Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A party,’ said Helen.

  ‘But I mean a real party, very exclusive.’

  ‘I won’t know anyone.’

  ‘You’ll know us,’ said Fran.

  ‘Shouldn’t I change?’

  ‘Ideally, yes, but there’s no time for that,’ said Alex. ‘This is … fine.’

  ‘Is anyone else going?’

  ‘Just us. We’re initiating you into our clique. You should feel very honoured.’

  ‘I don’t know if I should—’ Three, four days he’d been alone now.

  ‘Stop talking!’ said Helen.

  ‘I have to—’

  ‘Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking!’

  ‘Come,’ said Alex, ‘we burn daylight.’

  ‘We will see you there,’ said Fran. ‘You did promise. Remember?’

  And now Alex was steering me back towards the others, his hands on my shoulders, his mouth to my ear.

  ‘Oh, Charlie. Can’t you see what this is? Go! Go quickly, say goodnight, before they start another song.’

  The Pines

  The house was on The Avenue, or Millionaires’ Row as it was known, at a time when that still meant something. A coniferous Beverly Hills, captains of industry lived here, presenters of local news programmes, respectable gangsters, a handful of actors who’d made good in seventies detective shows. Door numbers were too déclassé for The Avenue. Instead, the houses had fanciful, faux-rural names with a whiff of the National Trust: Marble House, Stone Cottage, The Mount, The Hollies. My scrap of paper told me to look for The Pines, and for some time I swooped from side to side on the wide, silent street, peering at the gateposts of mansions hidden behind high privet hedges, until I found a great, impenetrable slab of artfully rusted steel, like the airlock of a space freighter.

  Time passed, twenty minutes, half an hour, creeping towards midnight, as I loitered like a burglar casing the joint. The police paid special attention to Millionaires’ Row. In my wallet, stolen scratch cards and cash from the till. What if I cracked under interrogation? I sat on the kerb, listened to the click-click-click of automatic sprinklers, watched the bats tumble against the purple sky, a fox trot blithely down the centre of the avenue as if looking for the party. The minute hand clicked over to twelve and, sober now, I began to wheel my bike away.

  A mini-cab approached, Alex’s head already protruding from the window. ‘Noooo! Stay right where you are!’ They pulled over and tumbled out onto the wide grass verge, transformed; first Alex in a grey satin shirt open to the sternum, Helen dressed in the day’s dungarees but with her hair gelled into random stalagmites, two thick black lines drawn under her eyes with what might have been a fat felt-tip, more war-paint than make-up, and finally Fran in a black shift dress, a nightdress almost, lace-trimmed at the top and bottom, the same Adidas trainers below.

  ‘We stopped at mine to change,’ said Alex, paying the driver. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

  Fran tugged at the hem. ‘What d’you think?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t she look amazing?’ said Alex. ‘It’s my mother’s negligee. Paging Doctor Freud!’

  ‘I feel a bit underdressed, Alex,’ said Fran.

  ‘Nonsense. It’s underwear as outerwear.’

  ‘I’m wearing outerwear as underwear,’ said Helen.

  ‘I’m not sure if I should have this on,’ said Fran and touched the red bra-strap on her shoulder.

  ‘No, you shouldn’t. Take it off!’ said Alex. ‘You’re with friends.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Later then. The night is young.’

  ‘This feels weird too …’ She touched her lips, the lipstick butterfly-shaped, overlapping the edges as if applied with the edge of a thumb. ‘What do you think? Alex did it.’

  ‘Great,’ was all I could say.

  ‘It feels a little … mime-y.’

  ‘It’s meant to be like that,’ said Alex. ‘It’s Kabuki-style. This is a serious do, people, not the last-night party for Bugsy Malone. You’ve got to make an effort. And with that in mind …’ From a Tesco bag, he produced a neat white rectangle, holding it flat like a tray then, with a conjurer’s flourish, taking one corner and flicking it into a shirt. ‘For you.’

  ‘I can’t wear this.’

  ‘Charlie, you look like the paper boy. They won’t have you in there like that. Put this on.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘You can go behind a car if you’re bashful.’

