The Last Time I Saw You (3 page)
Sally would despair of the men on offer. “They’re all boys, you know what I mean?” she said later in our first term, casting a disparaging glance around the first-year common room, adorned with tattered posters for the mountaineering club and the like. “Totally,” I agreed, even though I was harboring a secret flutter for a fresh-faced boy in our English tutorial, the first non-James-related response I’d experienced since I didn’t know when. He was friendly with Lola, and he’d told me he’d be at her birthday drinks in a couple of weeks’ time. I never assumed boys fancied me, but I knew my nascent prettiness was starting to peep through, and so I held onto the idea that there was a motive behind him casually dropping it into conversation in the queue for the brackish brown water that passed for coffee. When he paid for mine along with his, I was almost sure.
Sally busted me in the next class, spotting the geeky blush that spread up my face when he asked me what I thought of the sonnets our handsomely grizzled tutor Dr. Roberts had sent us off to read. She teased it out of me, then cocked her head to look at him.
“I s’pose I can see it,” she said, in a voice that suggested the polar opposite, “if you’ve got a Bagpuss fetish.”
“What do you mean?” I said, laughing despite myself. I tried to imagine what a cat from a children’s television show had to do with it.
“Oh, you know,” she said, making her hand into a paw, rubbing her sleepy face with it as she gave a slow yawn. She was brilliant at that kind of thing, as sharp as glass, and I saw immediately what she meant. There was something slow and soft about him, a gentleness that could be something to mock or something to treasure. I watched him as he laid out his books and folders with studious deliberation, his pens arranged in a neat line. I liked the care he took, it added to the sense I had that he would want to look after me if I let him.
“I reckon I could be his Professor Yaffle,” I said.
“Just ask him out then!” said Sally, digging me so hard in the ribs that she almost winded me. “Or I’ll do it.”
“No way!”
I was far too shy to do something so brazen, quite happy to watch from afar—it was a vantage point I knew all too well.
I felt like our nighttime gossips were a bit less frequent over the next week or so, but I hoped I was imagining it. I distracted myself with thoughts of Matt, both cheered and horrified to find my habit of building a whole fantasy relationship on the flimsiest of pretexts extended beyond James. By our next tutorial I felt almost too embarrassed to speak to him, worried his X-ray vision would turn out the contents of my addled brain.
“It’s an odd choice,” he said, referring to the semi-erotic e. e. cummings poem that Dr. Roberts had passed around a week after a raft of Shakespearian sonnets.
“It certainly is,” I said pompously, then backed away to my seat next to Sally, cursing myself for squandering his opening gambit.
Sally had heard it all. She smirked at me as I eased my way into my chair.
“Smoothly done, don’t you think?” I said.
“You’re a goddess, what can I say?” said Sally, and we tried to stifle our giggles, my humiliation evaporating. I loved the way any kind of pain or embarrassment or wrongness I felt could be fed through the machine of our friendship and transformed into something good—it would become ours, another shared experience, the newest piece in the warm patchwork of our friendship. Of course I didn’t like to think of the moments when the threat came from within our little bubble.
“Do you really think it’s an odd choice?” she asked, a few seconds later.
“Yes, a bit.”
She giggled, looked over at Dr. Roberts.
“My fault. Chose it last night when we were in bed.”
I gasped, then tried to conceal it, aware how closely she was studying me. It was like a talent show, like I had a single moment to prove to her that I was worth putting through to the next round.
“You go, girl,” I said, like I was in an American high school movie.
She didn’t say a word, didn’t react, simply turned her kohl-ringed eyes back down to her open book. She knew I was a fraud. Even worse, so did I.
It’s the day of Sally’s funeral, a little more than three weeks on from James breaking the news. I remember I took the phone away from my ear and vomited violently by a tree. Then I stumbled home, keeping him on the phone all the way. When he met me at the door I almost collapsed on him.
