The Best Thing That Never Happened to Me

by Laura Tait

  Holly’s email said she would kip on Leah’s sofa tonight and come to see me tomorrow. I should have been patient.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ reassures Kev unreassuringly.

  A horrifying thought occurs in my mind: what if I’ve got this all wrong? More than a year has passed since she rang me from a hostel in Bangkok and explained why she didn’t reply to my calls and messages. We’d waited eleven years, she said, and I finished her sentence in my mind. Had I read too much into her tone, imagined promises that she did not make?

  Since then, we’ve said nothing about us. A couple of times she called, a snatched conversation here and there, always cut short by a dying battery or an adventure waiting to be had. Occasional emails filled me in on her travels: swimming off Bondi Beach; a flat tyre in the outback that meant she had to sleep in a hire car; cookery lessons in somebody’s house in Chiang Mai; the horrors of a ping-pong show recommended to her and some girls from her hostel by a cab driver in Bangkok. Isn’t it entirely conceivable that she shared all these adventures not just with girls from her hostel, but with someone new, that my year of celibacy has been misguided, and that this is why she planned to see me tomorrow, to break the news gently?

  ‘What are you up to?’ I say to distract myself.

  ‘Stripping wallpaper off the spare room – that’s my Friday night.’

  ‘Where’s Diane?’

  ‘Downstairs. Watching telly. She’s been throwing up like a bulimic.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘At first I was checking my watch, waiting for the afternoon to come, thinking she’d be all right then, but it turns out the name’s a con. They should call it morning, afternoon and all-through-the-night sickness. Doctor says it lasts up to sixteen weeks.’

  I know we’re at the age where everyone is having kids, but I still can’t get used to the idea of Kev as a dad. Not that I think he’ll be anything other than great. Torvill and Dean and Reggie and Ronnie want for nothing. I just always presumed I’d be first. Deep down, if I’m really, really honest, something inside me saw myself as being superior to him – as if he was Lennie to my George in Of Mice and Men. Which I know is absurd. He’s beaten me to every significant milestone in a man’s life: kissing with tongues, losing it, getting a job, buying a house.

  ‘Anyway, I best get back to the stripping, mate.’

  ‘I’ll come up and see you both soon.’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  I slip the phone back in my pocket and begin to scan every face that passes through Arrivals, finding myself increasingly anxious as travellers come and go with their wheeled suitcases and their backpacks and their plastic bags full of duty free. The scrum around me becomes less intense. Kerrigan and Lovejoy are led away. I use my phone to check her email for the umpteenth time. She definitely said Friday. My abdomen aches with nerves and a touch of despair. I start to prepare myself for disappointment.

  HOLLY

  ‘If my bag doesn’t come out soon I’m going to fall asleep on my feet,’ I groan, allowing my eyelids to droop with the hypnotizing motion of the conveyer belt.

  ‘If my bag doesn’t come out soon I’m going to scream,’ Ryan counters, and the same orange case that’s done four circuits reappears.

  ‘If my bag doesn’t come out soon I’m going to kill myself.’

  ‘If my bag—’

  ‘THERE’S MINE,’ I interrupt, as my rucksack glides past. ‘Quick!’

  Ryan runs after it and brings it to me. ‘There you go, kiddo.’

  ‘Thanks. So this is it,’ I exclaim, hauling the bag up onto my back. ‘Give my love to Jess, won’t you, Ry? Tell her I miss her and we need to meet up loads now we’re all back. Especially after the baby’s born.’

  Jess had reluctantly broken up with Ryan, who she met working in a bar in Melbourne, when her expired visa forced her to come home. Then when she phoned him a month later to tell him she was pregnant, he booked straight on to my flight to come and be with her. My old uni friend and I have got much closer since I spent Christmas with her in Melbourne, and I’ve become great mates with Ryan too.

  ‘Thanks. Hope your godson likes his koala gear. When will you get to meet him?’

  ‘Tomorrow, I think,’ I say excitedly, straightening the twisted straps on my rucksack. ‘I’m actually kipping at Leah and Rob’s tonight, but Leah said he’ll be in bed by the time I arrive.’

  We grin at each other for a second or two then stick our fists out for our trademark fist bump, with a ‘BOOM’ and a rocket noise. Then I start the walk towards Arrivals.

  ‘Can I still pull that off now I’m thirty?’ I turn back to enquire.

