My Best Friend's Girl (4 page)

Amazingly, annoyingly, depressingly, no one suspected what was going on. Or, if they did, they looked away, not wanting to get involved. No one noticed, it seemed, what was going on behind the closed doors of the Hamilton-Mackenzie household. They accepted it when Mr. Hamilton-Mackenzie, a respectable, clean-cut example of white, middle-class decency, despaired time and again at his daughter’s clumsiness, her tomboyishness that got her into scrapes, her silliness that made her hook up with rough boys.

Like me, Del’s escape was college. She desperately wanted to be loved by her father, and the only way I could help her was to pretend that he was capable of it and say that one day he would. Whether she believed me or not, it kept the hope alive in her, and even I knew we all need hope to survive.

My family weren’t perfect but they were bothered—very vocally so—if I didn’t go home every few months; they did call me regularly for a chat and, because she was my friend, they accepted Adele into the fold. Adele found a new place called home with the Matikas. It wasn’t her real home, it wasn’t the love of her father, but every time my mum told us off for waking up the house when we came in at 3 a.m.; every time my dad reached into his wallet and gave her a tenner to buy herself something; every time my sister asked for advice about her love life, it was almost as good as her real home. She felt she belonged.

Obviously, only one thing could possibly come between us: a man.

chapter 4

T
his was surreal.

Being in London, a city I had fled over two years ago. But not just London, this particular area of it. Waterloo.

I wandered across Waterloo’s huge station concourse, memories slamming into me with every step I took. No one seemed to notice how freaked out I was. How I walked slowly, expecting to run into a younger version of Adele, or even myself. Commuters hurried around me; announcements for trains blared over the loudspeakers; life rushed on oblivious. Oblivious to the fact that this was the place where I used to come to meet Adele after work for drinks when we were both single. When she wasn’t ill and thin, the shadow of a person lying in that hospital bed. She used to work just around the corner and I used to get the tube here from Oxford Street, where I worked, so we could travel home together after a few drinks.

Waterloo was also remarkable for another reason. This was the place where I met him. At a house party just up the road from here. Him, the man who came between me and Adele.

He wasn’t just any man, though. He was Nate Turner, my fiancé.

Nate walked into my life one cold April night and said he didn’t want to walk out of it again. I told him to try that line on a woman who might believe it. “I’m going to win you over,” he’d stated seriously.

“Better men than you have failed,” I’d replied equally seriously.

Eighteen months later we decided to get married. And three years after that we set a date for the following year. We didn’t have the perfect relationship, more a perfect understanding. He put up with a lot from me, had to deal with my issues.

My “issues” weren’t immediately obvious. By the time I met Nate my outward appearance was that nothing bothered me, that year after year of being called fat and ugly hadn’t done a thing except spur me on to success. No one, except maybe Adele, knew that beneath my adult veneer, beneath my confidence and great job and ability to sleep with good-looking men, beat the heart of a terrified girl.

The outside world, and even to an extent Adele, was taken in by my facade; the impenetrable, polished image that I diligently maintained. People truly believed I was cool and haughty, confident and capable. Nate had seen through me. He discovered almost straightaway the thing that terrified me more than anything else. My ultimate phobia? People.

It’d started before the bullying at school. I suspected it was what triggered the bullying—those who terrorized me saw that I didn’t fit in, that every conversation was underlined with the fear that they’d discover I wasn’t like them, and they exploited that terror.

I didn’t seem to have that thing that binds us, makes us human. I struggled to make those connections, struggled to form relationships, even platonic ones. I grew up in a big family, was close to my siblings, but for some reason I never quite knew how to react in certain situations. I was so worried about messing up, about saying the wrong thing, of inciting wrath, that communication became an exercise in terror. And it made me seem standoffish, judgmental and, in later years, a hard-faced bitch. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to relate to others, it was just that I didn’t know how.

Then I met Adele and found I could do the communicating thing. I started to believe that I wasn’t defective, broken. I could form relationships.

I’d been seeing Nate for a few weeks when he told me he knew my secret. We’d gone to one of his work parties and from the moment I walked in I knew I didn’t belong. I wasn’t dressed as classily as the other women, I didn’t radiate their insouciant style and I didn’t work in broadcast media. I tried to make polite conversation but I knew with every word I was confirming how different I was, how out of place I was. When, three torturous hours later, Nate said, “Shall we go?” I was out the door and hailing a taxi before he’d finished forming “shall.” Later, Nate wrapped himself around me like a cat curls around its owner’s legs and said, “People terrify you, don’t they? That’s why you’re so cold. I saw you tonight, you were trying to talk, to connect with people, but you had such fear in your eyes.”

