The Last Time I Saw You (22 page)

The winners and losers from the holocaust of my birthday were as follows:

LOSERS—Me and James. When I’d got back to my bedroom he was fully dressed, sitting bolt upright on the side of the bed as if he were waiting for sergeant major to come in and do an inspection. He took me for a heartbreaking, rushed “birthday breakfast,” en route to a train he claimed he had to catch in order to write an urgent essay. I found the paucity of the excuse almost worse than the fact he felt he needed to make one—it was as if I’d crossed into the enemy camp, become a generic girl to be managed, the whole sweep of our confusing, unruly friendship destroyed by one disastrous mistake. I knew him far too well to think he’d ever have abandoned a chance for fun in favor of academia: he’d have written it, pepped up on ProPlus, until the early hours of Monday
morning, then handed in to his tutor with the kind of smile that would have charmed them into an A.

Breakfast reflected my new diminished role. He was offensively polite, not stealing a single chip from my plate, swallowing down a burp as though he couldn’t bear to offend my delicate sensibilities. He even asked me about my course. Needless to say, neither of us mentioned the fact that he’d been crawling over my naked body less than twelve hours earlier. When he got back to Norwich I didn’t hear a peep, and neither of us contacted the other for the entirety of the Easter holidays.

I think my shame and hurt would have completely done me in but for the fact that I had Sally to distract me. Though not as much as I’d have hoped.

WINNERS—On the winning team we had Sally and Shaun. As the door slammed shut on Matt’s and my relationship, it swung gloriously open on this fledgling love match. “Timing’s a bitch,” giggled Sally as she disappeared off on yet another date, reeking of Chanel No. 19 and something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on: she was emitting some kind of musk, like an animal does when it’s in heat, a sexual energy that radiated off her until she almost glowed with it. It only increased my sense of inadequacy: I couldn’t help thinking I’d been punished, sent back to the geeks’ corner where I belonged, my virginity supersized and handed back to me as a life sentence. The timing was indeed a bitch and I nurtured an illogical resentment about it. I felt like I’d in some way sacrificed my relationship with Matt for my relationship with Sally, only for her to spirit herself away on a magic carpet, tantalizingly out of reach. Matt meanwhile was resolutely avoiding me, dodging behind the shelves in the library if he caught so much as a glimpse of me. I didn’t know if it was
because he hated me or if it was the opposite, but I was too much of a coward to find out.

Shaun was perfectly nice, a hulking, sexy bear of a man who was studying photography at the less prestigious university down the road. Watching her with him was a master class for a novice like me. She would fix her big, limpid eyes on him across the kitchen, hold his gaze just long enough and then look away. She would flick her hair, giving the kind of girly giggle that should have been like nails down a blackboard but was clearly music to his ears. Her voice would turn all sugary too, scraped clean of that abrasive edge it usually had. “Mom” became “mommy,” “dog” became “doggy” and my friend became unrecognizable. Is that what men want, I would think, the feminist credos my mother had drummed into me ringing in my ears, then take one look at Shaun, hopelessly caught in Sally’s slipstream, and admit defeat.

I never would have chosen it, but having room to breathe was the best thing that could have happened to me. Lola was no sex kitten, she and Justin were happily committed rather than obsessive, and she and I started to knock around more, taking ourselves off to afternoon films and working opposite each other in the library. It was second best for both of us—we didn’t give each other the same heady thrill that Sally provided—but it was comforting and solid, and it meant I’d started to feel good about the fact that we were going to be sharing a house the next year.

When Sally invited me to spend the last few days of the Easter holidays at her parents’ house I was thrilled, any residual sense of abandonment consigned to history. On the train there I worried that the visit was the consolation prize, that she was bringing me there to tell me that our second-year plan was off, that she was moving in with Shaun, but it wasn’t the
case. It was like the semi-estrangement of the last few weeks had been a mirage. She picked me up at the station, hugged me like she never wanted to let me go.

“We’ve got so much to catch up on,” she cried, giddy with it all, and my heart leapt at the joy of having her back. I didn’t have much to share, truth be told—I’d been mooching around Northfields, trying to fit back into a life that no longer existed since we’d all scattered, hoping to bump into James but dreading the very real prospect that if I did, he’d be wrapped around someone every bit as beguiling as Sally. I’d started the slide back to my pre-Sally wardrobe of corduroy skirts and ill-fitting jeans, but she soon put paid to that, heaping me with gorgeous, alien clothes that she claimed she never wore anymore. She introduced me to her mom as her “best friend Livvy” and I almost burst with pride, loving their colorful, overheated house with televisions in every room, so different from our muted, drafty family home.

Sally was still Sally, if I’d chosen to see it, but of course I didn’t. When Gina produced spaghetti carbonara for dinner she acted like she’d assaulted her—“you bloody well know I’m not eating carbs!”—until she gave up and shuffled off to make her a salad. Her dad, a quiet, withdrawn kind of character, simply let it play out like he was immune to it. I wonder now if he was a bit of a depressive, if some of Sally’s problems came from him. I sat there, squirming in my seat, not knowing where to look—nothing like that would ever have happened in our house, it would have been seen as the height of bad manners—but perhaps that was what was good about it; emotions were expressed, played out in all their flamboyant glory, rather than swept under the carpet in an orgy of middle-class restraint.

