When Good Friends Go Bad (4 page)

Seemed kind of bitchy now, considering she'd just turned his poor Fiat into an origami model, but he hadn't shown any resentment when he'd collected her this afternoon.

Suddenly, the race was over, the tannoy announcing the winners. Ollie vaulted one-handed over the barrier, his face stricken with concern, as he helped pull Jen and her bad knee out of the car.

'What happened to slow in, fast out?' He scooped her up carefully, his voice gentle and teasing.

'Enough of the sex talk.' She threw her arms around his neck. 'Just get me home, big boy.' And then she succumbed to the delicious sleepiness that crept over her, relaxing into his warm strength.

'I thought you'd take it slowly at first,' he murmured. 'I never dreamed you'd get hurt.' He carried her through the crowd, ignoring her protests she could walk, to the first-aid station to get her knee bandaged. Asking his friend Paul to sort out the wreckage of his car, he then drove her all the way to Muswell Hill, hefted her up five flights of stairs, opened the door, swept past Helen's astonished look of horror and into her bedroom, with Jen giggling as she pointed the way, hiding her face in his shoulder so as not to see Helen's glare.

They fell on the bed together, pools of sweat drenching the back of Ollie's oil-stained vest and dampening his hair. He was breathing hard, the sweat on his impressive muscles glistening.

'Thank God you're such a little thing,' he said. Then he rolled to face her, their mouths met and that was it.

Kaboom!

JULY 1998

She recognised Meg right away. Signing the register in the former coaching inn, Jen had just passed over her Visa for processing when she heard the brass bell clang and an unmistakable figure stepped on to the Indian rug in the foyer.

'Meg,' she said, feeling overcome with a sudden shyness. They were virtually strangers now, after all.

For a split second they both stood motionless, the whole foyer between them, brains taking in every detail. Complexion, hairstyle, size, shape, clothes, shoes – Meg was wearing tasselled flip-flops, while Jen had on a brand-new pair of Converse sneakers.

Meg's face was fresh-looking and unlined, beaming from ear to ear, with the same marginally upturned nose and slight overbite that expensive braces had failed to eradicate. Not surprising, given she'd yanked them out as soon as boys began to show interest. But somehow, at twenty-eight, all Meg's features fitted together so much better. Her freckles had faded into a deep tan, her red hair, once a gingery tumble, looked Pre-Raphaelite and romantic, her dandelion-yellow top and fuchsia flares showed off a flat navel complete with ring and butterfly tattoo and the whole hippy ensemble was topped off with a peace-sign medallion and a multicoloured headband worthy of Meg's boho mother.

Impulsively Meg dropped her bags on the floor and ran across the room. 'Jen!' She threw her arms around her in a bear hug. 'God, it's so great to see you.' She held her at arm's length, grinning. 'You look awesome, dude. Is Rowan here yet? Wasn't this the most excellent idea of hers?'

Jen felt her face go scarlet as she squirmed, horribly aware of being the eye of Meg's hurricane, even though the only witness – the receptionist – was busy with running Jen's card through the machine, apparently unaware that she was witnessing an occasion momentous enough to rival a Beatles reunion.

'Um, yeah, it's great, isn't it?' Jen muttered, dropping her eyes and finding herself stupid and stiffly British. Meg seemed much more American than Jen remembered – after five years at Ashport they'd stopped noticing her residual twang – and, Jen felt guilty wondering this, had she always been so loud?

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and gave Meg a weak grin. 'Long time no see,' she managed feebly, racking her brains for something witty or remotely interesting to say.

'We serve food in the bar,' the receptionist told them as she handed Jen back her receipt, 'but we also have a lovely dining room. Our chef is famous ever since those nice folk from Michelin gave us two stars last year. So if you haven't already, we do recommend reservations.'

'We got them already,' Meg stepped up to the desk as Jen scrawled her name, 'under Georgina Carrington. And I've a room booked too, Meg Lennox.' Exuberantly, she squeezed Jen again, one arm around her shoulders. 'Isn't this wild! We're all grown-up.' She laughed from her three-inch advantage. 'If you can call it up.'

She looked as out of place in deepest Wiltshire as her mother Clover had in Ashport all those years ago. Pictures unfolded in Jen's mind like someone flipping through a scrapbook of memories. Always the most flamboyant dresser in their class, Meg had gone full circle from their ra-ra skirt and legwarmer days – Jennifer Beales had a lot to answer for – into the nineties neo-hippy revival.

Details were flooding back. How Meg always told them she was conceived at Woodstock. How Clover and Herb had boasted they'd stayed naked during the whole event and even featured in the famous documentary. Which Jen always thought was another of Meg's stories but when she did the maths, it could have been true, Woodstock being August 1969 and Meg born in May 1970.

