The Things We Do to Our Friends(81)

I shook my head. Remembered Tom Landore’s look with so many things mixed in, and how I’d run away from him.

A quick calculation—that would have been about two weeks before she did it, and things must have been bad. He’d wanted to speak to me that night.

“That’s awful,” I said.

“By the way, this is all news to me,” Imogen piped up.

Samuel and I ignored her, and he continued. “Eve was so upset. But I never thought she’d do anything so final. You’re sure you didn’t know any of this?” he asked me, as if it was impossible that so many things could have been going on that I hadn’t been aware of.

How oblivious I’d been to what was happening around me even though the signs of discontent from the two of them had been there for a while. When things had been going well, I’d been more than happy to ignore anything that felt wrong, and even then and there on the beach, I wanted to run away from it all. Wished I could go back in time to when we were all a group.

“I only ask because right at the end, before Christmas, I gave Eve your number,” he said.

“What!” A sudden sickness as a thought bubbled. “Why on earth would you do that?” I asked.

“I just thought it might straighten some things out. It was all such a mess. God, the whole thing’s such a fucking mess still, really. I don’t know what I was doing, to be honest. Did she call you? Did you speak to her before she did it?”

The calls.

I thought of the breaths, catching and weepy. So late at night that they barely felt real. Nights so long and desperate and cold that I was sure no one else in the world could have possibly been awake apart from me and the person on the other end of the line. Then they had just stopped.

“No. No calls,” I said, because I couldn’t bring myself to go into it with him.

“I know there are things Tabitha has on you,” he said. “You can tell me.”

“I really can’t.”

He rubbed his eyes, wearily. “Fine,” he said.

“So, what now?” I asked.

He considered it. “I doubt they’d let you go so easily. You hold the whole thing together, far more than Tabitha. Who would have thought you’d be so good at it?”

Imogen nodded in bored agreement. “You are good at it.”

I didn’t respond.

“The boys found Eve,” Samuel continued. Now that he’d started, he seemed to be unable to stop. “They called me. Everyone always calls me. After that, there was no way I could be part of any of this.”

Imogen stared at the house. “You should get out too. Stay away from them and stick to that boring boyfriend of yours,” she said.

Samuel smiled properly for the first time that afternoon. He reached out, and I thought he might touch my cheek, but he didn’t even though I think he wanted to. I would have let his fingers run over my face just to feel warmth on that cold afternoon.

“Look at you! You wouldn’t say boo to a goose before and now you’re so…spiky! It’s good. I like it,” he said.

Imogen’s eyes were rolling almost out of her head again, and I wanted to scream and shout—Do you know how hard I worked to be a better person? How hard I worked to be good and kind and quiet, to speak correctly like everyone else, to not cause any trouble, and to never let things spiral out of control? To not be the center of attention? To not be spiky?

What had it all been for? I was trapped.

He tried again. “I stuck around for longer than I should because I owed Tabitha so much. I always have. I never felt like I’d paid her back for helping me get off the booze, and things just got out of hand, and then at some point, me and Imogen realized it had all gone too far. What Tabitha wants to do, it’s about something else. She likes it when we hurt people, but what were we supposed to do?” he asked me. “We’ve known Tabs forever. And you know how good it feels.” He looked at me, almost pleadingly. Then we both turned to Imogen, who was coughing away for attention.

“You don’t need to speak for me,” she snapped at him.





67


We walked without speaking, which was made easier because of the wind; it forced us to pull our hoods up around our ears. When we got back to the town center, I bought chips to share because I thought it might perk Samuel up and he might stay to discuss things more, but he said his goodbyes swiftly and disappeared in his car. I also bought a battered sausage, picked off the batter, and ate the reconstituted meat; the grease hardened and became thick and yellow when it met my frozen hands. Imogen watched with unconcealed revulsion. I didn’t care.

Nothing worked anymore. Seeing Samuel and Imogen together, they didn’t seem interested in each other at all. I knew if I tried hard enough, I could remember how we used to glow and dance around each other—whisky in the kitchen, the night at the casino. But the magic had never come from the two of them and I suspected it had gone forever. Even as Imogen had laid out the story, there was none of the dramatic choreography I’d grown to expect.

How Samuel was with me was so formal too, which made it easy to think about how things might have been constructed. I could see it now, Tabitha sidling up to him, her hands all over him: Flirt with Clare, make out you’re interested, just a little. She’d like that! You’re such a bloody catch. It’ll keep her closer to us all…One for the team…