Page 14 of Not Moving Out
‘Maya is pissed off with me,’ said Dolly suddenly.
Freya and I looked across at her with relief. Something meaty to get our conversational knives and forks into.
‘What, why?’ said Freya.
‘Don’t know. You know Maya, she’s… temperamental.’
‘Right, yes, totally,’ I replied, but I didn’t know because I had only met her a handful of times, and I had no idea if she was temperamental or not. Apparently, she was.
‘I had a friend around your age,’ said Freya. ‘Shelly Barnes. I thought she was a good friend, we had known each other since primary school, but she would change gears faster than a Formula One car. One minute we were as thick as thieves, sleepovers, and talking about boys until the early hours, then the next day, it was like you’d physically assaulted her family.’
‘What happened with you and Shelly? Did you stay friends?’ asked Dolly.
I looked across at Freya because I had never heard this story before.
‘It was just before my seventeenth birthday. I was having a house party and I had invited everyone we knew from college, and Shelly and I had a huge fight. She claimed I was only having the party because she had mentioned that she was having one, and apparently I stole her thunder. Long story short, she turned up drunk, tried to set fire to the sofa, and attacked Simon Thompson with a frozen cheesecake because she thought I was trying to get off with him.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Dolly. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘How have I not heard this story before?’ I asked incredulously.
‘I don’t know but it was insane,’ said Freya.
‘What happened to her?’ said Dolly.
‘I never saw her again after that night, and her family moved to Swindon soon after.’
‘So, the moral of the story is?’ I asked.
‘Don’t make friends with psychos?’ conjectured Dolly.
‘I don’t know. I’m sure Maya isn’t like that, but I suppose the moral is, sometimes friendships don’t work out and that’s okay. There was a time when I thought Shelly and I would be friends forever, but then she tried to burn my house down,’ said Freya, and we all giggled, and it felt good to just laugh together at the table. For a wonderful moment, all the awkwardness evaporated and we were just us again, eating, talking and acting like a proper family.
Unfortunately, once the laughter died down, the rest of dinner played out more like the first half had, like a challenging play you had been ushered along to see with a friend because they had a spare ticket, but you spent the whole time trying to work out what the hell was going on. There were long, difficult stretches that were hard to watch, and broken, stilted conversations that seemed to be heading nowhere, until finally it was time for the last scene, where hopefully some of it made sense and you had a clearer idea of what had just happened. Dolly eventually left and headed back upstairs to study, and Freya and I were cleaning up. I felt like I had to say something.
‘I’m sorry about dinner,’ I said, rinsing a plate under the tap before placing it into the dishwasher.
‘No, it’s fine, Joe. We didn’t discuss it, so it’s just… it’s fine.’
‘Details please,’ I said, looking across at Freya.
‘I don’t know what the answer is, Joe. Being separated, and yet still having dinner together every day feels a little strange, but also not eating together feels like…’
She stopped, I stopped, and we both stood in the kitchen and looked at each other.
‘Strange, too?’ I ventured.
‘Something like that. Can we just play it by ear?’
‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘I still can’t believe the Shelly Barnes story.’
‘I know. I hope Maya isn’t another Shelly Barnes.’
‘I doubt it. It sounds like Shelly Barnes had real mental health issues. Have you ever tried finding her on Facebook?’
‘Once, but she has no online presence.’
‘Maybe she’s in prison for arson or grievous bodily harm with a Cornetto,’ I said before we got back to cleaning up, and Dolly was upstairs in her room, and it sort of felt like everything was the same but at the same time I knew it wasn’t. Changes were happening, albeit slowly, but I knew that bigger changes were coming and soon, and we needed to prepare ourselves for them.
