanted to move to Alaska and harpoon whales for a living!” (true story). This was, after all, someone who had dumped her immediate ex because she didn’t like the shape of his head from the back.

It hadn’t happened yet. Getting married was, apparently, the best thing that had ever happened to her. Better, I presumed, than the glorious year we spent working as waitresses in a Hawaiian beach café (the highlight of my life so far). I knew it was churlish to feel put out that suddenly choosing earthenware fruit bowls in Sainsbury’s HomeBase was more exciting to her than falling into bed in a beach-side bamboo hut after meeting hundreds of fabulous people from all over the globe and frolicking in a dream-like ocean. But that’s what happened to people when they reached thirty apparently; they suddenly had a personality spasm and settled down.

 

 “What the hell are you meant to be?” Mick said, when he arrived to pick me up from his house later. He was lounging against the bonnet of his cab wearing his mother’s floral dress, high heeled shoes and a skeleton mask. I was wearing a beige sleeping bag with arm holes and half a balaclava painted brown. My hair sprayed wildly from underneath it.

“You know what I’m meant to be,” I said. “I’m a sausage roll.”

“That’s the worst costume I’ve ever seen. You look like a hotdog.” He chucked his woman’s handbag onto the back seat to let me sit down.

“So have you heard that Helen’s engaged?” He said, starting to roll a cigarette. “She was showing me her engagement ring in the Feathers yesterday. Or rather she tried to �" her hand was moving at such speed it was like watching the Queen Mother waving with time lapse photography. I told her to stop before her hand fell off.”

I shook my head weakly. “No, I hadn’t heard.”

“What has possessed the guy? Surely the thought of growing old and bitter on one’s own is better than growing old and bitter with Helen? Did you see her last night?” Helen was my second best friend. She had gone out at 1pm dressed as a squirrel and would now be rolling drunk.

I shook my head. “I’m not speaking to her. Last time we went out she got drunk and fell into a hedge and it took me two and a half hours to get her out. That’s what I was doing while Miller was ….you know.”

“You should see her costume!” Mick said. “Her tail’s gone limp and it drags around on the ground after her. She looks like a big brown rat.”

I turned away from his foul-smelling roll-up. “A sausage roll and a rat,” I said, dully. “I can see we’re gonna be beating the lads off with a stick tonight.”

Not that I wanted to meet anyone of course. I didn’t believe in love anymore. Romeo and Juliet may have loved each other at the time, but give it three more years and he’d have been shagging her nursemaid behind her back. Love with Miller for the last six months had consisted of staring at the sprig of yellow hair sticking out of the back of his baseball cap whilst he played WWF Smackdown! on his playstation. He hadn’t touched me for 9 months and then humped a woman who looked like Deirdre Barlow circa 1976. Apparently it had all been a one-off, a hideous sordid mistake, they’d both been pissed out of their heads blah blah blah, but I didn’t believe it. As far as I was concerned the writers of the Karma Sutra had nothing on Miller and Jill. Probably they were at that very moment doing it upside down on the stairs of the Brown Lion with her hanging backwards, her frizzy hair a compass point to the downstairs landing. 

I didn’t care what happened tonight, but one thing was for sure. I would find Miller and I was going to have it out with him. And if he was out with her there would be a scene neither he nor I would ever forget.