The Reunion (25 page)

‘Could I just have some water?’

Lilah was crouching down next to her. Jen was aware of an expanse of tanned flesh, Lilah’s long legs, bright pink toenails, wedge heels. ‘Here you go, sweetie.’ A glass in one hand, a tissue in the other. She was dabbing at Jen’s head. ‘It’s not too bad, just a little cut. You don’t need stitches.’

Lilah and Conor helped her to her feet. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen in Andrew’s flat. Andrew came running in from the garden where he’d been doing the barbecue.

‘What happened? Bloody hell, Jen, what happened?’ They took her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed. The pillow smelt of Chanel No. 5. Lilah. Conor was talking about taking her to casualty. Lilah leaned over her, laid a wet flannel on her forehead.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Con, it’s just the heat,’ Jen said. She reached out for his hand again, gave it a squeeze. ‘I’ll pop down and see the doctor tomorrow if I’m not feeling well.’

Lilah drew the curtains, Andrew went to fetch her another glass of water. Conor kissed her on the head.

‘Leave me a minute, OK?’ she asked him. ‘I just want to lie here for a bit. I’ll be out in a sec. OK?’ Reluctantly, he left and, just as she’d hoped (or feared or dreaded), it wasn’t long before there was a knock at the door.

‘You OK, Jen?’ Dan was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, his skin tanned a deep brown following three weeks of relentless sunshine. He shut the door behind him, sat down at her side, leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry.’

He placed his hand, cool and dry, on her waist, slipped it under her shirt, just above the waistband of her skirt.

‘Dan, don’t.’ He stopped, but she didn’t want him to. At that moment she wanted desperately for him to lie down with her, for the door to be locked, the flat to be empty, the two of them to be alone. She closed her eyes and felt the tears squeeze out of them.

‘You should go,’ she said, and he left her.

September 1995

HALF THE BOXES
were still unpacked. They’d shifted them all into the second bedroom and piled them up against a wall. They had intended to get everything done before the party, but they’d been too busy having sex all afternoon.

‘It’s better like this anyway,’ Conor said, lazily grabbing at Jen’s calf as she tried to get up off the floor. ‘This way if the party gets really wild then only half our stuff will get trashed.’

Jen laughed, kicking his hand away. ‘Yeah. I’m sure it’ll get super wild. There’s only going to be, like, fifteen people there.’

‘True,’ Conor conceded, ‘but one of those people is Lilah, so frankly all bets are off.’

Jen pulled a T-shirt over her head and slipped her knickers back on. Conor grimaced.

‘Ah, don’t do that. You’re so much prettier without.’

‘Oh really? You’d like me to greet our guests at the front door with no clothes on?’

Conor lay back on the floor, stretching his arms above his head. ‘Nah, probably best not, you’ll give the old boy next door a heart attack.’

‘You want something to drink?’ she asked him, walking into the kitchenette. ‘Cup of tea?’

Conor propped himself up on his elbows, watching her walk away. He loved to watch her walk. He loved to watch her reach her hands back to the nape of her perfect, pale, graceful neck and twist her long, dark hair up into a knot, he loved the way it stayed there, piled on her head, without a clip. Like magic. The idea that he was going to get to look at her, every day, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, it made him feel as though his heart might burst with happiness.

‘I’d love a cup of tea, ta,’ he said.

She turned to look at him over her shoulder. ‘Are you planning on getting dressed at all?’ she asked, grinning, a big dimple opening up in her left cheek.

‘Not right now,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘They won’t be here for at least an hour yet. Plenty of time.’

‘Oh yeah? Plenty of time for what exactly?’ He raised the eyebrow again. She giggled.

‘Again? Bit ambitious, aren’t you?’

He jumped to his feet and was across the room in a second, grabbing her round the waist as she shrieked with laughter. ‘Oh, I’ll show you ambitious, babe,’ he said, kissing her neck, slipping his hand under her T-shirt. ‘I’ll show you.’

They were just about dressed by the time Natalie arrived, at exactly eight-thirty. Nat was endearingly punctual, even for parties. Conor poured drinks while Jen gave her the tour, which took all of sixty seconds. The reason there were to be only fifteen people at their party was that you couldn’t actually fit more than fifteen people in the flat. In theory, it consisted of five rooms, a living room downstairs with a tiny galley kitchen off to one side, and the spare room on the other, the main bedroom upstairs, with an even tinier ensuite bathroom. It was three rooms really, neither the kitchen nor the bathroom were large enough to deserve the name, and the spare bedroom was actually no more than a box room. There was a small balcony at the back of the building, too, overlooking the gardens of the larger, grander apartments below, and beyond that, a line of trees at the edge of the common.

‘So, you’re not going to be doing a lot of cat-swinging, then?’ Nat asked Conor with a smile as she accepted the drink.

‘Not a lot, no. I said we should go for the place down the road with about double the square footage, but Ms Donleavy over there refused.’

‘Isn’t it great though?’ Jen asked Nat, beaming. ‘I know it’s tiny, but isn’t it just lovely? The view out back, and this building, the square…’ They’d rented about 350 square feet spread over two storeys at the top of a grand old Georgian terrace which extended all the way around three sides of a square, a private garden in its centre.

‘It’s not the kind of place we’d ever be able to afford under normal circumstances…’

‘Normal circumstances meaning being able to fit things like, I don’t know, furniture or appliances, into our home,’ Conor said with a grin. It was true, it was ridiculously cramped, but he didn’t care, he cared not one iota when he saw the look on Jen’s face as she talked about ‘our place’. Their place, the place they shared. The place they would cook and drink and plan holidays, the place they’d entertain their friends, the place they’d spend hours, days, whole weekends in bed together. If his sixteen-year-old self could see him now, he’d think he’d died and gone to heaven.

