The Last Time I Saw You (24 page)
I’d spent the summer holidays hanging out with James, our uneasy ease reestablished. He was a nineteen-year-old boy, he wasn’t going to overanalyze anything, he was just pleased that normal service had been resumed. I advised him about other girls, determinedly swallowing the lump in my throat, and then cheerfully accepted his last-minute cancelations when my excellent advice paid off. I took what I could get, too craven and devoted to think about the price that I was paying; I was like any addict, only my drug was James, and I was prepared to put my heart in hock to get a fix.
Then it was back to Leeds, and time to guiltily move into the apartment that had cost so much in every sense. I’d rung Lola three or four times over the holidays but she’d never returned my calls. I’d tried to write her a letter, but our story was peppered with lies, and anyway, I couldn’t even justify
my behavior to myself. I remember I tried to tell Jules about it, and found myself lying again, almost unconsciously, too embarrassed to tell her how shameless we’d been. How lonely I’d made myself, how dependent on one person. I missed Lola far more than I could have predicted, held on to the hope that all those clichés about time’s healing properties would turn out to be true.
Sally arrived back before me, had already been to Habitat and bought a bleached wood coffee table and a chrome magazine rack and all kinds of other fancy pieces that looked more befitting to a Martini advert than a student apartment.
“Looks amazing, if I do say so myself,” she said, grinning at me, her face alight with triumph.
“Yeah, it does,” I said, dropping my bag, and drinking it in. I wanted to revel in it, but it was hard for all kinds of reasons, not least the thought that my grant check had already disappeared in a puff of smoke. She’d said we should have a shared bank account for house things, and I hadn’t been nearly forensic enough about what that meant. “But how are we going to afford—”
She waved an airy hand.
“Don’t worry about it, you can pay me back. Now get some glasses, my friend, Mr. Bubbles is in the fridge.”
And there you had it: whichever way you looked at it, she owned me. Perhaps it was the way I liked it.
Sally insisted we threw a housewarming. She loved a party, but also I knew she wanted to show off the apartment. She draped it in fairy lights, carefully planned a playlist, worked out how to mix a lethally strong strawberry margarita in our brand-new blender. The party was thronged, but I realized,
as I did on my birthday, that while I did have other friends there, their friendship was a weak, insipid thing compared to my bond with Sally. In fact the friends I had that weren’t also hers were always at risk, her sharp eyes seeking out their faults and finding a way to write them on a banner across my consciousness. A lot of people there that night were friends of Shaun’s, an older crowd I didn’t really know. By one a.m. the neighbors were starting to complain—after all, it wasn’t a student block—but Sally was defiant.
“They’re just being uptight,” she said, her limbs wrapped around Shaun like an octopus’s tentacles.
I turned the music right down, ignoring the howls of protest.
“Jesus, Livvy!” said Sally sharply, streaking across the room to turn it back up. I felt like everyone’s eyes were trained on us. “Don’t be such a killjoy.”
As the volume peaked, a cheer went up, and I retreated, furious, to my room. There was a couple snogging on top of a pile of coats, and I kicked them out, dumping the coats outside in an angry heap. An hour later it was still as loud, and I got back up and found her. She wasn’t in the living room, wasn’t in the kitchen. I knocked on her bedroom door and eventually, after much giggling, the door swung open. “Hi, Livvy,” she said, hugging me too tightly. Her pupils were like round, black buttons in the center of her bright blue eyes. Shaun and a couple of other people were squashed up on the bed, silent, like a line of naughty children.
“Are you taking drugs?”
“No!”
“I don’t want people taking drugs in my house!”
“Did you hear that?” said Sally. “Livvy doesn’t want people taking drugs in her house.” She turned back to me. “Okay,
Livvy” she said, in a sing-song voice. “I’ll make sure no one takes any drugs in Livvy’s house.”
“I mean it, Sally, I’ll call the police.”
The four of them started laughing, their laughter growing uncontrollable, and fear began to grip hold of me. I was out of my depth, being punished for pretending to be someone it turned out I didn’t even want to be anymore. What if a neighbor decided they’d call the police—could we be arrested? I thought of my dad, the profound disappointment he would feel, and grabbed her arm, imploring.
