Girl Friends, page 1
GIRL FRIENDS
Also by Alex Dahl
The Boy at the Door
The Heart Keeper
Playdate
Cabin Fever
After She’d Gone
GIRL FRIENDS
Alex Dahl
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2024 by Head of Zeus Ltd,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Alex Dahl, 2024
The moral right of Alex Dahl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781801108331
ISBN (E): 9781801108348
Cover design: Matt Bray | Head of Zeus
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
To my girl friends
Contents
Also by Alex Dahl
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Part Two Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Part One
‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’
–Sun Tzu
Prologue
Bianka
Can Xara, Ibiza
Charlotte comes to slowly, though Bianka is increasingly persistent in her attempts at rousing her, slapping her cheek at first gently, then firmly, audibly. She’s on her back on the floor of the farmhouse, her white linen dress smeared with vivid blood and vomit. She opens her eyes briefly, then throws up again, a splash of thin green bile and wine. Bianka helps Charlotte into a half-sitting position, holding her tight to her chest, the way a mother would an injured child.
‘We’re going to get through this. I’m going to help you. Wake up, Charlotte. Charlotte, can you hear me? Here, sit up, oh no, hey it’s okay, I’ve got you. I’ll never let you go, Charlotte. Never.’
Bianka glances around the room. How are they going to get out of this? There has to be a way. At least Bianka is sure of one thing – this will bring them closer together. It has to.
Charlotte makes a low growl, then coughs repeatedly. Her throat must be sore from the shouting and vomiting. Her glossy brown hair flows loose around her shoulders and into the narrow space between them like slivers of silk, and Bianka gently smooths it down. The long metal pin that held it up in a twisted coil is in Charlotte’s hand, its entire length slick with blood. Bianka pulls away slightly and sees that Charlotte’s eyes are fully open now and taking in the impossible and shocking scene.
When she’s certain Charlotte is able to sit unaided, Bianka releases her from the half-embrace that was propping her up.
‘No,’ Charlotte whispers as she recognizes the lifeless figure by the door; dead, beyond any doubt. It’s the absolute, empty stillness that gives it away, and the sliver of white beneath half-open eyelids. Bianka’s stomach turns, and she’s overcome by a vicious nausea, her heart racing.
‘Yes,’ whispers Bianka, catching a fat tear rolling down Charlotte’s cheek with her fingertip. ‘Oh, Charlotte, what have you done?’
One
Bianka
She’s imagined this moment over and over for several months, but when it comes, she still feels unprepared, and a bolt of anxiety rushes through her, settling in the pit of her gut like a cool, hard fist. The house is mostly empty, their personal belongings in transit. All she needs to do is take a couple of steps across the hallway, strangely uncluttered now, then step out through the open door to where Emil and Storm are loading suitcases into the waiting taxi. Storm looks wan and suddenly much younger than his sixteen years, and for a moment Bianka feels bad for all the times she’s looked forward to the time when she wouldn’t need to deal with him every day. That time has come and, in a couple of minutes, a blue school van will pull up at the curb, ready to take Storm and his extensive equipment to his introductory summer camp at his new boarding school.
But it isn’t saying goodbye to Storm that Bianka finds unsettling, it’s the frightening nature of making a change this big, of turning her entire world upside down. She swallows back tears at the thought that their house will just stand there, like an empty shell, all the memories of life as she’s known it for over a decade fading slowly. Who knows whether they’ll ever return? At least they’re not selling it or renting it out, so they’ll have the option to go back, but Bianka knows all too well that big changes are rarely reversible, no matter the intentions. She resists the urge to turn back around to look at the house that gave her shelter and security – a home – when she needed it most. She smiles at Storm, who has placed the last of the suitcases into the boot of the car, but he turns away, and she can tell he’s embarrassed by the sheen of tears in his eyes. How do you say goodbye to a child you’ve raised but who often feels like a stranger?
Bianka feels a little faint, so she gets into the back seat of the taxi and closes the door with a soft click, staring down at her hands, avoiding the eyes of the driver in the rearview. Through the open window carrying a soft, warm June breeze, Bianka can pick out snatches of conversation between father and son.
‘You’re going to love it.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘I know you will.’
‘Well, it’s not like you’ve left me much choice. The slopes aren’t that great in London.’
‘Just give it a chance, Storm. We’ll see you in two weeks.’
The van arrives to take Storm to the school high up in the mountains a couple of hours north of Oslo, where several of the other kids are also on national teams for skiing and other sports. The Olympic Factory, they call it.