Clover claimed Janis Joplin had inspired her singer-songwriter career and Jen recalled that framed photo of Meg's parents at Woodstock, Clover in bell bottoms and a tatty old Afghan coat, Herb bare-chested, wearing a ragged vest and torn jeans, presumably before they stripped it all off and frolicked starkers in that muddy field.

'Are you . . .' Jen started.

'Why didn't . . .' Meg's sentence clashed as they both began talking and then broke off, laughing and apologising.

'You first,' Meg waved.

'No, you.'

'I was just gonna say – why didn't we do this years ago?' Meg continued. 'I meant to write to all you guys. It's just . . . well, you know me, I sucked at English.' She gave an unapologetic shrug.

'Our teacher didn't think so.' Jen shoved her purse into her worn leather handbag. 'You always got far better marks even when you'd scribbled a lot of old rubbish during morning registration and I'd worked on my masterpiece all night. It drove me bonkers.'

Funny how some things stayed with you. Like the image of herself swatting a giggling Meg with her rolled-up notebook, pretending outrage at the sight of another A.

'It was all in the content.' Meg's grin stretched the length of the reception desk as she took a man-style wallet out of her fringed shoulder bag and handed over her Mastercard. 'Lucky for me Dippy Dugan valued imagination over my creative spelling. Made up for the Ds I got from all the other teachers.'

There was another pause as the conversational bucket hit the bottom of that well. Meg twirled her room key round her finger, both of them quietly hoping Rowan and Georgina would appear and help break the ice.

Twelve years had passed since that last fateful escapade in Ashport had got them in trouble with everyone, including the police, and might have meant expulsion if they hadn't just finished their GCSEs. They'd all been pulled out of Ashport anyway. Rowan's mother had dragged her back to Wales, stuck her in some type of Welsh language immersion college where you got reprimanded – Rowan wrote – for talking English during breaktime. Meg's parents had decided Britain was way too uptight and decamped to Seattle to check out the grunge music scene. Jen's father, despite all her tears, hysterics and heartfelt pleas, took them to West Croydon, of all the world's dreary holes, and found Jen her first menial clerking job. Georgina did a term abroad in Switzerland, courtesy of her grandmother, prior to returning to Ashport Comp for her A levels.

'So – I take it the others aren't here yet?' Meg scanned the floral-wallpapered reception area with its fireplace, wing armchairs and framed hunting prints.

'Nope. I already asked.'

'I'm in six,' Meg studied her key, the number burned into a large wooden tag. 'How about you?'

'Four,' Jen said. 'Shall we find our rooms?'

As they lugged bags up the stairs, she too wondered why they'd left it so long. Why hadn't they done anything about meeting again until Rowan's phone call just last week?

They'd sworn undying friendship, even written for a while. Meg sent a few widely spaced postcards, each wackier than the last. Rowan's letters had been full of comical complaints about the nutty teachers chosen by her nutty mother but you could sense the misery beneath her humour. Jen and Georgina's exchanges had lasted the longest, with Georgie sending Jen cigarettes and a weekly two-page missive in her perfectly formed script all through her stint in Switzerland and the Lower Sixth year in Ashport. They'd ended the following October just two months before Jen's whole world was shattered and she no longer cared. About anything.

'Say, babe.' Meg's voice came from the rear, one step behind her on the staircase. 'Are you still cutting your own hair?'

'Only my fringe now. Why, do you think it's too short?' Jen's free hand ran through the curls at the back of her neck, feeling oddly wrong-footed as if she'd been caught out somehow.

'No, it's cool. I dig the Artful Dodger look.' They headed down the hall towards their rooms, Meg's scrutiny taking in Jen's frayed old denim jacket and navy cargo pants. 'Hey,' she made a show of peering into her face. 'Is that
make-up
I see?'

'I've always worn mascara,' Jen reminded her, defensive the way she often had been with Meg, as if not wearing cosmetics as a virtual child had been nerdy in the extreme. 'Even when you knew me. And lipstick and eyeshadow at parties.' She found room four and turned the key in the lock. 'God, how nice is this?'

The room was charmingly quaint, if modest in size: ochre walls, bucolic paintings, an actual four-poster bed and fireplace, exposed ceiling beams and mullioned windows overlooking the yard below.

'Where's the cat?' Meg looked around.

'What cat? Why?'

'I'm looking for a place to swing it. Where's the crapper?'

Further investigation revealed a bathroom with instant-hot shower squeezed into the dimensions of the average broom cupboard.

'Clever really,' Jen approved.

'We should have shared,' Meg said, when they checked her room, almost identical but with the bathroom down the hall. 'Even a Motel Six would give you two queen beds and your own bathroom. They'd never get away with charging top dollar for a shoebox like this in the States.' She stood on the bedspread and wrapped her leg suggestively round one of the posts. 'But hey, you only live once, right? And look,' she went into a perfect back arch that Jen could only dream of attempting, 'we're all set should we get the urge to do some midnight pole dancing.' She straightened up and jumped off the bed. 'Are you dying for a drink? I am. Let's go to the bar.'

