Brand New Friend (8 page)

‘That was the deal,’ said Ashley, and kissed him. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘Hey, you,’ said Rob, into his mobile.

‘Hey, babe,’ replied Ashley. ‘Just calling to see what you’re up to.’

‘Nothing much. I’m about to go to the cinema.’

‘On your own? Sorry . . . I shouldn’t have said it like that. Do you want me to come with you? I can meet up with the girls another day.’

‘You’re fine,’ said Rob. ‘Anyway, I know how you ladies like your girl time together. I’ll see you at home, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said, reluctantly.

It was just after half past one on a relatively warm Saturday afternoon in May and Rob was sitting alone at a table in Bar 38 on Peter Street. He put his phone on the table in front of him and wondered why he had told Ashley he was at the cinema when she was sure to ask him about the film. He shook his head and looked down at the items on the table in front of him: an iPod (a happy-moving-in gift from Ashley, which gave him the illusion of not being alone), a pen and notebook (for noting down design ideas he was working on for clUNKEE mUNKEE) and a packet of cigarettes. Anyone who knew Rob well would have spotted which was the odd one out: he had given up smoking in his mid-twenties, yet a gold packet of B&H lay beside his Guinness.

Rob took a deep breath, tore off the Cellophane wrapper, screwed it into a ball, tore into the silver paper and plucked out a cigarette. He put it to his lips and bravely scanned the bar. This is it, he thought, my way in. A cigarette and nothing to light it with.

Four months had now elapsed since the move to Manchester and Rob had still to make a friend. The day after the party in March, Rob had told Ashley, much to her surprise, that he was so desperate to make new friends in Manchester that he was prepared to accept the help from her that he’d previously declined – namely, to ask her female friends if they knew anyone who might fancy going for a drink with him. To this end, a week later Rob had met up with Peter Nicholls, the brother of Ashley’s work friend, Lucy. He was thirty-nine and had been an army engineer since his early twenties but had recently left to work in his dad’s haulage firm in Bolton. Ashley thought that because Peter had once seen the Rolling Stones at Wembley and Rob had their
Greatest Hits
in his CD collection they would have ‘loads to talk about’.

When Peter had called Rob to arrange the date, however, they hadn’t talked about the Rolling Stones. They’d talked about squash and Peter had insisted they play a game rather than go to the pub. Rob hadn’t played squash since university but was willing to give it a go and the two men had played four consecutive games, all of which Peter had won without conceding a point. The humiliation didn’t end there: in the bar of the sports hall Peter had sunk two pints of Fosters in the time it had taken Rob to get half-way through a single pint of Guinness. And at the end of the night – having continued at that pace all evening – Peter had been so drunk that Rob had had to bundle him into the back of a minicab and pay the driver an extra ten pounds to deliver him direct to his front door.

At the beginning of May Rob had gone for a drink with Stuart Farley, a Salford-based probation officer. Ashley had been getting her hair cut and telling Sian, her stylist, about Rob’s predicament when Sian had told her that Stuart, her former lodger, had found it difficult to make friends too. At Stuart’s suggestion they had met up at the Wellington Arms in the city centre. Stuart had been nice enough and the conversation was relatively okay until Stuart confessed he was a real-ale enthusiast. This wasn’t Rob’s thing but in an attempt to be more open-minded he had persuaded Stuart to tell him more about it and wished immediately that he hadn’t. Out of a battered satchel Stuart had pulled out a black notebook in which he had listed every pub he had been to in the last ten years. Beside each one’s name were a number of elaborate symbols representing ‘essential categories’, covering comfort, bar staff’s knowledge of ale, the décor and service. Rob hadn’t had the heart to tell Stuart that he only drank Carlsberg and Guinness. At the end of the evening Stuart had told him that he had enjoyed himself immensely and suggested they meet up again because the Black Horse in Salford was having a Special Beers of the World festival. A few days later Stuart had called and left a message on Rob’s mobile but Rob hadn’t called him back.