“How’s it going with Shaun?” I asked her, once we were holed up in her room with a bottle of wine she’d casually plucked from the kitchen cupboard. I was determined not to fail this time. I would ask all the right questions and respond with womanly knowingness.

“Good, yeah,” she said in a way that somehow failed to convince.

“Has he met your parents yet?”

“God, no!” she said, and I felt a rush of pride that I’d got there first: Sally’s special skill was weaving a triangle out of thin air. “It’s fun, you know?” she added in a tone that tarnished it. I couldn’t help but wonder why she’d bothered to make him fall head over heels in love with her if she was so neutral. “How about you?”

“No, no one since Matt,” I said, blushing for no earthly reason.

“That’s not strictly true,” she giggled, poking me in the ribs. James and I was not something I could giggle about yet: I summoned up a weak smile, hoping she’d leave the subject alone. “You still not heard from him?” she said, cocking her head and turning her full attention on me.

“No,” I said, curling in on myself like a snail. It was so tender, so private. I didn’t even understand my feelings, was nowhere near being able to articulate them, even if I’d wanted to.

“You should just call him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Yeah you can,” she said, playfully picking up the phone in her bedroom.

“No Sally, don’t,” I said, panicky. She put the receiver down and then stared at me until I broke. “I just feel like such an idiot. I always knew he didn’t feel the same way. I should’ve just kept what we had, not messed it up by becoming another notch on his stupid bedpost.”

“But you thought you loved him.”

I didn’t speak. It wasn’t a past tense, but I didn’t want to say so.

“I know it sounds totally pathetic, but I’m just not the kind of girl he’d ever feel like that about.” Not like you, was the unsaid end to the sentence. “It’s hard to explain to someone like you . . .”

“Someone like me?” said Sally with a hysterical laugh even though she knew exactly what I meant. I’d temporarily snuck past the velvet rope, forgotten my place in the pecking order, before being summarily sent back to the end of the line. I just wished that I didn’t miss him so much, that it wasn’t a constant, savage throbbing, a mixture of loss and trepidation about what I might hear next.

“Let’s not talk about it,” I said hurriedly.

“Okay, if that’s really what you want,” she said, leaning over and giving me a spontaneous hug. “But we’re gonna fix it. I can’t have you going around feeling like this.”

How comforted I felt, how held. I loved that my problem was her problem, like we were twin souls, all our woes merged and halved. It didn’t occur to me to think about how little interest she’d taken over the previous weeks when I’d been skulking around our house, blatantly miserable, mummified by layers of sex-repelling corduroy.

“Anyway, I’ve got something to tell you that’ll cheer you up,” she said, glugging wine into my glass until it nearly erupted over the brim.

“What?”

“Shauny’s got a house for us!”

Some other third years were moving out of a wood-floored, light-filled apartment that they rented from someone’s dad, thus bypassing the list of scuzzy, student-friendly hovels that the local landlords peddled. Sally had Polaroids, which she laid out on the bed, getting increasingly excited as each one slapped down. I pored over them, loving the prospect of our sophisticated, urban existence. I was so aspirational then, so ready to slough off my parents’ values and speed in the opposite direction. Then I went through them again more carefully.

“Where’s the third bedroom?” Sally pulled a face. “We can’t . . . we’ve promised Lola.”

“But it’s perfect! And she’s got Justin, anyway. I wouldn’t say it if she didn’t.”

“I don’t think she wants to live with Justin.” I knew she didn’t now we’d spent more time together. They had that certainty they’d have the rest of their lives for that, wanted to wring the best out of their student years. “We can’t!” I said, then saw Sally’s black expression and started to wither. “I mean, I really don’t see how we’d do it.”

Those three little words—“we’d do it.” I was toast.

It was both better and worse than I’d imagined. Lola didn’t scream or swear, she simply flushed a deep red and asked us to leave her bedroom. “Lola, don’t be like that,” said Sally, trying to step toward her and stifle her distress with one of her patented hugs.

“I mean it,” said Lola, more dignified than I ever could have been. “I just want you to get out.”

I looked at her, stricken, and she stared back with an unwavering gaze. It was the look of one suburban girl to another, and it cut me to the quick. She was telling me that what I had done was unforgivable, that she and I were not cut from this kind of cloth: Sally’s vividness couldn’t help but breed this kind of mercurial reversal, but I had not earned the right. When we got to the kitchen I burst into tears and, seconds later, so did Sally. I question those tears, I think they were of the crocodile variety, but at the time they bonded us even more tightly together. Sally’s hug was unleashed on me and we clung to each other like we were the victims.

“Wanna hear something that will cheer you up?” she said, once our sobs had subsided.

“Go on.”

“We’re going on a little weekend jaunt. We’re off to see your friend James.”