‘How?’
‘She’d been coming on to me for ages. She and Matt had been together a year when it started. Every time we were alone she’d flirt or tell me I was gorgeous and sexy.’
‘Don’t all the women you sleep with tell you that?’
‘Yes, and I’d always tell her not to be silly or ignore her. But, that night, when she rang me and said could I bring back her CDs and videos, I’d been doing some serious drinking. I can’t remember how much I’d had to drink, but I knew I didn’t want to stop. Nina had been on the phone. This time, she didn’t do her usual “you’re a bastard” routine, she said some evil things that I knew were true. She said I’d always be alone, that nobody who I loved would stay because I was so incapable of love.’
‘Why didn’t you call me? You always tell me these things.’
‘I tried. I picked up the phone to call you, but then I stopped. It was so humiliating; I’d never felt so worthless. Not even after Kristy left me. And I was in love with you, I couldn’t tell you those things. Even if you didn’t believe them straight away, they’d still be “out there”. Still be lodged somewhere in your head. As it is you only half trust me.
‘When I got to Jen’s I was barely keeping it together. I drank more and she was giving it the whole routine: touching me, complimenting me. I kept reminding her and myself about Matt. She was wearing this dress . . .
‘It’s no excuse, I know, but I felt wanted. After what Nina said, I just wanted some affection. I did realise that I shouldn’t be responding to Jen so I got up to go home. At the front door she asked me to kiss her. I kissed her cheek. She kissed me properly. We broke away, and then my body took over.’
I do and don’t want to hear all this. I have to hear it for my sanity’s sake so I don’t imagine worse things like slow-mo kissing and soft lighting and sax music . . .but I don’t want to hear it because it’s my boyfriend and my best friend having sex. ‘You made love in her and Matt’s bed?’
‘It wasn’t lovemaking. It wasn’t even sex. It was a fuck. A quick, meaningless fuck. It could’ve been with anyone, but it was with Jen.’
I shift in bed to look at him.
‘The second it was over I knew I’d done something terrible. This was what Nina was talking about. I was emotionally corrupt. I remember saying sorry to Jen and that it’d never happen again. She said we should talk about it in bed.’
They spent the night together?! Her slender body nestled against him, listening to his heart as she fell asleep, his hands stroking through her blonde locks. He probably told her a fairy story as well.
‘She wanted us to go to bed because, I think, it would’ve made the whole thing seem legitimate. As if we liked each other. But I told her no, made her promise we’d never talk about it again. That we’d pretend it never happened. I went home and I smashed up my room. It was either that or drive my car into a wall.’
‘Jen must’ve felt great. You sleep with her then run.’
‘It wasn’t easy, especially as I knew what Matt was up to. But then, she knew what I was like. I’m a bastard. How many times has she said it over the years? She should have known that having sex with me would end up in me running away.’
‘Why didn’t you just tell me all this?’ I ask. ‘You told me Nina had a tight vagina, you’ve called me from police stations and hotel rooms, why couldn’t you tell me this?’
‘Because you wouldn’t have given me a chance. We wouldn’t have got together.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes I do. You wouldn’t have let me near you if you thought I’d even flirted with Jen, let alone . . .’
‘Do you blame me? Would you have gone near me if I’d slept with Matt? . . .No, wait, don’t answer that question, I already know the answer.’
‘I kept waiting for you to find out. For Jen to tell you and for my whole world to come crashing down around my ears. Every time you saw Jen or spoke to her, I braced myself for you to find out. It was the biggest mistake of my life, and I regret it every day.’
I say nothing.
‘Amber, I love you. I’ve not said that to a woman in over five years. I love you, I don’t want to lose you.’
This is the part where I melt. Where I sobbingly tell him that I love him; that he won’t lose me now he’s explained.
The music swells, close-up on our linked fingers, cut to close-up on our teary eyes. Cut to sun rising outside: the world brightens, you know it’s going to be all right. Love will win through in the end . . .
I am not in a fucking movie.
