‘Exactly! And best of all, now I’ve got Fabian, I’ll never, ever have to date again. I love that feeling.’
‘Oh my God, me too,’ I said.
Eighteen
Today a rival has an eye on your prize, Aquarius. If good fortune was yours for the taking, remember that it can be snatched from you just as easily.
‘This is our stop.’
I followed Jude down the steps to the lower deck of the bus, clinging tightly to the handrails, because the vehicle was still moving. We were in a part of East London I’d never visited before, part of the old docklands, except, unlike most of the area, this bit hadn’t been redeveloped and taken over by shiny glass skyscrapers. Here, it looked as if nothing had changed for forty years: the grubby high-rise apartment blocks, the scrubby patches of grass where children kicked footballs between swathes of broken glass, the washing lines strung haphazardly across balconies, the cars parked on the grass verges on the rims of their wheels, rusting quietly to death.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘How long has your friend lived here?’
‘Only a couple of months. It’s not permanent – she’s acting as a property guardian, looking after a flat in a building that’s due to be knocked down. It would have happened years ago, but the residents put up a fight, and rightly so. They’ll be moved out to God knows where, the whole community ripped apart.’
I noticed the sun glinting off a pile of used nitrous-oxide canisters outside a boarded-up pub and wondered whether, if it’d had an Alice to rescue it, breathe new life into it like the Ginger Cat, it would have changed anything at all. Somehow I couldn’t picture it.
‘It’s a shame,’ I said. ‘So much underinvestment in infrastructure for so long. How sad.’
‘It’s become a dumping ground for forgotten people,’ Jude agreed. ‘Refugees, the long-term-unemployed, people with substance abuse and mental health problems. I’ve worked in communities like this, volunteering at food banks and stuff, and you never get used to the hardship.’
‘But this is a social call, right?’ I tried my best to lighten the mood. ‘We’ve brought wine and everything.’
‘And Indigo can’t wait to meet you.’ Jude looked down at me and smiled, his face softening. ‘You two will get on really well, I just know it.’
‘Are you sure I look okay?’
I felt woefully unprepared for my first official outing as Jude’s girlfriend and first introduction to one of his friends. Just the night before, I’d mentioned that I had the evening off, and he’d said, ‘Cool! We can go and see Indigo,’ and before I’d been able to gain much more intel than that they’d been at university together and she lived not that far away, he’d whipped out his phone and WhatsApped her, and now here we were.
‘It’s this one, I think,’ Jude said. ‘Pettigrew Tower.’
We looked up at the sign on one of the concrete walkways, which was missing all its letters bar the ‘T’s and ‘E’s, and could just about make out the less-stained shadows where the others had been.
‘Must be,’ I said.
‘There’s no lift. Well, there was, back in the day, but not any more. So we’re walking up to the eighth floor.’
I laughed. ‘Just as well I’m wearing flat shoes. That, and I hit the gym almost every day.’
Even so, I was properly out of breath by the time we reached our destination, and had to stop and wipe sweat off my top lip. Meeting Jude’s oldest friend was nerve-wracking enough without being a panting, perspiring mess.
‘Are you sure I look okay?’ I asked.
‘You look gorgeous. You couldn’t look any other way if you tried.’
Reassured by his words and his hand gripping mine, I fixed a friendly smile on my face as Jude tapped on the door of Flat 805. But I felt it waver as soon as Indigo answered the door. It wasn’t so much that she was attractive – although she was properly, knock-out beautiful – it was the particular type she was.
She was tall, slender almost to the point of gauntness, with pearl-pale skin and long, poker-straight black hair that matched her all-black, trailing clothes. She had enormous bluey-green eyes fringed with lashes so thick and dark they looked false, although I was ninety-nine per cent sure they weren’t. See also her full, perfectly curved lips that I was willing to bet had never been near an aesthetician’s needle. She looked exactly the way fourteen-years-ago emo me had dreamed of