The Best Thing I Never Had (15 page)

‘Exactly. It’s Johnny.’

‘Oh, its exams soon, and then he’ll be going back up north, what’s the point?’ Leigha said, crinkling her nose. ‘Let’s just go with the flow, can’t we? He’s certainly enjoying himself either way’. She raised her eyebrows suggestively. ‘And he knows I’m not the girlfriend type, I’ve never pretended any other way.’

Rather than answer, Nicky turned back to survey herself in the mirror again. She looked much better for the bronzer. Leigha put her arms around her from behind and air-kissed an inch away from her cheek, always mindful of the red lipstick prints she tended to leave behind.

‘You look beautiful,’ Leigha told her. ‘Malibu?’

She wanted to feel blunted, but she just felt sharp, and growing sharper every day. All the shots she could drink and all the joints she could smoke, nothing seemed to touch the sides anymore.

That was a positive – however fucking sick it was to say that – about the death of a parent. People were uncomfortable with your grief, never knowing what to say, and so instead grew very generous with buying you drinks and sharing their cigarettes and weed.

Sukie rubbed her middle and index fingers together distractedly. She’d kill to be able to have a fag whilst waiting to be served; fucking smoking ban. She took her phone out of her clutch bag to keep her hands busy, opened her inbox to double check there were no messages that she’d accidentally forgotten to respond to; she was notoriously bad for that. For once everything seemed up to date and so she started to delete message threads to clear space on her phone’s memory.

After she’d cleared the first few contact threads, her one with Harriet started to rise up the list; she deleted the whole thread. Almost instantly she felt a little pang; there were probably some old messages she’d actively been saving – but then again, what did it matter?

Her mother’s car crash had been the earthquake of her life, cracking and shaking her through to her core, causing irrevocable damage. But rather than being the emergency services, Harriet had taken a sledgehammer to the suffering foundation stone. She’d like to say it was unexpected, but she and Leigha had since agreed that Harriet had always been inclined towards more egocentric tendencies.

She sought Leigha out in the crowd of dancers; she was queening it over by the rear wall of the club, immediately conspicuous in her bright dress, one arm around Nicky and the other around her course-mate, Sasha. It might be Johnny’s birthday but Leigha certainly seemed to have been in charge of the guest list.

Leigha, Nicky, Sasha and a handful of other girls formed a loose circle around a pile of handbags, dancing erratically to that new Rihanna song. Johnny hung back – hard to distinguish against the darkness of the wall with his dark hair and black tee-shirt – bottle at his lips, face turned towards Leigha. Adam stood off to his side, face underlit by the glow of his mobile phone; texting Harriet, no doubt. Miles completed their trio, looking abandoned and lonesome whilst his usual partner danced beside Leigha, happily occupying the space left by Harriet.

She was still three or four people away from being served. Sukie stuck her arm through the ranks of people ahead and laid one forearm against the sticky bar-top possessively. The track changed to Justin Timberlake. Sukie glanced back at her friends. Leigha was drunk already, unsteady as Bambi in her gold high heels. Nicky stretched out her arm to snap a picture of the two of them, cheeks pressed together. Their faces lit up pale in the flash. Leigha staggered apart from Nicky, both of them laughing, both taking another drink from their plastic cups. Sukie felt a sear of protectiveness, of indignation; poor Leigha, betrayed on both sides.

‘Why’d you never say you and Adam had been together like that?’ Sukie had asked Leigha – after the two had fled the tension of the house in the aftermath of confronting Harriet – ensconcing themselves in the pub on the high street. Leigha had stirred her drink with its straw, slowly, thoughtfully, sending carbonated bubbles rushing upwards. ‘You’re not normally so reticent with details when it comes to the bedroom!’ Sukie had jokingly pressed. Leigha had regarded her soberly.

‘Well, Adam was different,’ she’d said, quietly, and Sukie’s heart had panged a little for her.

Harriet had said that nothing had happened between her and Adam until Nicky’s birthday, but that had to be another lie, because Adam had gone inexplicably cold on Leigha right after the start of term. She was a compulsive liar, shitting all over her best friends when they were at their most vulnerable, pissing things up just before exams, the end of term, the end of university in general.

At least, Sukie reflected wryly, Harriet was proving excellent for being angry at, and that was better than the sharpness she felt when she thought about her mother, about what was waiting for her in July, a house with all the heart and soul gone out of it.

The fatigued bartender made eye-contact as she slipped her phone back into her clutch bag. Six orange VKs please, Sukie mouthed over the thrum of the music, holding up six fingers for good measure. The guy fetched them from a fridge behind the bar, flicking the caps off with practiced swings of the bottle-opener’s blade. Sukie poured the money into his cupped hands, waited impatiently for her change, and then grabbed the bottlenecks between her fingers, pushing her way back through the queue.

