To My Best Friends

‘The question is,’ said Mona, putting her glass on Nicci’s dressing table and joining Lizzie in the doorway, ‘where the hell do we start?’

‘Knowing Nicci,’ Lizzie said, ‘there’s an arcane filing system. Nothing as straightforward as “what goes with what”.’

‘Alphabetical by designer?’ Mona suggested.

Jo scanned the wardrobe. The air was far cooler in here than in the bedroom. On the wall beside her, just inside the door, a thermostat was set at fifteen degrees Celsius. Typical.

‘Good guess,’ Jo said. ‘But I don’t think so. It’s too much of a mishmash. If all the McQueen, for instance, was in one place, the Prada in another, the rails would look more uniform.’

Mona frowned. ‘By style?’

‘I’ve got it!’ Lizzie announced loudly, glancing over her shoulder at the sleeping girls almost before the words were out of her mouth. ‘It’s autobiographical!’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Jo. ‘That would be chaos.’

‘And your point is?’ Mona laughed. ‘Lizzie’s right. Look.’

In the left-hand corner, tucked at the back, was a pair of beaten-up Doc Martens, the fluro-pink that graffitied them now almost invisible. Above them hung a familiar cracked and faded leather jacket.

Jo blinked and stared hard at the thick-pile carpet, determined not to let the others see her cry. Tears rolled down the side of her cheeks, dampening her neck.

‘I guess we start at the beginning then,’ Lizzie said, taking charge. Pulling a small wooden stepladder from its place at the back of the closet, she lifted a yellowing hatbox from the uppermost shelf, set it on the floor and removed the lid.

‘Omigod,’ she said, wrinkling her nose as she stepped back from the box. A piece of something unquestionably dead was suspended between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Gross. Can you believe she kept this?’

‘What is it?’ Mona asked.

‘Dead bunny,’ Lizzie said. ‘It was dead as a doornail then, and it’s even deader now. And it smells rank.’

‘Bin!’ Mona wretched. ‘Where it should have gone long ago. Why haven’t we got an option for bin? I’ll go and get a black bag.’

‘You can’t,’ Jo said. Taking the rabbit fur shrug from Lizzie’s hand, she laid it carefully on the bed and stood in front of it, as if guarding it from Mona’s malign intent. ‘It’s cherish, definitely cherish. Is there a peach satin slip in that box, too?’

Peering through folds of aged tissue paper, Lizzie nodded.

As soon as she saw the slip she remembered exactly what Jo had known the second she saw the shrug. Almost reverentially Lizzie handed the delicate fabric to Jo, who folded it neatly and put it on top of the shrug.

Mona watched, her expression one of revulsion. ‘If you apply the principle to everything,’ she said, ‘that if-Nicci-kept-it-it’s-significant, then the chuck-stroke-sell pile and the charity shop pile are going to be non-existent.’

‘It won’t apply to everything,’ Jo said. ‘But if it’s twenty years old and has no obvious value – like, it’s not the first piece of McQueen she saved up for, or those original Vivier shoes she bought in a junk shop on The Lanes in our second year, or her Helmut Lang suits – then it has a different value. A sentimental value. Like this.’

‘Why that particularly?’ Mona asked.

‘You must remember?’ Jo said.

She could still see Nicci in the living room of their rundown student house, drumming her newly graffitied docs impatiently while they waited for Lizzie to decide what to wear. ‘It’s what she was wearing the night we . . . The night she met David.’

Chapter Eight

The Rabbit Fur Shrug

Sussex University, Brighton, 1994

The evening hadn’t got off to the best of starts.

‘Lizzie, c’mon!’ Nicci bellowed up the stairs. ‘We’re gonna be late.’

Silence.

Late wasn’t Nicci’s thing. She affected casual insouciance but she was scrupulously punctual. Lizzie was always late, a reaction to her mum, who would always rather arrive two hours early than be two minutes late. And this involved clothes. Clothes and Lizzie just didn’t go together.

‘Just wear the bloody 501s!’ Nicci yelled.

More silence.

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering.’ Mona stuck her wet head, her arm and a single shoulder around the bathroom door. ‘You know how she gets.’

Nicci did. They all did. Lizzie was at war with her wardrobe.

‘Why don’t you just go and style her?’ Jo suggested.

