The Last Time I Saw You (29 page)

It couldn’t last. It was never going to be that simple. Even if I’d been ready to truly throw her off—like a snake effortlessly shedding its mesmerizing, jewel-colored skin—we were signed up for another year in that expensively furnished prison.

I’d thrown myself on the mercy of my friend Catherine when I’d gotten back to Leeds. Even though she and I were closer, I was careful to be circumspect, as she also had tutorials with Sally. Besides, I didn’t feel so sure of myself now I was out of the fetid prison of the so-called holiday, and when I tried to articulate it, even to myself, it sounded like the worst kind of hair-pulling pettiness, the sort of catfighting that gives girls a bad name. It wasn’t an easy landing. I was too blighted by confusion and guilt to appreciate the longed-for camaraderie of a shared house, but too ruined by luxury not to recoil at the skid-marked toilet and leaning tower of washing up.

By the time I ran into Sally, a week or so into term, I was a broken woman. We were both in the common room coffee queue, a painful reconstruction of the many other times we’d stood there, snorting with laughter and shushing each other as we came up with grosser and grosser suggestions for what the coffee actually was. She pretended not to see me, but I knew she had; she was standing a little more straight, shoulders flung back, her fingers tightening around her red vinyl purse. It was my heart that tightened; it wrung out tears for the loss of something that felt suddenly precious and irreplaceable. I remembered the awful things I’d said to her, that last tirade, somehow defusing all the grenades she’d lobbed in my direction until they had no charge. I think it was more self-protection than altruism. It was easier to take it on myself—incinerate it in the well-stoked fire of my anxiety and self-doubt—than to leave it lying outside on the periphery where I would be forced to read the small print. My sense of who I was still so fragile, a thin canopy that I’d stretched over the pain of my family breaking apart, and I didn’t want to risk its destruction.

She was ahead of me and she got all the way to the top before she acknowledged me, interminable minutes in which my stomach mulched and rumbled like an angry monster. Then she spun on her high heels, two paper cups held close to her body, a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat.

“Hello, You,” she said, grinning, mouth painted that familiar shade of plum. “Fancy a cup of sewage?”

And there was no doubt that Sally was nicer to me. She took to stocking the fridge with more than just alcohol, thinking about the things I actually liked to eat. She stopped turning her back on me as soon as a man floated across her orbit and also stopped undermining all the friends I had who weren’t her. She started treating me like an equal all the time, rather than just when it suited her.

As we settled down in front of
EastEnders
one night, Sally turning around for a cheery toast with the red wine she’d bought even though she preferred white, I allowed myself a moment of self-congratulation. Maybe that was all it needed—a line in the sand, an opportunity for me to hold my ground and tell her that she was not the boss of me. Spain, for all its grimness—self-created, perhaps? I didn’t know anymore—might have ultimately reaped dividends. Now our friendship had been handed back, polished and restored, and I could pour myself into it without any of the traces of wariness that had dogged it before.

Sally insisted on driving me to the station to get the train home for Christmas. She was teary as she hugged me goodbye, and I was ridiculously touched.

“It’s gonna be so freaky without you down the hall.”

“I know.”

“Don’t ever forget how much I love you. You’re my best, best, best friend.”

“Me too,” I said. “You I mean!”

And I set off for home, my heart soaring with that velvety, vivid, magic carpet ride of a feeling.

“Hello, stranger,” I said, aware as soon as I said it that I sounded more like Sally than like me. Although what did “me” actually mean? Of course phrases and habits drift back and forth between people when they’re close, a constant shifting osmosis making a strange kind of whole somewhere in the middle.

“Hi,” he said, not sounding like James. Who did he sound like? I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach, terrified at the thought of what shady ventriloquist might have winkled her way in during the autumn term; this relationship was so fraught with danger. I don’t know why, for an intelligent girl, I was so incapable of realizing that what I desperately needed was a relationship that did exactly what it said on the tin. We looked at each other, wary. “Gin and tonic for the lady?” he said, tugging an imaginary forelock, and I finally allowed myself to breathe out.

But when he sat back down it still didn’t feel right. We tried to reminisce, tried to swap news about last term, but nothing took flight.

“How’s Sally?” he asked carefully, and I felt the hairs on my body stand to attention.

“Oh, fine.”

“Great. Send her . . . send her my best.”

We’d known each other too long and James was too lacking in guile.

“What’s she told you?” I demanded, blood rushing to my face.

He looked at me, helpless.

“I said I wouldn’t talk about it.”

Fury slammed into me so hard that I couldn’t form a sentence. He shrugged, sheepish.

“She came to see me, bit before the beginning of term.”

“What, did she call you?”

“No, she just turned up. She came from Gatwick.” He looked scared by the memory. “She was in a fucking terrible state. She was bawling, Livvy. Her face . . .” He gestured, and I could see it, as clear as if she was standing right in front of us; her face, awash with mascara, those crocodile tears painting a canvas out of her distress. “She told me that you’d had that horrible argument, and she didn’t know what to do.”

