Brand New Friend

by Mike Gayle

  Two

  ‘Look,’ spat Mr Clarkson, menacingly, ‘I’m only going to say this one more time. Are you going to replace the broken toilet in my bathroom or am I going to have to take matters into my own hands?’

  It was Monday afternoon, a month after Jo’s argument with Sean. She was at her place of work, the Cresta Community Housing Association (South Manchester), being shouted at by one of her tenants.

  It was without doubt her greatest regret that she had ever accepted the temporary post as housing officer ten years ago when she had been a new graduate – greater than having allowed her brother to ‘shoot’ an apple off her head with a dart when she was twelve, greater than walking out of the exam room ten minutes into her second A-level history paper because it was too hard, thereby ensuring that she got a U, greater than selling half of her record collection for a hundred pounds to raise funds when she was a student for a week in Turkey with her mates.

  As she gazed at Mr Clarkson it dawned on her how much she hated this job. She hated it with a passion – with everything she had to give and a little more. The only thing that stopped her getting up and walking out was that she had nowhere else to go.

  ‘Mr Clarkson—’ said Jo, patiently.

  ‘What?’ he snapped.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me this again because, as I said to you when you arrived this morning and the last eleven times that you’ve called, I can’t send anyone out to repair your broken toilet until the requisite paperwork has been filled in. Since you refuse to tell me how your toilet was damaged, my hands are tied.’

  ‘What does it matter how it got broken?’

  ‘It matters to the paperwork.’

  ‘It’s your paperwork,’ he said, ‘you fill it out. But let me warn you, if someone from Housing doesn’t get themselves round to my place and fix my toilet soon there’s going to be trouble.’

  Jo didn’t doubt this for a second. Nine months ago when the Benefits Agency had threatened to stop Mr Clarkson’s income support, on the grounds that he’d been spotted working on a market stall in the city centre, he had come to the conclusion that someone at the housing-association office had ‘grassed’ him up and come into the office screaming about how he was going to ‘get’ everyone. Three days later a masked man, who was clearly Mr Clarkson in a bright orange balaclava, had thrown a large chunk of masonry through the association’s office window, then hurled a barrage of expletives at the staff before making his escape. The police couldn’t do anything because Mr Clarkson persuaded a few of his friends to give him a watertight alibi. With no forensic evidence to tie him to the scene, and only association staff’s eye-witness reports that the man responsible ‘looked, acted, dressed and sounded like Mr Clarkson in a ski mask’, it was depressingly inevitable that he would get away with it.

  ‘This is pathetic!’ snarled Mr Clarkson.

  Jo stared at him blankly. She knew that Mr Clarkson had smashed his own toilet on purpose because it had happened several times before. No one could break toilets quite like Mr Clarkson, who had had two new ones in the last year alone. She was aware that he knew that she knew he’d smashed up his own toilet. She couldn’t understand why he insisted on continuing this charade. Perhaps it gave him something to do.

  ‘Is that all, Mr Clarkson?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll be hearing from my solicitor,’ he barked, then kicked one of the grey plastic waiting-room chairs against the wall. He picked it up by the back rest as if he was going to throw it at the security screens, but snorted and let it go. It tumbled across the floor and came to rest under Jo’s window. When he left the office Jo, and the queue of people waiting to see her, breathed a sigh of relief.

  Today can’t get any worse, she thought.

  Then the phone rang.

  ‘Cresta Community Housing Association,’ said Jo, robotically.

  ‘It’s me,’ said a voice she recognised as Sean’s. ‘You ought to know that I’ve sort of moved out.’

  Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could somebody ‘sort of move out? When she’d gone to work that morning she’d been cohabiting with her boyfriend and now he was telling her that some time during the day he had taken it upon himself to de-habit or un-habit, or whatever the word was for a boyfriend moving his stuff out without telling his significant other. What was worse was that he hadn’t even cleared his throat before he made the announcement. He’d just said it.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ asked Sean, when Jo didn’t reply. ‘I said I’ve moved out.’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I mean exactly what I’ve said. I’ve moved my things out of the house.’

