Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  I feel myself getting worked up, and she draws back from me a little, rests her elbow on the couch again, puts her fingers to the side of her head. Her eyes keep half-closing, like she’s having difficulty staying awake.

  ‘I need to sleep,’ she murmurs, the vodka dipping to one side as the glass begins to slip from her hand.

  I take it from her grasp and put it on the floor, and when I straighten up she is already lying back against the cushions, her eyes closing.

  A lock of her hair rests against her cheek and I reach out and push it back. She hums with pleasure, her face turning into my hand.

  ‘You’re so good to me,’ she says, her voice thickened by alcohol or sleep.

  Slowly I draw my thumb over the smooth planes of her cheek.

  It’s like a hunger inside me. A hunger I’ve long felt but have never been able to satisfy. Her skin beneath my touch makes me dizzy. She’s so close now. Could I?

  Fear holds me back, but desire is stronger. I am helpless to it. And when I lean in and kiss her, feel the heat of her mouth against mine, the desire is stoked, like an animal nudged awake. She makes that noise again, that happy moan, and our lips open to each other, and it’s like I’ve been travelling for so long across arid, lonely plains, and now it’s all behind me, the hard journey.

  I’m home.

  17.

  Cara

  I don’t know where I am.

  Cheek stuck to the sheet, I breathe through my mouth and try to focus. I’m vaguely aware of the pain but I’m more alive to the guilt – a thick wash of regret that always heralds a hangover. My vision clears slowly. A dim light brushing against a chalky-grey wall. A rug on the floor stitched and woven in shades of beige, tufts of lamb’s wool, that I have only the vaguest memory of buying. A sour taste fills my mouth, a backwash of bile, and it’s an effort to swallow, my tongue and teeth tacky and dry. I have the feeling that somewhere in the back of my head there is a bank of thoughts and images and revelations waiting to burst forth, but I’m holding them back, not ready – not able – to deal with them yet. It’s all I can do to peel my face off the mattress, stare blearily at a clock face I don’t recognize. Someone shifts in the bed next to me.

  I struggle to get up, all of it coming at me now. This is Amy’s room, Amy’s bed, her head flattened into the pillow next to me. I have the sensation that I am propelled from the bed – like an ejector seat suddenly released – and I find myself standing by the wall on shaky legs, assaulted by confusion and the awful panic that comes from oversleeping. A cacophony of thoughts come crashing in: I have spent the night in her bed with no recollection of how I came to be here. What happened between us? Spidery thoughts crawl around my head. Was there some kind of intimacy? A sexual act? One small mercy: I have my clothes on, and, as far as I can see, so does she.

  I step out of the room without disturbing her, and rush up the stairs to my bedroom. The bed is unmade, as I left it. I am disastrously late for work. On the nightstand, my phone sits, almost throbbing with malice. I pick it up and swipe to the fourteen missed calls from Victor, Katie, Derek. There are texts with varying levels of urgency and annoyance. I haven’t the stomach to listen to the voicemails. It’s almost 9 a.m. – the show will be on air in fifteen minutes and today it’s supposed to be my turn in the producer’s chair. Swimming up from the deep comes the memory of Finn’s assertion yesterday. ‘My daughter,’ he had snarled at me. And it is this that frightens me the most.

  Downstairs, Amy is sleeping. I know that I need to find out what happened between us, but there’s no time for that now. I focus on the most pressing emergency – work. In all my professional life, I’ve never once allowed a lapse like this. I call Katie.

  ‘Where are you?’ she hisses into the phone.

  ‘I overslept.’

  ‘Are you alright?’

  In the background, I can hear the patter of voices, the industrious din of the office floor so familiar to me now.

  ‘I’m fine. A bit of a bug, maybe. I’m on my way in now.’

  I press her to fill me in on what’s happening, trying my best to scramble some air of authority and to conduct proceedings from this end of the phone, but there’s a queasiness gathering inside me and my head throbs with pain.

  ‘Can you put me on to Vic?’ I ask, and she says sure, and I can hear her voice distantly, telling him I’m on the line. I cannot hear his response.

