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‘Josh knows all about trees,’ said Kelly proudly. ‘He spends every weekend planting them all over London.’
‘Really?’ Audrey asked, and Josh looked down at his shoes.
‘He’s set himself a goal to plant a thousand trees in his lifetime.’ Kelly leant over to kiss him again. ‘Isn’t that the cutest thing?’
‘I help out sometimes with a reforestation project,’ Josh explained.
‘It’s a charity that plants trees in the city and cultivates new woodland,’ Kelly added.
Oh great, so now he was some kind of sexy lumberjack environmental crusader too. Audrey didn’t need any more fuel to feed this ridiculous crush she was developing. An image of Josh shirtless with a huge spade, digging holes in the earth, single-handedly reforesting Britain, had forced its way to the forefront of her mind. His modesty about volunteering only made it more endearing. Why couldn’t he have some unappealing hobby, like fox hunting or Morris dancing?
‘It’s how we met,’ Kelly went on. ‘I’m doing a PhD in Biodiversity Economics.’
Audrey swallowed. ‘I thought you were a model?’
Kelly smiled. ‘I only do that on the side, to help pay for my tuition.’
Audrey felt a wave of inadequacy wash over her.
‘Audrey’s a student of astronomy,’ Josh told Kelly, and Audrey shot him a grateful look. She was surprised he’d remembered.
‘An amateur student,’ she said. ‘It’s just a hobby.’
Kelly and Josh both looked up at the clear, star-studded night sky.
‘What can you show me?’ Kelly asked, giving Audrey a smile of encouragement.
‘Well, the easiest thing to point out is the Plough,’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘You see there’s a line of five bright stars. If you imagine they’re a slightly crooked pan handle, and just below, on the right, that’s the pan.’
‘I think I see it,’ said Kelly, but she was looking in completely the wrong direction. Audrey moved to stand behind her, lifting her arm to guide it to the right spot in the sky. ‘Oh yes!’ Kelly bounced excitedly.
‘That star there is called Dubhe, it’s about three hundred times brighter than our sun,’ Audrey said, shifting Kelly’s finger. ‘If you can find that, and then Merak below, together they’re known as the pointer stars. They’ll guide you to Polaris there, the North Star.’
‘And that will always show you north?’ Josh asked.
‘Polaris is the centre of it all. All the other stars appear to be in perpetual motion, revolving around the night sky; you can’t pin them down. Polaris is a fixed point, so you can use it to navigate. You draw the shortest line from the star to the horizon, and that’s north. She’s our celestial compass.’
Kelly and Josh were quiet, and Audrey let go of Kelly’s arm, conscious she had got carried away and that other people might not be as interested in the night sky as she was.
‘It’s amazing you know all that,’ said Josh, looking at her with wide, curious eyes.
‘Yeah, wow, Audrey, that’s pretty cool,’ said Kelly brightly. ‘If I ever get lost in space, I’m calling you.’
As the evening went on, Audrey drank more, trying to distract herself from the stab of jealousy she felt every time she looked in Josh and Kelly’s direction. Somehow, the fact that she quite liked Kelly made it worse. Everyone around the table appeared to have coupled up. Paul was flirting with Josh’s sister, Miranda, doing his usual party trick of impersonating various Bond villains but giving them regional accents. Miranda had tears streaming down her cheeks at his Brummie Blofeld. Clara was chatting animatedly with her fiancé Jay. The guitarist was flirting with Clara’s friend Billy, and Audrey, as ever, was alone. Suddenly worried she might be the drunkest person in the room, she picked up two bottles of wine and walked around the table topping up everyone else’s glass.
At the end of the night, she found herself in the living room, kissing a man called Hamish. He was Jay’s flatmate, a performance poet, who wore a pork-pie hat. He had tried to kiss Audrey in the past, but she had never been keen. Clearly a cocktail of wine, jealousy and loneliness caused her to make bad decisions.
‘Bye, Audrey,’ she heard Kelly say behind her and pulled her lips away from Hamish’s to see Kelly and Josh, holding hands in the doorway.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Josh. ‘We were just leaving.’
‘Thanks for having us, we had a blast,’ added Kelly.
Audrey thought she noticed Josh eyeing Hamish with the same air of disapproval he had given Sage at the Hallowe’en party.
‘Nice to see you!’ Audrey shouted, a little too loudly.
‘Shall we go somewhere quieter?’ Hamish whispered into her neck as the door closed behind them, and she tried to nudge him away. Her head was full of smoke, cheap red wine and a creeping sense of self-loathing that she knew would hit her with full force in the morning.
