Free Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend by Jenny Colgan Page B

asked, saucily. To my amazement, I suddenly found I was tempted to run my fingernails down his chest. I looked at my nails. I hadn’t had a manicure in goodness knows how long. Maybe he wouldn’t mind.
     
    ‘Hey, is there one for me?’
     
    I interrupted my Cal’s chest/my nails interface fantasy at the sound of a young voice with a heavy accent, possibly Spanish. There was a tiny, dark-haired girl with huge bosoms and a large bottom. In my circle we’d have considered her fat, but actually it was clear she was really very sexy. She had long messy black hair strewn over her face, and glossy olive skin, and black circles under her eyes which should have looked bad and which I’d have got sorted out at the dermatologist straight away but actually made her look sexy. She bit one of her huge pillowy lips.
     
    ‘Hello.’
     
    ‘Hello,’ I said, a little stiffly. All my nail-based fantasies dropped into the sink with an ‘uh-urr’ type noise.
     
    ‘This is Sophie, the cleaner,’ said Cal. The girl raised her eyebrows slightly.
     
    ‘I’m not “the cleaner”,’ I said. ‘I live here. I’ve moved in. I’m helping out with the cleaning for a bit.’
     
    ‘The bathroom is deesgusting,’ said the girl. ‘Deesgusting. The whole flat is deesgusting.’
     
    ‘Well, I haven’t started in there yet,’ I said, feeling annoyed. It wasn’t my fault that the place was a pig heap. The girl had immediately lost interest in me and wandered off, which was incredibly annoying, seeing as if she’d turned up at any of the parties I used to go to, nobody would have spoken to her .
     
    ‘Here’s the tea,’ I said. Cal peered in the pot suspiciously. ‘Do you normally only put one teabag in a pot of tea?’ he said. ‘Is that what you do where you come from?’
     
    ‘No,’ I said, reddening. OK, OK, OK. I hadn’t wanted to admit it. But it was true. Between Esperanza, my preference for Starbucks and/or champagne, and the fact that we went out all the time . . . OK. I’d never made tea before. I’d only seen it done on EastEnders . I never wanted to admit this to another living soul.
     
    ‘You do it then,’ I said. ‘I’ve got bathrooms to clean apparently. ’
     
    The girl turned round. ‘Ooh, your cleaner’s quite stroppy.’ ‘I’m not the cleaner!’ I said.
     
    ‘Sorry,’ she said, not looking sorry at all but wandering over to Cal. She snuggled under his shirt and - grrr - ran her nails down his chest.
     
    ‘Can we go back to bed?’
     
    ‘In the absence of tea,’ said Cal. ‘I say, yes, why not?’
     
    He opened the wobbly fridge, pulled out a bottle of wine and the two of them disappeared, leaving me standing there with a teapot full of tepid brown water I didn’t want to drink.
     
     
     
    Four hours later I felt empty - like all the core of Sophie had been hollowed out and replaced with scouring powder and greyness. I’d given up on my nails long ago; they were gone, maybe for ever.
     
    But the kitchen was clean , goddam it! Bucket after bucket of filthy water, crumbs, hairs, unidentifiable grungy bits, some pockets of smells that I couldn’t believe were even legal, and it was getting there. The cabinets weren’t brown, actually, they were beige, once I’d removed the patina of tomato soup. Still hideous, but not actually a contact hazard in themselves.
     
    The floor turned out to be black and white diamond patterned lino, which reminded me of our black and white marble entrance hall in Chelsea, but I wasn’t going to think about that. The main thing was that, though the oven wasn’t exactly silver, it was no longer exactly black either, and had a lot fewer crispy black cheese boogers hanging off the side of it. I’d polished the tiles, scraped the drawer handles, washed and dried all crockery and cutlery (after first washing and drying all the tea towels, which looked like a tramp’s underwear collection).
     
    It was disgusting. It was revolting. I’d hated every