“Sally, please, I don’t want it to be like this.”
Sally hugged me, dropped a wet, lipsticky kiss on my cheek.
“We’re having fun! You should have more fun. You’re my best friend and we’re having a party.”
Suddenly I wished more than anything that I was in a big, messy house where baked beans encrusted an ancient range, and I could sit around a kitchen table and bemoan our essay deadlines with my fellow geeks like they really were a matter of life and death.
I missed my innocence, so carelessly squandered and so impossible to regain.
She was right though: we did have fun. The nights I really loved were the ones where I would cook—Sally full of praise, even though all she’d do was nibble a few bites and then push the food around the expanse of her plate—our dinners perched on our knees so we could watch whatever TV program was our current obsession. Sally could create a sense of occasion from a tiny thing, and for a few months the weekly episode of
This Life
was like a stadium event. Thursday night was sacred, and we’d huddle up close on the sofa, a bottle of
cava on the coffee table, agog at the latest twists and turns, lusting after Miles and Egg like they lived next door.
But other times the closeness would seem like a mirage. I lived in fear of Sally stepping into the dark forest that sometimes took her away from me, and turned her into someone unrecognizable.
Those times, she would come home from college and barely utter a word, shutting herself in her room, her birdlike eating replaced by a diet of junk food. I’d noticed it in the first year, but I’d been able to minimize it in my head. There’d been Lola for one thing, as well as a whole houseful of other people, all there to provide a distraction or share the responsibility. Now I couldn’t help feeling it was my fault. She often wouldn’t say what was wrong, but if she did, it often seemed to be some kind of romantic bruise from the past that surely should have healed by now. I would feel helpless, naive, without resources. The storm could blow in so many different ways; she could be cold and aloof, want me nowhere near her, or she could be wracked with sobs, her white fingers wrapped tightly around me like they were claws, me trying to somehow hug her back to happiness.
But the storm could blow over as swiftly as it blew in. Shaun might appear, and she would plaster a happy smile on her face, her foundation a little thicker than normal to cover the ravages of her tears. One weekend James was due to visit, and I warned him in advance of what he could be facing, knowing he was absolutely useless at dealing with emotional girls. But sure enough, as soon as he tipped up she put on a face and poured the drinks, for all the world like a sunshiny cocktail waitress. It should have troubled me, the way she lit up around him, but self-preservation prevented me from registering it. After all, we were each other’s life support.
When I think about it now, I realize that she always did make sure she had backup, even while she tried to keep my options to an absolute minimum. I remember bursting back through the door one
This Life
night, my stint in the library longer than I had intended. “It’s starting!” I shouted, running into the living room, only to find Lola, stockinged feet neatly tucked underneath her, sitting on the sofa.
“Hello, Livvy,” she said, giving me a brief, polite smile devoid of any warmth.
“Oh . . . hi! Lovely to see you.”
I walked toward her, hoping she’d let me hug her, but she might as well have been wreathed in barbed wire.
“We’ve got a house guest!” said Sally, sailing back in, a bowl of Pringles in her hand, not a trace of discomfort. I don’t know what she said to her, I never asked, but she somehow managed to lure her back into the fold. But now the fold was only big enough for two. They would hug and shriek and go for drinks, and occasionally I would go along, but it was abundantly clear who was making the bed sag in the middle now. Lola would tolerate me, but no more than that, and to go out with her on my own and lay it on the table would somehow have felt like going behind Sally’s back. Neither of us would have dared do that.
It wasn’t just Lola. It sometimes felt like she got crushes on people, girls as much as boys, and she’d suddenly want to see them all the time. She might invite me along, but it was always in a way that told me she was doing me a favor rather than relishing the idea of my company. After the first couple of times I learned not to be jealous. These people were like fireflies, their tenure brief, the friendship burning out before it gained any real momentum. And then it would be me and her again, almost as if I’d imagined it.
That apartment left me broke. The rent was sky high, and that was before you took into account how much it cost to survive the cold of a Yorkshire winter. We’d divided up the bills when we first moved in, putting a few in each of our names, but Sally would leave hers until they were red and angry, final demands and threats of court action. I’d beg her to pay them, and she’d laugh.
