What My Best Friend Did

by Lucy Dawson

  We both glanced over at them. Tom had his hand in the small of Gretchen’s back, which made me clutch my glass a little tighter. Gretchen was excitedly telling a story to a small audience who were hanging off her every word. She was all in black, but showing quite a lot of cleavage and leg. I actually thought she only just looked the right side of slutty, but was prepared to admit I might be very biased. ‘I think he’s very happy with her, yes,’ I answered, my voice cracked and brittle. Tom must have felt us staring, because he looked over and smiled, raising a glass in our direction.

  ‘That is bad for me,’ Paulo said reflectively and then looked a little shifty. ‘I find I still like her a bit, you know? Seeing her again after . . .’ He trailed off, but I knew exactly what he was referring to. ‘Maybe it’s good for me that she is not going to be here any more. I will lose my heart somewhere else.’

  Oh for fuck’s sake. I stared at him in disbelief and found myself rather violently needing to be somewhere that a member of the Gretchen fan club wasn’t. I put my empty glass down unsteadily and shoved through the throng to get to my room. Opening the door, I found two people I didn’t know snogging on my bed, like teenagers. They’d actually gone to the trouble of lifting my boxes off it. ‘Can you can go somewhere else, please?’ I said. ‘You’re in my room.’

  The girl sighed, as if I was doing it just to annoy them, and I wanted to hit her for it. She sat up, adjusted her top and gave me a filthy look as she got up and stalked out. The bloke just muttered ‘Sorry’ and pulled the door shut behind him. I sat down on the end of my bed and felt like I was falling apart from within. Drunken tears welled up and it was only because my door opened gently and I looked up, embarrassed to be caught crying, that they were prevented from spilling over.

  Tom came in, clutching a beer can. He was wearing a fiercely fashionable top I didn’t recognise and jeans over sneakers. He looked good in them, just not very comfortable. I suspected Gretchen had chosen them.

  ‘You’re crying,’ he said and his face creased with a concerned frown. ‘I knew this wasn’t a good idea – I couldn’t have done it if I had been you. I’m not trying to big myself up but . . . it’s just too weird, isn’t it?’

  I nodded and a tear jumped out, weaving unsteadily down my cheek.

  He sighed and pushed the door to. It drifted back open an inch as he came over and crouched down in front of me, setting the beer can carefully down on the carpet.

  ‘Please don’t cry, Al.’

  But that just made it worse.

  He awkwardly took my hand and said, ‘I thought you were remarkably cool and calm about me saying I was moving in with her.’

  And because I was drunk, I confessed, ‘You didn’t actually tell me you were. You just said you’d done a lot of thinking, knew what you wanted and then asked me to move back in here.’

  He looked totally puzzled and then, as the realisation hit him, horrified. He exhaled and said, ‘Oh Alice! Oh my God. You thought . . .’

  I shook my head quickly. ‘No, no. Please don’t. It was me! I misunderstood.’ But I found myself suddenly unable to let go of his hand.

  His legs were clearly uncomfy, just crouching, so he knelt down instead, facing me.

  ‘When you were saying all that stuff about what you wanted,’ I said, the words rushing out because if I slowed down, I might actually realise the ramifications of what I was about to say and stop. ‘About not holding back, living in the moment and all that crap. You were talking about her, weren’t you? Not me?’

  He nodded slowly and I smiled through my tears. ‘How embarrassed am I?’ I tried a laugh, but I wasn’t fooling either of us.

  He gazed at me and I couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. He looked so sweet and earnest and just concerned about me that I felt my heart tighten painfully, which was followed by an impulsive, drunken and reckless desire to just kiss him. So I did.

  I felt his lips, warm and dry, and for a second they instinctively moved against mine. We had, after all, been in similar positions many times before and I think, just for a moment, his body remembered a point in the past when his heart would have responded and his hands would have moved gratefully to me. But then . . . nothing happened. He didn’t kiss back. It was like bumping into someone in a bus queue – an invasion of personal space that makes you step back and instinctively say sorry. I felt it and broke away. At first I looked at him in shock and dismay, then I glanced over his shoulder.