A week later Rob had met up with Russell, a twenty-seven-year-old junior doctor who was new to Manchester. Ashley had told Rob that she was sure they would get on because Russell liked ‘good music and good films’. At Russell’s insistence they had met up in a bar called Prague V. Rob hadn’t been there before, and he liked Russell immediately. He was cool without being
too
cool. At the end of the night Russell had said he’d enjoyed himself and would call Rob to arrange another night out soon. But when no call had come by the beginning of the following week Rob had had his doubts. Finally, at Ashley’s insistence, he had called Russell and left a message on his mobile. When a few more days had gone by with no word from him, Rob had contemplated leaving another message and had half dialled his number –
Maybe he’s lost mine
, he thought,
or can’t retrieve his voicemail. Maybe . . .
And that was when it had struck him: he’d been blown out and he hadn’t even realised it. Rob had done the I-promise-I’ll-call-you thing with women more times than he cared to remember, and now it had happened to him. Ashley had apologised on Russell’s behalf, but Rob had told her not to worry. ‘When you want to make friends with someone,’ he’d explained, ‘you’ve both got to get That Feeling. Because if you don’t there’s no point in trying to fake it.’

The following Saturday Rob had decided it was time he took control of his own destiny. Which was why he was now in Bar 38 with a cigarette and no lighter.

To Rob’s left there was a group of ridiculously good-looking Spaniards: two guys and two girls. One girl had dreadlocks; the other’s nose was pierced. Although all four were smoking heavily, and therefore potential candidates for Rob’s experiment, they were also wearing sunglasses indoors which, to Rob’s mind, immediately disqualified them.

Behind the Spaniards he could see another table of smokers, this time a couple of student-looking guys talking animatedly. One had long hair tied back in a ponytail while the other wore a baseball cap and was cultivating his facial hair into something approaching a full-on beard. Rob strained to hear their conversation and having picked out words like ‘rehearsals’ and ‘auditions’ and ‘the director’ it became clear to him that they were actors. He shuddered as he recalled a conversation he had once had with an actor called Victor, whom he had met during a Christmas party a few years earlier. In the middle of a conversation about the difficulties of getting a black cab during the Christmas season Victor (for no good reason that Rob could see) had begun stripping off his clothes, until he was standing in the middle of the room wearing only his boxer shorts, fully aware that he had the attention of the room. In his best actorly voice he had announced to Rob and everyone else: ‘Sometimes I can’t help but express what I’m feeling inside.’ That night Rob vowed that as long as he had breath in his body he would never again make the mistake of opening a conversation with anyone in the theatrical fraternity. Although these two men looked nothing like Victor he couldn’t take the chance.

Finally, Rob’s gaze locked on to a man of roughly his own age, sitting alone. Today Rob was in jeans, a black sweatshirt and green camouflage All Stars baseball boots and the other man was dressed similarly. On the table in front of him was an iPod, a pint of lager and a packet of Silk Cut. He’d got a lit cigarette in one hand and was engrossed in a novel.

Rob checked him out covertly.
He doesn’t seem overly bothered about sitting in a bar on his own
thought Rob.
He’s drinking a pint, which is always a good sign
–
although I don’t know of what. And if he’s got an iPod he must be into music, a bonus. All in all, he looks like my type of guy.

Rob took a deep breath and stood up. His chair legs screeched on the floor loudly enough to gain the attention of the Spanish group and the actors. Fortunately the guy with the book didn’t look up or Rob would have lost his nerve and abandoned his mission. He straightened the chair and, cigarette in hand, began the long walk to the man with the book. The closer Rob got to him the more detail he noticed: he was quite good-looking, with heavy eyebrows and a light scattering of faded freckles across the bridge of his nose. He had dark brown hair, and a slightly Mediterranean complexion. Right now, however, none of those details mattered to Rob: what mattered was that he didn’t lose his nerve before he did what he had to do.

‘Sorry to bother you, mate,’ he said, on reaching the book guy’s table. ‘I was just wondering if I could have a light?’ He waved his unlit cigarette in the air apologetically for emphasis.

‘’Fraid not, mate,’ said the book guy, in an immediately recognisable Manchester accent. ‘I had to get one off those guys over there.’ He pointed to the Spaniards. ‘But you can bum a light off this, if you like,’ he said, offering Rob his cigarette.

