In the kebab shop, we ordered chips and we drowned our polystyrene containers in burger sauce. We established that we both suffered from condiment anxiety—a fear that the sauce will run out on the walk home. We found a bench, finished our chips, then we kissed some more. The kissing was rigorous and exhaustive—we encompassed every teenage tradition in our medley. There was neck-kissing and dry-humping and ear-nibbling. There were all the things we used to do to make just one thing—kissing—as exciting as possible, before the act of sex distracted us all.
“Your neck smells of bonfire,” I said, nuzzling into it.
“Does it?”
“Yeah, it smells of burning leaves. I love it.”
“I built a bonfire a couple of days ago, I must have been wearing these clothes,” he said.
“No you didn’t.”
“I did, near the allotment.”
“Shut up,” I said, before kissing him some more.
We walked back up to the pub, now dark and locked up, and he stood by his bicycle, which was chained on the railing outside. He asked how I was getting back (bus) and told me to text him when I got home (another delicious patriarchy seasoning).
He unchained his bike, then turned to face me. “I’ve had a lovely night, Nina,” he said, and held my face in his hands as if it were as unexpected as a pearl in an oyster. “And I’m certain I’m going to marry you.”
He declared it quite plainly and without a note of sarcasm or comic hyperbole. He hoisted his bag over his shoulder and mounted his bicycle. “Bye.” He pushed off the pavement and cycled away.
And do you know, for about five minutes as I walked to the bus stop—I believed him.
If there’s one visible warning sign that a friendship has become faulty, it’s the point when you realize you only ever want to go to the cinema with them. And not dinner and the cinema—I mean meeting outside the Leicester Square Odeon ten minutes before a specifically late showing of a film, then having a “quick catch-up” during the trailers and an excuse to leave as soon as it’s over because all the pubs are about to close. It is the platonic version of no longer wanting to have sex with your long-term boyfriend. It is the lingering, looming sense that something is no longer working, pervaded by a reluctance to fix it. I had started, for the first time in over twenty years of friendship, longing to only meet Katherine at the cinema ten minutes before a late film began.
But I couldn’t, because Katherine had a toddler and I’d found that trying to get her out of the house was always more of an effort than sitting on the Northern Line for an hour to get to her place near Tooting Broadway. And neutral ground seemed to have become an intimidating place for her—she used every environment as a way of justifying and defending her life to me, when I had never asked for justification nor defence. When she came to my flat, she’d make comments on how she couldn’t own half the things I owned because Olive would break them, as if a set of mismatched whisky tumblers off eBay made my dingy flat a boutique hotel. When we went out for dinner, she’d talk about how she never got to go out for dinner any more and emphasize what a treat it was for her, no longer making it feel like a treat for me. And when we met up for a drink, she’d talk about her “former life” of “drinking” that felt like a “distant memory” as if she were a recovering addict giving an educational talk in schools, rather than a woman who worked in recruitment and enjoyed two-for-one Mojito night at her local.
I walked to the Cotswold green-grey door and rang the bell. Katherine answered, and the smell of used coffee machine pods and an expensive woody candle smell I could instantly and depressingly identify as “fig leaf” wafted out.
“Thank you so much for coming, my darling!” she said into my hair as we hugged. “This must be so much earlier than you normally wake up on a Saturday. Really appreciate you coming all this way at the crack of dawn.”
“It’s ten a.m., mate,” I said, taking off my denim jacket and hanging it up on a hallway hook.
“No, I know!” she said. “All I meant was, if I didn’t have to wake up so ridiculously early for Olive, I would sleep in every day.”
“There’s the small matter of my job, though,” I said pedantically. Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why couldn’t I let her think my childless life allowed me to rise at noon and lie in a warm bath of milk and honey all day while being fanned with dodo feathers?
“Yes, yes, of course!” she laughed. I had been in her hallway for less than a minute and was already thinking about the dark, cosy silence of sitting side by side in the cinema for two hours.
We exchanged small talk about the intensity of this August’s heat while she made us coffee, then went into the living room. The components of Katherine’s interiors made up a completed game of middle-class-London-zone-three bingo, but I always loved being there. There was something so reassuring about all the strategically placed low-light lamps and the deep, squishy sofa and the creamy-beige colour palette as easy to digest as a plate of mashed potato or fish fingers. Instead of prints and posters there were photos that charted every step of their relationship: Katherine and Mark when they first started dating, drinking plastic pints of cider at a London day festival. The two of them on the steps of their first rented flat together. Their wedding, their honeymoon, the day Olive was born. There were hardly any photos in my flat. I wondered if this breadcrumb trail of a couple’s history became important when they had a child—a way of tracing back who they were before they became co-wipers of a face and arse. The reassuring evidence was always there on their mantelpiece.
