The Last Word (22 page)

‘Thank you, Mrs C.’ Tabby stepped out of the hallway and towards the front door. ‘I really miss her.’

‘You’ll forgive each other. It is always the way with love. There is a part of my daughter that jumps from cliffs with passion, and the other is steady as a rock, content. You are similar in many ways, but in this I think you’re very different. You’re more like the water, back and forth with the waves, rushing forward, shrinking back.’

Tabby stared at this woman she had been scared of for most of her childhood, indignant towards for most of her teenager years, and finally thought she understood what it meant to raise a child and understand them. Claudia may not have nagged as much as Mrs C, or been as strict, or as quick to punish, but she would never know how her daughter loved, or how her daughter’s friends compared in their actions. She was honestly astounded.

‘The old watch a lot more. We have nothing to do but be nosey and interfere in young lives.’ Mrs C grinned, and Tabby suddenly realised how much easier Chandra’s life was going to be with her mother supporting her decision.

‘Tell Chandra to talk to me, I love her very much.’

‘In that, we have always been the same.’ Mrs C nodded. ‘Tell your mother congratulations on her wedding.’

And then Tabby was standing outside the house she’d stood outside every morning for five years, waiting Chandra so they could walk to school. They would leave extra early, just so they could walk slowly through the quiet streets, avoiding the other students with their bright blue blazers. So they could laugh and be silly, and talk about boys and then avoid eye contact when they saw them in the hallways.

Tabby walked down the road to the bus stop and sat there, remembering consoling Chandra when she couldn’t go to Brian Gibson’s birthday party, because her mother knew there would be drinking. So, instead, they went to the cinema, ate so much junk food they felt ill, and sat at the bus stop imagining all the stupid things that had happened at that party they didn’t care about, to those beautiful people they didn’t know. The bus stop was where they had both, at separate times, had their first kisses, it’s where they planned their escapes from their mothers and North London and everything school had to offer. It’s where they made up future boyfriends who were much more sophisticated and beautiful than Brian Gibson, boys who played in bands and wrote poetry.

And then, later, it would be the last place they would cling to each other at the end of the reunion night before separating, back off to universities at opposite parts of the country, and getting further away from the people they used to be.

‘Hey,’ a voice said, and of course, Chandra was standing at the bus stop, smiling just a little. ‘Mama called.’

‘That was quick.’

‘I was already on my way here.’ She shrugged.

‘Voluntarily visiting your parents? Things do change.’

‘Could say the same for you. Going into the lion’s den for me.’ Chandra didn’t move, stayed leaning against the bus shelter. She was wearing her old ripped jeans and her scuffed trainers and an oversized jumper. She looked beautiful, and normal, and so much like the girl she was before she became so polished and in control of her life.

‘I’m so, so sorry Chands, God, I don’t even– I’m so sorry.’ Tabby felt her throat closing up and tears welling, the same way they did any time she apologised to someone she loved for something she was truly ashamed of. She felt her chest cave in a little and tried to take a few breaths. ‘I promise I will be so much more supportive of you from now on.’

Chandra frowned a little, and moved to sit next to Tabby. ‘It’s not really me I’m worried about, it’s you.’

‘You think I’m fucked up because I couldn’t be happy for you, and you’re right – ’

Chandra took a deep breath. ‘No, I wasn’t, not about everything. Look, you are scared, but the more you pretend this thing doesn’t matter, the more likely you are to get hurt. And Harry doesn’t deserve that.’

Tabby took a moment to control her breathing, wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. ‘You remember when we came here the night before uni? We had two alcopops, bright blue ones, and we promised that we would do everything we’d always dreamed of. Kind of stupid and naive, really.’ Tabby paused, and felt Chandra focusing on her, but couldn’t quite make eye contact. ‘I said that I would be a writer, whether I was poor for ever, as long as I could write, I could breathe, I could be me, and I would be OK, and nothing else would matter.’

‘I remember,’ Chandra said quietly. ‘I was upset, because I didn’t have anything like that to guide me.’

‘You said as long as you could live where you wanted, buy what you wanted and say what you wanted, you would be fine.’

‘I think maybe “love who I wanted” was also on that list,’ Chandra said wryly.

