Wishful Thinking by Jemma Harvey Read Free Book Online Page A

along and she goes with it. Whereas Georgie wants to be the one who does the happening, who jumps in the water and tells the current where she wants to go. So you would think that her life would be pretty different from Lin’s, a controlled sort of life, a life that follows a plan. Fat chance. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of women Which, taken at the flood, leads – God knows where.’ (Byron, not Shakespeare.) The point is, life can’t be controlled. Destiny, or whatever it is, carried Georgie along as helplessly as any of us. She made her own decisions, she jumped into the water instead of being pushed – but when you get it in perspective, her history is basically the same as Lin’s. Life took over and swept her away. In the end, I suppose, we’re all just mayflies who kick a little while the water clogs our wings, and then go under. It takes more than a fly’s strength to swim against the tide.
    Well, enough of that. Back to the story. Georgie grew up in the sixties and seventies; she remembers the mini-skirt, and first-time-around flares, Biba, the Beach Boys, John Travolta when he was young. If you ask her what she was doing when Kennedy was shot, she says: ‘Potty training.’ But she isn’t like the generation before, who go all nostalgic and misty-eyed about their youth, as if the sixties were some kind of Golden Age. It was tough being a girl in the seventies, she maintains, because all the boys had very long hair and beards and it was impossible to tell what they really looked like. ‘Of course nowadays, what with shaving and the ravages of time, you don’t usually recognise old boyfriends, and that has to be a plus.’ But despite the hairy condition of the menfolk, Georgie insists she had fun. Georgie could have fun anywhere, any time. Georgie could have fun in prison – especially if it was a men’s prison. Georgie could have fun in Milton Keynes . She has a talent for it.
    Anyway, she was bright and teachers thought she should study something serious, like law or medicine, but she decided that was too much like hard work and did English instead. She went to university in Bristol, where – you’ve guessed it – she had fun. She emerged after three years with a drink habit, a drugs habit, and a sex habit, and sailed naturally into PR, since it sounded like – hmm – fun. Not publishing PR but the really glamorous stuff, with models and film stars and parties, parties, parties. It was the eighties, Edina and Patsy were still young, the Bolly ranneth over. Everyone had money. ‘Well, everyone who mattered,’ Georgie amends. ‘Except the poor people, of course. And me. I never had money, I just spent money. It’s always been that way.’ In those days, she spent other people’s money, lots of it, launching everything from board games to blockbuster movies. She lived in a succession of increasingly beautiful flats and had affairs with a succession of increasingly beautiful men, including several celebs. Lin and I know names but I won’t repeat them: Georgie doesn’t want to join the kiss-and-tell brigade. She was living her life the way she wanted, even if it didn’t feel too good the morning after. At the latter end of the decade she took up condoms to forestall AIDS, gave up coke before it eroded her nasal cavity, and moderated her alcohol intake to preserve some liver and brain cells. As far as anyone could be, she was in control. Or so she thought. Then along came Franco.
    His full name was Francesco Michelangelo Cavari, Conte di Pappageno, though there were at least a dozen more middle names thrown in with which I won’t bore you. Italian birth certificates used to get so overcrowded that a few years ago the government decided to slap a tax on excess names, ostensibly for the benefit of harassed form-fillers. The Italian system of taxation is highly creative, and would beggar the entire