“Adam.” It’s barely a whisper, and I don’t know what it means. His thumb travels along my collarbone and back once again. Is this a good idea? I want to ask, but just as suddenly, I really don’t, because I know I’m going to take this careless, reckless step anyway. He’s waiting for me to move. I lean into him and it’s done.
TWO
BRONWYN
Breakfast. Breakfast on my own, on a terrace overlooking a bay with colors so brightly saturated that it’s as if someone has applied an Instagram filter to the whole vista. Breakfast that has been cooked—cooked, not poured from a cereal box!—by somebody else and delivered by a young man with a smile and skin so perfect it’s ludicrous that he isn’t starring in a face cream commercial. I would give anything for this normally, so why can’t I enjoy it?
“Morning.” It’s Georgie, looking exactly right for the setting in a pale sleeveless shirtdress and flip-flops, with enormous sunglasses hiding half her face and damp hair pulled into a messy bun. Time marches on everywhere, except around Georgie.
I pull out a chair for her. “Where did you get to last night?” I ask, though I already know. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together when neither Adam nor Georgie appeared in the bar after the swim; though it made for a tamer evening than I’d anticipated. Or perhaps Lissa’s absence would have done that anyway. She was always the match to Georgie’s touch paper. But Georgie makes a noncommittal gesture with her hand. “Adam?” I press, then immediately feel gauche.
“Yes,” says Georgie, but then she’s turning to order muesli and a black coffee from our wondrous-skinned waiter. I wonder where Adam is. What does it say about their tumble if they aren’t even eating breakfast together afterward? I’ve never known how to handle Georgie and Lissa’s casual approach to men—as if they are toys to pick up and put down, as if those men have no feelings of their own; I could never quite work out if I was appalled or impressed by it. Though Lissa at least evolved enough to marry. Twice, in fact.
“Adam was asking the other day about how we met,” I say. Georgie doesn’t answer, but I’m fairly sure she’s paying close attention. “Sometimes I forget he wasn’t at uni with the rest of us.” Us, meaning Georgie, Duncan, myself and Lissa—and Graeme, once upon a time. Five, then four; now three. “Anyway, what was it: sixteen, seventeen years ago that we met?”
“Something like that. I’ve known you as long as I haven’t.” A short laugh bursts out of me unexpectedly, and she arches her neck slightly and smiles, enjoying my reaction. How typically Georgie. The sly twist she puts on things, that halts you in your tracks. She never quite says what everyone else would, but she almost does. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d miss the difference.
“Ah,” I say wryly, “but I’m wysiwyg, remember?” Wysiwyg: what you see is what you get. That’s what Lissa used to describe me as. It was affectionately meant, and I took it as such, even if I sometimes wished to be just a little mysterious. Though only a little; mystery must be so exhausting. “You don’t need long to get to know me.”
“I don’t know. You still manage to surprise me from time to time.” She’s still smiling, still pulling me into the bright circle of Georgie. She could be the exact same girl, not a cell different, from the one I met seventeen or so years ago.
“Working?” I gesture at the laptop she’s placed on the chair beside her.
“Yep. We’re having IT issues, though, so I’m not sure how successful I’ll be at logging in remotely.” Her hand moves as if to chop off that conversation—too dull—and then she tips her sunglasses up on her forehead and focuses on me with her green eyes. “Anyway. It’s so good to see you, despite . . .”
“I know. You too. We still miss you in London, you know.” I try to cajole her back every time I see her, but it never works.
Her smile is rueful. “I miss you guys, too. New York is great, but you can never make friends as close as the ones from uni. Nobody has the time after that.” The rueful smile makes a brief reappearance.
“Tell me about it. All these new friends I supposedly have—all the mums at the school gate—they’re lovely, and they’re almost all of them really friendly; they’ll happily grab your child for you if you’re running late, but it just feels superficial when the only thing you have in common is kids the same age.” We smile at each other, a smile that somehow echoes through all the years: all the training sessions, the competitions, the nights out and the parties; those years when we saw each other absolutely every day. Then after uni, when Georgie was still in London, all the catch-up lunches and coffees and dinners and phone calls, when the frequency was still at least twice weekly. All that time invested in a relationship such that it can now survive a distance of three and a half thousand miles on a diet of only emails and calls and a visit or two a year.
