Chapter Two
Chapter Two
When I finish work on Wednesday evening I see that Jay has messaged me.
We’re out at book club this eve. Something arrived for you today, waiting in the living room.
I’m guilty of the occasional impulse order for books or skincare on nights when I’m bored and want to feel something, but I don’t remember doing it recently, so I turn the key in the front door without knowing what to expect. I drop my satchel on the ground and scratch Millie’s ears as she trots up to greet me.
‘Hey gorgeous,’ I say, as she wriggles with excitement and pads around me. I hold her happy golden face in my hands for a few moments before she leaps away and bounds back into the living room. I follow her and stop when I see a parcel on the coffee table. I recognise it immediately as the journal I sent to Frannie, unwrapped, rewrapped and repackaged. For one horrified moment, I think she’s returned my gift, but then someone speaks.
‘Hey gorgeous yourself,’ a voice comes from the sofa at the back of the room and I look up to see her in the flesh.
‘Frannie!’ I call out in delight, hurrying through the living room with my arms out, forgetting why she must have come to see me. She stands and gives me a stiff hug, and we stand in awkward silence for a few moments.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I say, partly to fill the icy feeling that Frannie, who normally speaks enough for two, is creating.
‘A cappuccino out of that fancy coffee machine in the kitchen is the least you can do at the moment.’ she says.
I go into the kitchen, hearing her fussing with Millie as I make us both cappuccinos. I dust cinnamon across the foam just as she likes it. When I bring the drinks back through, Frannie’s face has softened. With her high cheekbones and strong features she can look intimidating at times, but now she’s holding the parcel in her hands and looking at the card with her lips pressed together. I sit down beside her and place the drinks on the coffee table.
‘Why did you send this?’ she asks.
‘It’s an engagement present.’ I say.
‘You already sent an engagement present. You sent flowers and a card when I first got engaged. This was a cop-out.” I look at my knees.
‘It’s been months since I’ve seen you, and even that was just a quick lunch. You didn’t come to my engagement party. You didn’t come to the housewarming last year when Theo and I moved. You didn’t come to my birthday this year. And now you’re not coming to my wedding. Have I done something? Are you angry with me? Because as far as I can see, my best friend is pulling away from me and I have no idea why.’
When she stacks the events up like that I realise how awful it all sounds. I’d met her for coffee and lunches when we were in the same neighbourhood after university, and I had visited her new house a few days after the housewarming with an aloe vera plant. But the more her life accelerates through these important adult stages, the more big moments I miss. And Frannie doesn’t know that I agonise over each excuse, trying to negotiate with myself. How can I see my best friend, when I can’t bring myself to see her brother? And each time I bail, all Frannie sees is her friend’s absence. For a second I consider just telling her, but I can’t face it. Hating myself, I pull my most powerful card.
‘I don’t have a high-flying corporate job like you. I work in a stationery shop. I can’t always afford these things you know.’
It’s a low blow, and it’s only partially true. Though my job doesn’t pay well, my rent is low and my outgoings are minimal. I could budget for most of the events I turn down. It works though, Frannie fidgets with the cuff of her blazer.
‘I know, I know. I appreciate that. I would never ask you to spend loads of money on me, but if you’re worried about the costs for my wedding you don’t need to. Everything is being sorted out so guests barely have to pay a thing. Please say you’ll come.’
I look into her face. Though she has always looked a little older than her age, right now she looks young, the way she looks when she’s concealing hurt feelings. I’ve seen the expression before, after failed exams and breakups.
‘I realise we’ve lost touch a little bit, but you know your friendship means the world to me. I wanted to come over to ask if there was any way to make it work. If you’re busy, maybe we can find a way to fly you out just for the ceremony and back the same day. It’s only a few hours flight to Spain. We could do the bridesmaid prep with you on a video call? Then it would only be that one weekend.’ She looks pleading.
‘I miss you. My whole family misses you. Mum was so upset when you weren’t at the housewarming. It’s been years, she still thinks you’re that scrawny blonde teenager nervously poking at her plate of aloo gobi. I had to find a photo to prove you have in fact turned into an adult at the same time as me.’
She crosses her legs on the couch. ‘I did the maths,’ she says, ‘you know, the last time you saw George was my sixteenth birthday party? Do you even remember that?’
‘Do you?’ I deflect quickly. ‘You had so much Prosecco I thought you were going to be sick.’
Frannie laughs, ‘Me? That’s not how I remember it. You had half a glass and I found you by the pool twenty minutes later looking like you were about to pass out. My Dad had to take you home, remember?’
I nod, amused that this is her version of events. The details are right, but a crucial element is missing. Frannie takes my silence as a cue to get back on topic.
‘Just say you’ll try and make it work for me. I want to finally be able to have everyone special to me together in one room, and if I can get both the Spanish and Indian sides of my family to fall in line and get themselves organised, I can’t accept you being the one straggler missing from it all.’
I sigh. I can’t bear the thought of seeing George again. But I also can’t bear to let Frannie down. And as the two feelings tussle in my mind, love edges out fear.
‘I’m sure I can make it work. Let me check my schedule.’
Frannie cries out with relief and hugs me. I hold her close, my feelings in a tangle, but when she lets me go we start to chat all about her wedding plans, and when Adam and Jay return with pizzas and a leftover bottle of gin from their book club I forget the panic sitting in my chest, enjoying the time I’m getting to spend with my very best friend.
Fifteen Years Ago
I had met Frannie in primary school, back when everybody called her Francesca. I had been the one to start calling her Frannie, and it has become the name she uses for herself, even in job applications and serious correspondence. Even her parents call her Frannie now, the name sounding slightly different in each of their accents.