“Olive, what’s nursery like?” I asked her. I had picked up some miniature chocolate cakes from a bakery on the way over, and she was already cresting a sugar high. One of my favourite things about my goddaughter was how utterly obsessed she was with food—it made it very easy to make her love me.
“Olive,” Katherine said brightly and loudly. “Tell Aunty Neenaw about nursery.” Olive continued to ignore us both, her fingers jabbing into the cakes with a smile on her face, while she chewed the first two she had stuffed in her mouth before the plate had even reached the coffee table. Katherine sighed. “Are you going to tell her about your friends?”
“How old are you now, Olive?” I asked, bending closer towards the apple rounds of her cheeks in profile. She turned her face to me—the same alabaster skin as her mother was smeared with brown buttercream.
“Chocklit cake,” she said slowly and surely, like a child about to undergo an exorcism in a horror film.
“Yes,” I said. “And how is nursery?”
“Chocklit. Cake,” she repeated.
“Okay and what’s your favourite colour?”
She turned away from me, already bored by this game, and picked up another miniature sponge, stroking it like a pet hamster.
“Chocklitcake.”
“Imagine if happiness was as easy in adulthood,” I said, sitting back up on the sofa. “Imagine if that level of divine contentment were that accessible to us.”
“I know.”
“It must be good to know you can completely control another human with sugar. Enjoy this phase because as soon as she’s a teenager, it will be money.”
“It’s bad, though,” Katherine said, tucking her bare feet underneath her impossibly long legs and blowing on the steaming mug. “I’ve started using cakes and biscuits as a way to buy some conversational time with my friends when they come over. It keeps her distracted, but I don’t think it’s proper parenting.”
“Every parent does it.”
“Yes, and I actually think we’re much better than most,” she said briskly, the tireless performance of perfect motherhood resuming after a sentence-long interval of humility. I took a long glug of my coffee.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m good, I have some news actually,” she said, leaving a dramatic pause. “I’m pregnant.”
“March.”
“How exciting.”
“You’re going to have a little brother or sister, aren’t you, Olive?” Katherine said.
“Ice cream,” Olive replied flatly.
“No, no ice cream,” Katherine sighed.
“Cake!” I said, picking one up and waving it under her face. “Look, yummy yummy cake. Have you told work?”
“Not yet. I’ve actually decided not to go back after I have the baby and take my mat leave pay, so I’m going to have to play it all very delicately.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “That’s great. Are you looking for other jobs?”
“No, we’re actually thinking of moving out of London.” There was a brief silence as I quickly replayed all the conversations we’d had over the last year to remember if she’d ever mentioned this before. “Which will give me a chance to properly think about what it is I want to do once I have both kids.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, we’ve been talking about it a lot—Olive, don’t eat the cake casings, honey, that won’t taste good.” She reached over and pulled one out of Olive’s grimacing mouth. “And we could get somewhere bigger while reducing our mortgage and the kids could have a proper childhood.”
“We grew up in London, do you not think we had a proper childhood?”
“We grew up in the very furthest edges of the suburbs, which is barely London.”
“We’ve discussed this—if there are red buses, then it’s London.”
“There was a man outside Tooting Broadway station the other day selling blocks of hash before midday. Olive tried to grab one because she thought it was a biscuit.”
“BISSKIT!” Olive suddenly shouted, Lazarus returning from her sugar coma.
“No biscuits, you’ve just eaten four chocolate cakes.”
“Bisskit, Mummy, please,” she said, her squeaky little voice and rosebud mouth beginning to wobble.
“No,” Katherine replied. Olive marched into the middle of the living room and threw herself on the floor like a grieving Italian. “MAMA, PLEASE!” she wailed. “NEENAW, PLEASE, BISSKIT. BISSKIT. PLEASE.” She began to cry.
Katherine stood up. “It’s just never-ending,” she said. She returned a few seconds later with a custard cream. Olive’s sobbing ceased instantly.
“Where would you move to?”
“Surrey, I think, near Mark’s parents.”
I nodded.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“I know you have all those opinions about Surrey.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“Do you know anyone who lives there?” I asked. “Apart from Mark’s parents.”
“We do, actually—do you remember Ned, Mark’s best friend from school, and his wife, Anna?”
“Yes, I met her at your birthday last year and she spoke exclusively about her kitchen extension.”
“So they’re in a village not too far from Guildford, and she says there are lots of mummy friends around there who she’d happily introduce me to.”
Mummy friends.
“Okay, that’s great,” I said. “I just don’t want you to be lonely.”
“I’ll hardly have a chance to get lonely, London is a half-hour train journey away. It would take me as long to get into central London as it would you, probably.”
“That’s true,” I said. I didn’t think it was true at all, but I was familiar with this defensive heat in her voice and I was keen to throw a bucket of ice on it. “And we’ll always have the phone.”
“Exactly,” she said, playing with Olive’s dark, soft tendrils of hair. “This all began on the phone.”
