Our Stop(34)

‘Facials in twenty minutes!’ Emma said, opening the door. ‘And I was thinking, how do you feel about the pub down the road for dinner? The Ox and Cart?’

She seemed a little wired to Nadia, but Nadia didn’t say anything. Instead, she settled on, ‘Facials: excellent. Pub? Less keen on going out if I’ll have no make-up on. Shall we get room service instead?’

‘Great,’ said Emma, her brightness almost a bit forced.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Me? Yes. Of course. Are you?’

Nadia stared at her friend. Something wasn’t right.

‘Yeah, I’m feeling better,’ she said.





16


Daniel


‘Well, what about the time you stole that bouncer’s waistcoat, and he chased you all the way down to Walkabout and then broke your nose?’ Jonny laughed, as Dean delivered another round of beers to the table.

‘Oh my god – he should have gone to jail for that!’ Daniel was hysterical at the memory. They’d been ribbing Jeremy for a good ten minutes about how out of control he was in third year. Daniel looked around the table in the front room of The Ox and Cart, where his mismatched collection of friends sat. There was the love monster Jeremy, now happily settled down with Sabrina and father to two kids – his second had just been born. Jonny lived with his wife Tilly, not far from Terrence, whose Cotswold estate they were all staying at as his pregnant wife was away for the weekend. Terrence had become a professional poker player at eighteen and used the money to put himself through an undergraduate degree and then an MBA, turning ten thousand pounds into three million by the time he was twenty-eight and adopting twins a few years ago, almost out of a need to keep occupied. And now he’d be a dad to a third! Sam was there, and Taz, Dean too; and although Daniel wished all the uni lads were there, being together with this group was enough. He was having a brilliant time.

‘Yeah, but Jimmy was shagging his girlfriend, and she asked us not to press any charges, remember? She was scared he’d find out?’ Jeremy had had several girlfriends that year, not so much because he was a cad, but more because he really did have that much love to give. He could charm a lamppost and believe everything he said, as he said it.

They’d all piled into the house after a delayed train to Charlbury from Paddington after work, starving and tearing into the pizza in the oven that had gone both soggy and crusty at the same time after being reheated, because Terrence still didn’t understand how the Aga worked.

‘I’m from a backstreet terrace in Manchester!’ he said, as way of apology. ‘I only learned what heated floors were two years ago!’

They’d made their way down the road to the pub, and easy banter and memories were stirred up in record time, juxtaposed with the new lives they all lived, all married or fathers and in Terrence’s case, millionaires too. In the years Daniel had known his ‘group’, he’d always felt at home. There was a shorthand between them that had only got shorter since doing shots as freshers and competing over who could list the most obscure band. They could have drifted apart in their late twenties, when life got busy and more complicated than they were used to. But it hadn’t. They’d gone the distance together. They were as tight as ever, even if they all lived in different places now. They didn’t see each other enough, but when they did get together it was like being in university halls all over again.

‘How you doing, you know – after your dad?’ Dean had said on the train, not long after they’d boarded. Daniel had vague recollections of them being at the funeral, but he’d been in no state to string sentences together.

Daniel told them all the truth.

‘I was a mess,’ he’d said, ‘but I’m doing all the right things to get through it and feel pretty okay now. The doc gave me some pills and I go and talk to someone about my head and see my mum a bit more in case she’s lonely.’

‘Fucking hell, yeah,’ Jonny had said. ‘I’ve only been married eighteen months but fuck me, if anything happened to Tilly I don’t know how I’d get up in the morning.’

‘We’re here for you, pal,’ Dean said, raising his beer can towards him so that all of them saluted the memory of Mr Weissman, silently saying a prayer that it hadn’t been them to lose their father. It was a strange rite of passage to pass through first: Terrence had been the first to get married, and Jeremy the first to become a dad, but Daniel was the first to have lost a parent.

He felt better just for being with the people who made him feel safe. The ones who’d seen him pull an all-nighter because he left essays until the last minute and the ones whose sisters he’d snogged when they’d come to visit and the ones who’d got so drunk with him the night of their graduation ceremony that they’d all ended up in the hospital while Taz got his stomach pumped, eating McDonald’s and sobering up as they talked about what they wanted for their lives. For all of them, the answer was the same: to lead better lives than their parents had. They’d all managed it.

Daniel got up to go to the loo, and Dean said, ‘Your round on the way back, mate!’ Daniel flipped up his middle finger at him good-naturedly as he walked to the Gents. He peed and noted in the mirror as he washed his hands how bright-eyed he looked. He was still buzzing about his latest advert getting published so fast. He was able to enjoy being where he was, in the moment, with his mates, because he knew that right now she could be reading his reply and that at half seven on Monday morning something brilliant could happen. Would happen – he could feel it. Life was good. He could honestly say, for the first time in ages, that he felt positive about what was coming next. About the future.