The Third Wheel

by Michael J. Ritchie

  That was the one secret I kept from Lara – she believes that I lost my virginity to my next girlfriend, Clare, and I’m happy to let her think so. Despite that, we’ve been solid friends since that time, the sort who can go a month or so without seeing one another and then pick up immediately where we left off. Most of our bonding takes places in bars over wine and cigarettes. Through her, I found Georgina for that short period, so I can happily blame Lara for any events involving her.

  *

  Not too long after Lara and I became closer friends, she met Steve Hutchinson. There aren’t many relationships that form over someone having their stomach pumped, but I guess everyone has their story. Lara and I had gone up to the hospital from school one day to meet her mum, a nurse, who was going to give us a lift out to Ruby’s place for a party.

  If you’re not there to visit someone, recover or work, hospitals are pretty dull places, although I’m aware they’re also really boring if you are doing one of those things. Still, with Lara’s mum held up with an emergency, we had some time to kill and so we took ourselves off sneaking around the hospital. We weren’t stopped once, which seems remarkable. It’s not like we were going into operating rooms or marching into A&E wards, but surely someone would’ve had something to say about two teenagers stomping around the place, sipping on bottles of Sprite that were actually gin and tonics.

  On the third floor, we were sitting in an otherwise unoccupied waiting room drinking and talking about the upcoming evening, when the swinging doors were pushed open and a guy on a gurney was pushed in by a nurse who looked like she had already been at work for eleven hours and had another thirteen to go.

  ‘Mr Hutchinson, I’m sorry for the mess up,’ she said, running fingers through her flyaway hair. ‘We’ll try and find you another bed. You hold on here for a few minutes, I’ll get the ward sister.’ She bustled off, black shoes squeaking on the shiny floor.

  ‘Not like I can fucking go anywhere!’ Steve shouted after her, because this was indeed Steve on the gurney. Abandoned by the NHS, he lay his head back down and stared at the ceiling. Lara wasted no time in jumping up and going over to him. Slightly unstable on my feet – these were not our first drinks – I followed.

  ‘What happened to you?’ said Lara, leaning over this poor guy who was as pale as clotted cream, with tiny beads of sweat on his forehead which were partly due to his condition and partly due to the thermostat – as ever with a hospital – being stuck on the Floridian Mangrove setting. Like her, he was ginger, his hair cut short, something about it suggesting that it normally had product in it.

  ‘Been in to have my stomach pumped,’ he said, trying to make it sound like it was something all the cool kids were doing and the mark of a life being successfully lived. He attempted to prop himself up on his elbow, but something was causing him pain and so he gave up. ‘They’re keeping me in a bit longer. I’m Steve.’

  ‘I’m Lara,’ she said, beaming down at him as if she’d never seen someone so cool in her life. I thought he was a bit of an idiot, but in my experience the line between the two is very thin and very subjective. ‘This is Dexter.’ I waved my fingers at him. He looked at me in the same way you look at a disappointing smudge on the wallpaper of a hotel you thought was upmarket, and turned his attention back to Lara. I couldn’t work out his age, but he was definitely older, and I wondered if he should be talking to her.

  Then I remembered that she had started talking to him.

  ‘Why haven’t you been put in a room?’ she asked, shoving her Sprite bottle into her coat pocket and resting her hands on the side of his trolley.

  ‘They had me in one, then someone came in from surgery and they had to move me out and find me somewhere else.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Not well enough to go home yet, according to the experts, but I feel fine.’

  ‘You look alright,’ said Lara. He gave a short smile.

  ‘Maybe I’m dying and they’ve sent me an angel,’ Steve winked and had I had anyone else with me, I would’ve made throwing-up gestures with them. Lara blushed and giggled and Steve, in a moment of clarity when he realised he’d better cover his own back, said, ‘How old are you, Lara?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ she said, adding in her own attempt to make herself look better, ‘but nearly seventeen!’ Bored of being ignored, I slumped back over to the hard chairs to sit down and drink my gin and tonic. The two of them continued muttering to each other. I wasn’t able to hear what they were saying so I texted Ruby to let her know that we were running late.

