Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

  ‘I made up with Naomi…’ she said to him, beginning weakly, shaking the macabre thoughts away, trying desperately to bring him back, to slip into their routine.

  Her grandfather’s words of comfort did not come. He was gone.

  She ran upstairs, pulled out the clippings from their hiding place and then threw them across the room angrily. ‘I can’t do this alone, Deda! Not without you!’ she cried, breaking down into sobs.

  After a long cry, sitting in the middle of the scattered paper, she pulled herself together and pushed the cuttings back inside the mattress. But as she was closing the bedroom door, feeling a little lighter, she had an idea.

  Kneeling at the bed again, she unhooked the corner of the sheet and partially pulled the cuttings out of the slashed opening, leaving their edges poking through. Might this be a way of revealing the truth to Naomi, without making a hash of telling her? It would be like leaving an email open on a laptop or a letter lying on top of a packed bag.

  As Sophie remade the bed and smoothed the duvet flat, she imagined Naomi’s curious fingers stumbling on the articles. If the truth slipped out, Naomi couldn’t blame Sophie for that. Naomi was certain to think it noble of Sophie to have attempted, at the very least, to keep their secret forever, to have tried to protect Naomi from it.

  Chapter Nine

  I rustled inside the supermarket bag and lifted out a selection of cleaning fluids, cloths and bin bags, having agreed to help Sophie clear out her grandfather’s cottage. Deep down, I was feeling resentful. Her pleas of innocence about Harley’s disappearance had been convincing, but I still harboured a pinch of scepticism. I had known her to lie before.

  ‘Start in my old bedroom,’ Sophie said.

  ‘I was going to do the bathroom first.’

  ‘You do the bedroom. It’ll be like memory lane.’

  ‘Okay,’ I shrugged, happy to escape toilet-cleaning. ‘If you’re sure.’ I snapped on my rubber gloves. ‘Here goes,’ I said, grabbing the bathroom cleaner and the furniture polish and sticking two bin bags into my back pocket.

  ‘Let me know if you find anything interesting.’

  ‘Ha. Yes. Should I be scared?’

  She closed her eyes and breathed in. ‘This is going to be hard for me.’

  I touched her shoulder and said, ‘Yes, I know. Let me know if you want to stop. I can take over any time you like.’

  Popping her pastel eyes open, she said, ‘Deda will not want strangers in his house.’

  Indignantly I replied, ‘I’m not a stranger.’

  ‘Not you. The people who’ll be renting it.’

  ‘They’ll solve all your financial problems, Soph.’

  ‘I know. But Deda will make his presence known, believe me.’

  I checked her expression to see if she was serious. In the harsh stream of sunlight, her delicate lips had turned a purplish hue and her hair was blanched.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ I whispered, feeling my heartbeat speed up.

  She pointed the nozzle of the kitchen cleaner at me and pulled it, spraying me. ‘I was kidding. He’s dead, you nincompoop. Next you’ll be looking under his bed for creepy clowns.’

  I ducked from the burst of liquid that disintegrated into the air. I laughed. ‘Oh, shut up. See you in an hour for a cuppa.’

  ‘Or something stronger,’ she winked. ‘And don’t forget to strip the bed,’ she added.

  Upstairs, I peeked round the door to the bathroom and then the two bedrooms, stopping at Sophie’s old room, where she had insisted I begin. I opened the door. It was exactly the same as it had been back then. Blu-Tack had not been left on the walls, nor were there yellowing strips of sticky tape. Unlike every other teenager I knew, there had never been any posters on Sophie’s bedroom walls.

  I walked in and over to the desk by the window, which looked out on to the back garden. A spotty-patterned ring binder folder was lying open on the desk. I leafed through pages of her unintelligible essays and caught words and doodles in my own handwriting. Aimlessly, I looked inside the drawers. The study cards and pen cartridges and old rubbers were as familiar to me from our university days as my own possessions might be. For twenty years, they had not been touched. It seemed that she had clung to these old things, these old memories. In her reluctance to clear out this cottage, she had held onto her grandfather for a while longer. It seemed she had clutched to her heart every single detail of both her past and his, and, strangely, as I felt it now, my past, too.

