Perfect Day

country. You have to give up your job but, surprise, surprise, you get a new career instead that you enjoy and pays you more money. And now there’s a strapping great Swede trying to get into your knickers for daytime sex. And you’re like,’ Frances puts on a whiney voice, ‘ “ How did I get into this mess?” ’
    Nell’s stunned, not just by the words, but by their fluency. It sounds almost as if Frances has rehearsed the outburst many times.
    Frances continues washing up increasingly vigorously. Little clouds of suds dance around her weightlessly, like snow.
    ‘He’s not Swedish.’
    It’s the only thing Nell can offer in her defence.
    Frances turns round again, brandishing the washing-up brush as if she’s going to hit her with it, and suddenly they both burst into almost hysterical laughter.
    ‘So, how do I get out of my mess?’ Nell asks when the laughing has become gasping, and died down as instantly as it started.
    ‘Don’t ask me.’
    ‘What would you do?’
    Frances gives it serious consideration.
    ‘I’d have fucked the Swede by now,’ she says, eventually. ‘I mean, first things first. I think you owe it to yourself to do that before even thinking about anything else.’
    ‘Owe it to myself?’
    ‘You have to see whether he’s as fantastic a fuck as you dream he is.’
    ‘It’s not just about sex...’
    ‘What, you’d feel the same way about him if he had a willy the size of a walnut whip?’
    ‘Oh, yuk !’
    ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot he keeps a nut-free house.’
    Nell tries to look disapproving. ‘Kindness is very important,’ she says firmly.
    ‘Oh please. Kindness doesn’t do you much good when you want to be tied to the bedposts and fucked raw.’
    ‘True,’ Nell admits.
    All her sexual fantasies about Chris are to do with him taking her, possessing her, giving her no choice, taking away her responsibility for it. But they’re never going to happen. If she wants to have sex with him, she is going to have to say so, and she can’t imagine herself doing that. She can’t imagine getting the tone of it right. She wonders whether she would find sex with him as sexy as the possibility of it, and she suddenly feels rather panicky, as if she’s set something in motion that should have been left dormant, and it’s taken on an inevitability she’s not sure she’s ready for.
    ‘What’s the point, in the end?’ she asks dismally.
    ‘What do you mean?’ Frances asks, sitting down at the table again. The brief flurry of washing up appears to have restored her composure.
    ‘The weird thing about falling in love is that it makes you think that you’re unique,’ Nell tries to explain. ‘It makes you think that this special sensation is more important than anything else. It makes you disregard sense, it makes you disregard experience. It makes you really arrogant, like, yes, I know he’s married, I know I’m effectively married, I know that these things never work. But this is different. Falling in love is like childbirth. You forget about the pain of splitting apart the next time you do it...’
    ‘Can I feel a column coming on?’ asks Frances .
    ‘I suppose it is really like giving birth,’ Nell muses, ‘given all that stuff about hormones. I hate that. Once you know it’s just a hormone rush and it’s going to wear off in a year, you wonder if it’s worth all the bother...’
    ‘Of course it is!’ Frances exclaims. ‘A comet might collide with earth and finish us all off in a year. We might all have new-variant CJD…’
    ‘But we might not,’ says Nell.
    She finds herself actively wanting to be persuaded, but thinking that Frances is going to have to do better than that. Which is ridiculous. She has to make up her mind. She has to decide. Nothing is going to make it easier for her.
    In the next room, the thumping heartbeat of the BBC News titles is playing. ‘Hang on,’ says Nell, ‘I always watch this with Lucy, in case it’s horrible.’
    She slides open the double doors, smiles at Lucy and perches on the arm of the sofa.
    ‘Another train crash kills dozens of people...’ the newsreader begins.
    Usually, at this point Nell would reach for the remote control in an effort to protect Lucy from the grisly evidence of a major disaster, but Frances has no remote, and if she walks across the room and switches the television off, it’s such a deliberate act of denial that Lucy will feel as if something’s being hidden from her, which will probably