  ‘You’re leaving me?’

  ‘Things aren’t working between us, are they? We need to take time out from the relationship to find out what we really want from life, don’t you think? Surely you must see that.’

  Jo knew that Sean was trying to persuade her to agree that their relationship was over. But she didn’t want it to be over.

  ‘I don’t see it like that,’ she countered. ‘Not at all. I can’t believe that after all the time we’ve been together you’ve got so little respect for me that you’re telling me our relationship is finished over the phone . . . when you’ve already moved your stuff out.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘This is so typical of you.’

  ‘I didn’t want a scene.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ she snapped. ‘You’d like everything to be clean and clinical. Well, you can’t just slip out of my life like that. You can’t do it to me!’

  ‘It might not be permanent. I just think we need to get our heads round what’s going on between us. We need to get some perspective because if we don’t we’re dead in the water.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Davey’s going to put me up.’

  ‘I hope the two of you will be very happy together.’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that,’ said Sean. ‘It’s for the best.’

  ‘If it’s for the best,’ she said, ‘then why am I so upset and why are you so relieved?’

  Sean remained silent.

  ‘Don’t move out,’ said Jo, desperately, as tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Please don’t. I know things haven’t been very good for a while and it’s all my fault, but I promise you I’ll change. I really will. But don’t move out! Not even for a night!’ She was clutching at straws now. ‘You’ll hate it at Davey’s. He’s never got any food in and his place is a pig-sty. Stay with me and we’ll work everything out, okay?’

  ‘No,’ said Sean. ‘It’s not okay. I’ll speak to you in a few weeks.’

  And then he put down the phone.

  Three

  Jo had spent the last two days crying and was now scrolling through the numbers in her mobile phone’s address book, looking for a friend in whom she might confide. Forty-seven numbers were stored on the memory. When she had discounted those relating to parents or relatives (seven), she did the same for those relating to Sean (four), his friends (five) and his friends’ girlfriends, with whom she spent most of her time (three), friends from school she hadn’t seen in years (three), people from work (eight). Domino’s Pizza (one), and Rail Enquiries (one). The remaining fifteen (home, work, and the occasional mobile) belonged to Liza, Vicky, Sonia, Karen, Gina and Kerry – friends from Jo’s days at what had been Manchester Polytechnic. The six had been the centre of her social life for a long time but once she had got together with Sean they had faded away. Jo hadn’t been in touch with five of them for nearly a year, and when she removed them that left her with just one friend in the world: Kerry Morrison. And Jo wasn’t sure that Kerry even liked her any more.

  ‘Hello?’ said Kerry, croakily. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Kerry, it’s me,’ said Jo.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ said Kerry, abruptly, ‘let me guess. This is about you and Sean, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘You’ve split up, ha
ven’t you?’

  ‘You’re right. I’m that predictable, aren’t I? I don’t call you for weeks on end –’

  ‘More like months.’

  ‘– and now that Sean’s gone the first person I call is you. I know I’ve been the worst friend in the world over the past few months—’

  ‘More like years.’

  ‘Okay, years—’

  ‘In fact you’ve been the worst friend ever since you started going out with Sean.’

  ‘I know—’

  ‘No,’ snapped Kerry, ‘you don’t know at all. And you certainly don’t know anything about me. Were you aware that Sammy had died?’

  ‘No,’ said Jo, recalling the tortoiseshell cat that Kerry had owned for as long as Jo had known her.

  ‘I’m really sorry to hear that, but—’

  ‘Or that I’m an auntie now?’ interrupted Kerry.

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Or that I got promoted at work?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Jo. ‘I don’t know anything about your life, do I?’

  ‘You haven’t returned a single one of my calls in the last six months,’ said Kerry. ‘Not one.’

  ‘I know I—’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Jo,’ said Kerry, ‘but now is not a good time to talk.’ And with that she hung up.

