The Night That Changed Everything

by Laura Tait

  Jamie is on the other side, waving at us.

  I feel my cheeks redden as we leave the path and cross the street towards him, visions of him in my bedroom invading my head. I banish them and wave back.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hi,’ he says with an easy confidence I envy. He kisses my cheek then holds his hand out to Jemma. ‘I’m Jamie.’

  ‘Oh my God. . . and I’m Jemma! Our names are practically the same,’ she gushes as she shakes his hand. ‘Rebecca’s told me all about you.’

  Jamie tries to catch my eye and I hope he doesn’t assume she means I’ve told her all about the other night.

  ‘I’m just about to open up if you girls fancy coming in for a coffee?’

  ‘Jemma has a train to catch,’ I tell him, avoiding his gaze.

  ‘Och, I’ll get the next one,’ says Jemma. ‘A coffee would be ace.’

  ‘Or maybe a hair of the dog?’ I suggest. I might need a drink to get through this.

  ‘So, how’s 2015 treating you?’ Jamie enquires as I help pull down chairs from tables. Jemma wanders off to give herself a tour.

  ‘All right,’ I mumble. ‘And you?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Good.’ I wonder if he’s said anything to Ben about what happened on New Year’s Eve but I can’t bring myself to mention it, so I just ask: ‘How’s Ben?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him since the party,’ says Jamie.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I think he’s gone back to Manchester.’

  Now it’s Jamie avoiding eye contact, and I’m about to ask why Ben has gone back so soon after he was there for Christmas, when Jamie says: ‘I think I have a plan for him work-wise.’

  He stops and leans on the back of the chair he’s just placed on the floor, and I think he’s going to say more about his plan for Ben, but what he says is: ‘Look, about the other night . . .’

  ‘We really don’t need to talk about it, Jamie,’ I whisper, finally meeting his eye. ‘Let’s forget it. We’re good.’

  ‘This place is wicked,’ calls Jemma from one of the red horseshoe booths.

  Jamie turns from me to smile at her. ‘I’ll get the coffee machine on.’

  ‘Make mine Irish,’ I call after him, sliding in next to Jemma, just as she’s clambering out the other side.

  ‘I’ll give him a hand,’ she tells me.

  I watch her climb on to a stool and lean across the bar to chat to Jamie. I have to hand it to her: when it comes to men, she’s not scared to do the chasing. No matter how many setbacks she has, she’ll keep taking risks.

  A few minutes later Jamie disappears out back and returns with a piece of paper and a pen, handing it to her. Oh my God – is she giving him her number?

  ‘I know exactly what you’re up to, you know,’ I remark when she returns a few minutes later.

  ‘You do?’

  She looks slightly embarrassed.

  ‘Jem, it’s so obvious,’ I say. ‘Why would you go up to the counter unless you wanted to speak to Jamie without me hearing?’

  ‘Right, here you go, ladies.’ Jamie carries over the drinks on a tray, then pulls a chair over and sits on it backwards. He and Jemma exchange a look.

  What’s going on?

  ‘She knows,’ reports Jemma.

  ‘She heard?’ asks Jamie.

  ‘Hey, it’s no big deal,’ I say quickly. I don’t want either of them to think I have a problem with them swapping numbers. I especially wouldn’t want Jamie to let what happened the other night stop him.

  Jemma sighs and pulls a sheet of paper from her pocket, holding it up for me to read the messy letters written across it in Biro.

  ‘Uoitu . . . hang on, I can’t really—’

  ‘Sorry,’ she yelps, turning it round. ‘It was upside down.’

  Intervention.

  ‘Um . . . ?’

  Jemma takes a deep breath. ‘Jamie is worried about your drinking, and I agree. So this is an intervention.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I smirk. ‘You’re hosting an intervention on my drinking . . . in a bar?’

  They glance at one another, and Jemma shrugs. ‘It was a spontaneous intervention. A spintervention, if you will.’

  ‘Well, if I’m going to have to sit through this, I’ll need a proper drink. Mine’s a large Scotch.’

  They don’t crack a smile.

  ‘I don’t have a drinking problem,’ I insist, laughing.