I sometimes think people can see that I’m defective, that there’s nothing there. Behind the job and clothes and makeup there’s nothing to know. I sometimes think I’m this shell and I can’t work out why people like me. And when I’m with strangers it reminds me of that. That I’m insubstantial.
I didn’t say that to him, of course I didn’t. Even if I could get the words out, why would a casual fling want to hear that?

To my silence he added, “You don’t have to be scared. I’ll always look after you. I think you’re amazing. You’re everything to me, babe.” That upset me so much I got dressed and went home.

Nate didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t one hundred percent strong, independent and capable all the time, that he was with someone who had the potential to become needy and dependent. He took me as I was, loved me whether I was nice or nasty. He dealt with everything I threw at him, and then some.

It wasn’t one-sided though. I put up with a lot from him too. He came across as laid-back and infinitely secure, but he was a mass of neuroses that I took on once I decided to give it a go with him. We had balance, Nate and I. A perfect symmetry of love, honesty and trust. With him, as I confessed to Adele after about six months, “commitment” and “forever” weren’t only concepts, they were a reality.

Saturday night.

It was a Saturday night two years ago. Del and I had put Tegan to bed with the intention of doing some wedding planning, seeing as my big day was only two months away, but we’d been waylaid; distracted by four bottles of wine and a packet of cocktail sausages. Del was reclining on the brown leatherette sofa, having unbuttoned the fly of her dark green camos and tucked her top under and up through the bottom of her bra. Her stomach was disconcertingly flat, especially considering she’d given birth three years earlier. You could see the silvery stretch marks across her creamy-white skin, but otherwise everything seemed to have returned to where it should be—she’d even started wearing the white gold bodybar through her pierced navel again.

I was on the other sofa. I’d also undone the top buttons of my jeans, and taken off my bra, but my less than flat stomach and stretch-mark-rippled breasts were hidden under a white T-shirt I’d borrowed from Del. I’d had to borrow the T-shirt because Tegan’s bath earlier had resulted in my top and bra being soaked through.

Rather than sorting out the seating plan, we were talking about Del’s dating. I knew Nate would go mad when I went home without a seating plan (when he’d offered to do it I’d indignantly replied, “Don’t mind me, I was obviously mistaken when I thought this was my wedding too”) but Del’s dating was important. She’d recently met a man and was at the start of the dating ritual. The ritual that began with wanting to recount every detail and nuance of their first conversation, which was followed by the excitement of the second date. Then came the anticipatory days leading up to the “sex” date. And then there was the continued excitement that were the fourth to tenth dates. Swiftly followed by the decline into one of them not calling the other, with its accompanying soundtrack of self-recrimination and wondering what was wrong with you. Del was at date six with this new man and interest wasn’t as yet waning.

“He does this thing with his hips and it’s…Wow,” she revealed. “It blows my mind every time.”

This man, although he knew how to blow her mind every time, didn’t know she had a child. If he got to date fifteen she’d tell him but this man wasn’t likely to make it that far. She liked him, but he wasn’t The One. Nor even The One Who Was Going to Be Around for Very Long, so she wasn’t going to upset Tegan by introducing her to a man who would eventually be gone from her life. Del was fiercely protective of Tegan. Her daughter’s life had to have as few disruptions as possible, and anyone who got in the way of that was literally taking their life in their hands. She’d rather be single a lifetime than introduce Tegan to someone who wouldn’t be around for long. And, she reasoned, as soon as she told someone about her daughter they were obliged to meet her.

“Nate does this thing with his mouth,” I revealed. “He starts off licking my inner thighs really slowly, then he does this thing with his mouth…It’s…” I grinned and sighed.

“Amazing.” I rarely shared the intimate details of our sex life with anyone, even Del, but then I hadn’t drunk two bottles of wine in a long while—I’d pretty much tell her anything at that moment. “It’s…I’m getting shivers down my spine just thinking about it.”

“Hmmm, I know,” Del agreed. Then froze. Everything about her froze the second those three words came out of her mouth.

My heart had stopped mid-beat and the breath was caught in my chest. Time seemed to stand still.

