Life and Soul of the Party (6 page)

Even without knowing anything about either of them I could tell straight away that these two had history. The second Melissa saw Paul her whole being lit up like a switch inside her had been flipped. Seeing them together like that made me think how Freya was the only person I could think of who could make me feel the way this girl was feeling.

‘We all thought you weren’t coming,’ said Melissa.

‘I’m just a bit late, that’s all,’ he replied.

Melissa bit her lip. ‘Where’s Hannah? Getting a drink?’

He shook his head. ‘No, she . . . er . . . she couldn’t make it.’

Melissa looked concerned. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’

‘No, nothing’s wrong,’ replied Paul. ‘She’s fine.’ He paused. ‘So what have I missed?’

Melissa smiled. ‘Nothing much really, Laura wants to go travelling and Cooper wants to save up for a deposit for a house and it’s all going to end in disaster; and Chris and Vicky are, well, you know . . .
Chris and Vicky
and I . . . I . . .’

I could tell that Melissa had just recalled the fact that prior to Paul’s arrival she had been in the middle of a conversation with me and now I was dangling, like some kind of spare part, wishing one of them would put me out of my misery.

Melissa looked at me apologetically.

‘Paul, this is . . .’

‘Billy,’ I replied. ‘My name’s Billy.’

‘That’s it. Billy,’ said Melissa. ‘This is Billy. And Billy, this is Paul. He and I are old friends.’

‘Very old friends,’ added Paul. ‘How long has it been? Ten or eleven years?’

‘Twelve,’ replied Melissa. ‘Twelve long years.’

Half past midnight. Thirty minutes into a brand-new year. And Paul and I, having shouted, cheered and done the Auld Lang Syne thing with everyone else at midnight, were outside in Ed and Sharon’s back garden sitting on their damp patio furniture with a freshly purloined bottle of wine watching an explosion of fireworks in the night sky. I could feel the damp of the table soaking right through my jeans to my underwear but I didn’t care. There was something different about Paul tonight. I could sense it.

‘Genius idea of yours,’ I said as yet another firework popped and sparkled in the sky. ‘Leave the comfort of a nice warm house and sit outside in the rain.’

Paul shrugged. ‘You could’ve said no.’

‘And miss out on all this? Never.’

Paul took a sip of wine and handed the bottle to me. I put it to my lips, took a long, deep gulp and swallowed. It felt good to drink wine like this. An instant reminder of the days when finer graces genuinely didn’t matter.

‘I haven’t drunk straight from the bottle like this since the year we all went to Glastonbury. And for some reason I’ve done it twice tonight.’

Paul smiled. ‘I remember that year at Glastonbury. That was the year we bought those bottles of home-made wine from that hippie guy near the main stage and Cooper refused to drink it in case it was laced with weed killer. Do you remember? Like a hippie hasn’t got better things to do with his time than poison a bunch of middle-class layabouts.’

‘I remember the hippie . . . and I sort of remember handing him the cash but other than pushing the corks into the bottle with my keys, I don’t remember much about that night at all.’ I paused and laughed. ‘Still, somehow I just get a sense that it might have been one of the best nights of my life.’

‘Easily up there in the top ten.’

I glanced at Paul. He looked thoughtful and pensive.

‘So are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well, where’s Hannah for starters?’

‘I’m guessing she’s at home. I don’t know for sure. We split up just before Christmas.’

There it was. Paul and Hannah had split up. They were over. It didn’t seem to make any sense given how happy they had been last time I had seen them together, all loved up and fawning over each other.

‘How did she take it?’ I asked carefully.

‘How do you know it was me?’

‘Come on, Paul,’ I laughed. ‘This is me you’re talking to.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ he said obliquely. ‘It wasn’t like I was the love of her life.’

‘And you’d know that how exactly?’

‘You think I was?’

I shook my head. ‘I doubt you’ll ever be the love of anyone’s life. It would be tantamount to making a public admission that you didn’t have much of a life to begin with. I have to admit I’m surprised though. I actually would’ve put money on you and Hannah going the distance.’

