Chapter 39
Sunday—or technically the rest of Sunday—was quiet.
Not totally the good kind of quiet. Jaz spent literally the whole day in her room, but if we were judging success on a spectrum from “stays in her room” to “steals the car and drives to Dagenham,” then things were definitely moving in the right direction.
Downstairs, the wreckage of the previous night’s dinner lay congealing in the good crockery, and Oliver set about diligently collecting it all up, scraping what could be scraped into the bin, and then loading the rest into the dishwasher.
I followed him, diligently picking up the occasional fork and trying not to look or feel too utterly useless.
Then I realised I could do something genuinely non-useless and went upstairs, turned the water supply to the toilet off to stop it leaking all over the floor, and arranged for an emergency plumber.
Around noon I got a text from Bridge that read IS JAZ OKYA?
I texted back Long story, and my phone rang three milliseconds later.
“It’s Bridge,” I yelled through to Oliver. “I might take it upstairs.”
Oliver made “Of course” noises from where he was still slightly distractedly cleaning, and I vanished into the bedroom to explain the previous night’s events to the woman who, while she wasn’t my token straight friend anymore because I’d picked up loads of those when I got with Oliver, was definitely still my best friend.
“Oh Luc,” she sympathy-wailed when I was done. “That’s so sad.”
Sad was certainly one way to put it. “I think she’s okay now. Well, okay-ish. She’s in her room.”
“I meant more it was sad in general. Imagine being so desperate to see your mum that you had to steal a car.”
I didn’t have to imagine very hard because I’d seen it play out in front of me, but I knew what she meant.
As somebody whose mum had only been downgraded to second-most important person in his life relatively recently, the thought of being forcibly separated from her, especially at such a young age, was horrifying.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, it’s kinda”—I made a noise that I hoped encompassed the enormity of the concept—“when you think about it.”
“I know,” replied Bridge, who used I know as a sort of all-purpose expression of support.
“So, how’re you holding up?” I asked her. Because while the Jaz thing had been intense, it hadn’t been the only intense thing that had happened yesterday evening, and the first intense thing had been quite Bridge-centred.
In all the years I’d known her, it had never taken more than a “How’re you holding up?
” for Bridge to tell me with unflinching honesty exactly how she was feeling.
And today was no exception. “Oh, Luuuc.” Bridge was the only person I knew who could produce audible emojis. “I feel terrible. I ruined everything.”
“I really don’t think you did.”
“I’m the one who made a scene. I should never have even started showing baby pictures, and I certainly shouldn’t have jumped all over poor James like that.”
“Poor James,” I reminded her, “is a grown-arse man who can take care of himself and who has been winding us all up for months. Like there’s ‘proud of your kid’ and there’s ‘won’t shut up about your kid’ and then there’s whatever James was, which is worse.”
“But it was coming from a place of hurt.” Bridge sounded like she was about to burst into tears for our mutual very annoying friend. “I’d never have been upset with him if I’d realised he was coming from a place of hurt.”
That was Bridge all over. But Bridge being Bridge all over and me being me all over was kind of what made our relationship work. “Take it from somebody with a lifetime of firsthand experience,” I told her, “you can be coming from a place of hurt and still be acting like a dickhead.”
“I should apologise to him,” declared Bridge, whose belief in the power of apologies was as unshakeable as it was unfounded.
“You probably should,” I said. “But also remember, he should probably apologise to you too. Honestly, we should all probably apologise to each other. I don’t think any of us exactly came out of that looking good.”
Bridge went quiet for a moment. And then came back with a plaintive, “Oh, why does it have to be so hard?”
“I think it’s part of being an adult?” I told her. “If it’s any help, I’m not happy about it either.”
From the other end of the phone, I heard the sounds of movement. The kind of sounds of movement I heard when Bridge was about to set off at no notice to do something noble and foolish.
“Bridge,” I asked, hesitantly, “are you putting your shoes on?”
“I’m going to see James. Then I’m taking James to see Jennifer.”
“Are you one hundred percent certain that’s a good idea?”
“Yes.”
That had been a silly question. “Okay, but are you sure the fact you’re one hundred percent certain it’s a good idea actually makes it a good idea?”
“Well, I don’t see how it can make things worse.”
The beautiful thing about Bridge was that she genuinely didn’t.
And I suppose I didn’t see how it could make things worse either.
Only that didn’t stop me from having the clagging, all-pervading feeling that it definitely could anyway.
Except that was the difference between me and Bridge.
Well, that along with gender, sexual orientation, taste in Christmas movies, and whether or not Tom could stand going out with us.
She really, truly believed, deep down, that people were good and the world was good with them.
