Can We Still Be Friends (35 page)

Paddy was peering at a piece of joinery in the corner with the concentration of a cat waiting for the reappearance of a mouse. ‘Mmm. That’s the plan. Still some things to be resolved with the snagging.’

They both turned to the front door, through which Lee had come and was now pacing the room.

‘Neat … love the zinc. Makes me think of those counters in Paris, gives it a bit of the
ooh la la
factor.’ Annie couldn’t see any resemblance to the historic Parisian café but Paddy seemed pleased by the allusion. Lee was good at that stuff.

‘Yeah, you’ve got it in one.’ Paddy slapped Lee on the back. ‘It’s that mix between old and new.’

‘I thought I’d try and get Bananarama in here during the first week. An old mate of mine works with them and he says the girls owe him a favour. Then we get the paps snapping them walking out
with their nosh.’ Lee’s broad smile showed that he was pleased with his idea but also that he acknowledged the humorous side of it. It was one of the things Annie loved about him. He was obsessed with his job, but he would always get the joke.

Annie pulled her coat around her. Lee had left the front door open and there was a piercing wind coming through.

‘Lee, I’m heading back to the office. I’ve got a meeting with Tania. Catch you later.’ She gave Paddy a formal kiss on the cheek. ‘I’ll send you the press outline over tomorrow so you can cast your eye over it. Let me know if you want anything else.’ It was a drab day. Heavy overnight rain had pooled at the side of the road, and spat out from the wheels of buses. She looked down at the dirty pavement, remembering how, when she was a child, her parents had brought her up to London as a treat, and Letty had told her not to step on the cracks otherwise a bear might get her. Annie had spent all afternoon becoming increasingly anxious about this possibility before her father had reassured her that it wasn’t true, the bears would never attack a good girl like her.

Over the past two years Torrington’s had increased their staff, so Tania was always thinking about moving somewhere bigger, somewhere they could go open plan, but it hadn’t happened and the townhouse rooms were packed with too many staff, filing cabinets lining the walls and almost no space for visitors. Annie had just begun to go through the post when her phone rang. She picked it up, cradling it in her neck while tearing open a Jiffy bag.

‘Sal, how are you?’

‘OK. I wondered if you were free for lunch? I’ve got to come down your way later.’

In those few words, Annie could hear the difference in her friend. She still wasn’t used to the new Sal, the one that had emerged from the country-house rehab and flung herself into the safety net of the AA community. The uncertainty of ‘I wondered’ grated. Before, she would have said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, drop it now. We’re having lunch.’ Everybody talked of this being a phase. Once people levelled out after treatment, they got more of their old selves back.
She knew it was selfish wishing that the Sal she remembered would return – after all, look at the havoc the drunk Sal had created. But she knew lunch was going to be a lot less fun than it used to be.

She’d been looking forward to an apple and coffee at her desk but she didn’t feel able to let Sal down and agreed to meet in the basement Italian down the road where, in the old days, Sal would order several glasses of the bitter house red (always commenting on how small they were) to go with bread rolls and sticky
carbonara
. The windows, as always, were steamed up, and the noise from the kitchen drowned out most of the conversation as the two overworked waitresses in their black dresses and white aprons piled dirty plates on their arms around the squash of tables.

Annie couldn’t put her finger on what had changed, but Sal was different. It was as if somebody had turned down the volume. Her hair had grown longer, now reaching to her collarbone, and she wore it with a soft fringe. The smoking hadn’t changed though.

‘How are you doing? It’s been ages. We haven’t seen each other since that time when you just came out. I can’t believe it.’ Annie supposed they hadn’t met because of Charlie. He was still utterly unforgiving, which made seeing Sal a treachery. If she was honest with herself, that probably wasn’t all. She just hadn’t wanted to see Sal. Otherwise, she might have tried to go to that awful rehab place. But it had been so much easier all round not to. Now that they were sitting together in the stuffy, bustling Italian, she realized that she had missed Sal, a lot.

‘Don’t feel bad. I’ve been busy since I got sober. Sometimes it’s easier to be with other people who have gone through the same thing. I’ve been hanging out with my sponsor, who’s wonderful.’