  I took the shirt by my fingertips, walked a little distance and turned my back. It was a struggle to flex every muscle and take off the T-shirt simultaneously and I realised, as it passed over my head, that this morning’s underarm Aztec had long lost its power. I rubbed at my grimy neck and under my arms with my old T-shirt. It seemed almost sacrilegious to climb into this pristine thing, which smelt of the airing cupboard and felt expensive and heavy and cool against my skin. The white shirts I’d worn at school were scouring, non-iron polyester things that came in packs of three. This label said Dior. I went to tuck it in—

  ‘No, leave it like that,’ said Helen. ‘Let’s look at you.’ I turned, rolled my shoulders, tried to tuck my hands into air.

  ‘It will have to do,’ said Alex. ‘Are we ready?’ He beckoned us over to stand beneath the security camera. ‘Band photo! Smile. Say “Eighteen”!’ We arranged ourselves, assumed our most mature faces and Alex pressed the intercom button. ‘Hello, Bruno! It’s Alex. I’ve brought some friends. Is that all right?’ Time passed but we held our pose until finally, with a low industrial rumble, the great airlock began to slide open.

  At the end of a long woodchip drive lit by burning flares the house emerged from the ground, low and long, smoked glass and gunmetal like an expensive coffee table, and immediately I recognised this as the drug lord’s house from the old action movies. Somewhere, guarding the perimeter, there’d be a security guard in sunglasses, pressing his finger to his ear, reaching into his jacket just as he’s pulled into the privet and garrotted.

  ‘Fucking hell, Alex,’ said Helen.

  On the patio – I’m sure it had a better name – stylish men and women arranged themselves in stylish clusters like the plastic figures on an architect’s model and dance music thunked from the speakers concealed somewhere in the trees, the eponymous pines that shielded the grounds from outside eyes. Off to one side of the house we could see a rectangle of phosphorescent light that cross-faded pink to blue to green to red; a swimming pool, empty now but waiting.

  ‘Again, I say it. Fuck-ing hell.’

  ‘I know, right?’ said Alex.

  ‘Should we have brought something?’ I said.

  ‘Four cans of Stella and a mix-tape?’ laughed Alex. ‘It’s not that kind of party.’

  ‘It’s an orgy, yeah?’ said Helen, eyes lit up. ‘You’ve brought us to an orgy.’

  ‘Not until much later. Until then it’s just a nice party with someone that I know from the local scene.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had a local scene,’ I said.

  ‘Charlie, you’re not meant to know. If anyone asks you – they won’t – then you’re all at college and, by some statistical freak, you’ve all just turned eighteen.’

  ‘I can’t pretend that I’m at college.’

  ‘Yes, you can! Imagine school with less violence and everyone drinking coffee.’ He looked at us intently one by one, a fortune-teller. ‘Fran, next year you hope to study … Psychology at Durham; Charlie – Geography, Sheffield; Helen – PE and Politics at Loughborough. You want to be a games teacher!’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘So Alex,’ I said, ‘are we gate-crashing?’

  I had gate-crashed parties before, in houses all over town, Montagues sneaking into the Capulets’ ball. ‘We’re friends of Steve,’ we’d say, or ‘Stephanie said we could come.’ I’d been to parties that had been gate-crashed by hordes as merciless, crazed and destructive as any Vikings;
CDs and purses stolen, locks prised from drinks cabinets, sinks wrenched from the wall, sausage rolls ground underfoot and brawls on the lawn as the parents returned home in fury and shock. I’d been at parties that had made the local news. Once a helicopter had hovered overhead. Didn’t all house parties end like this? With blue flashing lights and molehills of pink salt on the carpet?

  ‘Are we going to get chucked out?’

  ‘No, because you’re not gate-crashing, you’re my dear friends from the show. I’ll go say hi to Bruno. Mingle! Go! Go!’ and as he disappeared into the house, we were left, the three of us, gawping at the edge of this entirely new world. I had never seen so many attractive men and women in one place, so varied and glamorous, and I wondered, were these really the neighbours that I saw in the Cottage Loaf Tea Rooms, the Boots and the Spar, the Trawlerman Fish Bar and the Golden Calf Chinese? The men wore expensive T-shirts or open shirts under linen suits, the women stylish summer dresses or ironic retro jumpsuits, like the covers of the house-music CDs my dad had sold so reluctantly. Even the middle-aged guests looked cool as they stood, drinks held out to the side, in a minty, soft-focus mist that might have been steam from the heated pool or haze from all those Marlboro Menthols, or just the flattering light that comes from money. ‘This is so not the Methodist Church Disco,’ said Helen, and I found myself trying hard not to stare at a statuesque woman in a red PVC catsuit, while another man, handsome as a model, walked directly at us, a tray held at shoulder height.