Jo sat in the doorway between the hall and living room, a plastic cup of cheap white wine between her knees. She was wearing jeans. Mona and Jo both were. All three of them did, usually. Only Nicci refused, claiming they made her look even more like a boy. They didn’t, but who were Jo, Lizzie and Mona to argue? Nicci understood clothes in a way no one else did. Jo liked them – sometimes – more than clothes liked her, but she didn’t know how to play them. How to make them do her bidding.

Nicci was wearing her beaten-up DMs, with torn fishnets and one of the many vintage underslips she’d bought from a local flea market, topped off with a rabbit fur shrug she’d brought home earlier that day. The row about how disrespectful Nicci’s dead jacket was to Mona’s vegetarian sensibilities had just finished, only to segue into this.

If I didn’t love Nicci so much I’d be eaten up with jealousy, Jo thought. But she did. Nicci was Nicci. Whatever ‘it’ was, she had it. She could pull it off, black bra showing beneath the slip and all. That was just how life was.

‘Finally!’

Jo looked up at the sound of Nicci’s voice. Lizzie was hurrying down the stairs in her usual uniform of 501s and outsized man’s shirt.

‘You look great,’ Nicci said.

But Lizzie obviously didn’t feel great. She looked defeated. In the battle of Lizzie vs. her wardrobe, Lizzie had lost. Again.

They were so late they decided to skip the pub altogether. They’d drunk a bottle of the cheapest white table wine Tesco had to offer before they left the house, and had another two bottles in their bags so they went straight to the house party. The thud of the bass met them before they could turn the corner into the right street, and pissed students were already spilling onto the pavement.

The girls were so far behind everyone else on the alcohol-and-illegal-substance front that they almost kept walking.

It was Lizzie who saw him first. Not that his old-school purple Mohican was easy to miss. But in the dark, with the fug of B&H and dope smoke clouding the ceiling, and the pulsing beat of The Prodigy destroying the bits of her concentration alcohol hadn’t already wasted, it was a miracle she noticed anything at all.

Lizzie found him in the kitchen, beside a keg of Dutch cooking lager, set up on the draining board.

If she was honest his look intimidated her, but between the fierce hair and torn leather jacket were kind brown eyes.

‘Want some?’

After glancing over her shoulder to make sure he really was talking to her, Lizzie nodded. ‘Four cups, please.’

‘The party that bad?

She grinned. ‘I’ve been to worse.’

He grinned back. ‘Me too.’

When Lizzie fought her way back to Nicci’s corner, plastic cups of something warm and flat balanced between her hands, she looked different, somehow. Glowy.

‘You look different. Have you been smoking?’ Nicci asked, extracting one of the cups from Lizzie’s hands.

‘No!’ Lizzie yelped. ‘You know I don’t.’

But Nicci was right. She felt different too.

‘What is it then?’ Jo said. ‘You met someone? Fast work, O’Hara. You’ve only been gone ten minutes.’

‘Maybe,’ Lizzie said, but even in the dark they could see her blush.

‘You left one behind.’ The voice behind them made Lizzie start. She jumped, knocking Nicci’s hand and sending warm lager sloshing across her peach satin slip. ‘Bollocks,’ everyone said in unison.

‘Shit,’ said the guy with the purple Mohican. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I was just trying . . .’

‘Yeah,’ Nicci said.

‘I’m David,’ he added helplessly.

His face was in direct contrast to his hair. If his hair was all aggression and sharp edges, his face was round and friendly, his eyes soft and brown. He looked genuinely mortified. ‘Whose is this?’ He held up the final plastic cup and Jo claimed it.

‘I’m Lizzie,’ Lizzie said. ‘And these are my housemates, Jo, Mona and Nicci.’

In the time it took her to give their names Lizzie saw it happen. She’d seen it before. She was used to it. They all were. So used it, she didn’t even mind any more. Not usually. It wasn’t as if Nicci did it on purpose.

David smiled warmly at the others but his gaze returned to Nicci, who was staring back, her mouth slightly open. Lizzie started to say something, anything, to capture his attention, but it was pointless. She could have jumped up and down between Nicci and David and neither would have noticed. She knew the warning signs, but this wasn’t just a sign, it was hazard lights and sirens and all the makings of a ten-car pile-up.

