The Last Time I Saw You (27 page)

I should’ve known: Sally was never going to let her twenty-first go past without celebrations of a magnitude roughly akin to the Queen’s Coronation. She set such store by birthdays, and I felt bad for my sense of trepidation. She had been so generous on my nineteenth, even though it wasn’t a significant one, and I didn’t want to let her down.

What she’d asked for was a “girls trip,” a long weekend in Malaga. I knew I couldn’t afford it, and racked my brains for something else that would satisfy her sense of occasion, but she was deaf to my arguments. “My Dad’s mate’s got a place,” she’d say, “I’ll get the flights, so it’s just meals out.” I tried a feeble excuse about coursework, knowing how coruscating she could be about stinginess, but that fatally weakened my position. “You can read on the beach,” she said, then booked the flights, stealing my passport from my bedroom in order to do so.

Something had started to shift for me by then. We’d been back in Leeds for much of that summer, me not wanting to lose the waitressing job I now desperately needed. The cracks that had opened up had not gone away; if anything they were getting bigger. Sally’s moods seemed more fragile than ever, and the fact she’d split up with Shaun meant that there was little respite. I’d caught myself making up shifts, just so I could have a valid excuse to be away from her. I was planning a secret trip to East Anglia too, determined to spend some time with James far from the reach of her batting eyelashes. And yet it wasn’t like I didn’t love her anymore. She was still my best friend.

A couple of days before her birthday we climbed off a sweaty budget flight onto the Spanish tarmac, the intense heat hitting me like a steamroller. I was far from well traveled, and it was very different from the shabbily middle class bits of France that we’d occasionally gone camping in. I thought it was the unfamiliarity that made me feel so unsure of myself, but it was more fundamental. It was having only Sally to rely on, with no real way to make contact with Mom or Jules or any other friends who might give me a point of reference outside our tiny, suffocating little clinch.

The first night was fun. The apartment was nothing to write home about, a concrete drawer inside a big concrete box with only one bedroom, but it was absolutely fine. We dumped our stuff, took a cab into town, and had one of those drunken, laughter-fueled nights that were Sally’s specialty. I tried to resist her entreaties to have shots, but she cocked her head and said, in a little girl voice, “It’s my birthday” and I didn’t feel I could refuse. As a result, the next day we felt utterly heinous, struggling to even get as far as the pool downstairs from the apartment. I think Sally rather enjoyed
the extremity of those hangovers, they were like battle scars that proved the war had been won, but they made me feel melancholy and faintly ashamed of myself.

Her mood had also changed, made one of those subtle shifts that were invisible to the naked eye, impossible to call, but devastating in their effect. She said very little, but it wasn’t a comfortable kind of silence. I found myself searching for conversational titbits that would bring her out of herself. When I was talking she would study me as if I was an alien creature that had landed, inexplicably, in her orbit.

“I’m going to move that umbrella over here,” I said.

“I thought you said you wanted a tan.”

“I’m not that bothered, to be honest. My skin’s so stupidly English, I don’t want to burn.”

“Then why did you say it?”

I paused, waiting for my heart rate to slow, studying her profile, the purse of her painted lips. She’d lain back down, offering up her xylophone ribcage to the burning sun.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, reaching over and deliberately pushing her headphones into her ears.

My heart still wouldn’t return to normal, anger pacing around my body like a prisoner left too long in solitary confinement. I’d become so well adapted to this kind of thing, my coping strategies seamless—I would go to the library, or call my friend Catherine, or Jules, or simply retreat to my room and wait it out, knowing that in a couple of hours the scudding clouds would have blown through and Sally would be like a different person—but why was I putting up with it? I knew it was fatal to open this can of worms when I was such a sitting target, but perhaps it was that very fact that allowed
me to start tunneling my way out—it was too starkly apparent to ignore. No one said it would be easy.

She was the one who’d brought an adaptor plug, pulling me onwards when I tried to get my own at Gatwick. “We’ve got one, it’s fine,” she said, but now she was hoarding it. When it wasn’t in use, I was convinced she was hiding it. She would force me to ask for it, then behave as though she was doing me an enormous favor. For all her sanctimonious chat about stinginess, she was more than capable of withholding when it suited her.

