“I’ve nevva been to Cambridge.” Darian bounced excitedly on the balls of his feet as we dropped my bags off in the room Amy had booked for me at her old college. “It’s well nice.”
“Bah. It’s just like a smaller version of Oxford, where they cheat at Tiddlywinks and punt from the wrong end.”
“You gonna show me rand?”
“No, we’re going to stay here and fuck—I think we have time before dinner if we’re quick about it.”
“You’re so romantic, babes.”
We fell onto the single bed with such abandon that it went crashing into the wall, knocking a chunk out of the plasterwork. From the arched, wisteria-woven windows came a sudden shaft of sunlight, warmed gold by the surrounding sandstone, in which the dancing dust motes glittered like stars.
The rehearsal dinner was being held in the fourteenth-century Old Hall—though I was unsure why we needed to practice eating and having awkward conversation.
“Are we like ’aving dinner in a church?” whispered Darian, awestruck.
“It’s just a college dining hall.”
“What’s wif the stained glass?”
“Most likely an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century addition.”
He gave me a look. “I just fink it’s proper weird.”
At that point, we got swept along into the rest of the milling guests, escaping only from the hurricane of introductions, greetings, handshakes, and meaningless civilities when we finally washed up in front of Max and Amy and the rest of the wedding party.
Amy threw herself into my arms. “Ash, you came. I’m so happy!”
“Um, yes. And I brought, um, Darian.”
Amy beamed at him. “Thank you for coming to the wedding of a total stranger. I hope it isn’t completely awful.”
“No way. I love a wedding, me. I fink it’s proper nice, taking an oaf to be with someone for your whole life. I reckon most people wanna get done wif me after five minutes, janarwhatamean?”
“That’s a blatant lie,” said Amy staunchly. “You’re lovely.”
He gleamed under his tan, blushing. “Awww, fanks. ’Ow nice are you? Did you come ’ere? Like Cambridge?”
“Yes, this is my old college.”
“You must be well clever.”
“I’m well good at bullshitting.” She grinned. “Why do you think I’m an agent?”
“What? Like a spy?”
“Err, no. A literary agent?”
“Oh, right. Ha-ha.” He shuffled his feet.
Amy looked grave. “Of course, I have to say that, because otherwise I’d have to kill you.”
Darian laughed, and a vague, unexpected warmth swept over me. Something I hadn’t felt for a long time, something almost like pride, in Amy, in Darian, and a little bit for me. It seemed, just then, an impossible kindness that two such people could find something worth liking in all my sharp and scattered pieces. I turned into Darian’s shoulder and smothered a smile there.
One of his arms slid round me as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “This place is well nice for a wedding.” He nodded approvingly. “Well classy. But didn’t you find it a bit like depressing when you was ’ere, cos everyfing is so old and like . . . I dunno . . . serious?”
“God, yes. We’re only here because there was no fucking way I was getting married in Oxford, and Buckingham Palace wasn’t available, so what can you do?”
He laughed. “I hope you’re gonna be happy togevver.”
Amy gestured to Max, who was caught up in what looked like a tense, familial negotiation. “Have you seen the guy I’m marrying? If I can’t be happy with him, what chance is there?”
Darian followed her pointing finger. “He’s qualidee. Hunjed pahcent,” he agreed.
“I know, right. I mean the arse alone . . .”
“Totes.”
“Are you two quite finished?” I said. “Or maybe you want to marry each other? I suppose I’ll be able to bring myself to console Max. Taking one for the team.”
Grinning, Darian snuggled me further into the crook of his arm. “He’s getting jell.”
“There, there, Ash.” Amy smirked. “Your arse is quality, too.”
I was about to make a severe retort when Max turned around, and the whole cycle of introductions had to start again.
“Well, bless my heart,” exclaimed another voice, as incongruous within Cambridge’s oak-panelled walls as Darian’s. “What a perfectly charmin’ homosexual.”
My mouth fell open. Beside me, Darian’s did the same. Max had never told me his mother was Scarlett O’Hara.
Even wearing a single string of pearls and a black dress of such breathtaking simplicity it would have made Holly Golightly seem crass, she looked as though there ought to have been at least six gentlemen callers dead at her feet. She must have been at least fifty, but time had not dared to touch her. Max’s beauty was her beauty. His bone structure a bolder, more angular version of hers. His hair, the same precise shade of impossible, gleaming gold. At her side, he was making frantic, windmilling “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” gestures with his hands.
“Come here, you darlin’ darlin’ thing,” she said, crooking a finger at my date.
Darian looked nervously over his shoulder, on the off chance she was referring to some other darlin’ darlin’ thing. And then, with the air of a man going to his execution, allowed her to claim his arm.
She smiled at him like a firing squad readying arms. “I have always believed a gentleman needs a lick of the devil in him.”
I glanced at Max’s father, who was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and had a face like a three-day-old tea bag. At which point, taking advantage of my split-second distraction, Max’s mother stole my glitter pirate, leaving me standing there, jilted like Suellen.
“I’m so sorry,” said Max. “She’s actually the worst person in the world.”
Across the room, I caught sight of Darian, being whirled off through the guests. “I fink she’s mental!” he mouthed urgently and without subtlety.
I hid a smile and went to get a drink.
And another.
And another.
Anything to keep me afloat in this sea.
Somehow I ended up on the edge of a group of people I vaguely recognised from university. The conversation—politics, literature, the state of the economy, what had happened to so-and-so—washed over me. Bored. I was bored.
“Ash Winters,” drawled a voice that sounded gratingly posh to my ears and yet seemed familiar, “we must stop meeting like this.”
I gazed into a face I might once have found attractive. Brown eyes, brown hair, sharp, clever features, a thin blade of a mouth, whimsical and cruel.
