by Rebecca Reid
Chloe cocked her head, surprised. ‘I know it’s important to you. And that you want the work.’
‘Like I said, it might be fun. It’s been a while.’
Chloe made a non-committal noise.
‘I know you still think Max was partially responsible,’ Rav said. His voice was gentle and his thumb softly stroked her arm. ‘For what happened with Zadie. But it was a long time ago. We’ve all changed so much since then.’
Halfway through swallowing, Chloe’s throat stuck together. It had been years since she’d heard Rav say Zadie’s name.
Rav had no idea what he was talking about. Sure, he knew that Zadie had disappeared from university and that Zadie and Max had been a couple. But he had never really been in the inner circle, never seen Max and Zadie unguarded, up close. And he hadn’t seen Max’s face the morning that Zadie vanished. His skin – usually an even dark olive – had been waxy and somehow grey. By the time Rav saw them, Max was composed. Calm. The worried, long-suffering boyfriend with the highly strung, complicated girlfriend. Rav had swallowed Max’s lies about loving Zadie and missing her but respecting her need for space. Which was all very convenient. Space meant that Zadie couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t bring his beautifully designed artifice crashing down.
‘We’re pretty close now,’ she said, putting her hand on Rav’s thigh and inclining her head towards the driver’s satnav. There was no point revisiting the conversation about Zadie. Nothing she could say to convince him that Max was guilty as sin. Rav had chosen what he believed, the version of the story that best suited him. His muscles felt tight under her hand. Not desperately so, but tighter than usual. The kind of thing you only notice when you’ve touched the same person’s leg in the same way for fifteen years.
The car turned off the slow, busy road and on to a quieter one. Suddenly the trees either side were green and the buildings pretty. They must be nearly there. Eventually, the taxi came to a stop outside a modern glass house that stood, almost comically mismatched, at the end of a terrace of pretty Victorian buildings.
‘No prizes for guessing which one’s his,’ Chloe breathed as she got out of the car. Her skirt clung to the back of her thighs, sticky from the pleather seats. Rav rang the doorbell and Chloe counted inside her head, trying to stay calm. She was about to see Max for the first time in a decade and a half, the first time since … She stopped herself. She was not going to be dragged back there, even for a moment, even inside her own head.
Moments later, there he was, framed by the doorway. His feet were tanned and bare, his legs clad in dark, expensive jeans. His linen shirt was untucked and he’d not done up anywhere near enough buttons. The belt was Gucci, the watch Breitling. It pained her to note that he was still exceptionally handsome – almost more than he had been, in that irritating way some men had of improving with age. She detected, as she allowed him to kiss her on each cheek, that he had changed his scent. At uni it had been CK One. Presumably, he wouldn’t wear anything quite so passé now.
‘Coco. You look stunning.’ Was there a hint of an Australian accent, after all those years there?
Her shoulders raised a quarter of an inch at the old nickname, the name Max had dubbed her with so many years ago. At the time, it had felt like being anointed, as if she belonged to some new and brilliant world. Most of their posh friends had nicknames. Girls named Georgia who everyone called Winky, or boys called Josh who everyone called Wank. Coco was the kind of silly, pretty, sexy name your parents gave you if they didn’t have to worry about you being taken seriously, if your life was destined to be parties and lunches, laughing and shopping.
Chloe pushed the bunch of flowers into his chest rather than saying anything and looked around. It was all so desperately Max – lots of glass and chrome, everything brand new. But there was another force at work, too, something undeniably feminine. There were candles flickering on most of the surfaces and cut flowers in several vases. It was almost eerily like Archer Crescent.
‘It’s a great place,’ she heard Rav say as he followed Max down a staircase. ‘Have you had a lot done?’ She moved after them, her hand on the cool banister, feet on glass stairs, unable to quite believe that Rav had talked her into this, that she hadn’t put up more of a fight.
Rav was right about the house. It was great. Chic, and tastefully done. The hall was high-ceilinged and had wooden floorboards. The staircase gave on to an open-plan basement kitchen, sparklingly clean and magazine-modern, looking out over a wide green garden. How much would all of this have cost? Millions. Several millions. Clearly, things were going well for Max. But then that couldn’t come as any kind of surprise.
