Irish Girls About Town

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 marvelous? 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, while moving and shaking their way around a launch party for a Japanese beer. When Joel discovered the momentous connection, he declared, above the clamor: "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 elan 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 blond hair, although hers was highlighted. Indeed rumors 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 luster 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 northeast-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 togetherBinchy, Maeve is the author of 'Irish Girls About Town' with ISBN 9780743457460 and ISBN 0743457463.