The Guest List(75)

That bitch.

‘So all this time,’ I say, ‘all this time that you’ve been telling me you’ve only ever been friends, that a bit of flirting means nothing, that she’s like a sister to you … that’s not fucking true, is it? I have no idea what the two of you were doing last night. I don’t want to know. But how dare you?’

‘Han—’ He reaches out a hand, touches my wrist, tentatively.

‘No – don’t touch me.’ I snatch my arm away, stand up. ‘And you’re a state,’ I say. ‘An embarrassment. Whatever they did to you on the stag, there’s no excuse for your behaviour just now. Yeah, maybe it was awful, what they did. But it didn’t do you any lasting harm, did it? For Christ’s sake, you’re a grown man – a father …’ I almost add ‘a husband’ but can’t bring myself to. ‘You’ve got responsibilities,’ I say. ‘And you know what? I’m sick of looking after you. I don’t care. You can sort out your own bloody mess.’ I turn and stride away.





JOHNNO


The Best Man


‘Johnno,’ Will says, with a little laugh. The cave walls echo the laugh back at us. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about. All this talk of the past. It isn’t good for you. You have to move on.’

Yeah, I think, but I can’t. It’s like some part of me got stuck there. As much as I’ve tried to forget it, it has been there at the centre of me, this toxic thing. I feel like nothing has happened in my life since, nothing that matters anyway. And I wonder how Will has been able to carry on living his life, without even a backward glance.

‘They said it was a tragic accident,’ I say. ‘But it wasn’t. It was us, Will. It was all our fault.’

‘I’ve been tidying the dorm,’ Loner said, when we came in from rugby practice. I’d told him to do it, as I’d run out of other stuff for him to do. ‘But I found these.’ He held them in his hand as though they might burn him: a stack of GCSE exam papers.

He looked at Will. You’d think from Loner’s expression that someone had died. I suppose for him someone had died: his hero.

‘Put them back,’ Will said, very quiet.

‘You shouldn’t have taken them,’ Loner said, which I thought showed courage, considering we were both about twice his height. He was a pretty brave kid, and decent, too, when I think about it. Which I try not to. He shook his head. ‘It’s – it’s cheating.’

Will turned to me, after he’d left the room. ‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ he said. ‘Why’d you get him to tidy it when you knew they were there?’ He was the one that had stolen them, not me. Though I’m sure now that he’d have let me take the blame if it got out.

I remember how he gave a grin then that wasn’t really a grin at all. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think tonight we’ll play Survival.’

‘You couldn’t bear it,’ I say to Will. ‘Because you knew you’d get expelled if it got out. And your fucking reputation has always been so important to you. It’s always been like that. You take what you want. And fuck everyone else, if they might get in your way. Even me.’

‘Johnno,’ Will says, his tone calm, rational. ‘You’ve had too much to drink. You don’t know what you’re saying. If it had been our fault, we wouldn’t have got away with it. Would we?’

It only took the two of us. There were four boys in Loner’s dorm that night – a couple of them had got sick and were in the San. That helped. I felt like maybe one of them stirred when we came in, but we were quick. I felt like an assassin – and it was fucking brilliant. It was fun. I wasn’t really thinking. Just adrenaline, pumping through me. I shoved a rugby sock into his mouth while Will tied the blindfold, so that any noises he made were pretty muffled and quiet. It wasn’t hard to carry him: he weighed nothing at all.

He struggled a bit. He didn’t wet himself, though, like some of the boys did. As I say, he was a pretty brave kid.

I thought we’d go into the woods. But Will motioned to the cliffs. I looked at him, not understanding. For one horrible moment it felt like he might suggest we throw the kid off them. ‘The cliff path,’ he mouthed at me. ‘Yeah, OK.’ I was relieved. It took us ages, climbing down the cliff path, with the chalk disintegrating with every step, our feet skidding, and we couldn’t even use the handrail hammered into the rock, because our hands were full. The kid had stopped struggling. He’d gone very still. I remember I was worried he couldn’t breathe, so I went to take the gag out, but Will shook his head. ‘He can breathe through his nose,’ he said. Maybe it was around then that I started feeling bad. I told myself that was stupid: we had all been through it hadn’t we? We kept on going.

Finally we were on the beach, down on the wet sand. I couldn’t work out how we were going to make this hard. It would be obvious where he was, once he’d got the blindfold off, even without his glasses. It wasn’t that far from the school and anyone could climb up that cliff path – a little kid, especially. Boys went down to the beach all the time. But I thought: maybe Will wanted to make it easy for him, after all, because of all the stuff he’d done for us – cleaning our boots and tidying our dorm and all of the rest. That seemed fair.