A knock at my front door makes Baxter and me jump. It’s Lizzie, my best friend, and lifelong partner in fashion and chaos. She’s an exceptional human being who’s put up with me since we were thirteen. Tonight, Lizzie is wearing her hideously expensive, full-length Marlborough trench coat in red tartan, which she bought a few weeks ago during a moment of cocktail-fuelled online shopping madness, and has been threatening to return it as there is now a crater-sized hole in her savings. The sight of her coat with its double-breasted front, fitted shape and belted waist lights me up inside. Together with her striking shiny black hair, which is cut into a sharp French bob, Lizzie looks amazing. Underneath she’s wearing the cute evening dress in black crepe with puff sleeves and gathered waist I made her last year for her birthday. One of the many benefits of having Lizzie as a best mate is that she’ll always make you look cool when you go out with her.
‘Felix messaged me on Facebook to say you still love Rory and he’s got anawfulnew girlfriend,’ she says, before pulling me into a warm hug and air kissing me with plump lips coated in the boldest of red shades. She stands back and places her hands on my shoulders. ‘In my horoscope for today the astrologer did say I would get a mysterious message and have to act on it straight away.’ I watch her check to see if her bob is still in place. ‘Obviously I would have preferred a mysterious message from the cute Irish barman I have been lusting after for months and that could still happen later tonight, if he stops gazing longingly at that Cara woman from my office. Anyway, here I am answering Felix’s distress call.’
I stare at her in bewilderment. ‘What?’
My heart is thumping in my chest. Why did I let Felix borrow my iPad?
Lizzie coos at Baxter and scoops him into her arms. He rests his head on her arm giving her the impression he’s angelic. She sighs and heads for the living room. ‘Blimey, Ems, this room gets more overcrowded every day.’ I hear her screech. ‘Why is there a pile of chewed up knickers by this chair?’
Rushing in I curse at Baxter and pick up the remnants of my silky underwear. ‘That dog has been sent to test me.’
Lizzie hugs Baxter. ‘Sounds like you’re getting blamed for everything, my sweet boy.’
I also move a pile of patterns and glossy fashion magazines from the armchair. She plonks herself down and surveys my new swing dresses. ‘Wow – they look great. Do you want me to model one now for you?’
Lizzie is Forever Vintage’s model. As she has a perfect hourglass figure and is adored by any sort of camera, she models all my clothes on a regular basis. Without Lizzie’s modelling support I don’t think I could have got Forever Vintage off the ground.
‘I thought you were on your way out?’
Lizzie places Baxter on the floor before pouting and striking a model-like pose with her hand touching her face. ‘I’m in the mood for some modelling and later when the Irish barman asks me what I do for a living I can show him the pics of me wearing one of those fabulous dresses.’
She undresses and I help her into the swing dress which is nearly finished. ‘I can’t believe Felix messaged you,’ I say, making sure no pins holding the back panels together stab her.
Lizzie shrugs and once I have finished making sure the dress is ready, she lets her eyes wander over the messy room. ‘Do you think tidying up in here might be a good idea? Some models would refuse to work in such terrible conditions.’
Folding my arms across my chest I shake my head. ‘No, it’s organised chaos.’
Lizzie frowns at me. I clear her a space near the far wall. ‘Right, Kate Moss, strike your best pose.’
Taking out my phone I snap away as she strikes an array of elegant poses. ‘Lizzie – I don’t know how you do it, but you always bring my dresses to life.’
She pouts and makes me laugh. ‘It’s all the Milan fashion shows I do, darling, when I’m not sorting out payroll queries and undertaking staff disciplinaries at the factory.’
By day Lizzie is Head of HR for a factory which makes cheap electrical goods and by night she’s Forever Vintage’s top model.
Once I have got the perfect shot, she makes her way back to the chair she left her clothes on and I head for the sofa. ‘Good news,’ Lizzie says, ‘Bill is going to move into the flat with me and take your old room.’
