by Lindsey Kelk
‘My lab assistant broke a very expensive piece of equipment, buggered three months’ worth of test results and I really don’t want to talk about it,’ she said as Cass picked up the bottle I had just put down and filled it up to the top. Cass and I had already talked. ‘Liv, you’re back, yay. You look nice.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I replied, my eyes dry and sore from all the horrible, horrible crying. ‘I look like shit. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Sunday and an Alsatian had explosive diarrhoea all over the examination room when I tried to give him a rectal exam and – well, we’ll get to the rest.’
‘Good tan though,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Go on, then, what’s the big news that couldn’t possibly wait until tomorrow?’
It was only as she sank half a bottle of wine in one swallow that I realized she was expecting me to announce my engagement.
‘Nothing major,’ I said as Cass, who had already heard the story at least a dozen times since I arrived at the pub, held my hand under the table. ‘Me and Adam broke up.’
Abi picked up her glass, emptied the second half of her glass and put it back down. ‘Well, my dishwasher’s been on the blink for a week, so, you know, we’re all going through stuff right now.’
Determined not to cry in the Bell, I covered my face with my hair and snorted a half laugh, half sob as she bundled me up in a hug. Apart from a brief flirtation with Impulse Vanilla Kisses in Year Seven, Abi never wore perfume, so her hugs always smelled the same. Burying my face in her armpit was almost enough to push me over the edge.
‘He didn’t break up with you,’ Cass said, stroking my back. ‘You’re on a break, that’s not the same thing. Don’t freak out.’
‘I love how you know more about this than I do,’ I said, sniffling as I extricated myself from Abi’s hug. She stroked loose strands of my topknot back into place. ‘Feels a lot like a break-up, Cass. I mean, it’s six thirty on a Wednesday night, there are two open bottles of wine on the table and my friends are telling me not to freak out. That doesn’t paint a scene of everything being hunky-dory, does it?’
‘I didn’t tell you not to freak out,’ Abi said, refilling her glass as I leaned forward to sip from mine without taking it from the table. ‘I’d definitely be freaking out if I were you.’
‘Not helping,’ Cass said with narrowed eyes. ‘Adam told Chris it’s just a break. Chris thinks he’s got cold feet, that’s all, nothing to panic about. Everything will be back to normal by the weekend when he’s calmed down.’
‘Liv, what happened?’ Abi’s phone was flashing with a picture of a half-naked man with ridiculous muscles. She frowned and cancelled the call. ‘I thought you were coming back engaged. I’ve spent all day practising my excited face for when you ask me to be your bridesmaid.’
‘What makes you think I’d ask you to be my bridesmaid?’ I asked, sliding my glass back and forth across the table. ‘And more importantly, who was on the phone? Are you shagging Fabio?’
‘He’s no one. I was warming him up as a wedding date, but if you’re not getting married any time soon, I don’t need to answer that call.’ She tossed her phone into her bag then hid it underneath the table. ‘Seriously now, what’s going on?’
‘Technically Cass is right, we’re on a break,’ I explained, turning over my own phone to check for messages. Nothing. ‘All holiday, Adam kept going on about this amazing restaurant in town, how he’d heard it was so great but we couldn’t get a reservation until the last night, and so obviously, I’m thinking he’s going to propose then. But there we were, on our way out, and then I don’t even know what happened. One minute we’re walking down the beach on our way to a fancy night out, and the next thing I know, we’re in a taxi on our way home. No swanky restaurant, no proposal, not even any last-night-of-a-holiday shag. It was all very confusing.’
‘Chris said Adam said he wants to work out some stuff,’ Cassie said, twisting the wine bottle to check the label. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see: the Bell had two kinds of wine, red and white. We were drinking the white. It was not good. ‘He definitely said you hadn’t broken up.’
‘Chris said that or Adam said that?’ Abi looked distinctly unimpressed.
‘Adam said it to Chris, who then said it to me,’ she clarified, stroking the ends of her sleek, black ponytail. Everything about Cassie Huang was sleek. The word most commonly used to describe her was ‘willowy’ which I especially enjoyed hearing from my mum who had generally referred to her own teenage daughter as ‘sturdy’. And she wondered why I’d gone on the Haribo and Diet Pepsi plan in the first year of university.