If I’ve learnt anything it’s that I’m not in a movie.
‘What makes you think you haven’t already lost me?’ I ask. ‘What makes you think that every time I look at you I won’t see you making love to my best friend? Or hear you lying when I almost found out?’ It’s over. I think I’m telling him it’s over. I can’t even check if I am because I don’t know. I’ve never had this kind of conversation with a man. Not one I care about. Eric was right about that, I suppose. I’d never got to this point. People walk; I walk. I’ve never discussed it before.
‘What makes you think I won’t always wonder if you were comparing me to her?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘But how do I know? I keep wondering if you went with me as some kind of consolation prize. If all along you wanted her and I was just convenient.’
‘I never wanted Jen.’
‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it.’
I’ve always been mildly clairvoyant when it comes to the end of relationships. I can see the end, I can tell in the way someone talks, in what they say, in what they don’t say. I can feel it coming so I don’t bother returning half-hearted messages; don’t take solace in friendly-ish emails. And, once someone has made a move towards the door with a word, look or deed and I’ve bolted through it before they can, I don’t go back. I don’t do reunions and I don’t do breaking up speeches. But this sounds suspiciously like one.
Greg laughs, low and husky, like Mutley. But Greg’s laugh has no humour, just a sound. Moonlight catches his eyes and they glisten.
He’s crying. Not laughing, crying. He knows, I think. He knows what I’m saying. Even if I don’t, he knows that we’re finished.
Greg covers his face with his hands and goes into free fall. I can feel him clawing at his dignity and pride, knowing they’re way out of reach as he cries. He’s lost everything. His best mate. His friend Jen. And, if he’s to be believed, the woman he loves.
No matter what he’s done, he’s hurting. And I can’t listen to someone I love falling apart and do nothing. I couldn’t listen to someone I didn’t know falling apart and do nothing. I shift across the bed, put my arms around him, stroke his hair, hush him.
Slowly the room brightened. Darkness fell away and it was daylight. The hotel room melted and we were in a café, the bed dissolved and we were sitting at a table. Greg had his head buried in my chest and his arms around me. I held him, and stroked his hair. ‘Come on,’ I whispered, ‘I’ll take you home.’
chapter thirty-four
the end
Jen had on her royal-blue rain mac. I was wearing my red mac. We’d bought them from Leeds Market a couple of years ago and they cost a tenner each. I’d forgotten Jen owned anything other than clothes with posh labels.
I wasn’t allowed on school premises without special dispensation from God, signed in triplicate, so I approached Jen via the fence. It was home time and she was supervising the picking up of children. She saw the red of my jacket from the corner of her eye and turned to its source.
‘Hi,’ I said through the lattice wire fence. My heart was in my throat. That sickness I’d felt when I was talking to Greg? Nothing compared to how scared I was now. If this went wrong, I’d lose Jen forever. And that . . . I couldn’t think about that. Not even as an abstract.
‘Hello,’ she replied with ice in her voice. She kept one eye on the kids tearing around the playground. ‘I s
till don’t know how I feel about everything, so just say what you’ve got to say and leave. I’ll get back to you.’
I frowned, trying to work out what the hell she was on about. And, bingo! It came to me. ‘You think I’m here to apologise,’ I stated.
‘Of course.’
‘Why would I apologise?’
‘You were really out of order. You said some really hurtful things.’
I opened my mouth to point out that she had months on me in the hurtful things stakes, but stopped. ‘I didn’t come to argue,’ I said. ‘Or to apologise.’
‘What did you come for?’
‘To see what we can salvage of this friendship.’
‘Friendship?’ she spat. ‘If you were my friend you wouldn’t have disappeared when I needed you most. If you were my friend you would’ve stayed, talked last week. Instead you just disappeared, you didn’t answer your mobile, you didn’t return my messages. Nothing. For a whole week.
