Brand New Friend (21 page)

Although Ashley had reassured him several times beforehand that everything would go well, it was still an excruciating evening, from the moment Jo arrived (having called him from home to check what Ashley was wearing) until she left at just after midnight.

Rob was almost trembling when the two women met for the second time. As Ashley approached Jo to greet her he half expected it to turn into a hair-pulling, nail-slashing extravaganza. But Ashley was the perfect hostess: from pouring drinks and passing round pre-dinner nibbles, she did her best to put Jo at ease. She sat next to Jo on the sofa and began chatting to her in what Rob could only describe as a ‘friendly fashion’. Her opening conversational salvo was a joke about the Clash of the Tops, which, under normal circumstances, would have been a great ice-breaker but terrified Rob. He couldn’t help imagining Ashley as a landmine so sensitive to pressure that even bad vibes might detonate it. So while Jo relaxed, Rob became more tense – to the extent that at one point he stopped breathing for so long that when he finally remembered he was panting like a man crossing the finishing line of the London Marathon. Ashley and Jo stared at him, equally bewildered, and Rob faked a coughing fit to cover his breathlessness.

During dinner the conversation was amiable. Questions (mainly from Ashley) about Jo’s history were the order of the day and tended to begin ‘How long?’ and regularly featured ‘ . . . and what were you doing before that?’ but they weren’t issued in a digging-for-information-that-can-and-will-be-used-as-evidence-against-you way.

Later, Ashley talked about the meal – which cookery book she had got the idea from and where she had bought the key ingredients – and Jo used every opportunity to let Ashley know that she was a wonderful cook.

Soon they were on to their favourite recipes and Jo mentioned a coconut, chick pea and ginger soup she had made after reading about it in the
Observer.
Ashley nodded enthusiastically and told her she had made the same soup a few weeks ago when a group of friends had come round for supper. From there they discussed the cookbooks of Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein and Sophie Grigson, then concluded with an in-depth Nigella Lawson lovefest that covered the cookbooks, the TV programme and the woman herself.

After dinner they all retired to the living room for coffee, which Rob volunteered to make. Such was the state of his nerves that he now felt he understood nothing about women and didn’t want to be left alone with either Jo or Ashley for fear of saying the wrong thing.

Eventually Jo announced it was time she was going. Ashley called a minicab for her and until it arrived they chatted about a recent exhibition of impressionist paintings at Manchester art gallery and how they wished that they had more time to do cultural things.

Rob watched in amazement as Ashley kissed Jo goodbye, but when Jo tried to kiss him he extricated himself expertly and gave her an obviously platonic hug. Perplexed, she climbed into the cab, which sped off into the night.

As Ashley closed the door Rob became aware suddenly that they were alone. This is it, he thought, I’m about to feel the full force of a woman scorned. ‘So?’ he said.

Ashley yawned and stretched her arms above her head. ‘Well,’ she was clearly trying to fight off sleep, ‘that was nice, wasn’t it?’

Rob knew full well that women could mean many things when they said, ‘That’s nice,’ and he had worked out most of them. He ran Ashley’s sentence past his internal sarcasm-scanner but failed to pick up a single reading. He could only conclude that when Ashley had said, ‘Well, that was nice,’ she had meant, ‘Well, that was nice.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was.’

He turned on the burglar alarm and they went upstairs to bed. Soon they were lying in each other’s arms, under the duvet.

‘Rob,’ said Ashley, and pulled his arms tighter round her.

‘Yeah?’

‘Promise me one thing about Jo?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything.’

‘Promise me that, whatever happens, you won’t fall in love with her. That’s all. Don’t fall in love.’

‘But when will this be done?’ asked Mr Cuong. ‘You said last time it would only take a week and now it’s five weeks later.’

It was ten o’clock on the first Tuesday in October and Jo was already wishing she had stayed in bed feeling sorry for herself rather than venturing out to work. Mr Cuong, whose case she was now dealing with, had been forced to take time off work to come into the housing office to complain about a damp patch on his bedroom ceiling that was getting bigger by the day. In the time that had elapsed since he’d first reported it, it had grown from a circumference of about an inch to more than three feet and had turned pale brown. Her heart went out to him. He only wanted someone to come and look at it and she couldn’t even manage that.

