Articles
Originally published on Wednesday, 9th April 2008
Emma Gets Dangerous
Emmaprovement Continues...
There are some friends you fear. The ones you cancel on constantly because you know, deep down, there is no way you can just have one or two, or even seventeen with them. These are the people you consistently end up at Turnmills with, at three a.m. on a Tuesday night, taking your top off on a podium, when all you’d planned was a quiet, early supper at Café Boheme.
I have a whole group of such friends – known, appropriately, as The Gays – from college that I cannot be trusted with. We make some innocent plan to, say, meet up for coffee at 11am on Sunday in Portobello Market, and somehow it all ends in complete debauchery, with me begging my flatmate, Little Emma, at 8:45 the next morning to call in sick for me. Because, well, I’m slurring. And, whoops, I’m not actually home yet.
Such offenders are normally from your past. People you met when staying out all night was something of a goal. When alcoholism was a thing you only joked about, as you ordered your third bottle of house white. When hangovers were funny, and didn’t linger around for three days. When words like “liver damage” didn’t fill you with dread.
There are many things I’m thankful for. Relatively cheap rent in St John’s Wood. The fact I didn’t become a lawyer or dentist, like my parents wanted. Moving to London on a whim, just because I quite liked the Pulp song “Common People”. But mostly, I’m thankful for my wild youth. For deciding at 17 that experience was far more important that innocence. Because, really Youth of London, it is.
My best friend from home recently got pregnant. Listening to me discuss the celebrity party I had been to the night before, I realised she had gone quiet.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You still there?”
I thought I heard her sob quietly. Then, suddenly, she howled in despair. My partner in crime – the girl who witnessed my first kiss, first heartbreak, who used to hold back my hair when I puked – was pregnant. And, boy, was she furious.
“I should have done more drugs,” she wept. “Or a proper orgy. There is so much I’ve missed out on. Are you smoking right now? You are, aren’t you? I can tell by your breathing. Screw you.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the vodka tonic I was also knocking back.
That’s the thing about getting older, about a milestone like getting pregnant: it sneaks up on you. One night you are dancing on a table in some scuzzy dive bar with a nameless foreigner; the next you have a mortgage, a husband, and you aren’t allowed to eat soft cheese, let alone enjoy a bottle of France’s finest at the end of the day. How many twenty year olds panic that domestic bliss might never happen to them? No, for most, the nightmare is actually becoming Nigella without the Kate Moss years. Or decade, in some cases.
Not long ago, I had one of those accidental big nights out with an old friend, wandering home at dawn carrying my shoes, my dignity left in some Soho members’ bar, dreading the requisite shame that would inevitably descend when I came to my senses.
I woke to my phone buzzing a few hours later. A text from the friend. “I love you. But can we just be phone friends from now on? We’re dangerous together.” Even with the splitting headache, sudden nausea and the realisation that my day– and possibly week – was a write off, I still laughed.