She’d take forever to get ready in the evenings—straightening her hair, curling her eyelashes, all things that now seemed vacuous and shallow rather than fascinatingly glamorous—so that by the time we’d got out I’d be ravenous and grumpy. Food was an irrelevance to Sally, but I couldn’t starve myself the way she did. “Come on, Livvy, smile, you can do it,” she’d say, implying my badly disguised irritation was nothing but pettiness.

I longed for my own bed, wondered why I’d allowed this stupid tradition of us doubling up to become an accepted wisdom. I thought about retreating to the uncomfortable sofa, but I knew it would start World War Three. Instead we fought about having the fan on or off, the window open or closed—there was nothing we seemed to agree on anymore. Or maybe we’d always disagreed on things, it was just that I’d never let the words cross my lips.

By the time we got to her birthday, even the eighty-degree heat couldn’t overcome the permafrost that had sprung up between us. I was determined to make it nice, my moments of internal liberation interspersed with waves of enormous sadness about the way in which the gold plating was scuffing its way off our friendship.

“Happy birthday, birthday girl!” I cried, as she woke up, a sentence that didn’t make sense. Nothing really did. We went out for breakfast, as she’d requested, but the local cafés were a bit scuzzy, the menus lined with pictures of fried eggs and rashers of bacon. For once it was a good thing that Sally didn’t eat. She had black coffee and I slurped down some Frosties, wondering how to make today feel sufficiently different from the other days. I drew out her present, trying to do it with a flourish.

“Oh. Thanks for that.” It was a tube of the plum Chanel lipstick that she always wore. I’d imagined that it would seem thoughtful—something expensive and luxurious that I knew she used—but because Sally never denied herself anything, it just seemed unimaginative. I’d thought that my coming on the trip would count as a bigger present, but that seemed irrelevant now, my lone gift lying there, feeble and paltry, on the plastic tablecloth. Sally gave me a big, empty grin. “Shall we go down to the pool?”

I wished we could sometimes go to the beach, but Sally didn’t see the point when we had the pool on our concrete doorstep.

We lay in the sun, me reading Wilkie Collins, her reading Jilly Cooper, the day stretching out interminably. I kept talking to her like a Butlins Red Coat: to be fair, I was annoying myself.

“What would you like to do this evening?”

“Dunno. Surprise me.”

Oh God, Challenge Livvy was a game show that could run and run.

“Do you fancy some lunch, birthday girl?!”

“I’m not that hungry. Wouldn’t say no to a glass of vino, though.”

I knew I’d have to have one too, even though drinking in the heat made me feel like an alcoholic colonel in the dying days of the Raj. By the time it got to dinner time we were both drunk, a fatal start to proceedings. I suggested an overpriced fish restaurant down by the water, desperately checking my balance to make sure I’d be able to cover it. I knew that I had to pay. She wouldn’t say anything out loud if I didn’t, but she’d say it in other ways.

We ordered more wine, and I kept up my relentless chatter while Sally looked out to sea or across the restaurant, her eyes moving back to me just slowly enough for me to know that I was boring her. I couldn’t shake my feeling of guilt. I kept remembering my party, my basque, the exquisite breakfast she’d put together. I snuck off to the kitchen and briefed them that I’d want a candle in the dessert I knew she’d barely touch.

“Well cheers!” I said.

“Cheers,” she replied, voice flat, and then we returned to the odd small talk we’d been reduced to. How had this happened? I was too drunk and young and confused to diagnose any of it, resentment mixed up with love and with my whole fragile sense of who I was since I’d left home.

“I brought you something,” she said, as the waiter cleared our mains.

“Have you?” I said, surprised.

She reached into her handbag and pulled out a beautifully wrapped box. I nervously unwrapped it, revealing a little silver charm bracelet.

“It’s lovely,” I said, my heart starting to speed up. “But it’s your birthday, not mine.”

“I know. But it was a stretch for you to come out here, and I wanted you to know that I appreciate it.”

She looked at me, unsmiling, her face not remotely tallying with her words. I desperately wanted to believe her, but she didn’t really give me that option. What I suspected was that she wanted to grind my feeble efforts into the ground, trump my present and remind me how grudging I’d been. If she’d had to be genuinely grateful she’d have seen it as handing me something, and Sally couldn’t bear to give the smallest drop of her power away.

