What My Best Friend Did (8 page)

Watching Gretchen work a room was a master class in how to make an impact, although she didn’t even seem to be aware she was doing it. She paused, poised on the threshold just long enough for everyone to notice her, smiled as she saw someone she knew and then cut straight through to the center of the room, long blonde hair bouncing around like she was in a pop video. People even stepped back slightly to let her pass. I, however, made my way to the side bar and got a drink so I could people-watch in peace. There seemed to be a lot of arm touching,laughing, air kissing and peering over shoulders to see who else was arriving. Sadly there was no sign of Daniel Craig; only Craig David, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

“This is rubbish,” Gretchen said, appearing by my arm ten minutes later. “You seen him yet?”

“No”—I shook my head—“these drinks are nice though.”

“I reckon they must be in some VIP bit somewhere.” Gretchen looked around thoughtfully. “They have private rooms here.”

“In a private members’ club?” I giggled. “Just how much privacy can anyone need? It’s like MI5 in this place.”

But before she could answer me, there was a loud, “Ladies and gentlemen,” from the front of the room, and a man I vaguely recognized holding a microphone said, “Welcome on behalf of the Bengal Tiger Protection Society—keeping these beautiful beasts alive for the next generation to enjoy. We’ve now reached the auction part of the proceedings.”

“Come on!” Gretchen hissed to me. “Let’s go and take a look about while they’re all distracted!”

She grabbed my arm, and rather reluctantly, I began to follow. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to explore; when I was little and we were dragged around drafty castles and National Trust houses, what fascinated me more than anything were the doors marked PRIVATE, behind which I imagined secret passages stretching away. I used to long to slip through them and see what was going on behind the scenes, but, much like now, I really didn’t want to get into trouble either.

As we reached the doorway, however, the emcee said, “Our first lot is a signed pair of Christian Louboutins. You may never want to wear these out in the rain, ladies! A slightly early Christmas present for yourself perhaps?”

Gretchen stopped in her tracks, spun around and said, “Hang on a minute,” putting her arm out to stop me.

“Who will start the bidding at five hundred pounds?” the emcee asked warmly.

I shook my head. It was a pair of shoes, for crying out loud, and wouldn’t it be easier to save the tigers, wherever they were, just by donating directly?

“Thank you, madam, five hundred pounds I am bid,” he said, quick as a flash, pointing in my direction. My mouth fell open—I’d not shaken my head to bloody bid! Then I realized he was talking to Gretchen, who was standing next to me, excitedly biting her lip and jiggling lightly on the spot with one hand in the air. Five hundred quid! Was she mad?

It seemed she wasn’t the only one, however. Several women wanted to get their paws on those red soles, and the amount quickly rose to fifteen hundred. I had sobered up completely and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Tigers were a worthwhile beneficiary but …

Then it all leaped into fast-forward. The emcee, delighted at such a frenzy on the first lot of the evening, daringly raised the bar to two thousand pounds—and Gretchen nodded. I reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Do you even know if they’re your size?”

“Who cares?” she said. “I’ll just buy new feet.”

Another woman raised the amount to £2100. Gretchen frowned and impulsively called out “Five thousand pounds!” A low murmur of appreciation swept around the room as people turned to look at us and I nearly dropped my drink. The camera equipment I could get with that!

The emcee beamed at her. “Wonderful! Do I have five thousand one hundred pounds?” The room hushed in anticipation. No one spoke. “Then, going once, twice, three times and sold to the enchanting lady at the back of the room!”

Gretchen laughed excitedly. “Oh what fun!” she said. “This is even better than Daniel Craig!”

In the taxi home, to mine and then Gretchen’s—that she’d made wait while she finished a cigarette—she stroked her new shoes and said, “I just love them.”

I shook my head in the dark. “I still can’t believe you did that.”

She leaned her head back on the seat. “I know—I should have listened to you. Still, it’s only money. It ended up being a great night, didn’t it?”

“Absolutely!” It actually really had been. I was buzzing—just like LA again.

She suddenly became serious and said, “Al, I’ve got a confession to make. Promise you won’t hate me?”

“I promise,” I said, intrigued.

