Life and Soul of the Party (18 page)

Heading home I thought about the ring. How long had I peered through the the jeweller’s window trying to pluck up the courage to go in? There had been a dozen rings I’d had my eye on, varying in style and cost. Having come to a completely arbitrary decision that one of them would be the one that I would buy for Laura, I had ventured into the shop and asked the girl behind the counter to show me a few. As big decisions went I was pretty sure this wasn’t the best way to go about purchasing something that was supposed to be a representation of my love for Laura, but better to get the job done badly than not done at all.

I was after something that looked expensive without being gaudy, and cheap enough that I could afford it without taking out a crippling bank loan. I’d had a figure in mind. Earlier in the week it had been much smaller but when I had written it down on a Post-it note at work it had seemed woefully inadequate for something that was supposed to last a lifetime. I doubled the figure I’d first thought of (taking me well out of my comfort zone) and this new amount had seemed far more appropriate.

As the shop assistant showed me the rings, I’d begun to worry that I might actually be overstating my case. While I’m all for extravagant gestures I’m not particularly keen on spending money for money’s sake and all the obvious questions sprang up in my head. Would Laura really appreciate the five-hundred-pound difference between one ring and another? Would she be quantifiably happier? If I could have been sure that she would be happier then I would gladly spend the money. But if not, then wasn’t I simply throwing away good money for no reason? The only way to be sure was for Laura to choose her own ring and this would have been my ideal scenario, except that the whole point was for it to be a surprise. I’d wanted to do the whole get-down-on-one-knee thing and open the box, slip the ring on her finger and see the smile on her face. That would have made it all worth it.

By the time I’d reached home I knew what to do. I stuffed the ring, still in its box, into my pocket and made my way through the quiet streets towards Maitland Avenue and the boundaries of Chorlton water park.

I let my phone ring out until the caller gave up. I saw I had a voicemail message from Billy, the third he had left in the last hour asking me where I was. Just hearing the concern in his voice made me sad, but what was even sadder was that he hadn’t even crossed my mind until I’d got home.

Things had been great between Billy and me since the night we got together at Cath and Simon’s. Though we’d talked about going to Neelams to get something to eat, the plan changed. As I called a mini-cab to take us to Chorlton I began thinking about where all this was going with Billy. What I wanted – or at least what I thought I wanted – was a bit of fun and no more. I certainly didn’t want to get into another long-term relationship. So when the cab finally turned up I gave the driver my address and suggested we order a takeaway to eat at mine instead.

I’d been pleased to see that Creepy Susie and her boyfriend were nowhere to be seen and I’d led Billy to the kitchen and pulled out the drawer where we kept all the takeaway food menus.

‘Pick what you like and I’ll order it.’

As Billy flicked through the menus I became aware of the gulf between what I thought I wanted to happen and what I actually wanted now that thought was about to turn into action. Billy seemed far too nice a guy for a one-night stand and although he hadn’t said anything specifically I could tell that he wanted something more than a meaningless fling.

‘Do you fancy a beer? I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple of Becks left in the fridge.’

‘Yeah, that would be great.’ He looked concerned. ‘What’s wrong, Mel? Is everything was okay?’

I wanted to tell him I was fine. I wanted to tell him everything was okay. But instead I found myself saying: ‘I’m really sorry, Billy, but I don’t think this is going to work.’

‘I’ve been expecting you to say something like this,’ he sighed. ‘Is it anything to do with your ex?’

I nodded. ‘It’s sort of complicated.’

‘It always is.’ He put the menus down on the kitchen counter. ‘Look, it’s been great, Mel, but I think I ought to be going.’

I gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek. Part of me was already regretting letting him go but I knew I was doing the right thing. ‘I’m really sorry, Billy. You have no idea how gutted I’m going to be in the morning knowing that I’ve let you go like this.’

Billy didn’t reply. My words seemed to have made things more awkward rather than less.