  The pine bed was the same. The duvet cover and pillow set was the same red and grey zigzag pattern she had covered her bed with at university. I had slept under it once. My stomach turned and I backed out, closing the door firmly.

  Instead, I would start in her grandfather’s bedroom.

  As I entered, I tried to pretend I was not scared of seeing her grandfather’s ghost.

  To busy my fidgety fingers, I began by stacking the photographs on his dresser, noting that they were dust-free. He could have died yesterday, rather than last year.

  Many of the photographs were of Sophie when she was younger. How beautiful she had been. There was a blurred snap of both of us as nineteen-year-olds standing on a beach in the Highlands of Scotland, where her grandfather had taken us on holiday one summer. It had been a happy week of ice-cold swimming, gritty sandwiches and toasted teacakes; innocent, childish exploits after a year of heavy drinking and partying at university. The bad living showed on me, but not on Sophie. I looked blobby and frizzy next to her. Sophie’s blonde strands whipped across her blue eyes, and her long, skinny legs were crossed at the ankle. Physically untouched by our hedonism, her willowy elegance had been enviable. She could have floated down a catwalk in Paris and the world would have been transfixed. When I thought of her, downstairs, I realised that there was a listless, sucked-out quality to her now that hadn’t been there when we were young.

  I scooped out her grandfather’s vests and pants and shirts, which were folded neatly in the drawers, and filled the first bin bag. The bags were like black holes, swallowing his existence. It seemed impersonal and undignified.

  There were traces of mouse droppings in the wardrobe near his polished brogues, but otherwise his woollen jackets and trousers were hanging, clean and ironed, ready to be worn today. A collection of shirts was under plastic with the dry-cleaning label pinned onto one sleeve. At first I thought it sad that he had dry-cleaned them and never had the chance to wear them, but when I checked the date on the pink ticket, I noticed that collection was for January this year. I couldn’t understand why Sophie had wanted to dry-clean them eight months after his death.

  The wire hangers clanged as I brought down his last jacket. A pair of gloves dropped out of the pocket. They were the old-fashioned ivory crochet and leather driving gloves that Sophie had often worn at the wheel of his blue Alfa Giulia. She had said she felt like Grace Kelly when she drove in them. Automatically, I put them on.

  I thought of the Giulia in the garage, hugged by that overlarge red rhododendron bush, and a thread of ice ran up my spine. If I pushed my final memory of that car aside, a flood of fonder memories of our long road trips to and from Exeter came to mind. I could smell its plastic seats and hear the music blaring, and taste the crisps and Coca-Cola we would consume in large quantities, arriving at this cottage – my home-from-home – too full to eat her grandfather’s strange Russian food.

  My own parents had been too far away in North Essex to visit during term time. And if we had ventured there, we would have been fussed over too much. Endless orange segments would have been cut up onto plates by Mum – as though university might produce scurvy – and our knickers would have been picked up the second they were dropped. She had never recognised my adulthood, and I would have been embarrassed about her fretting in front of Sophie.

  I buttoned up the gloves at the wrist, remembering the few times Sophie had allowed me to drive the Giulia: how loose the key was in the ignition, how stiff the handbrake was, how noisy the engine.
Driving it fast had been the antidote to my mother’s caution and control; a rebellion against her mollycoddling, a determination to break out, to find my own footing in the world. Shooting back and forth along the South Coast, with the window rolled down and the wind in our hair, Sophie and I had been free and independent. We had been a tight unit of two, scrabbling through our experiences together, bumping into trouble, crawling out of it, self-sufficient and sexually powerful.

  ‘Naomi?’ Sophie called up. ‘Come down for some sustenance! And bring the bed sheets!’

  I tugged the gloves off, stuffed them in my back pocket and ripped off her grandfather’s bed sheets.

  Laden with laundry, I went downstairs and into the sitting room. My heart sank when I saw the two shot glasses and a bottle of vodka that sat on a plastic tray on the floor.