  ‘You never could pull it off, H. Now get out of here. I hate goodbyes.’

  ALEX

  And then, in the slipstream of a gaggle of students, she is there, and though I’ve been waiting for her for an hour – for a year – it somehow takes me by surprise, and I get an urge to shout her name like Rocky to Adrian. Until I spot a man walking beside her.

  Blond, stocky, wearing a vest. Almost certainly Australian. Suddenly my body is consumed by a fierce dread. But after a second or two he starts to walk in a different direction and relief filters through my every fibre.

  I take her in. Her hair, tied in a knot that fireworks into several directions. Her face, freckly and younger somehow than when I last saw her twelve months ago. Her clothes: jeans that are ripped above the knee, Converse trainers and a mustard beach T-shirt that cuts off just before her belt to expose a line of tanned belly. She looks . . .

  . . . more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen.

  The man is gone now, and it appears as though Holly glances my way, but it is like she doesn’t see me, because she looks away and continues walking. One step, two steps, three steps, and then she double takes, confusion etched on her face, but her expression quickly fades into something else, something happy. She changes course, quickening her pace, stopping a couple of feet from where I am standing. For a few seconds we stand there grinning broadly at one another, neither of us speaking.

  ‘Your taxi finally made it through the traffic jam, then?’

  She chuckles sweetly at her joke; I open my arms for her to step into, my heart racing.

  ‘Yep, I’ve been waiting all this time.’

  Her backpack makes it impossible to hug her properly, but I don’t want to let go. Eventually she draws herself away from me.

  Settled by her warmth towards me, I point to her backpack. ‘Let me take that.’

  Holly scrunches her face dismissively. We look one another up and down, and for just a second we’re both unsure how to proceed until she holds out her left hand and says: ‘Come on, we’ve done enough waiting around. Let’s get the tube.’

  I take her hand in mine and this time, unlike all the other times that have gone before, she doesn’t let go.

  Meet Laura and Jimmy . . .

  There are many brilliant comedy duos: Laurel and Hardy, The Two Ronnies, French and Saunders, Mitchell and Webb . . . Now Jimmy and Laura join the ranks! We picked their brains, which turned out to be hilarious and alarming in almost equal measure . . .

  How did the two of you meet?

  Laura Tait: We were on the same journalism course at uni and, shortly after we started, a bunch of us rebelliously skipped a media law class to go to the pub.

  Jimmy Rice: Someone suggested a game of pool and Laura was my doubles partner. That was the first time we spoke properly.

  What were your first impressions of each other?

  LT: That he was ace at pool AND very competitive, and I had a funny feeling that if I messed the game up for us, he wasn’t going to be gracious about it. Thankfully, we won.

  JR: She was doing shots of After Shock during the game, which made me question her commitment to victory. That aside, I noticed that she laughed a lot.

  Who’s the sensible one?

  LT: Me.

  JR: Me.

  LT: No way. What about the time you bought
an arthritic rescue cat just to impress a girl?

  JR: Well what about the time you left your passport on the plane in Croatia?

  LT: What about the time you tore the last page out of the book a friend had been reading throughout a group holiday?

  JR: What about when you couldn’t get to your toiletries for the whole week in Portugal because you forgot the combination lock on your vanity case?

  N.B Laura and Jimmy are still arguing about this.

  How do you plan out the story?

  LT: Good planning is even more important when you’re writing with someone else because we each need to know exactly what is happening in each other’s chapters for continuity. So we have lots of discussions before we go off and write independently. We start with the general idea – the theme and the plot of the book. Then we go into more detail: who the characters are, and how everything comes about. It’s only once we have a clear, detailed chapter plan and in-depth bios for the main characters that we start to actually write it.

  JR: Things do change throughout the process – one of us will call the other and say ‘I know this is meant to happen, but if this happens instead will it mess up your latest chapter?’ and the other will say ‘Yes, but you’re right – that’s better . . . I’ll change it.’

  When you’re writing, what does a typical day look like for you?

  JR: I’m quite disciplined about it. My alarm is set for 8 a.m. and once I’ve got a brew I’ll write until late afternoon, either at my desk or in a cafe. I try to set aside some time in the evening to sit with a notepad and think of ideas.

