The Friend

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘I’m really confused? I respect you and I want to treat you well,’ was the best he could manage.

  ‘There’s a difference between treating someone with respect and treating them like they’re a deity.’ I sat up so we were level, but I kept the sheet covering my chest. ‘You seem to be holding back with me. Now, I don’t want to know everything all at once, I don’t want to be your therapist or anything like that, but I’d like you to be real for once. It’s like … It’s like you’re always on your best behaviour. Like I’m some auntie who’s going to berate your parents if you don’t behave well in front of me. And when you’re not acting like that, you treat me like I’m a business acquaintance that you have to schmooze.

  ‘Do you realise you’ve never once sworn in front of me? You rarely go to the toilet, you certainly don’t let one off. And that’s fine, it’s not normal, but it’s fine and respectful like you say, but when it’s combined with the rest of it, it’s exhausting. That’s it: it’s exhausting. I always feel like I have to be on my best behaviour because you are.’

  Sanjay’s face creased up a little more with every word, until he didn’t have a face any more, it was one giant wrinkle. ‘But how else am I supposed to be?’ he asked.

  ‘Be yourself,’ I replied.

  ‘This is myself,’ he said.

  ‘Then yourself is fake, and I need to be going.’

  ‘Anaya, come on,’ he said.

  I held on to the sheet as I leant over the side of the bed to pick up my bra. From downstairs, the front door banged shut. I hadn’t heard a key in the lock, so I assumed he was being burgled. We both froze, eyes wide and alarmed. ‘I’ll call the police,’ I said.

  ‘Sanjay? Where are you?’ a woman’s voice called from downstairs. ‘I know you are here because the alarm did not sound.’

  A shockwave of fear about being on the scene of a crime in progress (I watched The Bill like anyone else) was swept away by the giant shockwave of him being married. That made everything clear: why he was holding back all the time, why he was never relaxed. He was married. The bastard.

  ‘Oh, fucking shit,’ Sanjay said, picking that moment to break his six-month run of not swearing in front of me.

  Wife? I mouthed at him. It was not going to end well. Women in these situations rarely blamed their lying, cheating spouses, they always blamed the other woman until the shock had eased off. I was about to get into a fight with his wife and I was naked.

  He shook his head. ‘Mother.’ He whipped aside the sheet and leapt out of bed and was round my side of the bed in less than a second.

  His mother’s footsteps went towards the back of the house, although she continued to call for him. ‘Sanjay! Are you asleep?’

  ‘You have to hide,’ he hissed at me, and grabbed my jeans, top, bra, knickers and bag into a bundle in his arms, then pulled the sheet off me.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. I reached for the sheet to pull it back.

  ‘Sanjay!’

  He pulled it off me again. ‘Trust me, you do not want to meet my mother like this. She will never accept you, if you do. And you will wish I had a wife if you meet her like this, I promise you.’

  I could hear his mother’s footsteps pause at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What is it that you are doing up there?’ she called. ‘I brought you food and your ironing.’

  ‘Please, Anaya,’ he begged in a whisper. ‘I love you. I want to marry you, but that will not happen if this happens.’

  ‘You love me?’ I asked.

  His face relaxed into a goofy smile, and he started to nod, then remembered what was happening, what those footsteps meant. ‘Not the time,’ he said.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I mumbled, then got out of bed. He thrust my stuff into my arms and then pointed to the large oak wardrobe that sat on the other side of his room. ‘You’re having a giraffe,’ I said.

  He pursed his lips at me and then pointed to the stairs. ‘You so owe me,’ I said and ran naked across the room to the wardrobe. Thankfully it was nothing like my wardrobe and everything was neatly hung up, the shoes carefully lined up at the bottom. You wouldn’t be able to find Narnia let alone space to hide in the mess at the bottom of my wardrobe. He slammed shut the door with me crouched in the corner, my belongings in my arms, just as his mother arrived at his bedroom door.