‘They had an early dinner at his dad’s house. I saw Chris for, like, ten seconds before I came out.’
‘Sounds like a real keeper,’ Abi said. She’d never been one to mince her words, Abi subscribed to the philosophy of calling a spade a spade. Or a wanker if she deemed it more appropriate.
‘Chris says it’s totally normal,’ Cass declared as they continued to argue over me. It was fine, I was perfectly happy to keep quiet and drink my wine. And their wine. And everyone else on the planet’s wine. ‘Chris says all men go back and forth before they pop the question, even if you don’t know it. Steve Harvey basically says the exact same thing in Think Like a Man.’
Abi gave her a stern look. Abi didn’t care for Cass’s reliance on self-help manuals. Abi really only believed in truly relying on herself. ‘Could you tell Chris to tell Adam that when he has made his mind up do you think he could find the time to tell Liv himself rather than have her wait for it to trickle through you and his brother first?’
‘I’m only telling you what Chris told me,’ she said, her phone fluttering across the table, buzzing against the almost-empty bottle. ‘Speak of the devil, I’ll be back in a minute.’
I half-stood, half-shuffled out of the booth until she could squeeze past, smiling at Mrs Moore, the landlady, as Cass dashed for the door. She smiled back, giving me the once-over as she passed. She’d been serving me since I ordered my first Malibu and Coke at fifteen. If she didn’t like what she saw, she only had herself to blame.
‘Liv, I’m so sorry.’ Abi straightened my collar as I sat back down, her huge green eyes full of concern and just a hint of murderous rage. ‘How are you really?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, raising a hand to wave at Melanie Brookes, my mum’s neighbour, mother of two children and owner of three rabbits and a diabetic cat. There had been a dog as well at one point but he got into a cupboard and ate an Easter egg and there really wasn’t anything anyone could have done about that. ‘I feel sick when I think about it. I just really want Cass to be right, I really want this to be a wobble. Because if it’s not, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Abigail Levinson and I had been friends ever since her dad brought her puppy into the surgery when we were both eleven. I was hanging out there, looking for animals to bother, when a little, skinny, dark-haired girl with Coke-bottle glasses and what I thought was a super cool Mickey Mouse T-shirt walked through the door. She sat down beside me as our respective fathers disappeared into the examination room, looked me in the eye and whispered, in her most serious voice, that the dog was not going to make it. I held her hand in silence until both dads reappeared with the dog who, despite my new friend’s most assured diagnosis, bounded out towards us, happy, healthy and a hundred per cent alive.
After they left, my dad explained Abi had been watching too much Blue Peter and took it upon herself to try to clean her dog’s teeth with her electric toothbrush and an entire tube of Colgate. In the interest of the dog surviving the summer, Dad took her on as his second junior intern (we were only allowed to clean out kennels and feed the cats but we felt terribly important) and we’d been joined at the hip ever since. After we graduated, she’d stayed on at uni to do her PhD and now she was such a super shit-hot veterinary research scientist. Even I didn’t really understand what she did and I was an actual vet. While I was taking pieces of Lego out of the Yo
ungs’ Labrador’s stomach, Abi was curing cancer. Dog cancer, but still, it was impressive. She was Superwoman as far as I was concerned.
‘Sod what Adam wants.’ Abi tucked her short brown hair behind her ears and drew her eyebrows together behind her glasses, still Coke-bottle thick but considerably more stylish than they had been when we were kids. ‘What do you want?’
I looked at her blankly.
‘You, Olivia, what do you want?’ she asked. ‘You do know who I’m talking about? Short, split ends, fiddles with animals for a living?’
‘I haven’t got split ends,’ I muttered, pinching together an inch of hair and holding it up to the light. ‘I don’t want to break up. I want everything back how it was.’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you want things back how they were?’ she asked. ‘It should be an easy question.’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed, busying myself by peeling the label from the wine bottle. ‘This wasn’t my idea. Leave me alone, I’m sad.’
