When We Were Friends

by Tina Seskis

  As Renée went through her patter the man said nothing, just stared at her hostilely. ‘So, um, do you have a spare room that I could, um, maybe stay in … ?’ she finished, her voice trailing off as she saw his face.

  ‘You what?’ he yelled. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Coming round here asking if you can move in with me? Are you crazy?’

  The man’s aggression, rather than diminishing Renée, seemed to strengthen her.

  ‘There’s no need to shout at me!’ she yelled back. ‘I’m only doing what I’ve been told to do. You don’t have to be so rude.’

  ‘Who told you to? What are you talking about?’ asked the man, and after Renée started rambling on about bookselling companies and headquarters in Nashville, and how it was all part of the programme, he seemed to understand, and told her that she’d better come in, and then he led her (quite forcibly, he was obviously angry still) by the arm into a room where the curtains were closed, and it was full of tangly plants and the only light was what seemed to reflect off the white antimacassars. One of the armchairs had a plastic protective sheet on it, and there was a strong fetid smell of cats, although she couldn’t see any in the room. Renée was a little freaked out now, but she started explaining how she’d been specifically instructed to go out and knock on people’s doors and ask to live for free in their spare rooms, how her friends were doing it too, they were all only following instructions – and as she spoke she felt ridiculous, as if she really had been brainwashed, she was not normally nearly so suggestible.

  ‘Have you any idea how dangerous that is?’ said the man. ‘How do you know whose house you’re going into? Anything could happen.’

  Renée privately agreed with him – after all she was sat here now with this weird-looking, raging man in his dingy stinking sitting room – but she didn’t know what else she was meant to do. Her host stood up and went over to the telephone table, next to an ancient-looking TV which had a silver film of dust across its screen, and he found a pen and wrote down something on a small square pad, and when he handed the sheet to her it said ‘Father Duncan’ and there was a phone number, written in scratchy blue ink.

  ‘Give him a call,’ said the man. ‘Tell him Larry Johnson gave you his number. I can’t promise, but he might be able to help you.’ He started towards the door and so Renée got up and followed obediently. She thanked him in the hallway, and as she moved out into the sunshine she felt like she’d had a lucky escape, as if the man had just rescued her from something close to madness.

  16

  Hyde Park

  Siobhan is really pissing me off now, thought Renée as she watched Camilla package up the remains of the scotch eggs. She couldn’t understand why everyone continued to put up with her, it was almost as if she were a child they’d adopted at university and were all too kind to shake off now. Their over-indulgence didn’t even seem to help – in Renée’s opinion Siobhan just appeared to get worse behaved every time they saw her. At this precise moment she was moaning on about the fact that they’d been asked to leave the Diana memorial, going on and on and on about how they’d have to pack everything up and that it was so inconvenient, and anyway it wouldn’t be dark for ages, why couldn’t they just stay where they were, what harm were they doing?

  For God’s sake, thought Renée, does she really think she’s so important that if she complains for long enough they’ll bend the rules just for her?

  ‘But we’re all settled here,’ Siobhan was droning on to the park attendant as the others packed up around her. ‘What difference does it make? There are people here who’ve come from miles for this picnic.’ And Renée thought the way Siobhan said the word miles she might as well have said Mars.

  ‘I’m very sorry, madam,’ said the attendant, a sunny-faced young man with a Scandinavian accent and a patience greater than any of the others could bear. ‘Those are the rules, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well they’re ridiculous rules – this is meant to be a free country.’

  ‘Just leave it, Siobhan,’ hissed Juliette suddenly. ‘You’re behaving like a child.’ The youth looked mortified, as though he didn’t want to have caused this friction amongst friends, he was only trying to do his job. Juliette, furious now, pulled fiercely at her rug, causing Siobhan, who was still sitting on it, to topple sideways and knock over yet another glass of Prosecco.