‘We redecorated a lot of it,’ Max was saying as he busied himself in the kitchen. ‘Structurally, it was fine, but the previous lot were some awful internet celebrities, after every interiors trend going. We wanted it to be a bit more timeless.’
Max had always been a ‘we’, as long as Chloe had known him. In fact, this was all almost exactly how she had imagined it would be when they got older. Her and Rav, dinner at Max’s incredible house. The only thing wrong was the woman who slid open the French doors and came in from the garden, a pair of secateurs in one hand and a bunch of herbs in the other.
‘This,’ said Max, striding across the kitchen and wrapping his arms around the waist of the tiny woman, ‘is Verity.’
As they bumped cheeks and exchanged pleasantries, Chloe drank Verity in. Her limbs had the kind of thinness that made clothes look expensive even when they weren’t – though hers clearly were. She wore a cream silk blouse tucked into high-waisted jeans cinched in with a Gucci belt. His ’n’ hers, thought Chloe, snidely. Verity’s hair was long and wavy, just dark enough blonde that it might be natural. Chloe pulled the strap of her dress on to her shoulder, feeling overdressed and far too tall in her heels.
‘What can I get you to drink?’ asked Verity, her voice sweet, and with a hint of an accent.
‘White wine,’ said Chloe.
‘Whatever’s open,’ said Rav at the same time. Chloe tried not to roll her eyes. Rav’s deference was exhausting.
‘We’ve got a bottle of this on the go,’ said Max, holding up a bottle of Taittinger. ‘Will that do, Coco?’
Chloe didn’t like champagne any more; she found it too sharp and acrid. Perhaps she’d drunk too much of it in the year that she and Max had been friends. But she didn’t want to be rude. ‘Sure,’ she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
‘I gather congratulations are in order,’ Chloe said, for lack of anything better to say.
Verity looked up from the chopping board and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It was quite a surprise.’
‘You’ve had a busy time of it, mate.’ Rav nudged Max’s arm. ‘New house, new fiancée. You’re turning into a real grown-up.’
‘Don’t remind me.’ Max sighed. ‘Though I think it’s worth it for this one.’ He looked across the room at Verity, an expression of rapture on his face. ‘I still can’t quite believe she said yes.’
Chloe looked at Verity’s left ring finger, white against the dark red ruby flanked by two square diamonds on a gold band. With anyone else, she’d have squealed and demanded to be told all the details of the proposal, but now she just couldn’t. Her stomach was churning, bile tickling the softness at the back of her throat. She had seen that ring before.
It had looked better on Zadie. Mind you, everything always did. She had had this way about her, this way of injecting life into anything she touched.
Verity must have seen where Chloe was looking because she lifted her hand and said, ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’
Chloe murmured her agreement, forcing her words out. ‘Is it antique?’ she asked, knowing what the answer would be.
‘It’s a family ring,’ said Verity. ‘One of a kind. It’s been in the bank since Max’s great-grandmother died.’
Chloe took a sip of the champagne, trying to forget herself and Zadie, nineteen years old and high as
kites, finding the ring in Max’s room and screaming as Zadie tried it on, jumping up and down and yelling the words ‘bride’ and ‘bridesmaid’. But as she pushed that memory away it was replaced by another one. The same ring on Zadie’s bloodied finger, as she lay on the bedroom floor.
Chloe felt herself burn with an anger she had spent fifteen years trying to extinguish.
He really thought he had got away with it.
7
Then
Chloe had been to parties before of course. She hadn’t been especially beloved at school, but she hadn’t been reviled either and had always been invited along even if no one would really have noticed if she didn’t turn up. But parties at home had been bottles of cheap fizzy wine, lukewarm, in someone’s parents’ garden, before summoning the local taxi driver to take them to a club in town, and the driver then warning them several times that he always enforced the soiling charge. Chloe had usually stood on the outside of these gatherings, sitting in the front of the taxi, talking to the parents during the pre-drinks, never entirely sure where to put herself. This party was different. It belonged in an American TV show. The house might have looked grown-up earlier, but now it reeked of student. The garden was full of boys in T-shirts, despite the chill in the air. There were pretty girls with long hair and lace-edged vest tops sitting on every surface, cigarettes hanging from their delicate fingers.