As she approached her group of friends, Johnny came forward to relieve her strained fingers of some of the bottles.

‘What, no shots?’ he yelled in her ear. Sukie swatted him playfully.

‘What am I, an octopus?’ she yelled back. ‘I can’t carry
everything
.’ Johnny grinned at her and passed two of the bottles across to Miles and Nicky. Sukie approached Leigha and Adam with the other two.

Adam was quite drunk for once, she noted, evident by the way he was bobbing his head emphatically to the music. He also seemed to know all the words to this particular Backstreet Boys’ song, something that Sukie planned on joyfully teasing him about when he was sober. She passed the bottle of orange alcopop into his left hand – he still had one in his right – and he smiled in thanks. Leigha barrelled into her, grabbing at her bottle impatiently. Adam immediately reached to steady her with the crook of his arm, his hands being occupied. Leigha lay her palm flat against his chest and smiled up at him gratefully. Such a gorgeous couple, Sukie thought, bringing her drink to her lips.

‘Smile,’ she bellowed over the music, extracting her phone from her bag once again and sliding it open with her free hand.

May 2007

Harriet spent her last day being twenty years old revising in the library with Lucy and Andrew. Adam had a killer hangover and had begged off when she’d rung him that morning to check he was still planning on joining them. She’d not been surprised; she’d heard the state of everyone else getting in at three-thirty that morning, heard someone falling drunkenly on the stairs and everyone else’s’ sympathetic laughter.

She leafed inanely through book after book, the heavy quiet of the study floor broken only by Andrew’s occasional sniff or cough; he was just getting over a cold. Harriet regarded her course-mates over the top of her textbook, both uncharacteristically diligent in their studying in the face of the looming final exams. Harriet was living in silence too often these days; she wanted to talk and laugh. She glanced out of the window in the hopes that the drizzle had stopped enough for them to be able to study out on the grass, but it was still falling in soft, misty whorls.

Silently signalling her intent to her study companions, Harriet moved across to a computer terminal, signing in with her student details. She had an email from one of her lecturers confirming the name of a particular journal article she thought she might find useful to read in advance of the Literature of the Fin de Siècle exam. As this was a module she shared with Adam, Lucy and Andrew she forwarded it onto them for their reference.

The online journal catalogue was slow and buggy and after almost ten minutes of searching Harriet still hadn’t found the right entry. Frustrated, she glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of the screen, wondering if Lucy and Andrew would be up for breaking for a spot of food and caffeine any time soon. She sighed to herself. Just because she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to get any revision done shouldn’t mean she should distract her friends. Giving into the urge to slack, she logged into her Facebook account.

High and proud on her newsfeed was a new photo album; Sukie had created it only minutes before. Harriet was surprised; Nicky was usually the one with the camera on nights out and therefore the one to upload any photos onto Facebook. There were only seven photos though, all blurry and overexposed, most likely taken with Sukie’s phone.

In the first Johnny looked startled as Miles poured a stream of drink straight into his mouth. Leigha and Sasha made exaggerated pouts at the camera, lips dark in the whiteness of their flash-lit faces. Miles and Nicky posed with their arms around one another for a shot, pretty much identical to all the other photos of them taken over the past two years. Adam stood tall, smiling his wide, bright smile, Leigha with her arm and entire upper body pressed against his, face blurring as she spun to face the camera.

Harriet stared at the indistinct, pale pixels of that face, her mind replaying that reel of Leigha kissing Adam with her red, red lips, scratching down his bare back with her red, red nails until the depths of her gut was roaring and churning like the sea.

‘Hey,’ came a loud whisper from behind her. Harriet jumped a mile and immediately minimised the window, as if she’d been caught looking at something she shouldn’t have. Lucy looked at her quizzically. ‘Do you wanna get some lunch any time soon?’ she asked.

‘Oh, that would have been such a nice picture,’ Leigha lamented. ‘Shame I’m all blurry.’

Johnny turned around from his seat at the computer to stare at her. Was this girl for real? What was she doing, posing for pictures like that – knowing how it would make her boyfriend feel – let alone commenting afterwards how nice a picture it is?

Leigha lay on her front on her bed, leafing through handwritten revision notes. ‘Nicky’ll put the pictures from her camera up soon, probably,’ she continued, eyes back on the paper. After a minute she seemed to realise that Johnny was still staring at her in silence and glanced back up. ‘What?’ she asked, agitated.

Johnny answered with a question, one he’d steeled himself never to ask.

‘Leigha, are you my girlfriend, or what?’

She physically flinched away, but it only served to make him bolder. ‘Because I think you are, so if you don’t agree, then I think we have a problem.’ Sighing, Leigha pulled herself up to a sitting position and regarded him seriously.