Tabby nodded. They watched a few cars go past, watched as the bus they had used for the entirety of their childhood appeared in the distance and trundled towards them, creaking to a halt. The bus sighed and a gang of teenagers bounced off, blaring music from their phones, walking in rhythm, not noting the two twenty-somethings at all. Which was the way it had always been, and the way they liked it.

‘All I need to survive is to write,’ Tabby said simply. ‘I can manage without love, or prospects, or a great job or sex. That is the only thing I need. And I can’t risk that again.’

‘You could find another writing job if things went sour with Harry. You can’t let that stop you!’

‘After the injunction incident, when I told you both I was looking for writing jobs, I wasn’t. It took me a year and a half before I wrote another word. I couldn’t even look at the notebooks I kept, I couldn’t form a sentence or find anything I cared enough about to put down on paper. I was…shell-shocked. And that was when I was the worst. You remember.’

And Chandra did remember. She remembered Tabby staying in a shitty bedsit in Brixton, before Rhi had found their Tufnell Park house and dragged Tabby along. She remembered how Tabby spent all day in her pyjamas, didn’t eat, didn’t read, didn’t do anything but smoke weed and watch daytime television and occasionally burst into tears. She stopped using the internet because she couldn’t bear to see what it said about David, or what had happened to the newspaper. She couldn’t watch how they represented her in the press, suddenly on the other side.

Chandra remembered when they had tried to come after Tabby with the law, and told her to write down a statement of events, and she couldn’t even hold the pen properly. She kept trying to rearrange it in her fingers until it stood upright, but she couldn’t make it work, staring in horror and eventually bursting into tears in frustration. The board declared she was under deep mental strain, and that she’d never been up to the task of working at a demanding newspaper like that. The article they wrote about her said she’d burnt out, it happened with the ones who shone too brightly too young. She’d been excellent, and then she was finished.

‘I can’t go through that again. Not even to do with the injunction and David. I can’t risk not writing. It would kill me. I would honestly…that’s my one thing.’

Chandra’s eyes were full of pity. ‘I know, but maybe you wouldn’t let yourself get back to that place. Nothing can be as bad as that, can it? You got out once, you can do it again.’

Tabby didn’t mention that the only thing that had allowed her to write again was that strange phone call one day to her mother’s house, telling her that her father had died, and that it was too late to say goodbye. That one moment, her need for catharsis, finished any block she had. She wrote frantically, without thinking, without even looking at the paper. And three days later, when she locked away all those bits of paper in the bottom of an old trunk, having decided never to look at them, she found that she could laugh again. That she could scribble a limerick on the corner of a page, that she could describe a stranger’s face, or the beauty of the Brighton seascape. After that, Tabby kept it light, Jaffa Cake stories and top ten hair bobbles. Staying away from the big stuff. Until Harry had come along and dragged her back again, or at least halfway.

‘Sorry, I made this about me. I’m so shit like that. This is about you. About you and a lovely boy, who I really want to get to know.’ Tabby wiped her eyes, feeling guilty.

Chandra put an arm around her shoulder. ‘And you will, and he’ll become a part of our little group, and we’ll all love and accept him, and invite him to Nothing Days and then take the piss. Just like with Harry.’

‘But – ’

‘Come on, Tabs, paint your future with me for just a minute, would you? Because I know what I see. I see group trips to the beach, and laughing, and Harry making us go to the posh restaurants he does, and then moaning when we drag him back to normality. I see Danny arguing with Rhi about politics a lot, but always giving in, because Rhi is Rhi. I see planning my wedding, and you covering it from random angles in your articles, and I see you, being the happiest I’ve ever seen you, like the last few months, but more so, because you finally see what the rest of us see: that this can be real for you.’

‘Jeez, Chands.’ Tabby started sobbing, partly because Chandra saying it made it all so perfect, but also because there was no reason it couldn’t be true. A few more teenagers walked past, averting their eyes from the sobbing woman and her soothing companion.

‘The mistake I made with Mark all those years ago was hiding him from my parents. He felt ignored, unloved, not special enough for me to fight for. And he was right. I was so busy holding him at arm’s length that I didn’t worry enough about what he felt. And he left, and he was right to do that. And I couldn’t get over it. No one else seemed worth fighting my parents for.’