“I sort of asked you out tonight because I thought if I made it look like I was helping you, you might get me in with some of your fashion-mag contacts. You have no idea how hard it is to get them to even consider you for a feature unless you’ve married Brad Pitt or won an Oscar or something, and I really need to raise my profile.”

“Oh,” I said. And felt really crap. All of a sudden she didn’t remind me of Vic at all.

“Sorry.” She was a little shamefaced. “It was a bit underhanded of me. Oh, don’t look like that!” She grabbed my arm. “I know what you must be thinking, but I’ve genuinely really had fun. I really have!” She sounded almost surprised. “And we did have a blast in LA. I’ve got another confession too: these shoes are about half a size too big for me. What size are you? Do you want them?” She held them out to me.

“Don’t be stupid!” I said. “Put them on eBay or something.I don’t think you’re going to recoup the five grand you spent on them though, you loony.”

She looked at me intently. “I haven’t pissed you off, have I? Still friends?”

I hesitated. She waited anxiously, hands clasping the Louboutins, framed by the black cab window. She’d merely wanted a leg-up on the glossy magazine ladder, in her pointless, ludicrous shoes … but then she had been big enough to be honest with me and come clean. She must genuinely mean what she was saying. Otherwise, why bother? I’d enjoyed her company. It was rare to meet someone interesting and funny but good at listening too. Sparkly new friends like her didn’t exactly drop into my lap every day of the week, and you could have different friends for different reasons, couldn’t you? Not everyone could know me inside out, like Vic did, and be there for every problem. Gretchen’d make a great coffee and cocktail partner in crime.

“Still friends,” I said.

I
think it’s the smell—the smell of hospitals that I can’t handle.I close my eyes and try to breathe deeply through my mouth.Tom cannot sit still next to me; he’s twitching and stop-starting with panic, fear and powerlessness. I can feel his every movement run down my arm because we are gripping hands as if our lives depend on it. We are waiting in the mercifully empty relatives’ room, the walls of which are a washy, spearmint green and I think it must be cold, despite the big old-fashioned iron radiators, because I am shaking. Helpful leaflets are stuck all over the place, some resting on top of a drinks machine. There are seven chairs and a small table, tucked tight against the wall, which I am next to. Tom is to my left.

We are both so frightened that, for the first time ever, we have nothing that we can say to each other. My teeth start to chatter and when I try to stop them, they won’t. Neither of us can bear to think about what might be happening down the corridor in that room. All I can see is that red, flat line on the monitor slicing through the center of the screen; continuous, unarguable and definite. I’m trying to think of something, anything else—for some bizarre reason I imagine me, Fran and Phil as children playing on a roundabout, Phil is using his foot to push us faster and faster—but then the red line appears at the edge and crashes right through the middle of the picture, cutting us all in half.

The door opens at that point and a very real nurse comes in. The line vanishes immediately and I scan her face desperately, looking for clues—is she smiling? Is her brow creased with empathy, ready to help us through the shock of hearing, “I’m so sorry, we did everything that we could but …”?

She walks straight over to us and sits down. Then it’s actually happening before I have time to imagine the rest.

“Gretchen has had a problem with her heart,” she says. “She’s had a cardiac arrest.”

Everything slows right down around me again, this time like I’ve been plunged into an ice bath. Her words feel unreal; I’m staring at her face but it sounds like she’s speaking under water. I begin to squeeze Tom’s hand so fiercely it must hurt him.

“It’s beating normally again,” she continues, her voice becoming clearer in my ears, like I’m surfacing, “but it’s a concern that it happened at all. It shows how strong the drugs she took are, that they’ve had a very real effect on her body.” Her eyebrows knit together in concern and she waits for us to digest what she’s saying. “She wasn’t aware of what was happening, though. It won’t have caused her any distress.” She pauses again, as if that knowledge is somehow supposed to make a difference. It doesn’t.

“Is she all right now?” Tom asks the only thing that really matters.

“We’ve managed to stabilize her.”

He looks at the nurse bravely. “Could it happen again?”

“It might, yes. She’s young and strong though, that’s very much in her favor. I’ll come and get you just as soon as they’re done in there, take you back through, OK?” She smiles reassuringly, calm with experience and being older than us—all of about thirty-five, I’d say. “You know, this bit is actually harder for you than it is for her.”

