The Great Escape (2 page)

‘What’s
this
?’ he cries, in a voice that suggests they’re trying to poison him.

‘He’s such an arse sometimes,’ Lou mutters, sidling up to Hannah.

‘You love him really,’ Hannah teases.

‘Do I? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes, and I know this sounds awful and I really shouldn’t say it, but …’

‘What?’

‘I wish I was you. God, Han, I do love him, he’s great, but it feels so scary now, having no lectures to go to, no structure, no nothing. It’s just me. Me and Spike.’

‘Hey, you.’ Hannah pulls in Lou for a hug. ‘You’ll be fine. We all will. Anyway, as soon as I’m sorted, you and Sadie are coming down to visit and maybe you’ll move too …’

‘
He
won’t,’ Lou says dryly.

‘Well, maybe he will.’ Hannah hesitates, then takes Lou by the hand and leads her to the beanbag where they both flop down. ‘Anyway,’ she adds, ‘it’s really about what
you
want, isn’t it?’

Lou nods mutely. Sadie is dancing in front of them, her outrageous curves encased in a black Lycra dress. It’s gone 3 am and around twenty people are still here, mostly dancing, some kissing in corners. It’s a warm June night, and Hannah hasn’t kissed anyone – at least not properly – since their New Year party, which Lou and Sadie regard as a serious snog drought. It’s better this way, Hannah decides now, spotting Johnny locked in conversation with his new girlfriend Rona. Being ensconced in a relationship, like Lou is with Spike, would just be too complicated.

‘Dancing, Han?’ Having managed to detach himself from Rona, Johnny has appeared in front of her, all gangly limbs and dark Irish eyes and clothes that always look a shade too big for him.

Hannah laughs and shakes her head. ‘I’m knackered, Johnny. Completely done in. I’m having a little sabbatical here.’

‘Oh c’mon, lightweight.’ He bobs down and grabs her hand.

‘I’ve been dancing for hours!’ she protests.

He cocks his head to one side. ‘Come on, Han. Last chance.’

Grinning, she allows him to pull her up to her feet. She dances, conscious of Rona watching her intently, as if she might be planning to kidnap Johnny, stuff him into one of her crates and whisk him off to her studio flat in Archway. ‘I’m dying of thirst,’ she announces as the song finishes.

‘There’s definitely nothing left to drink,’ announces Sadie, glossy red lipstick somewhat smeared.

‘We must have
something
,’ Hannah declares, heading for the kitchen as Rona reclaims Johnny with a sharp tug of his arm.

‘Spike saves the day!’ Spike announces, brandishing a bottle of red wine like a trophy.

‘Where d’you find that?’ Hannah asks.

‘Ah, well …’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘It was hiding at the back of your cupboard behind Lou’s bird food cereal.’

‘Spike, you can’t drink that!’ Lou shrieks from the doorway.

‘Why not?’ He grips the bottle to his chest as if someone might try to wrestle it from him.

‘My parents gave it to me the day I left home. It’s to stay unopened for fifteen years – that’s why it was hidden – and then it’ll be worth a
fortune
.’

‘Fifteen years?’ Spike looks bereft. ‘How can anyone be expected to wait that long for a drink?’

‘Mum and Dad’ll go crazy,’ Lou laments. ‘God, Spike, you’ll have to jam the cork back in. Quick, before air gets in and ruins it …’

‘Jeez …’ Spike rakes a hand through his hair. ‘Sorry, Lou-Lou. I just thought, seeing as it’s still early …’

Lou pauses, then her small, dainty face erupts into a grin. ‘You honestly think my parents would trust me to keep a bottle of wine for fifteen years? It’s just ordinary stuff we must have forgotten about. Come on, get it open.’ Obediently, and clearly relieved, Spike pours a glass.

‘You’re not actually planning to drink that, are you?’ Rona has wandered into the kitchen, and is gripping Johnny’s hand firmly.

Spike raises his glass unsteadily. ‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘Because it’s disgusting. It’s got
bits
in it. Look.’ Rona steps forward – she’s all bones and sharp edges, Hannah decides – and prods his glass with a burgundy fingernail.

Spike peers at it. ‘Right. Well, they’re probably just bits of grape, and fruit’s good for you, isn’t it …’

‘… says Glasgow’s top wine connoisseur,’ someone quips.

‘No one would drink that unless they had some kind of problem,’ Rona retorts, glaring at Johnny as if expecting him to agree.

‘The only problem Spike’s got,’ he chuckles, ‘is how to strain out the bits.’

Spike frowns as if faced with a tough mathematical equation. ‘Yeah, you’re right. What can we use?’

‘A colander?’ someone suggests.

