The Guest List(63)

I think I get it. He was too clever to cut me off at the beginning. The idea for Survive the Night was mine and we both knew it. If he’d done that, I could have spilled the beans, told everyone about what had happened when we were kids. I didn’t have nearly so much to lose as him. So he brought me in, made me feel a part of it, and then he made it look like it was down to someone else that I was chucked out. Not his fault at all. Sorry about that, mate. Such a shame. Would have loved working with you.

I remember how much I liked doing the screen test. I felt natural, talking about all that stuff, stuff I knew. I felt like I had something to say – something people would listen to. If they’d asked me to recite my times tables, or talk about politics, I would have been fucked. But climbing and abseiling and all that: I taught those skills at the retreat. I didn’t even think about the camera, after the first bit.

The most fucking offensive thing about it is how simple it all must have felt to Will. Stupid Johnno … so easy to pull the wool over his eyes. Now I understand why he’s been so hard to get hold of recently. Why I’ve felt like he’s pushed me away. Why I practically had to beg to be his best man. When he agreed he must have thought of it as a consolation prize, a sticking plaster. But being best man doesn’t pay the bills. It’s not a big enough sticking plaster. He’s used me, the whole time, ever since school. I’ve been there to do his dirty work for him. But he didn’t want to share the spotlight with me, oh no. When it came to it he threw me under the bus.

I swallow my whisky in one long gulp. That double-crossing motherfucker. I’ll have to find a way to get my own back.





HANNAH


The Plus-One


Olivia is someone else’s sister, someone else’s daughter. Perhaps I should back off, as Jules told me to. And yet I can’t. As the others are streaming into the marquee I find myself walking in the other direction, towards the Folly.

‘Olivia?’ I call, once I’ve stepped inside. There’s no answer. My voice is echoed back to me by the stone walls. The Folly seems so silent and dark and empty now. It’s hard to believe that there’s anyone else in here. I know where Olivia’s room is, the door that leads off the dining room – I’ll try that first, I decide. I knock on the door.

‘Olivia?’

‘Yeah?’ I think I hear a small voice from inside. I take it as my cue to push open the door. Olivia’s sitting there on the bed, a towel wrapped around her shoulders.

‘I’m fine,’ she says, without looking up at me. ‘I’m coming back to the marquee in a minute. I’ve just got to change first. I’m fine.’ The second time doesn’t make it sound any more convincing.

‘You don’t really seem fine,’ I say.

She shrugs but doesn’t say anything.

‘Look,’ I say. ‘I know it’s not my business. I know we hardly know each other. But when we talked yesterday, I got the sense that you’ve been going through some pretty major stuff … I imagine it must be hard to put on a happy face over all that.’

Olivia remains silent, not looking at me.

‘So,’ I say, ‘I guess I wanted to ask – what were you doing in the water?’

Olivia shrugs again. ‘I dunno,’ she says. A pause. ‘I – it all got a bit much. The wedding, all the people. Saying I must be so happy for Jules. Asking me how I was doing. About uni—’ She trails off, looks at her hands. I see how the nails are bitten down as a child’s, the cuticles red and raw-looking against the pale skin. ‘I just wanted to get away from all of it.’

Jules had made out that it was all a stunt, that Olivia was being a drama queen. I suspect it was the opposite. I think she was trying to disappear.

‘Can I tell you something?’ I ask her.

She doesn’t say no, so I go on.

‘You know how I mentioned my sister Alice, last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I … I suppose you remind me of her a little bit. I hope you don’t mind me saying that. I promise it’s a compliment. She was the first one in our family to go to university. She got the best GCSEs, straight A’s for her A-levels.’

‘I’m not all that clever,’ Olivia mumbles.

‘Yeah? I think you’re cleverer than you like to let on. You did English Lit at Exeter. That’s a good course, isn’t it?’

She shrugs.

‘Alice wanted to work in politics,’ I say. ‘She knew that she had to have an impeccable record and to get the right grades for it. She got them, of course, she was accepted into one of the UK’s top universities. And then in her first year, after she’d realised that she was easily knocking off Firsts for every essay she turned in, she relaxed a bit and got her first boyfriend. We all found it quite funny, me and Mum and Dad, because she was suddenly so into him.’

Alice told me all about this new guy when she came home for the Christmas holidays. She’d met him at the Reeling Society, which was some posh club she’d joined because they had a fancy ball at the end of term. I remember thinking she brought the same intensity to this new relationship as she brought to her studies. ‘He’s dead fit, Han,’ she told me. ‘And everyone fancies him. I can’t believe he’d even look at me.’ She told me, swearing me to secrecy, that they’d slept together. He was the first boy she’d ever slept with. She told me that she felt so close to him, that she hadn’t realised it could be like that. But I remember she qualified this, said it was probably the hormones and all the socio-cultural idealisation of young love. My beautiful, brainy sister, trying to rationalise away her feelings … classic Alice.