The second difference was that Claire mood-altered with happy abandon and never developed a dependency: she was an enthusiastic drinker and had a whole suite of pills at her fingertips.
Me, though? I’d been to rehab twenty years ago for being too fond of cocaine and other drugs. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me and these days I lived a normal, happy life – so long as I steered clear of any ‘mood-alterers’。 Which meant no codeine, no occasional Xanax for anxiety, nothing at all – not even alcohol.
Which baffled my ‘loved ones’ （my sisters and parents）。 Alcohol hadn’t been a big problem for me back in the day, it had been all the other stuff. But I was a person who could get addicted to rice cakes. To tap water. To tofu, magnolia paint, nude lip gloss, boiled cauliflower – anything. No matter how bland, how unremarkable, I could get addicted to it. So, no alcohol for Rachel.
‘How’re you bearing up?’ Claire asked.
‘We’ll save it until we’re inside. Tell me what’s going on with you.’
She pressed her lips together. ‘You know Adam?’
The man she’d been with for twenty-three years? ‘Er …’
‘And you know our friends, Piet and Beatriz?’
‘Mmmm.’ They were fairly new but Claire and Adam seemed to see a lot of them. They were a bit flashy. Very Claire. No offence meant.
‘So, turns out that they’re swingers.’
Oh, here we go. The real surprise was that Claire hadn’t taken up swinging much sooner.
Valiantly, I said, ‘No judgement.’ My personal brand was ‘In Recovery but Still Great Fun’; it was important to seem breezy about all lifestyle choices in case I stopped being invited to things. People were already uncomfortable around me when they wanted to get hammered and I was sitting there, nursing a Diet Coke. I worked hard to never seem disapproving.
But the truth was that I had a good deal of judgement here. Based entirely on the fact that I wouldn’t like to swing with Piet – he was too big, he shaved his head and he wore chunky gold rings.
‘They want to, you know, swing with us. Beatriz fancies Adam and Piet fancies me.’
Well, they were all adults.
‘Piet wants to date me. And Beatriz would, yeah, date Adam.’
Dating? I’d visualized swinging as a more generalized sort of thing, that they’d all be flubbing round together, like kids in a ball pit. But dating? That sounded a lot more … intimate.
Unless ‘dating’ just meant ‘riding’？
‘Piet suggested it to Adam. Adam told him to sling it. But I’d, you know … I think I want to.’
‘You can’t make Adam swing if he doesn’t want to.’
‘… yeeeahh. Maybe I should just have a thing with Piet? He’s always giving me hot stares and saying things like “If I didn’t know that Adam would throttle me …” It’s sexy.’
‘Having a thing with Piet is different from swinging.’ Then, ‘Claire, are you sure you want to be a swinger? It sounds to me that you just fancy Piet.’
She exhaled. ‘I really fancy Piet. On the mercifully rare occasions I have to have sex with Adam, I pretend it’s Piet.’
Horses for courses. In my opinion, Adam was a showstopper. Big and tall but not in that meaty, Piet way. And he suited Claire. They were both immensely social, great fun and said yes to everything – at least everything that involved alcohol and other people. It would be hard to find a more perfect couple.
‘It would upset Adam if I had an affair on the sly –’
‘– ya think?’
‘– but if we were swingers, it would all be out in the open.’
‘Listen to me, Claire. Swinging is grand if everyone is on the same page. You and Adam need to talk about this. And remember, you and Adam have a good thing going. It’s rare and wonderful. Seriously, you don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘Ah, stop! No need to be all serious. Just tell me what to do. You’re wise.’ Jokily, she elbowed me. ‘Yes or no? G’wan, say yes!’
‘Okay.’ I sighed. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do.’
Her face lit up. Eagerly she said, ‘Yes?’
‘Golden Key it.’
‘NOOOOOOOO!’ Then, ‘Christ, here’s Margaret, in her anorak of doom. Say nothing.’
Claire and I clambered from the car, while Margaret gave us a wounded look from inside her navy nylon hood. ‘You’d think that, by now, I’d have got used to being left out of things,’ she said as the three of us hurried through the strangely wet mist to Mum’s front door, Claire holding her Bottega pouch over her wonderful hair. ‘But it still hurts.’