by Jane Fallon
‘Is he going to do DIY?’ Anne Marie asks now.
‘God knows. I’m running out of …’ I stop as my phone starts to buzz. Pick it up. ‘It’s Lyds. I’ll just tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.’ I walk into the hall as I answer to get away from the chatter.
‘Hey.’
‘Evening. Oh … have you got people round?’ She must be able to hear them in the background. Harry is doing an impression of his boss who has a voice like a foghorn, making even the most trivial things sound vitally important. ‘HAS ANYONE SEEN MY FUCKING COFFEE MUG?’ I can hear him booming.
‘Harry and Anne Marie. I’ve got a minute though. You OK?’
‘Totally. I just phoned for a catch-up. Shall I ring you tomorrow?’
‘Lovely. I’ll be here. No date tonight?’
I can hear the smile in her voice. ‘Just a drink with Tom from work. I’m on my way.’
‘Have fun,’ I say as the doorbell rings to announce the curry has arrived.
Once they’ve left – Nick and I waving them off from the doorstep, laughing as Harry slipped on a patch of ice and had to grab Anne Marie’s arm to steady himself, nearly pulling her over in the process – and we’ve done a bit of cursory clearing-up, we slump back in the living room, both too tired to make it to bed. I scroll lazily through my phone. Check my Twitter and answer a few Wilbur compliments. He’s a big deal with the three-to-fives and their mums and dads. I check Patricia’s almost out of habit. Notice that she has another private message. Lydia of course. It’s a continuation of the conversation from the other day.
The thing is that I hate my job and doing this on the side reminds me of who I really am. Especially when I get lovely responses like yours. Does that sound sad? It does, doesn’t it?
She’s added a laughing emoji to show she’s joking but I feel a tug on my heartstrings because I know that actually she isn’t. There’s a second message underneath.
What do you do, Patricia?
I’m a bit pissed. I know I shouldn’t engage in this conversation. Sober I’m sure I’d think twice. But in the happy afterglow of an evening with friends, I think what the hell? Lydia’s second message was only minutes ago. She’s obviously still up.
I work in a shop. Boring, I know. A haberdashery. But we do classes and tutorials so it’s not just selling.
I can picture Patricia pottering around a dark-wood-lined store, measuring out fabric and cutting ribbon. Do haberdasheries still even exist? I’m not sure I’ve seen one in years. But I know it’s not a field Lydia is remotely interested in so hopefully she won’t ask any awkward questions. Her reply is almost immediate.
Sounds lovely! So does that mean you’re a whizz with a sewing machine?
God, she really must be bored. I wonder if she really was having drinks with someone from work or if she just told me that to make me feel better for not having invited her over, and instead she’s had an evening home alone. She’s only met Anne Marie and Harry a couple of times and, although she’d protested that she liked them, I’d felt there was a snippiness on her part that pervaded the whole dynamic. She’s never liked hanging out with couples – Nick and me aside, of course; I think because she was there for the early stages of our relationship, we didn’t come as a pair – she always feels as if she’s being judged for her singleness, she says, and she has a tendency to get defensive and start seeing smugness and pity where there is none. She’s a virtuoso in micro-aggressions. Tiny digs said with an innocent smile on her face. It’s a trait that’s always made me uncomfortable, if I’m being honest, but I know she only resorts to it when she’s feeling under siege. On the back foot. In the end, though, I decided we would all have much more fun if we met up separately, but I still sometimes feel bad for excluding her.
I went to fashion college. Ooh, Patricia, you old dog you. You have hidden depths. A lifetime ago, obviously.
Amazing!! So do you teach the classes?
Why not? Some of them. There are two of us. Me and Dinah the owner.
Omg I love that. Do you make your own clothes too?
‘Who are you chatting to?’ I jump. I’d completely forgotten Nick was even in the room.
‘Oh. Lydia,’ I say, sticking as close to the truth as I dare.
‘She’s up late.’ He yawns. ‘I’m going to bed. I told you three times already but you were completely absorbed.’
‘I’m coming.’
Occasionally. I don’t think I’ll be appearing on Sewing Bee anytime soon though. What about you?
Well, I’m currently in an Uber that’s being driven by an absolute psycho!! If you don’t hear from me ever again he’s got me in his basement!!
I have to resist the urge to phone her and ask if she’s OK. Patricia would be concerned too, though.
