 Soulmates
Marian Keyes
'So was it a disaster?' Peter
begged Tim. 'Did they try to kill each other?'
Watched by seven avid pairs of eyes, Tim shook his
head sorrowfully. 'They got on like a house on fire. They're going to do it again in
July.'
A murmur of Isn't that marvellous? started up.
But Vicky couldn't take any more. In despair, she put
her face in her hands. 'How do they do it?' she whispered, echoing everyone's sentiments.
'How do they bloody well do it!'
Georgia and Joel were born on the same day in the same year in the same city though
they didn't meet until they were twenty-six-and-a-half, whilst moving and shaking their
way around a launch party for a Japanese beer. When Joel discovered the momentous
connection, he declared, above the clamour: 'We're twins! Soulmates.'
Georgia was called the golden girl, an inadequate
attempt to convey how fantastically energetic, gorgeous and nice she was. In every
group of human beings there's a natural leader and she was one. Only a very special man
could keep up with her: Joel was the perfect candidate. The kindest and best-looking of
his good-looking group of prototype New Lad friends, how could he not help gravitating to
Georgia, the deluxe version of her coterie of glossy, shiny girlfriends?
And now she had a soulmate. She would, her best
friend Vicky thought, with shameful envy. Georgia was always the first. With the first
ankle-bracelet, the first wedge sandals, she had an unerring instinct for what was good
and new and right. Some years back Vicky had tried to trump her with a pair of boots she'd
joyously ferried back from New York. This time I'm the winner, Vicky had
thought, breathlessly ushering her new boots ahead of her. But Georgia had beaten her to
it. Again. By wearing a similar pair of boots - similar, but better. The heel was
nicer, the leather softer, the whole élan simply much more convincing. And she'd
only bought them in Ravel.
Soulmates. It was the start of the nineties and
new-age stuff had just started being fashionable. Katie had recently bought four crystals
and dotted them about her flat, but four crystals couldn't hold a candle to a real live
soulmate. It was about the best thing you could have - better than a tattoo or
henna-patterned nails or a cappuccino maker. Quickly others followed their example by
claiming that they too had found their SM. But it was only a spurious intimacy based on
chemical connection, which dissolved just as soon as the cocaine or ecstasy or Absolut had
worn off.
'We're twins,' Georgia and Joel declared to the world,
and paraded their similarities. A crooked front tooth that she'd had capped and that he'd
had knocked out in a motorbike accident and replaced. Both had blonde hair, although hers
was highlighted. Indeed rumours circulated that perhaps his was too.
Within weeks they'd moved in together and filled their
flat with a succession of peculiar things, all of which assumed a stylish lustre the
minute they became theirs. But no matter how much the others tried to emulate their
panache it was never quite the same. The liver-purple paint which Georgia and Joel used to
such stylish effect in one room in their south-facing flat never survived the transition
to anyone else's wall. Especially not Tim and Alice's north-east-facing living room. 'I
can't bear it,' Tim eventually admitted. 'I feel as though I'm watching telly inside an
internal organ.'
Georgia and Joel spent money fast. 'Hey, we're skint,'
they often laughed - then immediately went to the River Cafe'. On receiving a particularly
onerous credit card bill they tightened their belts by buying champagne. Attached to them,
debt seemed desirable, stylish, alive.
'Money is there to be spent,' they claimed and their
friends cautiously followed suit, then tried to stop themselves waking in the night in
overdrawn terror.
After four years together, Georgia and Joel surprised
everyone by getting married. Not just any old marriage - but you could have guessed that.
Instead they went to Las Vegas; hopped on a plane on Friday night after work, were married
on Saturday by an Elvis lookalike, were back for work on Monday. The following weekend
they rented a baroque room in Charterhouse Square, draped it in white muslin and had the
mother of all parties. Proving they were ahead of their time by serving old-fashioned
martinis which made a comeback amongst the Liggerati a couple of years later.
