Party Night

Party Night
Lucy Lord

The biggest night in the year and the party is just beginning!A wickedly decadent short story from the author of Revelry.It’s New Years Eve and best friends Poppy and Bella are ready to celebrate in style in the brilliant short story from Lucy Lord.Heading to the trendy Hoxton hotspot owned by Bella’s brother they are soon surrounded by their glamorous friends and the party is in full swing. Bella couldn’t be happier when things start heating up with the breathtakingly handsome Ben, but as the drinks continue to flow Bella soon finds the evening not going to plan.With the clock approaching midnight, engagements, treachery and explosive confrontations guarantee the year will start with a bang. And for Bella the excitement is just beginning, with plans for their holiday in Ibiza already underway who knows what the summer has in store for her…Join Poppy and Bella in a summer packed full of sunshine and parties in Revelry due out 21st June 2012.

Lucy Lord

Party Night

Table of Contents

Title Page (#uc8567f10-4eed-5363-846e-a9bb7a2f4253)

Party Night (#u9ae12491-33cf-500b-89e5-3e55756cd6e2)

Extract from Revelry (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Lucy Lord (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

New Year’s Eve in London can be riotously good fun.

But most of the time it sucks. Gridlocked traffic, hideous bar queues, monstrously inflated prices. I mean, why put yourself through it? I’m not too bothered about the enforced-jollity aspect – as far as I’m concerned, jollity, enforced or not, is always a good thing. It’s just that it could be so much jollier without the circumstances dictated by the time of year.

Last year I made the mistake of going to Soho, where I lost my friends and abandoned any hope of finding them after all the phone networks went down. With no taxis available, I waited for the night bus home in evil weather for nearly two hours, surrounded by Dutch tourists in stupid jester hats. Not that I have anything against Dutch tourists – in fact, they are pretty high up on my ‘what’s not to like?’ list – but, once gallons of booze have been replaced by gallons of rain, even the most amiable, even-featured tall people can start to get on your tits.

This year, I hope, will be better. My brother Max has decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party at Divine Comedy, the insanely popular bar/club/restaurant/whatever, that he owns and runs in Hoxton. It’s a bugger for me to get to (I live just off the dodgy end of Portobello Road), but worth it. Max has managed to capture some kind of zeitgeist – ‘a bit Berlin, a bit Studio 54, a bit Jagger and Pallenberg in Performance’, as he puts it. Poncy git. Last year, he declared New Year’s Eve ‘too much hassle’ and fucked off to Brazil with his boyfriend, Paolo.

I only returned to London this afternoon, after way too much Christmas spirit at my mother’s house in Oxfordshire, and am still feeling like shit. For the last month, no normal rules have applied to diet, exercise or sanity. Too hung over for breakfast, incapable of anything resembling physical activity until it’s time to dance on tables, I’ve found myself wondering whether mulled wine and mince pies could conceivably comprise a couple of my five a day. Jetlag has nothing on the way my body clock is buggered, and I am actively looking forward to the dreary January detox.

As I pull on my new pink tights, I put my left foot into a full ashtray on the floor.

‘Yuck, fuck!’ I mutter. There wasn’t time to tidy up before I went home for Christmas and my tiny flat is still in the repulsive state I left it in just over a week ago.

My gaze falls on my thighs, encased in shocking pink Lycra, and I say, ‘Yuck, fuck!’ again. I’ll have to fall back on my trusty black opaques – as far as I’m concerned, ‘flattering’ beats ‘directional’ every time.

I take off the horrible pink tights and wander into my kitchen to get some more wine out of the fridge, clad only in my new matching bra and knickers. In fact my only matching bra and knickers, a Christmas present to myself after pondering the sorry state of my underwear drawer a couple of weeks ago. The brightly coloured spotty, stripy, gingham, floral and animal-print knickers, uniformly trimmed in lurid Day-Glo lace from Primark, may have seemed comfortable and cheery when I bought them, but are unlikely to do me any favours in the seduction stakes. Especially when paired with ‘nude’ (beige) underwired bras bought solely for their shape-enhancing properties.