“Tell me everything,” Georgie says. “What’s going on with you?”
“All good, really. Well, apart from—well, this, of course. The move to the dreaded burbs has actually worked out really well. I knew it was the right thing for the future, for the kids’ schools, but I thought I would miss London, and actually I don’t at all. It helps that the house is lovely, I suppose.” Her head is inclined to me, and she nods as she listens, but I still wonder if I sound boring—harping on about schools and the suburbs, while Georgie dons designer clothes for work, drinks cocktails in Manhattan bars and goes home with whoever she feels like. Or maybe she’s envious of family life: grass is always greener and all that. Rob would tell me I’m being silly, but even he turns up his smile a notch when Georgie and Lissa are around. Sometimes I think that’s what the attraction was with Graeme: that he had Lissa but he wanted me, even if only in that moment.
But there’s no point in thinking about Graeme. I slide my knife decisively into my croissant. “You must come stay next time you are over. See your goddaughter; Kitty would love that.” Kitty adores Georgie, and Georgie is brilliant with her. The expression of unmitigated outrage on Kitty’s little face when she realized I would be seeing Georgie without her was priceless. I feel a pang. Kitty and Jack will have climbed into our bed this morning for a cuddle, like they always do. I can almost feel the warmth of their little bodies against me, still heavy with the remnants of sleep, before the energy that fizzes through them for the rest of the day has had a chance to take hold.
“That would be lovely. It’s been too long since I’ve had a trip back.” She doesn’t say home. We all know Georgie never goes home, and we all know she won’t talk about it. Even I, with my famous lack of tact, know better than to tackle that subject. “So you and Rob are better now?” she asks.
“Yes.” She tips her head sideways, a mild telegraphing of her disbelief. “No, really; we are. I think that—episode—was a good thing, actually. It made me appreciate him more, appreciate what we had.” It’s terrifying now to think of everything I jeopardized. My marriage and my family, even my friendships. If Lissa had ever found out . . . And all for what? I didn’t get whatever I thought I would from it, if I was thinking at all. “I mean, he’s still rubbish at—well, all the things he’s rubbish at, but it doesn’t drive me quite so mad now.”
She thanks the waiter, who has brought her order, then turns back to me. “Your wysiwyg-ness didn’t extend to telling him, did it?”
“God, no. What on earth would that have achieved?” I stare at her, confused. Did she expect that I would have? Surely the only people who confess are those who are looking to walk out the door but need a push?
One shoulder shrugs in the smallest of movements. “And you don’t think Graeme told Lissa?”
“Are you kidding? Do you think Lissa would have ever spoken to me again if he had? Do you think I would even have been allowed to live?”
She winces, and I wish I could drag back the words, but it’s too late now. “God. Sorry.” An odd thought strikes me: is she asking because she herself told someone? “You didn’t tell her, did y
ou? Or anyone else?”
“Of course not. I promised you I wouldn’t.” It’s so simply put: she promised she wouldn’t, and therefore she didn’t. End of discussion. And it really is: if I have to trust someone with my secrets, there’s no one better than Georgie. Though not all my secrets. Not that.
“I know. Yes. Anyway.” I find I’m rubbing my temple where a headache is forming. It’s the brightness of the sun, maybe, or the wine from last night. Or maybe it’s just this conversation. I want to drag it somewhere less fraught with obstacles, for either one of us, but I can’t suddenly start talking about the weather, or Brexit, or Trump. Lissa died. It’s why we’re here; there’s no escaping it. “When did you last see Lissa in person, then?”
