The Party

by Elizabeth Day

(I’ve never liked animals. I find it sickening how we fetishise them with tartan dog coats and velvet cat collars and special tins of food with jellied rabbit chunks and how we invite them into our homes, these wild, unthinking things, and expect them to reflect all the human characteristics we most wish to see in ourselves.)

I wonder if it’s because we all have an innate need to be protected. So we seek out the bigger, brawnier specimens and we want to be around

them because they will shield us one day when we most need shielding. They will man the lifeboats when we hit the iceberg. And for this, we are willing to overlook their complete lack of conversational guile or intellect.

y’know.’ A few years ago, Ben started saying y’know, eliding the two words to form a seamless whole. It was around the time certain politicians started eschewing the glottal stop in order to demonstrate their man-of-the-people credentials.

One half of the table was arguing with the other half about the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, in that semi-detached, earnest way that moneyed people do, always safe in the knowledge no political outcome will really affect them.

But other people’s money has a narcotic quality. It makes you high. It makes you forget your misgivings. You feel privileged, somehow exceptional to have been invited, as though the tiniest fleck of gold leaf from a giant glittering statue has smudged off on you and you can kid yourself you belong. That you are, for a single night, indubitably

One of Them.

That’s the thing about nonchalance. It takes an awful lot of bloody effort.

‘Were you happy?’ Keith asked me this morning, his tone scrupulously calm. Was I? Not exactly. But I wasn’t unhappy either and it’s possible the entire notion of happiness is overrated anyway. Contentment with flashes of happiness is the most we can hope for.

That’s the problem with charm. It means you get away with stuff. It means you never have to develop a real character because no one remembers to look for one. They’re too busy basking in the glow of your attention. They’re too busy being impressed.

When I thought of that long-ago Lucy, it was as if I were imagining a

character in a book. She had changed, over the years. She had been stuck behind a pane of glass and then, without warning, she had punched her way out.

It makes no difference,

I want to scream, you’re wasting your time – I’ve seen how little I mean to you and I cannot un-remember it. I refuse.

The line between life and death is so very faintly drawn.

Bearing children is treated as some sort of sacred rite of passage. But I see it as an impossible gamble. Because who knows what one might produce?