‘Your idea or not, someone needs to set some boundaries before this gets messy,’ she said in the nicest voice she could manage. ‘And that should be you. He doesn’t get to dictate this entire situation, Liv, even if you are going to be back together tomorrow. You need to think about you a little bit. First he decided you were going to get engaged; now he’s decided he wants a break. You need to know what you want.’
‘I want to know what you want,’ I said, nudging her in the shoulder and taking a sip.
‘For you to be happy,’ she replied. ‘And for Mini Eggs to be available all year round.’
‘I don’t want to break up with him,’ I said, slowly pulling on the label, trying to move it in one piece. Life without Adam didn’t seem like an actual possible thing. ‘I can’t even process the thought of it. If he says he needs space, I should just give him space. This seems like a classic rubber band situation to me, don’t you think?’
‘You know I won’t answer that,’ Abi replied, cursing our best friend’s name as the wine bottle label ripped in two. ‘One, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is a shit present, and two, it’s full of shit advice. Cassie should be shot for giving it to you in the first place.’
‘Sorry, it was Chris.’ Cass bounced back into the booth and grabbed her glass. I shuffled around, glad of her interruption. ‘Gus was crying but he was just hungry. I’m going to head back soon, I don’t like leaving him alone for too long.’
‘Chris or the baby?’ I asked Cass.
‘Liv, don’t be mean,’ Abi admonished. ‘Surely you don’t expect Chris, a grown man, to be able to take care of his own child for more than forty-five minutes at a time?’
‘It’s not the same as asking him to record Gogglebox,’ Cass replied tartly. ‘Gus gets fussy when I’m not there at night. Sometimes he won’t settle.’
‘Chris or the baby?’ I asked Abi.
‘We should meet at mine some time,’ she said, throwing cardboard coasters in our general direction. ‘Then I won’t have to run off so early. Plus, we’ve got much better wine. You two have to come over more often, Gus barely even knows his Aunt Abi.’
‘He doesn’t know anyone, Cass, he’s five months old.’ Abi swirled her wine, coating her glass and taking a sniff. ‘And I’ve Stockholm Syndrome’d myself on this wine. Whenever I drink wine anywhere else, my brain doesn’t recognize it as the same substance.’
‘That would be because all other wine is good,’ Cass explained. ‘And this is very bad.’
‘Cass only drinks the finest wines, these day,’ I explained, ignoring the look on her face and topping off her glass. ‘Cass married up.’
No one was going to say it but our weekly meet-ups had been much more like monthly meet-ups over the last year or so. I understood sitting around a dank old pub was hardly the most alluring idea to a pregnant woman but Cass had started making her excuses well before Gus was so much as a twinkle in Chris’s eye and I hadn’t realized how long it had been since we were all in the same place until I really needed to be there. I glanced over at Abi and wondered how many times I’d cancelled on her to hang out with Adam instead.
‘If you didn’t want me to marry your boyfriend’s brother, you shouldn’t have introduced me to him,’ she said, knocking back her drink and sticking out her tongue. ‘It’s your fault.’
‘It’s true,’ Abi agreed. ‘You should have introduced him to me first so I could bone him then never speak to him again. I’m much better at alienating the opposite sex than Cass.’
‘You just haven’t met the right man,’ Cass said, making me splutter into my wine glass. Having a baby had made her brave. ‘You work too hard and you don’t give relationships a chance.’
‘You’re so right,’ Abi framed her face with her hands and blinked her big, anime eyes. ‘Teach me everything you know, oh wise married one, help me be like you.’
‘I’m going home,’ Cass said, ignoring our loud, squawking pleas for her to stay. ‘I know, it’s early but I’m knackered and I want to put Gus to bed. You should think yourself lucky I’m here at all. If my grandmother had her way, I’d still be housebound. She thinks I bring evil spirits back into the house every time I go outside.’
‘That’s not a very nice way to describe me and Liv,’ Abi said, shaking her head.
‘Isn’t your nan from Reading?’ I asked, slapping Abi’s leg.