“When she came to New York. I was planning to come out a month after you guys came; we had it all arranged for when my work eased up. But . . . anyway, I last saw her in New York. That must have been, oh, five months ago.” She looks sideways, a little furrow forming between her eyebrows as she squints against the sun; when she turns back to me, there’s a trace of it there still: the first evidence that Georgie is not immune to time. A teeny burst of something akin to triumph blooms inside me and is followed immediately by hot shame: I am mean and petty and not worthy of being her friend, this girl who has never been anything other than utterly supportive to me. “She seemed . . . happy. For Lissa, I mean.” She shrugs and her lips twist ruefully. “It’s all relative. But given how—broken—she was after Graeme died, she really seemed to be doing well. She was pretty absorbed in the hotel project. I know it had been Jem’s dream for—well, forever, but it really seemed to be hers, too.”
“Yes, she and Jem stayed with us for a bit when they were sorting out some of the financing in London, and it was literally all she could talk about.” It had been an odd visit. She stayed for a fortnight, and yet we hardly seemed to find a moment to properly catch up. Was she happy? I would have said so. With hindsight, though . . . But perhaps hindsight casts shadows that were never really there. I pull myself back to the present. “Well, they’ve done an amazing job with it—not that you’d expect anything else.” Both Lissa and Jem made careers out of high-end hotel management. They actually met at a professional conference. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She looks around, as if taking in the view for the first time, then back, dismissing it entirely. “I can see how it suited them. As a couple, I mean.”
I know what she means. The glamour of this place is undeniable. “Yeah, I couldn’t see Graeme here.” Graeme again. What’s wrong with me?
“I know.” She has barely touched her muesli, which is unlike her. Despite being almost as lollipop thin as Lissa, Georgie likes her food. “He was better for her, I think.”
“Hardly. Graeme and Lissa were fighting like cats and dogs before he died.” I sound truculent; I try to soften my tone. “And remember, her dad never much liked him.”
Georgie huffs out a breath. “Did you ever see him approve of anything Lissa chose to do without consulting him? As if his opinion was ever worth counting.”
I shrug. I know Georgie’s opinion of Lissa’s father, and whilst I don’t exactly think she’s wrong, it still seems somewhat . . . disrespectful. “Well, anyway, Jem adored her.”
She looks at me in that way she has, as if she’s peeling back the surface to see what’s underneath. Nothing, I think defiantly. I’m wysiwyg, remember? “I suppose. Though Duncan said Jem and Lissa were arguing that night, the night she—”
“You were talking with Duncan?”
“Yes. This morning. Adam and I ran into him at Kanu Cove.” I see the cove in my own mind’s eye, a narrow tongue of a bay, shaped more like a fjord, all dramatic cliffs and almost no beach; it’s exactly the sort of place that would have a serpent myth attached to it. She doesn’t miss the shudder that goes through me. “Exactly. The water there—there’s not a chance you’d get me in there. So it doesn’t make sense that Lissa would opt to swim there—”
“Jeez, Georgie.” My words are too strident. An elderly man in a frighteningly bright orange shirt looks up from the next table, but I can’t help myself. “Do we have to? Go over everything?”
She looks at me quizzically without saying anything for just long enough for me to feel myself start to flush. “Bron, are you okay?” she asks quietly.
“No!” I take a breath, then two, before I risk a glance at her. I’m pushing her away, I know it, but I just can’t bear the questions . . . “I mean yes. Sorry. Yes.” I dash a hand at the tears that have spilled out. “I’m just on edge today; I don’t know why.” She hands me a napkin and strokes my upper arm while I wipe away the tears, trying not to mess up my eye makeup. Though I don’t know why I’m bothering to take care, given that in this heat my mascara will have smudged into panda eyes by lunchtime anyway. I take another deep breath and let it out slowly. Georgie is waiting patiently for me to say something. “Maybe it’s being away from home. I know it sounds lame, but I really miss the kids.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t sound lame at all.”
“When I’m with them, I’d kill for a little alone time, but the minute I get it, I’m wishing they were here.” I force a laugh. “They ruin you twice over.” But Georgie has her head tipped to one side again. “What?”
