by Robert Young
I did the right thing. Of course I did. I pointed at Sonny and told the police the truth as he stood there watching me, twenty odd years of friendship ended and the betrayal scratched into his face as I spoke. He is not equipped for what will come next and I hate myself that I may have been the one who finally made all those jumbled bits of Sonny finally come undone and fall into pieces, and I hate him just as much for making me do it to him. Sometimes it feels like all those years of unlikely friendship, when we seemed so destined to drift quickly apart as University and graduate recruitment schemes and corporate ladders were laid out in front of only one of us, happened solely for such a painful rending to occur. As though it were all building simply toward this one ridiculous moment.
Any sort of whiff of associating with a drug dealer cannot have played well for Sally’s burgeoning career. I don't know if it ended it or simply screwed things up for her but I could hardly call her to ask after that now could I?
She said nothing to me when she left. Just watched Sonny loaded into the back of the patrol car and then walked away from me and if for one passing moment you consider that sad or feel a twinge of sympathy for poor me you can stop immediately.
The Book of Luke had little to offer on the whole affair though Ed made a remark more poignant than he'd meant as we picked through the bones of it during a phenomenally low key and morose birthday night.
’I can't believe you got away with nothing Tom.’
We reflected for a moment in silence on the layers of meaning that his statement might contain, before Luke issued him with a deserved Sambuca penalty which went down like the dominos.
Such a confluence of events lining up in that way can seem unlucky, can feel grossly unjust. If only I'd not been so thrown by Mel’s text, or by the hurried and disappointing (for Sally) sex I might have seen what was coming. If only I'd told Sonny to come back later, what with Sally changing into something very much for my private benefit at that exact moment. What on earth was I doing letting anyone into the flat just then? What if I had ended things with Mel when they should have been ended, months before? What if I hadn't been four pints cocky?
Truth is; it's not bad luck and poor timing. It is what it is. The outcome of the things you do or don't do in life, or the choices that you make. I should have been more respectful and responsible with Mel and dealt with things better but I let them drift because I was too much of a coward to do anything else. I should have treated Sally with better respect and responsibility than to put her in the path of Sonny, not just because he's unpredictable and feckless but because she was a police officer and he a drug dealer.
And I should have done the respectful and responsible thing for Sonny and tried to help change the course his life was taking. I was his oldest friend and had opportunity enough to help him make better decisions all down the years, to try in some way to divert him away from becoming a fucking drug dealer, rather than just sit back and watch him get things wrong and not try to help like it was nothing to do with me. People's lives are not a game, and you are not a spectator.
You might have been hoping for a different ending here, something a little more light-hearted and slapstick from the slightly chaotic and frequently drunk bloke you met at the start. So was I. It all seemed so innocuous, but here I am and here we are.
So if the image of the scrambling, clumsy desperation of Sonny tripping over Sally in order to divest himself of the incriminating evidence of a load of class A's or the fear-paralysed moron with the slack-jawed expression watching it all unfold isn't enough for you, let me leave you with this little nugget of delicious irony.
Morning after my birthday evening of staring into slowly emptying pint glasses with Ed and Luke, my phone woke me up with a text message at about 10. It was from Mel and when I saw her name appear on screen I nearly flipped it face down and ignored it but caught a few words before I could do that and was damned. It could not be ignored and neither, for several re-reads, did it seem to make sense.
“Have a nice birthday then? Did u get it? Sent you a little pressy. Hope you shared! ;-o”
A pressy? What present had Mel sent me? There had been nothing in the post, no Amazon packages and no cards from her. One from the folks, from colleagues, even the local Indian restaurant. But nothing from Mel.
And why would I share it? What would she have sent me that I would have wanted to share out? Some food of some sort? Some wine?
Then, in my head, the dominos started tumbling and all of them white.