“They’re messing with us. They won’t do anything. I’ll pay it next week.”
She was right, of course, but I didn’t like the menace of it, the sense that we were in trouble. It gave me a feeling of living in the last days of a dying empire, like we were squatting in Buckingham Palace.
I dated a bit that year, but it was halfhearted. The real romantic punctuation came from my time with James. His visits got more frequent as the year rolled on, and any remaining awkwardness trickled away. It was still a pose on my part, but like I said, I was craven.
It wasn’t just me who was excited when a visit was imminent. “I love James,” Sally would say, and I would try and be pleased that my two favorite people liked each other so much. It seemed petty to not be happy about it, but I couldn’t help but resent the way she’d never give us any time alone. I knew that if I asked there’d be all manner of trouble, and even the act of asking seemed to contradict my breezy assurances that we were no more than friends.
She hardly ever invited Shaun on our nights out with James, even though it seemed obvious to make it a foursome. Instead we’d be a sharp-cornered little trio, jumping on a virtual trampoline, competing to see how high the fun could
take us. One time we somehow ended up in a house club, full of bare-chested ravers sweating all over us and blowing whistles in our faces. It was the last place I wanted to be. Sally disappeared off somewhere, and after an hour me and James started to get worried. I finally tracked her down in a corner by the loos, snogging someone I could barely see, beyond knowing for absolute certain that he wasn’t Shaun. I waited until I started to feel like a Peeping Tom, then gave up. When she got back I managed to make myself heard over the bass line.
“What were you doing?”
She looked at me, blank-faced, and then danced a little bit harder. Once we got home, I tried again. We were in the kitchen alone, waiting for James to sort out the music.
“Who was that guy?” I said, trying to stop myself from sounding disapproving. I didn’t think Shaun was the love of her life, but nor did I think he deserved her cheating on him. He’d wanted to come out with us, but she’d claimed it was a girl’s night. She’d told us conspiratorially, said how much she was looking forward to us being the three musketeers, and I’d swallowed my irritation at the way she acted like she’d been there from the beginning.
“What guy?”
“The one you were snogging.”
“I dunno what you’re talking about,” she said, pouring boiling water into our mugs, her eyes refusing to meet mine.
“You so do!” I said, trying to keep it light.
“Why are you saying that?” she said, blue eyes flashing ice.
“I saw you.”
“Shut up, Livvy,” she hissed, spotting James coming back into the room. “Hello, You,” she said, honeyed. “Cup
of tea, or shall we go for one last cheeky vodka? You know it makes sense.”
It wasn’t really working. I’d always longed for me and Sally to be more like sisters than friends, which just goes to show, you should be careful what you wish for. Sally saved her worst behavior for her family, and I think that, once we’d moved in together, that was what I’d become in her eyes. Living with her made me anxious, the whole atmosphere dictated by the violent seesaw of her moods, and my grades were suffering as a result. I’d got a part-time waitressing job to help fund my rent, which made it even harder to focus. I started to wonder if my rackety finances might provide me with the life raft I needed. Perhaps I could plead poverty, move back into a shared house, and keep the good bits of my friendship with Sally and slough away the bad.
“That sounds like a fantastic idea,” said Mom, when I told her, her relief palpable. “You’re only a student once in your life, so you should jolly well be one.”
It was nice to feel that my family was there too, that not everything was dictated by my relationship with Sally, each experience taken back and pored over in the lab of our friendship.
I put off mentioning it for a couple of weeks, rehearsing it again and again in my head. In the end I broached it on one of our sofa supper nights, hoping that the chilled domesticity would soften the blow. As soon as she grasped what I was saying she burst into hysterical sobs.
“You’re my best friend,” she said, burying her face in the cushions. “Why wouldn’t you want to live with me?”
“It was only an idea!” I said, helpless in the face of her grief. “I just thought, we’ve only got a year left. It might be fun to share again.”
“If it’s about money I’ll pay more! It is about the money, isn’t it?”
I paused, trying to muster up enough courage to tell her that it was about more than that. That I couldn’t give her everything. That if I did there would be nothing left for me.
“Forget it. Forget I said anything. It’ll be fine.”