‘You’re not at uni, are you?’ Mona asked. ‘I mean, I haven’t seen you around.’

‘I know Phil, the guy whose party it is,’ David said, dragging his attention away from Nicci.

‘Mad Phil?’ Lizzie said.

David nodded, his gaze never leaving Nicci. ‘I’m doing architecture at King’s. Just finished my placement. And just broke up with my girlfriend. Phil said there’d be some fit birds here so I should come down.’

‘They must have left already,’ Jo said. Boom boom!

Lizzie rolled her eyes and stuck her elbow in Jo’s ribs. Not funny, she mouthed.

‘What course do you do?’ David was saying, but it wasn’t a general question.

‘Eng lit. No idea why.’ Only Nicci answered.

‘What’s wrong with English?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just more interested in fashion.’

‘C’mon,’ Jo said, grabbing Lizzie’s elbow, ‘let’s go and steal someone else’s bottle.’

‘But I just got—’ Lizzie protested. She knew it was futile.

‘Lizzie,’ Jo hissed as Mona took Lizzie’s other elbow. ‘We. Are. Not. Wanted. Here.’

And imperceptibly, Lizzie drooped.

One of them met a bloke, then the bloke met Nicci and that was it. It wasn’t that Nicci was a babe. Mona had the model body, Jo had better boobs and Lizzie had the wild Pre-Raphaelite curls. But whatever it was Nicci did have, men wanted it. The path to their student house was littered with the broken egos of Brighton’s straight male population. And some of the gay ones too.

Chapter Nine

Seven fifty-five p.m. Mona glanced at her mobile, double-checked the clock on her DVD and sighed. Whichever clock she looked at it was still seven fifty-five.

She wasn’t sure which made her more tense: the fact Neil said he’d phone between seven and eight, and it was now precariously close to being clear that call was not going to come at all (oh, there’d be a good reason, there always was); or that in five minutes Jo would be knocking on David’s front door and doing what they’d all reluctantly agreed had to be done. Asking him the big questions. Had he had a letter too? If so, what did his say? Had he been in on this crazy plan all along? And if not, what was he going to do about it now he did know?

‘Daniel!’ Mona yelled. ‘Have you done your maths homework?’

Silence. If you could call the drone of computer-generated gunfire and the grinding gears of video-game tanks, silence.

‘Daniel!’

Silence, literal this time.

‘What?’

‘Homework? Have you done it?’

‘Yes, Mum. Ages ago.’

‘When, ages ago?’

Dan, all five foot ten and counting, filled the doorway. The flat was too small for them now. Too small for him, certainly. Barely fourteen and already four inches taller than Mona. Every inch his father’s son. Physically, at least.

‘After tea and before now. Maths and physics. Do you want to see it?’

It was a dare, not a question. He knew she wouldn’t; especially not physics. English or history she might have taken him up on. Funny how his homework was never English or history.

She shook her head and watched his back – spookily familiar and scarily alien – return to his boxroom.

Once Coronation Street was finished, Lizzie dabbled with a documentary about obese babies on Channel 4 and now she was trying to care about University Challenge.

When Jo first volunteered to talk to David, Lizzie had to admit she’d been relieved. But now . . . she felt . . . what did she feel? Guilty, she supposed, for copping out. But also a bit excluded. This affected her too. All right, so Nicci had left her a patch of land (albeit right outside David’s kitchen window). But still, it wasn’t the same. The others had been left people.

‘Picasso,’ Lizzie guessed. Just as the boy onscreen said, ‘Van Gogh.’

‘No, it’s Picasso.’

Lizzie high-fived the air. Still got it.

No matter how many times Lizzie looked at her mobile, balanced on the arm of the sofa, it refused to ring. Jo should be there by now. She’d promised to call as soon as she could, but that might not be for ages.

Idly, Lizzie flicked through the channels, ending back at University Challenge.

Gerry had gone straight to squash from a late meeting; he wouldn’t be back until gone ten, maybe eleven. Perhaps if she texted Jo now she could go with her, be her wing woman. Lizzie could be at David’s in ten minutes if she left now. Snatching up her mobile, she found Jo’s number and clumsily typed, Want some moral support? She pressed Send, before she could think better of it.

