Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  I drifted back into the conversation she was having with Scott.

  ‘Perhaps the wedding got too big,’ she said. ‘You know? Perhaps we let the wedding get out of control. Maybe we need to just forget about all that and focus on us.’

  At that exact moment I received an email from the office of Farly’s local MP.

  Dear Dolly,

  Thank you for your email. Andy would be delighted to help – it sounds like you are going above and beyond to make sure your friend has a very special hen do! Would you be able to pop by Andy’s constituency office next Monday at 11.30 a.m. to film?

  If that isn’t convenient, I will have a look in his diary to find another day.

  Best wishes,

  Kristin

  I deleted it quietly.

  We drove up to my flat, I flung a few things in a bag and texted India and Belle to tell them that Farly was ill with tonsillitis and Scott was away with work so I was staying with her for a few days. I felt bad for lying, but as everything was still so up in the air and no final decision had been made, it was better to keep things vague so she could avoid any questions. I put up an out-of-office and we got in her car to go to Cornwall.

  It was a car journey we had done together many times: M25, M4, M5. For holidays at the house in Cornwall, for the summer road trips we took aged sixteen and seventeen, and the journeys we did back and forth from London to university when we were at Exeter. Farly had a rigorous ranking system for all the motorway service stations according to their snack outlets and she liked testing me on her order of preference (Chieveley, Heston, Leigh Delamere).

  A long car journey, strangely, felt like just what we needed in that moment. Her car was the home of our teenage relationship. In the years I was so desperate to be a grown-up, Farly’s driving licence was our passport to freedom. It was our first shared flat; it was our shelter from the rest of the world. There was a viewpoint on a hill in Stanmore that looked out over the sparkling city as if it were Oz. We would drive there after school and share a packet of Silk Cut and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s while listening to Magic FM.

  ‘What do you see when you look at that?’ she asked me once, a few weeks before we left school.

  ‘I see all the boys I’m going to fall in love with and the books I’m going to write and the flats I’m going to live in and the days and the nights that lie ahead. What do you see?’

  ‘Something completely terrifying,’ she replied.

  The drive – five hours – felt even longer than usual. Perhaps because it wasn’t accompanied with chit-chat or radio or our scratched Joni Mitchell CDs, but a silence that wasn’t a silence; I could hear the noise in Farly’s head. We rested her mobile phone on the dashboard and both waited for Scott to call and say he’d made a terrible mistake. Every time her phone lit up her eyes would briefly flicker down from the road to the screen.

  ‘Check it for me,’ she would say quickly. It was always another message from one of our friends wishing her and her tonsillitis better and asking if she wanted them to come round with soup and magazines.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she said, managing a weak laugh. ‘Me and him have spent the last six years texting constantly about the most mundane stuff and now all I am desperate for is to hear from him and all I get is a load of texts of support about a fake illness.’

  ‘At least you know you’re loved,’ I offered. There was more restless silence.

  ‘What am I going to tell everyone?’ she asked. ‘All those wedding guests.’

  ‘You don’t have to think about that yet,’ I said. ‘And if that situation does arise – you won’t have to tell anyone anything. We can do it all for you.’

  ‘I don’t know how I could survive this without you,’ she said. ‘As long as I have you, everything will be OK.’

  ‘I’m right here,’ I told her. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here for ever, mate. And we’ll get through to the other side together, no matter what that place looks like.’

  Tears ran down her cheeks as she looked straight ahead into the darkness of the M5.

  ‘I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you were second best, Dolly.’

  When we arrived just after midnight, Richard and Annie were waiting up for us. I made tea – in the week after Floss died, I learnt by heart how everyone took theirs, it was the only useful thing I could do – and we sat on the sofa talking through everything that had been said and all the possible outcomes.

  Farly and I lay in the same bed with the lights turned out.

  ‘Do you know what the real tragedy in all this is?’

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Me and Lauren have finally nailed all the chords and harmonies of “One Day Like This” for the ceremony.’

  ‘Oh, I know, don’t. I loved that recording you sent me.’

  ‘And the string quartet have just confirmed they could do the intro.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘It may be a blessing in disguise,’ I said. ‘I actually think that song makes everyone think of X Factor montages now.’

  ‘Are you going to lose money for the hen do?’

  ‘Don’t worry about any of that,’ I said. ‘We’ll sort it out.’ There was silence in the darkness and I waited for her next sentence.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m ninety per cent sure it’s not happening now so you might as well tell me.’

  ‘But is it going to make you sad?’

  ‘No, it will cheer me up.’

  I told her about the weekend we had planned for her. With every absurd detail, she groaned like a child missing out on sweets. We watched the videos of the Great and the Good of Britain’s D-List give their well wishes on my phone.

  ‘Thank you for planning it,’ she said. ‘It would have been wonderful. I would have loved it.’

  ‘We’ll do it for you all again.’

  ‘I won’t get married again.’