  ‘That’s exactly what someone with a drinking problem would say,’ Jemma tells Jamie sadly.

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘You were meant to – otherwise I’d have said it when you werenae here.’

  ‘Rebecca,’ Jamie laughs, folding Jemma’s sign in two, ‘you do drink a lot these days.’

  ‘I’ve always drunk a lot. We all drink a lot.’

  ‘It’s different now. You used to know when to stop. You didn’t drink alone. You didn’t have memory blanks. You never missed a work meeting because you were hungover.’ He gives me a gentle smile. ‘You weren’t careless or clumsy, or in no state to look after yourself. I’m worried that you’ll get hurt if you’re not careful.’

  ‘She fell off a table last night,’ Jemma reports. ‘Show him your bruise!’

  ‘I’m not going to show him my bruise.’

  ‘Oh, I have a video. Here, Jamie.’ She starts to play it like we’re in court and it’s exhibit A.

  Jamie tries to crease his forehead in a look of concern, but his eyes are laughing.

  ‘Turn it off.’ I grab the phone. ‘And stop being such a tell-tale, Jemma.’

  ‘Don’t blame her,’ Jamie argues. ‘I brought it up. I was worried and Jemma agrees.’ I shoot Jemma a look and she just stares back at me with wide-eyed innocence. ‘We’re not saying you’re an alcoholic. But if drink starts to affect your job or your relationships, or makes you do things you regret after, it is a problem.’

  I can only assume his last point refers to New Year’s Eve. My cheeks burn.

  I need to be an adult and get over that. I’ve already lost Ben and Danielle – I can’t lose Jamie too.

  Or Jemma, for that matter. I’m not sure how I would have coped without her. My friendship with her is probably the best thing to have come from my break-up with Ben. It’s like the antidote when the pain of Danielle’s deceit creeps into my head.

  ‘No one is saying you should become teetotal,’ Jamie continues.

  ‘Christ, no,’ shrieks Jemma. ‘That would be even worse. I mean, we could no longer be friends.’

  ‘But you’ve not been yourself lately. We just want you to be happy, so we want you to know we’re here for you if you want to talk or anything.’

  ‘Exactly,’ chips in Jemma. ‘Turn to us. Not the bottle.’

  The humiliated part of me wants to tell Jamie to go feck himself and storm out.

  But there’s a sensible part of me that acknowledges that everything he just said is true. And that this must have been a hard thing for him to say to me.

  The humiliated part means I can’t quite bring myself to thank him, though.

  He winks at me. ‘I need to finish setting up. Holler if you need anything.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I hiss at Jemma, when he’s gone.

  ‘For what?’ she asks, like butter wouldn’t melt.

  ‘Agreeing with Jamie.’

  ‘He’s fit.’ She shrugs. ‘He could have asked me to help him bury a body and I’d have gone along with it.’

  I shake my head but can’t help laughing. ‘Let’s go.’

  I walk her to the station and give her a quick, awkward hug. ‘Thanks, Jem.’ She looks pleased.

  ‘Nae worries.’ She starts walking up the steps then stops and turns round. ‘Hey, what did you mean when you said you knew what I was playing at? You seemed surprised when I told you.’

  ‘I thought you were giving Jamie your number.’

  ‘Ha ha, as if.’

  ‘I thought you fancied him?’

  ‘Cour
se I do. But you’ve told me how girls in there throw themselves at him every night. I’m way too insecure to go out with someone like that.’

  Then the train pulls in, so I’ve no time to tell her she shouldn’t be.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  BEN

  Monday, 5 January

  I head straight to the office from Euston, having boarded the first train down from Manchester. I’ve been dreading going back to work, though it’ll at least be nice to catch up with Russ and Tom.

  ‘George Riley is leaving,’ is the first thing Russ says to me.

  George works in the post room. We started on the same day, and even though there is more than thirty years between us, he’s one of the people I get on with most in this place.

  People wondered how long he’d stay on after Dorothy from reception retired last month. It’s like when one half of an old couple dies, and everyone speculates that the other half mightn’t survive without them. They die of a broken heart. Unless they’re like Rebecca, in which case they forget the other one ever existed and carry on as normal.

