The Best of Friends (7 page)

He grinned. ‘That yours?'

She nodded. ‘Remember Colin? Colin Weaver? We're living with his mum. He's driving for a brewery. This,' she said without much interest, ‘is Emma.'

‘Wow,' George said, ‘a baby.'

‘Not exactly planned,' the girl said. ‘You at college?'

‘Yeah. Thought I'd better not take my washing home.'

‘I see your brother around,' the girl said, ‘Adam. He's in the same year as my sister.'

George didn't want to talk about Adam. Adam would cackle with glee when he heard George hated his course. ‘You must be mental,' Adam had said when George went off to Birmingham. ‘Totally insane. Hotels! Haven't you had enough of fucking hotels?'

‘Got any change?' George said again. ‘For a fiver?'

She shook her head.

‘Haven't got a bean. I'm waiting here till Col finishes work. I'm not going home without him. Not to that old cow.'

‘You married?'

The girl picked up her magazine again.

‘You must be joking,' she said witheringly.

George went back out into the street, holding his crumpled note. He would go for change to the newsagent where he and Adam always bought their music magazines and, in his case, the cigarettes he smoked with a kind of angry furtiveness out of his bedroom window. It wasn't that his parents had ever expressly forbidden him to smoke, but because Hilary
especially treated him with such devastating contempt when she smelled smoke on him, it made him behave in a way that was both furious and secretive. Outside the newsagent, he almost bumped into Sophy Bedford. She was looking very pale, almost transparent, and when she recognized him her face suddenly became convulsed, as if she might faint or cry.

‘George—'

He gave her a rough hug. Funny old Sophy, technically Adam's friend because they were the same age, but kindly patronized by him and adored by Gus for as long as he could remember. ‘Gus,' Hilary once said, ‘has been in love with Sophy all his life.'

George said, ‘Great to see you.'

Sophy nodded. She had her hair twisted into some complicated plait and she was wearing torn jeans and a huge, faded T-shirt with a stretched neck and hem.

‘I didn't know you were coming home.'

‘Just the weekend. I was – well, doing a bit of washing before I saw Mum.' He grinned. ‘Diplomacy, you know. I was just going to Skinner's for some change.'

‘I've got change,' Sophy said. ‘I'll lend it to you.' She began to scrabble in the straw basket on leather straps that hung on one shoulder. ‘I'll come with you.'

‘No need,' he said kindly.

‘Yes—'

He peered at her.

‘Soph? You OK?'

She produced a purple canvas purse and held it out.

‘There—'

He took her by the wrist.

‘What's up?'

‘I'll tell you,' she said. Her wrist felt like twigs in his grasp. ‘In the launderette. While we do your washing.'

The girl and the pushchair had gone. Only the
magazine she had been reading,
Real Life Modern Romances
, lay on the orange plastic chair where she had been sitting. George pushed Sophy down into another chair opposite his machine, collected powder, poured it in and set the machine in complaining motion. Then he sat down next to Sophy.

‘Come and have a coffee.'

‘No. I'd rather be here. It's more – invisible.'

He leaned forward.

‘What's up, then?'

Sophy pulled her plait over her shoulder and began twisting the end.

‘When – when you get to your house, you might find my mother there.'

‘Gina? Well, so what?'

‘I mean – I don't mean just visiting, but maybe staying. Some nights she does, some she doesn't. If she goes back to High Place, I go with her. Otherwise I stay with Gran.'

‘Sophy—'

‘Daddy's gone,' Sophy said, twisting wildly. ‘Gone. Three weeks ago. He's taken half of all the things we had and he's gone to London.'

George put his head in his hands.

‘Oh my God.'

‘It was one quarrel too many, Gran said. Daddy said my mother had changed, that she wasn't the person he married any more and that they were killing each other. He said he hadn't got a girlfriend. He said he couldn't stay another day, not even for me.'

George took his head out of his hands and looked at Sophy. She wasn't crying but she looked as if she'd cried so much already she was all cried out, like a piece of waste paper, or an old rag.

‘God, I'm sorry.'

‘Gus keeps giving me flowers. Like Daddy was dead.
I don't know where to put them. I sort of don't know where home is.'