  ‘You don’t know that. And even if you don’t, I’ll just lazily transfer all those plans to a birthday. I’ll do you a great fortieth.’ I heard her breathing deepen and slow; years of bed-sharing and bickering over her falling asleep before the end of a film meant I knew she was drifting off. ‘Wake me up in the night if you need me,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks, Dolls. I wish we could just be in a relationship sometimes,’ she said sleepily. ‘Everything would be easier.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not my type I’m afraid, Farly.’

  She laughed and then a few minutes later she cried. I stroked her back and said nothing.

  The next few days were spent going for long walks, talking through the same details of their last conversation over and over again, trying to trace back where things might have gone wrong. I made tea that Farly didn’t drink, Richard cooked meals she barely ate and we watched TV while she stared into the middle distance. After a few days, I had to go back to London for work. A couple of days later, Farly came back to the city too, where she and Scott agreed to meet in their local park, walk and talk everything through.

  On the morning of their meeting, I couldn’t concentrate on anything and I watched my phone like a television, waiting for a message from her. Finally, after three hours, I decided to call her. She picked up before the first ring had finished.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Tell everyone the wedding is off. I’ll call you later.’

  The phone went dead.

  I rang our close friends one by one and explained what had happened; each of them was as shocked as the last. I wrote a carefully worded message explaining that the wedding was off and sent it to Farly’s side of the guest list. And then it was done. Extinguished in a copy-and-pasted message in an email and a few calls. The day, that future, their story was finished. I dismantled every elaborate component of her hen do, due to happen in less than a month, and cancelled everything. Everyone I called – who already knew the wedding had been put back a year due to a family tragedy – had nothing to say but how sorry they were.
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br />   Farly left the flat the day of their conversation and went to stay with Annie and Richard in their family home a few miles away. I went to the house, my positivity bank account totally out of funds and well into my overdraft of cheering platitudes.

  ‘I feel like I’m in jail for something I didn’t do,’ she told me. ‘I feel like my life is somewhere over there and I’m locked somewhere over here, being told I can’t reach it. I want my old life back.’

  ‘You’ll get there. It won’t be like this for ever, I promise.’

  ‘I’m cursed.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not cursed. You’ve had a terrible, awful, unbearable bout of bad luck. You’ve had more darkness in eighteen months than a lot of people get in a lifetime. But you’ve got so much light ahead of you – you’ve got to hold on to that.’

  ‘That’s what everyone said after Florence died. I don’t think I can take much more.’

  With everyone’s encouragement, Farly went back to work immediately and our friends kicked a military operation of keeping her distracted into action. Even though it was the most time we’d spent together since we were teenagers, I also sent her a postcard every other day so she’d always have something nice to come home to from work. The bridesmaids took her away for a weekend of wine and cooking in the countryside for what would have been her hen do. I booked us a holiday in Sardinia for the week of her wedding. We all took turns to spend the evenings with her after work in the month after they broke up; there wasn’t a night that passed without at least one of us there. Sometimes we talked about what was happening and sometimes we just sat eating Lebanese takeaway and watching trashy TV. Whoever visited would send a message out to the rest of us on the way home, update us on how she was and check who was seeing her next. We were a circle of keepers; nurses on shift. Our first-aid kit was Maltesers and episodes of Gogglebox.

  It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat – the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart.

  I drove back to the flat with Farly and waited in the car while she picked up more of her belongings and had one final discussion with Scott. Their flat went on the market. Farly unpacked everything into her childhood bedroom – this was somewhere more than temporary but less than for ever, now.

  The first moment any of us glimpsed an ember of Farly’s old self was on an utterly disastrous Sunday that saw me roping my friends into doing a photo shoot for a fake dinner party. It was to accompany a piece I had written for a broadsheet culture section about the death of the traditional dinner party and the editor wanted a photo of me ‘entertaining guests’ in my flat. I had warned him that I didn’t have any male friends available that day and he had reluctantly agreed that an all-female gathering would be fine. However, when the photographer arrived, it seemed he was under new instruction to definitely make sure there were men in the photo.

  Farly, who had been mainlining white wine since she’d arrived at noon, went knocking door-to-door along my street trying to find a willing male neighbour, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Belle and AJ drove to our local pub, went in, tapped a glass for everyone’s attention and made a rather limp announcement that they were looking for a handful of men to be photographed in return for some slow-roast lamb and their picture in the paper.

  ‘If this sounds like something you would be interested in,’ Belle bellowed, ‘then we will be waiting in the red Seat Ibiza outside.’

  Five minutes later, a group of sweaty and inebriated men in their thirties and forties trundled out of the pub and into the car.

  When we were all squeezed round the table, clinking glasses and trying to look like old friends, it became clear that one of the gentlemen was far drunker than the others, eating the roast lamb with his hands, like a Roman emperor. The photographer was standing on a chair so he could get all of us into the shot in my rather cramped living room, a light broke and one of the men started bellowing for more wine. It was a sort of slapstick caper of people running around and things breaking with a low-level manic energy.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ I said under my breath to the girls.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s a disaster AT ALL,’ Farly barked drunkenly. ‘I got jilted by my boyfriend of seven years a month ago, so this is a walk in the park!’ The photographer looked at me for reassurance and even the drunken emperor stopped his masticating. ‘Cheers,’ she said merrily, raising her glass to all of us.

