Wish You Were Here (2 page)

‘What?' I stammered, battling with my disappointment. ‘What are you on about now, Andy?'

‘I'm asking you what you're doing a week from Sunday. That's what I'm on about.'

I projected myself into the future. All I could see was a lot of moping around the flat trying to make myself feel even worse than I already felt.

‘Nothing much,' I replied eventually. ‘Why?'

‘Because you . . .' he paused to give himself a silent drum roll ‘. . . are coming on holiday with me.'

‘Holiday?'

‘Yeah.'

‘With you?'

‘Yeah.'

I went completely silent. This was typical of Andy. And I knew that if I was going to prevent him from talking me into something I didn't want to be talked into I was going to have to be firm.

‘I can't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because . . . because I can't.'

Andy wasn't fazed for a second by my sub-standard debating skills. ‘You do know that I'm doing this for you, don't you?' he began. ‘I was sitting here at home thinking about you and . . . everything that's going on and it just came to me – what Charlie needs is a holiday. Think about it. You, me and a nice beach somewhere hot. We can chill out for a week, sink a few beers and have a laugh – it'll be great. And you won't have to do any of the legwork either, mate. I went to a travel agent this afternoon and checked it all out for you. All you need to do is write me a cheque for roughly four hundred quid and in exchange I'll give you the holiday of a lifetime.' He paused as if waiting for a round of applause. ‘So what do you say?'

I had many reservations about my old college friend's suggestion, but they had less to do with the idea of going on holiday than with the idea of going on holiday with him. Despite his long preamble, I knew Andy well enough to know that this holiday wasn't about him wanting to help me out at all. It was about him wanting to go on holiday without his fiancée and using me as an excuse. He'd probably told Lisa that he wanted to take me away to help me ‘get over Sarah' and while there might be a modicum of truth in that statement I strongly suspected a far more self-interested motive. I could just feel in my bones that Andy was going to use this holiday as a week-long practice run for his eventual stag-night, meaning he would inevitably end up dragging me to a lot of places that I wouldn't want to go to, persuade me to do things that I wouldn't want to do and generally force me to act in a way that wasn't really me at all.

And yet he was right. I did need a holiday. I did need a break from my usual routine. Sarah's leaving had completely kicked the stuffing out of me. And other than the option of going solo (which given my state of mind wasn't really an option at all) Andy's was the only firm holiday offer on the table. Fortunately for me I had one last trick up my sleeve – the perfect way to ensure that should he persuade me to go with him the balance of power wouldn't always be in his favour.

‘What about Tom?' I asked.

There was a brief but telling silence.

‘What about Tom?' he replied, faking indifference.

‘Well, aren't you going to ask him too?'

‘Of course not. Why would I conceivably invite a born-again Christian on holiday? It's not like they're particularly renowned for being the life and soul of the party.'

‘But he's our mate.'

Andy sighed. ‘To be fair to Tom, mate, even at university he was always more your mate than mine.'

‘Well I'm not going without him,' I replied. ‘So if you want me to go you'd better get dialling now because you're really going to have your work cut out for you.'

After that I didn't expect to hear from Andy on the subject of holidays again because I was absolutely confident that Tom would turn him down before he even managed to finish his first sentence. As I was getting into bed, however, just before midnight, the phone rang.

‘You'd better start packing,' said Andy, ‘because Bible-bashing Tom is coming on holiday with us.'

‘Yeah right,' I replied laughing. ‘Do you think I'm going to hand over a cheque just like that so by the time I realise Tom's not coming you'll have cashed it and it'll be too late to back out? Give me a little bit of credit, Andy, I'm not that stupid. There's no way that Tom's agreed to come on holiday with us. In fact given the sort of thing I suspect you've got in mind for this holiday I'd say that you'd have more chance of persuading the pope to come with us.'

‘Oh-two-four—' began Andy.

‘What are you doing?' I interrupted.

‘Encouraging you to call him.'

‘Do you think I won't do it?'

‘I'm telling you to be my guest. But just so that you know, Tom was actually much less work than you. All I said was: “Do you fancy coming on holiday next week?” And straight away he replied that August is always pretty quiet in his office and that chances are it should be no problem for him to get the time off.'

‘You're telling me he said, “Yes,” just like that?'

‘My powers of persuasion must work well on the God fearing.'

I paused and mulled over the situation. This didn't sound like Tom at all. There had to be something else going on. ‘You know I will phone him, don't you?' I warned Andy. ‘And I'll well and truly kick your arse if you're winding me up.'

‘Like I said,' replied Andy boldly. ‘Be my guest. And when you do, just remind him that we're going on holiday to have . . . fun.'

The following Monday, Andy called me at work to tell me he had booked the holiday. When I asked where we were going he refused to say, on the grounds that he wanted it to be a ‘surprise'. The idea of being surprised by Andy made me feel very uncomfortable indeed: he was the sort of person whose surprises tended to be genuinely surprising. For example, once when we were at college Andy announced that he was nipping out to get a paper. Seventeen hours later, he called me from Belgium to ask if I could electronically wire him enough money to fly home. He's that sort of bloke.

Regardless of my concern, I was actually so relieved to have a date fixed when I would be free of the four walls of my flat that I actually didn't care where we went. All I knew was that once Sarah moved out of the flat for good my life would be as empty as my home. And so the idea of being somewhere in the sun – if only for a week – seemed tailor-made for the peculiarities of my situation. I could escape day-to-day reality and recharge my batteries at the same time. And whether Andy had booked us in for a week in the Canaries or at a Butlin's in Minehead, it didn't matter. All that mattered was being somewhere else.