‘Even though she’s so young?’

‘She’s twenty-three. That’s not so young.’

‘Do you think?’

I sighed. ‘It looks like it was more your problem than hers.’

Paul pulled at the label on the wine, eventually tearing off a small strip. ‘I wasn’t right for her. And I think she knew it.’

‘Ah, so it was Hannah’s fault you split up? You were doing her dirty work for her? Come on, surely not even you believe that?’

Paul didn’t reply and I didn’t say anything to ease the tension because I was thinking about Hannah and how I knew exactly how she would be feeling and what would be going through her mind.

We sat in silence. Paul proceeded to tap his left foot in time to some imaginary soundtrack in his head which made me want to sit as still as I could just to be awkward. It was only when Ed and Sharon’s back door opened spilling light and music into the garden that we both jolted back to life but then relaxed when we saw that it was Vicky.

‘Everything okay?’ she called out.

‘Yeah, we’re all good,’ replied Paul.

‘I’m just letting you know that Chris and I will probably be getting off soon.’

‘We’ll be in soon,’ I replied. ‘Don’t go without saying goodbye, okay?’

Vicky closed the door, plunging us both back into the darkness and silence. Paul coughed and then looked at me. ‘Do you know Chris and Vicky will have been married ten years this coming year? A kid. A proper home. A proper life. All in ten years.’

I nodded, wondering where he was going with this train of thought.

‘I suppose it’s just got me thinking,’ he continued, ‘You know – about wasted time.’

I put on a rubbish American accent in the hope of lightening the mood: ‘You’re preaching to the choir.’

I went to take another swig of wine but misjudged the manoeuvre, missed my mouth altogether and spilled some down my chin. I wiped my face with the sleeve of my cardigan and looked over at Paul to see that he was watching me with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t quite work out.

‘Have I still got wine on my face?’

Paul shook his head.

‘Then what?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘Try me.’

He stood up, turned to face me and held my hands. ‘You think you don’t want what other people want,’ he began. ‘You think that all you want is to be alone. But it’s not true. The day will come when you’ll be so sick of being alone that you won’t know what to do. And when it happens come and find me and we’ll pick up right where we left off.’

I pulled my hands away from him. ‘Do you think that’s funny?’ I barked. ‘Is that what I am? Just some kind of pathetic joke?’

‘Of course not, Mel,’ he said urgently. ‘If you would just listen for a second I’m trying to tell you that you were right.’ He grabbed my hands again. ‘You asked me earlier why I’d split up with Hannah and here’s your answer: I split up with Hannah because of you. I did feel for Hannah. It’s true. I liked her a lot. But the thing I couldn’t escape was that she wasn’t you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I replied. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying at all.’

‘Well understand this,’ he said, kissing me as a firework roared up into the sky and filled the air with a rainbow of tiny stars. ‘Understand that right here and now I’m asking you to pick up where we left off.’

Charlotte and

Cameron’s House-Warming Party

It was just after five on the last Saturday in January and I was standing at the bus stop outside the university library. It had been raining solidly all day and now that it was dark the streets seemed deserted. As a sudden gust of wind blew a sheet of rain against the shelter I huddled myself further into the corner for protection, closed my eyes and wished that I was somewhere else.

My day so far had already proved nothing more than an utter waste of time. I’d been given an essay title before Christmas, three thousand words on:
The Meaning of the Metaphysical in Seventeenth-Century Art.
Given that I frequently found it difficult to understand a single word that my lecturer said past the point that she opened her mouth to say good morning, I’d relegated the essay to the lower reaches of my To Do list in the hope that, if left long enough, it might somehow write itself. I ignored it for so long in fact that I forgot about it completely until the Friday morning when my lecturer reminded us that it was due in first thing Monday morning. With two shifts of my part-time job at Blue-Bar to complete and Charlotte and Cameron’s house-warming party to focus on, I’d begun to wonder when exactly I was going to find the time to breathe, let alone write an essay. Determined to get as much of it done as possible before time ran out altogether, I’d optimistically set my alarm for six in the morning in the hope of getting a head start on the day. What I failed to take into consideration was how quickly six o’clock in the morning came round when, following an evening of drinking and talking, you only allow yourself to give in to sleep at two.

