Cough. ‘Can you sign this card for Elaine and pass it on?’ Bob was standing in front of my desk. He handed me a pink floral card, tucked inside a red envelope. It was Elaine who did everything for everyone else’s birthdays; when it was her turn for happy returns, Bob always took charge and organised a card and a collection for a present, which was nice.
‘Of course. Just leave it with me.’
‘Thanks, darling.’
As Bob wandered off, pulling a hanky from his pocket, I noticed his shoes were especially shiny today. They instantly made me think of my former best friend and husband-stealer, Gabby. Great. I was plonked back in the past again…
Gabby. It kills me to even think of her name. I don’t think I’ve said her name out loud, since it happened. If I’m referring to her, I call her whatsherface or that cow or, simply, her. She knew all about Bob and his shiny shoes; we’d once spent a whole Saturday afternoon hooting our heads off with laughter in her conservatory, with him as our specialist subject. We’d sat there for hours. I remember she’d kept refilling my glass of rosé, in between shooing children away. It had been so funny. The more Bob stories I’d relayed, the more we’d laughed. We’d laughed until we’d cried, until we’d got into that hysterical state where no sounds come out of your mouth, where you are collapsed and helpless on the floor, with tears running down your cheeks.
I missed that bitch.
Oh lord, I was at work, I shouldn’t start thinking along Gabby. I’d just get depressed and angry. Or compose that same email I’d composed to her over and over again, but had never sent. The one where I tell her she’s ruined my life, she’s betrayed me in the worst possible way, that I hate her guts… and how I wish I could turn back the clock to when we sat on her bedroom windowsill, on summer evenings, and screeched along to George Michael’s ‘Faith’, then drove around Wimbledon Village in her dad’s convertible, trying to pick up randoms. How I wished I’d never met her, but at the same time I just wanted to go back and meet her all over again…
Enough! Stop it! Focus on the weather. A thick band of clouds will move in across the region overnight and heavy rain will continue until the early hours…
Gabby Louise Trench. She was a laugh. Such a good laugh. I’d known her since school. She was in the year above. Gabby was quite glamorous at school. When I was still in Clarks buckle-up shoes and A-line skirts, she was rocking a mini kilt and pointy, tasselled loafers. Grey ones. I admired them long before I became friends with her, and that only happened because she once attempted to bully me. It was a failed attempt. I’d been loitering by the lockers, minding my own business, when she bustled up with Fat Felicia, a known corridor terrorist and possessor of the only lost virginity in the Fourth Year – apparently – and asked me to ‘Move along’ as I was ‘making the place look untidy.’ I remember looking at them both in astonishment. It was so uncalled for, so out-of-nowhere. I was not someone who drew attention. I was so far under the radar I was like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, commando-ing along the floor in a museum full of diamonds.
Before I’d had time to even think about it, I’d retorted with, ‘The only thing that’s making this place look untidy is Felicia’s hair. There must be at least a couple of blackbirds nesting in there, making babies.’
I waited for anger to flash across faces, a possible fist to come flying my way – Fat Felicia was a notorious puncher – but, to my surprise, Gabby had burst out laughing.
‘Funny,’ she’d said. And she’d pushed a surprised-looking Fat Felicia along the corridor and they’d both disappeared in the direction of the Crush Hall.
A week later, they’d tried again. I was coming down the ramp of one of the Portakabins, after RE, when a grey tasselled foot shot out in a clear attempt to trip me up. I wasn’t having it. I stopped dead in my tracks.
‘You are joking?’ I said. Gabby and Fat Felicia were in shadow, the beige plastic side of the Portakabin casting weird stripes on their faces. ‘If you’re trying to make me fall over I suggest stretching skipping-elastic across the playground. I’ve seen more stealth on a nuclear weapon.’ It was the era of the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev, ‘Two Tribes’ and the threat of nuclear war hanging over everyone. Kids enjoyed frightening themselves silly over it.