  ‘Is my bed linen in that pile?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t done your bed yet.’

  ‘No problem. After a drink then,’ she said, waving her hand in the air.

  I pointed at the shot glasses. ‘Vodka at ten in the morning? Seriously, Sophie?’

  ‘Babe, my grandfather was a true Russian. I want to say goodbye to this house and all my memories of him in style. He would have wanted it that way.’

  She poured two shots. Out of respect for her grandfather, and out of sympathy for Sophie, I decided I could not refuse. I dropped the sheets in the corner, laid the gloves on top of my phone, took the shot glass from her. We sat opposite each other, cross-legged in front of the five-bar heater.

  Holding her vodka up and nodding at the gloves, she said, ‘Deda was the one who fixed the car.’

  In my imagination, the ashes in the urn on the mantel re-formed into his person. He was standing behind me, over me, around me.

  I placed my drink on the floor and rasped, ‘But he was so ill.’ The fear of that night I could taste even now, but very few facts came to me.

  Sophie lowered her glass. ‘We didn’t have the money to take it into a garage.’

  ‘Did he blame me?’ I whispered.

  Sophie looked away, almost in disgust, which I accepted, penetrated again by the sticky shame I had tried to slough off many years ago.

  ‘He never judged.’

  She closed her eyes before shouting, ‘Za vashe zdarovje!’ and knocking her drink back.

  I braced myself. ‘Cheers,’ I winced, sucking back the silky, thick liquid, feeling the burn on my throat, rasping like a novice. The instant hit was like an adrenaline rush, shooting me backwards to the days when I would live for this feeling: instantaneous escape, seeking absolute oblivion.

  There was a slide of vodka up my throat. I swallowed, saying, ‘I’m so sorry you and Evgeni had to deal with all that without me.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I feel so bad that you had to care for him on your own.’

  She ran the tip of her finger across the rim of her glass. ‘I quite enjoyed his chemo days,’ she said.

  My eyes widened.

  ‘Not because he was suffering,’ she clarified. ‘But I’d sit with him while he was on the drip and we’d chat or I’d read to him. I had him all to myself. And nothing else mattered except him getting better.’

  ‘I should have called more often,’ I said, sheepishly, remembering the challenging logistics and expense of making payphone calls from Thai islands, and how the days rolled into one another, and how selfish and nomadic and thoughtless I had been.

  ‘He survived it, and I got another twenty years out of him.’ She was trying to sound upbeat.

  ‘You must miss him so much.’

  She hung her head. ‘I do. Very much. I don’t want to let go of him. Or any of his stuff. Not even this horrible chair.’

  I stared at her picking the stuffing out of the moth-eaten, stained armchair and remembered how her grandfather had sat in it and inspected us before we went out for the evening, making sure our legs or tummies were not on show. Always, he would insist on having a drink with us before we left and would pour us half a shot of vodka, while he told us stories from his past. They had been fascinating tales of struggles far removed from our sheltered peacetime lives, of how he and his two sisters had escaped Soviet Russia, and how his beautiful older sister had worked as a secretary at British American Tobacco in Shanghai to pay for their food and rent.

  ‘I loved your grandfather’s stories.’

  ‘He should have been embittered by all that sadness,’ Sophie said, sounding bitter herself.

  ‘He never seemed that way.’

  ‘Did he ever tell you the story about how his father died?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I trawled my memory, unable to remember.

  ‘He was an alcoholic who drank meths secretly in the shed at the bottom of the garden and one day there was a fire and he burnt to death.’

  ‘That’s horrible!’

  ‘The rumour was that his wife – my great-grandmother – killed him by locking him in.’

  I stared aghast at Sophie, whose face was turned to the hearth, orange from the ugly bar heater.

  ‘She got away with it?’ I asked, swallowing.

  Sophie shrugged. ‘I suppose so. She never went to prison.’

  ‘Wow. You have a black widow in the family.’

  ‘It’s not like I ever knew her.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I laughed. ‘But that’s quite dark, as family histories go.’

