To My Best Friends

One of the mugs Lizzie recognised: she’d bought them all ‘I

NY’ mugs back from her honeymoon. The chair David sat in was from his and Nicci’s first flat. A battered old thing that had been more holes than leather when they’d bought it for a tenner in a junk shop. Nicci had restored it.

‘I always wondered what happened to that chair,’ Lizzie said. ‘And those cushions . . .’

‘What did she need a kettle for?’ Mona said. ‘I know it’s a big garden, but it’s not that big.’

‘Mona,’ Jo said crossly. ‘What?’

‘Think about it.’

An awkward silence fell. Lizzie and Jo were thinking the same thing: a couple of hundred feet is a long way when you’ve had chemo.

‘Like I said,’ David got to his feet, ‘Nicci used to spend time down here thinking. Until the last few weeks. Then the state of the garden made her feel too guilty. She hadn’t been well enough to put it to bed for winter, and she felt bad about that. Said it wore its neglect like unloved clothes.’

Yes, Lizzie thought, that sounded like Nicci.

David looked wrung out. Anyone who hadn’t known him with a purple Mohican would have thought the same hair-dresser had cut his short brown hair in the same style since he was a toddler. His brown eyes were bloodshot, his face puffy. His mouth, usually ready with a quiet smile, was set in a tense line, as if one wobble would bring his composure crashing down.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said. ‘We didn’t realise . . . I mean, if we’d known you were here we wouldn’t have intruded.’

‘OK,’ he said, brushing off his trousers, even though there was nothing on them. ‘I should get back anyway. After all, it’s my party . . .’

‘And I’ll cry if I want to,’ the women finished for him.

‘David,’ Lizzie said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I know,’ he said, his voice almost inaudible. ‘But not as sorry as I am.’

‘He knows,’ Mona said, when David had shut the shed door firmly behind him. ‘About the letters. He knows.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Lizzie asked. ‘He’d say something, wouldn’t he? If he did.’

‘We know,’ Jo pointed out. ‘And we haven’t.’

‘Of course he knows,’ Mona said. ‘When has it ever been that awkward with David? He’s known us as long as he’s known Nicci. It’s never been awkward. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago I’d have said I was closer to him than my brothers, by a mile. Dan certainly is. I’ve seen a lot more of David in the last fifteen years than I have of them.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, when we lived in that dive in Hove he probably saw us naked almost as often as Nicci.’

A memory of David walking in on her in the bathroom came to Mona and her grin slipped as fast as it had arrived. His appraising glance, before embarrassment hit them both. Nicci’s forty-eight hours of coolness, David’s mumbled apology in Nicci’s presence, and the wariness with which she watched David and Mona for a few weeks after that. It was unnecessary. Even if Mona would have, David wouldn’t.

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘He knows.’

‘The awkwardness could be coming from us,’ Lizzie said. ‘I know I’ve never felt uncomfortable around him before, but look at what we just did. We barged in on him in his own shed – a shed to which I now have the key – like we owned the place.’

‘Which you do,’ Mona said. ‘If those letters mean anything. Which is a whole other conversation.’

‘Look,’ Jo interrupted, ‘suppose Mona’s right?’ She’d been standing at the small window watching David’s back recede in the darkness. His drooping shoulders and scuffing walk radiated anguish. ‘And given that we just let ourselves into his shed – with his wife’s key – and he didn’t bat an eyelid, I think she is, then he’s waiting for us to make the first move.’

It took a while to sink in.

‘What did he say?’ Lizzie turned to Mona. ‘When he delivered your letter, I mean. How did he look?’

Mona shrugged. ‘Rough as hell. Like he hadn’t slept in days. Which he probably hadn’t. And he didn’t say anything much. Certainly wasn’t up for a cup of tea and a chat. He just handed me the envelope and said something like, “Nicci wanted me to give you this.” We hugged, just barely, now I think about it. He definitely wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Said he had the girls in the car.’

‘Which he did,’ Jo pointed out.

‘I found this,’ she said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from her coat pocket. ‘After I’d read the letter – about a hundred times – I went up in the attic and dug out the copy of The Bell Jar Nicci gave me for my birthday.’

Mona and Lizzie groaned.

‘She was obsessed with that damn book for a while,’ Lizzie said.