Fat Felicia looked confused. Gabby burst out laughing. Again. And again, Gabby trundled Felicia off – they headed towards the Fourth Form common room. I saw Gabby glance back in my direction a couple of times. She was still grinning.
That night, as I was waiting in the hall for my bus, she strode up to me. ‘All right?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
‘I like your style,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ I replied. And she went off to her bus queue.
The following Friday there was a school disco. Gabby was there. She spent the whole night sharing her contraband Hock with me and regaling me with tales of her five current boyfriends. We became inseparable.
We were the best of best friends. She was always up for high jinks and I was her accomplice. Her jinks included: smoking where she shouldn’t have been smoking; bunking off to go to the chippie; pulling the wrong sort of boy. I was the more sensible one, the one who was able to pull her back from the brink of complete rebellion and law breaking. She was the boss but I could be a persuasive employee. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t?’ I used to offer, on a regular basis. ‘Perhaps we should go back in now? It’s assembly in a minute.’ ‘Perhaps you should pay for those.’ Or I would make a joke and she would laugh and stop whatever near-criminal thing she was doing:
‘I really don’t want to have to visit you in Wormwood Scrubs, Gabby. I don’t think they let you wear make-up.’
‘That’s a men’s prison – I’d be in Holloway – but, okay, Daryl. I won’t do it then.’
I had to talk her out of serious trouble so many times. She would listen to me. It seemed I was only one she would listen to. She was blisteringly funny. We shared the same sense of humour and saw the funny side in everything. We laughed like drains at everything. We even had catchphrases. Lines from films like Ferris Beuller and Back to the Future and Thelma and Louise.
‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’
‘You’ve always been crazy, this is just the first chance you’ve had to express yourself.’
‘Party on, dudes.’
I bloody well missed her.
Early morning the clouds will dissipate briefly, only to move back in mid-morning when we can expect more rain…
She calmed down when she was older, she even became an accountant, mostly part-time, but she was still a brilliant laugh. And she was still pretty feisty when it came to men. She never got married; she just dated constantly, from seventeen. Only one, Martin, stuck around long enough to have a child with her. The rest were briefly brilliant love affairs and she always liked the same type: super rich but a bit flabby and a little bit dim, so she could feel superior (cherubs in chinos, she called them, Brideshead Revisited types with curly blonde hair). And, my, could she make me laugh when she told me all her stories about them. She was funny; it was why you could forgive her anything.
‘Oh my god, that total loser?’ she’d laugh when I reminded her of one of her hapless suitors. ‘Mr Bean in Burberry?’
‘You liked him, at first! You said you liked the way he drove!’
‘Did I? Did I actually say that? I must have been deluded – he drove like Mr Magoo. And I liked all of them, at first.’
‘Even Martin.’
‘Oh lord, Martin. That albatross. Still, at least he gave me Maisie… Come and sit next to me and I’ll do your eye make-up for you.’
It was such a massive surprise when she stole my husband. He’s thin and fiercely intelligent. He wears glasses and looks like Tim Robbins. He was not her usual bag. Her usual bag, which she swung casually from her shoulder, not caring if it got scratched or scraped in the dirt, was thrown in a skip and she came after mine. My bag. Which I had always clutched tightly to my
chest.
‘I could never fancy Jeff,’ she’d once said to me, as she’d sat smoking on her back porch, doing my tax return for me – it was balanced on her lap, on top of a place mat. ‘He’s a bit too weedy for me.’
‘Well, thank god for that,’ I’d replied. ‘You’d probably eat him alive.’
‘That I would,’ she’d laughed, and I’d giggled. Jeff was safe from her. Serial dater and man-rejecter. Queen of the gilet and the put down. Glamorous heartbreaker. My funny and brilliant best friend. She would have been the first person I’d gone to, if Jeff had ever cheated on me. I’d even confided to her once, near the end, that he seemed distant and I wondered if anything was going on.
‘Jeff? No, don’t be silly!’ she’d protested. ‘He wouldn’t have it in him.’
