Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  ‘… for never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’

  We stood beneath the scaffolding, looking up at the audience’s shins as the music faded and the last light disappeared. From here, the applause sounded immense, feet stomping on the wooden boards over our heads, and we were laughing, and then stepping back out for the curtain call with that perky little skipping run practised by gymnasts, flopping forward to show just how emotionally exhausting the whole thing had been, holding out our hands to Miles and Fran, resurrected and strolling on arm in arm. And then all discipline broke down and we were pushing Ivor and Alina to the front of the stage, and supermarket bouquets were appearing, and the audience was perhaps getting a little tired of clapping, would quite like to head home now. Squinting against the light I saw Alex’s father clap and look at his watch at the same time. ‘Encore! Encore!’ they shouted while privately thinking, please, don’t do anything again.

  But Dad was on his feet, attempting to force an ovation through the sheer vigour of his clapping. When it became clear that he wouldn’t stop, the rest of the audience caved, my father cheering louder than anyone, arms above his head, more, more, more, and not for the first time that summer, I wanted simultaneously to run away and to stay there forever.

  Last Night

  Backstage, boys and girls barged into each other’s dressing rooms for glimpses of underwear, no one trying too hard to remove their make-up. Tumbling out in our party clothes, we found the streets of Verona lit in reds and greens, the audience clutching plastic cups of warm white wine. Entire families were there, school friends, teachers kissing and hugging. Everyone, it seemed, was the best thing in it. I stood on the corner for a while, smiling as if watching a stranger’s wedding on the street; pleased to see the confetti but with no reason to join in.

  And then I saw Dad approaching through the crowd, beaming but still red around the eyes as he threw his arms around me.

  ‘Well done, my boy,’ he said. ‘I’m very proud of you.’

  Automatically, I replied, ‘Proud of you too, Dad.’

  ‘What for?’ he said, and laughed. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  Dad left soon after, cadging a lift into town from Mr and Mrs Asante, and now it was time for the party to begin. Chris and Chris had fixed the lights to turn Verona into a dance floor, and we threw each other around until we were all soaked in sweat, breaking off now and then to poke through hedges for bottles. There were sentimental speeches that went on for too long, and my attention turned to the bats in the night sky, looping and wheeling overhead. Then Polly drank too much white wine and had to lie down on the grass, and Lucy and Miles were seen snogging in the grotto, and Keith was dancing all alone. Concerned that someone might get hurt, George – very drunk – was tidying away all the bottles and cups. House music turned to dark techno. ‘I had a bag. I can’t find my bag,’ said Colin Smart over and over again. ‘Has anyone seen my bag? I can’t leave without my bag!’

  ‘High-level meeting,’ said Alex, drawing the four of us together. ‘This party is over. We are getting out of here.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we say goodbye?’ said Fran.

  ‘I have these,’ said Alex, dangling car keys. ‘Mum’s car. If anyone wants an adventure …’

  ‘Yes!’ said Helen.

  ‘Let me just say goodbye to George,’ said Fran.

  ‘No, we have to go NOW,’ said Helen.

  ‘Alex, are you too drunk to drive?’ I said.

  ‘I swear, I’m sober as a lord,’ said Alex. ‘Come on. We’re going to see the sun come up,’ and we slipped away into the night.

  We drove south down silent, frightening lanes lit up by our headlights like the corridor of a haunted house. To hold our nerve, we shouted along to old Madonna and Prince songs, Fran and me in the backseat drinking vodka and lemonade from fragile plastic cups that sloshed onto our wrists at each bend.

  ‘Where exactly are we going?’ shouted Fran.

  ‘I want to dance,’ shouted Alex. ‘Let’s go to Brighton!’

  This seemed like a fine idea, and we whooped and headed for the motorway, Helen lining up the songs and cranking up the volume until the speakers buzzed. We felt tireless, immortal, invincible. Entering Brighton, we found ourselves in traffic – a traffic jam, at two in morning, what a town! – and peered, amazed, at the crowds of people still out on the streets. We parked in a grand square close to the beach, delirious at the sight of the actual, literal sea, and underneath the promenade, we put on our most sober faces and joined the queue outside the nightclub in the arches, attempting a kind of world-weary nonchalance at the bowel-shaking dumpf-dumpf-dumpf of the bass, the sweaty, shirtless, goggle-eyed insanity of the skinny boys stumbling out for Marlboro Lights and water. We looked and felt like children in comparison, even Alex, and soon we’d been turned away from every place he knew. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Alex, ‘we’ll have a private party,’ and we found a spot on the beach itself and stomped the shingle down. Alex and Helen went off on an expedition for booze and chewing gum, chips and music and cigarettes, and Fran and I passed the time by kissing, clumsy and drunk like all the other lovers there, dark shapes on the shingle like a colony of seals. Then we lay for a while, our faces close enough to be a blur, our hands on the other’s cheek.

  ‘I mean, your face …’

  ‘And yours.’

  ‘Will we always know each other? Even if we’re not—’

  ‘Sh. Hope so. I don’t see why not.’