Lola had called on the landline, knowing it wasn’t a bombshell to drop without warning. Sally had been in a car crash in New York, killed outright on impact. I’ve always hated the humiliation of hearing Sally’s news second-hand—I remember when I heard she’d had her daughter, having never even known she was pregnant. I couldn’t quite bear it. “Oh, she had a girl!” I said, as if I’d just been waiting for this final revelation. Now I’d never have to worry about this kind of petty blow to my pride, not now the biggest life event of all had taken place. And it was only now, knowing she was gone, I realized how big a part of me had always wondered if there was a secret
trapdoor I’d one day stumble upon that would lead us back together. It was a fantasy in the purest sense; I hadn’t done much about it, hadn’t even wanted to after all the ways in which she’d twisted the knife, but I also hadn’t been able to truly say goodbye to the possibility. However sturdy I was, a part of me knew that Sally could always find a way to wriggle around my defenses if she’d shone her headlights full beam.
She had married a man that I’d only seen in the wedding photos that I’d pored over for clues. He was less handsome than I expected, square and slightly balding, with a look of pure delight on his face in every shot. He was a little older than us, but then, he looked like one of those people who was born forty. She was perfectly made up, smile never slipping, but I could have sworn that it didn’t have the unadulterated liquid joy that his contained.
He was English, very English, but they’d moved to the US for his work. The fact that she’d emigrated made it easier—everyone saw less of her, so I could convince myself that our estrangement was no different. Life carried on, acquired new aspects that postdated her, and her absence became a fact of life rather than a weeping sore. I never forgot her though, never stopped feeling the lack of her, despite my enduring anger. In fact its furnace-like intensity was what told me it still mattered—I know for sure that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
Do the people we love always remain part of us, even when they’ve absented themselves from our lives? I like to think that they do—that anyone we truly love changes some part of us forever, like waves pounding against a cliff until its shape is indelibly altered. Or is that no more than wishful thinking, a futile attempt to dodge the reality that
however much you love a person, you can never guarantee they won’t get ripped away from you? There are only two letters separating love from loss—the first always contains the threat of the second.
James knocks on my door just as I’m deliberating about shoes. My least scuffed black pair are some suede skyscraper heels, which seems faintly inappropriate. It’s so much easier to focus on the trivialities than to really engage with the reality of today.
“We should get going,” says James, gently.
I slip my left foot in, threading the strap through the fiddly silver buckle. It seems utterly beyond me. I sit down heavily on the bed.
“Remind me why we’re doing this.”
“Because you said you needed to say goodbye.”
I look up at him. He’s pale and anxious, and I wonder whether I’ve got any right to put him through it. I search his face, like it’ll somehow answer the questions that are swarming around my brain.
“I just feel like if I don’t, I’ll never really believe that she’s gone. It’ll still feel unfinished and horrible and . . .” I look up at him. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. It’s not like you . . .”
“It’s not about whether I liked her or not, Livvy. Anyway, you’re not going on your own. Put your shoes on. I’ll find your coat.”
I smile at him, grateful, love welling up inside me unbidden. My feelings are so close to the surface right now, constantly erupting, like a shoal of tropical fish breaking cover and flashing up out of the water.
“Are these too tarty?” I ask, looking down at my shod foot, not wanting him to see my face. “Not that it matters.”
It does though, weirdly: I feel deeply self-conscious about all the people whom I haven’t seen properly in years. When I lost Sally I lost a whole chunk of friends who quietly snuck into her camp and took up residence. They’re all Facebook friends, eagerly swapping news and commenting on each other’s photos, while I lurk on the sidelines, hating the fact that I’m somehow compelled to watch. There shouldn’t have been camps, it didn’t need to feel like a divorce, but somehow with Sally everything always took place in Technicolor.
“They’re not too tarty, but . . . they might not be a good idea for the graveside, not when it’s been so wet.”
My hand flies up to my mouth, another wave of shock washing over me. I’ve been to two of my grandparents’ funerals, have grieved them and then passed through to a wistful kind of acceptance, but this . . . this is outside my remit. Just for a second I think about taking the shoes off, curling up in bed and pretending that none of it ever happened. But I know in my heart it’s not an option.
Sally is being buried in a church near the family home in Kent, the same church in which she posed for those high-gloss wedding pictures. James drives us there, through relentless gray drizzle. We try out a few other well-worn topics of conversation—why our landlady always wears a sun visor, even in winter, how to persuade my dad to try online dating—but nothing really takes.
