LITMIR.BIZ

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red light flashing on the answer machine. There had been no messages when I came in after my adventure the night before. Someone had rung me while I was cleaning. Yet another reason why housework is a bad idea. You clean, you miss phone calls. I rest my case.

      I pressed the playback button. There was a long silence.

      ‘Bugger,’ I shouted. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

      I rang 1471 and was told that the caller, who had rung twenty minutes earlier, had withheld their number.

      Miserably I made my coffee, heated the blueberry muffin and went back to bed, but the muffin stuck to the roof of my mouth and the coffee grains floated to the top of the cup and niggled against my teeth. I hate missing phone calls. To take my mind off the frustration I began to worry at the quick crossword of the day before. Slowly I relaxed and had even got as far as referring to my Thesaurus when the phone rang.

      I snatched it up and breathlessly said, ‘Hello?’

      ‘Oh, Frankie, that was quick. I didn’t even hear it ring.’

      It was my mum.

      ‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’ She explained that she had one or two Christmas presents she had to buy (it was October after all, she reminded me) and she wondered if she could come and stay.

      I walked with the phone into the bathroom to clean my teeth. That’s the effect she has on me.

      I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I had a black eye. How would I explain that to my mother?

      ‘I’m going out,’ I said desperately.

      ‘That’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

      ‘No, I mean tonight.’ It wasn’t true, but something might come up. ‘I might be in really late.’

      ‘Don’t worry, I’ll make up the bed and switch on the TV and it’ll be just like home.’

      I sighed. I don’t know why I even bother to try. If my mum wants to come and stay, my mum will come and stay. I thought it best to wait and tell her about the black eye face to face. She’d only worry.

      ‘I’ve got a black eye,’ I heard myself blurt out.

      ‘A black eye? Why, whatever have you been doing?’

      I looked at myself again and my mind went blank. ‘I walked into the door,’ I said. ‘The bedroom door,’ I explained, adding detail to make it sound true. ‘I switched off the hall light before I switched on the bedroom light and I forgot.’ I wasn’t taken in, was she?

      She sighed. ‘Well, as long as you don’t have a friend who has one just like it.’

      ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking of the owner of the pock-marked face with its sly grin, unsullied by bruise or cut, but with hopefully fatal internal injuries. ‘I don’t fight, Mum,’ I said, thinking, Not very well anyway.

      ‘I’d hate to think it was in the genes,’ she said, obviously thinking of my father’s uncle, who had a reputation for assaulting his women friends.

      The consolation was she didn’t think I was the victim. But then, which was worse? To be the victim or the aggressor?

      ‘I don’t think it’s a genetic thing, Mum, I just have a black eye. It happens.’

      ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

      At least the house was tidy.

      The phone rang again. It was Lena.

      ‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’

      ‘Where are you ringing from?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were in Paris.’

      ‘I’m back. I came home early,’ she said, too brightly.

      ‘Where’s Sophie?’

      ‘Oh, she’s still there.’

      ‘Are we having coffee then?’ I asked. ‘The Blue Legume in twenty minutes?’

      ‘That would be great.’

      ‘I’ll bring the brandy,’ I said and rang off before she burst into tears. She and Sophie, what a pair.

      Slowly I put on some jeans and a faded black sweatshirt. My muscles were creaking. I wondered if I had overdone it. Physical assault followed by housework, not a good combination. As I bent to lace up my Doc Martens my eye twinged, reminding me I should wear dark glasses. I went to the sunglasses shelf on my bookcase. In front of three volumes of Stone’s Justices’ Manual of 1992 and two volumes of Rayden on Divorce lay twelve pairs of sunglasses, most purchased on holiday because of my habit of forgetting to pack the pair I bought last year.

      After five minutes fussing in front of the mirror I had chosen a groovy round wire-rimmed pair that looked as if they came from the thirties and convinced myself that the black eye was scarcely visible. I nearly broke my neck going down the steps of my house because the lenses were so dark, but it was a bright sunny day and I got used to them.

      I walked down to Church Street and found Lena already at a table in the gloom of the small café. I stopped in surprise. There was something about her that made me feel I was looking at a reflection of myself. She was wearing dark glasses, but then I realised she was also wearing an old jacket of mine which I had put out for a charity shop. It looked so good on her that I suddenly and intensely wanted it back, till I remembered it had never looked that good on me. With the great jacket and her thick black hair, caught back in a ponytail, you’d never have thought she was ten years older than I was.

      ‘Frankie, darling, what has happened to your eye?’ she exclaimed as she leaned over to kiss me. ‘Tell me in a minute,’ she said, picking up her large wallet from the table and heading to the counter to order the coffee. She had obviously weighed up who was more deserving of sympathy and had decided that, superficially at any rate, I was.

      Lena and I had known each other for almost eight years. We’d been really friendly for seven, ever since the infamous sixties night, when I’d gone into the toilets to be tragic over Kay and, instead, found Lena grimacing into the mirror, swigging determinedly from a hip flask. Her on/off girlfriend, Sophie, had just danced past her, very obviously on with someone else.

      ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she had said through gritted teeth, her dark fringe flopping into her eyes, ‘but that other woman is wearing a shirt exactly like the one I put in a bag of stuff for Sophie to take to the Oxfam shop. Bloody cheek.’ So we left the toilets together and danced all night long. We even danced the Twist, which is not something I normally do.

      The day after that I rang her to see if she was OK.

      ‘Do you want to go to the pictures?’ I asked. ‘Then we could go out for dinner and trash our girlfriends.’

      ‘Oh, Frankie, what a pal you are.’ She grinned down the phone. ‘That sounds great. What shall we go and see?’

      We wanted a film with wit and women, which we felt were missing from our lives. There was a Cary Grant retrospective at a small cinema in Soho and we went to see His Girl Friday, to pick up a few tips on being suave and elegant, and then we went to Chez Gerard in Charlotte Street, for the set menu. As we sat spreading anchovy butter on French bread we had shared our life histories.

      They were remarkably similar. We had both grown up on council estates with parents who had wanted us to do better than they had.

      My dad was an old Teddy Boy and my mum had had a beehive and wore American tan stockings, even on their wedding day. She and my dad went to the local dance hall together and jived to Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran. But when Tamla Motown came in in the sixties my mum swapped her allegiances and became a mod, while my dad

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