Eight ten p.m.

David wouldn’t mind Jo being ten minutes late. Since Jo hadn’t warned him she was coming, he wouldn’t even know. She hadn’t told him because that way she could still chicken out. And he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t convenient.

She’d come straight from Capsule Wardrobe’s offices, taking advantage of Parents’ Evening at Si’s school to get in some extra hours. She was knackered, and worried about last month’s profits. The new season had been in full swing for two months now, but business was still slow. Part of her wanted to put it down to the weather, but who was she kidding? They’d had a sub-zero spring before; it hadn’t affected sales then.

Smoothing down her sweater dress and tucking the hems of her skinny jeans into her ankle boots, Jo tried to gauge her reflection in the door’s glass panel. Her hair had been thrown into a ponytail hours ago, her roots were long overdue and, apart from red lipstick reapplied in the rear-view mirror two minutes earlier, her makeup hadn’t been retouched since breakfast. She knew she didn’t look great.

It was now or never, she decided. Do it, or go home and beat yourself up for the rest of the evening. As she raised her hand to ring David’s old-fashioned bell, Jo felt her mobile vibrate in her pocket. Damn. She was tempted to ignore it, but just in case it was Si she turned away from the front door and checked her screen.

Want some moral support?

Jo sighed. She didn’t know which was worse, Mona not attempting to disguise her relief when Jo volunteered, or Lizzie’s indecision. Come or don’t come, she had wanted to say, but make your bloody mind up. The fact was, Lizzie didn’t want to be there. She just didn’t want to not be there either.

It had to be a charity, the local MP canvassing or a neighbour looking for a lost cat/apologising for noisy teenagers/ wanting to borrow a parking permit. Nobody else knocked unannounced at quarter-past eight on a Monday night around here. If he ignored them, David decided, they’d probably go away. He couldn’t be bothered with being neigh-bourly tonight. It had been one of those days. Another one of those days. He just wanted to sit in the dark and wait for it to end.

The doorbell rang again. Its ancient chords hitting precisely the right note to pierce his low-level headache. Another ring like that and the girls would be awake.

‘Fuck off,’ David groaned aloud.

Could his day get any worse? The girls had taken for ever to go down tonight, demanding story after story and then complaining in unison that he didn’t do the voices the way Mummy did.

To which there was no answer. Parent fail.

David knew they weren’t saying it to hurt him. They weren’t even three years old, for God’s sake. And they were hurting too. They didn’t understand where Mummy had gone. Even though, as coached by the child psychologist his mother had insisted he consult (‘She’s an expert on child bereavement, you’re not’), he’d taken Harrie and Charlie to the funeral. And, to be honest, he didn’t understand why Mummy had gone away either.

The bell rang again. Whoever it was had no plans to go away. It was a miracle it hadn’t woken Charlie and Harrie already.

‘All right,’ he muttered as he dragged himself from the kitchen table. ‘You win. I’m coming.’

‘Look, just—’

David was in full flight as he flung open the front door. He stopped, as if looking for someone else behind Jo. ‘Jo . . . I . . . you didn’t . . . I wasn’t expecting you.’

He didn’t exactly look thrilled to see her.

From the far end of the hall she could hear the low buzz of voices competing for airspace. Someone in the kitchen. She strained to hear . . . someone in the living room, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a week or so. I dropped by on the off-chance. I should have called first, to check you didn’t have visitors.’

‘Visitors? I don’t . . . ?’

Pushing gently past him, Jo went to investigate. The door to the living room was open and a documentary was on the TV. In the kitchen a poet was saying something she clearly thought profound on Radio Four. An iPod played softly from the dining table.

The kitchen was a mess again. One of the spotlights over the sink had blown since her last visit. It looked like the washing-up hadn’t been done in days. And there were still bunches of dead flowers from relatives David claimed not even to know on the windowsill.

‘Oh God.’ She turned to him. She wanted to take him in her arms and hug him, but everything about his manner said no.

‘That bad?’ she said.

‘Worse.’

Shoulders sagging, David shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked about twelve. Boyishly handsome, utterly lost. There was a splosh of wine on the front of his work shirt. It didn’t look recent.