‘She’s being ridiculous,’ Cass nodded, opening a text and smiling to herself before showing the two of us. It was a photo of Gus and Chris in the bath and the bubbles weren’t covering nearly as much as I would like. ‘Mum said she wasn’t like this at all when I was born but she’s gone crazy with all the old Chinese traditions this time. She doesn’t even like Chris holding him. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to get out of bed for the first month at all.’
‘Can I stay in bed for a month if I have a baby with a Chinese father?’ Abi suddenly perked up while I made the expected cooing noises. Gus was a cute baby, if you were into babies. ‘Do you have any single cousins? Uncles? Would your mum lend me your dad for an hour or so?’
Ignoring Abi, Cass gave me a hug before shuffling out of the booth.
‘Don’t get too upset about this, Livvy, it’s going to be fine,’ she promised. ‘Let Adam have his mad half hour and I bet you anything, you’ll be back together with a ring on your finger before the end of the year.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, scratching at an indeterminate green stain on the hem of my shirt. Hmm. Gross. ‘But do me a favour? Please don’t go home and tell Chris everything we just talked about? It’s not like I don’t appreciate you trying to help but I don’t want him reporting back to Adam.’
‘I won’t say a word,’ she said, a look of surprise on her face. ‘You know I wouldn’t.’
‘Because you’ve done such a good job of keeping secrets so far?’ Abi pointed out. ‘You’re the one who told Liv about the ring, you’re the one who told her he was going to propose in Mexico, and all you’ve done tonight is spill what Adam has told Chris about this situation.’
‘Sisters before misters.’ Cass brushed off the indisputable accusations and rolled her eyes. ‘I tell you what he says but I don’t tell him what you say. Promise you won’t sit here all night and get upset.’
‘Brownie guide promise,’ I said, holding up three fingers.
‘Wrong hand,’ Abi whispered.
‘Whatever,’ I muttered, burying my face in my wine glass. ‘Bye, Cass.’
‘Bye Cass,’ Abi said, stretching out for her own hug. ‘Say hello to Chris for me.’
No matter how much they bickered, they loved each other really.
‘I honestly don’t know what to believe,’ I said as the door swung shut on Cass and Abi poured the remnants of her wine into my glass. ‘Chris is such an arse to Adam most of the time. Why would he pour his heart out to him?’
‘Because he’s his brother,’ Abi replied. ‘You’re an only child, chick, you don’t get it. You ha
te each other one day, you’re giving them a kidney the next.’
‘You gave your brother a kidney?’
‘Clearly not,’ she said, patting me on the top of the head. ‘I was making a point. I just mean, that’s how it is with siblings.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I poked my finger through a tiny hole in the velvet seat covering. This place really was starting to look tired. ‘Chris is always such a bully, always making fun of Adam for leaving law school then going on about how well his own company is doing.’
‘Probably just insecure,’ Abi rationalized. ‘Does Adam have a bigger dong?’
‘I really haven’t thought about it.’ I washed away the very thought of Chris’s penis with a mouthful of wine. ‘Adam’s taller, he’s definitely better looking and he’s a hundred per cent cleverer. I don’t know what Cass was thinking, I really don’t.’
‘She was thinking she’d marry a rich dude and get her parents off her back,’ she replied. ‘Let’s be honest about it, all Cass ever wanted was to get married, have a kid and not worry about anything else, ever again. Now she’s got that, so good for her.’
I pushed my finger all the way inside the seat until the tiny hole wasn’t so tiny any more.
‘Bit harsh,’ I said. Abi’s expression suggested she stood by her assessment. ‘Cass is more old-fashioned than we are. She does love him, I think. And he definitely loves her.’
Abi picked up the second bottle of wine and refilled her glass. Abi had an iron constitution, nothing could put her down, but I was a complete lightweight. One very full glass in and I was already light-headed. I held my hand over my glass before she could give me a refill.
‘I can’t,’ I said sadly. There was nothing I would have liked more than to fall into a white wine coma as soon as I got home. ‘Tomorrow is spay and neuter day, probably shouldn’t have a hangover because I’m going to end up doing all the surgeries. Dad’s been really off it lately.’
‘Is he OK?’ Abi asked. ‘I can’t believe he’s going to be sixty-five, it doesn’t seem like two minutes since his fiftieth birthday.’