Before Vivi died, Lizzie and I shared a flat together, overlooking Brighton seafront. I got very emotional on the day I moved into Vivi’s house. Our little flat was a true palace. It was the place where we happily failed at being responsible adults. We spent a lot of our time wrapped in duvets on the sofa comparing hangover symptoms, sat in the bathroom dyeing each other’s hair, crying over subsequent hair distasters and partying far too much. We had our own makeshift seventies cocktail bar in the living room, a square of wooden floor for dancing away our troubles and a silver disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The parties we threw in our flat were not the coolest ones in Brighton. Lizzie and I changed into comfy slippers the second everyone started dancing in our living room and by midnight we would both be in our PJs.
We also had a chalk board in the toilet with a long list of the men who had broken our hearts, and a selection of Lizzie’s paintings from her artist life phase. Lizzie goes through many phases. Her artist phase is mine and Bill’s favourite. Her still life artwork of vases, bowls of fruit and plants was ghastly. She was hopeless at painting faces, arms, backs, shoulders, and legs but she discovered a unique flair for painting naked male bottoms. Her teacher gushed at the use of her shading. Proud of her creative talent, Lizzie adorned our hallway with her finest artwork focusing on male buttocks in different settings, and to this day she will still give visitors to the flat a guided tour of her journey of self-discovery into male bums.
I gulp back a wave of emotion. Bill is one of our friends. Both Lizzie and I used to work for Bill many moons ago when we worked in a customer services call centre and he was our team leader. Fresh out of university, Lizzie and I found ourselves temping in a customer services department answering the phones, and we had to report in to Bill. Being a new team leader of eight young people wasn’t the best career choice for Bill, who had recently relocated to Brighton from Wales. He admits his brief spell in a semi-managerial role was a mistake. At his daily morning team meetings, Bill spent more time talking through all our boyfriend, girlfriend, and marriage issues than he did setting team goals for the week. His own romance issues were always interesting, especially when he started dating a local Brighton DJ and could get us all on the guest list. When we were supposed to have our 1-2-1 appointments Bill would take us for a coffee in the café and for an hour we’d sit and talk about the meaning of life. In terms of productivity, our team was the worst, and one day Bill was demoted. After that Lizzie and I decided to make him part of our friendship group. He’s been a close friend ever since.
My sadness has nothing to do with Bill. He’s a great friend and it’s good that he’ll be getting out of his pokey bedsit, with brown running water and his neighbours who seem to have noisy sex day and night. Moving in with Lizzie will be amazing for him. They will have a lot of fun together. I miss living with my best mate, we had such fun. I think I’m in mourning as that part of my life died too when Vivi passed away.
Lizzie has picked up on my quivering bottom lip. She shoots up, jumps over a pile of dresses, nearly loses her footing on an empty plastic dress carrier lying on the floor, dodges a pile of books about the history of dresses, hops over a confused Baxter and lands before me. ‘Talk to me,’ she whispers, shifting a half-finished stitched dress which was stretched across a part of the sofa and plonking herself down.
‘I’m not enjoying living here, Lizzie,’ I sniff as tears shoot for freedom down my cheeks. ‘I feel so guilty for saying that, but all Felix and I do is fight.’
Lizzie pulls me against her. ‘It was always going to be frigging hard to move into Vivi’s house and look after Felix 24/7, Ems, but you’re doing a great job with him.’
Shaking my head, I pull away. ‘Lizzie, I’m the worst person to be his legal guardian,’ I say, grabbing a tissue from my cardigan to stem the train of snot which has shot out of my nostrils.
Lizzie squeezes my arm. ‘Come on, don’t say that. I’m sure most kids who have just lost their mum would act the same as Felix.’
‘He tells me he hates me every evening.’
Lizzie casts me a warm smile. ‘That’s a normal kid thing. I was always telling my parents I hated them. I think it’s a part of growing up. You and Vivi must have told your mum that?’