Close friends Melissa and Tom, who were having a
beachfront wedding ceremony in Bali a month later, went into a trough of depression and
wanted to call the whole thing off.
Two years later, Georgia once more reinvented the
right lifestyle choices by announcing her pregnancy. Stretch marks and sleepless nights
acquired an immediate cachet. They called their little girl Queenie - a dusty, musty old
ladies' name, but on their child it was quirky and charming. In the following months,
various acquaintances named their new-born girls Flossie, Vera and Beryl. Georgia regained
her figure within weeks of having the baby. Even worse, she claimed not to have worked
out.
Then one day, pension brochures appeared on their
circular walnut coffee table.
'Pensions?' asked Neil, hardly believing his luck.
Joel had finally cocked up and done something deserving of scorn.
'Got to look to the future,' Joel agreed. 'You know it
makes sense.'
'Pensions,' Neil repeated, throwing his head back in
an elaborate gesture of amusement. 'You sad bastard.'
'You want to be old and skint?' Joel said with a smile
that was very obviously not a cruel one. 'Up to you, mate.'
And Neil wanted to hang himself. They were always
moving the bloody goalposts.
But most of all it was Georgia and Joel's relationship
that no one could ever top. They'd been born on the same day, in the same year, within
four miles of each other; they were so obviously meant to be together that everyone else's
felt like a making-do, a shoddy compromise. Georgia and Joel fitted together, like two
halves of a heart; symbiosis was the name of the game and their devotion was lavish and
public. Every year one or other of them had a 'surprise' birthday party, ‘for
my twin'.
Their friends were tightly bound to them by a snarl of
admiration, hidden envy and the hope of some of their good fortune rubbing off.
But as they moved forward into the late nineties,
perhaps Georgia and Joel's mutual regard wasn't as frantically fervent as once it had
been. Perhaps tempers were slightly shorter than previously. Maybe Joel got on Georgia's
nerves once in a while. Perhaps Joel wondered if Georgia wasn't quite as golden as she'd
once been. Not that they'd ever consider splitting up. Oh, no. Splitting up was for other
people, those unfortunate types who hadn't found their soulmate.
And other people did split up. Tom left Melissa
for Melissa's brother in a scandal that had everyone on the phone to each other in gleeful
horror for some weeks, all vying to be the biggest bearer of bad news, out-doing each
other in the horrific details. 'I hear they were shagging each other on Tom and Melissa's
honeymoon. On the honeymoon. Can you believe it!' Vicky's husband left her. She'd
had a baby, couldn't shift the weight, became dowdy and different. Unrecognizable. She'd
once been a contender. Of course, never exactly as lambent or lustrous as Georgia, but now
she'd slipped and slipped behind, well out of the race, limping and abandoned.
Georgia was a loyal and ever-present friend in their
times of woe. Tirelessly she visited, urged trips to hairdressers, took care of children,
consoled, cajoled. She even let Vicky and Melissa say things like, 'You think that your
relationship is the one that won't hit the wall, but it can happen to anyone.' Georgia
always let them get away with it, bestowing a kindly smile and resisting the urge to say,
'Joel and I are different.'
People gave up watching and waiting for Georgia and
Joel to unravel. The times people said, 'Don't you think Georgia and Joel are just too devoted?
Methinks they do protest too much,' became fewer and fewer. People ran out of energy and
patience waiting for the roof to fall in on the soulmates and their 'special
relationship'.
But the thing about a soulmate is that it can be a
burden as well as a blessing, Joel found himself thinking one day. You're stuck with them.
Other people can ditch their partner and forage with impunity in the outside world,
looking for a fresh partner, where everyone is a possibility. Having a spiritual
twin fairly narrows your choice.
And Georgia found herself emotionally itchy. What
would have happened if she hadn't met Joel? Who would she be with now? And she experienced
an odd yearning, she missed the men she hadn't loved, the boyfriends she'd never
met.
So acute was this unexpected sadness that she tried to
speak to Katie about it.
