My Best Friend's Girl Page 3

  I suddenly felt like an accidental mass murderer. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t realize.” The worst part was that she hadn’t been trying to make me feel guilty for how I’d judged her, she was simply being honest. Adele was lacking in manipulative guile. I had no bitch follow-through and Adele was up-front and open in everything she did.

  “It’s all right,” she said, tossing back her hair and flashing me a big, bright smile. “You weren’t to know.”

  “Listen, Adele, if we’re going to hang around together you’ve got to cut that out,” I said.

  “Cut what out?”

  “Being so damn nice all the time. It’s not natural.”

  Adele’s steel-blue eyes lit up. “You want to hang around with me, to be my friend?”

  I shrugged nonchalantly.

  She grinned at me in return. That smile not only lit up her face, it put an effervescent gleam in her eyes and a rosy glow in her cheeks. The radiance of that smile flowed from her to me and I fell for her. Deeply. I couldn’t help but like her. She was going to be an important part of my world. She was going to help shape the person I was to become. I didn’t know how I knew, I simply did. For some unfathomable reason I knew she was going to be in my life for a very long time.

  We became almost inseparable because we grew up together. Once Adele settled into college life she settled into her personality. She found herself and who she was. She stopped dressing like a fifty-year-old—slacks never darkened her body again, and she often had a sulk that involved shouting, swearing and throwing things. But she finally killed the timid Adele I’d had that drink with when she had her belly button pierced.

  I, meanwhile, lost weight, smiled more and murdered the Kamryn that Adele had that first drink with when I refused sex with a gorgeous man because he was wearing paisley-patterned Y-fronts. But all that was to come. At that moment, Adele was enormously happy that I’d shrugged my consent at the possibility of us hanging around together and I was secretly overjoyed that someone thought I was lovely.

  “Anyway, I thought we already were friends,” Adele said.

  “Every stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet, and all that.”

  “Oh, shut up and get the drinks in.”

  I stood up from the pub table, stone-cold sober. I’d intended to drink myself into oblivion, to make all of this reality—returning to London, seeing how ill Del was—go away, but at the bar, instead of ordering a double vodka and orange (my drink of choice when oblivion was required), I’d asked for a double vodka and orange without the vodka.

  The barman had been unimpressed, thought I was trying to be funny and glared at me before he reached for a glass. I’m not being funny, I wanted to say. It’s just, I’ve got this mate and she’s never going to drink alcohol again. I can’t do it either, out of loyalty to her. But he wouldn’t understand. And why would he care?

  As it was, the orange juice sans vodka went virtually undrunk as I sat remembering my first meeting with Del.

  Now I slipped on my red raincoat. I had to get to Guildford, should have made the move down there over an hour ago. I’d been delaying the inevitable, though. The second I got on that train to Surrey I’d be embroiling myself further in this. I hadn’t intended to do that. I’d meant to come down here, see how ill she was, then get back on the train to Leeds the second I left the hospital. If I missed the last train, then I’d find a cheap B&B for the night and get on the first train back. No hanging around, no visiting friends and family who I hadn’t seen since leaving London two years ago. Now I was getting embroiled right up to my neck.

  I hoisted my holdall onto my shoulder. Come on, bird, I cajoled myself, it’s Guildford or bust.

  Adele quickly became a member of my family. Christmas, Easter and summer holidays if I went home, she came with me. Her father and his wife weren’t bothered that she never went home. If she called, which I was always amazed she did, she’d come off the phone in tears, always wondering what she could do, how she could change to make him love her even a little bit. I got used to putting her back together, to reassuring her that she was wonderful and lovable because I cared for her, because lots of other people adored her. And that maybe, one day, he’d see sense. I never believed that for a second, but it was what she wanted to hear so I said it, and sounded convincing to boot.

  Mr. Hamilton-Mackenzie was never going to change, I knew that. When we first met, Adele would often get falling-down drunk and confess how awful her life had been before Leeds. She’d tell me about her father’s quick-to-discipline attitude. About time spent in the hospital with broken arms, fractured legs, a cracked jaw as a result of being “punished.” Once he’d knocked her through a ground-floor window and a piece of glass had lodged itself in her back, narrowly missing her kidney—the glass had to be removed by surgery. Another time he’d hit her with the buckle end of his belt and gouged out a huge chunk of her left thigh, meaning she rarely wore skirts.

  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

  This 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 immedia
tely 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. Fr
ozen. 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.