During that week Andy set a plan of action in motion. Tom (who was based in Coventry) would get the train down to Brighton on the Saturday night before the flight and stay over at my flat. Andy (who lived with his girlfriend Lisa in Hove) would come round to mine on the Saturday evening and stay over too. Following a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast we would make our way to Gatwick and catch the plane to our mystery destination. It felt good having a plan. For the first time in a long while, it felt as though I was moving forwards.

It was just after three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon and I was standing in my bedroom staring at the empty suitcase in front of me. In terms of symbolism (always useful when you're looking for new and inventive ways to make yourself feel that little bit more unhappy) it was hard to find an object more fitting than an empty suitcase because my heart was empty and the flat itself was pretty empty too. Sarah and Oliver had been and gone while I'd been last-minute shopping for holiday stuff in town. In the time that elapsed between the two events they had managed to remove everything she owned. Now, given that when I'd bought the flat twelve years ago my furniture had consisted of a decrepit wardrobe, a musty-smelling chest of drawers and a sofa that I'd rescued from a skip; and given that the deal when Sarah had moved in two years later was that she would (with my blessing) systematically eradicate the flat of every single item of furniture and replace it with things that worked and looked nice (and hadn't come from skips) the flat was now, inevitably, empty. Oh, she'd left a desk in the spare room (I'm guessing because the front of one of the drawers has come off), a bookshelf in the living room and a few other items as well but these were all things that, like me, either no longer worked or were no longer needed.

Back to the suitcase. I had always hated packing. Always. This was mainly because I don't understand how it all worked. How was a person supposed to guess what they might need for every single occasion that might come up when visiting a foreign land? For instance, I have a band T-shirt that I bought when I was at college that says ‘Death To The Pixies' on the front of it. Back in my college days I used to wear it all the time but now I don't wear it that often. That said, however, there are still times when I wake up at the weekend and think to myself, ‘I really want to wear my “Death To The Pixies” T-shirt,' and I'll rummage through all the clothes in the ironing pile until I find it. And even though it's now grey (where it once was black and is now much tighter than it used to be), frayed on the neck and with loose stitching underneath one armpit, I'll put it on and wear it all day. And I'll be happy. And at the end of the day when it has fulfilled its function, I'll take it off and throw it in the dirty laundry basket where it will slowly make its way through the decommissioning process (dark wash clothes pile on kitchen floor to washing machine to tumble dryer to ironing pile in spare bedroom – where it will remain unironed until the next time I need it). Now, multiply the problem I have with my ‘Death To The Pixies' T-shirt with a pair of favoured jeans, a white shirt that I think I look good in, trainers that are good for walking in (but not necessarily all that good to look at) and various assorted other clothes and accessories for which I feel various degrees of attachment and it becomes easy to imagine the problems I had with packing to go on holiday.

So how did I manage in the past? The quick answer is Sarah. She always did it. She'd get sick of me standing there slack-jawed with a ‘Death To The Pixies' T-shirt in one hand and a pair of threadbare-in-the-crotch faded Levi's in the other and she'd kick me out of the bedroom and sort it out herself. And the funny thing is, even though I hadn't had anything to do with the packing of my suitcase, once we'd reached our holiday destination I would always (without fail) find absolutely everything that I needed for every occasion. The right shoes for the right kind of bar. The right shirt for the right kind of restaurant. The right shorts for the right kind of beach. Everything. And on the one occasion (a holiday to Turkey in year five of our relationship) when I needed the right T-shirt for a day of wandering round a local market I opened the case and there it was: ‘Death To The Pixies' in all its faded glory, neatly ironed and folded right in front of me. Right there and then I took off my hat to her (she had packed that too). No one could pack a suitcase like Sarah. No one. I can't really remember what I did about packing suitcases before Sarah came into my life. I suppose that back in those days I had a lot less stuff so it was an awful lot easier just to pile everything I owned into one suitcase and close the lid.

As the afternoon began to slip away from me and the suitcase remained empty I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do would be to leave packing until later in the day. Retiring to my now sofa-less living room I sat down on one of two old dining chairs Sarah had left behind and turned on the TV. An old episode of
Murder She Wrote
was on one of the cable channels but despite being drawn into the plot I switched it off after ten minutes because I was unable to adopt my usual slouching position. As I debated in my head whether it was too late to drive into town and order a new sofa from Argos (possibly something in black leather?) the phone rang. It was Tom. He was at the station and needed me to pick him up. As I put down the phone, picked up my car keys, grabbed my coat and locked the front door I remember quite clearly feeling happy for the first time in a long while. Tom's arrival meant that my holiday plans were in motion. There was now an implied momentum to my life. I was no longer stationary. Instead I was hurtling towards the unknown.

At the station I spotted Tom instantly amongst the crowd of recently arrived travellers. Though we were roughly the same age, Tom had always looked a good few years older than me. It was his lack of hair that did it. Tom had begun losing his hair in his early twenties and now that he was in his thirties I barely registered his lack of hair. There's something about men whose hair loss comes earlier in life that makes them cooler than the rest of us. It's as if they've had an entire decade to come round to the idea that their hair has gone for good and so by the time they reach their third decade it's quite clear that they patently don't give a toss about what's going on on top of their skulls. Possessing a full head of hair is no longer linked to their masculine identity. It's just the way things are. And when women say that they find bald guys sexy (and there are quite a few out there) it's this lot that they're talking about and not the late arrivals who are always too panicked by their hair loss to do anything other than look mortified.

‘How long do you think we're going for?' I asked, staring at Tom's hulking suitcase and marginally smaller rucksack as I helped him load his luggage into the back of my car. ‘We're going for seven nights. Not seven years.'

‘And I bet you haven't even packed yet,' laughed Tom.

‘You know me too well. How are you, mate?'