  ‘Sanjay, did you not hear me calling you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, no. I mean, I was trying to sleep – it’s been a heavy few days. But when I heard you, I thought I’d check to see if there was space in the wardrobe for the ironing.’ His voice was quite loud and clear, so obviously he was standing in front of the wardrobe.

  ‘What is that smell?’ his mother asked. ‘Perfume? Have you had a girl in here?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by a girl,’ he said. ‘I did have a woman in here earlier checking out the … erm … ceiling? Yeah, she was checking out the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if there was a fault with it or not and she was looking at it.’

  ‘A woman was a structural engineer?’ his mother asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, there is no room in here. Can you hang those up in the spare room? Come, I’ll show you.’

  ‘You haven’t greeted me properly, Sanjay. I come all this way to see you and you don’t even bother to greet me properly.’

  ‘Mum, you live three streets away.’

  ‘Do not measure your journey by the miles travelled, but by the distance you know that you have crossed to arrive there.’ That sounded almost Buddhist, I thought, slightly awed that such wisdom had simply tripped off her tongue.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ Sanjay replied. He sounded far less impressed by his mother’s wisdom than me. ‘Sorry.’ He began to speak to her in Punjabi and she replied, their voices growing quieter and quieter as they moved away from the wardrobe and out of the bedroom.

  Once I was sure I was alone in the room, I carefully stuck my hand into my bag and rummaged around until I found my BlackBerry. I checked the time while I was turning off the ringer. The last thing I needed was my boss to ring me – which he did on every single one of my days off, just to remind me that I was lucky I had a job – and for all of this to have been a pointless exercise. I shifted carefully and quietly so I could stop crouching and instead sit down – and immediately regretted it as the cold of the wardrobe’s floor flashed across my bare bottom. I pulled my clothes towards my chest to try to warm up a little. I didn’t want to move too much in case they came back or they could hear me below.

  Sanjay loved me. It didn’t sound like he was saying that for effect, it seemed like he meant it. The second after he’d said it had been the most real I’d seen him if he wasn’t talking about his beloved Brixton. He loved me. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

  I wasn’t feeling quite so lovey-dovey when he opened the wardrobe door thirty minutes later. Thirty minutes.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ he whispered, throwing the door wide open.

  I was almost frozen solid; I’d had my head on my knees and had been drifting in and out of naps as I’d waited for him to get rid of his mother.

  He held out his hand, and if I hadn’t been so stiff and unable to move on my own, I would have told him to F-off. He reached into the wardrobe and slipped his arms around me before helping me to climb out.

  ‘I’ve been in there for half an hour.’ He walked me over to the bed and I tried to unkink myself. I was stooped like a woman whose eighty or so years of a hard life had rested on her back and kept her constantly bent and burdened. I could barely shuffle as my thighs were almost locked into their legs-up pose. I was taking up yoga again, I decided. I’d stopped a while back, had decided I didn’t need it, but I did. I clearly did. ‘I thought you’d get rid of her quickly. Half an hour.’

  ‘Anaya, that was getting rid of her quickly. Usually, if she comes by and I’m home, she stays for the rest of the day. She cooks, cleans, and then basically browbeats me about not being married and not giving her grandchil
dren like my sisters who have all got married in good time. I had to tell her I had a business meeting overnight before she’d go. If I’d said I just had a meeting she would have waited for me to go and come back.’

  I fell gratefully onto the bed and began trying to unlock myself. Definitely back to yoga. ‘So, what this whole day has taught us is that you’re a giant mummy’s boy,’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘No,’ he said. He started to massage my thigh, loosening the muscle with his expert touch. ‘What this day has taught us is that I have to be honest with you about how I feel so I can introduce you to my mother as soon as possible.’

  ‘You don’t have to be honest about how you feel,’ I replied. ‘You just have to chill the hell out and stop being on your best behaviour all the time. That’s if you want this thing between us to work out.’

  ‘I do, I really do.’

  ‘Well then, you need to be more like Sanj and less like Sanjay Kohli, businessman.’

  He said something in Punjabi and then kissed my forehead, my nose, my mouth.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I said: “For you, my love, anything.”’