‘Bloody depressing,’ Mona added. ‘I’m pretty sure I binned mine years ago, before I went to Australia.’

‘Anyway,’ Jo interrupted them, ‘this fell out. I must have been using it as a bookmark and forgot all about it.’

Smoothing the square of paper flat with her hand, Jo held it up. The picture was faded where the flare of the flash had turned pink. Blu-Tack stains still speckled its back.

‘I remember that night!’ Mona exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t long after I moved in with you.’

Jo glanced at her friend anxiously. She knew the fact that Mona had joined their little group a year after the others still smarted, but if Mona was thinking that it didn’t show.

The photograph was of the four of them, just before a party. Snarls and pouts and grins for a camera on self-timer and balanced on a bookshelf. All with that early nineties hair, which was still really late eighties. Except for Nicci, of course. She had a bleached crop, the kind that looked like she’d cut it herself, which she had.

‘Look at you!’ Lizzie laughed, and Jo was embarrassed to see she was hoisting her boobs for the camera. As if they weren’t big enough already in those days. She wore a towel and nothing else. Lizzie was all wild red hair, in an over-large man’s shirt and Levi’s 501s, a look she adopted in their first term at university, under Nicci’s tuition, and wore for years. As ever, her hair hid her face.

Mona was in the hippy phase that presaged her wander-lust. A long Indian skirt and a mirror-beaded waistcoat over a puffy shirt. On anyone else it would have looked like a sack, but she looked as lean as always. Only Mona would hide the slim-hipped, long-legged figure of a model under that outfit.

And Nicci? She was channelling Courtney Love.

Doc Martens, with her original sixties biker jacket, over a peach satin slip, her hair spiky. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jo was pouting, Mona was inscrutable and Lizzie was grinning, more or less. As for Nicci, she had a rock star snarl and that wildness in her eyes. The wildness that had only started to fade when she met David.

Lizzie’s sniff broke the silence. ‘Still no tissues, I suppose?’ she asked, glancing around the shed. Her gaze fell on the remains of a kitchen roll. She tore off a square and passed the roll to the others.

‘Nicci lived in that leather jacket,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was wearing it the very first time I met her.’

Chapter Three

The Sixties Vintage Biker Jacket

Sussex University. Brighton, 1992

Lizzie barely opened her mouth in the Hardy seminar. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what she thought; she’d read Jude the Obscure three times to be sure. But why would anyone care what Lizzie O’Hara thought? And anyway, she was too intimidated by the peroxide blonde in the charity-shop nightie and battered motorbike jacket who’d been holding court for the last ten minutes. Where did she get her self-confidence, Lizzie wondered. At least she wasn’t afraid to express her opinions, even if Lizzie wasn’t convinced they were entirely accurate.

When the blonde came up to Lizzie as she waited for a lift after the seminar, Lizzie couldn’t have been more amazed if Damon Albarn had asked her out. ‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m gasping for a coffee. Fancy one?’

Dumbfounded, Lizzie just nodded, and found herself walking beside – well, slightly behind – the coolest and fastest-walking person, she’d ever seen, let alone spoken to, in her entire eighteen years of small-town life.

They looked like chalk and cheese.

Despite her best efforts, Lizzie’s long reddish hair was frizz rather than curls. Her skin was white and freckly, what little of it could be seen beneath her floor-length black jersey skirt, which bagged at the knee where she’d crossed her legs in the tutorial. An over-sized man’s shirt was meant to disguise her pear-shaped – and much-loathed – size fourteen body. In Lizzie’s eyes, it did the job adequately.

Apparently not . . .

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Nicci, sliding into a corner table in the Students’ Union café, laden with plastic cups of nasty, lukewarm machine coffee. Allegedly black, the liquid looked more like a murky brown. ‘But that skirt . . . it really doesn’t suit you. You should try men’s jeans with a big belt. Or leggings, they’d work. The shirt’s great, by the way. But a baggy top and a baggy bottom just make you look . . .’

At the expression on Lizzie’s face, the conclusion trailed away. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Nicci said. ‘What I meant to say was, you’ve got that amazing body, and I’d kill to have curves.’ She ran one ring-laden hand down her birdcage-like chest to reveal a Jenga of ribs under her slip. ‘No such luck. If I had boobs – even small ones like yours – and a bum, I’d make sure everyone knew about it.’