“When did you last see her?” asks James eventually.
“The last proper time was just before she got married. I told you about it.”
We’d seen each other at the odd social event, stalked around each other like cats, my pride too hurt to risk moving any closer. I’d seen her at someone’s twenty-fifth, obediently admired the rock that shimmered and sparkled like a strobe light, and felt silently crushed by her brittle, impersonal breeziness. I’d probably been jealous too, truth be told, even though midtwenties felt incredibly young to be tying the knot, especially for someone as free-spirited and mercurial as Sally.
But then she called me. I remember my body told me what my brain was trying so hard to deny: just hearing her voice triggered a fizzy sort of excitement, a chain of memories like a snatch of bubbles, taking me back to a time when she was the person whose company I craved above all other. I wasn’t a total amnesiac—I still remembered all the hurt she’d caused me—but some stubborn, optimistic part of me wanted to believe that the diseased part of our friendship could be sliced out, like a malignant tumor that’s caught before it’s spread, leaving the part that I’d loved to thrive and grow. Good sense dictated that I play hard to get, but she knew me too well to let me wriggle off the hook, and three phone calls later I was ensconced in a private members’ bar that I could never have dreamed of getting into myself, clinking a wide-rimmed martini glass and hoping, with an unhealthy desperation, for the best. It was the height of summer, and the windows were all flung open, the warm air thick with tipsy, nonsensical chatter that spilled from the mouths of the beautiful people who treated it like a second home.
It was like a diva coming out of retirement for one, single Oscar-winning performance. “It’s soooo good to see you,” she kept saying, squeezed right up close to me on a
velvet banquette as if she couldn’t bear to endure the cold expanse of a table. I started out trying to remain aloof, but she wouldn’t allow it. “I’m so sorry about all that shit,” she’d say, clinking glasses for the hundredth time, “what are we like?!” I made a feeble attempt to dig into what had happened between us, but she swept it away in a tsunami of love and warmth and something peculiarly Sally-ish that still had the power to hypnotize me. Besides, there wasn’t much in it for me: I wanted to believe her, for order to be restored and to be finally liberated from the feeling that my judgment was fatally flawed—it had made the world feel like a very unsafe place.
I asked her about the wedding, glowing internally at the thought of my thick, cream invitation and my reestablished status at the hen night, but she rolled her eyes and made a funny face. She was still a brilliant mimic, Sally, a great physical comedienne, but I knew it was more than a joke.
“Tell me!” I said.
“Nothing to tell. In two months’ time I’m going to be Mrs. Sally Claire Harrington,” she said, each word over-enunciated, rolling heavily from her mouth like a cannonball.
“Are you not sure?” I said, shocked and also not shocked. The innocent in me couldn’t believe that someone would walk into that kind of commitment with any kind of doubt, but the wise one knew that nothing was beyond Sally’s reach.
“He’ll be good to me, Livvy,” she said, suddenly intense.
“Yes, but that’s not a good enough reason,” I said, earnestly. “You could just live together . . .”
She flung up her hands and summoned the waiter, ordering yet another round. Of course she didn’t want to
live with him: it was a half measure, and Sally never lived her life by half measures. She wanted my opinion, in fact I felt sure it was what had brought her out of hibernation, but she was determined not to listen to me, which made me increasingly evangelical.
“You need someone you’re crazy about,” I told her, “even if it means you have to wait.” Sally hated being single, whereas me, I was a bit of a terminal case.
“The One,” she said, theatrical.
“Yes!” I insisted. “He’s definitely out there.” I remember as I said it, I tried to imagine Sally’s “One,” but it was hard to get a fix on him, this hypothetical man who could love her so skillfully that he’d trick her into a relationship instead of a duel. As for William, I didn’t get much sense of him either, only of her in relation to him. When we parted she hugged me for an age. “You’re the best, Livvy, you know that?” she said, swaying off on her vertiginous heels in the direction of a cab. I meanwhile took myself to the night-bus stop, pregnant with the sense of a job well done, of a friendship restored.
