Читать книгу Pear Shaped - Stella Newman - Страница 10

My friend Pete and I are at his local cinema, sitting in overpriced armchairs waiting for a Norwegian vampire movie to start. Having checked the coast is clear, I remove the family pack of Revels I’ve smuggled in under my jacket. I’ve paid £14 for this seat, if they think I’m paying another £6 for their Valrhona chocolate buttons they can think again.

Pete is a serial commitment-phobe. When we were fifteen, Pete and I had a heated dry-hump on the floor of David Marks’s parents’ guest bathroom. Pete has never gotten over the fact that I wouldn’t let him touch me up when I’d allowed David Marks a brief foray the previous summer, and in a tiny part of Pete’s still-teenage mind I am The One That Got Away. If this were a rom-com movie, I’d be played by Kate Hudson and Pete would be played by someone appropriately dreamy and thick-looking – Ryan Reynolds, perhaps – and we’d end up together. That is not how this story ends.

‘Did you kiss him?’ Pete always wants full details of my scant sex life, which is nowhere near as prolific, athletic or incessant as his. Pete’s phone is full of picture-messages from various twenty-something actresses and stylists gazing over their own naked shoulders at their bottoms reflected in Venetian mirrors. These photos make me feel depressed and prudish and make Pete feel moderately aroused and then bored.

‘Briefly, as he put me in a taxi.’

‘Old fashioned!’

‘Old full stop. Did I tell you he’s forty-five? He doesn’t look it or act it. He has way more energy than me.’ I have never dated anyone this much older. One of my few memories of my father was blowing out the candles with him on his forty-fifth birthday cake, when I was six. Forty-five is properly grown up. It is dad aged. Yet James radiates vitality – he is a man in the prime of his life. His expression seems to say ‘I am going where the good times are.’ I want to go with him.

‘You’d like him, Pete. You should meet him.’ If he sticks around. ‘How’s your love life?’

Pete shrugs. ‘I’m seeing one of the PR girls at work, I’m not sure about her …’

‘What is it this time?’

‘Don’t know. She’s gorgeous but she’s a bit … she’s never heard of Bladerunner.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Try dating someone your own age. Or IQ.’

‘Why would I want to do either of those things?’ he says, smiling as he shoves a handful of contraband Revels into his mouth as the trailers start.