The Way It Never Was (9 page)

When I’m working and feeling as okay as I’m ever going to be about the world, I can do small talk with the best of them, honed in that Australian hostel where I moved in knowing absolutely no one. When I wasn’t shooting the breeze with people about all manner of trivial things like who left the strip lighting on all night and who had stolen our dorm’s telly, I would be chatting to the forty year-old backpacker with the hairy mole, looking forlorn on the hostel bunk below. That weekend cleaning job was also a baptism of fire in small talk too – how many weekends did I get up at the crack of dawn, only to have to humour all nighters on the stairwell with yet more idle chatter. I’d agree with their drunken drivel and ask whether they’d mind peeing over that part of the floor as I was cleaning at this end and didn’t want a facial sauna. Oh yes, I used to be able to turn on the chitchat big time. Then I got home and my reservations of old returned as I started working in windowless offices and living with girls like Claire; girls who do nothing but tut.

Slowly taking her rollers out, Claire is now sitting in front of Linda looking like Shirley Temple, debating about whether face masks are better than facial spas with the passion of someone discussing nuclear disarmament.

Knowing she’ll hate me interrupting the heated discussion, I clear my throat. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear you mention Wayne just now. Have you seen him recently?’ I enquire, handing over a cup of tea to Linda who takes it gratefully, probably needing to swill her mouth out of cardboard cake remnants.

‘Excuse me, why would I notice him?’ Claire sneers. ‘He was such a nerd at school.’

Reaching for my own cup of tea, I sit down. ‘You probably have seen him you know. You just wouldn’t recognise him.’ Despite her best efforts to look indifferent, even Claire seems a bit surprised to hear that Wayne has lost that pubescent moustache that he tended to as though it were a bonsai tree.

‘I don’t care,’ she then says, slightly too defensively. ‘Once a nerd, always a nerd.’

Looking at her sun-baked skin born from too many lunches in the tanning booth and her receding hairline from years of extensions, not to mention those heavy fake lashes, if Wayne is still the nerd what does that make Claire?

Wayne and Claire knew each other from school, but they weren’t exactly the best of friends as he was hopelessly in love with her. It all started when fifteen-year old Wayne, who up until then had just been hanging out with his mates from the IT club in the common room, decided to shake it up a little. Leaving his friends chewing gum and arguing about one of those really big computers that never looked any fun to use, he strutted over and casually asked Claire out in front of all her friends. I remember sitting nearby with my teeth glued together by strawberry bon bons, looking on in absolute horror.
What
on
earth
was
he
doing
?

Claire then made him repeat himself as though she hadn’t heard him properly before laughing in his face.

‘Yeah right, like I would ever go out with a loser like you!’ she shrieked, prompting Wayne to go bright red in embarrassment. I just remember thinking that it was a mean thing to say, as from where I was standing self-assured Wayne was way cooler than vain Claire. Wayne was far cooler as he wasn’t trying to be anything other than he was and while a little on the stocky side, was built like a brick shithouse. He could have confidently taken on the big guy in a fight any day. Even Andy Happy, who had been going out with Claire for all of two lunch breaks, came to Wayne’s defence.

Claire didn’t seem to care. She just laughed and laughed until Wayne walked slowly away, scratching his head in humiliation. I just sat there unpicking sweets from my fillings, wondering why some people got to decide on the fate of others. And I asked myself a question that still plagues me to this day: Just what did Claire have that was so special?

After that public humiliation, you would have thought Wayne would have given Claire a wide berth, but far from it. For the next year, he bought her two bars of chocolate every single day, doubling the gifts on her birthday and at Christmas. Mars and Snickers were the favourite, and although Claire still ridiculed him, she did so behind his back as she quite liked it all. She would wait for the common room doorbell to ring then disappear for a minute, only to reappear with a load of chocolate bars to put in her bag.

‘He’s such a sucker,’ she would laugh, and I would watch her slice open the foil of the chocolate bar with a single tap of one of those long nails of hers.

Then one day, Wayne didn’t drop off his usual supply of chocolate. It turns out that he had got his first proper girlfriend Debbie, who upon finding out his odd habit gave him an ultimatum – Claire or her. I’m sure he had to think about it long and hard, but next we knew he left Claire alone. And despite being the daughter of a sweet shop owner, you could tell Claire was ever so slightly put out.