‘I don’t want to put a label on it,’ she began, in an extremely reasonable tone of voice. Johnny was unimpressed. He’d heard these exact words already; Leigha had said them to Nicky, who’d told Miles, who’d told him. ‘It’s not a really good time for me to be thinking about stuff like that, what with the exams and with… with Harriet…’ she continued. Johnny had a nagging misgiving that the sad little stutter she’d given before saying Harriet’s name was an affectation to get him to feel sorry for her. His resolve hardened further.

‘I love you,’ he said. It was the first time he had. Leigha just looked disobligingly wretched.

‘Listen,’ she tried again, ‘you’re going to be moving back up to Bradford in, like, what? Six, seven weeks? I really don’t think I’m a long distance kind of girl.’ Johnny’s jaw clenched so hard his back molars ached in protest. Leigha just smiled apologetically.

‘I don’t have to stay up north,’ Johnny found himself saying. ‘I could come back down here, live in London with Adam. Maybe even with you.’

‘Johnny,’ Leigha groaned. ‘You’re just being silly. You’ve got your internship at that paper, doesn’t that start in August?’

‘There are other newspapers,’ Johnny said, stubbornly. ‘Magazines, trade publications, copywriters. Maybe London is actually the best place for me to be to get into journalism. Maybe it’s not just about you. But it can be. I love you,’ he repeated. ‘I really believe that I can be the one to make you happy, Ley.’

Leigha ran her fingertips through her hair in silence. ‘Well,’ she said, finally. ‘If you want to move to London it’s not like I’m going to stop you.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Actually, it could be good.’

‘Yeah?’ said Johnny, hardly daring to believe his ears.

‘Yeah,’ Leigha agreed. ‘It could be really good.’

‘So, can I officially say you’re my girl?’ Johnny pressed.

Leigha’s gaze rested momentarily on the wall behind him and the desk, beyond which was Harriet’s room. Was she thinking of Adam over there, in bed with Harriet, Johnny wondered; did it even matter at all, if she answered him with a yes?

‘Okay,’ she said after a long moment, swinging her legs to the floor and moving across the room to give him a kiss. Her face and lips were cool against his flushed face.

Harriet was so funny lately, so passive aggressive.

‘I’m telling you, this is fine,’ she said, punctuating her comment with a rather fierce dabbing of her french fry into her ketchup. Adam stared at her.

‘This,’ he said, with a sweeping gesture of his hand to indicate the greasy formica table-top, ‘is brunch. I want to take you out for
dinner
. For Christ’s sake, Harriet, it’s your 21
^st
birthday. You have to do
something
to celebrate.’ She looked up at him sullenly.

‘I don’t feel much like celebrating, to be honest,’ she muttered.

Spring had sprung upon them, all of a sudden. Campus was awash with bare arms and legs, the grass completely yellowed over with daffodils, drooping and bowing with the weight of their heavy heads. Harriet didn’t seem to have noticed; she was still pale-faced, aside from the dark prints under her eyes. Did she really sleep when she lay down next to him at night, Adam wondered. She was wearing opaque black tights with flat boots and a dark grey woollen dress. Adam couldn’t help but guilty reminisce about the days that Harriet used to wear reds and purples and blues and smiled all the time. That was a good metaphor actually, he realised sadly. All of Harriet’s colour was gone.

He reached across the table and rubbed her knuckles with his fingers. ‘Please let me take my girlfriend out on her birthday,’ he tried.

‘Adam, no,’ Harriet replied stubbornly. ‘You barely have any student loan left and neither do I. There’s no point wasting it.’

‘Wasting it!’ Adam repeated, incredulous.

‘Let’s just stay in,’ she pleaded, grabbing his hand and holding it in hers, almost as if in a panic, as if she’d just realised she might be upsetting him with her mood, her obstinacy. ‘Please?’

‘Well, it’s what you want, I guess,’ Adam begrudgingly relented. ‘Although at least let me bring something round later.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a bottle of wine? Real wine, not that fizzy Lambrini shit.’ Harriet looked doubtful. She wasn’t that big on wine; in the house, Nicky was the only one who ever drank it. ‘If you won’t let me take you out for a grown up dinner,’ Adam continued, ‘at least let’s have a grown up drink. I’ll also bring lemonade, in case you need to spritzer it,’ he teased. Harriet laughed, as he’d been hoping she would.

Harriet had lain awake in her bed with her eyes closed for a good ten minutes that morning. She couldn’t quite believe it was her birthday. It had always seemed so far away.

