Sweet Sorrow(117)

‘Okay. Do I have to?’

‘Of course you do! It’s a great honour, you homophobic bastard. Also, Alex is filming, so—’

‘Fine, but do I have to make a speech?’

‘Uh, yes.’

‘And does it have to be funny?’

‘Of course it has to be fucking funny, it’s the best man’s speech.’

‘It’s a lot of stress. I’m not a natural performer.’

‘Oh, I know that.’

‘I can’t be funny.’

‘You can be funny, you just have to do it out loud. The main thing is to be heartfelt. Tell everyone I swear too much and you cherish our friendship. There you go – I’ve written it. Now you have to say yes.’

And so I was Helen’s best man, and when the time came, I asked her to be mine.

And then a month before the wedding, an email arrived, a screen grab of a Facebook page announcing a London reunion for the Full Fathom Five Theatre Co-operative, 1996–2001.

Got to be done, don’t you think? See you there.





Digging Down


I pulled on the jacket, while Niamh watched from the doorway.

‘That’s not your wedding suit, is it?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t realise it was that kind of party.’

‘Got to make an effort …’

‘Of course. She’ll be expecting it.’

‘They’ll be expecting it, all of the people there.’

Was my behaviour so unusual? It’s true that I’d always resisted the tug of nostalgia. I skipped school reunions, rarely went home, had few photographs, did not chase down old girlfriends online. Life was a series of befores and afters, the dividing line shifting every seven years or so: before and after meeting Fran, before and after moving away, before and after Niamh, the divide between each era as distinct and precise as the stratification in geological layers of rock. As long as the ‘after’ was better, why dwell on ‘before’?

Marriage would mark the next great divide, and yet here I was, three weeks before the ceremony, digging down through one, two, three layers. It was uncharacteristic and Niamh saw this too, and the light-heartedness she’d put on when I’d first explained the expedition had faded as the date drew near.

‘I’ve told you, you’re very welcome to come.’

‘Someone else’s am-dram reunion? That’s desperate. No thanks, I’m not deranged.’

‘Helen’ll be there.’

‘I can see Helen any time. You’ll both be wanting to talk to all your old friends anyway. Doing your vocal warm-ups, tossing your beanbags, playing your trust exercises …’

I laughed. ‘If it’s like that, I’m not staying either. I probably won’t even know anyone.’

‘Oh, I think you’ll know someone.’

I sighed and slumped onto the bed. ‘I don’t have to go, if you don’t want me—’

‘Oh, no, don’t pin it on me. You’re a grown-up, you can do what you want. Do you want to go?’

‘Well, yes, I kind of do.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Nostalgia.’

‘Curiosity?’

‘Bit of that.’

‘So go. I’ll have a nice night in by myself. Google old boyfriends. Photoshop my face into their wedding photos.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Don’t get any lipstick on your collar.’

‘Like in the song.’

‘What song?’ she said.

‘That’s where it comes from. Lipstick on your collar/Told a tale on you. You know that song.’

‘No, because I’m not one of the Andrews Sisters. I wasn’t born between the wars.’

‘Who gets lipstick on their collar anyway? How would it get there?’

‘Lipstick on your dick, more like. That’s what I’ll be looking out for.’

‘You’re filthy.’

‘I am. So hurry home.’

Now that we’d laughed, I felt able to leave, but on the bus I found myself unaccountably nervous. I’d once seen a documentary about locusts or cicadas that hide as dormant adolescents in the sun-baked soil of Arizona, or Mexico, or the Sahara, then, after precisely seventeen years, rise up simultaneously in a great, destructive swarm. What if first love was like this? Dormant but gathering its strength, then laying waste to everything stable and good? These things happened.

It seemed unlikely. I loved Niamh like mad and besides, Fran and I were entirely different people then, bizarre sixteen-year-old aliens, and first love wasn’t real love anyway, just a fraught and feverish, juvenile imitation of it. These things don’t happen if you don’t want them to, and if I summoned up the thought of Frances Fisher, I felt a kind of fond embarrassment. Something else too, harder to name and hardly the stuff of great destructive passion, but still enough to make me change my clothes and brush my teeth and leave the house on a damp Sunday in November.

The venue was the top room of a pub in Stoke Newington, the start time an innocent six p.m. Family-friendly, the invite had said. I met Helen in a bar across the road so that we could revise.

‘Who was the guy who played Friar Laurence?’ said Helen. ‘Always crying.’