Chandra finally revealed what had happened, her own silent days, and dark, dark nights, where neither Rhi nor Tabby, nor any family member or uni friend could understand why Mark was suddenly gone, and Chandra was suddenly mute.

‘And now I don’t have to fight my parents about Danny because they’re supportive. But even if they weren’t, I’d fight for him. That’s how I know. That was my lesson. This is yours.’ Chandra elbowed her gently.

‘I can’t believe your mum approves of a boyfriend!’ Tabby said hoarsely into the silence a few minutes later. It was starting to get to that grey time of day, and rain clouds were settling in.

‘Are you ready for the final bombshell, now we’ve got all the drama out of the way?’ Chandra dabbed at her own eyes delicately with her fingertips.

‘OK, hit me, I can take it!’ Tabby turned to face her friend completely, meeting her eyes.

‘He’s Indian!’

Tabby Riley squealed, and her ‘no fucking way!’ could probably be heard from Chandra’s parent’s house. So that was at least one thing that hadn’t changed in ten years. They spent the next hour at the bus stop, each grasping an alcopop. And it wasn’t until Tabby knew everything she possibly could about her best friend’s new boyfriend, had laughed and cried, and cried with laughter, that it finally started to rain.

Chapter Twenty

‘OK, darling, I’m going to need you to be very relaxed.’

Harry’s voice at the end of the phone line was calm and tentative, and Tabby did the only thing she could when faced with Harry the Lion-Tamer. She panicked.

‘What the hell’s happened? Are you all right?’

Harry huffed, ‘I’m fine. Everyone and everything is fine. We’ve just got a bit of not-so-friendly banter at the paper with the competition, and, well, I didn’t want you to be caught unawares. That’s all.’

Harry sounded too breezy, too care-free.

‘Shulman, stop bullshitting me. I know when you’re spinning a PR web,’ Tabby grumbled and pushed her laptop aside, stretching out on her bed, phone in the curve of her neck. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

‘OK.’ Harry’s terse business voice made an appearance, and Tabby suddenly missed him a little, and wanted him to call her ‘darling’ or ‘babe’ or whatever the hell he wanted to call her. ‘Clearly a rival paper has seen how our sales are affecting them and have decided to attack our newest blogger in the hopes of distracting us. Now, I’m only telling you this so you don’t get a shock if you randomly find it, that’s all…’

Harry voice faded as Tabby grabbed her laptop and quickly typed her own name into a search engine. When the first hit was labelled ‘Why Bloggers Should Remain Bloggers’, and was listed on the Guardian. A writer at the Guardian was reviewing her work at The Type. OK, so it would be bad, but whatever. She had a great job, and she knew she was good at what she did.

‘Harry, honestly, I’m not going to get upset just because…’ She scanned the article and her gaze settled on the name on the byline. An official sounding name, a smarmy picture. It could have been any widely respected and often-read writer. Except that it was Dick the Prick. Being a prick, again.

‘Did you see who wrote it?’ Tabby breathed softly, her eyes picking out ‘incapable’, ‘unstable’ and ‘atrocious ramblings of a naive and unbalanced youngster’. He had called her an embarrassment to print, and recalled the time he had worked with her, sure even then that she would be destined for online journalism, that only certain writers could make it into print, and the doomed and untalented would purge their eager minds online, into the ‘rubbish bin of puerile thoughts.’ He even asked if she was obsessed with cake, and compared her to ‘an even more irritating and less self-aware Bridget Jones.’ He was comparing her to a fictional character, a needy fictional character.

‘I did. Tabs, you still there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tabby said emptily. ‘Am I?’

Harry took on his ‘I’m in control’ voice, one that usually made Tabby either completely relax, or get very, very irritated. ‘Look, sweetheart, it’s really not a problem, OK? The guy’s a dick. We ignore it, it gives us some free advertising, and we know that he is coming from a place of jealousy. Our paper is selling more, due to his protégé, who he threw away. He’s striving for something. He’s desperate. Don’t worry about it, honestly.’

Tabby felt that anger harden in her stomach, from a frazzled knot of worry into a ball of desperate violence. She wanted to punch and kick and hurt. She was angry with Richard, at herself, at Harry, and she wasn’t even sure why she was angry with Harry, as he was being so lovely and supportive.