At the front door he paused to do up his jacket. ‘Look, Mel, is it okay if I give you a ring later in the week so we can go out as friends – “no-strings attached”?’

The thought of seeing Billy again really appealed to me. And while I’ll admit that part of it came down to vanity – the novelty of basking in his adoration had yet to wear off – the rest of me genuinely liked him. He was funny, he was good company and he seemed more honest and open than most guys I’d met in years.

‘That would be great. I’d really like that.’

After he left I set about clearing up in the kitchen, which was a mess. I got bored of that almost immediately so opened the fridge instead, took out a half drunk bottle of Chardonnay and poured myself a glass. As I took my first sip I reached into my pocket and pulled out the novelty keychain that Billy had given me and couldn’t help smiling, still baffled by how he had managed to come up with such an appropriate gift. Pulling out my phone I typed out: ‘The lobster. How did you do it?’ in a text message and pressed ‘send’. Sixty seconds later I received the reply: ‘A good magician never reveals his tricks.’

Billy called next day and we arranged to go out for a drink the following week ‘just as friends’. We met up at Sam’s Chop House on Chapel Walks and talked all night, barely drinking because we had too much to say and too many jokes and bad puns to share. By the end of the night it was completely obvious to me that we would end up being more than just good friends. Something about him clicked with me. The chemistry between us felt natural and easy in a way that I’d never imagined was possible with anyone other than Paul. And although nothing happened on that first night – we didn’t even kiss again – I knew that something would happen soon and it would feel right.

A few weeks later, Billy invited me to the cinema on Sunday night. By this time we were already spending so much time together that when I wasn’t at university, working at Blue-Bar or asleep, chances were that I would be with Billy. But in all this time I’d never been to his house. When I pointed this out to him after the film, he confessed that it had been a deliberate strategy because he was embarrassed. I playfully pushed as to why but he seemed to go into a bit of a mood so I dropped the subject, but then out of nowhere he said, ‘Do you fancy coming back to mine now?’ He seemed agitated so I felt bad for teasing him and said we didn’t have to, but he insisted so we caught a cab back to Withington.

We stopped off on the way at the twenty-four-hour grocery shop around the corner from his house and bought two bottles of red wine, a four-pack of Red Stripe and a family-sized bag of crisps and then made our way back to his place.

The house was part of a huge Edwardian terrace in a dilapidated state of repair. Paint was peeling from the windows and a pane of glass in one of the upstairs windows had been smashed and replaced with a piece of cardboard gaffer-taped in place. It reminded me of the kind of place that I had lived in when I was in my twenties. The kind of place that in my thirties I’d never dream of moving into on pain of death.

Billy’s flat was much nicer than the hallway with its two seemingly abandoned mountain bikes and three full black bin bags had led me to believe. In the living room there was a big brown sofa, a seventies-looking armchair and a large tiled-top coffee table. The only adornment on the magnolia walls were a number of film posters, the titles of which I could’ve guessed without even seeing them:
The Godfather II, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs
and
Goodfellas.
Classic boys’ films, each and every one. I could’ve been standing in the very same flat that Paul and Chris had been sharing back when we all first met. Nothing changes.

‘Do you fancy a drink?’ He didn’t bother to hide his relief that his flatmates were out.

‘Why don’t we make a start on one of those bottles of red?’

Billy disappeared into the kitchen in search of some glasses and I followed. He began rooting around in the various kitchen drawers for a corkscrew before somewhat explosively giving up and kicking one of the cupboard doors in anger.

‘What’s wrong?’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘This is why I didn’t want you to come here.’

‘Why?’ I tried to lighten the mood by making a joke. ‘Because you don’t have a corkscrew?’

Billy shook his head like I was missing the point. ‘Forget it, Mel, maybe you should just go.’

Now I really was confused.

‘Look, I was just joking, Billy. This isn’t a big deal.’ And because I could tell he didn’t mean it about me going, I put my arms around him and then after a short while we started kissing.