As they ordered food, Annie wasn’t sure whether she should just assume that Sal would be on water or Diet Coke. It seemed odd not to be asking for their same old, same old with the house red. She thought she’d better not have wine either, not if Sal wasn’t drinking.

‘How’s work?’ she asked. ‘I bet they’re pleased to have you back.’

‘They’ve been really good, giving me the time off. ’Course I feel all the time I’ve got to prove that I’m “cured”. It’s different working
with Andrea now. She even looks like another person to me. You know how when you see a room for the first time it looks one way and then, when you get used to it, it looks different? Well, that’s how I feel about her, but in reverse. All that time, she was such an authority figure to me, but not really a person, and now, I see the person.’

Annie was grateful for the arrival of their
tricolore
salads. She hadn’t got used to Sal saying things like that, and wasn’t completely sure she wanted to.

‘Makes it easier that
The Times
poached Marsha,’ Sal continued. ‘I don’t think I could have borne having to sit opposite her as she looked all understanding about “my problems” while digging the knife in at every opportunity. I’m working on the Andy Warhol story this week. It’s a shame he’s died. I remember Kendra’s parents had a couple of Warhols. It would have been good to go and have a chat with them, but I don’t suppose that’s a possibility now.’

‘Probably not,’ Annie confirmed.

‘I really want to see her soon, I need to make amends. It’s important to me.’

‘But it’s still too soon for Gioia, Sal.’ That was an odd thing to say: ‘make amends’. It was probably more AA speak. ‘They lost their jobs, remember. Let Ken get herself together out there. I miss her too. But if she wanted to hear from us she would have let us know. Sometimes I think that last year was at least a decade ago.’

‘How are you, anyway? I know it’s not as if you can ever get over something as awful as losing the baby, but are you feeling any better?’ Sal looked around for a waitress. ‘I’ve become totally addicted to coffee. Coffee with a mountain of sugar.’

‘You don’t look any fatter … I guess the sugar replaces the alcohol.’ Annie watched Sal pour two paper packetfuls into the cup when it arrived. ‘I’ve come out of that depression, thank God. I don’t ever want to feel like that again, but everything’s changed. I just don’t know what I want. It all used to be clear, but now I wonder. Do I want a baby right now? Can I face the risk of losing another one?’ She shrugged. ‘Charlie’s keen. He keeps saying that I should
think of working part time, and really going for it. He’s always half blamed work for the miscarriage. But I’ve got lots of time, and work’s going well.’

She’d been hesitant about bringing up Charlie. Sal had known her long enough to see that her picket-fence dream had not turned out to be what she’d hoped, but she didn’t want to start on that topic. It wasn’t Charlie’s fault that things weren’t going well. It was hers. She just didn’t love him at the moment. She wasn’t even sure if she had ever loved him. But then, people change. It was only fairy tales where you loved someone for ever with no problems. Where once Charlie’s capability and sense of control and order had made her feel comfortable and safe, now they grated. Where once she had loved the way that he was besotted with her sexually and had enjoyed playing up to that role, now she often felt as if she was playing a part that didn’t fit.

Work, on the other hand, was the thing that made her feel most like the person she was now, and it was where she was most comfortable. That was something she had never expected.

The floor of the fish market was inches deep in water and it was soaking into Kendra’s plimsolls. Even so, it was better than when she wore flip-flops and the smelly liquid seeped between her toes. She and Gioia had made the mutual decision to loosen their commitment to vegetables and to eat fish once they reached the Algarve, enjoying the sardines tasted straight from the roadside grills or tearing the shells off giant prawns and dipping them into the garlicky mayonnaise. Kendra’s favourite was the
bacalhau
and chips at the shacks in the dunes where the wind from the sea whistled around and the sun was hot on your face.

She decided on red mullet. Gioia was the better cook, which wasn’t surprising since, before they’d lived together, Kendra had rarely attempted anything other than her veggie stews. But the move abroad had inspired her to cultivate a new skill. After all, Gioia had learnt to swim. She smiled, remembering those early lessons in the municipal pool down the coast with Gioia’s noisy shrieks.