'Sounds like you're bored with Joel,' Katie offered.
'Do you still love him?'
‘Love him?' Georgia exclaimed, with kneejerk
alacrity. ‘He’s my soulmate!'
Then one night Joel got very, very drunk and
admitted to Chris, 'I fancy other women. I want to sleep with every girl I see. The
curiosity is too much.'
‘That's normal,' Chris said in surprise. 'Have an
affair.'
'It's not normal. This is me and Georgia.'
'Sounds like you're in trouble, mate.'
'Not me and Georgia.'
They believed their own publicity and, in
time-honoured tradition, attempted to paper over the cracks by having another baby. A boy
this time. They called him Clement.
‘That's an old man's name!'
'We're being ironic!' But their laughs lacked
conviction and when they painted Clement's room silver no one copied them.
On they laboured, shoulder to shoulder. While all
around them people danced the dance of love: merging and splitting, blending anew with
fresh partners, sundering, twirling and cleaving joyously to the next one. And shackled to
their soulmate, Georgia and Joel watched with naked envy.
It was only when Georgia began questioning her mother
on the circumstances of her birth that she realized how ridiculous the situation had
become. ‘What time of the day was I born, Mum?' she asked, as Clement bellowed on her
lap.
'Eleven.'
'Could it have been a little bit later?' Georgia heard
herself ask. 'Like gone midnight?' So that it was actually the following day, she
thought but didn't articulate.
'It was eleven in the morning, nowhere near
mid-night.'
Three weeks later when Joel and Georgia split up it caused a furore. Everyone declared
themselves horrified, that if the golden couple couldn't hack it, what hope was there for
the rest of them? But there wasn't one among them who couldn't help a frisson of
long-awaited glee. Now Mr and Mrs Perfect would see what it was like for the rest of them.
The 'press release' insisted that they were still
friends, that it was all very adult and civilized, that they were in complete agreement
over finances and custody of the children. Sure, everyone scorned. Sure.
But, disconcertingly, Georgia wouldn't join in an
'all men are bastards' conversation with Vicky, Katie and Melissa. Not even when Joel
began going out with a short, plump dental nurse called Helen.
'Tim has met her,' Alice consoled. 'He says she's not
a patch on you.'
'Oh don't,' Georgia objected. 'I think she's really
sweet.'
'You've met her?!'
And when Georgia began seeing a graphic designer
called Conor, Tim assured Joel that Alice said he was a prat.
'Nah,' Joel protested. 'He's a good bloke. We're all
going on holiday with the kids at Easter.'
'Who are?' Tim wanted to pass out.
'Me and Helen, Georgia and Conor.' Everyone declared
that it was wonderful they were being so mature about the split and only the certain
knowledge that the holiday would be a bloodbath consoled them. Itching to find out just
how bad it was, Tim rang Joel the day he got back. Then Tim, Alice, Katie, Vicky, Melissa,
Chris, Neil and Peter gathered in the pub, ostensibly for a casual drink. Conversation
glanced off the usual subjects - house prices, hair-straighteners, Pamela Anderson's
breasts - until no one could bear any more. Peter was the first to crack, the words were
out of his mouth before he could stop them.
'So was it a disaster?' he begged Tim. 'Did they try
to kill each other?'
Watched by seven avid pairs of eyes, Tim shook his
head sorrowfully. 'They got on like a house on fire. They're going to do it again in
July.'
A murmur of Isn't that marvellous? started up.
But Vicky couldn't take any more. In despair, she put her face in her hands. 'How do they
do it?' she whispered, echoing everyone's sentiments. 'How do they bloody well do it!'
|
Irish writer Marian Keyes has
published five novels since she was first published in 1995 - Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan
is Getting Married, Rachel’s Holiday, Last Chance Saloon and Sushi for
Beginners, all international bestsellers. Her latest book, Under the Duvet, is
a collection of her non-fiction, and her next novel, Angels, is due out in
September 2002. She lives in Dublin with her husband. 