  A minute later, she’s back with me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cara. He’s with Derek in the studio. They’ve asked not to be disturbed.’

  She delivers this in an awkward manner and I sense her discomfort, but it’s overpowered by my own feelings of sudden anger, a jolt of hot anxiety.

  ‘Look, are you sure you want to come in?’ Katie asks, her voice softening with concern. ‘Especially after yesterday. Maybe you should just stay in bed and get well.’

  I close my eyes briefly, shutting them against the memory of that photograph, humiliation crawling over me like a virulent rash. The thought of running the gauntlet of all those stolen looks, those judging glances and whispered asides, is almost unbearable. I could stay at home, pull the covers over my head, cry off sick for once.

  But I don’t like the thought of Vic and Derek pushing me out. Riled by fear of exclusion, I tell her that I’ll be there in forty minutes. Underneath the noisy anger and queasy anxiety, a small voice whispers: You just don’t want to be alone with her. I push it away.

  There’s no time for a shower or breakfast. So, I dress quickly, scrub my face clean and brush my teeth. I knock back a couple of painkillers and grab a cereal bar, and soon enough I’m on the train hastily applying make-up and trying to calm the squalls in my brain and stomach. I need to get on top of things at work. What happened yesterday will be gossip for a day or two but then it will be forgotten. The important thing is to rise above it, stick my chin out and act like I don’t care. Derek has been openly flouting my authority lately, no longer bothering to hide his attempts to usurp me. This morning’s error only tipped the balance more in his favour, and I struggle to remain clear-headed; I must not be pushed into any corners by him.

  It’s not until I emerge from the Tube station that my thoughts turn to Jeff. I am astonished to find that I have hardly thought of him since waking to this nightmare. Have things fallen this far between us? I take out my phone and call him, propelled by guilt, and when he doesn’t pick up, I can’t tell if I feel disappointed or relieved. I listen to his voicemail recording, and then leave a message.

  ‘Hey there. Listen, I’m so sorry again about yesterday. I understand how painful it must have been for you to see that photo. It was a stupid, reckless thing I did many years ago before I met you, and I’m sorry it’s come back now to cause you hurt. I hope you’ll forgive me. Call me if you get a chance.’

  And then I hang up. Briefly, I imagine telling him what had happened last night, but know that it could only compound the difficulties of yesterday. And how would I attempt to explain it? That at some stage last night I passed out? That I awoke this morning in bed with our nanny? A plunge of horror goes right down through me, and it unearths something – a hard little kernel of memory: a hand on my breast, eager, probing.

  Oh Jesus. It comes at me so suddenly, I have to stop in the street. Did that happen? Or am I just imagining it? The buildings around me tilt. Everything is blurry and indistinct. Memories are opaque and unreliable. They swerve through me and I push back against them, battling to regain my equilibrium, hurrying now towards the office, pulling my jacket tight around me.

  I need to work, to keep busy. Work will save me. Work will stave off all these feelings of insecurity and doubt. The show is on air when I arrive, and I can hear Vic’s voice piped through the speakers in the lobby as soon as I push through the doors. I take the stairs two at a time, don’t even bother stopping to dump my jacket and bag at my desk, instead heading straight for the control room, ignoring the heads that bob up above the partitions as I pass, the knowing
smiles, the trace of laughter that skims my progress across the office floor. Rise above it, I tell myself. And it’s not like I haven’t been the subject of whispered gossip before. I can still recall with icy clarity the trail of whispers that followed me through university in the wake of my mother’s death. Back then I had Finn as my support, my protector. How crushing it is now to realize that this time he is the perpetrator of my pain.

  In the control room Derek and Katie huddle alongside the sound engineer and the broadcasting coordinator, peering through the Plexiglas at Vic, who is wrapping up the segment and nodding to Anna, who is poised to read the news.

  Derek gives me a sidelong look as I come in and says, ‘There you are. Pick up the Evening Standard on your way in, did you?’

  ‘Ha fucking ha,’ I say, but I catch the glint of malice in his eye. ‘Well, I’m here now. So I can jump in the chair, let you go.’

