Until It's Over Read Free Page B

plates being scraped. There was little conversation. Everybody seemed distracted. Then Davy returned, breathless and slightly flushed, but triumphantly brandishing his camera. ‘It wasn’t where I thought. Now, all squash together. No, you don’t have to move, Astrid. Everyone can stand round you. Owen, you’re out of the picture like that. I still can’t see you.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Dario, your face is hidden by Pippa’s shoulder. Mick, you look a bit weird with that smile. Scary, actually. OK, ten seconds. Are you ready?’
    ‘What about you?’ said Pippa.
    ‘Just wait.’
    Davy pressed a button and ran round to join us. His foot hit the table leg so he stumbled and half fell on to the tightly massed, scowling, smiling group as the light flashed. That was how the camera caught us, a blur of flailing arms and legs, and me in the centre, mouth open in surprise in my grazed and swollen face, like the victim of a drunken attack.
    ‘Look at us!’ screamed Pippa in delight: she came out the best of us all, of course – dainty and gorgeous in the scrum.
    ‘My eyes are shut,’ groaned Dario. ‘Why does that always happen?’
    ‘Right,’ said Miles, once we’d sat down again. He pushed away his plate of congealing orange curry. ‘I want to say something.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘This isn’t easy, but I’m giving you plenty of warning.’
    ‘It’s about the state of the bathroom, I know it.’
    ‘Leah and I have decided to live together.’
    Pippa gave a little whoop.
    I frowned. ‘So why the solemn face?’ I asked.
    ‘She’s moving in here.’
    ‘We can cope,’ said Dario. ‘Can she, though? That’s the real question.’
    ‘I mean,’ said Miles, ‘it will be just Leah and me.’
    For a moment, nobody spoke: we stared at him while his sentence hung in the air.
    ‘Oh,’ said Mick at last.
    ‘Fuck,’ said Pippa.
    ‘You’re chucking us out?’
    ‘Not like that,’ said Miles. ‘Not at once.’
    ‘How long?’ I asked. My face was starting to throb.
    ‘A few months. Three. That’s all right, isn’t it? It’ll give you time to settle in somewhere else.’
    ‘I was just settling in here,’ said Davy, ruefully. ‘Oh, well.’
    ‘You couldn’t all stay here for ever,’ said Miles.
    ‘Why not?’ Dario looked stricken. His freckles stood out in blotches.
    ‘Because things change,’ said Miles. ‘Time passes.’
    ‘Are you all right, Astrid?’ Davy asked. ‘You’ve gone a bit pale.’
    ‘I need to go to bed,’ I said. ‘Or at least lie down for a bit. I feel odd.’
    Pippa and Davy levered me to my feet, hands under my elbows, making tutting noises.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Miles, wretchedly. ‘Maybe it was the wrong time.’
    ‘There’s never a right time for things like this,’ said Pippa. ‘Come on, Astrid, come into mine for a while. It’s one less flight of stairs to manage. I can rub Deep Heat into you, if you want.’
    I shuffled up the stairs, taking them one at a time, and edged my way into Pippa’s room, which was thick with the smell of perfume. It was a large room at the front of the house. When we had first moved in, it was the designated sitting room, and didn’t seem to have been decorated since the fifties. Pippa had done nothing to change that, just filled the space with the frippery and clutter of her life. The effect was peculiarly jarring. Two walls were a grubby mustardy yellow, and another was covered with flowery wallpaper busy enough to make your head ache and peeling at the joins. The lightbulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling had a brown paper shade, split along one side. A large bay window gave out on to the street, but Pippa kept the shutters half closed so the room was in permanent shadow.
    In my woozy state, the mess she had created took on an unsettling, almost hallucinatory aspect. There was a metal bed – a large single, which was particularly inappropriate to her lifestyle – with a lusciously crimson velvet bedspread; a small divan that