In the living room someone had set up a speaker and sickly dance music pumped into the rooms. The house was detached and ancient, but the music still travelled. Chloe wondered how angry the neighbours must be and then immediately hated herself for it. The kitchen, where she had been standing for longer than she wanted to admit to herself, had been transformed, drowned in students drinking from plastic cups, every surface littered with bottles.
The party might have been different, but the feeling that she had no idea where to put herself was exactly the same as it had been back in Surrey. She couldn’t see Zadie or Max, both of whom had disappeared into the crowd an hour or so earlier. They’d pointed at a few people and shouted their names at her before they’d gone, clearly assuming that Chloe had a far better grasp of herself than she did. Term had only been going for a few weeks. How did all these people already know each other so well? She took a long slug from her drink and steeled herself.
‘Hey,’ she said to a pretty girl with auburn hair who was pressing her back against the fridge.
The girl raised an eyebrow. ‘Hello.’
‘How do you know Max and Zadie?’ she heard herself ask. As if this were one of Greg’s golf-club mixers. The girl cocked her head. Perhaps she would think it was a satirical remark. Maybe it was such a pathetic thing to have asked that it would seem funny.
‘I went to school with Max,’ she replied, still seemingly uncertain. ‘I have to pee.’
She had left a cigarette – a rollie – on the counter next to where she had been standing. Chloe picked it up. Really, she shouldn’t take it, but it was only a cigarette, and the girl had been unfriendly enough that Chloe sort of hated her. Plus, she knew from watching people at school that smoking was the quickest and easiest way to make friends. She put the cigarette between her lips and went into the garden, looking for someone with a lighter. A group of boys were gathered, watching the tallest of them down a giant bottle of Magners. ‘Have you got a light?’ she asked one of them. He turned and she drank in his dark hair, dark eyes, dark blue polo shirt.
‘Sure,’ he said.
She took a long, heavy drag as he flicked the flame, grateful that, if nothing else, she did at least know how to smoke properly. The thought evaporated as the acrid stream filled her lungs, and she coughed, an embarrassing, hacking cough.
‘You might want to go easy on that,’ the boy said, smiling. ‘It smells fucking lethal.’
Chloe held the cigarette out, looking at it sideways, as the realization dawned on her.
‘I think this might be a spliff,’ she said, breathing in the familiar smell, which took her back to pretending to inhale in the school car park.
‘I think it might be.’
‘Do you want to share it with me?’ she blurted, trying to recover.
He cast a glance back at the group. ‘Go on, then. I’m Rav, by the way.’
‘Chloe.’
‘Nice to meet you.’
They sat on the wall at the bottom of the garden, taking turns to drag on the spliff while watching the scene unfold in front of them. Chloe could feel the dampness of the stone soak slowly through the thin material of Zadie’s dress. Her mother would have told her she was bound to get piles. She giggled, thinking about it, then looked at Rav’s profile, trying to see whether he had noticed her laughing. Chloe hadn’t ever given much thought to a person’s profile before, but now she studied Rav’s in the half-light. His jaw was a perfect right angle and his nose had clearly been broken, presumably playing rugby, like Max did, but somehow it only added to the symmetry of his face. He had the slightest hint of stubble – proper adult, not the sad, downy stuff that so many boys his age seemed inexplicably proud of.
‘It’s like a play,’ said Chloe. ‘All lit up, all of them playing, us sitting here, watching.’
‘Do you like plays?’
Chloe nodded. ‘I wanted to go to drama school. But Greg said I didn’t stand a chance, and my mum does whatever he says. So I’m here. Studying English. Sorry. Reading English. Why do they say that? Reading? What if you’re doing a course like Maths or Engineering, where there isn’t any reading?’
