Will Harris on the danger of being a free spirit
“What the Hell…?” My jaw drops open as Nadia comes hobbling along the street towards me, crutches clattering attention-seekingly loud on the pavement. Beneath an enormous pair of Oliver Peoples sunglasses, her face is clearly bruised, while her entire leg from the knee down has been cast in neon pink plaster, the overall impression being that someone has erected a field hospital in Ministry of Sound.
“Surprise!” she beams. “Do you like it? Pink to make the boys wink, eh?”
“You’ve broken your leg,” I say, when I genuinely can’t think of any other response.
“Yes, and I’m also on a lot of pain medication right now, plus I think my dad’s somehow managed to make one of these crutches imperceptibly shorter than the other. You’d better get me inside before I break the other one.”
It happened, Nadia tells me, when she decided to give up men. After one too many bad dates, she had rather melodramatically decided to pre-empt her life-long spinsterhood by embarking on a major new relationship, this time with herself. To celebrate the blessed union, she took herself out dancing, and was delighted to discover just how liberated a life without men could be.
“Do you realise,” she asks, as I heave her cast onto a neighbouring bar-stool, “how much time I’ve wasted worrying about my love life? Does he like me? Why hasn’t he called? If I spent even half that time focusing on myself, on my own needs, I’d be…”
“Me?”
“I was going to say happy,” Nadia sniffs, toying with her mocktail (her liver, thanks to the meds, will have a much-needed break for the next six weeks). “Listen, don’t laugh, but it was one of the best nights of my life. I mean, there were guys there, but I can honestly say I didn’t notice them. And because I didn’t care what anyone thought of me, it was like I became this free spirit.”
“My friend, in trying to guard against a broken heart, ended up breaking her leg”
This, I discover, was all well and good until Nadia the free spirit had climbed onto a table to express her new-found enlightenment through the medium of Rihanna, and one towering heel had slipped in a puddle of not-so-free spirits, namely sambuca. Her ensuing tumble had broken two Martini glasses, the table, and her tibia.
“I don’t remember any of this,” she tells me, “but apparently I stood up, dusted myself off, and started shouting ‘Where’s the afterparty?’”
There’s probably something poetic about all this, I think. My friend, in trying to guard against a broken heart, ended up breaking something else entirely. When I suggest this to her, though, she laughs darkly.
“I’ll tell you what’s poetic, Maya Angelou,” she says. “The guy who set my leg signed my cast. Look!”
I look down to where she’s pointing. Of course. It’s a phone number.
Illustration: Paul Lewis www.pointlessrhino.com