‘I don’t know, Mr Cuong,’ she replied. ‘I’ve called our maintenance contractors countless times and no one ever gets back to me. I understand this must be very frustrating for you.’

‘So what shall I do?’ he asked.

‘I really don’t know. As soon as I’ve finished talking to you I’ll call them again and hopefully scare some life into them.’

‘Do you really think that will help?’

Jo thought carefully about her reply. There was no point in sugar-coating things. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not really. This housing association is possibly the most disorganised organisation in the whole of the United Kingdom. Do you know how many forms I have to fill in to request a new batch of plastic pens from supplies? Three. And the only reason I’m requesting plastic pens is so that I can fill out the forms to request the plastic pens. It’s ridiculous, Mr Cuong, and petty. Really petty.’

Mr Cuong looked at her blankly. She suspected that her little diatribe had gone straight over his head.

‘I’ll call them, Mr Cuong,’ she added. ‘In fact, I’ll make it my mission to call them every hour on the hour until someone rings back and promises to come to your house and fix that damp patch.’

Mr Cuong nodded. He seemed happier now, which Jo thought bizarre: she’d said the same thing to him the last time he had come into the office. She looked at her watch. Time for her mid-morning break. As she pulled down the ‘position closed’ blind she began silently to scream her ‘I hate my job’ mantra. Eventually she ran out of steam, reached into her bag, pulled out her phone and dialled her favourite number.

‘Rob, it’s me,’ she said, when he answered the phone. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Working. What did you think I’d be up to?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jo. ‘Taking one of your many tea breaks or bidding for stuff on eBay?’

‘Nope,’ said Rob. ‘I haven’t got time for any of that these days. Phil’s been talking up our company to an important art director at Ogilvy-Hunter who’s looking to outsource some of his work to us. I’m supposed to be coming up with some revolutionary design ideas that will change the way they think about marketing and make them spend their budgets with us.’

‘What have you done so far?’ asked Jo.

‘Nothing,’ said Rob.

‘Well, that’s not very good, is it?’

‘No,’ said Rob. ‘I’ve been over-analysing and deconstructing things too far. I need to feed my brain with new ideas.’

‘Excellent,’ said Jo. ‘I’m having one of the worst days of my entire working life and I don’t know how much longer I can stand being here. I’ve been thinking of ways to cheer myself up all morning and a trip to the cinema might do the trick, especially as in all the time we’ve been friends we’ve never seen a film together.’

‘Really?’ replied Rob. ‘Can’t say I’ve noticed. I suppose it’s because we always talk so much that it makes more sense to go to the pub than somewhere where we have to be quiet.’

‘Can you make it?’

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ said Rob. ‘Ash is on shift tonight and I was going to stay in and do some work but . . . yeah, why not? What do you want to see? Not some chick flick, I hope.’

‘There you are with that cheeky sod thing again.’ Jo laughed. ‘I don’t know what’s on at the cinema because I haven’t looked. And I don’t care – I just fancy seeing a film – any film.’

‘How can you not care what you see?’ asked Rob.

‘It’s very easy,’ replied Jo. ‘You just take a deep breath and not care.’

‘Now who’s being sarcastic?’ said Rob.

‘Look,’ said Jo, ‘just be ready for half seven, okay? I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to the Odeon in town.’

‘I don’t like it there. It’s always full of students being studenty.’

‘How about the Trafford Centre?’

‘No,’ said Rob. ‘I can’t do cinemas in shopping centres. They’re normally full of spotty teenagers sucking the faces off each other.’

‘Right,’ said Jo, patiently. ‘What about UGC Didsbury? It’s modern, it’s got big screens and I doubt there’ll be many kids.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

‘Are you always so picky when you go to the cinema?’

‘If you think that’s picky watch me tonight when I work out where we should sit.’

