Brand New Friend (12 page)

‘Or that I’m an auntie now?’ interrupted Kerry.

‘No, I—’

‘Or that I got promoted at work?’

‘You’re right,’ said Jo. ‘I don’t know anything about your life, do I?’

‘You haven’t returned a single one of my calls in the last six months,’ said Kerry. ‘Not one.’

‘I know I—’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Jo,’ said Kerry, ‘but now is not a good time to talk.’ And with that she hung up.

With tears in her eyes and the dialling tone in her ear Jo looked around her bedroom as if she was seeing it for the first time. It was like a crime scene. Everything was as she had found it when she got home on the day Sean had moved out. Both wardrobe doors were open, revealing a gaping hole among her clothes where Sean’s had hung. Next to the wardrobe, the bottom two drawers in the chest from the same IKEA range were half open and empty. The table on Sean’s side of the bed had nothing on it but dust marking the outlines of his clock-radio, the pile of paperbacks he’d been reading and the bedside lamp they had bought two summers ago during a sale at the Pier in the Trafford Centre. She was just about to begin crying again when the phone rang. ‘Hello,’ she said, hoping it was Sean.

‘It’s me,’ said a female voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kerry. ‘I shouldn’t have hung up on you like that.’

‘I should be apologising to you,’ said Jo. ‘I’ve been the worst friend in the world.’

‘Some of the girls are getting together next Thursday night at BlueBar in Chorlton,’ said Kerry, briskly. ‘I’m sure you’d be welcome to come.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, of course. They’re always asking after you.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘I’ll come by yours and pick you up. How does eight sound?’

‘Great. I’ll see you then.’

It was just after nine o’clock and Jo was sitting at the table in BlueBar surrounded by her old college friends. Over the last hour she had heard everyone’s news: Liza and her boyfriend Craig were engaged and getting married the following summer; Vicky and her long-term partner, Roger, were three months pregnant; Sonia and her husband, Ivan, had just bought a four-bedroom house in Didsbury that needed extensive renovation; Gina and her boyfriend, Dimitri, were planning to sell their house, buy a new one in Bradford near her parents and then go travelling for a year; and Karen was applying for the deputy-headship of her primary school and, with her partner, John, was planning to buy a three-bedroom house in Fallowfield. Jo was the only one at the table who was single.

‘So what’s new with you, Jo?’ asked Karen, having reached the end of her job-promotion/house-buying saga.

‘Nothing really,’ said Jo.

‘And how are things with Sean?’

‘Not too good,’ said Jo, looking at Kerry and wondering why she hadn’t primed them not to ask. Kerry looked back at her apologetically and winced as she mouthed, ‘Sorry.’

‘You haven’t split up, have you?’ asked Vicky.

‘Not officially,’ said Jo, avoiding all eye-contact, ‘but he has sort of moved out.’

‘You poor thing,’ sympathised Liza.

‘He says he needs time,’ added Jo.

‘Why do men always think they need time?’ asked Sonia. ‘They’re supposed to be great decision-makers and leaders, yet when it comes to relationships they can’t make up their minds about anything.’

‘How long were the two of you together?’ asked Gina.

‘Five years,’ said Jo, and her friends blanched.

‘Does anyone want another drink?’ asked Kerry, diverting their attention. Everyone nodded, so she took their orders and looked at Jo expectantly.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Jo, and stood up.

‘Thanks.’

By the time they had returned with two gin-and-tonics and a bottle of red wine the others were suggesting names for Vicky’s baby. Kerry slipped into the conversation, offering up her favourites: Leon for a boy and Clarissa for a girl. Jo couldn’t think of any names she liked and, to make matters worse, couldn’t imagine ever having children. She had felt out of the loop all evening and now she felt invisible too.

The conversation soon moved off in a different direction (house prices in Chorlton and Didsbury) but instead of joining in, Jo sat back to observe the table. These women weren’t the people she remembered. They were strangers. And it was all her fault.