Oh, OK, I’ve been single for about three months now and – between you and me – I’m gagging for a shag. My last ex, dull Rupert, dumped me for not being ‘corporate wife material’. A lucky escape, I’m sure you’ll agree (although, looking around my flat now, I may have to concede he had a point). But being dumped is always a blow, whatever manner of bastard does it to you. The most annoying thing was that I really wasn’t that into him to start with. His eyes were too close together and he overcompensated for being an Old Etonian banker by using terms like ‘sick’ and ‘da Bomb’.

I had never even considered going out with a banker, but he wore down my defences by constantly telling me how beautiful and special and lovely I was. It wasn’t the flowers and fabulous dinners at restaurants I couldn’t possibly afford that did it – though they were nice, of course. It was the intoxicating adoration with which he showered me: if somebody tells you enough times how wonderful you are, you eventually start to believe it yourself.

(There could also be the fact that I’d just turned thirty-one and was getting desperate.)

Anyway, as soon as he knew I’d capitulated, he lost interest. Why do the bastards do that? Why?

I take the wine out of the fridge and fill my glass nearly to the brim. It’s about bloody time the hair of the dog started to work. I take a huge swig that nearly makes me gag, and try to cheer myself up by thinking about Ben, the most gorgeous man in the world. And, to be scrupulously honest, the real reason for my beautiful new underwear.

Ben is my best friend Poppy’s boyfriend’s best friend (got that?), and the four of us have been hanging out together ever since Poppy and Damian first hooked up, nearly five years ago. He is an actor and occasional model, and permanently surrounded by fawning females, but, as far as I’m concerned, our friendship transcends his multiple flings – I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. He split up with the last one, a supremely irritating MTV presenter with a voice like Fearne Cotton’s, a couple of weeks ago. And now, for the first time in God knows how long, we are both single at the same time.

Maybe tonight will be my lucky night, after all.

I cheer myself up still further by picking up the dress I discovered in my mother’s attic on Christmas Eve. Mum was a Biba model when she met my father, a photographer, in the seventies. With woeful lack of imagination, Dad married her, then went on to cheat on her with countless other models. It hasn’t given me much faith in men.

But it’s given me some great dresses. And this one is to die for: high-necked and floaty, with a skirt as short as the balloon sleeves are long. Its faded coral pink silk, embellished with a splashy daisy print in shades of orange, red and fuchsia, looks great against my dark hair and eyes, I have to admit.

I’ve put my iPod on shuffle and now Abba is blaring out – ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. I prance around, singing to myself and thinking about Ben as I pull the dress over my head, before turning to the boring task of making up my face. Tonight, after the ravages of the last month, it’s more damage limitation than gilding the lily.

By the time I’ve finished (after another glass of wine), I think I look pretty A-OK and thank God for the wonders that are Benefit, Laura Mercier and Lancôme. I’ve gone down the smoky-eye/neutral-lip route, and, having wrestled my unruly long hair into a cheekbone-flattering half-up, half-down style, I reckon I’m just the right side of retro. The wine is clearly working its magic.

Abba segues into Dusty Springfield singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and I giggle to myself: Abba? Dusty? I’m quite clearly a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Glass in hand, I dance into my bedroom to look for my Topshop knee-high boots, which I eventually unearth under a heap of clothes, Sunday supplements and – oh Christ, I’m repulsive – a half-empty bottle of Baileys. Only at Christmas, I promise.