Oh goodness. Are you all right?
Just about!! In the daytime I work for a publisher commissioning artists. It’s soul-destroying.
One day that will be you! I have faith.
‘Do you think Lyds gets lonely?’ I say to Nick through a mouthful of toothpaste.
‘Where’s that come from?’
I wipe my mouth on a towel. ‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’
‘She has loads of friends, doesn’t she? She always seems to be out.’
Lydia leads an Insta-perfect life. Carefully curated. No sticking up a drunken, out-of-focus selfie for her. Every image is cropped and filtered. Perfectly framed. Her make-up is always impeccable, her outfits agonized over. Showing a glamorous, fulfilled existence. All friends and cocktails and art and perfection. I take the piss out of her for it sometimes. ‘What? This old thing? I just threw it on,’ I said in my best impersonation of her smooth Home Counties vowels when she showed me one photo of her lounging on her sofa in a cocktail dress and spiky heels. She had taken it on a timer, she told me. She’d rewarded me with a smile. ‘Oh, you took me by surprise. I’ve just got out of bed,’ I deadpanned in response to another picture, this time with artfully messy hair that I knew had taken her hours to perfect. ‘Stop,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘Don’t.’
‘Who are they for?’ I’d asked her. Not meanly, I was genuinely curious. ‘What’s the point?’
‘Everyone does it,’ she’d said as if that was a good reason.
‘Well, if everyone does it then that makes it even more pointless. Because they all know everyone else’s lives are being staged same as theirs.’
‘You just don’t get it,’ she’d said and I’d agreed. I really didn’t. Nick, on the other hand, seems to have been taken in by it all.
I clatter my toothbrush back into the holder. ‘She doesn’t have this though.’
He raises a sardonic eyebrow and I know I’m not going to get a serious answer. ‘Fighting over who gets to spit in the sink first?’
I roll my eyes. ‘You know what I mean. The mundane stuff. The stuff that doesn’t take any effort. She has a lot of people she can go to the theatre with or the cinema or whatever, but they’re not people she can really just relax with. Say anything to.’
He takes the towel from me. Folds it over the radiator. ‘That’s what you’re for, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose. But it’s not the same. Not really.’
‘She’s fine,’ he says, heading to the bedroom. ‘She likes being on her own, that’s what she always says.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, but suddenly I’m not so sure.
CHAPTER 5
When Lydia and I were in our third year of college her parents died. One minute she had a loving home. People who adored her unconditionally. We were both only children and had bonded over the pressure – but also the privilege – of being the sole focus of your family’s hopes and dreams. And the next she had no one. An absentee aunt. It was the single most shocking thing either of us had ever experienced. Probably ever would in her case.
They were alive – she had spoken to them both the night before, queuing for the payphone in halls for forty-five minutes as a girl from our floor snivelled accusations
at her wayward boyfriend. They were on their way out, she’d told me. Off to see a play at their local rep theatre. Like Lydia, they were culture vultures. They loved nothing more than a show or an exhibition. An excuse to dress up and have fun.
And then they were not.
Lydia and I were hanging out in her room – a condition we had made for ourselves when we’d applied to go back into college accommodation in our final year was that we got into the same hall. We had lived together for a year at that point and we had no desire to be separated. In fact we’d ended up on the same corridor. Two rooms separating us. She was pasting henna on to my hair, laughing as the thick brown clumps slipped on to the oatmeal carpet. The air was filled with the cloying smell. I still can’t stand it to this day.
I remember so clearly that we were crying with laughter about something that had happened that morning – her with a hand on my shoulder – when there was a knock at the door. She was still smiling when she opened it.
They had lost control of the car on the way home from the theatre, the sympathetic policewoman told her. There were two of them, a young woman and an avuncular older man, and the warden of the halls standing behind them ashen-faced. They had taken a bend in the road too quickly – her father at the wheel – and maybe had to swerve to avoid a fox or a rabbit. There were no witnesses, of course – the country lanes were deserted – but the tyre marks suggested a sudden change of course, a loss of control. Straight into the path of a tree.
They had been found by another driver, how much later no one knew. They were both dead before an ambulance even arrived. There was an implication in there that I tried to block from my mind, that I desperately hoped Lydia hadn’t picked up on, that they were still alive when that random stranger came along. That if the road had been busier, they might have been found in time.