It was the last time she ever contacted me. There was no heavy white envelope plopping on to the mat, far from it. There wasn’t so much as a text message, despite the increasingly pathetic messages I sent her, unable to believe that the guillotine had come whistling down all over again. I insisted that Lola show me the wedding photos, even though I knew that doing so made her deeply uncomfortable. I ripped each one from the packet, rejection reverberating off me. I tried to tell her what had happened, but I sounded petty and bitter, a suburban single girl with an ax to grind.
“I think that’s why,” said Lola sharply, two high discs of color throbbing on her plump cheeks.
“What do you mean?”
“She said you were unbelievably negative. You really hurt her feelings, Livvy.”
Was she hurt? I suppose it was possible, but it seemed more like an inexplicable counter-move. I didn’t understand her, and even more painfully, I didn’t understand myself. Why had I been stupid enough to go back for more? It’s a question I’ve never really been able to answer, a question that’s lingered and festered ever since.
“You know what she was like,” says James, momentarily taking his gaze away from the driving rain. “She had to be the one calling the shots. It doesn’t mean she stopped caring.”
“Oh I think she did.”
“But that was Sally, wasn’t it? She was a good actress.”
The atmosphere thickens and congeals, both of us rendered silent. Not in our comfortable, easy way: it’s a lid we’ve slammed down so we don’t have to go back to a time that we move heaven and earth to avoid. Maybe it was a mistake to invite him, I think, but as soon as I’ve thought it I feel how grateful I am to have the solidity of his presence.
“There are special oldie sites my dad could try, aren’t there?”
“Yeah, totally. My Single Tooth?”
I laugh, laugh too much in fact. I’m actually starting to feel slightly hysterical the closer we get to our turnoff, my heart pumping like a piston, my palms clammy and cold.
We drive into the nondescript commuter-belt town Sally grew up in. I remember coming here one Easter for a visit,
the ordinariness of it in total contrast to Sally. I was so fascinated by her then, transfixed; it almost felt to me that she must’ve been found in a Moses basket, transported from somewhere more fitting. “Manhattan,” she cried, gleeful at the compliment, too cool to say New York.
The streets around the church are packed with cars, and I can’t help thinking how gratified she’d be. She thrived on attention, on popularity; it was a drug for her. James narrowly avoids scraping a BMW, his hands shaking on the steering wheel.
“Shit,” he mutters.
“It’s fine, you missed.”
The churchyard is thronged, Sally’s gray, wan parents surrounded by family, her younger brother at their side. The sight of them makes a lump rise up in my throat, the enormity of what it is that they’re facing horribly vivid. I stand there for a second, but before I can get myself together I’m ambushed by Sinead, a girl from college who was much more Sally’s friend than mine. She gives me a long hug, eyes full.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” she says.
“It’s horrible,” I agree, wondering what else there is to say—absolutely nothing, judging by the long pause. It seems crass to swap news, but I feel so awkward talking about Sally when we’d been so long estranged. Why did I come? I can’t order my thoughts enough to recap on my reasons, and yet I know in my gut that it was right. “This is James,” I say eventually.
“Hi!” says Sinead, unable to avoid looking impressed. James does look particularly handsome in his dark suit. “How long . . .”
“Oh no, we’re not a couple,” I say, swiftly. “James is my roommate . . . he, he knew Sally.”
We’re spared further social embarrassment by the sheer volume of mourners. I have the same exchange about the tragedy of it with person after person, some of them people I’d almost forgotten existed. It’s such a terrible way to glean an instant snapshot of how time’s moved on. “It’s a shocker, isn’t it?” says Max, a pothead chancer who we shared our first year halls with. He’s plumped out now, got a kind of toadiness about him that makes total sense. “Can’t believe she’s actually dead.” I feel myself recoiling—I believe he’s shocked, but there’s something about him that’s tangibly enjoying the drama of it all. “What you up to anyway?” he adds, already more cheerful. “Married? Babied up?” I mutter a halfhearted response, looking around at the throng. How many of these people are moved by the loss of Sally herself rather than by the ghoulish, faintly thrilling reminder of our mortality?