Still Alive by Jess Whitecroft

Author:Jess Whitecroft [Whitecroft, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

8

The next day Gina calls. “I’m in London, and I’m trying to be less shitty at keeping in touch,” she says. “Are you free for lunch this week?”

I meet her in Southwark, at a restaurant with a terrace overlooking the river and offering a tourist pleasing view of the City, with St. Paul’s in the foreground and the Shard and the Walkie Talkie behind. Ridiculous buildings, but it’s impossible not to feel a tiny bit sentimental about London’s centuries long commitment to building absurdities. It seems a harmless folly compared to the more pernicious kinds of stupidity currently doing the rounds.

Gina’s in her element. She was born and bred in Tooting, and while she’ll tolerate New York for the sake of her husband Kwame, she’ll always be a Londoner at heart. She looks great – skin glowing, eyes bright, hourglass figure padded with a few extra pounds. She has one of those faces that can look drawn if she gets too skinny, and once there was a time when she seemed to be disappearing right in front of our eyes. Another one of those dark open secrets that nobody ever talked about, back in the day.

Not today, though. Today Gina is a loud advocate for mental health and eating disorder charities, and she takes her time with the menu. “What the hell is cockle butter?” she says. “It sounds like something you’d read in a sex abuse deposition.”

“What are you on about?”

“Trout,” she says. “With samphire and cockle butter. Sounds close to cock butter. Is that a thing? Cock butter?”

“Uhm…I hope not,” I say.

Gina jabs at her phone with a pale pink talon. I’m fascinated by how she manages to operate anything with those nails. Simply picking her nose must be like Russian roulette. “Duck butter,” she says, with an air of triumph. “That’s what I was thinking of.”

“Which is what?”

She sets down the phone. “What Michael Jackson used to call spunk. According to his victims. That was why I thought it sounded like something from a legal deposition.”

“Great,” I say, staring at the menu. I’d actually kind of fancied the trout, but now I was having second thoughts. “I think I’ll just have the chicken Caesar. Why does your mind work like this?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how people fall off their pedestals lately. Friend of a friend died recently and I always thought he was such a sweetheart, but then I read his obituary and apparently behind closed doors he was a wife-beating racist. Then there’s Piers, of course.”

“Piers was a wife-beating racist?”

Gina snorts. “I don’t know about wife beating, but he was always calling me ‘the chocolate one.’ Nobody mentioned that in his obituary, did they? Or the way he used to slink around the child labour laws when it came to you and Gareth, and yeah, I know you didn’t think of yourselves as kids at the time, but you were. We all were, even if you two were the only ones still legally underage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.