  ‘When did he hand in his resignation?’ I ask, wondering why I don’t already know about all this.

  ‘He didn’t. Richardson has asked me to hand it to him. He says the new receptionist can sort the post now.’

  ‘They’re binning him?’ I say, stunned. ‘This place!’

  Russ nods solemnly, then spots my bag and asks where I’ve been.

  ‘Up north for a few days,’ I tell him. ‘See the family.’

  I had to get out of London. I was so angry with myself. I don’t know where all those words came from. I admire Jamie more than anyone else I know, and to say what I said . . . I’ve been cringing ever since. And the stupid thing is everything he said was right. I should be trying to turn breaking up with Rebecca into something positive, because it has made me realize how much I hate my job.

  I just needed to get away for a bit for all of this to sink in, and now that it has I know exactly what I need to do. I’m going to spend the next three months looking into new careers and saving as much of my wages as possible, then I’m quitting.

  ‘I got back from my sister’s yesterday,’ says Russ. ‘I had the best New Year ever.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Babysat my nephews.’

  I look sceptical.

  ‘Seriously,’ he says. ‘There were no twatty bouncers on the door, no one looking repulsed when I tried to kiss them at midnight.’ He rips a piece of paper from his notepad, screws it up and throws it on to Tom’s desk for no apparent reason. ‘I didn’t have to dodge any vomit on the street. Although, actually, Jackson was sick on his bedroom floor after the second pack of wine gums.’ He goes all smiley at the memory. ‘They were supposed to be in bed at nine but I woke them up to watch the fireworks from their bedroom window.’

  ‘That actually does sound like the best New Year,’ I tell him, slightly moved. ‘How about you, Tom? What did you get up to?’

  ‘Avril and I walked up to Primrose Hill with a blanket and a flask of peppermint tea.’

  ‘Also sounds awesome,’ I say. ‘The fireworks must have looked incredible from up there?’

  He hunches his shoulders.

  ‘He never saw them,’ says Russ. ‘Avril got annoyed at all the people so they went home and listened to the countdown on Radio 4.’

  ‘Radio 4?’

  ‘Avril doesn’t have a telly,’ Tom says. ‘She says it pollutes the mind.’

  ‘Of course she does,’ I say.

  Once my monitor finally stops flickering I catch up on my emails, the most recent of which is from Delilah, the office manager, complaining about the food that was left to go mouldy in the fridge over the break, and saying that from now on any food left in the fridge at close of play on Fridays WILL BE DISPOSED OF. The email subject line is: The Year of Clean.

  ‘Some people need to have a word with themselves,’ I say to no one in particular.

  ‘The year of clean?’ says Tom.

  ‘Yeah.’ I delete the email. ‘I’m going to make this the year of getting out of this place.’

  ‘I’m going to make this the year of leaving stuff in the fridge on Fridays,’ says Russ, leaning back in his swivel chair. ‘That and meeting my future wife.’

  I contemplate a joke but decide against it. ‘How about you, Tom?’

  Tom sucks his teeth like he hadn’t seen the question coming at all.

  ‘Sack off Avril?’ suggests Russ.

  Tom objects with a tut and then, as though he doesn’t want Russ’s words to linger in the air, immediately provides an answer. ‘I hope this year I have an exhibition, for my sketches.’

  Russ raises the mug he keeps his pens in. ‘Here’s to me and my future wife visiting Tom’s exhibition for his sketches.’

  Tom and I raise our stationery mugs. As we’re clinking I catch a whiff of Brut. Richardson is standing beside us with an impatient smile.

  ‘We were just asking Ben what he’s going to make this the year of,’ says Russ.

  Richardson puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Closing down the ticket offices, I expect?’

  He mimes pulling down the shutter at a ticket office and chuckles to himself, because hundreds of people losing their jobs is amusing. For some reason I find myself thinking about George Riley. He was the one who told me about the starlings turning back the time on Big Ben.

  ‘No, actually,’ I say.