‘I know.’ Spike brightens. ‘Get me some tights, Lou. Clean ones, not fishnet, and not grubby old things out of your linen basket either …’

‘What for?’

‘Straining. Rona’s right – there are bits floating about in it. God knows, you girls keep a terrible wine cellar.’

Giggling, Lou rushes off to her room, returning with a pair of black tights, which Spike carefully stretches over a stripey milk jug so a leg dangles down at each side. He pours out the contents of his glass, and then the rest of the wine from the bottle into the gusset. Filtration complete, he removes Lou’s wine-sodden hosiery from the jug and shares out the wine. A disgusted Rona clip-clops back to the living room.

Someone has turned the music down, and a sense of quiet – or, perhaps, hushed respect for Spike’s ingenuity – settles over the group. ‘Where did you learn to do that, Spike?’ asks Sadie.

‘Boy scouts,’ he sniggers, ‘although there wasn’t a badge for it, sadly.’

With a smile, Hannah sips from her glass and lets her gaze skim over her favourite people in the whole world:

Lou, a talented jeweller, who, despite the odd flash of exasperation, is bonkers in love with the most flirtatious man in Glasgow (even now, with Lou in the room, Spike is sneaking quick glances at some friend of a friend with a long blonde plait coiled ingeniously on top of her head).

Sadie, the half-Italian beauty, who’s already had orders for her sensational hand-printed corsets, and on whom pretty much every boy in their year has nurtured an ill-disguised crush.

Johnny from upstairs, a catering student, virtually their fourth flatmate and provider of emergency rations ever since, one bleak winter’s night, he popped down to find the girls stony broke, trying to pretend that Weetabix and lime marmalade constituted a perfectly well-balanced meal. Johnny, whose new girlfriend is, although icily beautiful, a most
unsuitable
choice.

Hannah knows, too, that Johnny’s love life is none of her business, especially now, when she’s leaving. Feeling her stomach tighten, she glances again at Sadie and Lou who catch the look on her face, and who at once wrap their arms tightly around her. ‘Don’t forget us, will you?’ Sadie murmurs.

‘Are you mad? Of course I won’t …’ Then, as Rona comes in search of her fake alligator bag which someone must have ‘stolen’ – she finds it wedged behind the kitchen door – Johnny grabs Hannah by the arm and says, ‘Great party, Han. The best.’

‘Thanks, Johnny.’ She blinks, not knowing what else to say.

He meets her gaze, and she’s surprised by the flicker of sadness she sees in his eyes. ‘A new start, isn’t it?’ he adds.

‘Guess so. It’s bloody terrifying, though …’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ he mutters.

Hannah frowns. ‘What, London?’

He glances around the girls’ devastated kitchen. ‘Um … yeah. Sort of.’

‘Johnny?’ says Rona sharply. ‘You ready to go now? I’ve got a pounding headache.’

‘Yep, just coming.’ He smiles stoically. ‘So you’re off tomorrow?’

Hannah nods. ‘Mum and Dad are coming with the van at eleven. The way Dad drives, it should only take us about three weeks to get to London.’

Johnny laughs. ‘Bye, then, Han.’

‘Bye, Johnny.’ They pause, and he hugs her before Rona takes his hand and leads him to the door.

The final stragglers leave amidst drunken good-lucks, and Spike totters unsteadily towards Lou’s bedroom, a smear of pink, which doesn’t match Lou’s lipstick, on his cheek. ‘My God,’ Lou breathes, taking in the nuts and tortilla chips crunched into the cork-tiled floor, the gigantic pub ashtray piled high with butts and the table crammed with smeared glasses and empty bottles. ‘We really should make a start on this.’

Hannah nods wearily. ‘Yeah, let’s do it now.’

‘No,’ Sadie declares, ‘not on your last night. Me and Lou will do it tomorrow after you’ve gone.’

‘But I can’t leave you with this!’

‘’Course you can,’ Lou cuts in. ‘It’ll keep us busy – stop us pining for you, sobbing into your beanbag.’

‘Well, if you insist …’ Suddenly, Hannah’s attention is caught by a tissue-wrapped bottle nestling between the bread bin and the microwave. ‘Look, someone’s left this.’ Frowning, she examines the gift tag attached to its neck and rips off the wrapping. ‘It’s from Johnny. Oh, that’s sweet of him. Look, there’s something else too.’ As Sadie wrestles out the cork, and Lou grabs three plastic cups, Hannah peels the lid from a faded Tupperware box. GIRLS – FOR YOUR LAST BREAKFAST TOGETHER MAYBE? J x is written neatly across it in felt-tip. It’s an apple tart, the segments fanning out in circles beneath a golden glaze. Hannah smiles, snaps off a fragment of pastry and lets it dissolve on her tongue.