‘I’m doing Engineering. Trust me, there’s reading. Who’s Greg? He sounds like a twat.’
‘Greg is a twat, you are so totally right. He’s my stepfather. Well, he’s my mum’s boyfriend. My mum had me when she was nineteen. That’s like us having a baby right now.’
‘I think I should at least take your number first.’
Chloe dictated her number, and then, giddy with the excitement of how well this was all going, almost slipped backwards off the wall. Rav caught her around the waist. ‘Careful!’
‘You saved me.’
‘I did.’
‘That’s quite romantic.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
Chloe blushed and avoided making eye contact. But when she looked up Rav was staring straight ahead at a pretty girl standing a few metres away with a group of friends.
‘That’s her!’ shouted the girl. ‘That’s the bitch who stole my spliff.’
‘Finish it, quickly,’ said Rav. Chloe looked down at the spliff, which was still just glowing at the tip, then up at the girl, then at Rav. He hopped down off the wall. ‘Don’t think so, Corinne. That one’s mine, and Chloe only just got here.’
The girl looked disbelieving. She threw Chloe a dirty look then turned her back on them. Chloe took another deep drag from the spliff as Rav offered her his hand so she could jump down from the wall. Her head spun. Cold blood rushed from her feet to the back of her neck. ‘Rav, I don’t feel—’ she started, but before she could stop her words were interrupted by a stream of vomit, which splattered all over Rav’s feet and legs.
Zadie
Sometimes Zadie liked to wait until a party was in full flow and then retreat. Max called it her ‘Gatsby act’, though she was absolutely sure that he hadn’t read the book. It wasn’t that she didn’t like parties. She loved them. But they were like paintings. Something lovely to create, and then to step back and look at.
Max was having fun. Laughing, joking, drinking. And he had told her how glad he was to see Chloe there. She had ticked a box. Made a friend. Now he didn’t have to feel guilty that she had come here to be with him. It was still completely true, but he could enjoy plausible deniability. And, to her surprise, she liked Chloe. It had been a very long time since she had got ready with another girl. And while she knew that it was probably awful, she liked how impressed Chloe was with the house, with her clothes, with all of it. It made her feel less like a pathetic little hanger-on. Chloe didn’t seem to regar
d her as Max’s girlfriend, someone who just followed him around. And she was so brave. She had just walked off into the party, apparently without a second thought. It must be wonderful to be able to do that.
She pushed open the door to find a boy in her bedroom. A beautiful, tall boy with dark skin and dark hair, and no trousers on. He was crouched down, going through Max’s chest of drawers. She smiled as she watched him catch sight of her and panic. ‘I’m not stealing!’ he said. ‘The guy whose party this is said I could borrow some trousers.’
Zadie laughed. ‘Ah. That was nice of him. What’s wrong with your own ones?’
‘A girl was sick on me.’
‘Oh. Gross.’
‘I was trying to find some jeans.’
‘They’re in here.’ Zadie opened the bottom drawer and pulled some out. They were neatly ironed, probably by Max’s precious mother, who’d ironed his clothes before packing them, with more enjoyment than Zadie considered normal. His family had a housekeeper, but his mother still liked doing things for her little prince.
‘Thanks,’ said the boy. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I live here.’
The boy seemed even more embarrassed now. Zadie sat on the bed, enjoying his sweet bashfulness. ‘Why was this girl sick on you?’
‘She was smoking a spliff. It was really strong. She kind of whiteyed.’
‘Is she okay?’
‘Not sure. I sort of legged it to wash myself off.’
‘What a gentleman. I’m assuming she’s not a girlfriend?’
‘No, no. I don’t have a girlfriend. I just met her tonight.’
‘Poor girl.’
A pause settled between them, and the boy seemed to realize all over again that he wasn’t wearing any trousers. He coughed. ‘I should probably …’ He trailed off and started pulling the jeans on. Zadie turned away obligingly, but not before she caught a glimpse of his tanned, toned thighs.
‘Okay, I’m decent,’ he said a few seconds later, awkwardly wiping his palms on the denim.