  With tears in her eyes and the dialling tone in her ear Jo looked around her bedroom as if she was seeing it for the first time. It was like a crime scene. Everything was as she had found it when she got home on the day Sean had moved out. Both wardrobe doors were open, revealing a gaping hole among her clothes where Sean’s had hung. Next to the wardrobe, the bottom two drawers in the chest from the same IKEA range were half open and empty. The table on Sean’s side of the bed had nothing on it but dust marking the outlines of his clock-radio, the pile of paperbacks he’d been reading and the bedside lamp they had bought two summers ago during a sale at the Pier in the Trafford Centre. She was just about to begin crying again when the phone rang. ‘Hello,’ she said, hoping it was Sean.

  ‘It’s me,’ said a female voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kerry. ‘I shouldn’t have hung up on you like that.’

  ‘I should be apologising to you,’ said Jo. ‘I’ve been the worst friend in the world.’

  ‘Some of the girls are getting together next Thursday night at BlueBar in Chorlton,’ said Kerry, briskly. ‘I’m sure you’d be welcome to come.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. They’re always asking after you.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘I’ll come by yours and pick you up. How does eight sound?’

  ‘Great. I’ll see you then.’

  Four

  It was just after nine o’clock and Jo was sitting at the table in BlueBar surrounded by her old college friends. Over the last hour she had heard everyone’s news: Liza and her boyfriend Craig were engaged and getting married the following summer; Vicky and her long-term partner, Roger, were three months pregnant; Sonia and her husband, Ivan, had just bought a four-bedroom house in Didsbury that needed extensive renovation; Gina and her boyfriend, Dimitri, were planning to sell their house, buy a new one in Bradford near her parents and then go travelling for a year; and Karen was applying for the deputy-headship of her primary school and, with her partner, John, was planning to buy a three-bedroom house in Fallowfield. Jo was the only one at the table who was single.

  ‘So what’s new with you, Jo?’ asked Karen, having reached the end of her job-promotion/house-buying saga.

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Jo.

  ‘And how are things with Sean?’

  ‘Not too good,’ said Jo, looking at Kerry and wondering why she hadn’t primed them not to ask. Kerry looked back at her apologetically and winced as she mouthed, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You haven’t split up, have you?’ asked Vicky.

  ‘Not officially,’ said Jo, avoiding all eye-contact, ‘but he has sort of moved out.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ sympathised Liza.

  ‘He says he needs time,’ added Jo.

  ‘Why do men always think they need time?’ asked Sonia. ‘They’re supposed to be great decision-makers and leaders, yet when it comes to relationships they can’t make up their minds about anything.’

  ‘How long were the two of you together?’ asked Gina.

  ‘Five years,’ said Jo, and her friends blanched.

  ‘Does anyone want another drink?’ asked Kerry, diverting their attention. Everyone nodded, so she took their orders and looked at Jo expectantly.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Jo, and stood up.

  ‘Thanks.’

  By the time they had returned with two gin-and-tonics and a bottle of red wine the others were suggesting names for Vicky’s baby. Kerry slipped into the conversation, offering up her favourites: Leon for a boy and Clarissa for a girl. Jo couldn’t think of any names she liked and, to make matters worse, couldn’t imagine ever having children. She had felt out of the loop all evening and now she felt invisible too.

  The conversation soon moved off in a different direction (house prices in Chorlton and Didsbury) but instead of joining in, Jo sat back to observe the table. These women weren’t the people she remembered. They were strangers. And it was all her fault.

  She hadn’t meant to stop being friends with any of them. It had just happened. It was a weakness in her that she had known of since she was at school. She had always been desperate to be liked by the right people. When she was seven, they had been the pretty, popular girls, like Harriet Jones, Serena Gill and Stephanie Mills. The wrong people were her best friends, Lizzy Furnish, with her lazy eye, and Chloe Woodall, who was constantly afflicted with bad haircuts. Later on, at secondary school, the right people were the beautiful and popular Tina Osbourne, Tracey Matthews and Josie Barton; the wrong ones were Chloe Woodall, who still had bad haircuts, and Diane Miller, who was so extraordinarily tall for a fourteen-year-old that she was often mistaken by younger kids for a teacher.

