Four months before Lucian
While Ling and Catherine are out of the room, Harry corners me over by the sideboard, where I’m mixing more drinks.
‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?
’ His face is passive, but I know him so well.
‘Yes. You’re going to warn me about getting involved with Catherine.
’
‘Words to that effect.’
My friends know how drastically I fell apart when Catherine abandoned me – over-the-top expression, but that’s how it felt at the time.
I didn’t simply fall apart.
I took an overdose. It wasn’t just the misery of our break-up; there was more to it than that.
Let’s call it a decade of childhood heartache, my father’s suicide, my mother’s lack of interest, a pervasive loneliness that had followed me through school and the first year of university, and that, despite the almost claustrophobic circle of friends, constantly threatened to overwhelm me.
I’d bolted this stuff down inside myself and then Catherine came along, and the only way I can describe it is that it felt like I’d been travelling my whole life to meet her.
She cured me, that’s what I thought, in my hopelessly na?ve twenty-year-old mind; she released me from the bitterness of my past, from that boy brutalising his wrists in his bedroom, from the raging sixteen-year-old who left home without any clear idea of where to go.
When she disappeared, literally vanishing without a backwards glance, the darkness crashed over me.
I tried to find her, of course, staking out her flat until her best friend Liv took pity on me.
‘She’s gone home,’ she said.
‘You could try her there.’
Her parents were kind but they wouldn’t let me speak to Catherine.
‘She doesn’t want to speak to you.
And she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you any more,’ her father said, on my third and final phone call.
‘I’m sorry, but there it is.
I’m going to ask you to leave her alone now.
’
Leave her alone.
I wasn’t sure I could.
What, never again talk to the girl who had finally made sense of my life?
Never touch her again, never kiss the soft skin on the inside of her thighs, never hold her hand as I fell asleep?
Never surprise her with breakfast when she woke?
Never draw her, never undress her, never watch her eyes darken or hear her half-gasp as I pressed myself inside her?
Harry saved my life.
He’d seen me in the evening, vehemently drunk, violently morose, and though he’d gone home and got into bed, he had lain awake worrying.
Eventually he got dressed again, walked over to our house and found me unconscious on the bed, thirty minutes from fatality, apparently.
It wasn’t Catherine I was thinking of when I popped out two strips of temazepam (stolen from my uncle’s house for recreational purposes) and ground them into powder.
It was my father, who had chosen the same route to escape.
In those final moments I understood with piercing clarity what had made him do it.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die; simply that he no longer knew how to live.
I felt the same.
When I came to in the hospital, weak, sick, appalled at what I’d done, Harry was sitting in a plastic chair pulled up close to the bed.
He saw that I was awake and started to speak, then couldn’t.
‘Harry,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ My throat was raw and my voice just a whisper.
‘No,’ Harry said, eventually.
‘I’m sorry. For the pain you’re in.
’
‘You saved my life, Harry. What made you come back?’
He dragged one hand across his face.
He looked shattered, a whole night without sleep.
‘I just knew,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how but I did.
I couldn’t sleep, I had this feeling that you were right on the edge.
’
‘I’m an idiot.’
‘I’m going to get you through this,’ Harry said.
‘We’re going to break it right down.
We’ll take it minute by minute to begin with.
’
A thought occurred to me, something that seemed so horrific I tried to sit up in my hospital bed.
‘Can you promise me something?’
Harry rested a hand against my chest, pressing me back down.
‘Take it easy. Yes, of course. Anything.’
‘Catherine can never know. No one can know. Promise me that.’
He did promise.
But he also made me see that I couldn’t keep it from Jack.
‘Jack is like your brother,’ he said.
‘He has to know.’
Harry didn’t leave my side for the next few weeks.
He moved into our house and sat with me through the days and nights like a mother nursing a sick child.
He kept telling me I was better even before I was.
He kept a log of each hour we’d got through, then each day.
‘Two and a half weeks since you’ve seen Catherine,’ he’d say in his upbeat nurse-like voice.
‘I’d say that’s something of a record.
’
We had an agreement: no one other than the three of us would ever find out what had happened, not even the girls.
