10) The 30th Birthday
August 13, 2006
The day before my 30th birthday I realize with a hideous start that I am about to become officially “old.” I am doing a waitressing shift. I am polishing cutlery, which the rich and successful will use to eat their carpaccio. I am listening to Circle In The Sand by Belinda Carlisle on the badly tuned radio. I know all the words. Suddenly the corners of my mouth turn downwards. I am like Cinderella but there will be no ball. No Prince Charming. I am too old. I am past it, out of date, off the boil, gone to pot, mutton, tough, off, over done. I could go on and probably produce a tear or two but I have to go and get a port, a brandy and the bill for table 2. I plan to write maudlin poetry in a darkened room on the night of my birthday. I don’t want to go out. I always go out. I am going to think about my 20’s, the bits I can remember. I am going to think about what I have achieved. It won’t take long. I will write a list of what I want to achieve in my 30’s. I will do some yoga stretches and meditation. I will read that book on high interest banking and investments and the one about nutrition by that scrawny Scottish woman and then I will drink a whole bottle of fizzy wine on my own. The waitressing spinster is about to become a woman in her 30s. She can’t escape the fact anymore. It is time to grow up. Bugger. Homeless Friend, Live In Ex Boyfriend and Curly Haired Italian Friend bully me into thinking that the proper way to celebrate a land mark birthday is by rampant binge drinking. They underestimate my iron like will. My first acting job was a six-month tour of schools doing a play for 11 year olds about the perils of peer pressure. I smile and say firmly “no, I don’t need to go out and get drunk in order to have a good time and anyway I’ve got an audition the next day”. Then they go on and on about how much fun it will be, how I am only 30 once, how I am being selfish not wanting to celebrate my birthday. So much so that after about, oh, 3 and a half seconds, I’m shouting “Binge drinking, you say? Yes please!! Make mine a flaming sambucca and light it in my mouth!!” 
We gather a hasty bunch of midweek reprobates and Homeless Friend persuades me that bowling is retro and cool and books us some late night bowling lanes somewhere. My birthday is the celebration of how my mother pushed in agony for hours to introduce a seven-pound me to the big world. I won’t distort my birthday and use it in my raging quest for a man. I will not attempt any cunning ploys to get male attention. The spinster’s birthday shall be her day of rest. She shall not dwell on what she doesn’t have but rather on what she does have, 1) Some rather wonderful, albethem, mad, friends 2) And an unerring and ethusive capacity for liquor. I think the nuns would finally be proud. I find dressing hard. I go out for lunch with mother. I thank her for getting me out all those years ago. We eat a lot. I feel like a big boned whale with an under-active thyroid in all mine and Homeless Friend’s clothes. Live In Ex Boyfriend tells me that at 30 my metabolism slows down and I should feel free to chat to him about a diet and training plan. I really don’t know what I ever saw in him. I dress in a skirt, which I think, makes me look like Marilyn and a top that doesn’t show my overhang. The look is “bugger off it’s my birthday, I don’t care what I look like.” I think I carry it off rather well. We meet in a roof top bar, which is so close to my flat I could spit on it. I love having birthdays. I hear my favourite grouping of words apart from “Have you lost weight?” which is “We won’t let Lucy buy a drink all night.” Live In Ex Boyfriend thinks we must have shots to start with followed by double gin and tonics. The pretty bar girl makes us slippery nipples. Live In Ex Boyfriend falls in love with the pretty bargirl and her slippery nipples. He asks for 6 more and her number. Male Friend becomes sincerely smitten with Lovely Welsh Friend. Hormones are clearly raging on this special, balmy night in NW1. I tell everyone I love them. They buy me drinks. We get the bus to the bowling place because cabs are just too expensive to be able to relax in. I remember how much I loathe bowling when I am handed a pair of flat leather pumps, which could only ever possibly work with pedal pushers and a neck scarf. I am wearing neither. “Pleeeeeeeeeaaaaase don’t make me wear them. It’s my birthday” I whine to the Bowling Man to no effect. I start a birthday tantrum but I heave slightly after my slippery nipple. It’s best not to talk if there is a chance of vomiting. I do my best “disappointed look” to make him feel guilty instead. It is the look I first had when I was told that Freddie Ljungburg was gay. It is a look of hard felt loss and anguish. It doesn’t work and I have to put on the chicken Kiev shaped shoes.