George's washing machine began on a high whining spin.

‘Mum never told me,' George said. ‘I spoke to her last week but she didn't say anything.'

‘I expect my mother won't let her. I've heard them shouting. She won't let Hilary telephone Daddy, you see, she won't let anyone. I think my mother doesn't want to believe it's happened so she's pretending it hasn't, in a way. She keeps saying it's the end of the dream, the end of the vision. Your family are being so kind. Even Adam.' Sophy gave a ghost of a smile. ‘If she drank all the brandy he brings her, she'd be pie-eyed.'

George got up. He knelt down in front of Sophy and took her fidgeting hands.

‘I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say, really, but I'm devastated for you. Poor kid. Poor Sophy.'

‘I'm just another statistic now, aren't I? One more divorce, one more single-parent family—' She ducked her head. ‘I never really truly thought this would happen. I thought they'd go on yelling and screaming for ever, like they always did.' She extracted her hands and picked up her plait again. George noticed that her nails were bitten almost to the quick. ‘I'd give anything to have the yelling and screaming back again,
anything
.'

The machine gave a final triumphant clank and whirred unevenly to a halt. George straightened up and wrenched the lid open.

‘Will you come with me?' Sophy said suddenly.

‘Anywhere. Of course. Where?'

‘To my house. To see it. I can't go alone—'

George began to stuff sodden clumps of clothing into his plastic bag. Sophy sounded as she always had, all
her life, pleading with someone to come with her in the dark, or to the lavatory or on a school trip. ‘I can't go alone.' It was what she always said. ‘Go with her,' Hilary had always said to her sons. ‘Go on. She's an only child, you selfish louts, she's always alone.' He turned back to Sophy. She was gazing at him, pleadingly.

‘Of course,' he said.

High Place was as quiet as a church. Sophy had turned the key in the glass garden door and let them into the kitchen which looked like a show kitchen, shining and unnaturally tidy, except for the raw hole where the dishwasher had once been. Odd, George thought, to take a dishwasher. Tables, chairs, pictures, things with character you were fond of, yes, but a
dishwasher.
It was like choosing to take light bulbs or spare lavatory rolls, a sort of deliberate, impersonal, cold thing to do.

‘When did you last eat in here?' George said.

Sophy picked up the pink pelargonium in its pot from the kitchen table and carried it to the sink.

‘Weeks ago. Mum and I have take-away stuff now if we're here but she doesn't really eat it.'

‘Where's your budgie?'

Sophy ran water into the flowerpot.

‘At Gran's. He loves it there. She talks to him all day. Go and look at the other rooms. Go and see what I mean.'

George went out of the kitchen, into the dark panelled hall and then into the sitting-room. Sophy followed him, desperate he should have the same impression as she.

‘Look.'

George looked. The furniture in the room looked gawky and awkward. There wasn't enough of it and
what was left was at odd angles and there were large blank spaces on the walls, and lamps on the floor, and no curtains.

‘He took the sofa,' Sophy said, ‘and some tables and chests and a painting of Rouen Cathedral. My mother won't let me put things back. She says it must stay as he left it.'

‘Why d'you keep calling Gina “my mother”?'

‘Well, she is.'

‘But you don't call her that, do you? You call her “Mum”, don't you?'

‘Not at the moment,' Sophy said carefully.

George took a step towards the door. The room seemed to him to be full of pain and anger.

‘When we're here,' Sophy said, ‘we're like people trying to live in a house that's been half devastated by a bomb or something.'

George leaned against the doorframe.

‘Have you seen your father again?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I can't yet. Because of my mother. She's sort of numb.'

George had a brief and powerful vision of life at The Bee House at the moment – summertime, every bedroom full, his father almost permanently in the kitchen, his mother never still and particularly short-tempered, and in their midst Gina, numb with the devastation of Fergus's desertion. He glanced up the stairs.

‘All the jars have gone,' Sophy said, following his gaze. ‘The Chinese jars. When I was little I thought they were a family.'

George moved from the doorframe and put his arm round Sophy's shoulders.

She said, ‘It's grim here, isn't it?'