I want to laugh at that, albeit hysterically. I watch her enviously as she leaves the room; smoothing down her subtly highlighted hair, stepping neatly and nonchalantly out of the nightmare.

Tom stands up, reaches into his pocket and pulls out some change. Then he walks over and slots it into the machine, placing a cup under a spout that dispenses not even enough brown liquid to half fill it. Then he empties three packets of sugar and stirs it lightly with a plastic stick.

“Try and drink this,” he says, coming back and handing it to me, “it’ll help.” The tea is the color of watered-down tar and is giving off the bitter aroma of burnt tires, but it’s warm, so I huddle over it and even take a small sip. He collapses down next to me, drained by the dissipating adrenaline.

We sit in silence for a moment more, then he says, “You did tell them everything about Gretchen? Didn’t you?” His mind is still circling.

“What, that this isn’t the first time she’s tried to do this?”

It’s like forcing a door marked Private. I feel invasive and voyeuristic discussing such intimate and painful secrets from Gretchen’s past like you might say, “Did you mention she’s allergic to aspirin?” I know Tom doesn’t want to do it any more than I do.

He nods, with difficulty. “So they know that …”

“Tom,” I say, my head swimming. “I told them everything I could.” Which, strictly speaking, is true.

“I’m not having a go, Al, I’m just trying to think of something, anything we can do that might help her.”

Watching him desperately struggle with trying to make sense of this is breaking me. I put my cup down and reach for a magazine, setting it on my lap, but tears are welling up in my eyes again and the model’s smiley face goes all blurry. They threaten to splash over, down on to the ancient cover, which is undulating like sand dunes but is as crisp and brittle as old bone—a thousand different liquids having been spilled and dried on it.

Tom’s hand gently appears and removes the magazine, as he reaches an arm around my shoulder and draws me to him. As I release a sob on his shoulder he says, “Shhhhh” quietly, and, “It’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”

But I don’t see. I don’t see how this can be all right in the slightest and him soothing me is almost more than I can bear. After everything I’ve put him through … as if that wasn’t enough, now this. What kind of person am I?

“Her mum and dad,” Tom says, obviously trying to think rationally, “they really should be here. Did Bailey …” He says his name stiffly.

“I expect so. I’m sure he would have done.”

I can feel him tensing up, his arm tightening around me. “Well, you say that, but—”

“Tom!” I exclaim bleakly, which he totally misinterprets.

“Don’t ‘Tom’ me!” he bursts angrily. “If he’d just got to her when he said he was going to”—he releases me—“he might have found her earlier! Before she’d done anything—when she was just drunk!”

“That’s not fair, Tom,” I begin. “It’s not his fault that—”

“Of course it fucking is!” Tom explodes. “It’s absolutely his fault! He wasn’t there when he said he was going to be! He never thinks of anyone but himself, never stops to consider other people and the impact of his actions.” He balls his fist up so tightly his knuckles go white. “This is fucking typical of him!”

I wait and then I say quietly, “He just missed a plane, Tom. That’s all. You have every right to be angry with him for”—I struggle to find the right words—“other stuff. But he’d never have let something like this happen to her. He was worried sick when I spoke to him earlier.”

There is a silence and Tom clenches his jaw. “Other people manage to be reliable, do what they’re supposed to do, so why can’t he? What’s so fucking special about him?”

He almost shouts that last bit, right there in the relatives’ room, and I look shamefacedly at the floor, because I’m not sure if that’s just a rhetorical question, or he’s actually asking me.

A
lice Johnston!” Gretchen’s voice carried jauntily down the phone. “It’s me. So here’s the thing—are you around this morning?”

“I can be.” I turned over in bed, glancing at the space next to me that meant Tom had already left for football training. “All I had planned was a run. Why?”

“A run?” she said. “What on earth do you want to do something like that for?”

“Because it’s March! I can only hide the effects of my mother’s annual Christmas force-feeding under baggy jumpers for so long—and next Saturday she’s going to stuff a load of Easter eggs down our necks too. Before you know it, it’ll be bikini weather and I’ll want to kill myself.”