If you’d just landed from Mars and walked into Divine Comedy on New Year’s Eve, you’d think there were two distinct species of earthling. Around half the guests are glossy, buffed and gorgeous, the sort of people you see in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ section. The other half seems to have gone out of its way to look as bizarrely unattractive as possible. Welcome to Hoxton hipster land. A lot of the men are sporting novelty moustaches (seventies gay sauna, handlebar, even a couple of Hitlers), despite Movember having been over for a month. Brightly coloured skinny jeans atop spatula-like sneakers give several of them the unfortunate appearance of golf clubs from the waist down, while those that have chosen to hold up said jeans with braces look ridiculous from the waist up, too. A trend that particularly bemuses me is the earring that stretches a big circular hole in your earlobe. What’s that all about? I mean, really? It makes me feel sick just looking at it.

Among the women, there are unflattering short fringes, tutus, patterned leggings, Miss Marple tweed skirts, Ray-Bans with coloured frames and a lot of pink hair. There is attitude aplenty, and sneering once-overs by the bucketload.

Poppy and Damian are standing at the bar, trying to get served. As soon as Poppy notices me, she shouts ‘Belles!’ and runs towards me with her arms outstretched.

I’ve come to realize, over the years, that it’s counterproductive, nay masochistic, to try to compare myself to Poppy – either physically or intellectually. We’ve been best friends since we were new girls at school at the age of ten, and were inseparable until she went up to Oxford (where she got a first in history, despite partying like there was no tomorrow), and I floundered about in the pretentious hell that was Goldsmiths. Now she’s a highly respected TV producer, and I’m still a struggling artist.

You wouldn’t guess it to look at her, though, wired off her pretty little face in black leather shorts, cream woolly over-the-knee socks and a cropped grey marl T-shirt that falls off one shoulder and just occasionally rises to reveal a glimpse of perfectly flat brown tummy that matches the expanse of perfectly smooth brown thigh between sock and short. Her long blonde hair is straight and shiny, her green eyes wide and her teeth perfect. She looks a bit like Sienna Miller, although she professes, I suspect disingenuously, to hate the comparison.

‘I can’t believe you’re so early – I didn’t think we’d see you for hours, what with the hideous traffic potential tonight,’ Poppy is babbling. She and Damian, being cooler than I could ever hope to be, live just off Hoxton Square, a mere fifteen-minute walk away from Divine Comedy.

‘Yeah, I know. The cabbie took a brilliant route up the Harrow Road and around the North Circular, avoiding the West End completely. I could have kissed him.’

‘He’d have come in his pants.’ Poppy’s Timotei prettiness and girls’-school accent soften the crudity of her words, and I laugh. ‘I mean it, Belles, you look amazing! Love, love, love the dress!’

‘Thanks! Mum’s attic,’ I grin, trying not to sound too smug.

‘Ooh, you lucky cow. Why couldn’t my mum have been a model?’

I laugh again. Poppy’s mother is an ex-Radio 4 presenter and the epitome of elegance. ‘Anyway, look at you. I can’t imagine many people being able to carry off that particular ensemble.’ I mean it: Poppy is so tiny and perfectly formed that she always manages to get away with outfits that would look absolutely hideous on most people. My pink tights would have posed her no challenge whatsoever.

Requisite compliments exchanged, we hug again and make our way back to the bar.

‘Hey, Bella.’ Damian gives me a languorous hug, one eye still on the bar. He looks handsome as ever in black jeans and a purple V-necked T-shirt that sets off his half-Indian, half-Welsh complexion a treat. Damian’s a columnist on the men’s magazine Stadium, and one of my favourite people in the world. He’s cool and funny and gorgeous, and Poppy takes him for granted rather too much, I sometimes think.

‘Hey Damian, Happy New Year!’ I cry, hugging him back.

‘Surely you’re not meant to say that till after midnight,’ says Poppy. She’s probably right, but I am thoroughly overexcited, buzzing with anticipation of what tonight may bring (or, possibly more accurately, half pissed already).

‘Oh, whatevs.’ I clock both their looks of horror. ‘Said with irony, I promise.’

‘Whatevs, shmatevs,’ says Damian. ‘What do you want to drink? I’m trying to order margaritas …’