  It was four in the morning now and on Alex and Helen’s return we summoned up enough energy to dance once more to house music on Alex’s tinny CD player, retrieved from the car. Nearby, some other all-night revellers sat round a man with a guitar. ‘Could you turn it down, please?’ shouted one of them. ‘Hippies,’ muttered Alex, but the sky was lightening, exhaustion and self-consciousness were setting in, and we surrendered, turned the music down and sat, huddling close for warmth.

  Drunk and sentimental, we said out loud what we loved about each other and made declarations of lifelong friendship that would embarrass us when we recalled them the next day but which we hoped would hold true.

  ‘Helen – are you crying?’ said Alex. ‘My God, I didn’t think you could.’

  ‘What’s up, Hel?’ said Fran, taking her hand and shaking it out, and Helen laughed.

  ‘I don’t know. I just suddenly thought – what if it doesn’t get better than this?’ and she wiped her face with the back of Fran’s hand.

  ‘Don’t wipe your snot on me,’ said Fran, crying too. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘Look,’ said Alex. To our left out beyond the Palace Pier the sun was rising. ‘Night’s candles are burnt out and something something something.’

  ‘… jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,’ said Fran.

  ‘I don’t feel very jocund,’ said Helen. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I suppose we ought to think about heading home,’ said Fran.

  ‘Bit longer,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should try to sleep first.’

  And so we huddled close and closed our eyes, but something was happening behind us. The music in the clubs had stopped abruptly and now the crowds were spilling onto the beach all at once as if a fire drill was taking place. Steam rose from their bodies as they loitered, arms round each other, shaken and bedraggled and sucking on cigarettes, and now a crowd of clubbers was forming around a sea fisherman nearby to listen to his radio. A group of girls staggered past, high heels sinking in the shingle, some crying, others looking dazed, one girl laughing and crying at the same time and swearing to herself. ‘What’s up?’ asked Alex, but they didn’t stop, marching unsteadily to the sea where the laughing, crying girl began to wade out into the waves.

  The world was coming to an end, with no hope of salvation. Ballistic missiles were minutes away, an asteroid perhaps or a solar flare, the one we’d been waiting for. The group with the guitar must have heard the news too, bundling up their stuff and trudging up
the beach.

  ‘What’s up?’ shouted Helen. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘There’s been an accident!’ a girl shouted back, then something about Diana, a tunnel in Paris. ‘She’s dead.’

  Of course we didn’t quite believe it, not until we were back in Alex’s car and listening to the news on the radio, driving cautiously along the early-morning roads, the sun shining bright on the last good day of the summer, the four of us quite silent all the way home.

  Part Four

  WINTER

  –

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

  Shakespeare, sonnet 18

  1998

  We broke up in January. A love we thought would outlast all storms and struggles could not survive Fran’s daily commute to Basingstoke.

  Until that time, and for some time afterwards, I’d told myself that I would happily give my life for Fran Fisher. Well, not happily but I would give it. ‘Take me, not her,’ I’d say, though it seemed an important part of the deal that she should know the sacrifice was being made. If I was going to drink the potion, I didn’t want it to be a waste. I think, too, that she’d have sacrificed her life for me, to begin with at least, though a willingness to die seems a rather blunt measure of devotion. Was there some sort of sliding scale? Did a day come when she thought, Well, I’m not sure I’d die, but I’d definitely give an arm, then a hand, a kidney then maybe a toe, a little toe? Some hair, until finally Take him, not me! If Juliet had woken to find her Romeo dead and, instead of reaching for the happy dagger, had decided to carry on, to learn to live with grief and work towards reconciliation in the community, would we think less of her? What if she met someone else and lived happily into old age? No, self-destruction was the gold standard. In our case, the opportunity did not arise and, with a banality that no one would ever bother to dramatise, we came apart.

  We did our best to prevent it. Fran’s results – all excellent – meant that she’d go to a college that specialised in the performing arts, and while she began the daily commute, I started to look for a job. We both knew how things might go – envy and exclusion on my part, self-consciousness and awkwardness on hers as this new world opened up – and we’d laid down strategies to avoid these tensions. She would be free to do whatever she wanted, to go to parties, to study, to talk about the course if it excited her, and in turn I’d be free to come along and meet her friends or to stay away if I chose to. There’d be no jealous-boyfriend act, and we’d see each other three, or at least two, evenings a week.

  I met her parents properly and grew to like them, though they never lost the question in their eyes: is this someone we really need to get to know? Is it worth the investment? But I was allowed to stay over in the same bed, holding our breath and waiting until they were asleep before cautious, silent love-making. We’d take the train to London at weekends, go to galleries or to see the arty movies – not movies, ‘cinema’ – that never made it anywhere near our town. We went to restaurants – restaurants! – sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with her friends, and I did my best to get along with them, just as I had with Full Fathom Five. I was ‘taking some time out’ – this was the line that we both chose to stick to. Really I was one of them, a student, just twelve months behind. We both learnt to drive and for my seventeenth birthday Mum bought me a battered old Citroën with wind-down windows and moss growing in the window seals. As autumn faded into winter, we’d drive out to the coast and walk on the cliffs or beaches, then go back to the car, find some hidden spot, collapse the backseat and make partially clothed love behind the steamed-up windows.

