Free After Ever After by Rowan Coleman Page A

to Ladbroke Grove and gone all West London. Alice is a trustafarian, spent all of Daddy’s cash on cocaine. He’s cut off her allowance and now she has to model to pay her rent, poor cow.’
    Dora’s smile is paper-thin. ‘Karina is a PR exec, vodka. Her enlightened company forced her to attend NA after she threw up on the CEO’s desk during a board meeting. Personally I think they’re both lightweights, but knowing them helps me keep sight of the big picture.’ Dora’s smile widens as her new friends approach the table.
    ‘Ladies, how are we?’ she says with a rarely seen charm she reserves only for people she doesn’t like much. I smile at them nervously. Alice looks like she’s been San-Tropezed from head to foot, her skin a tawny gold and her hair streaked with blonde. Karina’s perfectly straight brown hair falls exactly to her shoulder-line and grazes the tops of her rounded shoulders. Why don’t they look like shit? I’ve been off any kind of toxic substance, including peanut butter, for over a year and I look like shit. Where’s the justice?
    ‘And this is Kits.’
    Dora introduces me and I haul myself back into the moment. I sit back in my chair certain that surely I, the married one with the baby and the lovely home, should have the moral high ground over three ex-addicts – four if you include Camille’s kamikaze flirtation with credit – but for some reason I feel as if these walking wounded have left me standing out in the cold, excluded from their fascinating complex of ‘issues’.
    ‘Oh my God,’ Karina says matter-of-factly as she slips into a chair. ‘I saw Julian last night and … we finally did it!’
    I blink as Dora screams enthusiastically and reaches across the table to hug Karina’s modest shoulders with one arm, extending her lit cigarette over the ashtray with the other. Even Camille seems to know what they’re talking about.
    ‘Soooo?’ Dora plonks back into her chair. ‘How was it?’
    ‘Please,’ Alice rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t encourage her. I’ve heard every single detail on the tube along with half of London …’
    Karina grins smugly.
    ‘Put it this way, I haven’t felt this sore since my first session of advanced yoga.’ She points her cigarette at her feet and then back to her face. ‘These toes were behind these ears only last night!’ The explosion of laughter washes over me and retreats without sweeping me up in its exuberance.
    I brush my hair off my shoulder and lean forward into the conversation.
    ‘So you’ve got stubble rash where you can’t see, have you?’
    Karina smiles fleetingly in my direction and rushes on as if I’m not there. As I listen to her exploits, to Dora’s sweetly sarcastic commentary and Camille’s enthusiastic giggles, I feel jealous, far away and jealous. This used to be me. I used to be Karina, the one who rushed in with the tales of terrible boyfriends and stupid sex. I used to be the person who had my friends in fits of hysteria as I told them about my latest conquest. I used to be the one constantly fluttering like a butterfly, excited and flushed by the promise and the hope of new love. At last Fergus had fulfilled that promise and had ended once and for all that constant edginess, that eternal waiting – yet somehow I miss it. Somehow I thought I could come back up to London and, abracadabra!, I’d still be the same person I was before Fergus and Ella. Somehow, I thought that everything that had changed in my life wouldn’t matter any more, not to the real me, not to my closest friends. But it does. In a flash of understanding, I realise I’m not me any more. I’m not me in my big house and posh kitchen in Berkhamsted, and I’m not even me in a London café with my best friends. I’m not me any more. Karina is, and she’s not even very good at it.
    ‘Are we ordering food?’ I say clumsily over the conversation so that I look rude and, what’s more, greedy. The waiter has returned to our table about