  1:16 p.m. ‘I thought I heard you!’ she says. Her hair is perfectly blow-dried to frame her slender face and she is dressed in a burgundy, pink and pale blue silk sari with an embroidered burgundy blouse. I used to feel inferior around her, like she is the template of what women are meant to look like no matter their age, no matter their state of mind or health. ‘Anaya, hello.’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I reply. I’m expected to walk to her, to greet her warmly with an embrace, carry on this farce that’s been going on between us for thirteen years.

  ‘I was wondering where you were. Sanjay is not here.’ She says this like a woman whose house I have wandered into looking for a man that she knows and I don’t. ‘I knocked but there was no answer.’

  She didn’t knock; she never knocks. She uses the key she has to my house to come and go as she pleases. When I once mentioned that we should probably have a key for their house and their alarm code like they have for ours, she was horrified. ‘She’s joking,’ Sanj told her to get that look of horror off her face. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ he said to me, his eyes wide, his lips set, and his face telling me to take it back.

  I’d laughed that fake laugh that always comes out whenever I am around his parents and said, ‘Of course I’m joking.’

  ‘I so wasn’t joking,’ I told him later.

  ‘I know you weren’t,’ he said. ‘But of all the things there are to fall out with my mother about, that was the one you were going to pick?’ He’d been right, of course, but it still niggles even now. Our house is clearly an extension of their home to them, and their home is something private and secure, a sanctuary they won’t have invaded by anyone at any given second of the day.

  ‘He’s working in London this week, didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘My son never tells me anything these days. I am often the last to find out anything about his life.’ She shakes her head. ‘But no matter, it was fortuitous that he was not here.’

  ‘Oh? Why?’ I ask. Idiot. Anaya, you are an idiot. I want to bite back those words, but they’re out there, they’ve opened a conversation, they’ve made me engage with her.

  ‘It gave me a chance to tidy up. You are so busy with your life, I know this, but it didn’t take me long to clean the kitchen and strip the beds and put the bedclothes in to wash. Nor to run the Hoover around.’ She smiles even wider; each one of her teeth is perfectly white and unnaturally straight. I suspect my husband paid for those teeth. Like I suspect he paid for their house, but I try not to think about that. ‘After all, that is what we women were raised to do, is it not? To create the home, make sure everyone is comfortable? A family cannot function without the heart of a woman to beat at its centre.’

  When I was young and still fresh from crouching in wardrobes, those sort of words impressed me – now they irritate me. They’re profound, thought-provoking and sometimes rather poignant – but it’s who is saying them that negates everything about them.

  ‘Thank you for the help, as always.’ Every syllable is forced through gritted teeth having been flambéed by my rage. ‘I always appreciate it.’

  ‘I know you do. You modern girls are so busy, busy, busy with your lives, it’s no wonder you have no time to run your homes. And obviously you, my dear daughter-in-law, you are especially disadvantaged because your mother was forced to work and did not have as much time to spend on your development as a woman. There are so many women nowadays who have suffered the same neglect, so do not trouble your heart.’

  I stare at my husband’s mother and have the urge to shout at her. It’s your fault! I want to scream. If you didn’t go around trying to find out stuff about my past, Yvonne wouldn’t be in a coma right now. This is your fault! And it’s my fault, too.

  WEDNESDAY

  Hazel

  5:05 a.m. I can’t stay in bed any more. I’ve had to get up, shrug on my silk dressing gown and then bring myself down here. It seems worse in the bedroom, trying to sleep. I feel more cloistered. Smothered. I hate the bed being empty, too. I wish I wasn’t alone right now. I wish I wasn’t walking around the kitchen touching things – the stainless-steel kettle, the white taps, the large cooker hood, the wooden kitchen table, the three different timetables on the noticeboard. I wish one of those things would give me what I need.

  I need to feel all right with all of this.

  I need to be OK with it.

  My mobile, sitting on the counter beside the cooker, lights up.