Back to the present day, Linda suddenly sits up. ‘Wait a minute, are we talking about Wayne Jones, my number one sales executive, the man who singlehandedly sold more flights to New York last month than anyone else combined?’ I slowly nod thinking that Linda must have a really bad memory not to recognise a former classmate. Before she has time to say anything else, Linda gets distracted by Claire who starts drumming home the importance of using moisturiser, ‘to seal the goodness in’ and I see my opportunity to make a swift exit to the sanctuary of my room.

‘Oh, Kate, a man called for you on the landline,’ Claire shouts after me. ‘Said he’d tried you on your mobile but you’re not picking up. He left his number but I didn’t have time to take it down as I was having a nail crisis.’

CHAPTER 10 -
PLUS ONE

Over the last twenty years, Stan has occupied a special place in my heart for one simple reason: He was my first proper male friend. When all the other boys at school were avoiding eye contact at the disco, Stan actually talked to me normally and was courteous and kind. There were no strings attached, no ulterior motives. He didn’t fancy me, or I him. We just got on really well. Now and again, he would give me a glimpse of the man he was going to be, so much so my heart would swell with something I can only interpret as absolute delight that I had here a rock solid friend.

It was the age of
Pop
Idol
, Avril Lavigne and Danielle Steele novels. Stan wasn’t supposed to turn up at my school for sixth form. However, once I got over my initial shock at seeing my friend from summer camp, I made a big effort to make him feel welcome. Although he clearly didn’t know a soul apart from me, far from being phased by this, he just talked to me and kept himself to himself. I then introduced him to the other boys in my class who were at that irritating stage of calling out names as the girls walked past, in a misguided attempt to get their attention. Unfortunately, it was a gesture that spectacularly backfired as to my horror, Stan then joined in. How wrong I was to think that being old friends would count for something. In fact, for the rest of that first year in sixth form, Stan and I barely spoke. When he wasn’t laughing along with the other boys, he was purposely ignoring me at every available opportunity and snogging other girls. The only thing I could do was to out-blank him blanking me – a skill that I regularly draw upon to this day.

Having long since given up on the idea of finding out why Stan was being like that, I turned my attention to my crush Neil Diamond (yes that was his real name). Neil was doing the same A-level English as me. It was love at first sight on my part as all my boxes were ticked: He wasn’t an arsehole – tick! He was head boy so was very wholesome – tick! He was a secret smoker, which I found cool – tick! He was also ridiculously in touch with his feminine side and had a good eye for interiors – tick! And he had Rob Lowe from
St
Elmo’s
Fire
good looks – tick! This was in sharp contrast to me who still had a month to go before my braces came off and boobs that were called ‘bee stings’ on a regular basis, not to mention a kilt for a school uniform that made my bottom half resemble a lampshade.

Then out of the blue, another person suddenly announced she liked Neil. Claire. Up until this point, I had managed to avoid her, as there was this invisible school etiquette that dictated that we only socialised with our kind – and Claire wasn’t my kind. She had come a long way from her chubby sweet shop days and was now one of those girls who took up all the oxygen in the room, telling everyone all about her latest boyfriend of the day, while the rest of them were forming an orderly queue to go out with her – one lunch break equalling six months of dating. Claire was starting to pick up on my general reluctance to worship her and began to pick on me for no real reason. I shouldn’t have been overly surprised as she was always pitting friends against each other, dropping them in favour of going out with boys, only to then come back to the fold and asking them who was their favourite friend. Why her of course!

‘Kate, don’t be upset if I go out with Neil,’ Claire said to me in front of the entire common room. ‘You won’t go all mental on me will you? It’s not my fault that he wants me. They all do.’ For five whole days, I had to eat my lunch watching her titter at everything that Neil said, agreeing with him that red was the new black and that a chaise longue was a far better choice than a sofa. Then as soon as it started it finished. Claire dumped the head boy for Andy Happy who had been waiting in the wings with his hairy chest, ready to light her cigarette for her. She then ended up forgoing the dating scene in preference for going steady with him. Clearly inspired by the Scott and Charlene storyline from
Neighbours
, she married him at twenty-one. And the rest, as they say is (a very short) history.

