Just Last Night(14)
“Hmm, yeah,” I said, to Susie’s shadowy outline, as I tired of squinting and put on my large sunglasses.
“Plus, he says he’s strawberry-blond but, in certain lights, it’s very dishwater mouse.” Susie wasn’t at all equal opportunity, when it came to men and the physical standards they had to meet.
“He’s almost ginger in some lights. I like fully red, flame hair,” I said. “Young Henry the Eighth was hot, you know.”
“Ugh he looked like a Christmas ham! You are so obtuse,” Susie said, “You are guaranteed to make the oddest choices of men in the future. I bet your husband is a genius recluse who wees in Kilner jars.”
We honked.
“He’s like an ideal brother,” I continued. “He’ll make someone a great boyfriend. He’s so easy-going and such a good listener. You feel like you can tell him anything.”
This was also one of the ways I knew Ed wasn’t a prospect—we would share all kinds of embarrassing things and laugh raucously. When I was interested in a male, I tried to be a riddle, I was tense. I didn’t admit to having once done a “fizzy poo.”
“But you can’t imagine ever having your ankles either side of your face with him,” Susie concluded, as I screamed in self-conscious horror and embarrassment. That’s Ed. Our friend. He doesn’t have sex, and neither did my parents. (Actually, that had turned out to be true.)
6
God laughs when we tell Him our plans, and He also has a good old chortle when He overhears us saying we know things for sure, like who we know we’re never going to feel feelings for.
(Yeah, my God is a man, I feel more comfortable blaming Him then.)
The four of us got places at university—all up north apart from Susie, who had to be Susie and go to London—and we were excited and anguished at our separation, homesickness, the big wide world.
Due to quirks of the different institutions, Justin and Susie left days before Ed and I did. Those days might as well have been months of desolation and a montage of trudging with pack ponies through blizzards and deserts for how well Ed and I bore it.
“Left behind, they’ll have forgotten us already!” we wailed, having killed a lot of time with coffees, and barrel-scraping action films at the multiplex, and comparing who’d had the most gnomic texts as bulletins from Justin or Susie. (I think Ed won, with Justin’s report that only said: “GRAVY AS PASTA SAUCE!”) Our city was a ghost town without our counterparts; all our contemporaries had vanished to halls of residences around the country. There’s no self-pity like a teenager’s self-pity.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked Ed, before our final day lingering in purgatory. We were eating chips from paper cones, our breath making ghosts, and I thought how grateful I’d been for Ed being around. He was dependable solidity itself.
“Oh, big game with my football team and then we’re going to get drunk at The Trip.”
“What?! What will I do?!” I wailed, and Ed replied: “Come! Come along. The game won’t take that long.”
I’d usually not want to be that superfluous at an occasion, or so openly needy, but the prospect of sitting indoors doing nothing but bickering with my mum and my younger brother, Kieran, was worse.
The game was in a park on a hill, north of the city and near where I now live. The field was on a slope, rolling down to the main road, and I languished at the upper end of it with a copy of Viz while they ran around.
I watched Ed with his five teammates—his good humor, his natural leadership, his powers of concentration. His muscled legs. Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realize you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.
Every so often he’d give me a Royal Air Force–style salute and I’d wave back. Separation makes you value something more and I was acutely aware of how fond I was of Ed, and how badly I’d miss him. It had thrown the big light on, in a room inside me.
I realized, at a subconscious level, I’d complacently assumed my future was full of Eds—what if it wasn’t?
Ed changed his T-shirt at the end of the match and I found myself curiously transfixed by upper-body definition I didn’t know he had, and the way he yanked the fresh one over his head. Something stirred. Obviously, I must be in a heightened emotional state to be ogling Ed Cooper’s milk-pale—if unexpectedly sculpted—abdomen. Susie would laugh when I told her.
We went to The Trip to Jerusalem and drank foamy sour things from casks, served in dimpled tankards, and felt brimful of cheer and anxiety and poignancy, at our imminent parting, to futures unknown. At eighteen, you’ve not experienced poignancy before.
Ed’s mum had insisted on picking him up to check he wasn’t too wasted, the night before the drive up to Newcastle. As we walked out of the pub I saw her car pulling in at the bottom of the road. We were too far away for her to see us.
“Sure you don’t want a lift?” Ed said. “It’s quite late to get the bus?”
“Yeah. No bother. I want the fresh air,” I said. The real reason I didn’t want their lift was because I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want the audience.
“Ack. This is it, then,” Ed said, gazing at me in the twilight, with a sad smile.