The Best Thing I Never Had (11 page)

April 2007

They deserved to have been caught; if the other girls hadn’t been so drunk they might have been. It had just been so difficult to say goodbye; their conversation had dragged on and she found herself still kissing him goodbye at the front door an hour after he was meant to have left.

They hadn’t paid that much attention to the sounds outside at first, the purr of an idling car, its doors slamming. But then – unmistakeable – Sukie’s drunken giggle and the grating of the rusty front gate being pushed open.

Within seconds Adam had opened Nicky’s nearby bedroom door and disappeared into the shadows beyond. As it clicked shut, the noise was echoed by Leigha’s key in the lock and Harriet had to step back to avoid being hit by the front door.

Leigha blinked at her in confusion. Sukie pushed past her into the house.

‘The music was GREAT tonight!’ she immediately informed Harriet, too drunk to be concerned with why her housemate was standing in the dark hallway at two in the morning. ‘You missed out, you’re lame.’

‘We called you,’ Leigha said reproachfully, closing the front door and kicking her high heels off and into the indiscriminate mass of shoes that lived at the bottom of the stairs. Sukie had borrowed Harriet’s beautiful but uncomfortable red wedges; they’d obviously pinched her too, as she already had them off and in her hands; she tossed them atop the shoe pile.

‘Did you?’ Harriet feigned surprise. ‘Sorry. My phone’s been on silent. I’ve really been in the dissertation zone tonight.’

‘Hmmm.’ Sukie had moved through to the mirror by the kitchen door and was slowly and carefully peeling off one false eyelash, her other hand to the wall to steady herself. ‘Well, this new and unimproved lifestyle of yours better be worth it. What’s your current word count?’ She stuck the eyelash to the gilded frame of the mirror, joining all the others that she’d stuck there over the past eighteen months, bristling like insect legs.

‘Almost eight and a half thousand,’ Harriet answered immediately. She’d stopped keeping count of these little lies. She’d actually finished her dissertation completely two weeks ago.

‘God,’ Leigha moaned. She was sitting on the bottom step peeling off her tights. ‘I’m only just on five. Living with you is bad for the academic ego.’ She unsteadily stood up on the stairs and from her elevated height planted a kiss on the top of Harriet’s head. ‘Su, bring me some water up, please! A lot of water!’ With her tights dragging behind her like a tail, she clumped heavily up the stairs.

With one false eyelash still fluttering, Sukie dutifully went through to the kitchen, collecting two clean pint glasses from the drainer and running the cold tap. She wouldn’t have been able to hear over the sound of the water pressure, but Harriet – still standing by the foot of the stairs – heard the slow slide of Nicky’s sash window being pushed up and, seconds later, back down. Then a singular heavy footfall as Adam hopped the garden wall and was away down the silent street.

Half an hour later, Sukie – always hyperactive when drunk – crashed out on her bed, left eyelash still obstinately in place, Harriet returned to her rumpled bed. On her little TV, the DVD menu for the film she and Adam had watched was still on rotation.

She picked up her mobile. She’d let the girls’ call go to voicemail; she assumed they’d just been ringing to hold up the phone whilst a particular song played. She was right; listening to the recording she could just make out the tune to the chorus of ‘Grace Kelly’, a recent favourite in their house. On top of the bass of the song she could hear Sukie’s voice, words indistinguishable – perhaps singing along – and then, suddenly, the background sound dropped away as Leigha presumably cupped her hand around the mouthpiece of the phone. She could hear her as clearly as if she was sitting beside her on the bed, palm cupped to her ear.

‘We miss you, Musketeer!’ Leigha had trilled down the phone. ‘Where are you?’

Johnny was in his customary position on the left hand side of the larger couch, be-socked feet up on the coffee table. On the other couch - the so-called ‘studying couch’, as it didn’t directly face the television – Adam was slogging away on his laptop, pausing in his typing every few paragraphs to expectantly hit the Word Count button. It wasn’t increasing by much, but the fact that it was increasing at all felt like a mini miracle. Only four days of work and he was already creeping close to two thousand words. With a great degree of satisfaction, Adam hit ‘Insert Footnote’ and flipped to the front of the book he was referencing to get the publication details.

