Page 5 of Last Night

I lean against the pleasantly chilly wall in the loo and type, grinning.

Having been in stone-cold love with Hester’s other half for the best part of two decades means I never know how much of my dislike is plain old envy. Susie and Justin continually – and inadvertently, because they absolutely don’t know – reassure me I’d have disliked her anyway. I often play Nice Cop in regards to Hester, to further throw everyone off the scent.

Eve:You wait, she’ll be right and that’ll show us

Susie:She’s not right, she doesn’t even know who Marcus Garvey was, you could see that when Justin challenged her

Justin:She probably thinks he won Best Video 2007 at the Grammys

Susie:Lol. And I’d just point out that Eve’s suggestion got shot down and she didn’t get the hump

Eve:Does this say anything bad about my breasts

Susie:Only that they’re not a carbon offsetting scheme for being a horror

Justin:Sigh. Let us get drunk.

2

Justin and Susie are both personality types who, by and large, don’t do guilt. It would slow them down considerably. I drink guilt like a smoothie for breakfast, and much as I revel in our regular secret back channel comms about Hester, I know I shouldn’t.

As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are intolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back.

Option two might not be assertive or noble but it has a lot less impact on the social contract.

None of us have ever really doubted that pushing back on Hester would badly damage our friendship with Ed. You don’t get a veto on your friends’ and relatives’ partners. Don’t I know it. Could’ve avoided my mum’s second husband disaster if I did.

When I return to the table, I can sense, at the pace we’re drinking, we’re beginning a messy descent from general knowledge acuity. Leonard has wisely curled up and gone to sleep. There’s only Friday at work to struggle through tomorrow.

‘You can tell you’re on half term,’ Susie says to Ed. ‘Hey. Eve. Did you mention the other day that Mark has had a kid?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say, taking a hard swallow of my fresh Estrella.Ah, lovely numbing beer.‘He posted the photos last week. Ezra. Cool name.’

Mark is my ex and my only serious boyfriend. He went off to be successful in journalism in London when we were twenty-nine and I didn’t move with him, we long-distanced. Pretty soon he decided my reluctance to relocate meant I wasn’t sufficiently committed – he was right – and finished it. He now works forTime Outin San Francisco, is married, an American citizen, and a father. Meanwhile, I got a cat.

Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot. Coincidentally my mum says that too.

‘Weird to think he used to be in here with us so often, and now he’s over there, forever. You’re not bothered?’ Susie says.

‘Uhm, no. It feels very distant to me, you know? In every sense.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘He popped up following me on Instagram a few months ago and I followed him back.’

‘Aha. He’s not entirely over you, then,’ Ed says. ‘He wants you to see he’s moved on, and check what you’re doing. Which is a sure sign of his not having fully moved on.’

‘Hah. I doubt it. The fashionable neighbourhood ofLower Haight, five thousand miles away, is the very definition of moving on.’

(Yes of course I know these things from 1.30 a.m bleary tap-tap-scroll research.)

‘I’m sure of it. Moving on has to happen here and here,’ Ed says, pointing at head and chest. He looks at me levelly and I blink at him and a tiny, near-imperceptible moment passes between us, and I mentally put it in one of my specimen jars.

‘… I bet he browses photos of you and Roger and thinks, hell, I miss that walking essay crisis with the Cleopatra eyes.’

‘Crisis!’ But I glow, a bit.

‘Hey – that’s good. “Walking essay crisis with Cleopatra eyes”, that’s like a Lloyd Cole lyric or something.’

---