‘At the moment—'

‘Nothing's the same.
Nothing.
One person does something they want and all the rest of us get knocked over.'

‘Perhaps when you have a chance to talk to him—'

‘I don't want to,' Sophy said, stiff in the circle of his arm. ‘I can't. I'm so angry.'

‘With him?'

‘And her.' Sophy slid free and began to pummel on the nearest wall with her fists. ‘How dare they? How bloody
dare
they? First they make me feel guilty and now they do this!' She whirled round and shouted at George, ‘They're just life-wreckers! That's what they are! Life-wreckers!'

George got back to The Bee House to find Don, the barman, unlocking the bar for the evening. Two residents were already waiting, making an elaborate pretence of lack of interest in the first drink of the evening behind newspapers and guidebooks. Hilary had had some trouble in persuading Don out of his penchant for tartan bow-ties and the invention of theme cocktails – ‘The Bee House Bombshell', ‘Honey Heaven' – but he still retained the chirpiness of a bartender from an old gangster movie.

‘How y'doing, George?'

‘Buggered,' George said, forgetting the residents.

Don gave an enormous wink in their direction.

‘Your ma's on the rampage. Water tank burst over number seven, new tank and all. Faulty, it was. Having a high old time in Brum, then?'

‘No,' George said. ‘It's knackering.'

‘No peace for the wicked,' Don said, clattering the protective grilles up. ‘You'll be on duty tonight. Full house in the dining-room and Michelle's off with a migraine. Now then,' he said, addressing the residents. ‘Sir and madam. What can I tickle your fancies with?'

George went through the swing door at the back of the bar, and into the narrow corridor behind it where Hilary's office was, and the staff washroom and the staircase that led up to the family flat at the top of the building. It was dark here, and shabby and the staircase walls bore the marks of long years of boys and bags banging their way up and down it. ‘Home,' Sophy had said almost savagely as she turned the key again on High Place. ‘Home! That's just a
house
!' George had wanted her to come back with him but she had refused.

‘Ironic, isn't it?' she'd said. ‘I should be there, all this summer. Hilary offered me a job, but of course that's gone west, like everything else. I thought I ought to stay around Mum. Then I couldn't stand it. And I didn't know what to say to Hilary so it all just sort of faded away.'

George toiled up the staircase to. the top floor. He thought it might be a comfort to see someone like Gus, or Adam, and just josh around for a while, but there was no music on, and no-one in the kitchen and their bedroom doors, though open on to a familiar chaos of clothes and sports things and dishevelled bedding, were empty. He paused by the sitting-room door and looked in. It was tidy, in the slightly apologetic, unconfident way that all little-used rooms are tidy, and Gina was in there. She was lying on the sofa, on her side, holding a cushion against her in both arms. Her eyes were closed and her shoes – very small shoes, George observed – were on the floor beside a mug and a plate with an apple core on it. She didn't move. George hesitated, took a breath and tiptoed on, down the passage to his own room, opening and closing the door with stealthy relief. Then he dumped his bags on the floor, kicked his shoes off and burrowed immediately and thankfully under his duvet, head and all.
Enough, George said to himself in the blessed, familiar-smelling darkness. Enough, enough.

‘She
knows
it's not true,' Hilary said vehemently. ‘She
knows
she isn't a manipulative hysteric with no purpose in life! She
knows
he has to give himself good reason for going! I don't blame her for wanting our attention but I really can't take all this “Woe is me because I'm all the awful things Fergus says I am” stuff. It's driving me nuts.'

Laurence, pushing basil leaves under the breast skin of a row of chickens, said he didn't think Hilary was being fair.

‘Not fair? What d'you mean, not fair? I've known both of them for almost twenty years and I've listened to Gina now solidly for three weeks and I'm not allowed a view even?'

‘Of course you're allowed a view,' Laurence said, not looking up. ‘I just think the one you have isn't quite fair. Fergus has made Gina feel a freak. That's the trouble. He's made her feel unwomanly and unsexy and neurotic and destructive. It's like being told often enough, cleverly enough, that you're mad. She's absolutely haunted by what he said to her. He did say terrible things, you know.'