Party Night

Lucy Lord

Party Night

Table of Contents

Title Page

Party Night

Extract from Revelry

About the Author

Also by Lucy Lord

Copyright

About the Publisher

New Year’s Eve in London can be riotously good fun.

But most of the time it sucks. Gridlocked traffic, hideous bar queues, monstrously inflated prices. I mean, why put yourself through it? I’m not too bothered about the enforced-jollity aspect – as far as I’m concerned, jollity, enforced or not, is always a good thing. It’s just that it could be so much jollier without the circumstances dictated by the time of year.

Last year I made the mistake of going to Soho, where I lost my friends and abandoned any hope of finding them after all the phone networks went down. With no taxis available, I waited for the night bus home in evil weather for nearly two hours, surrounded by Dutch tourists in stupid jester hats. Not that I have anything against Dutch tourists – in fact, they are pretty high up on my ‘what’s not to like?’ list – but, once gallons of booze have been replaced by gallons of rain, even the most amiable, even-featured tall people can start to get on your tits.

This year, I hope, will be better. My brother Max has decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party at Divine Comedy, the insanely popular bar/club/restaurant/whatever, that he owns and runs in Hoxton. It’s a bugger for me to get to (I live just off the dodgy end of Portobello Road), but worth it. Max has managed to capture some kind of zeitgeist – ‘a bit Berlin, a bit Studio 54, a bit Jagger and Pallenberg in Performance’, as he puts it. Poncy git. Last year, he declared New Year’s Eve ‘too much hassle’ and fucked off to Brazil with his boyfriend, Paolo.

I only returned to London this afternoon, after way too much Christmas spirit at my mother’s house in Oxfordshire, and am still feeling like shit. For the last month, no normal rules have applied to diet, exercise or sanity. Too hung over for breakfast, incapable of anything resembling physical activity until it’s time to dance on tables, I’ve found myself wondering whether mulled wine and mince pies could conceivably comprise a couple of my five a day. Jetlag has nothing on the way my body clock is buggered, and I am actively looking forward to the dreary January detox.

As I pull on my new pink tights, I put my left foot into a full ashtray on the floor.

‘Yuck, fuck!’ I mutter. There wasn’t time to tidy up before I went home for Christmas and my tiny flat is still in the repulsive state I left it in just over a week ago.

My gaze falls on my thighs, encased in shocking pink Lycra, and I say, ‘Yuck, fuck!’ again. I’ll have to fall back on my trusty black opaques – as far as I’m concerned, ‘flattering’ beats ‘directional’ every time.

I take off the horrible pink tights and wander into my kitchen to get some more wine out of the fridge, clad only in my new matching bra and knickers. In fact my only matching bra and knickers, a Christmas present to myself after pondering the sorry state of my underwear drawer a couple of weeks ago. The brightly coloured spotty, stripy, gingham, floral and animal-print knickers, uniformly trimmed in lurid Day-Glo lace from Primark, may have seemed comfortable and cheery when I bought them, but are unlikely to do me any favours in the seduction stakes. Especially when paired with ‘nude’ (beige) underwired bras bought solely for their shape-enhancing properties.

Oh, OK, I’ve been single for about three months now and – between you and me – I’m gagging for a shag. My last ex, dull Rupert, dumped me for not being ‘corporate wife material’. A lucky escape, I’m sure you’ll agree (although, looking around my flat now, I may have to concede he had a point). But being dumped is always a blow, whatever manner of bastard does it to you. The most annoying thing was that I really wasn’t that into him to start with. His eyes were too close together and he overcompensated for being an Old Etonian banker by using terms like ‘sick’ and ‘da Bomb’.

I had never even considered going out with a banker, but he wore down my defences by constantly telling me how beautiful and special and lovely I was. It wasn’t the flowers and fabulous dinners at restaurants I couldn’t possibly afford that did it – though they were nice, of course. It was the intoxicating adoration with which he showered me: if somebody tells you enough times how wonderful you are, you eventually start to believe it yourself.

(There could also be the fact that I’d just turned thirty-one and was getting desperate.)

Anyway, as soon as he knew I’d capitulated, he lost interest. Why do the bastards do that? Why?

I take the wine out of the fridge and fill my glass nearly to the brim. It’s about bloody time the hair of the dog started to work. I take a huge swig that nearly makes me gag, and try to cheer myself up by thinking about Ben, the most gorgeous man in the world. And, to be scrupulously honest, the real reason for my beautiful new underwear.