All the while this unrequited love and bitchy girl behaviour was happening, Stan started to be a little like my old friend again. I am not sure what exactly happened. Perhaps he had some time on his hands or had run out of girls to snog – who knew – but gradually he clawed his way back into my affections. However, I started to miss the teasing, the insults, the ignoring, because it turns out my newly reinstated friend role now involved being a mediator between the boys and the girls.

‘Stan can you explain to me why Becky is playing Lionel Ritchie on a loop in the common room?’ I moaned to Stan in the doorway, with the audible sound of a girl crying hysterically in the background, which all seemed a little over the top for my liking.
It
was
only
Stan
!

‘Err, I chucked her before break,’ he smiled.

I shook my head. ‘Why? You’d only been going out 12 hours!’

Stan just rolled his eyes and shrugged. ‘I just said that I didn’t want to get serious, ‘ he said, and I just sighed at the frankly ridiculous stuff coming out of his gob.

‘That’s not what she’s saying. Apparently, you told her you liked her too much to carry on going out with her.’

He grinned indifferently and patted me on the head. ‘Kate, girls need to be let down gently. “I liked you too much to go out with you” is my personal favourite, closely followed by “you’re the kind of person I would settle down with in twenty years”’.

For a seventeen-year old boy who would normally have the mental age of twelve, Stan was ridiculously astute, never more so than when he realised that us girls did like good exit strategies. Only now, having been fed those lines by none other than Joe, do I realise he was right all along. We complain at the bullshit but we don’t want to be told the truth, do we - namely that ‘I didn’t like you enough’.

For the rest of sixth form, I reinvented myself as the neutral friend of the people. I took my role seriously, set up meetings between Stan and his girlfriend of the hour until they stopped arguing. I heard every side of the two-dimensional story and got thanked for being so supportive. I’d sit in the back of Stan’s car, while he drove me home with some girl next to him in the passenger seat and I’d be okay with it. He was my friend again and I wanted to protect that.

In the years that followed, Stan became my plus-one for everything, and I his, which came in handy when a big padded envelope plopped onto the floor of my university digs – an invitation to Claire and Andy Happy’s wedding. To be honest, I was a little surprised as aside from the occasional conversation complimenting her latest hairstyle, Claire and I were not exactly the best of friends. However, I somehow suspected that her general behaviour at school had left her with relatively slim pickings on the guest front. Along with the usual literature that spilt out of the envelope - directions, wedding list passwords, travel fund, food allergy requests and lots of that annoying confetti – was an invite that said ‘Kate & Guest’. ‘Not that you ever have a boyfriend,’ Claire wrote on the bottom, clearly wanting to pigeonhole me for all of eternity. This was then followed by the most unlikely request. She needed someone who sounded clever to do a reading in church. Despite it being an honour of sorts, there was a distinct scraping the barrel air about it all. Naturally, I said yes.

Taking a date to a wedding was a first for me. It made sense that he came, after all, he knew Claire and Mr Happy too and despite school days being over, there we were, still great friends. Besides, by now, everyone at university had paired off with their respective other halves, while metaphorically speaking, I stood on the sidelines still waiting for the lights to go green. I needed a date.

I always remember that morning of the wedding, the way that Stan came out of the bathroom of our hotel room all suited up. He made me catch my breath, a reaction I put down to taking me by surprise as I was so used to him in t-shirts and jeans. There he stood, looking so ridiculously handsome that a part of me wanted to ruffle his hair and stroke his face as though he were a dog.

Instinctively, I whistled under my breath, which was then met with a hard slap on the bum as soon as my back was turned. ‘You want a shag Katie? I knew it!’ he shouted in delight, while I went red in the face.

‘Get over yourself!’ I said, as he twirled me around the room. ‘I just had something in my throat.’

Looking me up and down, Stan then complimented me on my own attire. I admit I did feel rather nice in my dress with sparkly heels that were so high I could barely stand. I knew I looked good.