  And saw Gretchen, visible only through the crack of the door, just staring at us, rigid with shock.

  She and I held each other’s gaze for what must have been no more than seconds, but it felt like eternity. I watched as her eyes dropped to the floor and she moved silently away. Just vanished.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tom said to me in astonishment. Utterly bewildered he sat back, away from me. ‘What was that?’

  He stood up and raked his hands through his hair.

  ‘I just wanted to,’ I said.

  His arms fell down by his side loosely. ‘Oh please don’t do this to me, Alice. Not now. It’s not fair. I was happy . . . I am happy! All my stuff is there. I—’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be!’ I said quickly. ‘You could go and get it all tomorrow. Be back here by lunchtime and it could all go back to how it was!’ But as I said the words and heard them on the loose in the air around us, I wasn’t even sure I meant them.

  Tom caught his breath and looked at me. ‘Go back to how it was?’ he said finally.

  I hesitated and then nodded hastily. That was what I wanted – wasn’t it?

  ‘But how do I know there won’t be another Bailey?’

  ‘I promise there won’t be! I love you, Tom!’ I said passionately, and yet was utterly astonished to hear myself say it. ‘I know you love me too.’

  ‘I did, very much indeed,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Then surely you could again?’ I pleaded.

  ‘Alice, I worked so hard to fall out of love with you. It was the worst time of my life . . .’ He trailed off. He looked like he was wrestling internally with something, a frown rushed across his face and he said, ‘Tell me this, then. If Bailey walked in here now, said he wanted you back and you had to choose between us, who would win?’

  I stared at him, thrown by imagining the scenario, picturing Bailey in the room. ‘That would never happen,’ I said.

  ‘But if it did – who would you choose?’

  My stomach knotted painfully and I didn’t say automatically ‘You’, because my heart was racing at the thought of Bailey standing right there in front of me, wanting me again. ‘You,’ I managed eventually.

  He looked at me and then closed his eyes briefly. ‘You have no idea how much I imagined this happening,’ he said, opening them and looking at the floor. ‘But now it is . . .’

  There was the longest silence in the world. All I had heard was the ‘but’ and, suspecting where it was leading, it only served to convince me completely that I wanted Tom more than anything.

  He looked up at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Alice, but I think it is too late. If I wasn’t seeing her, then maybe I could try to trust you again . . . but I am. And I’m happy.’

  ‘But you’ve only been going out for—’ I began.

  ‘I know, but she’s fun. We have a good time. I know she’s not without her faults, but I know how she feels about me and I think . . . I think I’d like to see where it could go.’

  I closed my eyes as his words hit me. I’d offered him me – and he’d chosen her.

  ‘I should go,’ he said. ‘I’m so, so sorry that you misunderstood the moving thing. I never meant to hurt you. Honestly.’

  I nodded silently, doing my best to hold the tears back until he’d left the room. Seconds later I jumped as yet another pissed couple banged into the door and fell through it giggling, slopping some beer on the carpet before taking a look at me, then each other, and dissolving into more giggles, blurting an insincere ‘Sorry!’

  I didn’t wan
t to be around other people’s happiness a minute longer. I jumped up, grabbed my keys and a cardigan and pushed through the crowd. I couldn’t look at Tom, who was back in the sitting room, glancing around having been ambushed into conversation by an intense-looking short bloke. Presumably he was looking for Gretchen, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  I squeezed past people on the stairs and stepped over a passed-out girl on a pile of coats, before opening the front door. I slipped round the side of the flat into the garden, a long, thin stretch of overgrown grass penned in by a rickety fence, gasping as the cold air sucked into my lungs. There was a gate at the back, leading on to an alley that ran behind the row of houses, little offshoots branching into other people’s gardens.

  I stood there in the dark and the cold, looking up towards the house, and closed my swollen eyes, feeling the wind bite through the loose knit of my cardigan, making me shiver. So this was what rock bottom felt like. Then I jumped as a voice behind me said, ‘Hello.’

