Free Something to Hide by Deborah Moggach Page B

‘Either Al Pacino or Robert De Niro.’
    â€˜Or Jack Nicholson.’
    â€˜When he’s finished his tea.’
    When we arrive, however, we find it’s a sell-out. The queue for returns stretches down the street.
    â€˜What a relief,’ says Jeremy. ‘It doesn’t half go on. I did it for O levels.’
    â€˜We can’t cop out of everything.’
    â€˜Oh yes we can.’ He stops dead in the middle of the road. ‘Do you realize we’re playing truant from playing truant?’
    Then I have an idea. ‘Let’s go in and watch it on the monitor. There’s one in the bar. Won’t cost us anything, either.’
    His face lights up. ‘You mean we can drink at the same time?’
    We squeeze our way through the crowded lobby. The bar’s on the first floor. Trouble is, our way’s blocked by an usherette who stands at the foot of the stairs, checking tickets.
    Jeremy, undaunted by this, gives her a big smile. ‘Hi, gorgeous. Our friends have the tickets and they’re up in the bar.’
    We breeze through, fuelled by Jeremy’s public-school chutzpah. It reminds me of something Bev told me, a long time ago. She and Jeremy had been given tickets to the opera, and he was wearing a dinner jacket. Afterwards they went to a restaurant but no waiters appeared and the other diners were getting restless. So Jeremy got up, draped a napkin over his arm and went round the room taking orders. And he did it with such aplomb that nobody realized he wasn’t a waiter.
    So we sit in the bar with a bottle of Sauvignon and soon the bell rings and the place empties. The monitor is high up on the wall. Its screen is so blurred that we can’t work out who the famous actor is; nor can we quite hear the words. It doesn’t matter because we know the story and can supply the dialogue ourselves.
You ungrateful cow, is that the way to treat your father
? Jeremy pours a glass of wine for the chap behind the bar and we have ourselves a party. More of a hoot, he says, than sitting through the arse-numbing boredom of the thing. And we do know the ending.
    Bev met Jeremy when she was working in a doctor’s surgery in Barons Court; he came in with a rugby injury. She was the nurse so she stitched him up. That evening, when she came back to the flat, she told me all about him. Never afraid of a cliché, she called him
a big bear of a man
.
    A few weeks later she took out the stitches. Apparently Jeremy talked so much she gave him a playful slap to shut him up. Jeremy had been brought up by nannies and no doubt found this arousing; he asked her out for a drink and at the end of the evening drove her home in his Triumph Stag – nobody thought twice about drink-driving then.
    Bev and I had a tiny bedroom each. Mine was in the freezing extension at the back of the flat, separated from our equally small bathroom by a flimsy wall. The first I heard of Jeremy was the sound of someone, unmistakably a man, vigorously pissing.
    In those days he was more of a Hooray Henry than he is now, and not my type at all. Still isn’t, really. Political correctness hadn’t been invented but he would have enjoyed winding people up. No, he was far too straight for me in those days, too saloon-bar buffoon.
    But then Bev wasn’t my type either. She was a real girl, with girly interests and girly curves. She spent hours blow-drying her hair. Nobody could call her an intellectual but she had plenty of native cunning, especially where men were concerned. She could, as she said, twist them around her little finger, the dears.
    I know I sound critical of Bev but we had a lot of fun together. We go back so far, and so deep, that whether I like her or not is irrelevant. We were in the same class at school, up in Chester, and lost touch for a while when I went to university. But then, when I came down to London, I found she was planning to do the same. So we rented the basement in