She hadn’t meant to stop being friends with any of them. It had just happened. It was a weakness in her that she had known of since she was at school. She had always been desperate to be liked by the right people. When she was seven, they had been the pretty, popular girls, like Harriet Jones, Serena Gill and Stephanie Mills. The wrong people were her best friends, Lizzy Furnish, with her lazy eye, and Chloe Woodall, who was constantly afflicted with bad haircuts. Later on, at secondary school, the right people were the beautiful and popular Tina Osbourne, Tracey Matthews and Josie Barton; the wrong ones were Chloe Woodall, who still had bad haircuts, and Diane Miller, who was so extraordinarily tall for a fourteen-year-old that she was often mistaken by younger kids for a teacher.

It hadn’t been until sixth-form college that the right people had changed sex. Ten weeks before her eighteenth birthday Jo had met and fallen in love with Adrian Boateng. He was her first proper boyfriend, and the happiness she felt from the sense of completeness he gave her was so overwhelming that, within a month, she had stopped seeing her friends. The wrong people – her new sixth-form college friends: Vivien McCarthy, Sarah Coe and Shelagh Prideaux – all tried to tell her that what she was doing was wrong but Jo wouldn’t listen. At first she justified it with the idea that if they had fallen in love with boys as good-looking as Adrian they, too, would be spending every second of the day either with him or thinking about him. It didn’t matter to her that half the time she was with Adrian his friends, Jamie, Rich and Dom, were there too. When, one by one, they too acquired girlfriends and when Adrian did boy things – like playing football, reading music magazines or listening to his Walkman – she had other girls to talk to. They formed a separate friendship of their own – which Jo’s old friend Vivien McCarthy labelled ‘The Girlfriends of Ade, Jamie, Rich and Dom’ and Shelagh Prideaux referred to, more pithily, as ‘The Four Stooges’. Jo and Adrian split up a month before he went to university in London because they didn’t want to do the Long-distance Thing. Jo’s friendship with Adrian’s friends’ girlfriends had long been on the wane as members came and went, and as she gradually came to realise that they weren’t really her friends anyway – convenient though they might be. She spent the month before her degree course began pining for Adrian but mostly for the friends she had abandoned at the sixth-form college who no longer returned her calls.

All that time
, she thought now,
and all those friends, but I still haven’t learned a single lesson.

Jo excused herself from the table, took her bag and went outside to call Sean on her mobile.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ said Jo.

‘I was going to call you,’ he said coolly.

‘Well, I’ve saved you the effort. It’s nearly two weeks since you moved out and that’s more than enough time for you to sort out your head. We need to meet up and talk through this mess once and for all.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow – say, nine o’clock in the Lazy Fox in Chorlton? It’s quiet in there.’

‘Okay,’ said Jo. ‘The Lazy Fox tomorrow at nine.’

Rob didn’t know what to do for the best. Through no fault of his own he was now sitting in a small room in a quiet pub, attempting to have a pint and do the crossword, while a woman he’d met only once before was sitting not far from him crying her eyes out. What exactly was the etiquette here? Was he supposed to walk over and comfort her – maybe tell her there were plenty more fish in the sea? Pretend to do his crossword to save her from embarrassment? Everything he came up with made him feel so uncomfortable that he decided that the best he could do was nothing. After all, she hadn’t addressed him directly when she’d said, ‘I feel so stupid.’ She’d said it in a general way. Rob was pretty sure that, had the room been empty, she would still have said it. He tried to feel relieved at this but failed. The fact was the room wasn’t empty. He was there. And even though he didn’t know the woman in tears very well, he still knew her, so doing nothing wasn’t an option.

Rob took a deep breath. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

The woman looked up, apparently bewildered that the room’s only other occupant was addressing her.

‘It’s you,’ she said unevenly.

‘I’m Rob . . . and you’re Jo, aren’t you? And, well I don’t mean to bother you – I’ll leave you alone, if you’d rather – if you want to be left with your thoughts and all that.’ He held up his paper to show her that he could amuse himself. ‘I was doing the crossword and having a pint and I can go back to doing that. I can even sit next door if you like – just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’

Jo cleared her throat and blew her nose on a tissue. ‘It’s just . . . I feel
really
stupid.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I threw Sean’s pint over him.’