“Did she tell you what happened?”

“Yeah.”

Stupid question: she’d told him what had happened in a fantastical scenario that suited whatever agenda she was pushing. And I had a horrible, fatalistic certainty about what that agenda was.

“She was a total bitch to me all week.”

“She said she didn’t understand what she’d done.” She was too clever to leave any scars. It was all spiteful pinches that hurt like hell in the moment but wouldn’t bruise. “She just kept going on and on about how much she loved you, and how she’d never had a friend like you.”

“So why couldn’t you speak to me?” I said, my voice sharp and brittle. He looked into his pint. “Just . . . just spit it out.”

“She kissed me,” he said, and I felt the bottom drop out of not just my world, but the world. It contained so much, this betrayal, but it was also a trapdoor into all the other times he’d looked past me to the girl a few feet behind.

“And you kissed her back,” I said, voice rising. Right then I wished fervently that I didn’t know him as well as I did. Denial would have been a warm bath in comparison to this.

“Just for like, a minute. I didn’t let it go any further. I promise you.” He looked more distressed than I could ever remember, far more than he had the morning after our ill-judged hook up. It was she who’d done this to him, not me.

“What, so she wanted to?”

He nodded, and I threw myself back against the padded seat, trying to control myself. I didn’t swear, or shout. “How could she?” I said, my voice as shrunken as the rest of me. He looked at me, trying to measure out his words. My eyes were trained on his beautiful mouth, waiting for them to land; I’d never kiss it again, I felt sure of that.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I was a total shithead to keep it secret. It was just she said . . .” And again, I knew what was coming. I steeled myself, like a tennis player angling himself for his opponent’s killer serve. It tumbled out in an awkward rush. “She said that you were in love with me, and that you’d be completely gutted.” He watched my face, but I was ready.

“She’s just saying that, ’cause of what happened, and Matt and everything.”

And that’s when I saw his face, the way relief spread through it like the bliss of a sunrise. That might have been the worst bit of all.

“Course, I know that!” He shook his head. “She’s unbelievable—we’re gonna be all right aren’t we, Livvy?”

“Yeah, we will,” I said, forcing myself to smile. I couldn’t afford to hold on to any of this with him, not even for a single night—the stakes were too high. If I lost him again, it would be for good.

“I should’ve told you straight off. At least you know now though, you can kick her into touch.”

He threw his arm around my shoulder, and I tried to minimize the tremor that was pulsing through my body like a riptide.

“She’s not worth a fucking tenth of you, Livvy. She’s dirt on your shoe.”

Yes, but you still wanted to kiss her, even when she looked like a war zone. You still wanted to sleep with her, if only you hadn’t had to stop yourself. There is still a tiny little piece, out there in the ether, which is just about you and her, not about me and you.

“Have you finished?” she asked, her voice clipped.

“Yes.”

“And it didn’t occur to you for one single second that he might have been lying? Or, I dunno, that there might be two sides of the story?”

“He’s not a liar, Sally,” I said, my tone loaded.

“Okay, so he’s not a liar. He’s right that I went to see him. You’d cut me, Livvy, so deep. The things you said to me . . . I’ve never had a friend like you. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I felt like you’d gone mad, and there’s no one except me who knows you better.”

“Right.”

“Yes, right!” she said, with a flash of anger. “And it was him who kissed me, for your information. You know what he’s like.” I hated her insider knowledge, the way she’d forced her way on to our patch. I was well aware what a hopeless tart he was—that’s why I knew he’d have kissed her back—but I also knew he was telling the truth about who had started it. I said as much to her, but she dismissed me.

“And you’re right, I shouldn’t have told him how much you like him, but he was . . . he wanted me, Livvy, and I was so fucking upset, I didn’t know what I was saying, I just knew I had to stop it. It was hard, you know?”

I didn’t believe her version, and yet the film still played in my head, looping around and around like some kind of instrument of torture. I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I’m going to go,” I said, fight replaced by resignation, by a sadness that stifled and suffocated me, like a fire blanket extinguishing flames.

“Get some rest. I’m sorry, Livvy, I am. But it only happened because I love you. ’Cause you hurt me so much.”

Isn’t that what wife beaters say? You drove me to it. I only did it because I love you.

Dear Livvy,

I’m writing because I can’t face another horrible row. The last phone call we had left me so destroyed that I couldn’t eat for two days and my mom thinks it’s better we don’t talk again. I’m sorry that I upset you, but like I said, it was a reaction to the unbelievably cruel and spiteful things you said to me on the holiday I took you on. I’m sorry too that you chose a boy over me, and trusted his word instead of mine. I guess there really is no such thing as Girl Power. I loved being your friend, and I loved you, but there is no point in a friendship where the trust has gone. I must have had you/it all wrong, which is very hard for me to cope with. We got past the last row, but this feels like too much to come back from.

I wish you well with everything. I hope you get the first I know you want so much. See you around I guess!

Sally x