With a big smile Rob took it, held the lit end to his own and dragged deeply. The book guy then returned to his novel and Rob berated himself:
Come on, idiot! Say something! Anything! Don’t just stand there staring like you’re in love with him.

The only topics that sprang to mind in the seconds available were:

Rob didn’t use them. Instead, once the tip of his cigarette was glowing, he said a very blokey ‘Cheers, mate, nice one’, and handed back the book guy’s cigarette. He then returned to his table, plugged his iPod’s headphones into his ears and pressed play. And although he stayed in the bar for a further half-hour finishing his pint and doodling on his notepad while he worked his way through an iPod playlist he had earlier entitled ‘How Gay Is This?’, he didn’t attempt to speak to anyone else.

When Ashley arrived home around five, laden with carrier-bags from her afternoon’s shopping, the first thing she asked was ‘How was the film?’ Without blinking an eyelid, Rob just shrugged and said it was so boring he’d fallen asleep. He felt bad about lying to Ashley, he really did, but the last thing he wanted was for her to think she was living with a man so desperate for male company that he hung around city-centre bars trying to make new friends.

Even if it was true.

BlueBar on Chorlton’s Wilbraham Road, just a bit down from Safeway, wasn’t the sort of place Rob would normally have chosen to celebrate his birthday, but as he had now been in Manchester for a full six months he had no choice. In London he would have gone to one of the many old-men’s pubs that he and his friends frequented, like their regular haunt the Queen’s Head, with its desperately cheap beer promotions, or failing that, the Nag’s Head in Balham, where Woodsy had once bought a TV for a tenner from a man hawking electrical goods from the back of a white mini-van, or the Bell and Basin in Clapham, which, when it came to licensing laws, was a law unto itself. They had certain characteristics in common that spoke volumes about the kind of people Rob’s friends were: the absence of a jukebox (so that they could talk without yelling), a lack of interior design (because how a pub looked didn’t matter to them) and no women under five foot five with all their own teeth (because no matter how much pleasure there was to be gained from observing attractive women, even they needed the odd night off).

But while Rob preferred pubs such as the Queen’s Head, he didn’t mind BlueBar. And as Ashley and her friends practically lived there he didn’t have much choice. Whenever he went in with her there was always a good crowd of people there. People like Rob. Young men and women in their late twenties and early thirties with larger-than-average record collections, interesting haircuts and an attitude to fashion that said, ‘I haven’t given up quite yet.’ He was going so often that he’d begun to recognise several faces even if he didn’t know their owners to talk to.
What makes matters worse
, he thought,
is that they all look like the kind of people I could be friends with.

The four guys at the bar.

The three guys smoking at a table near the window.

The two guys in suits finishing off their pints near the cigarette machine.

They all had the potential to be Rob’s brand new Phil.

That evening Rob was surrounded by friends. They just weren’t
his.
They were inherited friends, friends by proxy, Ashley’s friends. Ashley had invited them to come out and celebrate his birthday: Christine and Joel, Luke and Lauren, Jason and Louise, Mia and Edwin and, of course, Neil.

‘Happy birthday, mate!’ said Christine, kissing Rob as she handed him a pint of lager.

‘Cheers,’ said Rob, eyeing the group of men at the bar. They were similarly dressed in jeans, T-shirts and trainers, and were laughing and joking among themselves. Why aren’t I celebrating my birthday with you guys? he thought bitterly.

‘You’re only as old as the woman you feel,’ joked Jason, as he sidled up to Rob with a grin.

Rob smiled at him uncomfortably.

‘The woman he’s feeling feels great to me,’ replied Luke, squeezing Ashley’s bottom. ‘One hundred per cent peach.’

Rob’s eyes flicked to Luke’s hand, then to Ashley’s bottom and back to Luke’s face. Luke was always doing stuff like that to show Rob he’d known Ashley so much longer than Rob had that he could pinch her bottom secure in the knowledge that Rob couldn’t say a word without seeming churlish.

‘You can’t do that to Rob’s bird right in front of him – not on his birthday of all days,’ chided Neil. ‘Wait until tomorrow!’