  Coffee? M x

  I read the message, then immediately delete it. We agreed on Monday that we have to delete all texts to each other. Not just some, that would look suspicious. All texts.

  Once her message has gone, I know I can’t reply because I’d love to go for a coffee, I’d love to sit with Anaya and Maxie like everything is normal, but I don’t think I can.

  October, 2012

  ‘Hazel, you’re going to join the Parents’ Council, aren’t you?’ Yvonne was, as always, surrounded by people. They flocked to her like the bright, pretty, shining light she was. Right then, she stood outside the large, black iron gates of Plummer Prep, while we waited for our children to emerge, trying to sign up people to the Parents’ Council.

  The former head of the PC had left suddenly under shady circumstances – we’d all heard the whispers about drugs and money laundering. She’d seemed so nice, too. Always had a friendly word to say to people, smiley, happy; nothing was ever too much. But once she’d stepped down – well, moved out in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again – all the other board members had stepped down too. I’d heard those other whispers that they had been, if not involved or complicit, certainly talented when it came to overlooking where the extra funds came from to throw the lavish parties with low ticket prices and still make a profit afterwards. A couple of the more senior, more financially responsible board members had left the area as well, but most had just stepped down and taken to wearing huge sunglasses at the gates no matter the weather.

  We had only been at the school six weeks and Yvonne was already a popular bod. She’d gone for the position at the top of the Parents’ Council but hadn’t been around long enough to get it. But she was on the board and here she was, trying to recruit people. I was standing beside two other mothers whose children had started in Plummer Prep’s Preppy classes for pre-schoolers at the same time as Camille and Russell, and Yvonne’s Madison. I recoiled in horror at Yvonne’s suggestion – I did not need to invite more stuff to do into my life. I jiggled Calvin from one hip to another. He’d managed to escape his pram and if I didn’t keep hold of him, he would be re-enacting the Great Baby Escape his older sister was so famous for.

  ‘No, Vonny, I’m not going to join the PC. It’s not for me.’

  ‘Maxie?’ Yvonne asked, turning her smile on the woman to my right who had a son Camille’s age. ‘You�
�re creative with all your copywriting work, you’ll join, won’t you? We need someone to write flyers and compile the newsletter.’

  The woman shook her head. She’d pushed her black ringlets back with a silver hair band, and had her hands deep in the pockets of her denim jacket. ‘I’m not a joiner, Yvonne.’

  ‘Anaya?’ Yvonne asked the woman standing on the other side of me. She had two children, one who was in Preppy and one in Reception. If there was anyone at the gates who could make Yvonne feel inferior it was Anaya. She was so serene with her innate beauty and style. Although she was always expensively dressed, she didn’t seem stuck up, more content to just be. I’d found myself gravitating towards Maxie and Anaya, standing near them hoping Anaya’s calmness and Maxie’s ability to say no without apologising would radiate outwards and infect me.

  Anaya smiled at Yvonne then shook her head.

  ‘Oh, come on, if there’s anyone I would expect to get involved it’d be someone like you,’ Yvonne said.

  Anaya blinked. ‘Someone like me? What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Vonny, what do you mean?’ Maxie asked.

  ‘I mean someone who works in marketing, who runs her own business and who is always attending lavish events with her husband. I’d have thought this would be right up your street.’

  The first time Yvonne had done that to me, I’d been taken aback. I had said that Walter was complaining about spending money on sending the children to Preppy and Yvonne had replied, ‘Really? Are we or are we not drinking coffee from Wedgwood cups? Are these or are these not original Chippendale chairs we’re sitting on? Are we or are we not sitting in a house worth nearly two million pounds?’

  ‘Why do you know so much about my financial situation?’ I’d asked her.

  ‘Because I’m a nosey bitch!’ she’d said with a laugh. That was one of the best things about Yvonne: she was honest about her failings. She didn’t lie about the fact she could be shallow and vacuous and would rather be late for something than turn up make-up-less. ‘I did research on you and your husband. So? More fool you if you didn’t at least check up on me before you let me into your house and your life.’