Charlotte Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

shortcut to humour, like those people at dinner parties who mistake cynicism for wit, or bile for interesting opinion
.
    Still. It’s her own time she’s wasting
.
    (
© The Teacher’s Bumper Book of Handy Phrases
) Overall: I applaud her confidence and like her new hair and predict great things
.
    I’m as guilty of faux-cynicism as anyone, by the way. Although I’d hope it was for a forgivable set of reasons. When me and Sarah were splitting up, I described almost every album I was given for review as trashy or slipshod or synthetic (I know nothing about music, unless you count Hall & Oates). I started writing ‘whom’ instead of ‘who’. When she finally left me, I vented by scowling through screenings and crucifying directors (I know nothing about films, either, apart from
The Shawshank Redemption
, which I
love
, and I quite like Pedro Almodovar, too, but I don’t tell anyone because it makes me sound pompous). The simple truth is, I did not care. Life dictated those reviews, not me.
    And today, a hungover day after a horrible night, I guess someone’s in for it.
    But whom?
    ‘Abrizzi’s,’ said Zoe.
    She was wearing a black polo neck and those glasses she doesn’t really need but which make her look like she’s some kind of commissioning editor on a metropolitan newspaper. Which she likes to remind me she sort of is. I think secretly she doesn’t like the fact that I knew her at university, when she wasall Longpigs T-shirts and 20/20, a doe-eyed Winona Ryder in Converse.
    We’d been close at uni. Talked earnestly about the future and our places in it. Then she’d gone her way, which had earned her a desk and those glasses, and I’d gone mine, which had earned me some bags under my eyes.
    ‘New Italian place, for the New In Town section. Should be nice for you. You used to say breadsticks were just vegetarian pepperami. Remember those days? When you used to get outraged in the Pizza Hut on Haymarket because you thought that them putting out breadsticks was a conspiracy to fill you up and stop you gorging on the rest of the free buffet?’
    I am amazed I never became a celebrity chef.
    ‘You look dreadful, by the way. And what’s that smell?’
    ‘It might be blackberries,’ I said, ‘Or nerd. I’ve just had breakfast with a nerd.’
    ‘It’s not blackberries,’ she said. ‘Must be nerd. How
is
Dev?’
    ‘More like Dev than ever,’ I said, looking at the printout she’d given me. ‘A restaurant, then. Another restaurant.’
    She just smiled. She’d had been good to me, throwing work my way, and I was grateful. One night, when things had been going wrong with Sarah, I’d poured my heart out to my old friend, told her the mistakes I’d made in life, been far too honest and drunk and lost. Told her if only I could start again; if only I had something of my own to shape and shift and mould. Despite everything that had happened since, despite the distance that was now between us, I wanted to do right by her, as she was doing by me.
    She’d loved the last review, I could see that, because something about it had appealed to the world-weary woman this girl wanted to be. But instantly I had it again: this crystal-clear vision I’ve been having. The head chef at Sinbad, eagerly awaiting thereturn of one of his waiters, because he’s heard the restaurant’s finally been reviewed, and he can’t wait to see what they thought. ‘A food critic!’ he’ll be thinking. ‘At last! A well-travelled and knowledgeable urban connoisseur! What delights await me? How do my wonders translate to the written word?’ And then, as the waiter dashes in from the tube holding a rain-spattered copy of
London Now
over his head, his stomach will sink and his eyes sting as the words ‘irritatingly forgettable’ are forever branded onto his heart. And as his ventricles smoulder, and his eyes cloud over, it won’t occur to him that really, that phrase makes no sense, because why would you be irritated by