Page 41 of All the Right Words
‘Well, I had to confess everything. The mother thought I was nuts for not mentioning and she dragged me to the bathroom, where she covered me in calamine lotion, which was evenmoreawkward. Can you imagine meeting your girlfriend’s mother for the first time, and she has to slather you in cream an hour in? I was mortified.’
‘What about her? The mother?’
‘She was actually really cool about it. And later, I realised the whole thing was good fortune. Because after that, you better believe I couldn’t be nervous around her. She’d take one look at me and start laughing, and then I’d start laughing, and well, we were great after that. Obviously, me and Cho didn’t last. But I kept in touch with her mother. We still send each other Christmas cards.’
Harper was delighted. ‘Love it.’
‘Yeah, so my point is, bodily malfunctions happen. You don’t need to be embarrassed.’
‘I guess not,’ Harper agreed, having fun. Olivia might have taken her to a sucky play, but she’d turned the night around, and now it was fun. That was a very positive sign indeed.
Twenty-Five
‘Olivia, the plays a dud,’ Gina told her over the phone when she rang her that night for a “quick consultation”. She was cleaning the bathroom and had a toilet brush in her hand.
Olivia was defensive. ‘I know it’s not great, but… Wait, how do you know that?’
‘When you told me what play you were seeing tonight, I googled it and found a preview scene. The conclusion I very quickly drew was that it’s a flaming bag of dog shit.’
‘How much can you really tell from a few minutes?’ Olivia asked meekly.
‘That the writer doesn’t understand how people actually speak,’ Gina said plainly, trying to scrub around the u-bend. ‘If you don’t have that baseline skill, your characters will never feel real, and anything good about your story is gonna fall by the wayside.’
Olivia paused. ‘You’re actually bang on,’ she admitted, impressed. ‘But what the hell am I supposed to do? I picked the bloody play.’
‘Admit fault and swerve the second half,’ Gina told her, pulling out the toilet brush, trying not to look at it.
‘You don’t think that’s gonna read a bit flaky?’ Olivia asked anxiously.
‘I think pretending to like this play reads a lot worse,’ Gina told her with a snort.
‘Alright, alright, alright. I take your point,’ Olivia sighed. ‘Jesus. I can never seem to get this right.’
The toilet brush in Gina’s hand gave her a thought. ‘Have you asked her about that tummy thing, by the way?’
‘Well, I was a bit late, and we had to go straight into the play, so we haven’t had a chance to chat. But I thought it best not to broach it. People can be sensitive about bodily functions.’
Gina knew right away that when she mentioned people, she meant herself. ‘Look, Olivia, it’s… You don’t have to go into detail. Just ask if she’s alright.’
‘I mean, yes, I will do that. But then what?’ A terrible thought struck Olivia. ‘God, what if she wants totellme about it? I don’t think I can cope, Gina. It’s… I’m not great at…’
Gina had called it correctly. ‘I can’t make you do what you don’t want to do. But if I were Harper, I’d expect you to care.’
‘Idocare. That’s not the problem,’ Olivia said hotly. ‘I can just hear myself stuttering and getting weird about it, and I just… I’m such a fucking mess. This is why I don’t date. It gets into the real stuff, and I just panic.’
‘Hasn’t anything like this ever happened to you? Can’t you just relate to it on that level?’ Gina asked her.
‘Actually, no.’
That threw Gina. ‘What do you mean,no? You’ve never had your body turn on you?’
‘If I eat chicken, it repeats on me. But that’s about it.’
Gina was at a loss for a response to that. What did Olivia expect Gina to do, invent a personality for her?
‘I’m boring, aren’t I?’ Olivia said sadly.
‘You’re not boring,’ Gina said, regretting the judgment she’d felt. ‘You just need to loosen up a bit.’