There’s a card, too, propped up against the bread bin. She studies Johnny’s old-fashioned forward-sloping writing on the envelope and rips it open. The card depicts a wobbly line drawing of Glasgow, with the famous buildings all jammed in together, jostling for space.
Dear Han
, it reads,
So you’re off! We’re all going to miss you like mad, you know. What’s going to become of us? Who knows? And we’ll definitely miss your cooking! Haha. But we’ll be okay as long as you remember us and wear a bloody bike helmet in London
.
That’s an absolute order, and I’ve alerted the police to keep an eye on you too. Love, J.

‘Oh, Johnny,’ Hannah murmurs as Sadie fills the cups with tepid champagne. Raising hers to her lips, she wipes away the hot tears that have sprung to her eyes. ‘I’d like to make a speech,’ she says.

‘Speech! Speech!’ cry Sadie and Lou.

Hannah takes a deep breath. ‘I just want to say … I love both of you and we’re never going to lose touch, okay?’ She pauses as her friends murmur their agreement, then adds, ‘And there’s another thing.’

‘What?’ Sadie asks.

‘Johnny’s apple tart. I don’t think I can wait till breakfast, can you?’

THREE

The morning after

As Hannah and her parents trundle down the M6 in a hired van, Lou heads back upstairs, breathless and grubby from lugging a third black sack to the wheelie bin outside. ‘Oh, hi,’ she exclaims. Johnny is sitting at the kitchen table, studying Hannah’s butter bean dip into which someone has extinguished a cigarette.

‘That’s horrible, that.’ He looks up and smiles. ‘It’s an absolute crime against humanity. It looked so tempting as well.’

‘Ha. Yeah, disgusting. God knows who did that. Spike, probably. How old is he again?’ Johnny looks at her blankly. ‘Thirty-five,’ Lou reminds him. ‘I’m going out with a thirty-five-year-old man who still can’t use an ashtray because so many other things will do instead.’

Johnny smirks. ‘Where is he anyway?’

‘Went back to bed for more beauty sleep.’ Lou pulls a wry smile. ‘So has Sadie, lazy sods.’ She laughs, suddenly conscious of her limp, hungover hair and shiny face flecked with the remnants of last night’s mascara. She’s still in her pyjamas too – embarrassing ancient fleecy ones, not like the posh silk ensemble Sadie wears. Thank God she’s flung a sweater over her top. ‘Thanks for the apple tart,’ she adds. ‘That was very sweet of you. I’d have saved you some but we scarfed it all down last night.’

‘No problem. It was my first attempt, thought you could give me your verdict. So, left you with all the clearing up, have they?’

Lou grins. ‘Oh, Spike managed to pick up a beer bottle and rinse out my wine-strainer tights.’ She perches on the opposite chair. ‘Are you okay? Feeling a bit fragile?’

‘Er, guess so.’ He looks it, Lou thinks; not mildly poisoned, as Spike currently is, flat on his back in her bed with a saucer-cum-ashtray perched beside it, fag ends piled up like a mini Mount Etna. Johnny’s is a different kind of malaise altogether.

He looks up at Lou, and it fazes her, the way he regards her so intently. She gets up and rinses out the Tupperware box. No one knows – not even Hannah or Sadie – how she really feels about Johnny. She hasn’t said anything because he’s a friend to
all
of them, a flatmate really, separated only by one floor. Admitting that she’s nurtured a crush on him this past year, since Spike’s less endearing qualities came to the fore, would upset the balance and change everything. Anyway, she has Spike and Johnny has Rona. Spike might be annoying but he’s lived a life that Lou still finds fascinating,
and
he adores her. Lou has never been so completely adored by a boy – well, a
man
, Spike is thirteen years older than her. She looks forward to the moment when her Johnny-crush suddenly clicks off, as if by a switch.

‘D’you want an Alka-Seltzer?’ she asks to break the awkward hush. ‘Or something to eat? I might be able to rustle up a bagel if you’re lucky …’

He exhales. ‘No thanks. I’m not hung over, Lou. I hardly had anything to drink last night.’ There’s another pause, broken by Spike launching into a coughing fit in Lou’s bedroom. ‘Listen,’ Johnny adds. ‘I’m … I’m not supposed to tell anyone this. Rona’ll kill me if she finds out because she’s not ready to—’

‘What?’ Lou murmurs, frowning.

‘She … Rona’s pregnant.’

‘Oh God, Johnny.’ No, that’s not right. He might be delighted – perhaps they even planned it – and he’s just a bit shell-shocked and hasn’t quite taken it in. Lou sits on the chair beside him and tries to settle her face into a neutral expression. Johnny doesn’t look delighted, though. He looks like someone whose life has spun out of control.