  We quickly learnt how to deal with this sort of suicide bomb of a joke that became a familiar, well-worn piece of furniture in our conversations with Farly. You couldn’t join in the banter as you didn’t know where the black comedy was capped and tipped over into cruelty; but you couldn’t ignore it either. You just had to laugh loudly.

  We left for Sardinia a few days before what would have been Farly’s wedding. We landed late and drove up to the north-west of the island in our uninsured hire car, carefully winding up coastal roads with the same Joni Mitchell album on the stereo that we’d played on our first road trip over ten years before. A time when a relationship seemed liked the most laughably unreachable thing, let alone a cancelled wedding.

  We stayed in a pretty basic hotel that had a pool, a bar and a room with a view over the sea – it was all we wanted. Farly – the girl who loved school and went on to become a teacher – is and always has been a routine-based creature and we quickly created one of our own. We woke up early every morning, went straight to the beach where we’d do some exercise in the bright, white light of the early-morning sun, then swim in the sea before breakfast. Well, I’d swim. Farly would sit on the sand and watch. A characteristic where Farly and I clash most is the subject of outdoor swimming; I strip off at the sight of nearly any body of open water for a dip whereas Farly’s a strictly chlorinated-pool-only person.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted at the shore one morning, when the sea was as still and warm as bathwater. ‘You’ve got to come in! It’s so lovely.’

  ‘But what if there are fish?’ she shouted at me with a grimace.

  ‘There aren’t any fish!’ I bellowed. ‘All right, there may be some fish.’

  ‘You know I’m scared of fish,’ she barked back.

  ‘How can you be scared of them – you eat them.’

  ‘I don’t like the thought of them swimming around underneath me.’

  ‘You sound so bloody suburban, Farly,’ I shouted at her. ‘You don’t want to miss out on life because you only shop in shopping centres because you’re scared of rain ruining your blow-dry and only swim in pools because you’re scared of fish.’

  ‘We are suburban, Dolly. That’s literally what we are.’

  ‘Come on! It’s natural! It’s God’s own swimming pool! It’s healing! God is in the ocean!’

  ‘If there’s one thing I know for sure,’ she stood up and wiped the sand off her legs, ‘it’s that there is no God, Doll!’ She shouted it joyfully, while paddling into the sea.

  We’d spend all morning reading our books and listening to music, then we’d have our first drink of the day at noon. We napped all afternoon in the sun, then we’d shower and take our tans out for dinner in the town. We’d come back to the hotel afterwards, drink Amaretto Sours on the terrace in the thick blanket of evening heat and play cards and write tipsy postcards to our friends.

  On the day of the wedding, Farly was awake before I got up. She stared at the ceiling.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked as soon as my eyes opened.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, turning away and pulling up the cover. ‘I just want today to be over.’

  ‘Today will be one of the hardest days,’ I said. ‘And then it will be finished. At midnight, it’s done. And you’ll never have to go through it again.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said quietly. I
sat on the end of her bed.

  ‘What do you want to do today?’ I asked. ‘I’ve booked a restaurant for tonight that has those sort of glowing five-star Trip Advisor reviews that include disgusting close-up photos of the food like it’s a crime scene.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I think I just want to lie on a sun lounger like a basic bitch.’

  We spent most of the day in silence, reading our books and taking an earplug each to listen to podcasts together. Occasionally she would look around and say something like ‘I’d be having breakfast with my bridesmaids now’ or ‘I’d probably be putting my wedding dress on.’ Mid-afternoon, she picked up her phone and checked the time.

  ‘Ten to four in England. In exactly ten minutes, I would have been getting married.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least you’re here sunbathing in beautiful Italy rather than floating down a lake with your dad in rainy Oxfordshire.’

  ‘I was never actually going to arrive on a gondola,’ she said exasperatedly. ‘I just told you about it as a potential possibility because the venue said that’s what some of the other brides had done.’

  ‘You did consider it, though.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes you did because when you told me about it I could hear in your voice that you were waiting for me to say I thought it was a good idea.’

  ‘No I wasn’t!’

  ‘It would have been so awkward, everyone staring at you while you floated down a lake in a massive dress then someone heaving you out of it, the sailor clattering about with the oars.’

  ‘It didn’t have a sailor,’ she sighed. ‘And it didn’t have oars.’

  I went to the bar and ordered a bottle of Prosecco.

  ‘Right,’ I said, pouring the ice-cold fizz into poolside plastic flutes. ‘You would’ve been making vows now. I think we should make vows.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To ourselves,’ I said. ‘And to each other.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, putting her sunglasses on top of her head. ‘You go first.’

  ‘I vow to not judge however you handle this when we get home,’ I said. ‘If you want to have a really heavy amphetamine and casual sex phase, that’s fine. If you lock yourself in your house for a year, that’s fine too. You’ve got my support whatever you do, because I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose the people you’ve lost.’