Ben is my best friend Poppy’s boyfriend’s best friend (got that?), and the four of us have been hanging out together ever since Poppy and Damian first hooked up, nearly five years ago. He is an actor and occasional model, and permanently surrounded by fawning females, but, as far as I’m concerned, our friendship transcends his multiple flings – I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. He split up with the last one, a supremely irritating MTV presenter with a voice like Fearne Cotton’s, a couple of weeks ago. And now, for the first time in God knows how long, we are both single at the same time.

Maybe tonight will be my lucky night, after all.

I cheer myself up still further by picking up the dress I discovered in my mother’s attic on Christmas Eve. Mum was a Biba model when she met my father, a photographer, in the seventies. With woeful lack of imagination, Dad married her, then went on to cheat on her with countless other models. It hasn’t given me much faith in men.

But it’s given me some great dresses. And this one is to die for: high-necked and floaty, with a skirt as short as the balloon sleeves are long. Its faded coral pink silk, embellished with a splashy daisy print in shades of orange, red and fuchsia, looks great against my dark hair and eyes, I have to admit.

I’ve put my iPod on shuffle and now Abba is blaring out – ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. I prance around, singing to myself and thinking about Ben as I pull the dress over my head, before turning to the boring task of making up my face. Tonight, after the ravages of the last month, it’s more damage limitation than gilding the lily.

By the time I’ve finished (after another glass of wine), I think I look pretty A-OK and thank God for the wonders that are Benefit, Laura Mercier and Lancôme. I’ve gone down the smoky-eye/neutral-lip route, and, having wrestled my unruly long hair into a cheekbone-flattering half-up, half-down style, I reckon I’m just the right side of retro. The wine is clearly working its magic.

Abba segues into Dusty Springfield singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and I giggle to myself: Abba? Dusty? I’m quite clearly a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Glass in hand, I dance into my bedroom to look for my Topshop knee-high boots, which I eventually unearth under a heap of clothes, Sunday supplements and – oh Christ, I’m repulsive – a half-empty bottle of Baileys. Only at Christmas, I promise.

If you’d just landed from Mars and walked into Divine Comedy on New Year’s Eve, you’d think there were two distinct species of earthling. Around half the guests are glossy, buffed and gorgeous, the sort of people you see in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ section. The other half seems to have gone out of its way to look as bizarrely unattractive as possible. Welcome to Hoxton hipster land. A lot of the men are sporting novelty moustaches (seventies gay sauna, handlebar, even a couple of Hitlers), despite Movember having been over for a month. Brightly coloured skinny jeans atop spatula-like sneakers give several of them the unfortunate appearance of golf clubs from the waist down, while those that have chosen to hold up said jeans with braces look ridiculous from the waist up, too. A trend that particularly bemuses me is the earring that stretches a big circular hole in your earlobe. What’s that all about? I mean, really? It makes me feel sick just looking at it.

Among the women, there are unflattering short fringes, tutus, patterned leggings, Miss Marple tweed skirts, Ray-Bans with coloured frames and a lot of pink hair. There is attitude aplenty, and sneering once-overs by the bucketload.

Poppy and Damian are standing at the bar, trying to get served. As soon as Poppy notices me, she shouts ‘Belles!’ and runs towards me with her arms outstretched.

I’ve come to realize, over the years, that it’s counterproductive, nay masochistic, to try to compare myself to Poppy – either physically or intellectually. We’ve been best friends since we were new girls at school at the age of ten, and were inseparable until she went up to Oxford (where she got a first in history, despite partying like there was no tomorrow), and I floundered about in the pretentious hell that was Goldsmiths. Now she’s a highly respected TV producer, and I’m still a struggling artist.

You wouldn’t guess it to look at her, though, wired off her pretty little face in black leather shorts, cream woolly over-the-knee socks and a cropped grey marl T-shirt that falls off one shoulder and just occasionally rises to reveal a glimpse of perfectly flat brown tummy that matches the expanse of perfectly smooth brown thigh between sock and short. Her long blonde hair is straight and shiny, her green eyes wide and her teeth perfect. She looks a bit like Sienna Miller, although she professes, I suspect disingenuously, to hate the comparison.

‘I can’t believe you’re so early – I didn’t think we’d see you for hours, what with the hideous traffic potential tonight,’ Poppy is babbling. She and Damian, being cooler than I could ever hope to be, live just off Hoxton Square, a mere fifteen-minute walk away from Divine Comedy.

