The Things We Do to Our Friends(10)
“Well, hello, Clare from the lecture hall. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Sam.”
That was how he introduced himself, but I never called him Sam after that; none of us did. It was always Samuel or Sammy.
Tall and handsome with a shock of curly red hair. It was a bold type of beauty that suggested a level of maintenance. The result of expensive orthodontics from an early age and a good diet. He wore a formal shirt and trousers, and his clothes were carefully ironed in a way I’d not seen much among the general student population. I thought back to the two boys in the bar. I’d already forgotten their faces, but I remembered their braying laughs as they pawed at Tabitha and Imogen. Samuel was different from those boys.
The girl who I guessed to be Ava sat to one side, away from the windows, next to the fire, curled up like a cat on an overstuffed armchair that looked about a hundred years old with stuffing seeping out from its sides. I couldn’t imagine being so relaxed.
She gave me a small nod and stretched out so I could see how tall she was, all legs and knees and elbows sheathed in a fussy assortment of leather and denim with lots of buckles.
“Clare, nice to meet you.”
An American accent but with something else mixed in that I couldn’t place. The way she constructed the sentence sounded very formal, like a governess or an army sergeant. I felt my teeth instinctively draw down on my lips, testing my own pronunciation.
Imogen rushed in, pushing a glass of wine into my hand, fussing over me in full hosting mode with a frilly red apron tied around her waist. She had unfurled a little, which suited her, her hair falling in her face as she pushed it out of the way.
“Oh, hello, Clare,” she said, far happier than I’d ever seen her in our lectures together, almost as if she’d briefly forgotten that she didn’t like me much at all. “Do come through and we’ll eat.”
8
We ate in the kitchen, and Tabitha sat at the head of the table. Imogen produced a stodgy aubergine parmigiana.
“No haggis, Immy? Booo!” Tabitha declared, sticking her tongue out at no one in particular.
“Not everyone likes offal,” Imogen said, dishing out her meal like a dinner lady, piling it onto our plates in huge portions without any other side dishes.
Finn laughed a lot when I told him later about Tabitha’s fixation with serving haggis. “Of course they eat haggis, Clare. Cultural tourists, all of them do it. A four-year anthropological study of the locals. I bet they don’t eat jellied eels when they pop back to London every weekend, though,” he said scornfully. I smiled at his haughty explanation. It made sense that Tabitha would consider eating haggis all the time as a charming thing to do.
Imogen had served Samuel first, clearing his cutlery to make room and making sure he had a napkin, then blushing like a proud housewife.
He ignored her and wolfed it down. I stored the quiet imbalance in that interaction to ponder on later.
They all chattered about nothing much, mostly ignoring me. Questions bubbled up in my head, but I pushed them down.
“So how do you all know each other?” I asked finally. It was the polite thing to say.
“Oh, school, down south. And then we came here together.” Tabitha took a long sip of wine from her glass and when she’d finished her lips were stained with it, her lipstick rubbed away. “Samuel and I…” She let the words curl around her tongue. “Well, we really have known each other forever, haven’t we?”
Samuel grinned. “It’s a funny story.”
I smiled encouragingly even though I’ve always hated it when people say that. Surely it’s up to me to decide if it’s funny or not?
Tabitha laughed. “Oh, doooo tell!” she pleaded.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, love. Does our new friend want to hear that?”
“Go on,” she urged.
He seemed to delight in her attention and, after a bit more back-and-forth that was bordering on tedious, he turned to me. “Our mothers were in hospital together, Clare. In a private hospital in Bahrain. Anyway, there we were, and the nurses were a fucking shitshow, cooing over us nonstop, you know.” He flashed a conspiratorial grin at Tabitha. “They wrapped us up in swaddling, and we were swapped about, and in the end we were handed back over, and they discharged my mother and Tabitha’s. Anyway, old Minta, Tabs’ ma, gets home, opens up the swaddling, and there’s a fucking cock there.” He paused for dramatic effect, face deadpan, little finger raised.
Tabitha wheezed at the other side of the table, and Imogen and Ava laughed obligingly.
“So, she calls up the hospital, and she’s screaming at them in English, and they’re shouting back in Arabic. Probably thinks her little princess has been sold to some sheikh or something, and they end up calling up my mother, who’s so out of it on Prozac she’s barely even noticed her new baby boy is, in fact, a girl! Anyway, no one wants to go back to the hospital, and both of our fathers were working pretty much nonstop, so Tabs’ ma ends up calling mine, and they meet up at some compound in Manama and ‘exchange.’?” He raised an eyebrow, his eyes locked with Tabitha’s. “Then they both realize they know virtually no one, and they’re absolutely crap at the whole expat thing, although Tabs’ ma was a little better than mine at society life. And then it was happily ever after and we basically grew up together before we came back to the UK, didn’t we, Tabs?”