  After a few more moments of Lara and Steve gazing into each other’s eyes and pretending that the whole situation was romantic, Lara’s mum burst into the room with her coat on and a battered-looking rucksack slung over her shoulder.

  ‘There you are!’ she snapped. ‘I’d been waiting for you downstairs until Poppy came down to tell me you’re swanning about up here like you’ve got free rein of the place! Hello, Dexter. Come on, if you want to go to this bloody party!’ She swept out again and I saw Lara sneak her phone into her pocket. We followed at a safe distance while Mrs Greedy powered through the sterile corridors, nodding at people she knew. We followed her down the stairs and Lara showed me her phone as we went.

  ‘He gave me his number,’ she said, as if she’d been presented with a celebrity’s autograph.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ I asked. ‘He’s a guy you met in the hospital. I mean, it’s a bit weird.’

  ‘He’s really nice though!’ she protested. I didn’t force the issue, and it was only when we were in the car and halfway to Ruby’s place that the topic came up again, this time from the front seat.

  ‘Why were you talking to that boy?’ Mrs Greedy asked.

  ‘He was in pain – I was seeing if he was alright,’ Lara replied, a consummate liar to the end. Her mum, however, is not a pushover and wasn’t content with that as an answer. She pursed her lips and murmured low like Marge Simpson.

  ‘If I discover that you have anything else to do with that boy, you will be in serious trouble, young lady,’ she said. ‘He’s too old and is nothing but trouble. That’s not the first time we’ve had him in.’

  Being sixteen, Lara naturally proceeded to ignore her mum and started dating him, but Steve never found himself back in the hospital for any self-inflicted or immature reasons; just once when he tripped over a child on an ice rink and cracked his head open. It’s almost impossible to think that those were once Mrs Greedy’s words when, about a decade later, she would be beaming proudly at her daughter’s wedding to ‘that boy’, and counting him among her favourite people in the world.

  Oh sure, Lara-and-Steve had their rocky patches, and neither of them has still entirely grown up, but they both realised that life was simply better when they were going through it together than when they were apart and so they fought for it, no matter what got in their way. Say what you like about hospitals, but never rule them out as a place to find happiness.

  Five

  Breaking News

  It is Sunday lunchtime, a few hours after my return home from the wedding, and I am with Shell-and-Terry and Priti-and-Art having coffee and cake, hoping that further food will keep my hangover manageable.

  None of the four are friends with Lara save through me, so I run over the events of the wedding. Shell and Priti are interested, asking lots of questions that I can’t answer about the bridesmaids, the dress, the place settings, Lara’s family and Steve’s family, while Art and Terry discuss how to get a bigger gun in a violent video game with a hack one of them found online. I fill the girls in on what happened with Georgina.

  Priti, the less forgiving of the two, thinks I’m idiotic and tells me so.

  ‘You’re idiotic,’ she says, throwing her scrunched-up paper napkin at me. ‘For a start, she has a boyfriend. For seconds, you have been doing well without her – you broke up with her, remember?’

  ‘A shag’s a shag, though,’ shrugs Shell, fiddling with the many, many rings that cover her fingers. The only fing
er devoid of any glitz is the one reserved for a wedding ring. One day Terry might take the hint. ‘At least you both know what to expect from one another, but yeah, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve ever done.’

  ‘I thought you were happy being single?’ says Priti.

  ‘I am,’ I say, shredding the napkin in my fingers. ‘I was. I don’t know. It was a weak moment after a night of mixing my drinks. Plus it’s hard being a single person at a wedding, no matter how happy you are. Yes, it was stupid, but I made it very clear the next morning that we weren’t getting back together.’

  ‘Did you though?’

  ‘I think I used those exact words,’ I nod. ‘I said we could be friends again, if she tones down the crazy, anyway, but that there was nothing else going on.’ Priti makes a noise that suggests she isn’t convinced. I become aware that the television on the far wall has had its volume turned up.