“Tom,” I heard her calling in a muffled, hand-over-the-microphone kind of voice, “I’m going to see James.” Tom’s reply was too distant to hear, so I just got, “That’s what Luc said.” Then, “No, he isn’t. And I’m going to see Jennifer afterwards.”
“You know,” I said. “You don’t have to do this alone. I can come with you if you want.”
I thought I heard Bridge making hang on noises in the background.
“You think you should ditch Oliver to come running around our friends’ houses with me the day after you threw the world’s worst dinner party and your foster daughter slipped lamb into his vegan main course, trashed your bathroom, and stole your car, forcing him to compromise his professional ethics to save her from a criminal record? ”
I thought about that for the half a second it took me to realise how right she was. “Okay yeah, good point.” Then I said, “But, fuck, it feels weird not to be coming with you.”
Bridge sighed wistfully down the phone. “I think we might have to accept that our days of being there every time something interesting happens to one of our friends are behind us.”
That sucked. “That sucks.”
“In a way.” I heard the click of Bridge’s door opening. “But it’s not all bad. Yes, you probably won’t be here when Autumn says her first word, and I won’t be with you when Jaz gets her GCSE results—”
“Honestly,” I said, “we probably won’t be with Jaz when she gets her GCSE results. It seems really unlikely that we’ll be able to keep her after the whole car-stealing thing.”
This bounced off Bridge’s bulletproof optimism. “The fostering people will understand. Very few people are evil, Luc.”
“I don’t think it’s about being evil,” I told her. “I think it’s more about being, like, busy and part of a big bureaucratic system?”
“My point is”—I heard another door open, a car door this time—“even if you’re not here to share every moment with me and Tom and Autumn and I’m not there to share every moment with you and Oliver and Jaz, we’re still part of each other’s lives.
And our lives are bigger now than they were when we were in our twenties because we’re older and we have more important jobs or larger families or just other friends we’ve met over the years.
” I heard a seat belt and an engine. “Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker. ”
I hung on.
“And I don’t just mean,” Bridge went on, “because some of us have got children. Brian and Amanda have more going on than they did ten years ago too. So do Priya and Theresa and Andi. You pick stuff up as you go, and if you don’t put any of it down, you just get…stuffed. I suppose.”
The way she put it, it almost sounded comforting. “I suppose,” I echoed, noncommittally. Then I added, “Anyway, I should let you go. Being on hands-free is almost as dangerous as talking on a mobile normally.”
Bridge laughed. “Oliver really did change you, didn’t he?”
I couldn’t do little bit fingers down the phone, so I just said, “Yeah. Yeah he did,” and left it at that.
Then, once Bridge had safely hung up—only, I was sure, to immediately call somebody else because Oliver and I were probably the only people in the world who took the no-hands-free-while-driving thing seriously—I schlumped downstairs to see how Oliver was doing in the kitchen.
And also to see what had happened to that bloody plumber.
Which meant Sunday ended very much as it had begun, apart from the slight inconvenience of an emergency tradesman charging us way too much to whack a bit of sealant on a cracked toilet and tell us we should arrange to get a new one installed sooner rather than later.
By the evening, Oliver and I had curled up downstairs in the front room in our usual me-on-Netflix-him-on-laptop configuration.
I’d heard no more from Bridge, at least not directly, but Are the Straights Okay (Dinner Party Remix) had been renamed Dinner Party Survivors’ Club, which I thought was a good compromise between whimsical, not sweeping things under the rug, and also not overly reminding everybody of a deeply upsetting argument about our various friendship circles’ overlapping traumas, marginalisations, and identities.
“I think things’ll shake out,” I told Oliver idly between episodes of Perfect Match.
Oliver glanced up from his laptop. “I very much doubt it. I have no idea what Francesca sees in Damian, and he seems somewhat threatened by her bisexuality.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. Clearly that. But I was talking about our actual friends we know in real life.”
He got that I’m teasing and you haven’t noticed smile. “Ah. Then yes. I’m sure it will shake out. It wasn’t the first time any of those people have fought with each other, and it won’t be the last either.”
“It feels like the first time we all fought each other at once.”
Putting his laptop aside, Oliver replaced it with me.
And it was never going to be particularly dignified for me to sit in my boyfriend’s lap, but I was never stopping.
“I think, in this regard, found families can be much like any other kind of family. Sometimes special occasions end in massive rows.”
“Wow, that’s going to be fun for the next forty years.”
“I said sometimes. Not all the time. And, while I’m aware this is deeply saccharine, what matters isn’t whether we fight; it’s whether we can move past those fights with love and compassion.”
“God, you’re right,” I said. “That does sound saccharine.”
“The truth sometimes does.” Oliver gave me a rueful look. “It’s one of the nicer things about reality.”