  It hadn’t been until sixth-form college that the right people had changed sex. Ten weeks before her eighteenth birthday Jo had met and fallen in love with Adrian Boateng. He was her first proper boyfriend, and the happiness she felt from the sense of completeness he gave her was so overwhelming that, within a month, she had stopped seeing her friends. The wrong people – her new sixth-form college friends: Vivien McCarthy, Sarah Coe and Shelagh Prideaux – all tried to tell her that what she was doing was wrong but Jo wouldn’t listen. At first she justified it with the idea that if they had fallen in love with boys as good-looking as Adrian they, too, would be spending every second of the day either with him or thinking about him. It didn’t matter to her that half the time she was with Adrian his friends, Jamie, Rich and Dom, were there too. When, one by one, they too acquired girlfriends and when Adrian did boy things – like playing football, reading music magazines or listening to his Walkman – she had other girls to talk to. They formed a separate friendship of their own – which Jo’s old friend Vivien McCarthy labelled ‘The Girlfriends of Ade, Jamie, Rich and Dom’ and Shelagh Prideaux referred to, more pithily, as ‘The Four Stooges’. Jo and Adrian split up a month before he went to university in London because they didn’t want to do the Long-distance Thing. Jo’s friendship with Adrian’s friends’ girlfriends had long been on the wane as members came and went, and as she gradually came to realise that they weren’t really her friends anyway – convenient though they might be. She spent the month before her degree course began pining for Adrian but mostly for the friends she had abandoned at the sixth-form college who no longer returned her calls.

  All that time, she thought now, and all those friends, but I still haven’t learned a single lesson.

  Jo excused herself from the table, took her bag and went outside to call Sean on her mobile.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Jo.

  ‘I was going to call you,’ he said coolly.

  ‘Well, I’ve saved
you the effort. It’s nearly two weeks since you moved out and that’s more than enough time for you to sort out your head. We need to meet up and talk through this mess once and for all.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow – say, nine o’clock in the Lazy Fox in Chorlton? It’s quiet in there.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Jo. ‘The Lazy Fox tomorrow at nine.’

  Rob talks

  Rob didn’t know what to do for the best. Through no fault of his own he was now sitting in a small room in a quiet pub, attempting to have a pint and do the crossword, while a woman he’d met only once before was sitting not far from him crying her eyes out. What exactly was the etiquette here? Was he supposed to walk over and comfort her – maybe tell her there were plenty more fish in the sea? Pretend to do his crossword to save her from embarrassment? Everything he came up with made him feel so uncomfortable that he decided that the best he could do was nothing. After all, she hadn’t addressed him directly when she’d said, ‘I feel so stupid.’ She’d said it in a general way. Rob was pretty sure that, had the room been empty, she would still have said it. He tried to feel relieved at this but failed. The fact was the room wasn’t empty. He was there. And even though he didn’t know the woman in tears very well, he still knew her, so doing nothing wasn’t an option.

  Rob took a deep breath. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  The woman looked up, apparently bewildered that the room’s only other occupant was addressing her.

  ‘It’s you,’ she said unevenly.

  ‘I’m Rob . . . and you’re Jo, aren’t you? And, well I don’t mean to bother you – I’ll leave you alone, if you’d rather – if you want to be left with your thoughts and all that.’ He held up his paper to show her that he could amuse himself. ‘I was doing the crossword and having a pint and I can go back to doing that. I can even sit next door if you like – just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’

  Jo cleared her throat and blew her nose on a tissue. ‘It’s just . . . I feel really stupid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I threw Sean’s pint over him.’

  ‘I take it Sean’s your boyfriend?’