  ‘Most people don’t know their family history.’

  I thought about my own dull ancestors. My father had come from a long line of insurance brokers and my mother from a wealthy Northern construction family whose funds had dwindled by the time she was born.

  ‘My family was too boring to have any shocking stories.’

  ‘Until you came along.’

  I laughed to cover my alarm. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re as white as snow.’

  Rattled by what she was implying, I poured two more shots. ‘I am indeed.’

  ‘Tell me what you found in my room!’ she cried, slapping her thighs.

  ‘Actually, I started in your grandad’s room.’

  She seemed disappointed, or angry, and she slammed her glass down. ‘Another.’

  ‘No way! We’ve got the school run later.’

  ‘I’ve asked Adam to collect all the kids. He said he’d take them for hot chocolates and bring them back here later.’

  ‘You never mentioned it,’ I said, surprised and a little irritated.

  ‘I have now.’

  ‘But I need to tell the school.’

  ‘Call them.’

  The effects of the first shot were already seeping through me.

  ‘I’d better email them instead. I think I’m already slurring,’ I snorted, composing an email, shoving my guilt aside, just this once. ‘All done.’

  ‘We need some tomato juice and a stick of celery like the old days,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I miss those old days,’ I said, feeling nostalgic suddenly, enjoying the tingles of my altered state. ‘I don’t remember ever having hangovers, do you? Now, I just have to sniff wine and I have a hangover the next day.’

  At university, Sophie had taken me to all the best parties, in sticky pubs or on chilly beaches, where we had drunk wine and danced with boys. She, with a cool detachment; I, with too much attachment. But she had always picked up the pieces for me when I was too drunk at the end of the night. There had been a strange cycle to our friendship. We were a bad influence on each other, and we looked out for each other. She pushed me out, where I wanted to go, and I pulled her back to me, where she wanted to be. My inability to cope with the dangers of the world, thanks to Mum, was both exacerbated and cured by Sophie’s influence. Sophie’s desire to be the leader, to be in control, was both facilitated and challenged by my naivety.

  ‘I admire how you sorted your life out after uni,’ she said, as though present in my head, pouring two more shots. ‘Now you’re so… you’ve got it all wo
rked out.’

  Before I took up the shot glass, I hesitated, unsure of how to take her so-called compliment.

  ‘Cheers to moderation,’ I said defiantly, knocking back the drink, questioning how I had turned it around, questioning myself.

  I remembered back to the bold red-and-black arrow on a graph in the documentary that Charlie had forced me to watch, many years ago, before the children. The nasty arrow, arching across the plasma screen and burning itself onto my retinas, had illustrated how easy – natural, almost – the slide from heavy drinking to problem drinking to full-blown alcohol addiction could be. A guilty feeling had sloshed around along with the Merlot I had been drinking. Then Charlie had pointed at the screen, ‘You’re there,’ he had said, tapping at the heavy-to-problem-drinking stage of the graph. I had told him to fuck off.

  ‘To moderation,’ Sophie grinned, taking a sip from her drink with her little finger sticking out as though it were a sherry glass.

  I laughed and then she gulped the rest back in one go and held the bottle poised above my glass. I shot my hand out.

  ‘But I’ve still got your bedroom to do. I need to be able to see straight.’

  ‘We’ll do it together, drunk as skunks,’ she said, moving my hand away and pouring.

  * * *

  The back of my head was lolling from side to side on the hard floor. I focused on the cracks in the ceiling. Lying here, doing nothing, letting my limbs flop about and my thoughts mellow and my worries dissolve, I was more relaxed and amused than I had been for months. Like a hallucination, the ceiling began bulging out towards me, closer and closer to my face, like a giant rising sponge cake. I laughed, screwed up my face, turned my head and met with Sophie’s face. She stared at me and stuck her gloved finger in my dimple.

  ‘Sometimes when you smile, your dimple doesn’t dimple. That’s when I know you’re faking.’

  ‘I don’t fake smiles!’

  ‘Yes, you do. Everyone does.’