‘Yeah, I know. The cabbie took a brilliant route up the Harrow Road and around the North Circular, avoiding the West End completely. I could have kissed him.’

‘He’d have come in his pants.’ Poppy’s Timotei prettiness and girls’-school accent soften the crudity of her words, and I laugh. ‘I mean it, Belles, you look amazing! Love, love, love the dress!’

‘Thanks! Mum’s attic,’ I grin, trying not to sound too smug.

‘Ooh, you lucky cow. Why couldn’t my mum have been a model?’

I laugh again. Poppy’s mother is an ex-Radio 4 presenter and the epitome of elegance. ‘Anyway, look at you. I can’t imagine many people being able to carry off that particular ensemble.’ I mean it: Poppy is so tiny and perfectly formed that she always manages to get away with outfits that would look absolutely hideous on most people. My pink tights would have posed her no challenge whatsoever.

Requisite compliments exchanged, we hug again and make our way back to the bar.

‘Hey, Bella.’ Damian gives me a languorous hug, one eye still on the bar. He looks handsome as ever in black jeans and a purple V-necked T-shirt that sets off his half-Indian, half-Welsh complexion a treat. Damian’s a columnist on the men’s magazine Stadium, and one of my favourite people in the world. He’s cool and funny and gorgeous, and Poppy takes him for granted rather too much, I sometimes think.

‘Hey Damian, Happy New Year!’ I cry, hugging him back.

‘Surely you’re not meant to say that till after midnight,’ says Poppy. She’s probably right, but I am thoroughly overexcited, buzzing with anticipation of what tonight may bring (or, possibly more accurately, half pissed already).

‘Oh, whatevs.’ I clock both their looks of horror. ‘Said with irony, I promise.’

‘Whatevs, shmatevs,’ says Damian. ‘What do you want to drink? I’m trying to order margaritas …’

‘Ooh, a margarita would be great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’ll get the next round.’

A momentary hush falls over the room and, as if of one accord, the sartorially bonkers revellers part like the Red Sea, heads turning to gawp at the vision of masculine beauty that has just entered the bar.

It’s Ben.

He is wearing a navy-blue velvet-collared coat, over jeans and a plain white T-shirt, which somehow manages to make all the other men in the place look both under- and overdressed. His streaky blond/brown hair flops over his long-lashed bright-blue eyes, and his perfect high-cheekboned, full-lipped face looms towards mine as he hugs me and kisses me on both cheeks. I kiss him back, hoping my hug isn’t overenthusiastic, as my boobs squash up against his chest.

‘Happy New Year, Belles!’

‘You too,’ I say, flushed and flustered. ‘Though Pops says we’re not meant to say it until after midnight.’

‘She’s always been a pretty little pedant, hasn’t she?’ says Ben, lifting Poppy above his head and pissing me off. No need to make it quite so obvious that she is so much lighter than I am.

‘You’re just in time, mate,’ says Damian, who has finally managed to catch the waitress’s eye (the other is covered with a tartan patch that matches her blue hair). ‘Margarita?’

‘Cheers, mate.’ Ben puts Poppy down and high-fives his friend. ‘Good choice.’

‘Not your first today?’ says Damian quizzically, and Ben laughs. Looking at him again, he does seem somewhat refreshed already.

‘I’ve come straight from lunch with the Homeland cast at Joe Allen’s,’ says Ben, smiling his dazzling smile. ‘Most of them are still there. Usual self-congratulatory luvvie bollocks of course, but nice to have a postmortem.’

Ben has just finished playing an Afrikaans farmer with a conscience in a painfully sincere, overlong polemic about Apartheid-torn South Africa, at the Almeida. (‘Well, that was a barrel of laughs’ was Poppy’s whispered critique to me after we all loyally turned up to the first night.)

‘So how are you all?’ Ben adds. ‘Recovered from the Christmas excesses yet?’

Poppy and Damian both start laughing.

‘Do you want to tell them, or shall I?’ says Poppy.

‘Be my guest,’ says Damian, kissing the top of her shiny blonde head.

Ben and I look at them expectantly.

‘Right. Where do I start? Umm, OK. Last night, we decided to pop down to Zigfrid for a few drinks,’ says Poppy, name-checking the Hoxton Square institution that is less than a minute’s walk from their flat. ‘So we were sitting outside, having a fag, when we got chatting to this couple.’ She pauses and Damian chuckles again. ‘They had been out with one of his clients, to whom he had been trying to sell a private jet.’