I remember the utter disbelief. Lydia saying that of course her father would have tried to avoid hitting an animal. He loved animals. The cliché of the policeman making us both a cup of too-sweet tea. If it felt unreal to me, impossible to grasp, I couldn’t even imagine how it was for her.
The officers asked her if she had anyone she could stay with. Any family they could call.
‘I’ll stay here with Georgia,’ she had said, clinging on to my hand.
I’d helped her organize their funeral. Liaising with her devastated aunt Susan, who had flown over from her home in Florida. I’d travelled down with Lydia the night before, stood by her side on the day as their seemingly endless friends and acquaintances paid their respects, and then Susan and I had gone into a frenzy of organization, clearing the house to get it ready to sell, parading a series of personal items in front of Lydia so she could decide what to keep. It felt callous. Disrespectful. But Susan was adamant. ‘All she’s set to inherit is their debts,’ she’d whispered to me in the kitchen when we were alone. ‘I loved my brother but they were terrible with money. We need to sell the house otherwise Lydia’ll be saddled with it all before she’s even had a chance to start earning money to pay them off.’
I’d been there before, of course. Twice during the previous summer holidays alone. My mum hadn’t yet met Frank – my dad was long gone, moved up north and out of our lives. I saw him now and then but we weren’t close – and she was still living in the tiny, boxy 1970s house that I had grown up in. Everything was new. By that I don’t mean my mum spent lots of money on the most up to date and best of everything. She didn’t have any money to spend. I mean that nothing had any history, any soul. The house had no features, no personality. All our furniture came from catalogues. I had tried to persuade her many times that she could get more beautiful – and potentially cheaper – items by checking out the second-hand shops, but she said she hated the idea of having other people’s cast-offs, as she called them. She didn’t see the beauty in the past. She wanted new, convenient, disposable. She wanted neat and clean. Lydia’s home could not have been more different. It was like a treasure trove. Stuffed full with things her parents had collected; every surface held a trophy, a shared memory. It could have felt oppressive but what it actually felt like was home. I would potter around picking up a wooden sculpture, a glass bowl, an antique fan and asking where they came from while Lydia rolled her eyes. Her mum and dad loved having an audience to tell their stories to and I loved to listen. Their life had been full of colour. Of, well … life.
After a week we had travelled back up to London with the three boxes of personal mementos Lydia had opted to keep, and her childhood home – her only home – was on the market. Susan had gone back to the States, issuing an open invitation to buy Lydia a ticket whenever she needed one. From then on my mum had made it clear that whenever I visited, Lydia was welcome too. She had nowhere else. And so we became inseparable. Not just friends. Sisters.
Wilbur has been nominated for an award.
I’m going to say that again. Wilbur, my shopaholic wallaby creation, is on the shortlist for the ‘Best Illustrated Book for Age Six and Under’ category of the annual children’s book awards of one of the biggest bookshop chains in the country.
I am speechless.
Blown away.
Overwhelmed.
And not a little embarrassed. I can only assume that only four picture books for the under sixes were published last year. That I made the list by default. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. OK, so it’s hardly the Booker and it probably won’t even make the papers, but someone somewhere picked me, fought for me to make the list, considered me worthy. And there will be a do. At a posh venue. With free champagne and fancy outfits. At least I assume so. I doubt we’ll all be in jeans sipping Evian. Authors don’t get to go out much; we have to make the most of any occasion. I definitely won’t win (I google the other nominees and the level of skill is mind-blowing) but I couldn’t care less about that. I am a nominee and no one can ever take that away from me.
I reread the email from my agent just to make sure it’s true.
I need to call Nick. It goes straight to voicemail and I don’t leave a message because I want to hear the reaction in his voice when I tell him my news. There are only a handful of people in the world who I know will be as thrilled for me as I am. My mum won’t be up yet and you could call her to tell her she’d won the lottery but she’d still be furious that you woke her. The kids definitely won’t be awake; or, if they are, they’ll be like the walking dead, unable to grasp what I’m saying. That leaves Lydia and Anne Marie. Lydia has been there for every significant moment of my adult life but something holds me back from phoning her. Because this isn’t just my dream happening, it’s hers too.
