The Best Thing I Never Had (2 page)

October 2006

The front door blew open, slammed shut, the clatter punctuated by the dull thud of a handbag hitting the floor: Leigha, obviously. ‘Guess who I saw at the bank,’ she began, without preamble, leaning against the worktop with one hand, reaching down to pull her shoe off with the other. Harriet didn’t look up from her magazine.

‘Elvis?’ she asked, purposefully making her tone as weary as possible as clearly Leigha was dying to tell her something.

‘No!’ Leigha flapped her ballet pump at her like a teacher wagging a finger at a naughty child. ‘Seth.’ Harriet forced herself not to eyeroll.

‘Wow, I am so supremely uninterested.’ She turned the page with an exaggerated flip to underline said total indifference.

‘You’d care if I’d seen him with a girl.’ Leigha pulled off her other shoe and tossed them both under the table. That did it; Harriet’s eyes flicked upwards and narrowed.

‘I would be naturally curious. As to how he’s gone from suicidal to lothario in since I last spoke to him.’ Leigha turned her back to flick on the kettle. Harriet lasted about thirty seconds. ‘So?’ she pressed, admitting defeat and leaning back in the chair.

‘So what?’

‘So, was he with a girl?’ Harriet clarified with great impatience.

‘Of course not!’ Leigha laughed, reaching two mugs down from the cupboard. ‘Not that you care either way, right?’ She shot Harriet a challenging look.

‘Curiosity,’ Harriet repeated, her mouth twitching. And it was the truth; she was glorying in her new singledom, the space in her life, her bed! ‘And pride,’ she admitted. Leigha stirred the sugar around in the tea with a little more force than was necessary, the metal of the spoon chiming off the ceramic.

‘Pride! You bitch. Poor guy. You really shafted him,’ she said, her tone lighter than her words.

Harriet flicked a page over again. ‘I don’t want to hear this again, especially from you.’

‘What?’ Leigha placed the two mugs on the table and slid into the chair opposite.

‘Yes, you. You know jack shit about it. Your longest relationship so far—’

‘Don’t say ‘is breakfast’,’ Leigha held up a hand in warning.

Harriet smiled. ‘You don’t eat breakfast.’

Leigha ignored her, wrapping her hands around the mug to take away the last vestiges of the chill of the October day. ‘He loves you.’ She spoke quietly, her tone strange enough to make Harriet look up again.

‘I didn’t love him,’ she answered, deliberately pitching her voice louder.

‘Shame.’ Leigha took a sip of her tea. ‘Such a waste.’

‘Stop going on.’ Harriet’s eyes were back on the glossy pages.

‘I’m not going on. It is a shame,’ Leigha whined. ‘I just want you to be happy, Harry.’ Harriet looked up again, confused.

‘I am happy –
now
– you numpty. That’s the point.’

‘In love happy!’

‘Christ.’ Harriet closed the magazine and reached for her tea. ‘Who says there’s any such thing?’

‘Miserable bitch,’ Leigha said, with great affection, reaching for the magazine herself.

After Harriet ran out of the door almost late for her 4pm lecture, the house fell silent and chilly. Listlessly, Leigha stood up to re-boil the water in the kettle for another cup of tea, something to keep her hands focused, if not her mind. She had a paper due, should really focus on it in these quiet hours before the house filled up again, but knew it was pretty much impossible that she’d get anything done today. Seeing Seth always put her out of sorts.

Seth had always been a middling, background sort of character at school, until Year 11, when he returned from the summer break a good four inches taller and probably just as broad again besides. To Leigha, who had privately nursed a crush since midway through Year 9, it was a not unwelcome shock. She herself had just moved to contact lenses, cut her hair into a bob that made it sway and shine; she knew all about the power of personal reinvention.

So she spent the last year of her GCSEs dragging Sukie, Harry and the rest of their pack around, a little trail like ducklings: them following her, following him. She turned up at every sporting event, each party, forced the inevitable until they were all one big group, her girls and Seth’s guys.

And then during the summer before Sixth Form, there was a text from Harriet, and her careless amusement just dripped from every word. Seth had had her round the back of the sports’ centre; no joke; you couldn’t even make it up.