When we stopped, eyes closed, foreheads touching, he murmured, ‘I didn’t want you to come here because I didn’t want to give you another reason not to like me,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to give you another reason to walk away.’

For Billy, the flat was hard evidence of the age gap between us, it was proof that we were at different stages in life. I was living in a nice purpose-built flat in Chorlton while he was in a student hovel that didn’t even have a corkscrew.

If ever there was a single moment when the way you perceive a person changes so dramatically that it’s like seeing inside their soul, this was it. In that second, I really liked him. And it didn’t matter about what anyone thought, whether he would still love me when I was forty-five, about my biological clock, if he wanted kids or even that I was still in love with Paul. All that mattered was that I liked him and he liked me.

Standing next to the water’s edge watching the reflection of the moon scattered in front of me I thought about all of the times that Laura and I had stood in this very spot. The last time had been only a few weeks earlier when, inspired by a small flash of early summer that had gripped the nation, we’d sat in the sun watching the light reflecting off the water and planning the itinerary for her trip, while making sure also to talk about our plans for life after her return. But that was then and this was now. Now it was all over.

I took the box out of my pocket and held Laura’s engagement ring between my thumb and forefinger before clenching it in the palm of my hand. I threw back my arm to throw the ring and everything it represented into the water but at the last minute, just as the ring was supposed to have been tracing the arc that would have led it some twenty feet into the middle of the water, I closed my fist tightly and refused to let go. It wasn’t the cost of the ring that stopped me, the pointlessness of such a gesture or even the sense that I might regret the decision. It was that I still loved Laura and whether she was right here in Manchester or halfway across the world, I wasn’t sure that would ever change.

The sound of a police siren roused me from my thoughts of Billy. I suddenly missed him, so I tapped out a quick text telling him that I had felt a bit ill and had gone home but would call him in the morning. I pressed ‘send’ and was about to put the phone away and go to bed when the intercom near the front door buzzed. Assuming it was just some random drunk having a laugh I ignored it and carried on towards the bathroom but a few moments later it buzzed again, this time more insistently. I stomped my way to the hall and pressed the button that opened the front door, hoping that would be the end of it. People visiting other flats were forever pressing the wrong buzzer in the hope of gaining entry and as I had yet to discover that I’d accidentally let in a mass murderer rather than a bunch of my neighbours’ drunken mates, I reckoned it wasn’t worth losing sleep over.

Brushing my teeth at the sink going over the entire evening again in my head I was startled by an abrupt knock on the front door. My heart began pounding at the thought that perhaps I had after all let in some random nutter from the street. Fuelled by anger and tiredness I called out in no uncertain terms that whoever was knocking should leave the building straight away as I was already on the phone to the police. The second I heard the voice on the other side, however, I put down the phone and opened my front door, sure that my mind was playing tricks on me. But it wasn’t. It really had been Paul’s voice and now he was standing right in front of me. One look at the sadness in his eyes told me why he had come.

‘I want to talk about our baby,’ he said. ‘I want to talk about our baby that never was.’

Chris and Vicky’s Anniversary Party

It was just after nine on the morning of Chris and Vicky’s anniversary dinner and I was flitting around the flat doing several things at once badly to get ready to go into town. As well as finishing off my make-up in the mirror near the bedroom door, I was also trying to locate the matching shoe to the one I had in my hand, plug in the charger for my mobile phone and chat to Billy, who was sitting patiently on the edge of the bed watching me with a bemused grin. Without any warning he stood up and kissed me.

‘What was that for?’

‘That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was looking for. I was hoping for something a little more . . . I don’t know . . . effusive.’

‘I’m just suspicious of your motivation, that’s all.’ I eyed him with mock suspicion.

Billy whispered in my ear in a pseudo-Barry White voice: ‘I think you’ll find, Ms Vickery, that you’re all the motivation I need.’