Lizzie was mortified. Where did she get off, this stranger slagging off her clothes and calling her fat? The way Lizzie was brought up, if you couldn’t say something polite, you didn’t say anything at all. One reason why she didn’t tell Nicci where to stick it, crap coffee and all. Plus, she didn’t have the nerve. Her instinctive reaction was to crawl under the table and stay there until Nicci had gone. Instead, she just nodded sheepishly and stared hard at the brown plastic cup in front of her.

So that’s what I am, she thought as she stomped back to halls half an hour later, a charity case. And a fat one, at that. Well, bugger off. I can find my own friends. And I can dress myself without your help too.

But somehow next day, without intending to, she found herself the centre of Brighton, in a second-hand shop in The Lanes, fingering a ripped up pair of 501s, washed and worn to soft.

The following week, after their seminar Nicci was waiting for Lizzie by the lift, a battered paperback copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes in her hand.

‘Cool jeans,’ she said, when she spotted Lizzie. ‘Vintage too.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘They’re perfect on you. You look sexy.’

Lizzie flushed, embarrassed. In spite of herself, she was pleased. Nicci grinned. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude last week,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I can be clumsy like that. I need to learn to keep my trap shut.’

Smiling cautiously, Nicci slid her arm through Lizzie’s. ‘I just thought you’d look better in jeans – and you do. Come on,’ she added. ‘I’m meeting my friend Jo in the Union. I think you’ll like her. She lives in the room next door to me in halls. She’s the first friend I made here.’ She grinned again, taking Lizzie by surprise. ‘And you’re the second.’

It was supposedly the first day of the rest of Jo’s life. The day life really started to happen. But sitting on a yet-to-be-made-up mattress in a single room on the third floor of halls, Jo had never felt so out of her depth.

Her parents had left an hour earlier and she hadn’t moved since. So she sat surrounded by black bags, cardboard boxes and a new John Lewis suitcase bought especially for the occasion. Her worldly goods, such as they were. Sat and stared at the detritus of the room’s last occupant: Blu-Tack stains freckling the walls where once a montage of photographs had been, fading gig tickets still pinned to a corkboard, smiley-face stickers obscuring the window, which wasn’t big to start with. Proof, if proof was needed, that room 303’s previous inhabitant had been ‘popular’. All the signs so far suggested that Jo was going to be the opposite.

To judge by the blank stares, uninterested glances and irritated sighs as she’d lugged her bags into the lift, Jo was sure friends whose photographs might paper those walls would be in short supply.

Feeling like nothing so much as her eleven-year-old self, Jo allowed herself a few minutes to wallow. She knew absolutely no one here, and didn’t have a clue how to go about changing that. She’d probably be back home in Watford by the middle of term; friendless, grade-less and with a queue of people who couldn’t wait to tell her how much too big for her boots she’d been for wanting to do a degree in the first place.

Ten minutes and then she’d get it together.

Jo had just hurled herself face down on to the bed when there was a sharp rap at her door. Precisely the knock her mother used when she was making a show of respecting Jo’s privacy but intended to come in regardless.

Before Jo could shout, ‘Hang on a sec,’ let alone blow her nose and wipe tears from her eyes, the door had swung open and a small, pointed face with huge kohl-rimmed green eyes topped with spiky white-blond hair appeared around it.

‘Hi. Not interrupting anything, am I?’

Without waiting for an answer, she clambered over Jo’s bin bags and propped herself against the wardrobe, arms folded. One foot beat impatient time to the bass line of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ rising from the floor below. She wore a beaten-up leather jacket over a faded floral minidress and her skinny tanned legs disappeared into eighteen-hole Doc Martens that reached almost to her knees. The boots were ostentatiously battered.

Tugging her Hello Kitty T-shirt down over her too-big boobs, Jo wished her hair wasn’t mousy brown and held out of her eyes with a pink scrunchie. She had never felt so square in her life.

‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘We’re neighbours. I thought I’d brave the bar, but, I didn’t really fancy walking in on my own. To be totally honest,’ she said disarmingly, ‘you’re the only person I’ve met here, so I thought we could give each other some moral support.’

Chapter Four

‘That’s what these are meant to be,’ Jo said, pulling a letter out of her bag. The once-pristine vellum was now scuffed, the midnight-blue ink smudged by tears.