‘Cool,’ says Ben.

‘Anyway, he then told us that he’d met his wife, who was from Belarus, by the way, in a strip joint in Warsaw. She was the best pole dancer he’d ever seen, or so he told us, so he married her.’

‘Even cooler,’ says Ben, his smile widening. ‘Was she fit as fuck?’

‘Oh, only in an obvious, tarty sort of way,’ says Poppy, standing there in her black leather shorts, her long blonde hair cascading down her back.

‘The worst type of fit as fuck, then,’ says Ben, raising his eyebrows at Damian.

‘You’d kick her out of bed in an instance,’ Damian grins back.

‘Anyway …’ Poppy is dying to continue with her story. ‘The bar shut but we’d already had some of the coke that we bought for tonight – yeah, yeah, I know, there’s no point in buying it the night before as we always get tempted …’ Ben and I nod in assent. ‘But we always do. As the late, great Peter Cook said, we learn from our mistakes and repeat them with accuracy.’

‘Uncanny accuracy,’ says Ben, and we all laugh.

‘So, as we were enjoying their company, we asked them if they wanted to come back and continue the party at ours. They seemed quite happy to and I was dying to find out more about what sort of person sells planes for a living.’

‘Although what he’d told us about his former profession should possibly have given us some clues,’ says Damian.

‘Yes, I was coming to that,’ says Poppy impatiently. ‘He used to organize sex parties – orgies and stuff – in Ibiza, with the Manumission crowd.’

‘Better and better,’ says Ben.

‘Once we were home, we had a few lines and drinks, and then the bloody tart started trying to undo Damian’s belt …’

‘You should have seen Pops’s reaction,’ says Damian. ‘“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Elena?”’ He captures Poppy’s high-pitched squawk of indignation perfectly, and Ben and I laugh as one.

‘So they were proper swingers?’ Ben asks Poppy, before turning to me and wiggling his eyebrows about lasciviously. God, I love this man.

‘Oh, yes. They told us that they usually find other couples online but that they’d assumed that the reason we’d invited them back was for some foursome rumpy-pumpy.’

‘And we’d assumed they just liked us for our witty banter,’ adds Damian, and we all crack up.

‘So … did you?’ I venture.

‘No bloody way,’ says Poppy. ‘Apart from everything else, the girl – though cheap and obvious of course – was far more attractive than the man.’

‘Did they seem embarrassed when you turned them down?’ asks Ben.

‘Not in the slightest,’ Damian laughs. ‘In fact they stayed for a few more hours and kept trying it on.’

‘Weren’t you tempted at all?’

‘No.’ Poppy and Damian say this in unison, shaking their heads furiously. ‘I would hate to see Pops being shagged by some plane-selling Manumission pervert,’ adds Damian.

‘And I would hate to see Damian shagging some fucking pole dancer,’ says Poppy. ‘Cheap and obvious though she was.’

‘You know what?’ I say, draining my margarita. ‘You two have just proved the point that it’s always easier to get laid when you’re already taken. For fuck’s sake! You have each other, and you still have to fend the bloody hordes off. I …’ I stop myself. Jesus, how pathetic is this making me look in front of Ben?

He turns to me and smiles.

‘You’re gorgeous, Belles. I can’t imagine you’ll have to wait too much longer to get laid.’

Yay. Make that double yay.

The first floor of Divine Comedy is the restaurant, all minimalist, rustic, grow-your-own Petersham Nurseries plagiarism. My brother Max, all curly-blond-haired, big-brown-eyed six foot four of him, is sitting at the end of a vast, refectory-style table, holding court. A few of the pink-haired, bow-tied Hoxton twats rub shoulders with shaven-headed, leather-clad chaps Max clearly met in Vauxhall, some very pretty girls and a couple of his old friends from Cambridge. I recognize Andy and Charlie, good blokes from what I recall over the years, and their other halves, who are both, with wonderful serendipity, called Alison. It’s like Thompson and Thomson in Tintin, I giggle to myself, except that these Alisons are poles apart, physically.

The one attached to Andy is tall, skinny and frightening, with a severe black bob. The one attached to Charlie is blonde, plump and nice enough, if a bit wet.

