Page 15 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
‘Gracie Grace.’
‘You have ten minutes, that’s how long it will take forMoanato finish next door.’
‘You’re welcome!’ he sings back to me.
‘How do you knowMoana?’
‘Because I am a man of culture, no?’
I grin at the screen, watching Doug against the backdrop of his super-shiny New York office, grinning because this is Doug. Tom and I shared a house with him in Bristol when we were students. He used to wash his dishes in the bath and he got drunk one night and tried to boil pasta in a kettle. It’s always been so strange to see him in tailoring, in a proper job, with a fake houseplant on his mahogany shelves and a haircut that looks like he didn’t do it in a mirror with a pair of blunt IKEA scissors.
‘I guess you got the invite then?’ I tell him.
‘I did. Just booked the time off. You OK?’
‘You’re coming back to the motherland. I’m more than OK.’
Doug was one of Tom’s most loyal friends, the sort of ride-or-die friend, the male equivalent of the person who’d hold your hair back when you were throwing up completely bladdered. During Tom’s adventures in travel, New York was a huge stop. He was there for six months and tried his hand at everything from beat poetry (how I laughed) to artisan bagel making and, all that time, Doug enabled these adventures and offered him his very expensive sofa free of rent. The same sofa I slept on when I visited him after Tom died. It’s a good sofa. I see Doug scanning the bedroom behind me, the same shift of the eyes you always get on these calls. I know I have a stupid amount of throw cushions. I keep them there for a reason, so I can pretend they’re a person in the bed. That’s not sad. A blow-up doll would be sad.
‘What’s going on with your beard?’ I ask him, trying to distract him.
‘Does the beard work? I’m trying to impress a girl with this hipster-look thing. I’m also slightly vegan.’
‘Slightly?’
‘I still eat bacon.’
I laugh. ‘The beard makes you look like you have higher religious intentions. Like a semi-hot Jesus.’
It’s his turn to laugh now. He gazes towards the giant window of his office where you can tell he’s accessing memories.
‘Do you remember that time we got drunk on a night out, we ended up in a real church and a vicar tried to chase us out by throwing a Bible at Tom?’
‘Remember it? You sobbed because you had drugs hidden in your shoes and thought you were going to hell,’ I add.
‘And then I dragged you to that skanky club, Tom tried to pay with his library card and I pulled that girl… what was her name? The one with the face.’
‘You’ve dated girls without faces?’ I giggle.
‘Anna. God, she was out of my league… we had some fun in ol’ Brizzle, didn’t we? I’m always chuffed you ended up back there,’ he says, lolling back on his leather chair. It always feels nice to have Doug to walk through all those Bristol memories with. The halcyon days of the cheapest alcohol we’ll ever have access to, zero responsibility and my obsession with incense sticks that drowned out the general stench of sweaty bollocks and old trainers that inhabit any house share involving men in their early twenties.
‘You say that like you don’t have fun any more?’ I add.
‘Oh, I do. Just not Tom fun, you know…’
‘I think our definitions of Tom fun might be quite different…’
Doug guffaws at this point and I like hearing that sound. Tom was the sort of person who’d make everything fun. It was annoying. It was never a quiet night in. It was drunk Cluedo and listening to The Smiths at a volume you knew was disturbing the neighbours.
‘You’re getting out there, though, right? Still having fun, Gracie?’ he asks.
I nod. I mean, after I log off this call and bid farewell to the girls’ play dates, I’ll probably have a glass of wine. I’ll bathe the girls, wash and dry their hair and put them to a bed with a story where we’ve already got to page one hundred and twenty-three. Once the lights are out, I’ll have another glass of wine and I’ll fold the tea towels and maybe treat myself to a few squares of Galaxy and watch an episode of that new crime drama everyone’s talking about, making sure I don’t go on Twitter to see any spoilers. I will do this on my own. This is my fun now.
‘Yeah, I go down to Blue Mountain every weekend, drop a few tabs and break it down in my old Adidas Superstars.’
‘Really?’
That is also the beauty of Doug. New York hasn’t chipped away at how utterly gullible he is. I remember when he went out there post-university, headhunted by a massive finance start-up. Tom and I assumed they had him mixed up with someone else. You want Doug? He owns one suit and Puma Gazelles. He believed in Father Christmas until he was fifteen.