  ‘He’s coming over!’ said Helen, gripping my arm.

  ‘Mushroom galette?’ said the model, and obediently we all took one and dipped our heads.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Helen, canapé halfway to her lips, ‘caterers!’

  ‘Where I come from,’ said Fran, ‘these are called vol-au-vents.’

  ‘Oh, that’s rank,’ said Helen, spitting it into her hand. ‘That tastes like soil. What’s wrong with sausage rolls or cheese and pineapple?’ and she tipped the mulch into a pot of bamboo. ‘Bloody yuppies. I can’t eat this. I’m going to see if they’ve got Pringles.’

  Another tray passed by, shallow glasses filled with mounds of green alien snow, and I snatched two and hoped that caterers did not ask for ID. Alone now, Fran and I touched glasses and pouted and craned our necks towards the rims. We sipped, and Fran clenched her jaw and opened her eyes wide. ‘Look – I’m trying to be cool and not wince. Don’t wince, don’t wince, don’t wince …’

  ‘It’s basically a lime-flavoured slushy. You can get it from the newsagents.’

  ‘Do they put salt on the rim at the newsagents?’

  ‘If you ask them. Under the till, big catering tub of Saxa.’

  She sipped again. ‘Tequila. Have you noticed, when you’ve thrown up on a type of alcohol then it always reminds you of vomit?’

  ‘Well, I’ve thrown up on pretty much every kind of alcohol, so …’

  ‘Hey, James Bond. And you still like it?’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re meant to like it.’

  She patted my arm. ‘You’re so jaded.’

  ‘I am. I’m very experienced,’ I said, and removed the straw so that it wouldn’t poke me in the cheek again. ‘This is classy though.’

  ‘It is,’ she said and we perched on the edge of a tubful of cacti and took in the scene. ‘I feel like Daisy Buchanan.’

  ‘Who’s Daisy Buchanan?’

  ‘She’s Jay Gatsby’s first love. He becomes a millionaire and throws these amazing wild parties, just so Daisy’ll fall in love with him again and leave her husband. I won’t tell you what happens, but it’s very sad. And sort of annoying too.’

  ‘I’ll read it next,’ I said. I would read every book, see every film, listen to every song that Fran had ever mentioned.

  ‘Christ, I needed a party. I feel bad about the others though. We mustn’t let on. I hate cliques. Except, you know, when I’m invited to join a clique, in which case cliques are great. Did you have them at Merton Grange? Cliques.’

  ‘’Course. We didn’t use the word “clique”.’

  ‘Were you in one?’

  ‘Sort of. Just a gang of boys really.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what Colin said. He said your lot sort of ruled the school.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘And Lucy too. Except she said they used to call her stuff. Like – what was it? Number Forty-two. Like on a Chinese menu, which doesn’t even make sense, given that she’s Vietnamese. Or her parents are.’

  This much was true. She had been called Forty-two almost conversationally, more often than her real name. And then there was Boat Girl and Viet-Cong and, for reasons I’d never really understood, Buddha, and while I couldn’t recall ever using those names myself, I knew that I’d not objected.

  ‘And what did Colin say?’

  ‘He said he got the gay-wimp stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t say those things—’

  ‘They didn’t say you did.’ Fran put her hand on mine. ‘You think I’m telling you off. I’m not telling you off.’

  ‘I never said any of that.’

  ‘I know. She just said some of the boys did.’

  ‘That was mainly Lloyd and Fox.’

  ‘And Harper, too. I remember, because I’d heard you talk about him.’

  ‘He’s my friend, that doesn’t mean he can’t be a dick.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And Lloyd’s not really a friend, he’s just a friend of a friend, he just hangs around with us. He’s not even talking to me at the moment. I’m not sure if any of them are.’