‘It was like that in college, too. You’d go out for a pint of milk, or to post a letter, and I wouldn’t see you for hours because you dropped in to see someone, or you went to the cinema or went for a walk. Half the time I expected you to go on a chocolate run then never to see you again, like those men who go out for a packet of cigarettes and are never heard from again. And when you moved back to London, you didn’t tell me you were leaving. Me, your best friend. Your landlady knew, Yorkshire Electricity knew, British Gas knew, BT knew, Abbey Storage knew, but not me. The first I hear of it is when you stop off in a taxi, drop off my stuff you’ve borrowed and say you’ll call me when you get to London. For almost a year.’
‘I had to get away,’ I offered lamely. Maybe Eric had a point about the Heat/walk away from something in thirty seconds thing.
‘I needed you this week, Amber – my whole life fell apart but once again you’d disappeared.’
‘Much as I love you, Jen, not even I could counsel you about your relationship with Greg,’ I replied.
Jen signalled across the playground for another teacher to take over her hawkeye duties, then she swivelled to face me. ‘There was no relationship with Greg. Greg hates me.’
‘He doesn’t. He may not like you very much at the moment, but he doesn’t hate you.’ I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. It’s almost automatic trying to make Jen feel better.
‘What difference does it make? The point is, I had no relationship with Greg and, as it turned out, I have no relationship with Matt.’
‘Tell me about you and Greg.’
Jen fired a shot of pure hatred at me with her blue eyes, but I didn’t look away. I held her gaze. She didn’t get out of this with scowls, no matter how evil they were. She had to tell me. I’d stand here all night if I had to but I had to hear her side of it.
‘ All right, me and Greg,’ she conceded through gritted teeth. ‘About two years ago, when Matt and I had been together a year, we all went to a club for Matt’s birthday, remember? You and Matt were off on the dance floor – you were both so pissed you were actually dancing together. I went to the bar to get a round in or maybe I went to the loo . . . I don’t know, can’t remember, anyway, I’d almost got back to our table when I spotted Greg. He was slouched in his seat and swigging from a bottle of beer, but he was transfixed on something and he had this look on his face. This look of total happiness, affection . . . joy, even. I followed his eyes to where he was looking and it was you. You made him that happy. He wanted you. That made me so angry. Another bloke was going to fall in love with you and not me.’
‘Excuse me?!’
‘Blokes fall in love with you, and Greg, who could have any woman he wanted, was doing it.’
‘Blokes don’t fall in love with me, they become my friends.’
‘No they don’t. They all want you. It was like that thing between you and Ross in college.’
Ross was one of Jen’s boyfriends who I liked even less than Matt – oh yes, that was possible. Jen seemed to have a predilection to hooking up with rotten men. Ross had a habit of undressing women with his eyes and I was one of those women. When he graduated to brushing up against me and grabbed my breasts, I told Jen. His defence was that I was always flaunting my figure in his face and it was what he thought I wanted. The old, but surprisingly effective ‘she was asking for it’ defence. Jen had carried on seeing him and just kept a better eye on him. In other words, made sure he and I weren’t left alone together.
‘That really hurt. You were meant to be my best friend and . . .’
‘Hang on, when you say “that thing with you and Ross” you mean when he kept grabbing my breasts and rubbing up against me?’
‘You both had different stories.’
‘Jen, the man kept groping me. That’s not different stories. He was a creep and I’m sorry it took you seeing him with another woman to work that out.’ They split up when he left Jen for someone else – she thought they were going to get back together right up until he stuck his tongue down the throat of said someone else in front of her.
‘He kept going on about what a womanly figure you had and how I should think about implants.’
‘What further proof do you need? The man was a creep.’
‘But he was right. Men do want women like you.’
‘In which reality?’
‘Gawd, Amber, blokes respect you. They respect you, then they fall in love with you. With me they either want to shag me or they’re too scared to come near me. There’s all this bravado, this coming on strong, but when everyone’s gone, they’re just scared little boys who run away.
‘And when that happens a few times you start to put up barriers, you start to behave how they expect you to. And you get this reputation as “the ice maiden”, “the ice queen”.