In the hush that followed the pause in typing, Adam became aware of a weird scratching sound. He looked up; Johnny was staring past the television, eyes unfocused, a strange black shape in his hand that clicked open and closed and scraped along the loose denim of his jeans as it did so.

‘What the hell is that?’ Adam asked.

Johnny blinked out of his reverie and looked down at his hand as if he too was confused as to what was in it. ‘Oh, it’s a hair clip thing. Leigha left it here the other day.’

Miles looked up from where he sat at the dining table, bent over a text book and armed with a highlighter. ‘I’m going over there to have dinner with Nicky in a bit, I can take it back if you like?’ he offered. Johnny frowned.

‘No, no, it’s okay,’ he said, clicking the hairclip open again. ‘I’ll give it to her when I see her tomorrow. It’s fun to play with. It’s kind of like a stress ball. Helps me think.’ He resumed staring ostensibly at the television once more. Miles arched his eyebrows at Adam across the room; Adam nodded his head slightly to show his agreement, before returning doggedly to his footnote.

Johnny couldn’t work with other people around, had never been able to. As he gleefully and regularly informed everyone, his course was primarily test rather than coursework based. He didn’t have a ten thousand word dissertation like everyone else, but he did have fifteen rather nasty exams to revise for. He retired early to his bedroom that evening, rearranged his pillows to prop himself up, pulled one of his coursenote folders from his bookcase at random, opened it balanced against his thighs and started to read.

He held Leigha’s clip tightly in his hand, feeling its teeth press hard into the softness of his palm. His hand would smell faintly of Leigha tonight, as if he’d just run his fingers through her hair.

The SU was really scraping the barrel for themes this close to the end of the academic year. It was ‘Sex and the City Night’ in the Armstrong. Harriet could see no discernible difference from any other Wednesday night aside from the fact that they were serving Cosmopolitans and girls were slightly more dressed up than usual.

Leigha was wearing a cranberry-red dress with a sweetheart neckline and ropes and ropes of shiny, fake pearls at her throat. Harriet was in the black sequined dress that she’d let Leigha wear on Nicky’s birthday, the face of each individual bead and sequin glowing dimly under the bar’s downlighters.

Leigha plucked the small wedge of lime off the rim of her glass and squeezed it between her thumb and forefinger, adding its juice to her fourth Cosmo before discarding it with its forbearers in the middle of their table and licking her fingers with satisfaction. Harriet surveyed her friend; Leigha’s face and neck was flushed the same soft pink as the Cosmopolitan. Harriet could only assume she looked much the same, as for once, she was matching Leigha drink-for-drink.

Leigha was sparkling, as usual, half way through a story about a hideous dress her nemesis had been wearing in a seminar that day. Harriet leant forward across the small table and listened eagerly. She had missed this. She’d really been burning the candles at any and all conceivable ends, finishing her dissertation, keeping up with all of her modules and fitting in an increasing amount of time with Adam. There was nothing quite like spending your food budget on novelty cocktails and listening to Leigha turn what by rights should be an exceedingly boring story into something dreadfully entertaining. Harriet took a large and happy sip of her Cosmopolitan.

Leigha was already on about a terrible joke that Johnny had text her that afternoon – lightning quick changes of topic were par for the course with her – was it okay for her to have found a sexist joke quite funny or was that a betrayal of feminism, or something?

‘I swear we’ve had this conversation…’ Harriet said.

Leigha tilted her head to one side. ‘We have? When?’

‘At school. In like, Year Eleven. I swear!’ Harriet professed.

Leigha laughed. ‘God, probably. Nothing new under the sun, ey?’

No, there is, Harriet thought automatically. The one thing that I am dying to tell you and the one thing I can’t. Not yet. I can’t bear to see you look at me surprised and hurt. Not yet. Surely soon there’ll be a way around all this. I just need a little more time.

But you’re my best friend. I want to tell you about this guy I like. How he’s nothing like Seth – remember how I was worried that every boyfriend would be like that? Being with Adam is easy, almost as easy as being with you.

Leigha drained her glass, Harriet automatically mirroring the action. The vodka burned pleasantly in her stomach.

It was a common complaint amongst the Arts students that their library was in dire need of refurbishment. To call the old building shabby chic was being kind. It didn’t have automated stacks or self-service machines like the Management and Sciences library the other side of campus and the carpets and bookcases looked like they were probably the Victorian originals.

