‘Not too shabby, eh?’ said Pippa.
They excitedly crowded round the front door as she fumbled with the lock. I held back, desperately fighting the urge to get on the departing minibus, though to where, I didn’t know. I batted away stinging tears and then felt a hand in the small of my back.
‘You okay?’ Mum asked gently.
I managed a nod and swallowed down the lump in my throat. My mum was here. Everything would be okay.
Pippa had booked a table at BJ’s, a restaurant on the beach, for dinner. ‘Appropriate name,’ called out quiet Tess, as we navigated the steep steps from the dusty car park. ‘Going down!’
‘Bloody hell, how many has she had?’ Pippa laughed.
I felt a tug on my hand, pulling me back, and, on turning round, I realized it was Charlotte. ‘You haven’t said a word to me, not even hello,’ she said.
‘Not now,’ I replied. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘So why did you invite me, then?’
I stopped in my tracks and turned to face her.
‘Invite you? You think I invited you?’ She looked like she’d been slapped in the face.
‘Well, yes, that’s what Pammie said . . .’ she faltered. ‘Didn’t you?’
A heat rushed to my ears. Charlotte’s mouth was moving but her words became muffled. Pammie? I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how this could have happened. I searched for a connection, some way of putting them together. My brain whirred with images of Pammie, Adam, James, even Tom. They were all laughing, their features contorted like Spitting Image puppets, rocking back and forth. I felt like they were trampling me underfoot, but I couldn’t see who was pulling the strings.
Do they know each other? How did they meet? When? My mind was racing as it struggled to make sense of it all.
A moving image of Charlotte sitting astride Tom played out in front of me, and it took all my resolve not to push her over the edge and into the sea below.
‘Pammie?’ I asked, praying that I’d heard wrong. Every fibre in my body was preparing for fight or flight. I hated myself for being so weak. I needed to stay in control.
‘Yes, she said that she was inviting me on your behalf.’
‘What? How?’ I asked, shaking my head.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just know that Pammie called me and said you’d like me to come to your hen weekend. I asked if she was sure she’d got it right. She said yes, and I was over the moon. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘But how can you think that I’d ever want to see you again, after what you did to me?’ My eyes filled with tears as I looked at her properly for the first time. I felt a jolt as my confused emotions poisoned my brain with an overwhelming desire to hug her. I fought the urge back down, but it wasn’t easy. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her until she was in front of me.
Her eyes fell to the floor. ‘I’m truly sorry,’ she said in barely more than a whisper. ‘I still can’t believe I did it.’
‘But you did,’ I said tightly, before turning and walking down the stairs.
I needed a drink and, thankfully, our glasses had already been filled with wine by the time I reached the table. I took a large slug before I’d even sat down.
‘Okay, so who’s up for Fuzzy Duck?’ called out Tess. ‘Line your glasses up, ladies.’
‘And gentleman,’ Seb said, correcting her.
I could only smile and look straight ahead because, if I looked left, I’d see Charlotte, and if I looked right, I’d see Pammie, and I couldn’t look at her face right now as I was frightened of what I might do.
‘What about truth or dare?’ chipped in Seb.
‘Yesss!’ shouted Tess.
I kept my smile fixed firmly on my face, only parting my lips to take another mouthful of wine. It was already going some way to numbing my nerve endings.
The terracotta bottle that had so recently been filled with Lancers Rosé rocked and rolled as it spun, before slowing down and settling on Seb.
‘Truth or dare?’ asked Pippa.
‘Dare!’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘When the waiter asks what you’d like to eat, you have to do your best to order in Portuguese.’
He smiled and called the waiter over.
‘So . . . I’d like ze, how you say, spaghetti bolognesia con pan du garlic as un aperitif.’
We couldn’t contain our giggles. ‘There must be three different languages in there, but I’d bet my life that none of them is Portuguese,’ sniggered Tess.
‘Would you like parmesan cheese as well, mate?’ asked the smiling waiter, in a cockney accent.
Everyone laughed, though all I could hear was the loud silence coming from the end of the table. I refilled my glass, drank it, and looked at Pammie. She glared back at me, with a look of defiance, as if calling the fight on.
No one else would have noticed, but then no one else knows her like I do. They don’t know that the sweet old woman, ambling along, playing the martyr, is actually a calculating, scheming bitch. But if she wants to play that game, to systematically chip away at me until she hopes there’s nothing left, then I’m ready.
The bottle spun and landed on Charlotte.
‘Truth or dare?’ Seb declared.
Her eyes darted to me. ‘Truth.’
‘I’ve got a question,’ Pippa called out. ‘What’s your biggest regret?’
She seemed to know what was coming. ‘I stupidly thought I was in love,’ she said. ‘Only problem was, he wasn’t mine to love, he was my best friend’s.’
I could feel Pippa and Seb bristling beside me.
Tess gasped loudly.
Charlotte went on, ‘I naively believed that everything would work out for the best, but of course it didn’t. It never does.’
‘So, what happened?’ asked Tess. ‘Did your friend find out?’
Charlotte stared straight at me. ‘Yes, in the worst possible way, and I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was broken into a thousand pieces.’
My chest tightened.
‘Was it worth it?’ Tess pushed. ‘Did you stay together?’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘We both loved her more than each other, and once we’d realized the hurt we’d caused, it was over. A silly mistake with so much consequence.’ A tear fell down her cheek and she quickly wiped it away. ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ she laughed tightly, in an attempt to lighten the mood.
I swallowed back my own hot tears, only realizing fully at that moment the pain I’d been holding in for all those years. I’d never really stopped to take stock of the enormity of losing my boyfriend and best friend, seemingly to each other. I’d just stuck my head in the sand and soldiered on, in complete denial of the damage it had done. Maybe I thought that by not acknowledging it, it would somehow make it go away, make it seem as if it’d never happened. I’d almost convinced myself that it was the best thing that had ever happened to me; it had certainly sorted out the wheat from the chaff and I was better off without them. Except I wasn’t. Until then, Tom had been the love of my life, the man who I was going to have babies with. And Charlotte? Well, she’d been by my side since we met in Year Three of primary school.
‘Joined at the hip, those two are,’ my mum had commented to her mum at the school gate. ‘They’ll be together forever.’ Her mum had nodded, smiling, and from then on, not a day passed without us speaking to each other. We’d gone to the same secondary school, been on holidays together, and even got our first jobs just a few streets away from each other behind Oxford Circus. I’d call her mum every few days for a catch-up, as she did mine. It felt like we’d come from the same mould, had the same stamp running through us. But she’d proved we were nothing like each other at all.
Looking at her now, as she wiped the tears from her eyes, I grieved for the times we’d lost. The love and laughter we could have had, instead of the pain and hatred.
‘Okay, so who’s gonna be next?’ cried Seb, as he spun the bottle again.
A chorus of ‘whooaaah’ grew louder as the bottle began to slow down.
‘Emily!’ They all called out, clapping. ‘Totally deserved,’ shouted somebody. ‘The mother hen needs to repent of her sins.’