  He swings around, his expression incredulous. ‘I don’t fucking think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you reek of booze. Heavy night, was it? Not that anyone would blame you, after what happened yesterday.’

  A rogue thought slips into my head. Her hand cupped around mine, her mouth close to my ear. ‘Drink,’ she kept saying, pushing the vodka to my lips.

  How much did I have? The vodka, on top of the temazepam, made me bleary and confused. But to what extent? What had I allowed to happen?

  A sudden lurch of bile comes up my throat, and I dip my head and swallow it down.

  ‘You know the rules,’ Derek tells me. ‘No hangovers in the control room.’

  I have no choice but to concede.

  ‘Fine. I’ll see you in the meeting room with the others at eleven thirty for the post-mortem. Okay?’

  Not waiting for his reply, I grab my bag and push through the door. I need the loo, so I walk briskly down towards the Ladies, ignoring the glances, the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. Once inside I check my reflection in the mirror, then run the cold tap and take a spare toothbrush out of my bag – an old habit – and give my teeth a quick going-over. I don’t look too bad, considering, and after reapplying lipstick and a quick dab of concealer in the hollows beneath my eyes, I look almost human.

  My nerves begin to calm. I can do this. There’s a message on my phone from Jeff.

  I know things are difficult. We’ll talk it over at the weekend. See you tonight.

  I send a reply.

  Can’t wait. X

  Then I comb my hair and spray on some deodorant.

  I am coming back to myself. The headache is abating, reason returning. There’s a simple explanation for what happened. The temazepam mixed with the vodka must have hit me harder than expected. I probably crashed out in the living room, and Amy must have tried to help me up and get me to my room. No doubt she manoeuvred me as far as the kitchen, then realized she’d never get me up the stairs. It must have been at that point, weighing up the options, that she decided it was best to just dump me on to her bed to sleep it off. That would explain why we were both still fully clothed. Of course. It’s the only explanation. The logic appeases me. If I hadn’t been so panicked when I’d awoken because of the lateness of the hour, then I would simply have asked her and she’d have explained, thus saving myself all this unnecessary anxiety.

  How ridiculous! I almost laugh aloud. I imagine myself this evening, telling Amy of the fright I had gotten waking up in her bed, imagine the two of us laughing at all the crazy notions leaping around in my imagination.

  When I was a student, in the months before Finn, before my mother killed herself, I got entirely wasted one night on a bottle of Southern Comfort and lost a chunk of time. It was my nineteenth birthday and we were celebrating. The last thing that I remembered was knocking back shots with my friends in our dorm room, and after that: nothing. I woke the following morning in someone else’s digs, off-campus, cream cheese was smeared over my T-shirt and there were grass stains on my white jeans. The hair on one half of my head was sopping wet. I had no idea what had happened to me. At first, I was too hung-over to be alarmed. It was only afterwards that a sense of unease came over me, at how vulnerable I had been. Later, I managed to piece the night together based on accounts from other people. How we had decided to move the party to one of the lads’ flats, which involved walking across campus, and because I was so plastered I kept falling over in the grass. Back at his place, I declared myself famished, and attempted to eat toast with cream cheese, making a mess of myself. One of the girls thought it would be hilarious to pretend my parents were downstairs and wanted to see me, causing me to run to the bathroom and shove my head under the cold tap in an attempt to sober up. And so my movements were all accounted for. But I never managed to retrieve the memories myself.

  All of us, back then, had our black-out stories. It was like a rite of passage. Alarming, really, when you think about it, the boastful way we would state, ‘I can’t even look at Southern Comfort – I got completely out of it one night on the stuff.’ Or, ‘Just thinking about tequila makes my stomach flip. I lost a whole night because of it.’ I have friends who’ve woken up in strange places with strange people. One recalled coming to in a dentist’s chair. These are stories from my youth that we used to laugh about and cringe at. But they were part of my youth, firmly put behind me. Or so I had thought.

  And now, here I am, a grown woman, hung-over at work, trying to piece together the facts of the night before as she straightens herself out in front of the mirror. Pathetic.

  I turn from my own reflection, lock myself into a cubicle and hang my bag on the back of the door.