But on days like this one, where the springtime sunshine streamed in through the high windows and set the dust motes dancing, Harriet sincerely felt that those BSc lot could stuff their vending machines and state of the art study pods. The Old Library was clearly suited for those who had poetry in their souls, rather than numbers in their heads.

Adam certainly had poetry in his soul lately. He sat across the table from her, absorbed in a critical biography of Pablo Neruda, its pages bristling with strips of Post-its to mark points to revisit. Harriet was trying to focus on studying for her Fin de Siècle literature exam, an impossibly long and inaccessible essay on the androcentric hegemony of the 19
^th
Century medical profession leaving her eyes dry and itchy.

‘Do you want to go grab some food?’ she asked Adam, her voice pitched to a stage-whisper. Adam marked his place in the text with his forefinger and glanced up at her.

‘In a bit,’ he answered. ‘I want to finish with this book and make some photocopies. It’s Reference so I can’t take it out.’ Harriet smiled at him ‘What?’ he asked, defensively.

‘Oh, how you’ve changed Mr Chadwick!’ Harriet teased.

Adam shot her a wry look. ‘I’m just trying to impress this girl, is all…’

Harriet laughed quietly, reluctantly reaching for her text book once again. ‘You let me know how that goes.’

‘I love you, Harriet.’

She didn’t look up straight away. Had she heard him? Had he even said it at all?

He’d had big plans. He was going to take her out to dinner, somewhere far enough away that she wouldn’t be edgy about being seen, maybe out in London. And he was going to order a bottle of white, as Harriet was always saying how she wanted to start drinking it. He planned to say it calmly, casually, manfully; she, of course, would say it straight back.

But it was like how it had been the night they first kissed, he just hadn’t been able to stop himself saying it. The words were like a live thing, pushing its way from his heart, up his throat and out of his mouth.

Finally, she looked up at him. She looked distressingly calm and casual.

But then she half stood, leaning her whole upper body across the table and took his face into her hands and kissed him softly.

‘I love you, too,’ she told him, firmly. ‘
Now
can we get out of here?’

Adam didn’t respond for a moment; he felt a little punch-drunk. ‘The book,’ he said, a little stupidly. ‘My notes.’

Harriet rolled her eyes and plucked the Reference book from his limp grasp. ‘We’ll hide it and come back for it later.’

‘I think that ever since we met—’

Harriet cut him off with a groan. ‘PLEASE don’t say something bullshit like, it was love at first sight,’ she sighed. Adam glared at her.

‘That’s not what I was going to say – you unromantic bitch! – I was just going to say that it feels like, with the benefit of hindsight – that this was always going to happen.’

Harriet arched her eyebrow sceptically and shifted to a more comfortable position with what space she was afforded on the single bed, wedged tightly between Adam’s warm body and the cold wall.

‘Oh yeah? Go on..?’

‘Well, I mean, being in love…’ Harriet noticed with pleasure that Adam’s ears blushed pink. ‘At the end of the day, it’s finding a best friend who you sleep with, right?’

After a few seconds to absorb this, Harriet burst out laughing. ‘And you just called me unromantic! Jesus!’

‘No, think about it!’ Adam pressed. ‘When you strip it down, that’s basically what it is. A friend you love and the benefits of sex!’

Harriet groaned and threw her hands over her face. ‘Oh God…’

‘Okay, maybe that is making it sound a little… pasteurised,’ Adam conceded. ‘But I’m basically just saying that it was meant to happen, once we’d spent enough time together. I mean, I fancied you and all—’

‘You fancy everyone,’ Harriet interrupted again. Adam scowled at her.

‘Take the compliment, will you? And then I just needed time to get to know you properly, and fall in love with your personality. Then add sex and boom. Perfection.’

‘So you’re saying that if Johnny was a girl, he’d be your perfect girlfriend? You’d be in love with him?’

Adam pulled a disgusted face. ‘Man, that’d be one ugly girl. So I wouldn’t fancy him. So no! Now come here and stop being gross.’

Their kiss was interrupted by the dull ringing of Harriet’s phone in the recesses of her handbag; it was the third time it had rung in the last quarter of an hour. Harriet sighed as she broke the kiss.