“Do you remember what we even talked about? I still don’t understand how we could have spent all day at school together, then two hours on the phone every night of the week for seven years.”
“That bloody landline. It’s all me and my mum used to argue about. I always remember your dad coming to pick you up from mine and he’d printed out pages and pages of his BT bill. He and my mum sat at the kitchen table with two sherries trying to work out what they were going to do about it, like a meeting between two heads of state.”
“I had forgotten about that.”
“How is your dad?” she asked.
“He’s the same.”
“Has he not got any better at all?”
“It doesn’t really work like that, Kat,” I said, quite unfairly, because I also hoped she wouldn’t ask me how it did work.
“Okay,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. I was grateful for Olive, who could act as a conversational worry doll when I was with Katherine. I too started curling her soft strands of hair around my fingers. “Have you seen Joe recently?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I must see him. I assume he’s still with Lucy?”
“He is.”
“She’s from Surrey.”
“Is that why you don’t like her?”
“No, I have at least fifteen reasons why I haven’t warmed to her other than the fact she’s from Surrey.”
“Like what?”
“Like she once told me she finds air travel ‘glamorous,’ ” I said. “Or that she still boasts about the fact she got her Mini Cooper custom-painted a specific shade of duck-egg blue.”
“They were here for dinner last week.”
This annoyed me, even though it shouldn’t. Mark and Joe became friends when the four of us used to hang out and we agreed when we broke up that we were allowed to each keep our respective half of Katherine and Mark.
“How was it?”
“It was good,” she said. “I like Lucy, she’s very…creative.”
“She does PR for a bubble tea company.”
“Don’t be snooty.”
“I’m allowed to be snooty about bubble tea.”
“I always thought you’d end up back with Joe.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, Mark and I both did.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know, you just always seemed like such a good fit. And it made life so easy.”
“What, you mean easy for you and Mark’s social plans?” I said, sounding snappier than I meant to.
“Well, yes, sort of.”
“You can invite Joe and me both round for dinner, you know. We’re still really close.”
“I know, but it’s not the same.”
“I’ve started seeing someone,” I said reflexively.
“Have you?!” she yelped, with more surprise than I would have liked.
“Yes. Well, just one date. But he’s brilliant.”
“What’s he called?” she asked, her pupils—I swear—dilating. I knew she’d love this—I was speaking her language now. Dates, man, love, potentially someone for me to bring round for Mark to talk about rugby and traffic with.
“Max.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Through a dating app.”
“I think I would have loved those apps.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Although I do feel lucky that I never had to use them.” Another fleeting moment of self-awareness. “What’s he like?”
“He’s tall and intense and clever and fascinating and a bit…” I browsed for a word I’d been looking for in the days since I met him, trying to piece together his face from my woozy, boozy memories. “Twilighty. You know?”
“No.”
“There’s something dark and magic about him, while being wholesome. Wholesome in an essence-of-man way. He’s sort of biblical.”
“Essence of man?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, like it’s all stripped back so he’s just…instinct and hair. I can’t explain it.”
“Is he funny?”
“Kind of,” I said unconvincingly. “Not like Joe funny. But I don’t think I could be with someone Joe funny again.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it got a bit tedious all that ‘Is it just me or have you noticed this weird thing about deodorant’ stuff. I don’t need to feel like I’m at the Royal Variety Show in my relationship any more. I’d quite like to be with someone a bit serious.”
“He sounds great,” she said, grinning. “When are you seeing him next?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t actually heard from him yet.”
“You should text him,” she said. “Say: I loved meeting you the other night, when shall we do it again?”
“I want to, but Lola says that’s not how this works.”
“Lola has never had a boyfriend.”
“Yes, but she’s dated a lot. You and I haven’t dated at all, really.”
“But isn’t the point of dating to find a relationship?”
“You make it sound like a sport,” I said. Katherine always made me feel like I was taking part in a competition I couldn’t remember entering.
“Do you want more coffee?” she asked. I looked at my phone. I had to stay for at least another hour and a half.
Resetting the factory settings of a friendship is such a difficult thing to do. I knew it would take a long and uncomfortable conversation for us to say all we wanted to say and I couldn’t think of a time it would be convenient for us both to do it. I could count at least three elephants now omnipresent in the room of our friendship from my side, and I’m sure Katherine could count at least three more of her own. I couldn’t deduce how many elephants a friendship could withstand while still being able to function normally and when, if ever, they were going to stampede across us.
After exactly ninety more minutes had passed, I kissed Olive’s chocolatey cheeks goodbye. I hugged Katherine, congratulated her again on the pregnancy and told her I’d love to help her look for houses in Surrey if she needed another pair of eyes, which of course I didn’t mean. As I turned away, I felt the same sense of relieved satisfaction that I get when I clean my fridge or finish my tax return. I was pretty certain, from the other side of the door, I could hear Katherine have exactly the same thought about me.
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