‘So you start behaving in that way even more. All the while, your best friend is getting this reputation for being warm and friendly and nice. And that’s all you want. To be loved. Adored. Respected.’
Jen paused, swallowed hard. ‘Then Matt came along. OK, he wasn’t as good-looking as Greg, but Greg was a tart, he didn’t want a relationship. He didn’t look twice at me. But you . . .
‘That night in the club, it was happening again. Greg had fallen for you. Once again, warm, friendly Amber gets the man. Well, I decided that night, no more. If Greg was going to be with either of us, it was going to be me. Not the warm one, not the curvy one, me. I went over and started flirting.’
‘Let me get this right, you didn’t sleep with him because you wanted him, but so I couldn’t have him? Are you mad?’
‘I didn’t sleep with him.’
I noticed she’d ignored the ‘are you mad?’ bit.
‘There was nothing remotely sleep-like about it. Five minutes, against the wall in my corridor. It was all so hasty we didn’t even have time for a condom.’
Jesus. Christ. JESUS CHRIST. I thought I’d heard the worst of it. I knew first-hand how fanatical Greg was about safe sex – even when he hadn’t seen me for almost a month he’d practically torn off my clothes but had waited to find a condom before penetration. But not with Jen. Not with fucking Jen. And. . .
‘It was a mistake. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to dump me then he’s going to kill me,’ Jen’s voice echoed in my head. ‘That was why you were so frightened about being pregnant,’ I managed. ‘You thought it was Greg’s child.’
Jen nodded.
Her dalliance with Greg had cost me £180. She hadn’t at any point offered me cash for the pregnancy tests or for me rebooking my train tickets. She didn’t say thank you for me putting her before my parents. Not that I needed or wanted a thank you. Just the truth. The truth. Was that too much to ask from my closest friend?
‘Afterwards, I knew he’d forget about trying anything with you. That day I told you that Greg had made a pass at me, well, Matt had said they’d got drunk together and Greg had confessed he thought you were sexy. So I told you about the pass. I knew you’d ask him about it and he’d be remin
ded how I could screw up his life if he came anywhere near you.’
I had to ask again. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Amber.’ Jen could raise her voice now most of the children had been picked up by their parents. ‘You get filthy looks from women because of your chest. Imagine getting them because of your face. You don’t know what it’s like to be beautiful. Women hate me, men don’t want me. I wanted, for once, to have what you had. I just wanted to have Greg look at me with all that affection.’
What Jen was saying was poignant, touching, heart-rending. Cheeky bitch.
Cheeky bitch who had crossed the mythical line in the sand; who had done something I couldn’t forgive. She was calling me ugly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be beautiful.’ I never realised that was the thing that couldn’t be taken back with me and Jen. It wasn’t being called ugly, per se – I’d much rather be called ugly than stupid – it was because of who was saying it.
When your best friend can’t even pretend you’re beautiful, why is she your best friend? What’s a best friend for if not to bolster your ego? Sure, she’s meant to tell you if that lipstick makes you look like a cheap whore instead of the high-class hooker style you were aiming for; or if you have broccoli in your teeth; or if that bloke’s playing you for a mug. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d slept with Greg because she genuinely felt something for him; I wouldn’t have liked it, but if she’d genuinely wanted him then I’d find a way to understand.
She didn’t feel the same about me. She’d called me fat, I’d let it slide. She’d set me up on blind dates, I’d let it slide. She’d lied to me. She’d manipulated me. She’d even tried it on with my beloved brother.
Now, she was saying I was ugly. And there was only so much you can let slide before you become buried under a mountain of bitchy comments and ill-treatment. Before you become a world class mug.
In my head I went through all the thoughts I had of Jen, like searching through a crowded wardrobe. Each positive thought I had I unhooked then flung down onto the floor of my mind, banishing her good name from my thought closet. There went ‘caring’. Next, ‘thoughtful’. ‘Encouraging’; ‘friendly’; ‘vivacious’; ‘understanding’; ‘exciting’ – all of them, piling up around my head, waiting to be removed.