And so Leigha watched them for years, watched him teach her how to drive, watched him chuck her under the chin when she was low, watched their eyes flash with glares as they argued with one another over stupid, little things. She was privy to each excruciating detail when they first went to bed with one another, had to hear how afterwards Seth had gathered her up in his arms and told her he loved her, loved her, loved her, would never love anyone as much as he loved his Harriet. And even after three whole years, she never quite shook the feeling that this wasn’t meant to be, that something had gone terribly wrong and her heart ached, ached for the waste – that she had privately given up her love for this boy for what turned out to be no reason at all.

Because - during their second year at uni - something happened, although Harriet was never very articulate on what that something was. Either way, by the end of it, lovely, sweet Seth was crushed into something very small, something that couldn’t look Leigha in the face because she reminded him too much of how things had been before. It was the way he’d been in the bank, his eyes sliding across her like she was so much air – as usual, frustratingly heedless of the fact he made her heart sit up and scream inside her chest.

Adam came back into the room, throwing his mobile phone on the sofa with no small degree of irritation. Johnny didn’t look up from his laptop screen.

‘Y’alright?’

Adam didn’t answer, instead throwing himself down full-length on the sofa. The mobile made a muffled buzz and Adam swore under his breath as he fished underneath his legs for it.

‘Tell her to piss off and leave you alone!’ Johnny advised. ‘Tell her you’ve got shit to do.’

‘If you speak like that to women it’s no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend,’ Adam retorted as he located the phone, turned it right-side up and opened his message inbox.

In the girls’ house on Dell Road, Sukie had her disapproving face on.

‘Miles says Adam has a girlfriend back home.’ She stood with her arms folded in the middle of Leigha’s bedroom floor, as if she thought sitting on the bed with the rest of them would be collusion.

‘And?’ Harriet scored. ‘She’s sent him a casual text, not a picture of her -!’ She was cut off by a scandalised squeal from Nicky.

‘Yeah, so casual it’s just taken you three ten minutes to draft it!’ Sukie shot back. ‘I don’t even get the appeal of this guy, are you this bored?’

Leigha did her lips-pressed-together smile, the sort of smile that looks like it would rather be a laugh. ‘I just want to see!’

Adam was holding his phone like it might try to bite him. The uncharacteristic silence finally drew Johnny’s attention away from his coursework.

‘Lauren?’ he asked, giving Adam about five seconds to decide whether or not he was going to lie to spare his friend’s feelings.

‘No, Leigha,’ he admitted, wincing mentally as Johnny’s brows snapped together.

‘Oh yeah?’ He abruptly turned back to his laptop in an attempt to look as unbothered as possible. ‘She hasn’t replied to my message from last night. What’s she saying?’

‘Not much. Asking me if I’m going to the Union on Friday.’

‘That’s exactly what I asked her yesterday!’ Johnny immediately looked surprised at the aggression in his tone. Adam didn’t respond, just drummed his thumbs against the buttons of the keypad distractedly. ‘What are you gonna say, are we going?’ Johnny asked, in a slightly more reasonable voice.

‘I can’t be arsed really, can you?’ Adam sighed, tossing his phone across to the coffee table with Leigha’s message, still unanswered, on the screen. Johnny’s face was faintly mutinous. Adam hurriedly snatched up the controller from next to his phone. ‘Pro Evo, mate?’

‘But I think he’s interested. I mean, I wouldn’t think he’s interested if I didn’t have reason to think he was interested, therefore, he’s probably interested, yeah?’

Harriet brushed muffin crumbs from her hands as she tried to follow Leigha’s logic. ‘I guess,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But it doesn’t matter anyway, he’s got a girl at home, remember?’

Leigha shrugged indifferently. ‘Shows he’s not a commitment-phobe, I take it as a good sign.’

‘Ley, if he came in here right now and told us he’s engaged, you’d somehow take it as a good sign. You’re set on this, why are you even asking my opinion?’

Leigha hushed her hurriedly, eyes darting around the café. All walls have ears on campus. ‘Because I want you to make me feel better about having a wildly unsuitable crush on an involved man,’ Leigha whispered. ‘Tell me that he’ll probably break up with her for me!’ Harriet leant back in her chair and considered Leigha objectively for a moment. She was beautiful and obviously sexy with it: face, hair and body all soft and inviting touch. Men always wanted her, because she automatically acted like they would, and it captivated them.

‘He’s very like you, I think,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘Confident, I mean.’ Leigha tilted her head slightly as she considered this.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ she replied. ‘He’s got a real alpha male thing going on. I like it.’

