Just Last Night(55)

I prepared for tonight, as much as I could, and I force myself to ask (or I’ll be condemned to forever wonder): “Susie’s description of it was ‘torrid’?” Well, Becky’s. Same-same.

Ed’s face has gone from shrimp pink to shrimp pink tinged with sickly white. I really hope he’s not about to admit to an act I’ll have seared on my imagination’s retina forever.

“We did it in the loos at the club,” he says, after a pause, and I swallow.

The severe crush I have suffered for ten years is dealt a body blow. A two-body blow.

I will always have to have this as part of my mental landscape of Susie and Ed: a frantic coupling in a graffiti-strewn toilet stall, Arctic Monkeys pounding through the walls. As a definition of torrid, I suppose it’s preferable to some degenerate activity I’d never heard of involving orifices and water-balloon animals, as if the world is some huge gangbang I’ve not been invited to. If I’m placing it on the great sliding scale of “the best to worst sort of unusual sexual activity for two friends to partake in, when breaking a third party’s heart.” A third party. That’s me.

“Susie led me into the ladies. We did it again at hers. We passed out. We woke up in the morning to the worst hangovers of our lives, absolutely crucified with horror by it. Believe me, a huge motivation for hiding it was how badly we both wished it had never happened. We agreed not to tell you and Justin . . .”

“Justin doesn’t know either?”

That’s something. I’m not alone.

“Yeah, he does. I told him, down the line. Susie didn’t know that.”

“What?!”

“Man-to-man, late-night-confessional kind of thing. To get it off my chest when I felt guilt over Hester.”

“Great, so I was the only one. Susie never told me.”

The sense of having been made a fool of, sitting there as the sole member who didn’t know this thing, who wasn’t mature enough somehow to be told this thing, gives me a feeling of intense rejection. It’s like what Ed did when we were eighteen, squared.

“She bottled it. As time passes it gets harder and harder to come clean. Bottlings only get bigger. It’s the cost of cowardice. The price of making the wrong choice at the outset.”

Ed stares at me heavily, as if there might be a double meaning, and I’m grateful for Roger’s sudden screech for a second chew stick, breaking the tension. Ever resourceful and charming, Ed has another one, of course.

Amid the noise of eager feline mastication, Ed continues: “After Susie had finished throwing up that morning, we discussed what we stood to damage or lose entirely by being a pair of twats. I’d been unfaithful to Hester. We’d potentially upset this—” Ed says, gesturing at me, but meaning our group. “For what? For something animal we’d done after drowning our frontal lobes in Heineken. We could barely look each other in the eye. We didn’t remotely fancy each other and, in the cold light of day, that made it simpler, but also much worse. I’ve never known self-loathing like it.”

I strain to remember any time when I’d come back from seeing Mark, when Susie had been different. I can’t. I remember larking around in that flat, Susie smoking with her arm held out of the sash window. She was seeing people, on and off, but never anyone significant.

With some effort, I remember her once saying to me, uncharacteristically pensive: “The thing about you and men, Eve, is you fall very rarely and very hard. I fall often, but I’m over it in a week.”

She must’ve meant Ed—so she fell for him too? Why did she never confess? Did she think I’d explode into a shower of dry leaves? I pick up my glass.

“You let Hester carry on being friends with Susie, with no idea?”

“That was utterly shit of me, yes. But I only had shit choices. If I confessed and our relationship survived it, I wouldn’t have been allowed to still be mates with Suze, so RIP our gang. She’s always been messed-up about how close we all are, as you may have noticed. The cost-benefit didn’t seem worth it, and it still doesn’t.”

“The cost-benefit,” I say, witheringly. “It wasn’t about balancing books. It wasn’t going to benefit you.”

“No, exactly, who would it benefit? Hester deserves to know the truth, in principle, but it wouldn’t benefit her, quite the opposite. There’s no way of discussing this without sounding terrible, because it was. It was a really gross thing to do and I’m ashamed of it to this day. I offered the ugly truth and, yes, it’s ugly.”

I’m randomly reminded of my mum and dad arguing over Bill Clinton’s impeachment. My dad saying: “You ask a man if he fooled around with someone who wasn’t his wife, he’s going to say no, isn’t he? What man in the world when put on the spot would say, ‘Ya got me’? I don’t see why him lying was a big deal when anyone in his shoes would.” My mum replying: “He shouldn’t have fooled around!” My dad: “Yes, but that’s a ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ when someone’s asking for directions, Connie, isn’t it?”

Am I unreasonable, asking Ed to be better than a president? Ed’s lies have only been omission.

Roger, offstage, slaps at the door on his cat litter box.

“. . . I’ve asked myself, apart from alcohol, why I did it,” Ed says. “I’ve never come up with a better answer than ‘because I could.’ You can’t disown your own character under the influence. Suze used to taunt me for being staid, a lot. I think showing off might’ve been involved. When I realized what she was intending, me feeling I had to meet the challenge and show I could be wild too. Ironic, given there was nothing to be proud about in what happened, the opposite. I couldn’t have made myself look or feel more ridiculous.”