‘I can’t stand the silence,’ he said finally. ‘Before Nicci . . . when she was here, her constant racket used to drive me nuts, all the music and chat – you lot always here, and when you weren’t you were constantly on the phone. Never a moment’s peace, never just us. You have no idea how hard it was to get that woman on her own. But now . . .’ he shrugged, looking helpless. His eyes brimmed, the long lashes that Jo had always thought wasted on a man, glistened. ‘Now I can’t stand it, Jo.’

‘You should get an au pair.’ It sounded pointless even to her.

‘A what?’

She could see David thinking, How did we get from there to here?

‘I just mean it might help having another person around. With the girls, I mean, and . . .’ Jo couldn’t help glancing at the washing-up, a pile of clothes sprawling on the floor by the washing machine . . .

‘You mean the mess?’ He forced a grin. ‘I have a cleaner. I just gave her a few weeks off. I couldn’t, you know, cope with all her . . .’ he grimaced, ‘. . . sympathy. The nanny’s bad enough.’

Jo nodded, waited for him to continue.

‘I don’t think I could stand having someone around full time,’ David said eventually. ‘An au pair, I mean. Living here, with us. Not yet, anyway. It would be too much.’

‘Tea?’ Jo waved the kettle at him. ‘Or something stronger?’

David grimaced again. ‘Better be tea. I already tried something stronger. It just gave me a headache.’

The phone rang just as the kettle began to boil. Instinctively, Jo reached for it, as if it were her own. Sorry, she mouthed, seeing the expression that flashed across David’s face, and held it out to him.

He shook his head.

‘Hello?’ she said, and paused. ‘Hello? Hello?

No one there,’ she shrugged a few seconds later. ‘Must have been a wrong number.

‘That’s odd,’ David said. ‘Had a few of those lately. Wonder if it’s a call centre or there’s a problem at the exchange. Anyway,’ he added, watching her move around his kitchen as if it were her own, ‘I’m guessing you didn’t just drop in on the off-chance. What is this? Project check-up on David? Or something else?’

‘Does it matter?’ Jo said.

David said nothing. Instead he waited for her to turn to look at him. He’d been wondering when she’d come. And he’d known it would be her. Jo was the doer, the efficient one. Lizzie was too beaten down by that idiot she’d married to volunteer for a confrontation. And Mona – the bolter, his mother called her – she’d run to the other side of the world to get away from her family, and then run all the way back to get away from her cheating husband. And poor Dan, the evidence of that marriage, had packed his little rucksack and come with her.

No, when it happened, it was always going to be Jo.

‘You do know, don’t you?’ Jo said, after she’d dragged out the tea-making as long as possible.

Know what? David wanted to say. But he didn’t have the energy.

‘Of course I know.’

Even as he felt his anger rising, he tried to suppress it. This wasn’t Jo’s fault. There was no way she’d have come up with a stunt like this: four letters; life divided like a pie. No, there was only one person who could have come up with this.

Of course, Jo had been enabling Nicci for years. So had he. Every little thing Nicci wanted to do he’d tried to help her with, from the moment he’d fallen for the peroxide pixie.

‘What?’ Jo asked.

David shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ How did you explain your heart just twisted?

Nicci hadn’t been peroxide for a decade now, more, but the memory of that meeting was burnt in his brain. That was how he thought of her. Even now he felt bad about using Lizzie as an in. But from the moment Nicci had walked into the party, he’d known – like in some dodgy rom-com – she was his one, and he would do anything to get her.

‘David?’ Jo was standing in front of him. ‘Are you OK? I mean, I know you’re not . . .’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just thinking.’

‘So did she tell you about the letters?’ Jo ventured. ‘Consult you, I mean?’

‘You mean, did I choose Mona?’ Amongst the confusion and disgust, despite himself David could feel his fury take hold.

Jo stepped backwards. It was instinctive; she couldn’t help it. ‘I’ll take that as a no.’ Her voice was full of sympathy.

‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .’ David’s anger was gone. Dragging out a chair, he slumped at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. ‘No, Jo, she didn’t tell me. She didn’t consult me. She left me two letters. The first was instructions for delivering your letters; the second, to be read after I had, told me what she’d done. That she’d planned my future for me. Because she didn’t trust me to do it myself. Like an idiot, I did what she asked, it didn’t occur to me not to.’