Lifesaving for Beginners

stick of mascara – although, of course, Minnie carries these weapons in her arsenal too). There is a carefully crafted ‘weighting’ system. Minnie will take into account things like age (students and OAPs get a ‘Minnie-calculated’ discount). Ed has to pay full whack; there is no disability discount in Minnie’s calculations and for this – and many things – I love her. If people are ‘between jobs’, as many people are at the moment, there’s a discount for that too. Everything – and everyone – is taken into account. Is given due consideration. She works it out while the rest of us are scraping the froth from the bottoms of our coffee cups. It takes her about five minutes. Less, probably. She tells everyone what they owe and if there is a problem with change, she will sort it out. That’s what Minnie does. She sorts things out.
    I say, ‘You were right about Thomas, by the way.’
    She says, ‘What? That’s he’s a skyscraping muck savage with Monaghan silage-breath?’ And the funny thing is that Thomas is one of the few people that Minnie genuinely likes.
    I say, ‘No, the bit about him seeing someone. He’s seeing someone.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Nothing. I just . . . I thought I’d tell you. Confirm it.’
    Minnie says, ‘No need.’ And then she scoops couscous out of a clam shell. When it’s all scraped out and tipped into her mouth, chewed, swallowed and washed down with water, she continues, ‘A creature like Thomas doesn’t get to sit in the swamp licking his balls for any length of time. Especially in a recession, when people are desperate. I’m just surprised he managed to hold out this long.’
    If I say, ‘I miss him,’ Minnie will laugh and say, ‘Catch yourself on, girl.’
    So I don’t say that. I don’t say anything.
    Minnie says, ‘Anyway, it’s just as well.’
    I say, ‘What’s just as well?’
    Minnie has two settings on her optimism metre: none and bizarre. If nothing else, her response will distract me from the beef and Guinness stew.
    ‘You and Thomas. It’s good that you realised you weren’t suitable. When he got all domestic. It’s good that he played his hand so early. You’ve wasted less time.’ Minnie looks at me like I’m a balance sheet that doesn’t add up. ‘It’s not too late. You’re still fairly . . . viable’ she says eventually.
    ‘Good to know.’ I pierce a chunk of beef with my fork and scrape the Guinnessy sauce off it before putting it in my mouth. I manage to get it down by drinking most of my glass of wine. The carafe is nearly empty now.
    We order dessert. Carageen for Minnie, which is, at the end of the day, nothing but seaweed. And Baileys cheesecake for me. Baileys cheesecake makes you feel really good and really bad, at exactly the same time.
    I say, ‘I’m done.’
    Minnie looks at my plate. ‘Can I have the rest of your cheesecake?’
    ‘No, I don’t mean . . . I mean I’m done with dating. All that malarkey.’
    ‘What about sex? Are you done with that?’
    ‘Do forty-year-olds still have sex?’
    ‘Well, my parents are in their sixties and they’re still at it. I rang them yesterday afternoon and Mam said they were in bed and that’s why her voice sounded post-coital.’
    ‘She actually said post-coital?’
    ‘Swear to God.’
    ‘Let’s face it, sex is overrated.’ This may not be true of Grey’s Anatomy but nobody knows about that.
    Minnie says, ‘Hmmm,’ and I know immediately that she’s probably having terrific sex, even if it’s only with Maurice, and she doesn’t want to tell me because she feels sorry for me since Thomas dumped me and I’m about to turn forty. In less than two months. A matter of weeks, really. I’ll be forty and I’ll probably be a virgin again because I won’t have had sex in so long.
    And I can’t even write anymore. Which is the only thing I was ever any good at. My English teacher would be horrified if she knew that. She’d give us a three-page essay to write and I’d stop at the bottom of the third page. Even if I was in the middle of the story. Even if I was in the middle of a sentence. She said she’d never witnessed such indolence.
    Minnie looks at her stopwatch thingamajig. ‘I should go, I’m out of time.’ Which really means that I’m out of time. In fairness, we’re at minus six minutes and forty seconds.
    ‘How about coffee?’
    ‘Kat, I really should . . .’
    ‘Espressos.’ This is pathetic. I know it is. I don’t even like espressos.