‘I take it Sean’s your boyfriend?’

‘Ex-boyfriend now.’

‘And what did he do to deserve having a pint thrown over him?’

‘He moved out.’

‘I see. Who paid for the pint?’

‘I did,’ she replied.

‘Well, then,’ Rob grinned, ‘technically speaking it was yours so you could do what you liked with it.’

For a few moments Rob thought she might smile but then she blew her nose again and wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms.

‘Are you on your own?’ she asked eventually.

Rob nodded.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean? Why am I in the pub on my own?’

‘I mean, what are you doing on your own in
this
dingy place on a Friday night? I’m here because my selfish boyfriend chose it. It’s round the corner from where he’s living and it’s such a rubbish pub that there was no chance he’d bump into any of his mates. But why aren’t you out somewhere like BlueBar?’

‘Because I’ve got no mates and I didn’t think anyone would notice in here,’ replied Rob, matter-of-factly.

Jo half cracked a smile, as if she thought Rob was joking, but when he didn’t return it hers faded. ‘You’ve got no friends at all?’

‘Well, none in Manchester.’

‘But you
do
have friends?’

‘In London, yes. Loads.’

‘You’ve moved here recently then?’ asked Jo, sounding marginally relieved.

‘At the beginning of the year.’

‘For work?’

‘For love. My girlfriend lives here.’

‘The one I saw you with at the party?’

‘The very same.’

‘And you haven’t made any friends at work?’

‘I work from home.’

‘What about her friends’ boyfriends?’

‘They’re not my kind of people – but, to be fair to them, I’m not theirs either.’

‘But, like you said, you have friends somewhere?’

‘Of course,’ replied Rob, wondering where she was going with this line of questioning. ‘I lived in London for just under ten years.’

‘You’re wondering why I’m asking all of these questions, aren’t you?’ Jo said. ‘It’s because I’m nosy. And because a few moments ago I was in tears over Sean and now I’m not. And that’s the second time that you’ve had that effect on me.’

‘But I didn’t do anything,’ said Rob. ‘I only asked if you were all right.’

‘I know,’ said Jo, ‘but sometimes that’s all you need.’ She glanced at Rob’s pint of Guinness. ‘Well, Rob, as you’ve been very nice to me on two separate occasions, can I buy you a drink as a thank-you?’

Rob looked at his half-drunk Guinness, then at Jo, then at the crossword and then at Jo. He knew there was something odd about accepting a pint from a woman he barely knew but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

‘Another Guinness would be lovely, thanks, but only on one condition,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘The next round is on me.’

When Jo returned from the bar with two pints of Guinness she seemed to have forgotten that she had just split up with her boyfriend. And, as before, Rob was at ease in her company. By the time he’d finished his previous pint she’d made him laugh at least half a dozen times. And before he’d taken a single sip of the pint she’d bought him the total was in double figures.

That evening Rob and Jo covered such random topics as politics (she felt sorry for the Prime Minister because he had aged so much while he’d been in power), the Internet (she dismissed it as ‘CB radio for computer nerds’), and the Apollo moon landings (she’d seen a documentary on Channel Five that claimed they had never happened and firmly believed that it was all a big fake). Rob laughed so hard that he could hardly breathe. Then, finally, they exchanged life stories.

1.
   Jo was younger than Rob.

2.
   She was born in Oldham.

3.
   She owned a two-bedroom terraced house in Levenshulme.

4.
   Her birthday was on 21 February and she was now thirty-two.

5.
   She had been born Katie Joanne Richards but three months after the birth was registered her mum had decided there were too many Katies in their road and had started calling her Jo.

6.
   She sometimes liked to imagine that her alter ego Katie Richards was in fact her evil twin sister. ‘When I’m tired and I feel really irritable and bitchy, it’s Katie coming out,’ she revealed. ‘When I’m all sweetness and light, it’s Jo.’ When Rob asked, ‘Who am I speaking to right now?’ a big grin spread across her face and she said, ‘A bit of both. Although I’m pretty sure it was Katie who threw the pint over Sean.’