I am rubbish at bowling. I attempt to cheat by running up the aisle. It doesn’t improve my game though. Everyone objects. Curly Haired Italian Friend gives me a bowling lesson using sexual metaphors. I think this might do the trick. No, I am still rubbish. Like all things that I am rubbish at, I get bored quickly.
Thankfully there is music. I kick off my blue plastic shoes. I dance badly and tell people that I love them. A stalwart contingency of midweek binge drinkers move on. Me, Homeless Friend and High Powered Political Friend put our handbags down so that we can hug each other with excitement whenever a good song comes on. High Powered Political Friend quickly has a Lithuanian admirer. Live In Ex Boyfriend pulls me into a broom cupboard to tell me that he loves me. Homeless Friend pulls me out again because she doesn’t want to dance on her own. I am dragged back to the handbags. There’s one missing. Mine. “Has anyone seen my bag?” I wail. The whole club starts looking for my 1950’s black mini vanity case. The lady behind the bar produces it. I whoop with gratitude until I discover that although I still have my bag, my lovely birthday cards and my Mac make-up I no longer have my phone or purse. Live In ex Boyfriend tries to call the Halifax to cancel my card but misdials and chats to a man in Hull about London crime statistics for 5 minutes. Lovely Actor Friend buys me a vodka tonic. I carry on dancing. Suddenly Actor Friend says, “I’ve always been a bit in love with you, Lucy.” Now… Actor Friend is the nicest man in the world.(I’ve always felt he was the male version of me.) I swear though that I never thought he noticed me in the “other adult way.” He waits until I have finished protesting about his lack of interest and then he kisses me. It’s lovely. He says he knew it would be lovely kissing me. For the first time, probably since I was in the womb, I am speechless. I see Homeless Friend watching hands on her hips shaking her head. I realize I’ve broken my own kissing rule, again. I’ve also broken my long established “Actor Ban.” (I‘ve always felt that there was only room for one self-obsessed, deranged actor in any relationship and that part was mine) Suddenly I don’t care about stupid rules. I go back to his. We do kissing in the taxi. I keep saying ‘I’m staying at yours but we’re not going to have sex. I went to a convent.’ I get out of the taxi but bizarrely I have lost a shoe. The taxi driver is baffled and thoroughly searches the car for me. It must have fallen out when stopped at the cash point. Dammit. I wake up in his bed the next afternoon. Actor Friend looks at me and smiles. Then a look of horror crosses his face. “Oh God! You won’t put this in your blog will you?” I assure him I won’t. Then I remember that I am in somewhere in bloody South London, nowhere hear a tube, with no phone, no money, no front door key, and just one phenomenally high-heeled shoe. I have an audition at 5pm and the script is in the flat, which I can’t get into. I really am in a fix. It wasn’t the seamless start to my thirties that I had imagined. On a positive note, I think I must still be drunk because my head isn’t too sore. Actor Friend is legendary. He lends me his phone, runs me a bath, makes me toast and jam, airs my clothes in the garden, prints my script off on his computer, offers me a selection of gargantuan man shoes, makes me laugh, lends me a tenner and drives me to the station. All this while a while a band of berserk bongo-ing baboons are banging away in his hung-over head. I am impressed. I get out of the car he says “I hope I see you very soon.” I smile back at him as I start my barefoot walk of shame. I am beaming and giggling. I am aware that mothers should shield their children from my obvious depravity. I am 30. I’ve never felt less grown up. It reminds me of a favourite Rudyard Kipling quote. “Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she could not part with it.”
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25) Guardian Soulmates Online