We had been pushed together by the teachers, who hoped our opposing personalities could balance one another out. I was shy, as watery and pale as my blonde hair and light eyes, never speaking in class or raising my hand. I would spend lunch breaks alone, reading books and doing quizzes in magazines in the corner of the playground, as far away from the other children as I could get. Then one day, when we were in our fourth year, our teacher rearranged the classroom seating and put us next to one another.
At first, I was deeply unimpressed. Francesca had always been one of the loudest in the classroom, disruptive and sporty, with sharp features even as a child. At eight years old she had looked like a small adult, one of those children who already wears the face they’ll have for the rest of their life. Her appearance and attitude intimidated me, and I had stayed as far away from her as possible. Now we were suddenly being paired for projects and study groups. I wondered if I had done something bad at school, if the teachers were trying to punish me with this loud, irritable girl who answered back in class and would gleefully break a rule, just to see if she could get away with it. I spoke to her only when I absolutely had to, and she in turn would badger me with questions and comments, trying to provoke me into an argument. I wondered more than once if she was deliberately trying to make me cry.
Then, one day, we had finished our classes, and were each pulling our backpacks from our lockers to take home. Francesca went to push past me abruptly as I looped my bag around my arm. We collided and, as we tried to part, something caught, and we were each unable to move. I still remember the moment when I looked down and saw what had happened.
‘You like Star Girlz?’ Francesca asked, as if daring me to say yes.
‘You like Star Girlz.’ I whispered back, stunned.
It was a stupid thing to say on both our parts. Everybody liked Star Girlz. The four-part girl band was, at the time, a pop cultural phenomenon, most of our classmates in school liked them, knew the words to their biggest songs and could do the most popular dance routines. But very few of them were devoted enough to be a subscriber to their magazine. I had begged my parents for it, because the subscription came with a collectible charm bracelet. My father had bought the full-year subscription for my birthday present. I realised later that he had spent this extravagant amount of money out of guilt because by the time it came to renew, one year later, he had moved out.
When the first issue arrived, I sat on the doormat and tore open the welcome pack that housed the chunky braided bracelet, then waited for each subsequent issue, which came each time with a little clip-on charm, with a special insert in the magazine explaining its meaning. The first was a moon, which represented their debut single Meet Me at Midnight. After that came each of the band member’s birth flowers, their favourite animals, an apple to represent their first world tour starting in New York. We weren’t allowed to wear jewellery in class, and so I would wear my bracelet in the morning until I got to school, attach it carefully around my bag before putting it in my locker, then clip it back onto my wrist at the end of the day as I stepped out of the gates. The charms built up on the bracelet, and I would curate them as though they were an art installation, choosing an arrangement every day before clipping them in place while my Mother called for me from the front door. The most beloved charm of mine had come on the month of my birthday. A heart-shaped charm in which was set a purple precious stone, an Amethyst, my birthstone. Every subscriber received this charm when their birthday came around, and the charms were in fact glass replicas of the real gems, but it had made me feel as though the Star Girlz had sent something just for me.
It was this bracelet that had caught on Francesca’s bag, snagged it by the birthstone charm. It was tangled with something sparkly wrapped around the strap of her backpack and, when I looked closely, I saw it was another birthstone heart, wrapped around an identical bracelet, thickly loaded with collectable charms. Neither of us moved, both held in place by a bracelet we were terrified to break.
‘When’s your birthday?’ she had whispered, looking down at my charms as though affronted by them.
‘February,’ I replied.
‘I wish my birthday was in February,’ she said, ‘purple’s my favourite colour. My birthday is October.’
Her charm was a pale opal, almost transparent. I could see why she wouldn’t like it, it almost looked as though there was no charm at all. And yet when I turned my head I saw the rainbows sparkling beneath the surface. It was as though the stone secretly contained every colour in the world, and was just hiding it, keeping its beauty to itself.
‘Do you want to swap?’ I said, ‘I think yours is prettier.’
We stared at each other for a few moments and then, moving very carefully, worked in unison to untangle the two bracelets and set our bags down on the floor. We swapped the charms, carefully adding them to our own stacks.
‘Thanks.’ Francesca said, ‘I didn’t know you liked Star Girlz. You never join in with the dances.’
When I opened my mouth to reply a car horn sounded from outside and we both jumped to attention and hurried together out of the school gates. I had stood at the entrance of the school to begin the long wait for one of my parents and watched Frannie run to greet her own father with a hug. A handsome man with the same black hair, he kissed her on the top of the head and she got into the back of a large car. I caught a glimpse of a tall boy in his early teens in the seat beside her, in the uniform of the local middle school.
The next day before classes started Francesca walked up to me with a handful of small plastic sachets that she dropped on the desk.
‘I have doubles,’ she had said, ‘let me know if you want to swap any.’ I brought in my duplicates the next day, and we spent our lunchtime carefully sorting through and trading them. It was the quietest Francesca had ever been in a classroom, meticulously lining up the charms in neat rows to work out who was missing what.
The following week Francesca had coaxed me into joining in a choreographed dance routine that needed a fourth dancer. I had done the dance in my room a hundred times, rewound and replayed my cassette tape of the song over and over again until I could do it perfectly, even without the music. Francesca and I had become exasperated with the other girls, a giggly pair who couldn’t take it seriously, and the two of us took charge, strong-arming them into listening to us and following our instructions. We brought in our magazines and read them side by side at lunchtime, calmly turning the glossy pages in unison, or practised the dances in the mirrors of the school bathrooms. A teacher came to find us while we were spinning in circles, singing their lyrics at the top of our lungs. We should have been in our seats five minutes before. It was the first time I’d ever been in trouble, and I followed Francesca and the teacher back to our class and took my seat beside her, both of us flushed and giggling.