It had been four weeks since Rob and Jo had entered the new phase of their friendship. During this time Rob had thought of Jo as a stray cat in need of looking after and as no one else appeared to be doing the job (her ex-boyfriend, her parents and least of all Jo herself) he willingly stepped in as her platonic man-about-the-house. During September he fixed her car for her (a small problem with the transmission), helped her paint her bathroom (apple blossom white on the walls and buttermilk for the woodwork) and even offered to loan her money (she was having difficulty paying her bills now that she was living alone). She had accepted help with her car and the bathroom but drew the line at money: she’d get by somehow.

Of key importance in this new stage of their friendship was the effort they put into being good friends and no more. They avoided all forms of physical contact, except a kiss on the cheek at the end of the night. They rarely spoke about the nature of their friendship, so that it didn’t turn into an ‘issue’. They always fake-gagged when they were out for a drink and accosted by “rose-for-the-lady” men, who constantly assumed they were a couple. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t on the verge of falling in love but of ‘falling head over heels in friendship’ a fact to which the following moments in their relationship attested.

It was ten to ten and Rob was half watching a Channel Four documentary about sex-change operations while he flicked through a copy of the
Evening News
that Jo had left on her coffee-table. She had disappeared a few minutes earlier, saying she was ‘nipping out to the loo’.

Rob was wincing at some particularly gruesome footage of real-life gender reassignment surgery when Jo returned with a faded Adidas shoebox, which she handed to him.

‘What’s this?’ asked Rob, with one eye on the TV.

‘Take a look, you chump,’ replied Jo. More to herself than to Rob, she added, ‘This is like the worst thing in the world.’

Intrigued, Rob opened the box. ‘Is this your book?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea why I’m doing this,’ she said.

Rob, who had been lounging on the sofa, sat upright. ‘Are you saying I can read it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘How come?’ he asked. ‘I thought—’

‘Things change,’ said Jo. ‘You know pretty much everything about me that there is to know. Why should I keep this secret?’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Rob, taking the manuscript out of the box, ‘and impressed. I can’t believe you’ve written a whole novel. What made you do it?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Jo, sitting next to Rob, ‘but you have to promise me that you won’t read it in front of me. I couldn’t stand it.’

‘I’ll save it until I get home,’ he said, then turned over the blank cover page to reveal:
The Backpackers
by Jo Richards.

She screamed and he put back the page, then closed the box. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it’s away from prying eyes now. Tell me how it came about.’

‘Okay. Do you remember me telling you I went travelling after I graduated? Well, when I got back to Manchester I decided to write a novel using some of the experiences I’d had while I was out there. I know it sounds like a cheesy idea but I was young and I loved reading and I wanted to do something different with my life. Anyway, one Saturday afternoon a few weeks after I started temping at the housing association I sat down at my old house-mate Gina’s computer and started the story that ended up in the box in your hand.’

‘
The Backpackers
,’ said Rob.

‘Yeah. The story that came out of my head was about Rosie Collins a twenty-three-year-old woman who splits up with her boyfriend – like me and Callum, my then bloke – as they’re about to go travelling. She umms and aahhs about whether to go without him, then heads out to Thailand. All sorts of things happen to her involving drug-runners and murders.’

‘And does she get back with her boyfriend?’

‘No,’ said Jo, looking scandalised. ‘That would’ve been even more cheesy.’

‘But she meets someone while she’s away.’

‘Naturally,’ said Jo, grinning. ‘His name is Jean-Paul and I based him on a French guy I adored on my course at uni. But, just like real life, it doesn’t work out.’

‘So at the end she’s on her own?’ asked Rob. ‘That’s a bit gloomy, isn’t it?’

‘If I thought you were serious, Brooksy, with your layman’s lit crit there’d be trouble,’ said Jo. ‘In fact it’s upbeat because Rosie learns loads of stuff about life and herself so she’s a different person from the one at the start of the book.’

‘You sound really excited about it even now,’ said Rob. ‘How come you never sent it to anyone even though your brother loved it?’