The moment my clock radio lurched into life, dragging me from the deepest of deep sleeps to a confused state of consciousness, was one I’d rather forget. Everything hurt. My ears, my brain, my limbs. And I wanted it to stop. So pushing my bedside table away from the wall, I’d reached down to the socket and in one swift movement yanked the plug out. Taking a few moments to savour the merciful silence, I rolled over on to my side, sleepily kissed Paul’s ear, and allowed myself to fall gently back to sleep.

The next sound that I heard was the front door slamming shut as Creepy Susie left to go to work at the bank. Turning to face my clock radio I was horrified to see that the digital display was completely blank. That was when it all came back to me. I reached for my watch, hoping that it might be eight, or even nine at the very latest and was horrified to see that it was nearly midday. In that instant my entire future life flashed before my eyes: the essay wouldn’t get done, I would fail my course and be doomed to work at Blue-Bar forever.

Cursing my decision to re-enter higher education as a so-called ‘mature’ student, I’d flung myself into the shower, grabbed some clean underwear, recycled the clothes that I’d been wearing the night before and, grabbing a piece of toast and a bottle of water, left Paul unconscious underneath my duvet.

By the time I reached the university library, not only were all the tables in the Art History department taken by my fellow last-minute-essay-writing course members but, of the sixteen text books on the reading list, only one was still on the reference shelves. And I strongly suspected that the only reason for this was because some juvenile joker had deftly sketched a penis in marker pen on the front cover that featured a reproduction of a Rubens’ portrait of Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria.

I spent most of the afternoon in the library during which time I managed to sketch out a rough essay plan and make ten pages of notes. By the time I decided to call it a day I was completely demoralised by both the concept of education and what I perceived to be a distinct inability to carry out my life as a fully formed adult.

As I left the library and walked out into the dark and the rain the only thing that kept me going was the fact that in a short while I’d forget all about the rain and the cold, my unwritten essay and my shifts at Blue-Bar. I tried to concentrate on the simple images of happiness: kicking off my shoes and climbing into bed; reading the weekend’s newspaper from cover to cover and falling asleep; but the thought that gave me the warmest glow was seeing Paul again.

Of course I’d had my shaky moments since we’d got back together but as far as I was concerned the past weeks had been nothing short of perfect. The best start to a new year I’d ever had. After Ed and Sharon’s party, Paul and I had walked back to his place hand-in-hand, neither one of us able to believe that after all this time apart – five whole years – we were finally back together again. And though I had a thousand and one questions in my head about where things were going, I didn’t ask a single one. I shouted down every last shred of fear and doubt, determined to act first and ask questions later. Yes, things were complicated. But that didn’t seem to matter any more.

When I woke up on New Year’s Day lying in Paul’s arms I told myself that even if it all ended in the next few seconds, to have experienced that single morning moment, to have felt the delight of knowing the thing you hope for most in life could come true, all of it would have been worth the pain that would inevitably follow.

And it was inevitable.

All the evidence said so. Paul had only just split up with Hannah and I was obviously part of the rebound. The stuff about wanting what Chris and Vicky had got smacked too much of Paul’s binary logic: one second everything is off then he flicks a switch in his head and turns everything back on again. How was I supposed to follow a line of thinking that was more dependent on individual gut reaction than rational thought? Before Paul had even woken up I’d convinced myself that this would all seem like a monumental mistake to him.

I got up and dressed without waking him and was almost at his front gate when I heard him call my name. I tried to explain that I didn’t blame him for what had happened but I just couldn’t seem to get the words out. And that was the moment that Paul chose to tell me that he loved me for the very first time since we split up. I was torn. When you love someone as much as I loved Paul, you have a constant battle between the sane self-preserving you who is outraged at having been treated so badly and the vulnerable besotted you who wants to fall right back in love and jump into the past with both feet. This besotted you wins out eventually because it just feels so good, so sweet to let it.