  There was a tenderness to that time, a sense that we were taking care of each other, and for a while it seemed plausible that we might make it through. But through to what? Would I come to university open days with her? What would she say when she discovered that I’d not filled out the college forms? I had a new job, I had the house with Dad and friends in town, and what was this obsession with education anyway? I understood the arty films just as well as she did, I was reading more, and not everyone wanted or needed A-levels or a degree; to expect it was just snobbery. I rehearsed this argument in my head, ready for the day when I’d have to use it out loud.

  Then, in early November, we had the accident. We’d had sex in the back of the car, giggling and cracking shins and elbows, but this time I’d failed to fit the condom properly and it was only after we’d collapsed and pulled apart that we discovered it had disappeared like some terrible magic trick, only to reappear soon after, sticky and alarming. We’d both been frightened but it was Fran who’d insisted that we drive into Brighton first thing for a morning-after pill. ‘I just want to do it as soon as possible, for peace of mind,’ she’d said, and I’d sat in the driver’s seat on a wet, grey Monday morning and watched as she pressed the pill from its packaging and washed it down with water as if it were an antidote to something.

  Which, of course, it was, and we were both relieved. But if she had become pregnant, who would have had the most to lose? My father had become a parent at twenty-one, which wasn’t so much older, though perhaps my parents weren’t the best example. Still, an accident that was a disaster for Fran would, for me, have been – not ideal, not what I craved but something that I might have embraced. I wanted only to be with her, but she wanted very much more. An inequality had been illuminated, of achievement and potential, ambition and desire.

  The break-up took place early in the New Year – she had, I suppose, wanted to ‘get through Christmas’ – so that it had the quality of a resolution: 1) drink more water 2) end relationship. The scene itself was conventional and predictable, with the fraught and overwrought quality of a drama-class improvisation. Even the location, the beach at Cuckmere Haven, in drizzle on a desolate Sunday afternoon, gave the break-up that site-specific quality. I’d become angry, said Fran, and negative; we weren’t natural or at ease with each other, and I, in turn, got to make my speech about her snobbery. ‘Charlie, when,’ she said, ‘when have I ever, ever said any of those things?’ and though I couldn’t point to examples, I think she was shocked and saddened by how viciously I turned on her student friends, the parents who clearly thought she could do better. It was an argument from which neither of us could recover and as the light failed and the drizzle turned to rain, we were left with the practical problem of how we might escape this bleak and windswept beach. She would not get in the car with me, I would not leave without her and even when we finally set off in silence, we had to pull over frequently, to shout or scream or cry a little more.

  There were a few more encounters after that, late at night on the phone or in city-centre pubs, then out onto the street. The couple that you sometimes see in tears at closing time, alternately clinging to each other then pushing each other away: that was us.

  But though I fought for her, I knew these were the final skirmishes in a battle that was already lost. Fran Fisher walked away to get a mini-cab home. I wouldn’t see her again for more than twenty years, but I would see her again.

  2x 4x 8x 16x

  In the era of Dad’s VHS machine, one of my smaller talents was an ability to fast-forward with great accuracy, watching the action spool past and pressing stop at precisely the right time to allow for the momentum of the whizzing spools. In the digital era, things are easier and instead of seeing every single moment speeding by, transformed into silent comedy, we skip and hop directly to the things we want to see. It’s more efficient that way. So:

  As soon as I could drive I got a job at the airport, clearing the tables and trays of first-class passengers in the twenty-four-hour executive lounge. It was a job that might have been invented with the specific intention of filling me with loathing: loathing for the way the customers filled their glasses with free champagne they’d never finish, the rare roast beef scraped into the bin; loathing for the squalor of behind the scenes, the grey-faced staff sucking on cigarettes in doorways, the stinking lockers and vacuum-sealed packs of smoked salmon
like great blocks of pink alien flesh. The gulf between customers and staff, us and them, was like something from the Soviet-era propaganda machine, and the only way to get through each shift was to engage in petty acts of spite and sabotage that led in turn to that other, most poisonous, form of loathing. A Sussex University Philosophy student, slumming it for the summer, told me about Sartre’s waiter, fixing his smile and taking his orders and living his life of bad faith, and I thought two things: Yep, that sounds about right. Also: Fucking students.

  Like the Gold Card members of the Executive Club, I made the most of all that bounty, but while they were only passing though, I was on a fifty-six-hour week, living on pretzels and Brie. I became the overtime king, working all the hours I could, and with my first pay packet I bought a bed to replace the bunks in my room, then methodically paid off our household debts. In December, Social Security sent Dad to work at the Royal Mail sorting office and something about the early mornings, the routine and some old-English quality of the job struck a chord and he became a full-time postman. ‘Finished by two and the day’s all your own!’ he said as if he couldn’t quite believe it. He stopped smoking, cut down on his drinking and his highs and lows became less extreme, so that for the most part we were calmer, more peaceable, more sedentary.