The Guest List(55)

There it is. Oh God. Charlie has been drinking.





JOHNNO


The Best Man


I down my glass of champagne and take another off a passing waitress. I’ll drink this one quickly, too, then maybe I’ll feel more – I dunno, myself. This morning, seeing all of this, seeing everything Will has … well, it’s made me feel a little shitty. I’m not proud of that. I feel bad about it, of course I do. Will’s my best mate. I’d like to just be happy for him. But it’s dredged it all up, being with the boys again. It’s like none of it affected him, none of it held him back. Whereas I’ve always felt, I don’t know, like I don’t deserve to be happy.

There are so many familiar faces in the crowd outside the chapel: blokes from the stag and others who didn’t go but who were at school with us. ‘No plus-one, Johnno?’ they ask me. And, ‘Gonna be putting the moves on some lucky lady tonight then?’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’

There’s a bit of betting about who I’m going to try to crack on with. Then they’re off talking about their jobs, their houses. Share options and portfolios. Some story about the latest politician who’s made an arse of himself – or herself. Not much I can add to this conversation as I can’t catch the name and even if I could I probably wouldn’t know it. I stand here feeling stupid, feeling like I don’t belong. I never really have.

They all have high-powered jobs now, this lot. Even the ones that I don’t remember as being all that bright. And they all look pretty different to how they did at school. Not surprising, considering it’s not all that far off twenty years ago. But it doesn’t feel that way. Not to me. Not right now, standing here, in this place. Looking at each face, it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, or that there are bald spots where there was once hair, or dark where there was once blond, or contacts now, instead of glasses. I can place them all.

See, even now, even though I’ve been such a fucking disappointment, my folks have still got the school photo in pride of place on the mantelpiece in our living room. I’ve never seen it with a speck of dust on it. They’re so proud of that photo. Look at our boy, at his big posh school. One of them. The whole school out on the pitches in front of the main building, with the cliffs on the other side. All of us perched on one of those metal stands, looking good as gold, with our hair brushed into side-partings by Matron and big, stupid grins: Smile for the cameras, boys!

I’m grinning at them all now, like I did in that photo. I wonder if they’re secretly all looking at me and thinking the same old thoughts. Johnno: the waster. The fuck-up. Always good for a laugh – not much more. Turned out exactly how they thought. Well, that’s where I’ll prove them wrong. Because I’ve got the whisky business to talk about, haven’t I?

‘Johnno, mate. Can’t believe how long it’s been.’ Greg Hastings – third row, second from the left. Had a hot mum, whose looks he definitely didn’t inherit.

‘Ha, trust you, Johnno, to forget your bloody suit!’ Miles Locke – fifth row, somewhere in the middle. Bit of a genius, but not too much of a geek about it, so he got by.

‘Didn’t forget the rings at least! Wish you had done, that would have been the ultimate.’ Jeremy Swift – up in the far-right-hand corner. Swallowed a fifty-pence piece in a dare and had to go to hospital.

‘Johnno, big fella – you know, I have to tell you, I’m still recovering from the stag. You did a number on me. Christ and that poor bloke! We really did a number on him. He’s here, isn’t he?’ Curtis Lowe – fourth row, fifth from the right. Nearly played tennis professionally but ended up an accountant.

See? They call me thick. But I’ve got a pretty good memory, when it comes down to it.

There’s one face in that photo I can’t ever bring myself to look at. Bottom row, with the smallest kids, out to the right. Loner, the little kid who worshipped Will, would do anything to please him. Anything we asked. He’d steal extra rolls and butter from the kitchens for us, brush the mud off our rugby boots, clean our dorm. All stuff we didn’t actually need or could’ve done ourselves. But it was fun, in a way, to think up things for him to do.

We’d find ourselves asking for more and more stupid things. One time we told him to climb up on to the school roof and hoot like an owl, and he did it. Another time we got him to set off all the fire alarms. It was hard not to keep pushing, to see how far he would go. Sometimes we’d go through his stuff, eat the sweets his mum had sent him or pretend to get off from the photo of his hot older sister on the beach. Or we’d find the letters he’d written to send home and read them aloud in a whiney voice: I miss you all so much. And sometimes we’d even knock him about a bit. If he hadn’t cleaned our rugby boots well enough, say – or what we said wasn’t clean enough, because he always did a pretty good job. I’d get him to stand there while I hit him on his arse with the studded side of the boot as an ‘incentive’. Seeing what we could get away with. And he’d have let us get away with anything.

I grab another glass of champagne, down it. This one hits home, finally; I feel myself float a little higher. I move into the big group of Old Trevellyans. I want to tell them all about the whisky business. Just for the next half an hour or so. Just so they might finally realise I’m as good as any of them. But the conversation has moved on and I can’t think of a way to get it back.