By ten, everyone who was expected to attend had arrived, and although they had invited new friends from work and a couple of old friends from college, it ended up, as usual, with the six of them hanging out together, crammed like sardines out on the balcony, everyone talking at once.

Lilah: ‘I love this job. I don’t care what anyone says, PR is fucking brilliant. Basically, I get to take people out to lunch a lot, or out for drinks a lot, I plan parties and get paid for it, and not only that but they give me things. Like, for free. Look!’ She held out her wrist; she was wearing some sort of garish beaded bracelet which Conor thought ought to cost no more than a fiver, but from the reactions of the girls (ooh-ing and ah-ing, asking, ‘Is that real?’) was clearly worth a good deal more.

Andrew: ‘It is not a misogynist book! Yes, it’s challenging, transgressive even, but not simply misogynist. To say that is to miss the point.’

Natalie (loudly): ‘What point am I missing? The point where it’s entertainment to torture women? That book is basically a 400-page catalogue of new and interesting ways to damage and degrade the female of the species. It’s…’

Lilah (even louder): ‘Oh good God. I can’t believe you two are still bloody arguing about
American Psycho
. You read it, like, three years ago. Get over it.’

Dan: ‘The bastards are going to kick me out. I know they bloody are. Bloody yuppie twat who owns the building wants to redevelop it. I’m going to be homeless in a few weeks and I only bloody just moved in.’

‘You could move in here,’ Conor said to him and everyone started laughing, except Jen, who gave him a sharp look. ‘Oh, I’m only joking,’ Conor said, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her closer to kiss her. The smell of her sent a jolt through him, direct to his loins; he had the clearest flashback to that afternoon, it made him dizzy. ‘It’ll just be you and me in the love nest, I promise.’ He grinned at Dan, who smiled back, then looked away.

Andrew and Lilah were the last to leave. Conor kicked them out just after four, Lilah protesting loudly that it was way too early to go home yet before falling over on the pavement and howling with rage that it was all Conor’s fault. The first taxi they’d called refused to take them, the driver took one look at Lilah, shook his head and drove off. Andrew just shrugged and called another one. The patience of a saint, Andrew had. Conor would be the first to admit that Lilah was a gorgeous girl and a good laugh, but he had no idea how his best friend coped with that level of drama day in, day out.

He was the lucky one. He knew that as they sat together on the balcony, covered in a blanket, Jen in front of him, leaning back against his chest. Her eyelids were drooping but she refused to go to bed; she wanted to watch the sun come up, she said.

‘It feels like the beginning, doesn’t it?’ she murmured sleepily. Beneath the blanket she snaked her arm back behind her and around his waist.

‘Yeah, it does.’

She was right. They’d been together since they met on holiday when they were sixteen years old, but this felt different. This – the end of college, moving in, starting new jobs – it felt as though life were starting for real now, no more rehearsal. He was lucky. He kissed the top of her head, said it out loud.

‘I’m so lucky, beautiful. So lucky.’

‘Not as lucky as I am.’ He squeezed her closer. ‘I can’t think of anywhere on earth I’d rather be right now.’

‘Maybe the French house?’

‘Not even the French house. This is too perfect.’ The sky was turning pale on the horizon, the merest hint of warmth in the grey. ‘In any case, we’ll be back there in no time.’

‘Yeah,’ Conor said. He hadn’t told her yet, wouldn’t tell her now. There was no way his ma was going to let him skip family Christmas to spend it with his friends in France. There had already been an argument about how he’d spent all summer there and how Christmas was a time for family. And going to church. He’d tell her later, closer to the time. Who knew, he thought, he might even be able to change Ma’s mind? The thought of ever being able to change his mother’s mind made him laugh out loud.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he said softly. ‘You are falling asleep there because you want to watch the sunrise. You going to watch it with your eyes closed?’

He helped her to her feet and took her upstairs to bed.

November 1995

ANDREW STOOD LIKE
a soldier, Natalie thought, his back straight and chin raised; she could almost picture him in uniform. She tried not to picture him in uniform and listened to his speech instead.

‘I remember the first time she ever spoke to me,’ he said. ‘I was in the library, right at the very back, head deep in
Blackstone’s Statutes on Public Law and Human Rights
, and I looked up and there was this girl walking towards me, this
goddess
. She seemed about eight feet tall, she was just legs and blonde hair and bright red lips…’ Lilah giggled, she had the good grace to blush. ‘I knew who she was, of course, because everyone at college had heard of Lilah Lewis. Lilah Lewis was famous…’

‘Infamous!’ Dan interrupted.

‘Well, that too. In any case – and I’m not joking, now – I watched her walk towards me and I could feel my insides turn to mush because she was smiling at me,
right at me
, it had to be at me, because there was no one else around. She came up to me, she perched there on the desk, nudging my books aside with her gorgeous arse, and without any preamble she said, “You’re not seriously taking Karen Samuels to the Freshers’ Ball, are you? Because, sweetheart. You can do
so
much better.”’

‘Oh, God, she’s shameless! She’s utterly shameless!’ Conor laughed. Everyone was laughing, Lilah batting her lashes and smiling coquettishly at them all. They’d heard the story before, they’d heard it a dozen times, but it was one of those tales that didn’t get old, one of those first meeting, first kiss stories that you never tire of hearing.