  I see Richardson glance at Russ, whose face goes rigid with the effort of not cracking up, and then at Tom, whose head now hangs over his keyboard like he’s got something really important to type.

  ‘What do you mean, no?’ says Richardson, hooking his thumbs into his trouser pockets like a chubby butcher.

  ‘Precisely what I said: no.’

  I sense disbelieving eyes homing in on me from across the office.

  ‘Well, thankfully you don’t have much say in the matter,’ says Richardson, circulating a self-satisfied grin around the increasing number of onlookers, and for a few seconds I hesitate.

  I think again about all the things Jamie said on New Year’s Eve.

  ‘Actually, I do.’ I stand up, adrenalin streaming around my body. ‘I quit.’

  Richardson guffaws. ‘Well, as you know, if you want to quit you need to write a formal letter of resignation.’

  His tone is priggish and his smile smug.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I say, holding out my palm as if it was a piece of paper. ‘How about I mime you one instead?’

  Jamie and I haven’t seen each other since I stormed out of the bar, and he looks slightly puzzled when I walk through the door.

  He is standing alone at the foosball table. On any other day I’d go over and try to guess from the trajectory of the ball which City goal he was recreating, but there are things that need to be said first.

  I drop my bag and I’m about to launch into it when I hear the toilet flush. I notice a pair of stilettos by the door.

  ‘Have you got a girl here?’ I say.

  ‘No.’ He’s still got the look of someone who wasn’t expecting me. ‘Well, yes, but—’

  The bathroom door opens.

  ‘Oh.’ Danielle stops momentarily before walking awkwardly towards the foosball table. ‘Hi, Ben.’

  It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the break-up, and it takes a second or two for the words to come out. ‘Hi, Danielle.’

  I stand there, not quite sure what to say. Jamie glances at me, then at Danielle, then back at me, and his second glance compels me to speak.

  ‘What’s the score?’ I oblige.

  Jamie doesn’t answer, so that Danielle has to.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘What is the score, Jamie?’

  ‘I’m really not sure myself,’ he says.

  Danielle cackles and turns to me. ‘He’s losing eight–two.’

  ‘Eight–two?’ I walk over to observe. ‘Jesus, Jamie.’

  ‘To be fair,’ he says,
‘my guys keep getting distracted by that.’ He uses the hand controlling his goalkeeper to gesture towards Danielle’s cleavage, which is exposed by her low V-neck jumper. I avert my eyes before awkwardness descends on us again.

  ‘And she keeps singing,’ says Jamie.

  ‘That’s what people do at football,’ she says. ‘They sing.’

  ‘Which is why I’m never taking you to a football match.’

  Danielle explains that she’s working from home until her meeting in Greenwich a bit later on. She points towards her laptop. ‘I have to keep moving the mouse so it looks like I’m online.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ Jamie asks me.

  I hesitate so that by the time I answer they’re both staring at me. ‘I just quit.’

  They let go of the handles.

  ‘Jeez, Ben, surely this should have been the first thing you said when you walked in?’ says Jamie.

  ‘Actually, the first thing I was going to say when I walked in was sorry, but then . . .’

  I look at Danielle and when she smiles it occurs to me how much I’ve missed this. Hanging out as a group. I’ve been so busy missing Rebecca that I hadn’t really thought about it, but Jamie obviously has, and it didn’t take me long to understand that that’s why everything came out at New Year, because he’s frustrated at the situation.

  ‘You know I don’t mean those things I said. You’re my frigging hero when it comes to work. It was just my bruised pride talking, but I know that everything you said was spot on. I do masticate too much.’

  Danielle releases a dirty laugh, but tries to disguise it as a cough when she realizes neither Jamie nor I are amused.

  ‘Long story,’ Jamie tells her, picking up the tiny ball from the pitch.

  ‘Basically,’ I say to them both, ‘I was a total dick, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologize at all,’ says Jamie, studying the ball instead of looking at me. ‘I was a total dick too, so let’s forget the whole evening ever happened.’

  He holds out his hand and I shake it, and now we do laugh.

  ‘So what the fuck happened at work?’ says Jamie, and the two of them lean against the foosball table while I sit on the couch and go over what happened.