‘I’m going to bloody drown. I’m getting out of here right now!’ she would scream, as she pushed herself to complete a width. Since her wailing was in English, the local children couldn’t understand the words, but it would have been hard not to get the general impression that she wasn’t enjoying learning breaststroke. Now, though, only five months later, she was much more confident and, as the weather had begun to warm, she had started to swim some distance into the ocean.

By the time she arrived back at the flat Gioia was crouched in the concrete yard, where they had placed pots of vivid geraniums and were hoping that the bougainvillea would eventually climb the white wall. They’d arrived in late autumn but, even then, the sharp light that came off the Atlantic had encouraged them to adorn the
yard, and the mild winter had allowed much of their planting to flourish.

‘I got mullet in the end. Are there still some tomatoes?’ Kendra, addressing Gioia’s bent figure, was met only by an acquiescent nod. As she wedged the fish into the small, unreliable fridge, she tried to decide what would be the best moment to bring up the suggestion which increasingly scurried around her thoughts.

She had loved the calm of these recent months. They had been such a contrast to the terrible weeks before they left. As she predicted, Gioia had retreated into an impenetrable shell of her own fury and condemnation and would brook no discussion of what had happened. Her bitterness at the world in general, a world in which Charlie and Annie encapsulated the status quo, was obsessive. Her rage at Sal was so entrenched that Kendra had given up explaining that Sal was now in a course of rehab as a direct result of that piece in the paper. It didn’t make any difference whatever she said.

Losing the Chapel, although inevitable, was agonizing for both of them. At first, Gioia had attempted to fight, arguing that she should be given the opportunity to clear her name, but it soon became obvious that the combination of the local council’s desire to remove her (a fact which she had managed to ignore for some time previously) and the Charterhouse move on the property was going to make it impossible for her to stay. She had stopped talking to Kendra almost entirely – only speaking when absolutely necessary and so relegating her girlfriend, in this time of crisis, to somebody on the other side of the battle. After several weeks of this treatment Kendra had reached the point of phoning Art to broach the subject of moving back home. It was utterly miserable to have Gioia so present but so far from her, when they had always been so close. But then, one morning as they lay waiting for the sky to lighten with even the slightest evidence that it was now day, Gioia moved up and stretched her arms out to draw Kendra towards her warm body and announced, ‘Get packed, girl. We’re moving. I’ve had it here, but I know I still want to be with you. It’s been a
process, but I’ve got there. If they don’t want me, I don’t want them. I feel sorry for the kids of course, but I’ve – we’ve – got a life to get on with, and I can’t be doing with clinging on here till somebody chops my hands off and I just fall. Let’s get out of this shit-hole and head for the sun. You’ve got some cash in that account of yours – I knew it would come in handy. Just us.’ Kendra could only agree.

Once they had arrived, their life together started anew. It wasn’t just their prowess in cooking and swimming, the balance of their relationship had shifted, allowing Kendra to become a more equal partner and Gioia to admit occasionally to uncertainty. In London, Kendra had drifted along in her wake but, here, she found herself taking the initiative just as often as Gioia.

After unpacking the shopping, Kendra sat on their bed and once again read Sal’s letter, which she had collected the previous week from the nearby poste restante:

I realize that this may be impossible for you to understand, but I have learnt so much in treatment. I miss you a lot and I really, really want to make amends for what happened, to both you and Gioia. I’d love to come and see you there – it would be fun and you’ll be amazed by how I’m managing without the booze. Annie says I’m still Calamity Jane, but at least I’m sober. I don’t know if you’ve heard from her, but I think things are bad with her and Charlie and I know she’d love to come too. Please think about it. Write soon x

She returned the letter to the drawer and went to the yard to suggest a trip to the sea.

‘It’s warm today. I thought I’d head to the beach. Coming?’

In a few minutes, after Gioia had grabbed a few oranges and a bottle of water and flung them into their plastic string bag, they climbed on to the moped, stuttering out on to the wide road. Eventually they turned off, on to increasingly rough and small tracks, taking a left where the wooden sign directed
Playa
. At the edge of the beach there were other mopeds parked, alongside an old Lada which looked unlikely to make the journey home.