‘Wait,’ I said, confused. ‘Are you going to be OK, walking back by yourself?’ I glanced at my house, which was reassuringly still dark and asleep as I’d left it.
‘Oh, sure, it’s barely ten minutes.’ She backed away a few more steps, lifting her hand in a wave. ‘Buonanotte, my friend.’ Her hand lifted further into a mock salute. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, a grin was on her face and she looked as far away from a troublemaker as it was possible to be.
‘Buonanotte,’ I replied. I saluted back. ‘You fucking nutcase.’
‘Hey, watch your fucking mouth.’ She was still backing away. ‘What do they teach you in that school?’
By now she was too far away to hear any response, so I just waved until she turned the corner and disappeared. I made my way over to the garage, panicking for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to get back inside. But hoisting myself up turned out to be surprisingly easy, and I was through my window and into my bed in a matter of minutes.
The house was silent. My night-time exertions, which no doubt would have given my mother some kind of coronary, had gone undetected. I felt suddenly exhilarated, triumphant.
I fell asleep grinning.
Nothing strengthens a friendship like an argument survived. And nothing made me so sure of my friendship with Suzanne than the way she handled our first.
As soon as the very next day, our brief falling-out had become canonized, with Suzanne texting me after lunch with, ‘Remember when I called you boring? GOD. What a BITCH! Xxxxx’ and me replying ‘Careful. I haven’t forgiven you yet. (love you xxx)’. Her response – ‘Oh please. I brought midnight cookies for you, I’m basically the Goddess of all friends’ – made me laugh out loud on my way to art and almost got my phone confiscated.
The second time she turned up at my window, five days later at 1 a.m, she brought baklava and we sat together on my garage roof, huddled under my fleece blanket, talking about nothing. When she left she squeezed me into a hug and said, ‘It’s so great that you’re here,’ and I felt as if I’d won a contest I didn’t even know I’d entered.
The third time she was angsty, agitated after an argument with Sarah about the increasing number of detentions she was getting at school. That time we left my house to wander around Seven Dials together while she ranted. The fourth time, close to 5 a.m on a Wednesday, she turned up dishevelled and happy, saying that she was on her way back from Dylan’s house and just wanted to say hi.
‘Do you ever actually sleep?’ I asked, leaning out of my window, still half asleep myself. She’d plonked herself down on the roof and was sat hugging her knees to her chest.
She laughed, dismissive. ‘Sometimes.’
I knew it was stupid. I knew it was reckless. I knew that walking around Brighton in the middle of the night was even a little bit dangerous. And I didn’t care. Against all laws of circumstance and personality, I had somehow been chosen as the go-to friend by someone a little bit wild, a little bit crazy, a whole lot of fun. I was just grateful to be invited along for the ride.
I kept these midnight walkabouts a secret from Rosie, partly because I knew she wouldn’t understand but mostly because I liked having something that belonged to Suzanne and me. To me, it felt like a fair exchange. Rosie got Suzanne in the daytime, and I got her at night. Our imperfect trio had, finally, found its balance.
‘I feel like a tourist,’ Suzanne said, lifting herself up on to her tiptoes and peering over the heads of the people in the queue in front of us. ‘Isn’t this a really touristy thing to do?’
‘Yes,’ Rosie said, taking a long sip of bubble tea through a thick orange straw. ‘But actually, how many times you’ve been dragged around the Pavilion is a sign of a true Brightonian.’
‘It’s a rite of passage,’ I agreed.
‘I’ve been here four times,’ Rosie continued. She was grinning. ‘As a Brighton resident and a Pavilion virgin, Suze, you’re way overdue.’
February had bled into March and the sun had finally started to feel warm against my skin. We’d taken the opportunity to spend a Sunday together in town, and the Royal Pavilion trip had been Rosie’s idea. Suzanne had spent the previous night with Dylan and his friends drinking on the beach, and her eyes had the slightly red-rimmed smudgedness of the morning after. Despite the occasional twinge of hangover, she was her usual self: bouncy, chatty and excitable.
‘It’s so weird that there’s, like, a palace here,’ she said, her eyes scanning the domed rotunda of the Pavilion. ‘Right in the middle of town.’
‘You mean Reading doesn’t have a palace?’ Rosie asked, deadpan.
‘How conventional,’ I added, smiling. ‘No wonder you left.’