What became of us

won’t be able to get back to my room without seeing him now.’
    ‘True. Well, I don’t suppose it matters. You’re not likely to have the dress on for long anyway, are you?’ Annie said.
    Now that she had entertained the doubt, Ursula didn’t think she would ever wear the dress again.
    ‘Tell you what. Borrow mine,’ said Annie. Standing up, she pulled her little black dress over her head. Then she turned it inside out and sniffed at the armpits.
    ‘It’s fine. Stinks a bit of Obsession, but that’s probably not such a bad thing.’
    Ursula didn’t know what to say.
    ‘It’s Donna Karan,’ Annie insisted.
    When it wasn’t stretched round Annie’s curves, Ursula recognized the dress as the very same one Liam had urged her to try on the evening before. It seemed like weeks ago. How peculiar, she thought, taking it from her friend’s hand and gingerly stepping into it. Perhaps she was fated to wear it.
    It was a little loose on, but the overall effect was far more appealing than her linen dress.
    ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.
    ‘Positive. You look great,’ Annie said, delighted that although the dress didn’t exactly cling to Ursula, the looseness wasn’t as dramatic as she had feared.
    ‘Go on, then,’ she said.
    Ursula stood immobilized by the sense that it was a significant moment in their relationship and that something profound should probably be said, but she couldn’t think of anything.
    ‘Go on!’ Annie began to nudge her towards the door, like an older sister pushing a shy younger one up to receive a prize.
    ‘I don’t know what I’ll say to you tomorrow,’ Ursula said, as if she were going off to lose her virginity.
    ‘I hope you’ll be too busy humping to see anyone tomorrow.’
    ‘But what about Roy’s barbecue?’
    ‘I’ll say you’ve been unavoidably detained.’ Annie winked.
    ‘No, please don’t say anything. I’ll deal with him. You promise you won’t say anything.’
    She could imagine Annie concocting a ridiculous excuse on her behalf.
    ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Just piss off, will you?’ said Annie.
    Ursula opened the door, then closed it again.
    ‘Annie,’ she said, seriously, ‘will you promise not to put any of this in one of your programmes?’
    ‘Jesus H. Christ, what do you take me for? I never use anything...’
    ‘What about the time I got locked in the loo at the vodka bar?’ Ursula managed to get her counterclaim in before Annie could finish her protestations of innocence.
    At closing time the manager of the restaurant had heard Ursula’s desperate wails, and, assuming someone was overdosing, called the police to kick down the door.
    ‘Well, that was funny.’ Annie tried to justify herself.
    ‘Not for me, it wasn’t.’
    ‘It was more a joke against me, for being so drunk that I forgot all about you and went home.’ Annie couldn’t suppress her laughter as she remembered the incident.
    ‘Don’t laugh,’ Ursula said, crossly, then found herself unable to stop giggling too.
    ‘Was that the same weekend as the fake tan?’ Annie asked, getting unwisely carried away.
    ‘No,’ said Ursula, suddenly serious, ‘that was a different weekend, conveniently. You made a whole episode out of that as well.’
    ‘Well, you were much fatter then. If you’d been as thin as you are now, the tube wouldn’t have run out halfway through.’ Annie tried to turn the debacle into a compliment.
    ‘You said it wouldn’t show.’
    ‘Oh well, no lasting harm done,’ Annie said breezily.
    ‘Only the minor humiliation of going to one of your media parties and having one arm and one leg turn orange while the other side of me remained white and pasty...’
    ‘Your face was quite even,’ Annie protested.
    ‘... and then the major humiliation of seeing the whole thing acted out on television six months later with an actress playing me who was virtually obese.’
    ‘People say that if you made it up, no-one would believe it,’ Annie said, trying to draw the conversation to a close. She didn’t think she could bear another argument about the episode in which Annie McClintock was maid of honour at her fat friend’s interminably boring wedding. She had accepted long ago that she had been wrong to heckle the groom’s speech, but Ursula would never let it rest.
    ‘Your secret is safe with me,’ she said, giving Ursula a push out of the door.
    ‘Well, that’ll be a first,’ said Ursula.
    ‘Off you go,’ Annie said, ‘and wipe that