She might have expensive highlights and a three-figure haircut where once the mousy-brown split ends and pink scrunchie had been. She might even have a five-times-a-week runner’s body where once puppy fat had reigned, but right now Jo needed Nicci’s moral support more than ever.

‘Moral support?’ Mona snorted, pulling her own letter, minus its envelope, from her jacket pocket. ‘Only Nicci would do this and expect us to call it moral support.’

Ignoring Mona’s comments, Jo stretched out her hand. ‘Swap?’

‘Hey, what about me?’ Lizzie said, pouting. ‘Just because you two think my bequest is a joke.’

Leaning over to hug Lizzie, Jo handed her letter to Mona and reluctantly took Lizzie’s from her. It was true, though. She didn’t really want to read Lizzie’s letter. It was Mona’s she wanted to get her hands on. Mona had to be mistaken, she just knew it.

Mona dropped into the leather chair vacated by David, while Jo perched on the edge of the sideboard and Lizzie sat on a crate. For several long seconds, the women read in silence; the shed was so quiet they could hear voices coming from the kitchen at the far end of the garden.

‘Lizzie!’ Jo snorted, breaking their concentration. ‘I don’t want to be mean, but leaving her garden to you – a woman who famously reduced a cactus to an explosion of dust – what was Nicci thinking?’

‘I know.’ Lizzie’s laugh was mirthless. ‘How did she put it? “I can’t trust anyone else with it”? She might as well have said I’m the best of a bad lot!’

‘Cheers,’ Mona muttered without looking up. ‘What does that make me, then?’

‘That’s not true,’ Jo said, as if Mona hadn’t spoken. ‘Listen to this:

‘I need to make sure the things I love, the people I love, look after one another . . . So I’m leaving you my garden. The most nurturing of my friends. I know you’ll lavish on it the care that I tried to.’

Lizzie smiled. That much, at least, was true. She would try. But she couldn’t guarantee she would succeed, not if her own garden was anything to go by. The twenty-by-twenty square of concrete (inappropriately and not entirely honestly described by the property developer as a ‘private terrace ideal for outdoor entertaining’) was lined with the corpses of slaughtered plants. Not even last summer’s dead plants: most were relics from the summer before, when Lizzie had still believed her green fingers were in there somewhere, their potential just waiting to be discovered.

Returning her attention to Mona’s letter, Lizzie gasped. ‘Oh, Mo! This is excessive, even by Nicci’s standards.’

‘Told you,’ Mona shrugged. ‘Mind you,’ she waved Jo’s letter in the air, ‘talking of excessive . . .’

Jo rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘But if I read this right,’ Lizzie continued, ‘Nicci’s left David to you because you’re “too self-sufficient”. Is that Nicci-speak for lonely?’

Avoiding her gaze, Mona shrugged.

‘Let me see,’ Jo held out her hand for the letter. ‘It can’t be that basic. That doesn’t sound like Nicci at all. There must be some mistake.’

‘There isn’t,’ Mona rounded on her. ‘I know what that letter says – how many times d’you think I’ve read it? How many times have you read yours?’

‘OK, OK.’ Jo held up her hands in defeat.

‘It is,’ Lizzie said. ‘Listen . . .’ And she began to read aloud.

‘The thing is, I worry about you. You’re so . . . self-sufficient. Dan’s growing up fast and I worry you’re both alone. I know Greg broke your heart and then Neil stomped on it, but it’s like you’ve given up. You’re not interested in anyone else, in finding anyone new. It’s over two years now. You have to stop mourning the loss of – don’t hate me, but I have to be honest, it’s not like you can kill me, after all! – the loss of something that never really was. You must move on. For your sake and Dan’s. And I want to help you.’

‘Help?’ Mona spat. ‘Interfere, more like.’

Jo threw her a look, but she didn’t disagree. How could she?

‘Well,’ Mona said. ‘Honestly, only Nicci could interfere from beyond the grave. And I don’t know why you’re sticking up for her. I mean, take a look at this.’

‘I have,’ Jo said. ‘Believe me, I have.’

‘Let me finish this first,’ Lizzie interrupted. ‘She says it. I can’t believe she actually says it: “So I’m asking you to take care of David . . . the love of my life. The man I’ve been with my whole adult life . . . until death us do part.”’ Lizzie looked up, her eyes wide and glittering.