If I’m being honest, my friendship with Anne Marie has always been – what? Easier? Less competitive? – more straightforward, maybe, than mine with Lydia. We have different ambitions. We were on completely separate paths when we met. Lydia and I were always striving for the same thing and, when I achieved it and she didn’t, it added a filter to our friendship that wasn’t there before. I couldn’t always be 100 per cent truthful for fear of hurting her feelings. I learned quickly to edit what I said before I said it.
With Anne Marie there’s no second guessing, no need to tiptoe delicately round any subject. We truly want the best for each other, whatever that best may be. If that sounds disloyal to Lyds it’s not meant to. I adore her. Apart from Nick, the twins and my mum she’s the person I care about most in the world. She’s family. But families can be complicated.
I send Lydia a text. I feel guilty that she’s not going to be the first person I tell my news to, so I want to send her some love to make me feel better. Did you get home OK in the end last night? I was worried about you and the crazy driver. x
I get a reply a few minutes later. Yes! All in one piece!! xx
‘Oh my fucking God!’ Anne Marie squeals. ‘Oops, hold on. That was in front of two year sevens. Let me just walk round the corner.’ I check the time. It must be morning break. I can hear screaming and squealing. It sounds like the soundtrack o
f a horror film. ‘I’m on playground duty,’ she says. ‘Right, where was I? Oh yes: OH MY FUCKING GOD! That is incredible.’
‘It’s not like a big prestigious thing. And I won’t win …’ I say hastily. I always do this, prepare myself for failure. You know that saying ‘Fail to prepare and you prepare to fail’? Well, mine would be more like ‘Prepare to fail because you’re probably going to anyway.’
‘You so do not know that,’ she says. ‘If I was judging it you definitely would.’
‘Are you?’ I say, laughing.
‘Well, no, but let’s not get bogged down in the details. When is it? Tell me everything.’
‘Not for a few weeks. At a church in Mayfair. An ex-church, I mean. It’s a venue now; I looked it up.’ I think about asking her to help me find something to wear but I know that Lydia will want to do that once I can bring myself to break my news to her. She loves an excuse to go clothes shopping.
‘We need to celebrate.’
‘OK, don’t get carried away.’
‘My friend the award-winning author,’ she says and I can hear how genuinely happy she is for me. ‘It has a nice ring to it.’
‘Award-nominated.’
‘Who cares? It’s still brilliant.’
I suppose I just feel unfulfilled. It’s hard. My best friend is super successful. She writes and illustrates children’s books. I’m really proud of her but sometimes it’s hard not feeling a little bit envious. Do you know what I mean?
I snap to attention at the mention of me. Lydia and Patricia’s conversations have become more in depth over the past few days. I should have anticipated this. Lydia loves to make new friends. She’s the person who gets on a train in London and has swapped numbers with her seat mate by Birmingham. Who sits next to someone in a theatre and, by the time the curtain goes up, has arranged to have a drink with them in the interval. Maybe being on your own keeps you on your toes. You can’t sink into the isolated complacency of a couple, safe in the knowledge you always have a plus-one on standby. We’ve talked about music and books (Patricia is a big fan of Carole King and the Brontës. I thought I should stay on safe ground and stick with things I have at least a grass-roots knowledge of), family (Patricia’s only sister lives in Canada. Vancouver. I’m planning a trip there next year. I’ve been saving up my holidays) and hobbies (Patricia is a big walker and crafter. I worry that I’m making her sound old before her time, so I throw jiu-jitsu in there: I’ve been doing it since I was in my twenties. I’m a brown belt. It’s the anomalies that make her credible, I think, adding to my – ever-growing – notes). We’ve talked about Patricia’s love of football (I struggled a bit here; I should have picked passions I’m more knowledgeable about) and the time she met David Cameron at a local function (Ghastly entitled man. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us). Patricia is very definite about her likes and dislikes, unafraid in her opinions. I’m a little envious, I have to say. I’m inclined to edit myself before I speak so as not to offend. Patricia just breezes right on in there (Jeremy Corbyn? Overgrown student. Strictly Come Dancing? Load of people strutting around like they’ve got rods up their backsides, or wiggling about like they’ve got nits! I don’t get it). I’m trying to only respond when Lydia asks a question or when it would look rude if I didn’t, but she’s always very keen to chat, and I can’t say I’m not intrigued by the insights into my friend’s state of mind.