  I snapped my eyes open and turned around. Gretchen was standing there, wrapped in a coat, smoking a fag contemplatively and clutching a beer can with white fingers, her hair blowing across her face. The gate behind her was ajar and her make-up was a bit smudged; her lips in particular. She was staring very intently at me. She reached up and pulled the hair deftly away from her eyes. ‘You’ll catch your death out here like that, Al,’ she said and sucked on her fag. The end glowed furiously for a moment, then dulled. ‘Good party, isn’t it?’

  ‘You saw,’ I said, suddenly feeling frightened.

  ‘You know I fucking saw!’ she burst. ‘All these shitty silent moods I’ve put up with. After everything I’ve done for you!’

  I gasped, starting to sober up. ‘After everything you’ve done? You got that right! You didn’t just meet him in New York and fall in love! You told him I’d cheated on him and then you sought him out and tracked him down! You might be able to fool everyone else – not me.’

  ‘Oh, here we go. Alice’s conspiracy theory,’ she scoffed. ‘Don’t be such a twat – of course I didn’t! Just how manipulative do you think I am? He was the one good thing I had, Alice. The one good thing, as well you know. I hope you’ll be very happy together. Fuck you both. You deserve each other.’ She dropped the fag and ground it into the long grass, the ripping sound as the blades gave way under her foot made me feel sick. ‘I might have started seeing your ex, but you kissed my boyfriend – so don’t you dare talk morals to me. I don’t want to be your fucking friend any more.’ She started to walk past me up to the house.

  ‘He chose you anyway,’ I said bitterly. She stopped and turned round. Her face had gone absolutely white with shock. ‘What?’ she said. ‘But I saw you kissing!’

  ‘You saw me kiss him.’

  She swayed on the spot and her hand flew to her mouth. ‘But he was holding your hand!’

  ‘Because I was upset. When he asked me to move back in I didn’t realise he was moving out to live with you. He told me that he’s happy with you, that he wants to see where it goes,’ I said dully.

  ‘Shit.’ She laughed in disbelief and bit her lip. ‘Oh shit.’ She looked up at the sky and then said slowly, ‘You have no idea what you’ve done!’ She shook her head. ‘FUCK, Alice!’ she shouted. Then she twisted her body and threw her beer can against the fence as she released a pent-up shriek. It jerked liquid everywhere on impact. ‘You stupid bitch,’ she whispered, her bottom lip beginning to tremble as her face creased and she let out a sob. She covered her mouth with a hand and ran back to the party.

  I was utterly baffled by her reaction. She’d got him – everything she wanted. I just stood there motionless in the cold. But then I heard a movement behind me, like something shifting position and trying not to be heard. I spun round and looked at the gate, which Gretchen had left half open. Was there was someone in the alley? Had someone been there with her? What had they been doing back there?

  ‘Hello?’ I called, sounding braver than I felt. ‘Who’s there?’

  There was nothing. No response.

  I took a step towards the gate. My heart started to thump. Someone was there, for sure. I reached out, put a shaking hand on the latch and pulled the gate wide open in a sudden, abrupt move, slamming it into the creaky fence that divided us from next door. It juddered back on rusty hinges. That and the sound of my breath was all I could hear.

  I stepped into the alley and looked up the thin passage. It was lined with old metal bins, weeds, bits of glass and the odd empty crisp packet. Very tentatively, now holding my breath, I took two steps up and glanced left into one of the offshoots. There were two more bins in a dark, deep alcove, one with a decaying plastic lid hanging half off it and the other with a rubbish bag next to it that had been chewed by foxes or some other animal. I could see half a Weetabix packet sticking out of a corner, with a mouldy used teabag glued to the side that had gone crisp round the stained edges. But no sign of anything else.

  I turned right and nearly screamed as something moved in the dark shadows, darting back behind a large sheet of corrugated roof that had been abandoned and propped against a wall. Was it a foot? Was someone hiding behind it? I froze, sick and silenced with fear, unable to bring myself to look but also too terrified to move. Then I nearly fainted as a cat shot out and darted through a gap in a fence, flattening its body down before disappearing into a garden. It must have been its movements among the rubbish that I had heard.