He did, though. And so did she. She stole him. Right from under my nose, but she was round at ours a lot, at the time. She was single again. She’d pitch up with Maisie, on a Saturday night, a stack of duvets and pillows so high you couldn’t see the top of her glossy head, and a bottle of vodka hanging off her wrist in a Tesco carrier bag, declaring, ‘Staying in is the new going out!’
‘For now,’ I’d retort. ‘Until the next Chinless Chino comes along.’
Gabby and Jeff were both smokers. They’d go out through our conservatory doors and puff away. Giggles from her, a low rumbling laugh from him, and the mingled smoke from their fags would spiral through the air and into our bay tree. They would then stamp on their fags in unison and come back in. I don’t smoke. While they smoked I’d be washing up. Or picking up satisfying, molten pieces of wax from the tablecloth and flicking them into the bin. I never thought they were out there plotting to leave me.
She came over for dinner just a week before they went off together. I had no bloody clue. Not an inkling. I’d thought she only liked her men thick, but clearly she liked her friends that way too. Thick as mince. I had no idea they’d been shagging for a year – a year! That means that the Christmas before last they were at it, too. I’d been given the equivalent of the Joni Mitchell album in Love Actually, while Gabby got the heart-shaped necklace, and I hadn’t even known it.
I sighed and foraged for half a Twix from my desk drawer. Temperatures tomorrow will be low for this time of year with them reaching the dizzy heights of only seven or eight degrees…
It’ll end in tears, I thought, when I first found out. It won’t last. But it had lasted – they were still together, living in Gabby’s neat house in South Wimbledon – and tears had been shed, but they were all mine. So bloody many of them.
I’d popped over to see Gabby, after the school run that morning, a year ago. I knew she had a day off, and so did I, but I’d forgotten to tell her; I’d forgotten to tell Jeff, too. He wasn’t interested in what was happening at my work. He wouldn’t be interested in the fact that the studio had to be closed that day for an emergency fire and safety check (it was going to play piped-in pop classics, all day, from the sister station in Stevenage). I’d texted Gabby before I’d left but hadn’t waited for a reply – friends like us never had to. I expected her to be surprised to see me, but I thought I’d get a warm hug and a load of gossip, not the weird, shocked face that actually came to the door and peered wanly through the glass. She acted weird the whole time I was there, too, so I didn’t stay long.
‘I’m not feeling very well,’ she told me.
‘Oh? That’s not like you,’ I said. ‘You’re normally made of cast iron.’
‘Not today,’ she’d grimaced.
She’d disappeared off to the loo about three times while I was left sat staring at the telly. Eventually I left.
When I got home, I saw it. The letter. It was propped up on the sitting room mantelpiece. I only went in there to pick up a book I needed to return to the library. If Jeff wanted to guarantee I’d see it, he should have put it in the kitchen. By the kettle or on top of the fridge. But he must have thought the marble mantelpiece was the appropriate place to put it – solemn, formal, cold. He thought I’d read it when I got home from work tonight, but I was reading it now. It was cool to the touch as I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. My name written in Jeff’s best black pen. And inside his words wrapped a cold, hideous claw around my heart and squeezed it so hard I could hardly breathe.
He was leaving me. He’d fallen in love with Gabby.
I phoned her. We always picked up to each other. A call from Gabby never went unanswered and vice versa. She didn’t answer me, though. Not today. Her phone rang and rang. I left voicemails, texts. Nothing.
I drove back round to her house. She wasn’t there. I hammered on her door for half an hour – see, I have form for embarrassing myself in front of neighbours. I sobbed on her doorstep for a further hour and then I drove home. It had turned out later they’d gone to a hotel. And Jeff wouldn’t be coming home again. Ever.
