Just Last Night(4)
“What award did Marcus Garvey get?” Justin says.
“Rear of the Year?” I say, and Ed hoots. Hester’s fuming, I know.
“OK, ignore me then!” Hester says. “Pardon me for trying to participate, guys.”
“No, no! It’s good! I think you’re right,” Ed says, hastily. “None of us have anything better. Write it down.”
I always respect Ed for leaping chivalrously to Hester’s defense, while wishing it was for someone who better deserved it.
Hester scribbles while Justin, Susie, and I try not to meet each other’s eyes.
“More drinks I think, what’s everyone having?” Justin says and gets up to go to the bar.
I go to the loo and, after I flush, I see I have a text from Susie. (Not a WhatsApp, because it would risk appearing in full on a lock screen. Canny.)
When I open it, I see it’s been sent to myself and Justin. I know how they’re triangulating the signal, next door—Justin nonchalantly studying his handset while waiting to be served, Susie slightly angled away from the couple, feigning picking up her messages.
Susie: WHY IS SHE SUCH A BOSSY ARSEHOLE THOUGH
Justin: She can get away with anything due to the fabulous breasts, darling
Susie: I have great tits and you don’t see it affecting my personality. That answer is SO OBVIOUSLY WRONG. And why is Ed such a wimp about it. Oh yes write that bollocks down, my precious little poison dumpling. ARGH
Justin: Again, boobs
Eve: The poisoned dumplings
Susie: I swear she knows it’s the wrong answer and is doing it to fuck with us
I lean against the pleasantly chilly wall in the loo and type, grinning.
Having been in stone-cold love with Hester’s other half for the best part of two decades means I never know how much of my dislike is plain old envy. Susie and Justin continually—and inadvertently, because they absolutely don’t know—reassure me I’d have disliked her anyway. I often play Nice Cop in regards to Hester, to further throw everyone off the scent.
Eve: You wait, she’ll be right and that’ll show us
Susie: She’s not right, she doesn’t even know who Marcus Garvey was, you could see that when Justin challenged her
Justin: She probably thinks he won Best Video 2007 at the Grammys
Susie: Lol. And I’d just point out that Eve’s suggestion got shot down and she didn’t get the hump
Eve: Does this say anything bad about my breasts
Susie: Only that they’re not a carbon offsetting scheme for being a horror
Justin: Sigh. Let us get drunk.
2
Justin and Susie are both personality types who, by and large, don’t do guilt. It would slow them down considerably. I drink guilt like a smoothie for breakfast, and much as I revel in our regular secret back channel comms about Hester, I know I shouldn’t.
As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are intolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back.
Option two might not be assertive or noble but it has a lot less impact on the social contract.
None of us have ever really doubted that pushing back on Hester would badly damage our friendship with Ed. You don’t get a veto on your friends’ and relatives’ partners. Don’t I know it. Could’ve avoided my mum’s second husband disaster if I did.
When I return to the table, I can sense, at the pace we’re drinking, we’re beginning a messy descent from general knowledge acuity. Leonard has wisely curled up and gone to sleep. There’s only Friday at work to struggle through tomorrow.
“You can tell you’re on half term,” Susie says to Ed. “Hey. Eve. Did you mention the other day that Mark has had a kid?”
“Oh yes,” I say, taking a hard swallow of my fresh Estrella. Ah, lovely numbing beer. “He posted the photos last week. Ezra. Cool name.”
Mark is my ex and my only serious boyfriend. He went off to be successful in journalism in London when we were twenty-nine and I didn’t move with him, we long-distanced. Pretty soon he decided my reluctance to relocate meant I wasn’t sufficiently committed—he was right—and finished it. He now works for Time Out in San Francisco, is married, an American citizen, and a father. Meanwhile, I got a cat.
Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot. Coincidentally my mum says that too.
“Weird to think he used to be in here with us so often, and now he’s over there, forever. You’re not bothered?” Susie says.
“Uhm, no. It feels very distant to me, you know? In every sense.”
“How did you find out?”
“He popped up following me on Instagram a few months ago and I followed him back.”
“Aha. He’s not entirely over you, then,” Ed says. “He wants you to see he’s moved on, and check what you’re doing. Which is a sure sign of his not having fully moved on.”
“Hah. I doubt it. The fashionable neighborhood of Lower Haight, five thousand miles away, is the very definition of moving on.”
(Yes, of course I know these things from 1:30 a.m. bleary tap-tap-scroll research.)