The Best Thing I Never Had (6 page)

True to her word, Harriet ordered him a double portion of his favourite curly fries, and he immediately coated them in salt and drowned them in ketchup as she picked up her cutlery and gingerly cut into a shrivelled jacket potato.

‘Last night was fun,’ he said, with his mouth full.

‘Tell that to my poor head,’ Harriet answered, scraping some cheese and baked beans onto her fork.

‘Gotta be on it again for Saturday,’ Adam said. Harriet made a non-committal noise through her mouthful of potato. ‘I’ve got drinks tomorrow night too. My poor liver!’

‘You’re going to have to stay in all next week, detox,’ Harriet agreed. ‘Maybe even work on your dissertation.’ She smiled to show she that was only teasing.

‘Yeah right,’ Adam teased back. ‘We both know you’re going to end up writing my dissertation for me.’ He popped the twist of a chip into his mouth and gave one of what he thought was his most winning smiles, the kind that always made Harriet smile back; she did.

‘Adam, Adam!’ she sighed theatrically, ‘what am I going to do with you..?’

‘Oh, just love me,’ Adam answered, just as theatrically; a joke, just automatic banter, but immediately he felt his heart wallop grotesquely against the inside of his ribs. Harriet laughed.

‘Everybody loves you.’ She dropped her eyes to her plate and carved another chunk of potato. Adam looked hopelessly at the top of her bowed head.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he answered, softly, pushing his cooling chips around on his plate with his fingertips.

It was getting busier, noisier, at The Dive, and Adam was having to wait a frustratingly long time to get served. This wasn’t one of his usual haunts: a small, dingy campus bar built into the rafters of an extension on the main Student Union building, mostly frequented by Drama students; he could probably count the number of times he’d been in here on one hand.

He finally made eye contact with the frazzled bartender, receiving the briefest nod of acknowledgement in response; he’d be next. The bartender stuffed notes into the till, counted out change at lightning speed. Adam cleared his throat in preparation to shout his order over the din.

Quick as a flash, somebody took advantage of his hesitation.

‘Three bottles of orange VK, please,’ the girl bellowed, leaning the whole of her upper body across the top of the bar. Adam wheeled around, set to prodigiously tut his annoyance at this poor bar etiquette, but stopped in his tracks as he realised it was Sukie; she grinned at him. ‘And a pint of Fosters and two cherry Sourz, please,’ she appendixed to her order. ‘I presume you’re on the Fosters?’ she asked Adam.

‘Cheers, mate!’ Adam nodded his assent. ‘You girls out and about tonight too then?’ He peered behind her through the mass of people trying to get near the bar.

‘No,’ Sukie answered, ‘just me and some guys from my course.’ She started to count out change, almost three full years buying similar rounds ingraining in her the exact cost of various drinks. The bartender shouted out the total as he poured red Sourz into two slender plastic shot glasses and Sukie tipped the precise amount into his open hand, glittering shrapnel full of five and ten pence pieces. ‘We’re out for a birthday.’ She nodded Adam towards the second shot glass, and he picked it up appreciatively.

‘Oh yeah? Me too.’ In unspoken agreement they shot their Sourz right there at the bar, rather than risk spillage during the push through the crowd. Adam took a hurried swallow from his pint to drop the level of it down below the rim before following Sukie through the horde of Friday night revellers to the space of stools and high tables beyond.

‘Daniel Masterson?’ Sukie turned back to him, as soon as they were clear.

‘Yeah! How do you know Dan?’ Adam asked.

‘Does Drama like me, doesn’t he?’ Sukie answered, apparently possessive of this newly discovered-to-be-mutual friend. ‘How about you?’

‘Same halls in First Year,’ Adam replied. ‘Yeah, he’s a good guy.’

‘Yeah,’ Sukie agreed, slowing as they reached a particular table. ‘Everyone! This is Adam,’ she announced, parking two of her three bottles of alcopop on the table. Adam smiled through the round of introductions – managing a particularly brazen ‘nice to meet you’ at a girl he was pretty sure he’d pulled the previous year – confidently claiming a spot at the table with his placed pint glass.