She shrugs. “Nothing, just . . .”
“What?”
“I thought maybe it was my questions—”
“Georgie—”
“—I know I’m upsetting you with them, and Duncan, too; I’m not meaning to, I’m just trying to understand—”
“Why? What difference does it make if you understand? She’s still dead, and there’s nothing you could have done.” My volume has risen again: the elderly man is looking at me once more, and now the occupants of a few other tables are, too. “What difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to me. It should make a difference to all of us.” I stare at her, and suddenly I feel slightly afraid. When she’s set her mind on something, Georgie doesn’t bend. Lissa had that about her, too. Maybe I did once, but that was a long time ago, before marriage, and kids. “Don’t you think we owe it to her to try to understand? To make sure the same thing never happens again?”
“How could it ever happen again?” I’m genuinely bewildered, but Georgie has dropped her sunglasses back into place, hiding those intense green eyes of hers. All I can see is the azure of the sea and the white of the terrace wall reflected in her dark lenses. I look away, across the bay, to where the horizon blends into the sky. The blues are so bright that they make my eyes ache. I reach for my bag and push my chair back. “I’m going to call home. I’ll see you later.”
She purses her lips, then shrugs, reaching for her laptop. “Duncan, Adam and I are planning on swimming this afternoon, sometime after lunch.” Her tone is excessively polite. “Dunc was going to see if he could get a boat to take us out to the nature reserve island, so we can do a swim round there.”
“Oh,” I say, equally stiffly. “Well. I might join you.”
She’s opened up the laptop now and is firing it up. I feel dismissed, despite the fact that I was the one to get up from the table. I turn back when I get to the edge of the terrace, but she’s entirely focused on something on her screen. She’s not looking at me at all.
* * *
—
Only I can’t call home, because it’s not even four in the morning, as Georgie no doubt worked out because nothing much gets past Georgie—when she’s sober. Which, come to think of it, is the only way I’ve seen her this trip, in stark contrast to our university years, though she hasn’t said anything particular about it. Georgie is the direct opposite of wysiwyg—except no, Georgie isn’t as binary as that. She’s the strangest mix of wide-open rooms and locked doors. I had just started at uni when I met them both—Lissa and Georgie together, as they always were—and full of d
esperation to be more interesting than in my staid years at a girls’ private school, being diligently studious and enthusiastically sporty and utterly ordinary; the only thing that held me apart was my swimming. It was swimming that brought me to Lissa and Georgie, but Georgie’s was the arm that pulled me into their circle. It took me a long time to figure out that that same arm holds people away. Everyone except Lissa, that is. But I was an academic year younger; it felt natural that they would be closer.
Ordinary. It’s not the insult now that I felt it was at eighteen. I’m not even sure it’s damning with faint praise. So many well-lived lives are ordinary; so many enduring loves, too. It took me an even longer time—and Rob pointing it out—to realize that my very ordinariness is why Lissa and Georgie and I fit together so well. You’re their voice of reason, he said. They need a point of reference, a true north. A wave of longing to hear his voice sweeps through me—but he won’t much thank me for waking him at this time; I’ll have to wait a few hours.
I could go and lie by the pool, I suppose, and maybe I will later, though I’d better stick to the shade. Georgie hasn’t even been here a day, but already her skin has acquired a golden glow. The only things I’ve acquired are more freckles and an uncomfortable sunburn on the backs of my knees; I’ll need factor 50 there if I’m to swim later. But for now, for want of anything better to do, I head toward my room, winding my way up the hill on the paved stone path, occasionally having to move to one side to allow one of the fleet of what looks like adapted golf buggies to pass, laden with dirty bed linens or gardening equipment or some such. It can’t be more than two hundred meters, but it feels much farther in the heat. Jem has put us all up in amazing villas—I have one all to myself, with a private plunge pool, no less—at no cost to us, though it did make me wonder if maybe the hotel isn’t doing so well as I thought. Surely he ought to be putting paying guests in these accommodations?
How to Kill Your Best Friend Page 3