‘Does that make you an alpha female, then?’ Harriet asked sarcastically as she balled up the baking paper case her muffin had come in.

‘I would definitely feel like one on his arm,’ Leigha laughed.

‘Then you deserve one another,’ Harriet decided, mock-serious. ‘And I wish you a long and happy relationship together. Better get rid of the existing girlfriend though love, she might cramp your ‘alpha’ style.’

‘Harry, the way he talks about the poor girl – when he talks about her at all! – I don’t think I need to worry. To hear him tell it she seems to have the personality and allure of a teaspoon.’ Harriet couldn’t help but laugh at her friend’s audaciousness. ‘She’s a placeholder girlfriend,’ was Leigha’s brutal final analysis.

‘Poor cow,’ Harriet agreed, dropping the balled up muffin case into the remnants of her takeaway latte like a full-stop.

Nicky was in a photo-taking mood, the camera case swinging from her wrist by its cord, getting in the way. Sukie and Harriet snapped to attention each time she aimed the camera anywhere near them, arms flying around one another, lips pouting, over and over again. Johnny gave Leigha bunny ears in one shot, did the ‘wanker’ fist in the background of one of Miles and Adam, lifted Sukie – the birthday girl – up level with his shoulders, her legs pointed straight out like a burlesque dancer in the finale of her act. When she wasn’t taking photos, Nicky was kissing Miles, long, drunken kisses that were more tongue than lip.

Leigha was drunk on too many buy-two-get-one-free VKs. ‘I love this song!’ she’d shout over the music with each and every track change. ‘I fucking
love
this song!’ Nicky laughed, taking another photo of Leigha swaying with her arms in the air, a bottle in each hand.

‘She only really swears like this when she’s drunk,’ she explained to Adam. He laughed, taking a swig from his room temperature beer.

‘It’s cool, she’s funny.’ He twirled Leigha around with his free hand and released her pointed towards Harriet, who immediately pinched one of the bottles of alcopop, taking a mouthful. Leigha threw her now free arm round her friend and the two swayed together, shouting out the lyrics over the throb of the speakers. Sukie turned from Johnny to Harriet, reaching deftly over to take the bottle and a drink from it in turn, three dark heads together as they danced and sang.

Adam looked across at Johnny, the three girls between them still singing, drinking from the same bottle. Johnny cocked his plastic glass towards Adam in mock salute before his eyes slipped back to Leigha, striking in a forest green dress.

‘Adam!’ she suddenly shouted over the music, catching his eye-contact and bouncing her way closer, ‘Adam! Have a picture with me!’ Relinquished now of both bottles, she slipped both hands tight around his bicep, the side of her thigh pressing above his knee as she went up on tip-toes to speak into his ear. ‘Have a picture with me,’ she repeated, squeezing, pressing.

The censorious silence on the other end of the line was quite possibly the loudest thing Adam had ever heard.

He had planned on continuing to avoid ringing Lauren for as long as possible, but her fourth text of the evening had acquired strings of exclamation marks along with capital letters on its significant nouns and he felt she could no longer be safely ignored.

‘So how late were you going to leave it? Until I was on the train? At your front door? In bed with you?’ she asked. He couldn’t tell if the tremble in her voice was from anger or anguish.

‘Obviously not,’ he assured her. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier, I really am, but – you know, it was a hard decision for me…’

‘Oh, poor baby!’ Lauren immediately spat. ‘You’re right, of course, and nasty old me, I haven’t even asked how
you’re
feeling!’

‘Lauren…’ Adam patiently tried to talk over the tirade of sarcasm. ‘Look Lauren, it’s just a break. I just need to be alone for a while, focus on myself and the course and life down here, you know?’

‘Don’t you think I know the difference between a break and a break-up?’ Lauren’s voice had lost the obvious anger and was back to the tremulous softness of before. ‘And do you think I’d want you back after you’ve fucked whatever slut you have in mind?’ Adam made a noise of protest but Lauren cut him off before he could object. ‘I know you. It’s like last year. Someone’s caught your eye again. Someone’s made you wish you were free and single. Well. Lucky for you then that you are.’ And then, with a dignity that surprised him, she simply hung up.

‘Lauren?’ Adam spoke stupidly into the dial tone. ‘Fuck,’ he half-laughed, returning the landline handset to its base with perhaps a little more force than he meant to. ‘Fuck!’ he repeated, louder.