Three hours and seven rounds later, people started to slip away – home, or into the Union proper, where an R&B night was just starting to get busy. Adam and Sukie – without tickets or the inclination to attend – drank up and shrugged into their coats, Adam gallantly insisting that he walk Sukie all the way back to Dell Road, and Sukie not bothering to politely decline.

The streets on campus and into the student village were deserted. Everyone who was going out had already made their journey, and everyone else was entrenched indoors with the heating on full-blast. The sleety rain and correlating cloud cover of the day had blown away and the winter sky was at its deepest, inkiest black, the air glacier sharp. The heels of Sukie’s boots rang out against the pavement as they walked through the silence, hands stuffed in coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold.

Sukie dumped her bag onto the low wall of the graveyard as they approached it, the easier to rummage around in it.

‘Ciggie?’ She offered one to Adam with a deft flick of her fingers. He declined by holding up his hand. Sukie regarded him in silence for a minute. ‘Something stronger?’ She pulled a suspiciously fat roll-up from the depths of her bag. Adam laughed, both at Sukie and at his immediate reaction to say yes. He was always reckless, but he was a little more reckless than usual lately.

‘Go on then.’

Sukie put the spliff between her lips as she held her lighter underneath it before inhaling. She sat down on the damp wall, wrapping her arms around herself to keep warm, blowing out a thick, pale rope of smoke towards the sky. Adam sat down next to her and plucked the roll-up from Sukie’s fingers, inhaling from it with an embarrassing hiccup, his throat closing up against the unexpected sear of the smoke. They sat in silence for a few minutes, passing it back and forth. On his third drag, the back of Adam’s neck started to feel agreeably fizzy. On her fourth, Sukie exhaled with a long, satisfied sound, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

‘So, what’s the plan, Mr Chadwick?’ she asked him leisurely, passing the spliff.

‘The plan?’ Adam asked, confused. ‘Finish this and go home?’

‘No, not the plan for tonight,’ Sukie explained, slowly, as if he were simple. ‘Your plan for
life
.’

‘Bugger me, bit deep?’ Adam laughed. ‘Hopefully scrape a degree? Then move back in with the folks? Take the first decently paid job that comes my way and try and get whatever fun I can out of life.’

‘Nobody gets out of it alive,’ Sukie agreed sagely, waving her arm to encompass the field of mouldering bones behind them. ‘I’d like to fall in love,’ she informed him, matter-of-factly. ‘That’s all. You ever been in love?’ Adam screwed up his face. ‘Apparently it’s wonderful. Apparently it makes you feel high.’ She laughed, taking another deep drag. ‘All the time. That would be nice.’ She passed the roll-up again. ‘So, do you think Johnny really is in love with Leigha?’

‘Who knows?’ Adam replied, with a shrug, his words starting to slur and blend a bit. ‘I know he’s totally mad for her, can’t go a day without seeing her.’ The fizzing on the back of his neck turned into a prickle. Who was he even talking about? ‘Does that sound like love to you?’ Suddenly shaky, he took his deepest drag so far, pulling the heat deep down into his lungs.

‘Fucked if we know, right?’ Sukie answered, a little sullenly.

And suddenly – whether it was the booze, the weed, or the strange pressing quality of the night – Adam suddenly felt like he was going to burst open, unless he said the words that were massing on his tongue, shared this sudden epiphany with Sukie right then and there, a Pandora opening all the boxes in the world. He opened his mouth and the sentence dropped into the space between them like a stone.

‘But the way Johnny feels about Leigha… is the way I feel about Harry.’

Sukie didn’t say anything, not right away. She took several shallow draws on the spliff without offering it back to him.

‘You sick bastard,’ she said finally, although her tone was not unkind. ‘Do me – and yourself – a favour, okay? Never repeat that. Not to Harry and certainly not to Leigha.’ She pinched off the burning end of the roll-up with practiced fingers and put the half or so that remained back into a pocket in the lining of her handbag. ‘I’ll just assume it’s the wacky talking, okay? Now come on, walk me home already.’ She stood up decisively, hoisting her bag to her shoulder – ‘it’s fucking freezing out here,’ – and a rather shell-shocked Adam complied.