  ‘Owwwww!’ said Siobhan. ‘Juliette!’ She sounded puzzled, hurt even. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Juliette, horrified at her behaviour. She didn’t know what was the matter with her these days, the problem with her temper seemed to be getting worse. Just yesterday she had yanked, way too hard, her son Noah’s arm, hauling him screaming out of the bath after he’d shot her with a water pistol, squirting luke-warm sudsy water into her mouth and all down the mirror behind her. It had set off fireworks where her brain was, and she hadn’t fully calmed down until the children were in bed and the guilt had had time to set in. Why couldn’t she be a better mother, Juliette thought, her eyes burning. She loved them so much, had tried so hard – she’d read every parenting book under the sun in a bid to do better than her mother had managed, but it had obviously been a waste of time – and she was sufficiently self-aware to realise that she was in danger of turning into a bully, one who picked on emotionally retarded adults and little children, instead of dealing with her own issues. She needed to get a grip, before she ruined her poor children’s lives too.

  Sissy and Camilla helped clear up the spillage, and when Siobhan finally stood up the back of her jeans were wet too now, and the dark-brown stain on the front had crusted where it was drying. She looked a mess. She sulkily followed the others out of the fountain enclosure, muttering on about pointless bureaucracy, to a spot near the cafe, where a patch of grass was just big enough for them all.

  ‘This is fine,’ said Renée, and she gave Siobhan a ‘Don’t you dare’ look, and to her credit Siobhan said nothing, despite there being only a very limited view of The Serpentine here. As everyone started spreading out their rugs again, Sissy held hers to her chest, like a shield.

  ‘Look, I hope no-one minds,’ she said. ‘But I think I’m going to head off now. I’m really tired, and my throat’s beginning to feel a bit sore – I think I might be coming down with something.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go, Sissy,’ said Siobhan, and the slur in her voice was noticeable suddenly. ‘We hardly ever see each other these days, let’s all just have a good time.’

  ‘Yes, please stay, Sissy,’ said Renée. ‘At least finish off my scotch eggs before Camilla chucks them at me.’

  Everyone held their breath, it was never clear whether Renée was joking or not, but then she cracked a smile, and fortunately Camilla was as gracious as ever.

  ‘Very funny, Renée,’ she said. ‘I know I can be a trifle bossy at times, but I’m only trying to make sure we enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘I know, and we all love you for it,’ cut in Juliette, and she seemed more relaxed now. ‘Please stay, Sissy, I want to hear how Nell and Conor are getting on at school. Flo and Jack are fine, but poor Noah’s having a nightmare.’

  ‘Sorry, Juliette,’ Sissy said. ‘I just feel so tired, I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’ Although of course she did.

  It was Camilla in the end who persuaded Sissy to stay. She took her by the arm and led her down to the water and whispered to her that this might all be a bit difficult but they hardly ever saw each other any more, and they had a history, a shared past, which Sissy was part of – she couldn’t bail out now, before the evening had even got going. Everyone seemed to be settling down, Camilla said, maybe they could all have a good time after all. As Sissy listened, the realisation hit her that Camilla was right, they were friends, they’d all been through so much together – and so she walked with Camilla back to the group, and she laid out her tartan rug once more, and she sat quietly in her flowery dress, sipping yet another glass of sparkling wine, looking out towa
rds the ever-darkening water.

  17

  Cleveland

  Bookselling didn’t start well for any of them. Stephen had got a dog so mad with his knocking it had flung itself straight through the screen door, ripping an Alsatian-sized hole in it and causing the owner to call the police. The dog’s legs had ended up caught in the mesh, so it couldn’t actually bite Stephen, thank God, but the wife had chased him off with a broomstick and two little kids on their bikes had laughed at him, which he’d found harder to take in a way.

  But, inevitably, it was Sissy who proved to be the most out of her depth, undoubtedly not helped by the fact that they were currently staying in a flea-pit motel, using up all their money, still homeless. She’d obviously been crazy when she’d decided to do this – she thought now it must have been because Nigel had been heading off to Australia, and she’d been distraught at the prospect of the summer at home without him. It had felt like two losses to her – of both her university life and her boyfriend – and so stupidly she’d just followed Renée.