Her birthday had sort of been her last hope, so she’d lain there with her eyes tightly shut, trying to fool herself into believing that when she opened them Leigha would be sitting in the chair – normal and smiling – glancing into the mirror and fluffing up her hair. April Fools, she’d laugh – even though it was May – I was lying. Happy Birthday! A scenario that would give her back Adam, but – although she’d lain there and thought on it for the longest time – she couldn’t quite imagine one that would give her back Leigha, too. But then, she didn’t want to be friends with her again, did she? – and so the train of thought went round and round.

‘I asked for one that was sweet, not dry,’ Adam said, looking extremely pleased with himself as he cradled the swell of one of Nicky’s wine glasses in the palm of his hand. ‘It’s quite nice.’ Harriet agreed; the wine was cold in her mouth and warm in her stomach and was relaxing her quite nicely. She toyed with the idea of going downstairs to sit in the lounge. She had just as much right to sit down there as Leigha and Sukie, she still paid a quarter of its rent after all. Instead she just took another large swallow.

‘I got you something else too,’ Adam said, placing his wine glass carefully down on the desk. Harriet shot him a mock-withering look.

‘I told you, I don’t want any presents from anyone, and that included you.’

‘Just stop moaning for a minute and take a look,’ Adam grinned, reaching into the tatty canvas shopper bag from which he’d produced the bottle of wine.

It was a matt, black cube – a small jewellery box, and Harriet immediately had to clamp down on the urge to giggle uncontrollably. Adam looked anxious.

‘It’s only earrings,’ he said instantly. Harriet wasn’t sure whether he was saying it to play down the expense of the gift or whether he had sensed where her mind had gone to when she’d seen the little black box.

‘Oh, Adam. Thank you,’ she said, reaching her hand out to take her present. She loved earrings. Nestled in the black suede lining was a pair of drop earrings, little silver silhouettes of birds, backs arched in stylistic flight. Suddenly her eyes burned. She loved them; they were perfect for her.

‘They really made me think of you,’ Adam echoed her thoughts, reaching out his hand to softly graze her jaw and run his thumb over her ear. Harriet had at least forty pairs of earrings but hadn’t really thought to wear any, not recently. Her lobe felt naked and exposed under his touch.

‘I love them,’ she told him, dipping her head to smoothly slip the hooks through her piercing holes. The little birds span and dangled against her jaw as she straightened her head. Adam smiled broadly, looking satisfied with himself.

‘I have great taste,’ he teased. ‘In women and earrings at least.’

There’s your opening, Harriet thought to herself. Ask him again about Leigha. Ask him about his ‘taste in women’. Make him swear it when he flusters that he hasn’t. But when it came down to it, Adam was almost all she had left and she still hadn’t quite worked out what she’d say if he admitted to it.

And let’s face it – she told herself crossly, for what felt like the hundredth time – he probably
did
have sex with Leigha. She certainly would have offered it. She is gorgeous, and he’s a man, after all.

‘Happy Birthday,’ he said again, leaning forward to rub his nose against hers before he kissed her. Her heart felt like it was going to rupture. She’d never imagined being in love would be so painful. She couldn’t hear that he’d been with Leigha. Even just imagining it made her breath hitch up inside her.

So instead she just kissed him back, admired her new earrings in the mirror, and put off asking him about it for yet another day.

Johnny couldn’t decide how to feel after he read the email, so he just settled for feeling flat. He drummed his fingers absentmindedly against his thigh. So that was that then.

Adam either sensed his friend’s dip in mood or was overly eager for a distraction from his work. ‘What’s up?’ he called from where he sat at the table with his laptop. Johnny shot him a stern look.

‘Eyes front,’ he instructed. ‘You shouldn’t even be working down here. You’ve got less than a month to finish.’

‘Five thousand words in, like, three weeks is nothing. I’ve only got to write, like,’ – Adam squinted as he presumably consulted the calculator app on his laptop – ‘208 and a third words every day.’

‘Wow, you should have studied Maths, mate,’ Johnny told him, deadpan. Adam pulled a face before begrudgingly returning his attention to his keyboard.

The email was formal and polite, but the professional veneer didn’t manage to hide its writer’s confusion. Not that he was surprised. He’d slogged through four or five online tests, submitted an entire portfolio of work, missioned it back up to Yorkshire for two face-to-face interviews and cringed through three ones via telephone to get a coveted place on this amazing journalism internship programme. And with just a couple of weeks to go he had written to forfeit it. Yeah, I’d be a little surprised too, he thought ruefully at the response email.

He minimised his Hotmail window and immediately felt brighter. His desktop background was a picture of him and Leigha. It was from a pub quiz night, a month or so before they’d gotten together. Leigha was posed prettily, her body curving into his; his arm in actuality had been resting along the arc of the booth, but from the angle of the camera it looked like it was thrown possessively around Leigha’s shoulders.