February 2007

Sukie sat at Harriet’s desk in front of the mirror, trying in vain to get her heavy hair to curl using Nicky’s heated tongs. Harriet – already dressed in a black beaded dress – had her knees up against her chest and her foot planted on her bedside table, and was leaning forward to paint her toenails a bright coral colour. With a mournful noise, Sukie gave up, switching the tongs off and smoothing the heat kinks out of her hair with her palms.

‘That’s why I keep my hair short,’ Harriet observed, without looking up. ‘None of this hassle.’ Sukie made a face and reached for her glass of water. Usually she, like all the girls, started on spirits and mixers whilst getting ready – Harriet already had a glass of something-and-lemonade set on the bedside table beside her – but Sukie was still hung-over and dry-mouthed from the excesses of the night before and had never really been a great believer in the Hair of the Dog approach.

Adam’s face – earnest and bone-white in the moonlight – flittered across Sukie’s memory. She pushed aside the compulsion to spill the beans to Harriet that came along with it, reaching for her false eyelash glue. Once she’d applied both of the lashes, she looked back at Harriet, head still bowed to her foot as she dabbed on the nail-varnish. Behind her the bedroom curtains were still open to the dark evening beyond, the window-panes rectangles of black reflecting the points of light in the room. Outside, tufts of snow collided soundlessly with the glass.

‘It’s snowing,’ Sukie said. ‘Shit, I hope people can get taxis okay.’

Finished with her first foot, Harriet bent forwards even further to blow ineffectually on the wet nails, before craning her head back to see out the window.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll still be a good night. Especially now that things aren’t so tense in the Johnny-Leigha-Adam triangle,’ Harriet laughed, shifting her other foot onto the edge of the bedside table.

At the mention of Adam’s name, the desire to tell all pressed all the harder. Sukie drained her glass of water and then reached for Harriet’s something-and-lemonade, taking a deep gulp: vodka, it transpired. Then she stood and quietly closed Harriet’s bedroom door.

‘Okay, I’ve got to tell you something and you totally can’t let Leigha find out. And I mean totally, for your own good.’ Harriet looked up at Sukie, her interest piqued, replacing the lid on the nail-varnish bottle.

‘Go on then,’ she said finally, weighing up her loyalty to Leigha with her curiosity. ‘What’s up?’

Leigha was impatient and straightening her hair even though it wasn’t quite bone dry yet, her bedroom smelt warm and damp. Harriet silently perched on the novelty inflatable chair in the corner of the room. Leigha reached to turn down the volume on her computer speakers with her free hand.

‘You alright?’ she asked Harriet, watching her in the mirror. ‘God, I love that dress. You look hot. I have no idea what I’m going to wear and you’ve just totally upped the ante.’ Harriet looked down at her dress as if she’d never seen it before.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’m going to wear this actually,’ she said, touching the beaded panel across her chest with her fingertips. ‘Do you want to?’ Leigha put her straighteners down on the desk rotated her chair on its casters to look at Harriet properly.

‘What?’

‘I’m not in a very… sequiny mood,’ Harriet said. ‘You wear it. It looks better on you anyway, you’ve got the boobs for it.’

‘Well, if you think…’ Leigha replied, a little nonplussed.

In one swift movement Harriet pulled the dress up and over her head, throwing it across the room to land in Leigha’s lap. It smelt like Harriet’s perfume and was pleasantly warm from her body heat. Harriet crossed the room and pulled Leigha’s lilac dressing gown down from the hook on the back of the bedroom door, folding her bareness away into its thickness. Leigha fingered the beaded material on her lap.

‘I do love this dress,’ she repeated, finally.

Harriet had sat on her bed with her vodka and lemonade, wrapped in Leigha’s dressing gown, until the constant opening and closing of the front door and the swell of chatter from downstairs grew too loud to ignore.

She slipped into the pair of jeans she had earlier discarded; a purple and white silk camisole top was the first thing out of her drawer that resembled party-wear. Her coral orange toes peeped up at her from the hem of the denim and she glared back. How had eight o’ clock come so quickly? She needed more time to think, to deconstruct and compartmentalise, to work out how she felt about this massive and outrageous thing.

But all she could think about – in those precious few minutes before someone would come up and force her downstairs – was last week’s Shakespeare: Stage and Screen seminar. David Tennant was suitably becrowned, fretting and strutting his stuff upon the stage, projected on the wallscreen in front of the class and drawing everyone’s attention but hers. Instead, Harriet was noticing Adam’s hand resting on the desk between them. Each fingertip was perfectly squared off – so unlike her own – odd and manly and perfect. And she didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean.