“Thank you,” I said, slipping it back into the box and into my handbag. “That’s really kind.” I awkwardly squeezed her arm.

A couple of lads had been watching us from the bar, and now was the moment they chose to send over a round of drinks. I was grateful for the distraction but not for their attentions. They were plump and burned and stupid-looking, their white shirts only serving to magnify their redness. Besides, the all-day drinking had made me feel dozy and crave my bed. Needless to say Sally was having none of it, and as it was her birthday, it had to be her call. She made sure she paired up with the better-looking one, not that there was much in it, and we all ended up in a cheesy basement club, the two of them snogging on the dance floor. As so often happened, it gave the ugly friend confidence, and soon I was desperately spurning his advances, pleading an imaginary boyfriend. Surely I’d done my time? I waited until Sally came up for air, then tapped her on the arm.

“Look, would you mind if I made a move?”

“Of course I’d bloody mind.”

“We’re only five minutes away. I’m past my peak, and I really don’t want to cop off with his mate . . .”

Her eyes narrowed, the build up of pressure visible. It was like coffee whizzing through a machine, gaining heat, waiting to spurt forth, black and scalding. I nearly backed down, but my own pressure gauge had reached its maximum.

“Fucking hell, Livvy. It’s my birthday!”

“Strictly speaking it’s not anymore. It’s quarter to one.”

Her eyes flashed, disbelief on her face.

“Don’t you fucking dare . . .” she said, grabbing my arm.

“Get your hands off me.” I couldn’t stand her controlling me a second longer.

“Well cheers for that, Livvy. You’ve already destroyed my birthday, thanks for making it even more of a fucking disaster.”

“What? How exactly have I done that?”

“Watching you drop my bracelet in your bag like it was a piece of shit, not good enough for your precious wrist. You destroyed me.”

“Oh come on . . .” Again, she had a point, but how could I explain how loaded and toxic it had felt? “Don’t be so oversensitive.”

I hated myself for that. It was a crime I’d been accused of my whole life, but a row like this doesn’t allow for nuance, it’s little better than hand to hand combat, and we were right in the throes of it.

“Don’t you dare say that to me. I invite you out here—poor little Livvy, who can’t afford it—I pay for most of it, and you spend the whole time walking around with a face like a slapped ass. You’ve ruined it, like you ruin everything. You are the biggest killjoy I’ve ever known.”

“So why have you spent the last two years hanging out with me then?”

“Not a clue,” she said, with a sneering shrug. The boys were watching us, wondering whether to approach, but I didn’t care. We were locked in our own private vortex, the intensity of the last few years turned into something nuclear and life-threatening.

“I see you,” I hissed. “Don’t think I don’t. You think no one knows what you’re like, but I see you twisting people round your little finger and laughing at them behind their backs. You killed my relationship with Matt, you killed my relationship with Lola—the only person you give a fuck about is you.”

“That is bullshit,” said Sally, the shock in her face telling me I was hitting home.

“It’s not, and you know it. I’m taking my life back, Sally. I’m not your slave anymore.”

“You’re just some stupid little dork who sucked up to me so much I felt sorry for you.”

“Not anymore. It’s finished,” I said, struck by the words I used—the language of a love affair. “You’ve done nothing except cause me grief.” Another gross, unfair simplification. “You’ve bullied me, and cried on me, and trashed my reputation. And . . . and you’ve nicked my best friend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“James. Don’t think I haven’t seen how you look at him. All that pouting and wiggling and ‘hello, You’ bullshit. You’d do anything, absolutely anything, to anyone if it meant that you’d won.”

“Don’t try and blame me for the fact he doesn’t want you. That’s all you.”

She knew. She always had. I could see triumph in her eyes, the knowledge she’d hit me where it hurt the most.

“I don’t know why anyone would want you,” I spat back. “If they saw what I saw they’d never go near you. You’re poison.”

That was it. She let rip with a stream of expletives that even now I can’t bear to think about, and stormed out. I ran back to the horrible apartment, shoved all my things into my bag, then used the last of my cash to rent what must have been the most horrible hotel room in Spain. We didn’t speak a single word to each other on the flight and when we passed through customs she stalked off, her body as sharp and stiff and lethal as a blade, refusing to look back.