The Things We Do to Our Friends(39)

There were many other jobs we could have done if we’d been so inclined. I was still working at the bar, but the rest of them could have easily found work. We could have taught English to all the international students who poured into the city over the summer by bus. We could have taken internships at PR agencies and banks—dressing in cheap, wrinkled suits to make coffee all day for over-caffeinated men and women in their more expensive wrinkled suits. Working all summer for a single line on our future CVs to show we were keen and employable.

We didn’t do any of it, because we had bigger and better plans. I’d thought there would be more laziness involved, imagined scorching days where we’d have barbecues at Inverleith Park or sit outside bars with pints of lager growing warm in our hands, but the summer didn’t work out that way. As May seeped into a windy, strangely dreich June, the heat never came, and we spent lots of time in the flat. I remember the sound of our bare feet on the floorboards, handstands up against the wall, and classical music floating through the rooms. And plotting—so much planning and discussion.





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Firstly, we needed to work out how to be around the wives and with this we improved over the summer.

As labored and awkward as our exchange with Mrs. Landore had seemed at the time, the conversation was a dramatic improvement compared to our early encounters when Samuel set us up with some friends of friends who were interested in what we were doing. Afterward, one of them had phoned Samuel and firmly declined the offer. Because of Tabitha.

“That girl, she’s far too much.”

I was taken aback. I’d spent so long trying to not be too much, to talk slower, be nicer and meeker and calmer and not to stare. Never to be angry, because no one likes that. The rules didn’t exist for Tabitha, and the idea of her being too much was impossible for me to comprehend. Tabitha had her quirks, but she wasn’t too much for me. She was everything.

Samuel told me and then immediately regretted it. He begged me not to tell any of the others.

“She didn’t like Tabitha?” I was incredulous.

“She didn’t understand her like we do,” he replied, shutting down the conversation.

So, we adapted.

Ava would feature more prominently in some cases; her voice was low and she calmed people. An accent you couldn’t quite identify that made her sound a little more mature—international and probably quite rich. She worked well as a steering force. A safe pair of hands.

Tabitha, although intense and too much for long periods, dazzled in small doses, so her role was pared back. She was vital, though, because she added a dynamism to the whole thing that worked in our favor. I saw the way Mrs. Landore had assessed her—she couldn’t believe that someone so young could be so assured. Then me, quiet and set to the side. The one they so often chose.

It was a balancing act.

We worked on our playbook, and Edinburgh served us well for that. The students had mostly gone, but the city bulged at the seams with visitors to practice on. A dropped pen; a shy request for directions. We tried all the tricks and carefully built up a profile of what worked and what didn’t. We reassessed and we learned, or iterated as Tabitha said, because she’d been buried in books about entrepreneurship for the entire summer.

Under it all, there was the fundamental fact that we were so youthful. We could dress up and act and say what we thought people should say, but none of that meant we understood relationships. None of us had ever really been in a long-term relationship, excluding Finn from the equation because I still didn’t count it as anything serious. Tabitha and Ava were scathing of boyfriends, and of men in general.

What do men want?

We pondered.

“They like to be listened to,” Tabitha stated.

Ava and I exchanged a look. Tabitha’s listening skills left something to be desired.

“I saw it with my father,” Tabitha continued. “He’d come home from work exhausted and desperate to talk about his day, but his relationship with my mother had become so logistical. She’d ask him if he’d take the bins out. He’d ask her what was for dinner. She’d tell him he needed to sort out the house insurance. They’re the conversations I remember. So…yawn. Relentless,” she finished, with her own theatrical yawn.

There wasn’t much similarity when I thought of my parents and their glacial alliance against me—whispers in the corridor that faded into nothing when I entered the room, their bedroom door closed, always. I could recall opening it and feeling my mother’s hand on my wrist, nails digging in, and her hissing, “Knock.”

Tabitha was right, though. Listening was the key. For our first few clients, we listened to their problems, we made them think we understood. We practiced and we got better at it. I was a good listener. Less awkward than I’d been at the beginning, when I first moved to Edinburgh, because I understood my role better.

A clean start, and the focus was the present. Over that summer The Shiver never asked me about my background, and I appreciated that they never dragged Périgueux to the surface.

Often when you decide not to think about things, it’s impossible. But my own past, everything I’d buried, didn’t cross my mind much. Our world blinded me with its ambition, its increasing brightness, and it was easy to avoid examining any of it closely.





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