The Trials of Tiffany Trott Read Online Free PDF Page A

emphatically hors de combat. I have pulled up the drawbridge. p. 22 The sign says DO NOT DISTURB . And I have started to like my hard little shell. The prospect of yet another Saturday night on my own at home in front of the TV no longer fills me with dread. Who needs the romantic darkness of the cinema and dinner tête-à-tête when there’s a Marks and Spencer easicook-lasagne-for-one and the National Lottery Live? My newfound neutrality suits me—no gain, of course, but no pain.
    Lizzie says it just won’t do. “You’ve got to get out there,” she said again this morning, bossily, waving her fifth Marlboro Light at me. “You’re not doing anything to help yourself. You’ve got to forget about Alex, write him off completely, and get back on that horse .” I often wonder why Lizzie talks in italics. Maybe it’s because she went to such a third-rate drama school. She paced up and down the kitchen and then flicked ash into the sink. “You know, Tiffany, you’re like . . .” I waited for some theatrical simile to encapsulate my predicament. What would I be today? A traveler thirsting in the Sahara? A mountaineer stuck at Base Camp? A promising Monopoly player resolutely refusing to pass “Go”? A brilliant artist without a brush? “You’re like someone falling asleep in the snow,” she announced. “If you don’t wake up, you’ll freeze to death.”
    “I just haven’t the heart for it anymore,” I said. “It always leads to disaster. Anyway, I’m only thirty-seven.”
    “ Only thirty-seven? Don’t be ridiculous, Tiffany. There’s nothing only about being thirty-seven. To all intents and purposes you are now forty, and then very, very quickly, you’ll be fifty, and then you’ll really be stuffed .”
    I sometimes suspect Lizzie’s only being cruel to be cruel. I don’t mind her nagging me. I nag her about her smoking. But I can’t quite see why my lack of a husband and progeny bothers her so much. Perhaps in her funny, crass way, she is trying to be of help. And of course she is thinking how delightful Alice and Amy would look in primrose-yellow bridesmaids’ dresses, or maybe ice-blue, or possibly pale-pink with apricot hair bands, p. 23 matching satin slippers and coordinating posies—she hasn’t quite decided yet. Anyway, I know, I know that she is right. It’s just that I simply can’t be worked half to death anymore. It’s all too much of an effort—because nice, interesting, decent men with diamond rings in their pockets don’t simply drop from the trees; you have to go out and pick one, or rather knock one down with a very large stick. There are plenty of windfalls of course, but they tend to be bruised and wasp-eaten and I’ve had my unfair share of bad apples over the past few years. But even if I really was pursuing men—the very idea!—I have to face the fact that, as Lizzie keeps telling me, it all gets harder with age. And that’s another thing. Whatever happened to that dewy look I used to have? And when exactly did that little line at the side of my mouth appear, not to mention the creeping crepiness in the texture of my eyelids and the tiny corrugations in my brow? NB: Get more expensive unguents PDQ.
    “I’m losing my looks,” I said to Mum over the phone after Lizzie had gone. “I’m really going down the pan. In fact I’m quite ancient now. Basically, I’m almost fifty. I found my first gray hair this morning.”
    “Did you, darling?” she replied.
    “Yes. Yes I did,” I said. “Which is why I’m now firmly on the shelf. I’m going off. I’m the Concealer Queen. And this is why I’m being dumped all the time and why men never, ever, ever ask me out.”
    “What about that nice Jewish accountant?” she said. “The one you met last year?”
    “I didn’t fancy him,” I replied.
    “And that television producer—you said he was quite keen.”
    “Possibly, but his girlfriend wasn’t.”
    “Oh. Oh I see. Well what about that one . . . you