  Although Sissy did her best to give at least the bookselling part a go (having absolutely failed to find somewhere to live), it had proved a disaster from the very beginning. Like every Tyler’s student, before actively trying to sell any books, she’d been trained to do some investigative work. She was meant to pick a house where it was fairly certain there were no kids: old-fashioned curtains in the windows, primly neat borders, that sort of thing. If she was lucky she’d find a lonely old lady who she’d be able to get talking, as long as she was charming enough – apparently the old dear would be glad of a nice English student to chat to (just start talking about the royal family, she was told, and you’ll have her eating out of your hand). The conversation was meant to go something like this:

  ‘Hi, my name’s Sissy and I’m on a summer educational programme here in Cleveland and I’ve come all the way from Bristol University in England. Great to meet you, Mrs –?’

  ‘Smith.’

  ‘Oh, great to meet you, Mrs Smith. You know, you may be interested to know that I’m Lady Di’s second cousin.’

  ‘Gosh, are you REALLY?’

  ‘No, no, I’m just joking, but I did see her at a polo game once, and gosh she’s pretty in real life.’ (Lots of laughing.) ‘You know, I’m just really looking forward to spending the summer getting to know everyone around here, it’s such an exciting programme for the local children. Now, those people next door (with basketball hoop over garage), they have kids, don’t they? Great, and they’re the –?’

  ‘Joneses.’

  ‘Ah, that’s right, the Joneses. And what age did you say the kids were? And the ten-year-old, that’s a boy, right? Oh, a girl, and what’s her name?’

  And the patter was to continue for as long as Sissy could pump sweet, obliging old Mrs Smith for information, and then she was meant to say goodbye and duck into a quiet corner to draw herself a map of the street and detail everything she’d learned – who lived where, how many kids they had, what ages they were, their names, hobbies, etcetera – before she forgot.

  Sissy paced up and down the suffocating street, her anxiety threatening to escalate into full-scale panic, until finally she decided on a house that seemed to fulfil the criteria: no basketball hoop, no toys in the front yard, grass with weeds in and slightly too long, the paint on the front door faded and dusty. She clenched her stomach – come on, she had to do this, she couldn’t travel all this way and not knock on a single door, that would be pathetic. Sissy hoisted her bag, which weighed a ton, further onto her shoulder and teetered up the path. She put down the bag, exactly where she’d been trained to: by the side of the front door, butted up to the house, initially invisible to the person who answered.

  She rang the doorbell, but it made no noise and she wasn’t sure if it had worked. She stood back six feet, looking sideways down the street, and waited. The house seemed quiet, lonely. She rang the bell again. Just as she was about to give up, the door creaked open a little, and a shrivelled face poked through the crack. Separated as it was from its body, the face’s gender was unidentifiable.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hi! My name is Sissy and I’m here all the way from Bristol University in England and I’m –’

  ‘Whaddaya selling?’ said the face.

  ‘Uh, um nothing,’ said Sissy, flustered now. ‘I was just wondering if there are children living next door?’

  ‘What are you, a paedo? Mind your own business. And if you ain’t selling nothing, what’s that bag doing there? Get outta here, or I’m calling the police.’ And with that he, or was it she, slammed the door.

  Sissy stood frozen, horrified. Then, as her eyes started swimming, she scrabbled for her sunglasses, lugged her book bag onto her shoulder and started walking, fast, as fast as she could without actually running, cutting through residential street after street, oblivious to the heat now, clueless to where she was going, never looking up from the ground, never slowing, for at least half an hour. Finally she happened upon a deserted grassy park, where she sat down under the single spreading tree that seemed welcoming, almost as though it had been waiting for her, and she took out Volume One of Tyler’s handy educational book set and flicked through its pages until she found the history section, which although as a graduate in that subject told her nothing new, was at least something she could concentrate on; and when that inevitably got too much she lay down and wept, desperate for Nigel, who was somewhere up the Gold Coast, unaware of her misery, un-contactable.

  In the absence of any better options that day, Sissy ended up staying under her tree, periodically shifting round with the sun to follow the shade, reading, weeping, sleeping, for hours and hours, until it was time to go home.