Jack, of course, directed all his concern over me into vitriol at Catherine.
‘How could she leave you? How could she do that to you?’
He called her names I couldn’t bear to hear, and in the end Harry asked him to stop.
‘Let’s just agree never to mention her again,’ he said.
And now Catherine is back, in the midst of my friends, sensing their wariness, their defensiveness, without knowing the real reason why.
It’s a little unfair on her, I guess.
‘It was all a very long time ago,’ I tell Harry.
‘No matter what happens with Catherine, I’ll never do that again.
’
It’s the first time we’ve spoken of ‘that’ in a long time.
‘OK,’ Harry says. ‘I’m sure you can understand why I worry.
’
At the other end of the room, Jack, Alexa and Rachel are shooting their way through Harry’s tequila, watched by Celia, who sits hunched up on the sofa.
She seems to be having a miserable time.
‘Let’s go and rescue Celia,’ I say.
Rachel, in particular, is wildly drunk.
She’s leaning against the beam above the fireplace, breasts jutting upwards, a sort of inverse downward dog.
Too drunk to stand by the looks of things.
‘Rach,’ I say, ‘what happened? You’re completely wasted.
You need to get your head down.
Big drive tomorrow.’
‘I’ll take you up, if you want,’ says Harry, moving towards her, but Rachel wobbles to upright.
‘Just a quick sharpener first,’ she says, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a cling-film wrap of cocaine.
‘Oh no, Rach.’ Harry, Alexa and I swoop down on her, a cartoon dustball of pleading and chastisement and recrimination.
And then, above the maelstrom, Jack’s voice.
‘Just what the doctor ordered, I’d say.
’
The room slides.
We could stage a countdown.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …
Celia shrieks, no other word for it, and hurls herself up from the sofa.
‘No way, Jack! Don’t even think about it.
You’re so selfish. I’ve been waiting here for over an hour, we’re late for the babysitter.
We have to go.’
I don’t know what gets into Jack; it’s so clear that Celia is in meltdown.
‘We?’ he asks with a half-smile that even I find infuriating.
‘You could go on ahead, couldn’t you?
’
Alexa tries to intervene.
‘Jack,’ she says, ‘you really ought to—’
But Celia shouts, ‘No!’ and holds up a hand, a policewoman halting traffic.
Less of a scene, more of a volcanic eruption.
‘I’ve had it. You never think about me or Freddie.
It’s always about you.
Everyone thinks you’re such a great dad, they don’t know what you’re really like.
You turn it on and off whenever you want to.
’
And still Jack isn’t getting it.
‘Oh come on, babe,’ he says.
‘Don’t overreact. I can come home a bit later, can’t I?
You don’t normally mind.
’
‘Actually I do mind,’ Celia says quietly.
Her words linger in the air.
There’s a coldness and a determination in her voice that we’ve never heard before.
Jack has the sense to rush over and wrap his arms around her.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right.
I’m a thoughtless, selfish dickhead.
Why do you put up with me?
You should definitely trade me in for someone else.
’
He kisses her cheek, once, twice, three times, and scores a reluctant smile.
He has a gift for his own repatriation; we’ve seen it many times.
Jack and Celia leave, arms around each other, crisis averted, while the rest of us focus on getting Rachel into bed.
I haven’t seen Catherine since she disappeared outside with Ling and I am clenched with dread when I finally reach my own bedroom.
Will she be here? Or has the pressure of seeing my friends caused her to flee?
In the darkness I almost fall over her blue trainers, kicked off by the door, and I follow a trail of her clothes to the bed, euphoric with relief.
‘You’re still here,’ I whisper into the blackness, but Catherine is asleep.
I reach out a palm and place a hand on her thigh, lightly, just for reassurance; I won’t wake her.
I’d like to ask her how it felt being back amongst my friends after all this time.
Did she feel the tension, the way it clung to the atmosphere, a density that at times made it hard to breathe?
I’d like to tell her about the dark secret that binds Harry and Jack and me together, but I know I can’t.
A stupid, stupid thing that happened a long time ago.
A moment of madness like my father’s before me.
I’m deeply ashamed of it.