My phone beeps a text: bah humbug! Am running away from home. It’s Dixie.
I reply: c u in 10?
And get: make it 5!
Dermot arrives to help Stevie Lee to carry the Guitars’ coffees and they disappear. Gran is still skulking.
‘Why do I feel you’re acting shifty?’ she muses, catching my eye in a searching way that I so don’t love. I’m not sure how adults do it, but they can sniff controversy or a ‘situation’. I play dumb – eh, obvs – and I’m not sure if I want her to think it’s my crushmostpash for SLB that’s at the heart of this shiftiness she senses or the fact that I chucked my beautiful new bro in the bin. Such choices can leave a gal entirely between a rock and a hard place. I am saved by a v v melodramatic entrance by my bestest galpal, Dixie.
‘All this cheery happiness and good will to all men is killing me,’ she declares. ‘Plus my dork brother,* who I swear must be adopted and not related to me, drank a bottle of something pink and vile and is holed up in our loo as a result, so that’s out of bounds now. Maybe for evermore.’
‘Full-sized Kit Kat, so?’ I enquire.
‘Totes. And immédiatement – if not sooner!’
This means she’s in a genuine crisis. Ordinary snackage can be dealt with by a two-finger bar, but four … well, that’s major, that’s need not just want.
‘Plus, we’re down to the crapola chocs in the Christmas boxes in our house now,’ she says.
I shiver. ‘Coffee flavoured?’†
‘Yup. And nougat.’ Her voice is dripping scorn as she elongates the word noogah. ‘YUCK! NOOGACK! Who in their right minds ever thought that was a good thing to invent?’
‘And hello to you too, Dixie,’ says Gran.
Dixie sighs, v dramatically, and says, ‘Happy festive season to you and to us all.’ Her heart is so not in it, in fact she’s leaking insincerity, though I’m sure she’d pass it off as fabliss irony if quizzed.
Of course, one of the reasons Dix is in such doodah form is that she’s got lurve problems. She was snogging Jason ‘the Tongue’ Fielding for a while and, even though she says it counts for nothing, I think she really does like him. Then, out of the blue, he only went and posted a pic of them snogging on Facebook AND tagged her in it, without express and prior permission. She was v UNpleased,‡ to say the least. Guys don’t GET stuff sometimes, which is another of life’s trials.
We both try to stare Gran out of it so that she’ll leave us to a good goss in the kitchen, but there’s no shifting her. In fact, if I had money to bet on it, I’d say she’s doing this deliberately. She is v experienced at being:
a) an adult, as she is ancient, and
b) annoying, because she is an adult.б
She grants us a big beam and says, ‘I’m getting ready for my poker night,’ so we know she’s going nowhere else fast.
‘Dixie,’ I start, but she suddenly raises her hand and says:
‘Sorry, can’t concentrate, Baby Harry in the room!’
I understand it completely – that lil guy has an effect on us women. He’s swoontastic! And I don’t think he even knows it.
‘Wake him and you die,’ I tell her, although I don’t mean it, because I love it when he’s awake and doing his stretchies and gurglies.
So, we stand like two eejits whispering stuff into his cradle. It beats leaning over the recycling box by many miles, but that is an observation I keep to myself.