  18

  Sardinia, Italy

  Many years later, Sissy sat on the veranda of an apartment in Sardinia looking out across the low oleander hedge to the bold brash blue of the sea, and the rude red of the flowers sent electricity sparks through her eyes to her brain. It was all too obscenely beautiful, too alive, too vivid for her to believe that she could possibly be here, after the monumental absences, the living death she had endured with Nigel in London. She leaned back against the warm cream canvas of the double deckchair, but the sun felt too hot on her face, she’d never been good in the heat; so she got up and dragged the seat into the shade. She sighed, wriggled her toes, adjusted the seams of her costume, and, finally comfortable, closed her eyes and let her mind meander back, not accusingly this time, but gently, kindly, to the scene in the hospital, the one after Nigel had thrown up yet again from more horrific drug treatments and she’d finally flipped out, stormed out of the room to find a nurse and demand that they call the consultant, now. And when Sissy wouldn’t take no for an answer, hysterical at last, they had sent for the on-call doctor, who was young and didn’t know Nigel at all, and when he turned up he’d just looked at the notes and said impassively that it wasn’t clear why her husband wasn’t responding to the treatment, it was sometimes just one of those things. But the colour of Nigel’s bile, the obscenity of its hue in the face of his impending death, had made Sissy insistent that there was more life in him yet, she was convinced of it. And then she’d broken down and cried her heart out that she couldn’t be a widow, not now, not with her baby due in just a few weeks, what was the matter with them, why couldn’t they fix him, she loved him, for God’s sake. She’d caused such a fuss that the fresh-faced doctor became anxious and paged the consultant, so eventually Mr Tatchell had arrived too and they’d all been ferried into the patient’s room, and although Nigel was no longer conscious Sissy had screamed that they must be able to bloody do something. She had never been so demanding in her life, hadn’t known she even had it in her. Up until then she hadn’t asked for anything much, not even from her parents, who lived on the Welsh Borders and had thought Sissy was coping admirably through the crisis, so although well-meaning hadn’t visited that often – and Sissy hadn’t even thought to ask them to come more. But
now, finally, Sissy had had enough, and her anger was spilling out and she didn’t care who saw it, and she knew the doctors were only indulging her because they were worried that all the stress might make her waters break, and they didn’t want another death on their hands.

  Sissy heard a seagull shriek above her head and, looking up, she watched it fly across the peerless sky and land, like a precious object, on a terracotta chimney, and the colours were screamingly vibrant, immeasurably lovely. Her eyes filled with tears, perhaps from the beauty of the view, or from squinting into the sun – or maybe it was something else, the memory of those next critical moments at the hospital, full of drama and passion she hadn’t known was in her, and that had changed her life irrevocably. Would everything have been different if she hadn’t broken down that day? Sissy guessed she’d never know, but it was weird how she still couldn’t let it go, now it was over, now that she had room to live and laugh again. It was almost as if the further away she moved from the moment, the more intense her feelings became. No. She had to stop going over it. It was time to move on.

  Sissy shifted in her deckchair and gazed out to sea. A boat was moving across the water and from here it looked modest, small even, but she knew that up close it would be titanic, probably owned by some Russian oligarch who might have been in jail once for fraud or corruption, but now judged his position in the world by the size of his bank balance or the length of his boat, and never worried about just how he’d made his fortune. Terrible, she thought, how do people like that live with themselves? It wasn’t really her cup of tea, this kind of place, full of gorgeous, exquisitely turned-out people who made her feel dowdy in her canvas shorts and orange Birkenstocks – acutely, obviously English – but really, she was lucky she was here at all, Juliette and Stephen had been so kind to let them come, she shouldn’t criticise it. She smiled wistfully, not quite back from the past, as she watched the boat disappear behind the oleander blooms – and then she remembered that the others would be back in an hour or so, she should think about popping down to the supermarket to try to find something not too ludicrously expensive to cook for dinner. She’d go in a minute, she thought drowsily, and then she leaned back against the warmth of the chair and closed her eyes, just for a little while longer.