  LT: My alarm is set for 8 a.m. I snooze it. Eventually I get up and set up camp with my laptop. Then I make breakfast. Then I realise I can’t work in a non-spotless house, so I tidy it. Then it’s lunchtime. During the course of the afternoon I usually have emails to respond to and remember there’s something I urgently need to order online, like a picture frame for a poster someone bought me three Christmasses ago. Then, after dinner, I really get down to it and once I’m in the zone I just write and write, and I’ll still be sitting there writing when the sun comes up.

  How do you fit writing in around your other jobs?

  LT: I write and edit for my full-time job, so the last thing I want to do when I get home at night is open my laptop and write some more, so it’s usually weekends or days off work that I get most of my material written. But I use evenings to do things like think about my next chapter and jot down ideas, or read Jimmy’s latest chapter.

  JR: When I worked full-time I made the most of the fact no one in the office had a view of my screen. Now I’m freelance I leave myself four or five writing days a week.

  Have you always been ‘only friends’? And did you find writing the romantic bits difficult?

  LT: We really have. We’ve got a close-knit group of friends from uni who all still hang out and go on holiday together, so before we started writing the book we didn’t really spend much time together just the two of us. So we have got much closer, but only as friends. I’ve never felt awkward writing the romantic bits, but they’re probably the scenes we’ve had to work on the most so maybe on a subconscious level it’s difficult.

  JR: Our agent suggested in an email that our romantic scenes would improve if we pretended that we’d slept together. Although we both replied to the email we’ve never actually brought this up when we’ve been together.

  LT: It’s a good thing no one can see how hard you’re laughing through email.

  How well do you think you know each other?

  LT: Really well. We’ve been friends for eleven years but have got to know each other much better since we started writing together. I think co-writing only works if you develop a good sense of how the other person thinks, and what they find funny, and how they’d react in a certain situation.

  JR: And how they take their tea.

  Who’s funniest?

  LT: Jimmy does really make me laugh – he’s incredibly perceptive but at the same time lacks the filter most people have about what is polite or appropriate to voice, so he comes out with things that everyone else is thinking but wouldn’t necessarily say out loud.

  JR: Laura’s chapters are funnier than mine. She’s funny in real life too, often unintentionally. Stuff happens to Laura that would only happen to her. Like the time she dropped the entire contents of her handbag in the middle of a busy three-lane road.

  Like Chalk and Cheese (but in a good way)

  Drink of choice?

  LT: Mojito. Crushed ice, loads of mint.

  JR: Tea. Strong, half a sugar.

  Dream job?

  LT: To play the lead in a Broadway musical. I can’t sing, though. Apparently that matters.

  JR: To play up front for Liverpool. I actually played at Anfield once for a work thing and scored. It was being filmed. I definitely didn’t make the cameraman edit my goal and put it on YouTube.

  Book you’re reading right now?

  LT: Funhouse by Diane Hoh. I recently bought the entire collection of Point Horror books on eBay. Whenever someone catches me with one I pretend it’s ‘for research’.

  JR: Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

  Favourite food?

  LT: I’ll eat anything but usually opt for fish or seafood – and I love sushi.

  JR: I’ll also eat anything apart from fish – the smell makes me nauseous.

  Perfect night in?

  LT: Mates, red wine, board games, records, cheese board.

  JR: Sitting alone at my desk with a laptop, the words flowing onto the page.

  Weirdest celebrity crush?

  LT: David Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth.

  JR: I knew she’d say that. I had to think hard about this one, and even consulted my housemate, before settling on Karen Brady.

  We hope you’ve had as much fun reading

  The Best Thing That Never Happened To Me

  as we did.

  If you did enjoy it, please consider leaving a review, or get in touch with us on Twitter using @TransworldBooks and #thebestthingbook.

  We’d love to hear what you think.

  About the Authors

  Laura and Jimmy became mates while studying journalism at Sheffield University, so sitting in pubs talking about life and love is something they’ve been doing for the last ten years. Now they’re writing books together they just take their laptops and write it all down, but little else has changed. Jimmy still tells Laura off for always being late, and Laura can still drink Jimmy under the table.

  Their friendship survives because Laura makes tea exactly how Jimmy likes it (he once took a picture of his perfect brew on Laura’s phone so she can colour match it for strength) and because Jimmy noted Laura’s weakness for custard creams and stocks up accordingly.

  Laura Tait is a writer for Shortlist and Stylist magazines and Jimmy Rice is a freelance journalist. Both live in London.

  Follow them on Twitter at @LauraAndJimmy.