'I can't believe I was actually the first to arrive somewhere,' Jen commented as they went back downstairs. 'Ollie says he's never met anyone who keeps their watch, microwave and every clock they own forty minutes fast and still has to leg it like Red Rum on the home stretch to get to appointments on time.'

'Ollie?' Meg seized on the name, and Jen felt her cheeks flush.

'Just this guy I've been seeing. Nothing serious.' The words cost her a guilty pang as she thought how sweet Ollie had been recently. 'The real bugger,' she went on clumsily, 'is when my flatmate puts all the clocks right without telling me. I'd think she's out to scupper my brilliant career, except I don't have one.'

Was that enough of a diversion? She really didn't feel like telling Meg about Ollie. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

'So, when precisely are you going to marry me?' he'd ask with a grin, as he brought her a mug of tea in bed or wrestled with her in the sheets. And Jen would gaze at the ceiling, finger on chin, pretending to rack her brains. 'Well gee, I don't know. When you've reached puberty, perhaps?'

When he'd first started this nonsense, she'd been clutched with panic. One of many reasons why she rarely allowed her relationships to last more than a few weeks. Ollie was teasing, she reassured herself. He was using her the way she was using him. And what hot-blooded female could boot something so gorgeous and athletically talented out of bed? One day he'd come to his senses. Or she'd come to hers. Until then, the sex was phenomenal, better than she could ever have imagined, and for the first time since Starkey she was actually enjoying herself.

It had barely been four months. Granted, that was a record for her, but surely not reason enough to run, not yet anyway.

'It's hard to envision you with anyone except Starkey, somehow.' Meg trailed her hand idly down the banister, the question plain in her voice. 'The way you two were like soulmates or something, I thought for sure you'd be chained together for life.' Her kohl-painted eyes felt too penetrating. 'Do you ever hear from him?'

'Starkey who?' Strange how his name could still feel like a punch. Jen squinched up her brow comically. 'Oh, that old toerag.' She yawned. 'Classic amnesia case, Dr Lennox. Forgot my phone number, forgot my existence and unless he has positive proof of it being down to alien abduction, he's the last person in the world I'd want to see or hear about again. And who gives a shit? Men are bastards, anyway.'

'Like that, eh? Well, his loss, honey, not yours.' Meg linked her arm through Jen's. 'And exactly how non-serious is this new guy?'

Jen hesitated, but decided she couldn't resist. 'Blimey, I don't know.' She cast her eyes to the ceiling. 'Five or six times a week. Two or three times a night.'

'You lucky, lucky dog.' Meg tugged her towards the red curtain across the entrance to the lounge bar. 'Let's drink to that, shall we? I want to hear all about this stud, every tiny detail.'

'Oh believe me, it's not tiny,' Jen quipped suggestively. She was starting to feel her reserve thawing under Meg's happy-go-lucky nature. 'But I'm having a bit of a flatmate problem. I keep expecting to walk in the kitchen and find the poor sod gutted from sternum to groin while she wipes the bloody blade with a tea towel. Too bad, because he's wonderful really.'

'What?' Meg smirked. 'The thrice-nightly screams of pleasure keeping her awake?'

'Something like that.' Jen didn't want to get into Helen's prejudices. 'Shouldn't we wait at reception? For the others?' She dithered at the threshold to the bar.

'Hey, we're all staying here, aren't we?' Meg towed her through the velvet barrier. 'They won't need bloodhounds to track us down. And how can we miss Georgie with that big lardass.'

'She wasn't that fat!' Jen leapt to her old friend's defence.

'Sez you. Why did they always make her goalie in hockey? No one could get past that porkie pie.' She hooted suddenly, her wicked smile exactly like the old Meg's. 'I'm joking, you know I love her to bits.' She threw herself on a bar stool, clicking her fingers to attract the barman's attention. 'Jim Beam and ginger ale. What you having?'

'White wine please.' Jen sat next to her. 'I haven't seen Georgina since I left Ashport. How about you?'

'Nope. But I heard she's some kinda designer. I ran into Babs Pitstop at Waterloo – remember her?' Jen nodded vaguely as Meg popped a peanut in her mouth. 'I guess they hook up occasionally. I asked about you and Rowan but she said she hadn't seen either of you since fifth year. I thought I was tripping when I got Rowan's note. Did you talk to her?'

'Briefly. She still has that soft sing-song voice, I kept asking her to stop whispering and speak up. She was in the phone box of a café, said she'd got a mountain of things to tell us but she was running out of coins and it could wait till we met.'

'I tried to call her when I first got back to the UK a year ago. But all I got was her crazy mom.'