  ‘Hey, um, some real shit is going down,’ says Art. With a small furrowing of eyebrows, we turn our attentions to the television. The screen shows footage from a helicopter of central Paris. It’s difficult to explain what we can see. It’s a large, boxy shape, metallic but with nodules and bumps up its flanks. Steam rises up from the base, as if burning the grass it has landed on. It stands taller than the nearby Eiffel Tower. The police have formed a perimeter of uniforms and guns around it, but huge crowds of people have gathered to stare. The footage is fairly distant, but you can tell that almost everyone present is holding their phone up, filming the strange thing.

  ‘What the hell?’ whispers Terry.

  ‘Jay said earlier that something was happening in France,’ I say. ‘Terrorist, he figured.’

  ‘That’s not terrorists,’ says Art, jabbing a finger at the screen, even though we’re already looking. I turn my attention to the bold white words on the red banner that scroll across the bottom of the screen.

  *

  –SED TO REMAIN CALM. MYSTERIOUS OBJECT HAS APPEARED IN PARIS, FRANCE. BELIEVED TO BE EXTRATERRESTRIAL IN ORIGIN. PEOPLE BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN CRUSHED. WORLD GOVERNMENTS HAVE ENTERED EMERGENCY TALKS. POPULATION ADVISED TO REMAIN CALM. MYSTERIOUS OBJECT HAS APPEARED IN PAR–

  *

  You’ve got to be shitting me.

  One of the waitresses switches through the channels – both BBC One and Two, ITV, Channel 4, Five, all the same. Even Dave has stopped showing Top Gear and has footage of the object playing on a loop. Back on BBC One, the feed cuts to a terrified looking newsreader at a desk. His tie is askew and he’s as white as a snowdrift.

  ‘Breaking news, I guess,’ he says, his attempt at a composed voice wavering. You can see the sweat on his brow. He never dreamed he’d have to report something like this. ‘What we are witnessing here appears to be first contact with an alien species. Nothing has emerged from what is believed to be a craft so far.

  ‘The object appeared on Friday night during the European meteor shower. The craft – potential craft – landed at three o’clock in the morning, local time, at which point France cut off international communications, including access to social media.

  ‘At least twenty people are dead, crushed by the craft as it landed. The Prime Minister has chaired an emergency COBRA meeting and has joined talks with leaders of other countries to work out what is to happen next. The world watches with bated breath.’

  He stops talking, and I get the feeling that he should be carrying on, but there’s a horror in his eyes that suggests he can’t. The screen cuts back to the earlier footage, news helicopters circling the enormous thing. The five of us on our table stare at one another. Aside from the television, the café is silent.

  ‘What do we do now?’ says Art.

  I suggest we go to my house. I live nearest, and I’ve got alcohol.

  Six

  Shell-and-Terry

  There’s a noise outside the cell door and it wakes me from my reverie. A slot opens up near the floor and something is slid in. It glides with the smoothness of a curling stone towards me and comes to rest against my boot. It looks like the kind of bag you’d usually see hanging from an IV drip, filled with a dark orange liquid.

  I pick it up tentatively and hold it up to the light in the corner. It’s thick like marmalade and there are tiny yellow flecks floating in it. I wonder if it’s food or something designed to kill me. Is it some kind of alien bomb? I can’t see anything technological on it, just a thin cap that I flick off. I put my nose to the hole and sniff. The smell is somewhere between pine needles and salt water, a forest next to the beach.

  It might be poison. I decide that maybe that wouldn’t be so bad and squirt a sample onto my tongue, braced for my hunger pangs to vanish, either because this is food or I won’t be around soon to worry about it. The jelly-like substance hits my taste buds. It tastes like blackcurrants, or beetroot. It’s hard to say.

  I wish that Shell was here to share it with me.