Bianka watches out of the corner of her eye as her husband hugs Storm. She doesn’t get out of the car for a final goodbye – she decides to spare them all the awkwardness – and settles for a little wave. Emil says nothing as he gets in next to her and watches the van with Storm inside pull away and turn left at the end of the quiet residential road. Their taxi begins to move just as a light rain starts to fall, and only then does Bianka turn around at the last moment to look back at the white wooden house with its shiny black roof and small, well-kept garden dominated by the apple tree, reaching its long, gnarled arms across the lawn.
Emil takes Bianka’s hand, and she lets him hold it, sneaking a sideways glance at her husband. He’s a handsome man but somewhat bland; pleasant enough to look at but easily overlooked or forgotten, she always thought. With age, he’s grown more commanding, and his tall, lanky body, which once made him look gangly, now comes across as fit and athletic. After all these years of marriage, it still sometimes strikes Bianka as improbable that Emil would be the man she’d tie herself to. And yet, here they are. Just the two of them. And the day has finally come – the day they embark on the adventure of a lifetime.
*
Bianka spends the first few weeks driving slowly and carefully up and down the beautiful, serene streets of their new neighbourhood, memorizing their unfamiliar names; Clifton Road, Lauriston Road, Berkley Place, Lingfield Road, Edge Hill… She familiarizes herself with the one-way streets, the big new car, and driving on the left side of the road.
Before moving here, Bianka had been to London a couple of times before, but it was years ago and she’d only done the typical touristy things in central London – shopping on Oxford Street, lunch in Covent Garden, a show in Leicester Square. A few months ago, during the winter, Emil and Bianka had flown over for a quick visit just after the job offer had come, and while she’d thought Wimbledon seemed pleasant enough, the short time had passed in a blur of house viewings and Uber rides and client dinners in fancy restaurants in Mayfair with Emil’s new associates at Norbank.
r /> Now, it doesn’t take her many days to fall in love with Wimbledon Village. It seems to Bianka to be the perfect place – the embodiment of everything anyone could ever want – safe and quaint with a village feel but on the doorstep of one of the world’s most exciting cities. The people look sophisticated and quietly wealthy, not dissimilar to those in the upmarket Oslo suburb they’ve just arrived from, but vastly different from Bianka’s own beginnings. Even at home in Norway, she’d never quite felt like one of them. Might it be different here? She can feel the old Bianka and her boring life in Oslo slither off her like the discarded skin of a snake, and she realizes that all the worry was for nothing; she can do this – start over, make a new life for herself.
The house the company have provided on Dunstall Road is gorgeous, the kind of house anyone would fantasize about living in: vast and half-timbered with red-brick foundations and lovely, rambling gardens bordering Cannizaro Park. If only little Bianka could have seen herself now – living like a queen in London and not even having to work for it. Or slightly older Bianka – the incarnation of herself who had believed she’d never have anything worth having, after everything she’d lost.
She begins to unpack as soon as their belongings arrive from Norway, making the big, part-furnished house feel like a real home, with their smiling faces beaming from photographs placed around the living spaces, their art hung from the walls. She places Storm’s belongings into the smallest of the spare bedrooms downstairs and shuts its door firmly behind her – it’s not like he’ll be spending a lot of time here between school terms and all the international travel he does as one of the most promising Super G stars of the Norwegian national youth team.
Today is a Monday, the first of June, and even at nine in the morning, it’s getting warm. After Emil has left for the office in the City, Bianka sits for a long while on the terrace steps, drinking tea and enjoying the garden. She tries to imagine what the future will hold, how the new life will shape up, but draws a blank. They’ve agreed she doesn’t have to work during the years they’ll spend in London; Emil makes more than enough money for both of them and thinks Bianka ‘deserves to explore what makes her happy’ after over ten years in a job that hardly felt fulfilling. The problem is that Bianka has very little idea what might make her happy, and she already misses the daily routine of getting up and going in to the office, even though she resented it for years while she actually had to do it.
After less than a half hour she feels bored and decides to walk across the common and pick up dinner from one of the delis in the village. She passes people with dogs straining at their leads; mothers pursuing their little charges across the vibrant green, dewy grass encircling the pond; some school kids from one of the nearby private schools in gym kit, their chatter drowned out by the rumble of regular planes on approach into Heathrow. She smiles to herself that she is suddenly here, in the midst of all of this. She stops to look at the window displays of several of the upmarket boutiques on the high street and notices a group of Norwegian women sat drinking coffee at a café. It feels strange to hear her mother tongue here, as though nothing from her home country could exist here in this new world.