Having earnt her stripes for years of devoted friendship, Scary Linda was chief bridesmaid. I remember her shimmying into the hotel foyer, wearing what can only be described as a tight lilac mermaid outfit with more velvet trim than you could shake a stick at. Her coral lipstick was offset with a flower wreath that sat there on her head and made her look like a five-year old at a nativity, so much so that I suspect that Claire had a hand in styling her. From the hotel, we then drove to Claire’s parents’ house, where Angela and her husband Bradley now owned a mock Tudor mansion in a private estate, having sold all three shops for a considerable sum. Bradley wasn’t bad looking for an older man if you go for the diamond stud in ear kind of look and Angela had clearly been a guinea pig in Claire’s beauty salon a little too often, her pretty face frozen in time.

Once at the house, I had to endure precious minutes I would never get back watching Claire practising lifting up her veil without taking out her false eyelashes. I was on strict instructions to get to know her corset strings, in case Scary Linda and the four other bridesmaids took ill or couldn’t take big enough strides in their dresses to assist her to the loo. It was a prospect that terrified me as I remembered what she was like at school, spending most of her downtime gazing at herself in the bathroom. Having passed all things corsetry with flying colours, myself and the rest of Claire’s entourage were then told to go down to the hallway again by the excited mother of the bride who was squeezed into a pink rah-rah skirted number – the kind of pink that didn’t go with lilac.

‘Out!’ Angela said through plumped up lips. ‘Claire wants to mesmerise you.’ One of the bridesmaids, a friend from Claire’s salon rolled her eyes.

When the bride eventually walked down the steps in her dress, we all gasped – well, it’s what you do isn’t it? After weeks of being secretive, I was expecting a dress to end all dresses, a dress to show the bridesmaids dresses for what they were – lilac mermaids. I wasn’t far wrong. Claire was wearing a gigantic white duchess satin strapless gown with a zillion crystals imbedded all over it, going down into the most enormous bustle at the back, finished off with a train that seemed to take two hours to unroll and wouldn’t have looked out of place at a royal wedding. Claire then finished off the fairytale look with her hair down and a huge tiara perched on top of her tendrils.

‘Wow,’ I said and I meant it. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like it before. Mr Happy was going to be positively dazzled.

There was then the obligatory fluffing out of her train and veil, before Bradley put his daughter’s hand in the crook of his arm and walked her to the classic car, for a journey that was going to take no more than twenty seconds. Having walked to the church with the bridesmaids, as the girls took their positions by the bride, I snuck into a seat right at the back next to Stan who winked at me and squeezed my hand. Walking down the aisle to ‘The Power of Love’ by
Frankie
Goes
to
Hollywood
, Claire cried – as did as did her parents, but I think that was for other reasons, namely that this wedding had financially taken its toll.

I don’t think the majority of the guests were really listening to the vows, well I certainly wasn’t. I was too busy looking around at the congregation and working out who had got the best outfit, the worst and who clashed with the bridal party, that sort of thing. But despite doing this and Stan making sarcastic comments after my reading, I still found myself getting misty-eyed. Here were these childhood sweethearts Claire and Mr Happy looking so happy, I wanted to have a day like this for myself. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t found my special someone at university, or why all the eligible men were on every other course but mine. All I knew was that I had been I stuck with the sensitive souls who prided themselves on being in touch with the female psyche.

Later on, full of too much champagne, I propped myself up by the bar next to Stan and swayed to the music, while Claire and Mr Happy had an open mouthed snog for the entire duration of the first dance. At a quarter to midnight, in between a toilet break and another trip to the bar, Stan seized the opportunity to kiss the pretty bridesmaid from Claire’s salon. He then told me in no uncertain terms that he had pulled and I’d be staying on my own in the hotel. Any ideas I had of doing something similar with the handsome usher would have felt like I was copying him, so I just contented myself with flirting. Besides, relations had cooled with the usher, ever since he manhandled my bottom on the dance floor as though he was making bread. I had found it a bit off-putting.

That night I slept in my twin bed alone and reflected back on the day. Okay, I still had a lacklustre love life, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. With Stan, I got a glimpse of what it felt like to have someone – the perks that came with having a date. There had been nobody enquiring about my love life, or putting me on a table with the old people and children. There was no having to pluck up courage or wait on the sidelines to be asked for a dance. Having a date there was an automatic given that a dance would happen. No, all in all, I had absolutely no complaints.