My last bulletin went really well. The afternoon presenter, Pippa Honeywell, was setting a competition and chatted to me about some of the prizes. They were eclectic, as always: a trip to the local owl sanctuary, a case of peach schnapps, a ticket to see this year’s panto at Wimbledon Theatre. It was a giggle and cheered me up; my job always did. As I drove home, I tried to think positively again. Jeff was gone; he was no longer my concern and neither was Gabby. And thank god I had my friends Sam and Peony; they had really stepped up since everything had happened. I owed them a lot. They’d met Gabby loads, over the years and had liked her, but their loyalty to me was fierce and they hadn’t seen her since her betrayal. None of us had. My focus now was Freya – who I must ring tomorrow, actually. I needed to know the exact times for her graduation – and my own future. I decided I would definitely go speed dating tonight – to not let Sam down, mainly – and I had to go with what Peony said: treat it as just a laugh, just a giggle, don’t take it too seriously. I could do that. There was no ninety-nine percent chance of anything. Except me having a good laugh. And my hangover had completely evaporated now, which was helping.
As I got out of my car, Will was coming out of his house and locking the front door. He worked odd hours, I knew – he’d told me when he looked round my house. He was a consultant paediatrician at St Martin’s Hospital, in central London.
‘Hello. I’ve got a meeting,’ he said simply. He looked nice; he had a very smart suit on. He always looked smart for work. I’d seen him out of my kitchen window loads of times last week, getting into his car with his files and his briefcase.
‘Oh, right.’ I was embarrassed, so embarrassed. I’d planned to go round and apologise, but now I’d been caught unawares, seeing him again, I felt stupid and unprepared. Oh, the shame of it. The last time he’d clapped eyes on me, I’d looked far from smart. Staggering into one’s house, half cut and with only one shoe on is never a good look. ‘I’m so sorry about last night,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely mortified.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, smiling and looking far from cross. ‘It was funny.’
‘Was it? I thought it was just excruciatingly embarrassing. I’m so sorry,’ I repeated.
‘It’s fine. Honestly. Forget about it. We’ve all been there.’
‘I don’t think we’ve all quite been there, have we?’ I quipped, motioning at the ground.
‘Well, no,’ he said, ‘but most people have been daft and drunk, at one time or another.’
‘I was definitely both of those.’ I smiled at him. He smiled back. He thought it was okay; he thought I was okay. I knew he had a good sense of humour, after the whole Save the Whale thing, but I hadn’t known if it would extend to drunk neighbours in distress.
‘So, how’s the decorating going?’
‘I haven’t started yet,’ I said. I hadn’t. I’d spent the last week unpacking, faffing around and watching telly. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was competent enough to do it. I knew I’d end up with paint everywhere and make a right hash of it. Jeff and I had always hired someone in. In fact, I was probably going to do the same in this hous
e – it would save an awful lot of swearing.
‘Do you want me to help you? Tomorrow maybe? After work? I get home early on a Tuesday.’
I was so surprised. ‘Really? Would you? That’s awfully kind of you.’ Blimey, that was nice of him. I could hardly say no, could I? … Despite the fact it would be a lot simpler just to get some professional painters and decorators in. Despite the fact I could just tell him I’d be doing that and he’d just happily retract his offer… And nothing to do with the fact a tiny, teensy part of me thought it would be nice to spend some time with him, which I immediately told myself sternly off for. One: I was starting a whole new chapter of my life, in my new house; the last thing I wanted was some sort of torrid fling with my next door neighbour. And two: it would be a horrible cliché to get even so much as a crush on him – I’d had enough of horrible clichés, what with my husband running off with my best friend…
‘Half five?’ he suggested, looking at his watch. ‘Is this the time you usually get home?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I replied. ‘Half five would be fab. Thank you. That would be really great. Thank you very much indeed.’ Okay, now I was sounding like a bumbling idiot. You will not get an inappropriate crush on this man, I told myself. You will not get an appropriate crush on this man – however good looking he is. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
Okay, time to shut up and go in.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Well, see you then.’
‘Yes, bye. Thanks, Will. Have a nice time.’ And I thumped my own head with my hand once I’d got inside my front door. Have a nice time? He was going to work.
Chapter Four
Cloudy with a Chance of Love Page 4