  ‘Really? Why not?’

  ‘I sort of threw a pool ball at his head. Really hard.’

  She laughed. ‘Did you miss?’

  ‘Yeah. But I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something he said to me.’ I shrugged. ‘He says stuff.’

  ‘Well, it’s a shame you missed because he sounds like a real prick.’ She laughed. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s fair enough.’ A moment passed. ‘When did you and Lucy have this conversation?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. And you mustn’t get annoyed with Lucy, she wasn’t telling tales. The only reason it came up was …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She said she liked you more now. She said when you turned up with me that first time, she really hated your guts, because of all the … stuff at school. But you weren’t who she thought you were.’

  ‘It was another time. Different person,’ I said, feeling that this was true.

  ‘I’m really not trying to be pious or preachy, I can be a bitch too – trust me, I really can.’ She sipped the drink, winced and laughed. ‘I just wanted to be sure that if we were going to do this thing, that I hadn’t got you wrong. That’s all. Let’s forget about it.’

  Do this thing, she’d said and continued talking. I wasn’t able to take it in. Do this—

  ‘… should really mingle …’

  Thing, this thing …

  ‘… and get a different drink. Tequila’s never a good idea.’

  What ‘thing’?

  ‘… even in Mexico, I bet they’re all, have you got something soft?’

  ‘What “thing”?’ I said.

  ‘“Thing”?’

  ‘You said “if we’re going to do this thing”, this “thing”, but what thing?’

  I felt her press her arm against mine. ‘You know what thing.’

  ‘But say it.’

  She laughed, stretched her legs and pointed her toes. ‘It’s not something you say, it’s something you do,’ and I knew then that we would kiss later that night, and that it was only a question of getting it right – that small matter – and kissing by the book. ‘Come on …’

  ‘You haven’t got me wrong,’ I said.

  ‘No. I didn’t think I had. Let’s go inside. See what else they’ve got to drink.’

  She took my arm and we passed through the other guests, who smiled and nodded, amused and indulgent, as if w
e were children who’d come down in pyjamas to join the party, to light the grown-ups’ cigarettes and sip their drinks. I practised my alibi: Geography, Geography at Sheffield. Yes, it’s a great uni! I am excited, very, thank you very much. Through sliding glass doors, into a kitchen, glass on every side like an aquarium, with the sink and surfaces in the middle of the room, a mystifying thing, and all the pots and pans and implements dangling artfully from hooks like elaborate percussion. On polished black marble, the bartender was lining up more cocktails, red and orange and green like pastel traffic lights, and we took two of the red ones while his back was turned and, a safe distance away, brought our faces down to meet the rims. They tasted of rocket lollies from the ice-cream van and we carried them carefully down glass steps into a living room, sunken like an excavation and once again glass-walled and I wondered what Mr Harper, the Conservatory King, would make of it. ‘It’s just one big bloody great conservatory!’

  The sides of the living area were terraced like the Roman senate in gladiator films, the steps scattered with cushions and rugs on which the senators reclined, and here was Helen, arms clasped around a bowl of crisps as if protecting her child, and Alex telling a story, the crowd leaning in, smiling, laughing. Confidence and talent weren’t entirely the same thing – Miles was the most brash boy I’d ever met, and pure ham – but there seemed to be some connection and I wondered, what must that be like, to have the full attention of the crowd rather than wadding your words into the gaps in other people’s speech? The music was softer in here, an Ibizan bossa nova, and we were happy to stand a little way off and sip our drinks, sophisticates, and listen—

  ‘My friends!’ said Alex suddenly. ‘Come down here, don’t be shy.’ The audience turned to look at us. ‘This is our Juliet, the very talented Frances Fisher. This is our Benvolio, played by Mr Charles Lewis. Helen and I are trying to engineer a summer romance, isn’t that right, Helen?’

  Fran rolled her eyes. ‘Alex, pack it in.’

  ‘But where’s Romeo?’ said a shaven-headed man, elegant, Chinese, in thick black spectacle frames and a black shirt. ‘Why aren’t you with your Romeo?’