Chapter 3
Shane
Josie, hi! Lovely to hear from you even in these horribly sad circumstances. Yes, I had heard about Ravi. Tragic news. I’m so sorry. When is the celebration?
I stare at it, telling myself not to freak out. He’s just being polite and wants to know when it is. It doesn’t mean he’s going. Better not respond right away or he’ll think I have nothing better to do on an uneventful Tuesday evening than sit and wait for messages from him.
I pace around my living room, briefly examining my shrivelled spider plant, and reply:
Josie
Saturday May 3, 6-10 p.m.
Then, to suggest that everyone will understand if he can’t make it, I add:
Awfully soon, I know.
Shane
Right, thanks.
Well, that gives nothing away. Is he going or not? I don’t even know where he lives, and my fleeting glances at social media have revealed nothing. How do I ask without sounding as if I’m remotely interested?
Another message appears:
Shane
Where are you living these days?
So that’s his game. He’s sussing out the situation, and whether it’s feasible for me to go.
Josie
London. How about you?
Please say, ‘A remote Pacific island.’ Please add that, regrettably, there is no means of getting off it.
Shane
I’m in London too. Whereabouts are you?
My chest tightens. So he is in the same city as me.
A city of nine million people, granted – but here all the same, and now he wants to know my precise location.
In case he’s local and I’ll be living on my nerves every time I pop out for milk/wine, I ignore this and copy and paste Pam’s email to him instead. A few minutes pass.
Shane
Wow. Sounds like she really wants us both to be there.
Josie
It does. Think you can make it?
Shane
I’d really like to. How about you?
With my stomach swilling biliously already:
Josie
I’m not sure. Have a lot going on at the moment unfortunately.
Well, that’s nice – coming across as a cold, heartless cow when our friend has died. In fact, I’m fully planning to go because Pam and Kamal were always incredibly lovely to me, and my heart is breaking for them. What I’m trying to do is present not going as a viable option for Shane.
I wait, my gaze spearing the screen, for further communications. He finally replies:
Shane
What about this thing Ravi left for us? And Pam saying we have to collect it in person. What d’you think it is?
Rather than answering immediately, I go and check on the wine situation.
There is no second bottle and, actually, that’s great!
Because even though I’ve downed roughly two thirds of the recommended weekly units in one sitting tonight, I am now weirdly, shimmeringly sober and starting on a second bottle might alter that.
However, mixed in with my pride at being so mature and sensible is no small degree of fury as there is no more fucking wine!
Josie
Honestly, I have no idea.
He responds immediately.
Shane
I think we should go.
Then, clearly on a roll:
Just checking train times that day. How about we travel up together?
Hey, hold on a sec! If we’re going to be thrown back together, I’ll be ensuring that our face-to-face time is kept to an absolute minimum.
My focus will be Pam and Kamal and Dev and the wider family, because that’s what this is about.
A celebration of Ravi, our old friend, who came up with the mad idea of ‘Let’s start a band!
’ and made us believe we could make it happen.
Ravi was fearless, brimming with confidence and strikingly beautiful.
I’d observed her admiringly from a distance since we’d started secondary school.
As her house was a little way out of town, and not on the estate where Shane and I lived, I didn’t see her out and about that much.
But then our extremely generous music teacher set up a little room for pupils to use, with a record player.
And the three of us drifted together in there.
Found each other, really. Secretly, I was thrilled that Ravi wanted to be my friend, and I’d nurtured a bit of crush on Shane since I’d started to have those kinds of feelings.
Soon we were hanging out after school and at weekends, mucking about around town and playing records at Ravi’s.
She lifted us out of the shabby ordinariness of our lives and made our home town, with its long-abandoned mills and scruffy park with the broken fountain, seem like the most thrilling place on earth.
Once we’d started the band, there was no messing about.
We had to practise, practise, practise until we were good enough to play live.
Our first gig, in a pub veering towards dereliction, was a mess.
But we got better – Ravi saw to that – and by the time we left school we’d established a bit of a local following.
Even that wasn’t enough. We needed to branch out, Ravi decided, and do a short tour of northern towns, i.e.
play for strangers who’d surely jeer and spray lager at us!
Attack us, even, for our lack of musical prowess.
We’d heard of far more successful bands being bottled off stage and I pictured the three of us fleeing for safety in a hail of glass.
But Ravi wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Together, she assured us, we could do anything.
Now, as I study Shane’s messages, I’m not feeling so brave. So I quickly type:
Josie
My plans are a bit up in the air at the moment. I’ll see you there.
No reply comes. I wait and wait, repeatedly checking my phone, simultaneously freaking out at being back in contact with Shane, yet desperately wanting him to reply. Did my message sound curt? Oh God, it did. Who does she think she is with her ‘up in the air’ plans!
I re-read the whole thread, picking over it forensically.
In just one evening I seem to have regressed to being that deranged teenager who once loved him madly.
But then, I loved lots of things back then.
Pints of snakebite! Spudulike! Fluorescent hair colour from an aerosol can! It doesn’t mean I want them now.
Curt is fine, I decide. At least, it’s preferable to best golden love. And maybe Shane has forgotten everything that happened between us. After all, it was a lifetime ago. It’s not that I’m wishing cognitive decline on him, but I very much hope he remembers nothing before 1988.