Del’s eyes edged over to my area of the room, two discs of blue steel, now branded with terror. I exhaled but my muscles didn’t unclench. I inhaled deeply.
No, I’m wrong,
I told myself.
Surely I was wrong. But I’d heard her. I’d heard the inflection of her “I know.” She said it like she did. She did know. She’d been there. She’d done it. With Nate. She’d done it with Nate. His tongue had licked her inner thighs. His lips had…

I sat up, put my feet on the floor to steady myself, then exhaled again. Inhaled. Deep and slow. “When?” I asked, forcing the word out of my mouth.

Del didn’t answer and, for a second, I thought she was going to deny it, was going to try to bluff her way out of it. Instead she closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed hard, then faced me. “Long time ago,” she whispered, her eyes never leaving mine. “Long, long time ago. Way long time ago.”

The breath caught in my chest again and I inhaled to try to get it moving, but my body was immobile. Frozen. Nothing would go in, nothing would come out, it hurt too much. “How long?”

“Once. Only the once.”

Tears pricked behind my eyes and my jaw muscles clenched into a tight ball. I didn’t feel like crying but the moistness in my eyes, the pain in my jaw said I was about to bawl my eyes out.

Del sat up, ran her slender fingers through her hair, used the palms of her hands to rub at her wet eyes.

“Only the once,” she repeated.

Once. Only the once. The words didn’t have any meaning. Did once make it any better than twice? Or fifty times? It was done between them. Was it less wrong because it was once? I blinked but my vision was still blurred by tears.

Why?
I asked her silently.

Del sat hunched forward on the sofa, elbows rested on her knees, hands in her hair, staring at the laminate flooring.

Why?
I asked again in my head.

She continued to stare at the floor, obviously not hearing my telepathic questions. Lost in her own thoughts and her own world. A world where she’d confessed. Then she lifted her eyes, glanced at the picture of Tegan that sat on top of the television before returning her gaze to the floor.

It was an instinctive thing, a little thing that gave everything away. “No,” I gasped, more to myself than to her. I was trying to convince myself I was being ridiculous; that my heart had skipped several beats for nothing.

Del’s head snapped round to me as she heard my gasp. My eyes darted from Del to the photo to Del. Our eyes locked and her face drained of color.

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the thought, trying to remove the very idea from my mind. My eyes flew back to the picture. From that smiling snapshot, Tegan’s nose was a dead giveaway. She was Nate’s child.

Everything fell into place, like the final pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces had been there all along, of course, I simply hadn’t seen them. Hadn’t seen the bigger picture until that moment. Now I knew why Tegan looked so familiar. It wasn’t because she was her mother’s double, which she was in most ways, it was because she had the same ski-slope nose as her father, the shape of his large eyes, his sardonic twist of the lip. I’d seen those features all along, but my mind hadn’t made the connection.

I’d asked Del who the father was when she first found out she was pregnant. She’d tearfully told me that it’d been an accident, that he wasn’t around, that he was a married man she’d met through work.

“Bastard,” I’d hissed.

“No,” she’d replied. “He didn’t mean for it to happen. Neither did I, it was an accident. No one’s to blame.”

Every conversation we’d had about the father of her baby whizzed through my head: every time she said he wasn’t capable of loving her, let alone a child; how she’d repeated that it was a mistake—the best thing that had happened to her, but still a mistake; all those hours she’d declared she didn’t need the father messing her life up. And there was me, the surrogate father. The one who went to antenatal classes, who’d been in the delivery room almost gagging at what I saw, who helped out as much as I could—all the while encouraging her to tell the daddy because it was morally right, that even if she didn’t want him to know, he had a right. He had to earn his bastard stripes by rejecting her and the child. And, I often said, Tegan might want to know. “What are you going to tell her then? That you didn’t want him to know he’s a father so she wasn’t allowed to have a dad?”

She’d replied, “I’ll worry about that when I have to.”

Now she had to.

I was a prize idiot. A big fat festering idiot who’d been lecturing her, pushing her to tell the love of my life that he’d knocked her up.

I launched myself off the sofa but once on my feet I found I was almost doubled up from the searing pain in my stomach. I was still winded by the shock. My face creased up as it all hit me full force.

Nate had a child. Nate had fathered my best friend’s child.

I started to gather up my things: the damp bra I’d taken off; my belt that I’d discarded because it was cutting into my stomach; the notebook with the list of wedding guests; the map of the tables; the colored pens. I fumbled around for them, shoving them into my bag, running a hand through my black hair to neaten it. I spotted my socks slung on the floor beside the other sofa but I wasn’t going near her so I shoved my bare feet into my trainers.