  I gathered my cardigan round me and scurried back to the flat, but having plunged back into the relative safety of the party, I realised Gretchen and Tom were nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I heard nothing from either of them after the party, but then, I didn’t really expect to. What more was there to say? I thought about them constantly, though, and was eaten up by imagining them happily settling into Gretchen’s flat as they got ready for their first Christmas together. Having lived there myself, I could picture the scene all too well.

  My only diversion was Frances giving birth to a baby boy in the second week of December. I cried copiously, clutching my new nephew to me. I stroked his small, dark, furry head as he peered curiously up at me through scowling dark eyes. He was beautiful but, to my shame, I wasn’t just crying with happiness.

  ‘Fuck, Alice, get a grip,’ Frances said, sitting up in her bed with an exaggerated gasp of pain, as her husband Adam placed a cup of tea at her bedside and anxiously adjusted the pillows behind her. ‘It wasn’t you that just almost needed stitches. Try not to hold him so tightly. He’ll overheat.’

  ‘Have you got a name for him yet?’ I said, wiping my eyes, expecting to hear something dreadful and festive like Noel.

  ‘I like Bailey, actually.’ Frances looked at the baby. ‘You know, like that travel bloke you were seeing?’ I felt my bottom lip start to give way again. ‘But Adam says it’s tacky and too modern. And I don’t expect you really want to be reminded of that guy for ever, do you?’ She patted my hand sympathetically and then eased back on the pillow slowly. ‘Adam wants to call him after his father anyway, so Frederick it is. Alice, please . . . you’re actually soaking him. Adam, can you take him from her and dry his head? He’ll get cradle cap if he gets all damp.’

  Over Christmas itself, Frances completely dominated all proceedings – it was like having Mary and the baby Jesus himself staying at the house. There were nappies, bottles and muslin cloths strewn everywhere, to my mum’s tight-lipped irritation, but on the upside everyone was so busy catering to Frances’ every whim and cooing over Freddie, no one got on my case about why I was so quiet and withdrawn. I was pretty much left to my own devices, except for the odd moment of humiliating agony. At Christmas lunch, Mum – apron straining and face the same colour as her wilting paper hat – looked confusedly at the table while, bored, we waited to be told where to sit.

  ‘I’ve done something funny,’ she said, looking round the place settings, perplexed. ‘What’s not right? Adam and Frances, Philip, m
e and John, Mum and Dad . . .’ She counted through in her head. ‘But this is exactly what I did last year and it all worked. One at each end, three down one side, four down the other . . . how am I one over?’

  ‘Well Tom isn’t here, is he?’ said Frances, scowling at Mum as she gathered Freddie from Adam’s arms. ‘Tactful, Mum.’ Everyone looked at me awkwardly and my gaze dropped to the floor. ‘You had him next to Grandpa last year. It’s bloody hot in here, you know. Freddie looks very uncomfortable.’

  ‘That’s because he’s got a hat on, Frances,’ said Mum. ‘I’m not sure you’re right actually; didn’t Tom arrive after lunch? Oh no – that’s it! I remember now, he brought that vast thing of champagne and we all had it as a lovely toast, didn’t we? Anyway,’ she said hurriedly, catching sight of my face as Phil visibly nudged her, ‘never mind about last year. You come and sit next to me, Alice, so I can feed you up a bit. Let’s all sit down.’

  New Year’s Eve wasn’t much better. I sat dully in front of the TV, wedged in next to Granny on repeat loop in my ear, saying over and over again, ‘The BBC does this sort of thing terribly well, doesn’t it?’ while they all sipped at their sherries and Grandpa said, ‘Isn’t that the nice girl from the M&S adverts? I didn’t know she could play the piano too. What a talent she is.’

  As the fireworks went off over Big Ben and it chimed in 2009, I wondered where in the world Bailey was, who he would be kissing . . . and what glamorous party Tom and Gretchen were at. I pictured them in black tie, laughing and clutching champagne stems, with a large group of witty friends.

  ‘Now then, my little Alice, changing guards at Buckingham Palace,’ said Grandpa kindly, cutting across my thoughts, ‘don’t be sad. You come and give me a kiss. You wait, my love, this will be your year.’ He wrapped me in a hug, spilling his sherry all over the carpet as Mum suppressed a tut and quickly grabbed for a tea towel.