‘Bella!’ says Max, shushing his horrible boyfriend Paolo, who is waving his overworked out arms about in a very Latin American fashion. ‘For you guys who haven’t met her, this is my sister. Do I recognize that dress, Belles? I’m sure there’s a photo of Mum in it somewhere.’

‘Well remembered,’ I say, walking over to give him a hug and a kiss. ‘Hi, everyone!’

‘Hi, Bella!’ they all say dutifully. I am under no illusions that this is down to my charismatic presence. Everybody loves Max.

‘Hi, Bella,’ says Andy, who is sitting next to Scary Skinny Alison, on Max’s right. ‘Lovely to see you again. It’s been ages.’

‘Hi, Andy, you too,’ I say. ‘Gosh, I can’t remember the last time I saw you – I was probably drunk!’

‘Yes, you were,’ says scary Skinny, who is wearing a man’s dinner jacket over a black vest that emphasizes her bony chest. ‘By the way, I bumped into Rupert in the City the other day, and he was with a really lovely-looking girl. He told me he thought she was The One.’ She is referring to dull Rupert, who dumped me. ‘Have you found another boyfriend yet?’

What? Fucking bitch. What would possess you to say that to somebody you barely know?

‘Several,’ I smile through gritted teeth. ‘I juggle them: it’s good to keep them on their toes.’ A couple of the Vauxhall chaps laugh at this and Alison looks a bit put out. ‘Or actually off their toes, when they’re in the air,’ I persist, air juggling slightly manically as my analogy fails abysmally.

‘Sounds fun.’ The other Alison, the blonde plump one, smiles at me from the other side of the table and I smile back at her.

‘It is. I’m having the time of my life!’ I lie.

‘And looking great on it,’ her boyfriend Charlie leers chivalrously.

‘Shame about the sixties fancy dress,’ sniggers Paolo, who’s a stylist. ‘Bella, angel.’ He pronounces it ‘an-hell’. ‘The dress, the boots, the hair, the makeup? All just a little too retro, don’t we think? Couldn’t we have considered biker boots, angel? Or more directional tights? Or anything on your face except that dreary smoky eye that’s been done to death …’

‘Hands off my sister, darling,’ says Max lazily. But Paolo’s incredibly handsome, with liquid brown eyes, skin the colour of butterscotch and full, pouty pink lips, so Max doesn’t reprimand him nearly as much as I’d like, and I just stand there feeling foolish.

‘You look lovely!’ mouths Plump Alison at me from across the table, and I smile back at her gratefully.

Skinny Alison bangs a glass with her fork. Look at me! Look at me!

‘Order! Order!’ She waits until the table is silent before announcing, in her strident tones, ‘We weren’t going to say anything until the New Year, but I just can’t wait to tell you all.’ She smugly slides an arm around Andy’s broad shoulders and flashes me a triumphant glance, which leaves me utterly at a loss. I mean, I hardly know the woman: what the fuck has she got against me? ‘Andy proposed to me this afternoon. We’re getting married!’

‘Oh, wow!’

‘Congratulations!’

‘When’s the big day?’

Blah, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam, as Alison pulls a diamond ring out of her tuxedo pocket and slides it onto her long, skinny finger. Everybody gets up to hug them both and Alison sits there lapping up the compliments.

‘Blah, blah … my wedding … blah, blah … my dress … blah, blah … my flowers …’ I really cannot stand any more of her self-aggrandizing crap, so I pat Andy on the shoulder and say, ‘Congratulations. What wonderful news.’

‘Thanks.’ He smiles up at me through his glasses again. ‘It seemed the right thing to do. We’ve been together since Cambridge.’

Wow. Romantic.

‘Oh yes. Of course.’ I don’t really know what else to say to this, so shout across at my brother. ‘Got to pop upstairs and see some more mates, Max! See you later guys!’

‘Later, Bella,’ they chorus, and I skip out of the door as fast as my undirectional black opaque legs will carry me.

The top floor of Divine Comedy is normally ‘members only’, but tonight is guest-list-only, anyway, so it’s a free-for-all.

‘Bella!’ Mark lumbers towards me. He is the art director on Damian’s magazine and big and butch and macho. Possibly the least evolved human being I have ever met, Mark takes great pleasure in offending as many people as he possibly can. ‘Humourless dykes need a damn good shafting’ is one of his stock-in-trade phrases. He is annoyingly sexy, though, with his shaved head, crooked smile and body straight off the cover of Men’s Health.