‘Lizzie,’ Mona said, ‘did you think I’d made it up?’

‘No, no. It’s just . . . I . . .’ Lizzie started reading again. “I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I have to – death is about to part us. It will have parted us when you read this, and so I’m bequeathing my beloved David to you.”’

‘Give me that.’ Jo snatched the letter and the others watched her eyes speed down the page.

‘What the fuck?’ she murmured as she reached the end. ‘What. The. Fuck. Nicci, Nicci, Nicci, you can’t just go leaving people to other people. What were you thinking?’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Lizzie put in cautiously, ‘. . . perhaps she wasn’t? Perhaps . . . the drugs?’ Her voice faltered.

‘No!’ Jo said fiercely. ‘Don’t say that. Much as we don’t want this to be happening, Nicci wanted it. We have to . . . we have to try to find a way to cope with it.’

‘And you?’ Mona said, suppressing a shiver. The shed had not got any warmer in the half an hour they’d been sitting there. If anything the temperature had dropped. ‘What are you going to do to “cope with it”?’

‘No idea,’ Jo said, heaving herself off the sideboard and perching on the arm of the chair beside Mona so she could see her own letter over her friend’s shoulder. Not that she needed to. She knew the damn thing by heart. She’d read it so many times it was a wonder her eyes hadn’t worn away the words.

‘“You’ve been such a good godmother, which is why I need you to be more,”’ she read aloud.

‘More? What does that mean, “more”?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Read on.’ Jo nodded to Mona.

Mona did, the words sounding wrong through the remnants of her Aussie twang.

‘I’ve watched you over the years struggling to be a good stepmother to Si’s boys, trying and not managing to have children of your own. Harrie and Charlie are going to need a mummy. And I’d like her to be you. Not literally, of course! But their emotional care I leave in your hands. Under your watchful eye my two girls will find the confidence to grow into fearless, talented, wonderful young women. The women I know they can be. The woman you are. The woman I always strove to be.

‘But what’s she asking, precisely?’ Mona asked, when she’d finished reading. ‘Surely she’s not leaving you custody of Charlie and Harrie over David?’

‘No,’ Jo laughed. ‘No,’ she said again, with less certainty. ‘At least . . . I don’t think so.

‘I think what she’s saying, in her clumsy, bossy, Nicci way is, since, so far, I’ve been unable to have children of my own,’ Jo paused and swallowed hard, ‘I can have first dibs on hers. You know, Christmas, Easter . . . As if I don’t have enough other people’s children to keep me busy on public holidays with Sam and Tom.’ Her smiled dropped. ‘Not that I don’t love Si’s boys, because I do.’

‘We know that, Jo,’ Lizzie said gently. ‘Don’t we, Mo?’

Mona nodded.

‘She meant well,’ Jo said at last. ‘I’m sure of it. Nicci was a control freak but she was a good person. She meant well.’

Mona looked up. ‘Did she, Jo? Do you really think so?’

Silence filled the shed and cold crept under the door and through the tiny gaps in the window frame. It was as cold now inside as out.

‘I feel . . .’ Lizzie said, looking around, taking in her friends sitting side by side and feeling inexplicably left out, ‘. . . like I hardly knew her at all. There were hundreds of people at church I didn’t recognise, friends, maybe even family, I didn’t know existed. And this, two hundred yards from the kitchen where we spent so much time.’ She gestured at the shed. ‘I didn’t even know this was here, did you?’

‘I thought it was all dirty pots, plastic trays and bags of compost,’ Mona said, swiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Not another little world.’

‘It’s like she’s gone off,’ said Jo, getting up and brushing ineffectively at her skirt, ‘and taken the map.’ She sounded lost.

‘She left us the letters,’ Lizzie said.

‘They’re not a map,’ Mona said crossly, stamping her feet against the cold. ‘They’re hardly even a clue.’

Chapter Five

It has to be done, Jo told herself. Someone has to sort through Nicci’s clothes and that someone has to be us. David isn’t in a fit state to do it.

The high street was gridlocked: a snarl-up caused by the usual mix of road works, double parking, plus an icy drizzle so depressing it felt like it had been falling for eight weeks straight.

Checking her watch, Jo sighed. Six thirty. Too early and too late. When she left work she’d thought she had plenty of time to spare. That was before it took forty-five minutes to drive less than a mile.