Bianka takes a couple of steps closer so she can overhear what they’re saying. Unfortunately, it is uninteresting, like snatches of other people’s conversations usually are. They’re talking about a fundraiser at school, how to sell more cakes, how difficult can it really be to ensure everything is not only gluten-free but vegan, too, and why can’t the mothers of the senior school step up a little more? Bianka sneaks a glance at them. There are four of them, all groomed and blond and tightly botoxed. They wear variations of the same outfit: skinny jeans, ballerina shoes and floaty white blouses. A passerby might be forgiven for thinking that Bianka is one of them; she looks unmistakably Scandinavian in her colouring and most likely a little out of place in her brand-new London life. And perhaps Bianka will become like these women; ladies who lunch, whose husbands head in to the City every day while the wives spend their money in the suburbs, passing time until afternoons spent ferrying the children from their private schools to horse riding or tennis lessons or theatre club. With both a Norwegian primary school and the larger Scandinavian International School just down the road, Wimbledon is filled to the brim with Scandinavian expats.
She buys dinner from the deli, stops into a couple of designer boutiques, then picks up a chicken halloumi baguette and a coffee to go from Gail’s and walks back home the same way she came. Soon, she’ll hopefully have some friends to sit at the cafés with.
*
In the afternoon she takes a long bath with a glass of white wine, looking up at planes streaking across the sky through the domed skylight in the master bathroom. She reads an interiors magazine, and after, feeling inspired, decides to move the furniture around in the living room. She drags the sofas around so that they face each other rather than stand next to each other in a corner of the room, and places a low marble coffee table in between them, then a bronze vase filled with white roses on top. When she’s finished, she sits down and waits, but as the minutes and hours drag by, she feels increasingly lonely and annoyed. Why hasn’t Emil come home yet? It’s past seven and dinner is long ready, as in heated up. Of course she’s well aware that working hours are longer in London than in Norway, where it is completely normal to leave the office at four on the dot, but she didn’t anticipate just how long the hours would be or how displaced she’d feel.
Relax, she tells herself. You just got here.
At seven thirty Emil walks through the door, looking exhausted but elated. Over an exquisite parmigiana she bought from the Italians on the corner and pretends she’s made, he talks about his day and his various colleagues, none of whom Bianka has yet met. After dinner, they bring the rest of the wine into the living room, Emil settling down close to Bianka on the sofa when she expected he’d sit opposite.
‘It looks amazing, baby,’ says Emil, taking in the new layout of the room. ‘Oh, by the way – I forgot to say – we’ve already been invited to, like, five events. One is this weekend. At my colleague Andreas’s house. I wondered whether you’d heard of his wife, Charlotte Vinge?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Apparently she’s quite a big deal in Norway. The Keto Queen, she calls herself. I think she’s some kind of TV chef. Her show is premiering on Streamstar in the UK in English and they’re throwing a big party.’
‘Wow. Ok, sounds nice.’ Emil picks up the TV remote from the table in front of them and switches on the TV. He goes to YouTube and enters ‘Keto Queen.’ Nothing could have prepared Bianka for what happens next. There she is, back from the dead, leaping to life on the screen, only it isn’t her, of course it isn’t. And yet, there is something so similar about this woman that Bianka feels instantly and deeply affected. Her heart doubles its pace in her chest and she consciously works on keeping her expression neutral. Emil must notice it, too, but how could they possibly acknowledge it? Bianka sneaks a glance at her husband but his expression is seemingly unperturbed. They watch Charlotte Vinge talk about the apparent horrifying effects of consuming carbohydrates as she sears a steak to perfection, her beautiful face breaking into frequent, mesmerizing smiles, deep dimples studding her smooth, tan cheeks, until Bianka can bear it no longer and gently takes the remote control from Emil’s hand and switches the TV off.
‘Interesting niche to build a career in, isn’t it?’ says Emil, and Bianka watches him carefully as he speaks. He really does seem completely unaffected by Charlotte Vinge. A part of her wants to allow the tears that threaten to burst free from deep inside her loose, and ask her husband whether he sees what she sees – the impossible – she’s back. But she decides to say nothing, all the better if he doesn’t notice what she sees. She feels herself nod.
‘She was a newly qualified doctor, Andreas said. And decided to start this Keto Queen thing instead. Apparently makes a killing.’ Emil chuckles.
‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ says Bianka, and in this moment, the new life in London, the new start, and the new Bianka, take on a new meaning altogether.