Adam was – quite literally – cornered by a girl he’d known in his first year, apparently also friends with Nicky; incestuously small campus strikes again. He sipped from his drink and made feedback noises in all the right places as she prattled on, all the while glaring at the back of Sukie’s dark head across the room.

She’d opened the door to him and Johnny half an hour ago and had studiously avoided meeting his eyes, guilt emblazoned across her face with all the subtlety of a neon sign. And Harriet – where the fucking fuck was Harriet? – his bloody heart was in his feet.

Leigha practically danced across the room – barefoot and lovely in a black shift dress that shimmered with sequins and beads – proffering an open bag of Doritos to guests, Johnny a smiling shadow wherever she stepped. It was maddening; he could hear Harriet’s voice now, from somewhere out of sight, in the mass of people through to the hallway, perhaps? Someone shifted and he caught sight of the back of her, one elbow resting on her hip with her hand up by her ear, a stance that told him nothing. If he could just see her face, he would know if Sukie had told her, he would know how to play this. And he had to play this. He couldn’t let one moment of stoned confusion ruin one of his most important friendships.

He couldn’t bear it any longer, giving a rigid but polite excuse to the girl from his first year and pushing away from her through the crowded room, holding up a palm to decline the bag of Doritos that Leigha whirled into his face as he came near. He gripped Sukie’s upper arm, a little more tightly than he’d planned to, and she turned from her conversation to glare at him.

‘Sorry guys, just need to borrow her for one sec,’ Adam grinned out at the group assembled on the couch, affable as ever, before steering Sukie through the kitchen and unceremoniously out of the back door.

Sukie shivered dramatically, wrapping her arms around herself and pressing backwards towards the shelter of the wall, white chips of snow disappearing as they melted into her hair. ‘I haven’t told her,’ she said immediately, ‘stop freaking out.’

‘Who haven’t you told? Leigha? Or Harriet?’ Adam demanded.

‘Neither!’ Sukie shot back, but there had been the slightest flicker of hesitation there that Adam couldn’t ignore. He raked both hands through his damp hair.

‘Jesus Christ, Su, you’re the one that said not to make it into a big thing!’

‘I haven’t! Harry won’t tell anyone—’

‘For crying out loud, it’s Harriet who I didn’t want to know!’

‘Oh come on,’ Sukie said, trying to make her voice sound as even and reasonable as possible. ‘We’re all grown-ups here. And besides,’ she smirked, ‘it’s always nice to know that somebody likes you!’

‘But I don’t! Like her!’ Adam moaned. ‘Not like that. It’s just I was totally mullered. I didn’t mean to say it.’
Not to you, not out loud, not even to myself
, he finished the miserable thought. Sukie looked at him levelly.

‘Well, if that’s the case, you’re a bigger dick than I thought you were.’ She moved to open the back door, stepping inside the relative warmth of the back porch. ‘And I already thought you were quite a dick,’ she finished, balefully, moving away and into the bright kitchen.

Harriet strained to catch Sukie’s eyes as she walked back inside, rubbing her palms against her bare, goose-pimpled arms and scowling, a cowed Adam following behind and meekly closing the back door against the cold. Sukie gave her an almost imperceptible shake of the head:
we’ll talk later
.

To the uninformed observer, Johnny looked like he was having the worst night of his life. He sat rigid on the chair, staring out ahead of him into the middle distance with a faintly sweaty pallor to his face.

Perched daintily on his knee, Leigha rocked backwards as she laughed at someone’s joke, her whole body soft and yielding as it pressed against his.

‘Soft’ being the apposite word there. It wouldn’t do to have anything ‘pressing back’. And so – whilst Leigha wiggled herself to get more comfortable – Johnny continued to down his beer and mentally recite Manchester United goalies from the sixties to the present.

Nicky and Miles moved as a unit through the party, mingling and chatting like the jovial hosts they were. Every so often a guest would insist that Nicky – as the feted birthday girl – do a shot of their choosing, so it wasn’t too surprising that one leg of Nicky’s tights was heavily laddered and she’d managed to lose her left earring.