  *

  Shell Timmins is a sous chef for a fashionable restaurant in Fairmill, working most evenings but making the most of the ones she has off by drinking cocktails and having – judging from the notes shoved through her letterbox by neighbours – extremely loud sex. She’s the annoying sort of girl who has never stepped foot in a gym in her life but retains a perfect figure regardless. Most men love her. Most women hate her.

  She and I struck up a friendship when we were six thanks to a chocolate bar. There was no better way to be reminded of your social standing at primary school than by what was in your lunchbox. Our school was never as fussed about healthy eating as others – it was one of the last, I’m told, to let go of the Turkey Twizzlers – so lunchboxes had few restrictions on them and, like six-year-olds the world over, we knew that everything important in life revolved around chocolate and sweets.

  Oh sure, our parents were responsible enough to not load us down with sugar, but our parents weren’t watching us in the dining hall. A bag of Wotsits was worth two Penguins; a Fruit and Nut was worth one and a half Dairy Milks and, when Easter rolled round, all bets were off when it came to Creme Eggs.

  On this particular day, I was sitting opposite Shell, who I knew only in the sense that we were in the same class, where we sat on different tables about as far away from one another as it was possible to sit, meaning we met occasionally at the stationary pencil sharpener at the back of the room, or whenever we were called upon to stand in alphabetical order for whatever reason, Scithers coming directly before Timmins.

  My lunchbox that day contained a Twix and, while few of us would balk at the prospect, my six-year-old self didn’t feel like it. I opened up the bidding and asked who would trade me something for it.

  Someone offered me strawberry yoghurt, but that’s no kind of trade. Priti asked if I wanted her Wagon Wheel for it, but I didn’t because it was a plain one rather than the jam kind. Shell was the one who saved the day, offering her Time Out. There isn’t much between a Time Out and a Twix, but on that day the difference was enormous. We swapped and a tradition was born. Almost every lunchtime after that, Shell was one of the few people I would swap with. Sometimes she did better out of it, other times I did, but neither of us ever complained. Like so many early friendships, it was created because of something so tiny, but the future implications were enormous.

  Shell, Priti and I became an almost inseparable threesome, spending lunchtimes and breaktimes together, but a precedent had been set, and it felt like the rest of my life would be spent swapping things with Shell.

  On cinema visits with each other and a dragged-along parent, a handful of her salty popcorn would be swapped for a handful of my sweet popcorn. At birthday parties, bowls of different coloured jelly would exchange hands halfway through. Polos for Tic Tacs; Mars for Snickers; Monster Munch for Quavers. During a school trip to see a performance of Macbeth, we shared Wine Gums and Fruit Pastilles.

  As we got older, the swaps continued but with a very different flavour. At teenage house parties, we’d arrive with different bottles of artificially
coloured alcopops and chug half of each pack and think we were drunk. In actual bars, we’d get halfway through whatever cocktail we’d chosen and swap them. When she was training to be a chef, I’d give her bottles of wine in exchange for free practice dinners. At slightly more mature parties we’d swap Rennies tablets for condoms, hash brownies for cigarettes, and on one occasion we swapped our own saliva in a kiss we both regretted and never mentioned again.

  It’s impossible to say why it became such a tradition, but it was abandoned almost as soon as she started going out with Terry. If there was something to swap at that point, she was going to swap it with him.

  But among the swapping of sweets and drugs, we swapped so much more. She swapped her patience with me when I was going through rough times for my push to get her to find a career she would enjoy. I gave her my sofa after she had a blazing row with her flatmate, and she gave me a new DVD player when mine got stolen. We gave each other time and space, love and friendship and she stood by me throughout everything, never once wavering in our loyalty to one another. We may not have always liked one another’s decisions, but we stood by each other when they turned out to have been the wrong ones.

  Everyone gets a friend like Shell, the kind of friend who will always be there for you, no matter what the odds. All of my friends are solid and wonderful people, don’t get me wrong, but if it was three o’clock in the morning and I was in trouble and only had enough battery life for one more phone call, I’d already have dialled Shell’s number.