  It’s clear what I need to do. I need to stop drinking and get some early nights. I need to have a frank discussion with Jeff about the problems between us, possibly raise the notion of some kind of couples’ counselling. I need to set things right with Finn. And I need to tell Amy it’s time for her to move on.

  I lift the lid of the toilet, pull down my jeans, and it’s only when I’m sitting down that I see it.

  On the inside of my upper thigh. A bruise. Reddish-brown in colour, darkly veined towards the centre. I stare at it in disbelief.

  Moments ago, I was thinking of my student days of carelessness, and this too is a reminder of those days, when I would wear a scarf to lectures on warm spring days to conceal the love bites of some overly amorous boy I’d copped off with the night before.

  The ideas that I have been pushing away begin slowly surging forward. A love bite on my inner thigh. Not just one. As I lean in to examine myself, I find another peeking out behind it, further up. I stare at these bruises with horror and all the ideas explode in my head. Her mouth on my thigh, kissing, sucking. My insides churn and I have to put a hand out to the cubicle wall to steady myself. The tiles of the floor – grey with some kind of grit engrained – zoom and jag in my vision. Light gleams too brightly off the chrome handles of the door, the toilet-roll holder. My head is a mass of lewd horrors, and I get to my feet quickly, needing to pull my jeans up over that part of my body, as if by concealing it I can somehow erase what has happened.

  I don’t know how I get through the next few hours. The post-mortem is excruciating and I’m relieved when it’s over. Victor pulls me aside afterwards, and having slagged me mercilessly in the meeting over my hangover and my lapse in professionalism, he lowers his voice to a rare note of softness, enquiring, ‘You alright, love? You look shocking.’ It’s all I can do not to fall, sobbing, into his arms.

  Back at my desk, I take a few drops of Rescue Remedy, then call Jeff.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks, hearing the weakness in my voice.

  ‘Nothing. I’m just coming down with a cold or flu or something.’

  ‘Oh dear. Have you taken anything for it?’

  ‘Some paracetamol. Look, I know I said I’d pick you up from the airport, but I don’t think I’m up to it.’

  ‘Oh.’ A note of disappointment echoes down the line.

  ‘I’m sorry,
sweetheart. I’m just wiped.’

  ‘No, of course. Go home, have a hot bath and get to bed early, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, feeling the ache of not telling him.

  I get off the phone as quickly as I can, and after answering any pressing emails, Katie and I briefly run through the next day’s schedule, before I grab my things and head for the door. The effort of trying to appear normal is exhausting.

  On the Tube, I take a seat, instinctively crossing my legs, and straight away I feel the pinch of discomfort along my thigh. I uncross them, and sit forward, hunched, pushing down on the anxiety that has been gathering inside me all day. I do not look at my own reflection in the window opposite. I wonder what she is doing? How will she react to my questions, my accusations? Will she leave quietly without a fuss? Will I get her out of there without Mabel noticing, before Jeff gets home? I feel sick at the thought of the confrontation, and when the train pulls into my stop, the temptation to stay sitting here and not get off is overwhelming.

  As soon as I open the apartment door I am hit by the smell of cooking. Spices undercut by the sickly-sweet decaying scent of stewing meat assault my senses. I realize I haven’t eaten all day. But rather than feeling ravenous, instead the prospect of food makes me nauseous.

  She’s in the kitchen, hunched over the hob, with her back to me. She hasn’t heard me come in. Her phone is plugged into speakers and French rap fills the air. For a moment, I stand there watching her – the steady syncopated nodding of her head in time to the music as she prods at the flesh cooking in the pan. There are various clattering noises coming from Mabel’s room, the soaring voice of some Disney princess lifted in song alerts me to the laptop entertaining her in there.

  The pan spits, and Amy steps back, swearing under her breath. When she turns around, the heel of one hand is pressed against her eye. She catches sight of me and takes it away.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, her cheeks flushed. I can’t tell if that’s from the cooking or a sudden wave of awkwardness upon seeing me. She’s biting down on a smile that insists on surfacing, and it makes her look younger than she is, guileless.