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she hid from me.

      ‘She scuttled past about twenty minutes ago. She looked pretty tired. We might have been a bit noisy last night. Wasn’t Nicholas trying to pretend he could play the trumpet?’

      I grimaced. ‘That wasn’t a trumpet.’

      Fran grimaced back at the memory. ‘Bloody Amanda!’ she said. I nodded vehemently. Whenever anything really bad happened, Amanda was always mixed up in it somewhere.

      Fran, Amanda and I were at school together in Woking, one of those dreary endless London suburban towns, not city or country, just lots of people hanging round bus shelters wondering if they were missing something. I’d met Fran when she ran past our house, aged four, chasing my older brother with a cricket bat.

      Amanda lived next to us, and the three of us walked to school together for years, Amanda usually in possession of the latest Barbie-doll outfits, and extra sweets from the man at the corner shop with slightly dubious tendencies. Despite her blue eyes, strawberry blonde ringlets and general air of pinkness, she was pure evil, and played Fran and me off against each other with the talent of a Borgia poisoner.

      Our biggest wish as children was to grow up famous and be on Celebrity Squares. Twenty years on, we were all still following this wish: Fran in the time-honoured method of going to drama school then hanging about for years and years and years, usually round my flat. I’d decided to do it by marrying someone very handsome and famous. I kept a close eye on Hello! magazine to check out when celebrities got divorced. Amanda, however, trumped all of us totally while still at school, by getting her dad to invent a new way of opening milk cartons or something, and suddenly becoming utterly stinking rich.

      We didn’t really notice at first, just that all through the last year of secondary school she kept sighing and talking about how boring everything was – but then, we were teenage girls. Only when we saw the new house, with the pool and the built-in bar, did we realize something was seriously up. Her dad had left her mum by this stage and was too busy chasing totty our age to really care what we did, so we had big parties, shopped, and got tipsy in the new jacuzzi with the gold taps: it was a fabulous year.

      Eventually, Fran went off to the Central School of Drama to pretend to be a lizard for three years. Amanda was heading for Durham University and, not having much imagination, and rather less sense, I applied there too.

      I hardly recognized Amanda when we went up on the first day of freshers’ week – mainly because her hair had changed colour and she talked differently. She gave me a lift up in the open-topped sports car her dad had given her for getting into university, and cut through the town like she owned it.

      I knew when she dumped me in my seven-foots-square midden in the nasty students halls with damp running down the walls and shouted, ‘There you are, darling! See you around, yah?’ that somehow things had changed. Things had. She never spoke to me again, except once every six months when she’d condescend to take me out for a drink to remind me how wonderful everything was for her. I don’t think her glittering success meant as much to her if she didn’t have someone to look down on, and that was my job. I fell for it every time; the next day, she’d ignore me in the corridor.

      If things were fair, I reckoned, it would all go wrong for her one day. As things were, she got a good degree and, as a result of her blondeness, qualified for a job in PR, and now was invited to lots of show-biz parties. I got a terrible degree, probably something to do with the bile marks on the paper, and ended up reading copy for a boring stationery company in Holborn.

      But I still saw her. Every so often she’d phone, Fran and I would go see her, she’d gloat, and we’d get her to pay for all the drinks. And that’s how it had started last night, when the phone rang.

      ‘Melanie, darling.’

      I’ve finally worked out that darling is PR code for inferior acquaintance.

      ‘Hi, Mandy.’

      She hated that.

      ‘Listen, how about you and Francesca and I meet up for a drinkey tonight …?’

      Tonight? As if we had nothing better to do.

      ‘I have news!’ she trilled.

      ‘Really? What?’

      ‘Oh no, this is definitely drinkey kind of news.’

      ‘OK. Fran!’ Fran was lying on the sofa drawing a moustache on herself. ‘Fancy a drink with Amanda tonight?’

      Fran made a snarling noise, shook her head violently and contorted her face into that of a cougar, which apparently they teach you at drama school.

      ‘Great,’ I said down the phone. ‘We’d love to. Where?’

      ‘The Atlantic?’ she simpered.

      No chance. Cocktails and nob-ends. Plus, she lived in posh North London and we lived in Kennington, one of the nice but scruffy ends of South London, so it was like trying to arrange an inter-galactic alliance. I parried with the Ship and Shovel – both dirty and potentially dangerous.

      ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Melanie. All right, the Ozone then.’

      ‘I’ll raise you to the Pitcher and Piano and no further.’

      There was a sigh on the end of the line. ‘Well, if you must …’ She pouted audibly, which had zero effect on me as I don’t have a penis.

      ‘What did you do that for?’ groaned Fran once I got off the phone. ‘She’ll only have been promoted or been asked out by some poof in a West End musical or something.’

      ‘You never know,’ I said. ‘Maybe something’s gone horribly wrong. Maybe she’s up the duff by some sailors, and we, as her oldest friends, are the only ones who can truly comfort her. Heh heh heh.’

      ‘Did she have an up-the-duff voice on? Or perhaps a twee gloaty voice?’

      I thought for a minute. ‘Ehmm, twee gloaty voice.’

      ‘Well, that’s it then. Sean Connery’s son has asked her to lunch. And we’re going to have to listen to two boring hours of how fantastic everything is for her, and we’ll be so bored we’ll get accidentally drunk, then she’ll drive off somewhere much more exciting, completely sober, and we’ll stay and get totally plastered out of bitterness and self-loathing, and hate ourselves for days.’

      ‘Unh huh. So, what are we going to wear?’

      Amanda flounced into the bar on time. She was a three Ps girl – pert, pretty and petite.

      ‘Darlings, hi!’ she crowed across the bar. I forgot: when she got posh, she also got loud.

      ‘White wine OK?’

      ‘Special Brew for us, Amanda,’ shouted Fran. ‘But in a glass.’

      Amanda finally wandered over with the drinks, after checking to see if she knew anyone, perched down on her perfect arse and turned to us with a smile like a morning weathergirl.

      ‘What’s your news, then?’ I asked helpfully.

      ‘You’ll never guess what, girls!’

      ‘Ehm, you’ve won the lottery, for double world fairness? You’re actually a man? You’re pregnant by forty sailors?’ Fran said the last bit under her breath.

      ‘I’m ENGAGED!!!’

      ‘Oh my God! Who to?’ we yelled simultaneously.

      ‘You know him, Mel. You remember – Fraser McConnald, from Durham.’

      ‘Fraser who?’ said Fran.

      But I remembered. Sweet big gentle Fraser, with the scraggy hair and old clothes. I fancied him madly, he ignored it, so I followed him around pretending to be his mate instead. Not one of my proudest moments. God, did this girl have to win all the time?

      ‘You and Fraser! Arse

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