Spying a free space opening up on the couch, Miles opportunistically steered his inert girlfriend towards it and wedged her into place.

‘No shots for a while, okay pet?’ he recommended, perching himself on the couch arm.

‘Are you inferring that I can’t hold my drink?’ Nicky slurred, smiling up at him. Miles laughed.

‘I’m not ‘infurrrring’ anything,’ he mimicked, putting his arm around her. She leaned back into him, a peaceful expression crossing her face.

‘When we live in France,’ she said, eyes closed, ‘we’ll drink red wine with every meal. You can get a really great bottle of Merlot for just a couple of Euro.
La bonne vie
!’ Miles squeezed Nicky’s shoulders, placating.

‘Well, then you’d definitely better learn to hold your alcohol by then. Coupla years practice binge drinking should do it, I think,’ he joked.

Nicky opened her eyes and sat forwards, pulling away from his hold. ‘Couple of years? But we’re going next year? I’ve applied to do TEFL, remember?’

Miles looked confused. ‘What the hell is teffle?’

‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language.’ Nicky sat up, suddenly feeling all too sober. ‘Miles, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Oh, your teaching thing? I didn’t know you had to be abroad for that!’ Miles sounded alarmed. ‘I figured you could do that anywhere.’

‘But, but Miles! How often have I talked about a year abroad? Living in France? Using my Language qualifications?’

‘You haven’t mentioned living in France for ages!’ Miles tried to reason.

‘I haven’t?’ Nicky couldn’t quite believe him. ‘It used to be all I talked about. I need the TEFL experience to get on a teaching conversion course. You know I can’t afford a full PGCE.’ Miles was looking at her like she was speaking in French already.

‘Nic, pet, you know I’m going to Bath next year to do my PhD. I thought you meant to do this teffle thing up there.’

Nicky couldn’t say anything for a minute. ‘Can’t you take a gap year?’ she asked, finally. ‘It will only take me nine months or so out there to qualify…?’ She trailed off when she saw that Miles was frowning.

‘You know I’ll lose my grant money if I piss off to France. You’re not making sense. Let’s talk about this when you’re sober. No point getting wound up at your own birthday party!’ He put his arm around her shoulders again, pulling her back into position against him.

Being uncertain as to whether or not she wanted to be drunk, Harriet found herself mixing elaborate cocktails that she then stood swilling around in her glass. Realising this, she sipped at her drink, scrunched up her face: as she had suspected, she’d made it too strong. Across the room, Adam was sitting cross-legged on the laminate floor, safely trapped playing one of Sukie’s more indiscernible drinking games. Their eyes met – every so often – seemingly an accident on his part, as every time they did he couldn’t look away fast enough; suddenly finding his drink, his companion, or – in one instance, the couch cushion – utterly fascinating.

She felt a light touch to the small of her back; Sukie had extricated herself from the game under the necessity of refilling her glass.

‘You can relax,’ she murmured, after her back was to the rest of the room. ‘It was just his weird, twisted idea of a joke, apparently.’ Harriet couldn’t help but glance over at Adam again. This time he didn’t look away. This time he looked downright panicky, staring her down, eyes pleading.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked quietly.

Sukie looked at her. ‘It’s what he just said, in the garden, why? You all broken-hearted over it?’ Sukie smirked.

‘Just doesn’t seem like… his sort of humour.’ It just felt plain wrong, in fact. Harriet frowned, slightly, but not slightly enough that Adam didn’t clock it from across the room. Suddenly galvanised into action, he put his drink down on the floor against the wall, started to make excuses and pulled himself to a standing position. The hurried movement caught Sukie’s attention.

‘Oh fuck, speak of the devil…’ she rolled her eyes at Harriet, just as he reached them.

‘Harry, can I talk to you?’ he rushed, glaring at Sukie, who returned one with interest.

‘Come play,’ Sukie tugged at Harriet’s arm.

‘In a minute,’ Harriet replied, looking at Adam expectantly. Sukie made a tut of disgust and – refreshed drink in hand – moved back towards the crowd on the floor.

‘I am so, so sorry,’ Adam said immediately, taking Harriet by the elbow, as if the physical contact between them would add weight to his sincerity.

‘For what?’ Harriet asked.