“Quite,” I said. Who the fuck was he?
“Hugh,” he said, a smile concealing what was clearly irritation. “Hugh Hastings.”
Nope. Not a clue. “Of course.”
“We met in Brighton.” He smiled again. “We went to the same college.”
Oh, that Hugh. Right. The one I hadn’t pulled at the stag party.
“You know, after you left with that—” He waved a hand as if Darian defied mere description. “—I remembered how I knew you.”
“You did?” A vague sense of unease uncoiled like a serpent. It was just anxiety. Paranoia. Relax. Breathe.
“Yah, you were the one who had the complete psychotic break, right?”
Suddenly I was the centre of a circle of curious, glistening eyes. Somebody could have mentioned Robbie Williams, but there was nothing, just a hungry silence. I felt a shamed flush sear my cheeks. My head spun. My mouth filled up with the taste of bile.
“Yes,” I said, with broken-glass calm. “Yes, that was me.”
“Oh, you’re that fellow.” A different voice. “You poor bastard. Are you all right now?”
I’d had this nightmare before, but I’d always woken up.
I smoothed my cuffs. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
Another voice? The same? It didn’t matter. “What was it like?”
I was still smoothing my cuffs, and even I could see how it looked, a tic turned habit turned compulsion. Stop smoothing your cuffs. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even look at them. “What do you mean, what was it like?”
“Did they lock you up?”
“Was it like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”
“How did you get out?”
Breathe, Ash, breathe. “I dug a tunnel into the sewer system from beneath a poster of Rita Hayworth.”
There was a long silence as everyone tried to work out if the clinically insane were allowed to be sarcastic. It might have worked, too—I could have deflected them, and held them at bay instead of the other way round—but my breathing was too shallow, my voice too unsteady. It wasn’t a joke anymore, it was another piece of derangement. I might as well have been standing there in white pyjamas.
(Another myth. They let you wear whatever you want, and you still dress like crap because nobody cares and neither do you.)
I swallowed. “I got better, so they let me out.”
“Can they do that?” Hugh.
It took everything I had, but I risked a glance at him. Just then, I was not too proud to plead. Don’t do this to me. He had liked me once. But his face reflected only the blank, uncomprehending confidence of the wholly unhurt, and a touch of private malice. It seemed that being slighted by a lunatic was not something easily forgiven.
“I thought,” he said, “once you were in the system, it was impossible to get out again. I read a book by this American journalist who pretended to be batshit so he could expose what it’s really like for mental patients but, of course, once he was admitted, he couldn’t prove he wasn’t meant to be there.”
Murmurs rising like the sea to engulf me.
“I mean, I can kind of see why. If an insane person tells you they’re sane, how are you supposed to tell it’s not further evidence of their insanity? And that would be really dangerous, wouldn’t it?”
I felt the weight of all those expectant stares.
“We do walk amongst you,” I said, at last.
Pity. I was drowning in pity, as slick as oil.
I felt sick. Small and sick and utterly, utterly lost. I wanted— I needed—
Somebody to save me. But how could you be rescued from yourself?
Hugh’s voice pricked my skin like a thousand tiny needles. “And the orange chap in the feathers is your boyfriend now?”
Again, that stomach-churning surge of interest from the others. I could see what they saw: the madman and his fool. And now they would have us caper. Their scrutiny had been unpleasant enough when it touched upon my past, but now their eyes were burrowing into my present. A better man would have owned his truths. But, at the moment, the vulnerability of mere madness seemed nothing to the vulnerability of showing that I cared.
I managed to meet the stares and gave what I hoped was an insouciant smile. “I wouldn’t go that far. He’s more of a-a fuckee, really.”
“A fuckee? Is that like a fuck buddy?”
“Yes, like a fuck buddy, but without the tiresome buddy requirement.”
Someone chuckled. Finally, it wasn’t pity. “So, sort of the late-night drive-through of sex. For when you get that craving for something cheap and filthy, like a Big Mac.”
“Precisely,” I said. “None of the hassle of a relationship and cheaper than a whore. And, now I think about it, cheaper than a Big Mac too.”
I waited for the laugh that never came.
Nobody was looking at me, except Hugh. He put a hand to his lips, as if to conceal whatever lay beneath it. I thought, perhaps, a smile.
And then, I knew. I knew what I had done.
In that endless, awful second, I would have gladly destroyed the world, myself, and everyone in it, to avoid turning round. I’d plumbed the depths of my own shame and disappointment so many times it barely mattered anymore, but how could I face Darian? Knowing he had finally seen the truth of me?
He was standing behind me. Of course he was. His eyes had that shiny look of someone on the brink of tears. His mouth opened and closed a few times, before he said finally, “Mate, that’s . . . that’s bang aht of order.” His voice broke on the final word. “I fought you liked me.”
And then he turned and walked away.
Everyone was staring at me. I should have been running after Darian, apologising, throwing myself at his feet, even, but I was pinned by eyes, like a moth in a glass case. Besides, there was little value in the remorse of a creature like me. I was sorry, of course I was sorry, but it was the regret of the thief who gets caught, not the regret of the truly penitent. The scene was already replaying in my head, and I could not imagine a version of events in which I did not sacrifice Darian to save myself a little humiliation. I was too weak, too selfish, and I simply did not deserve to apologise to him.
“Man, that was cold,” whispered someone, in a voice that hovered on the brink of awe.
“Ouch,” said Hugh. Spite glinted in his eyes. “Bit of a mismatch in expectations there, I fear.”
I shrugged. “Plenty of cocks in the sea. Anybody got a cigarette?”
Blindly, I took the whole packet and the box of matches from Hugh and went into the quad. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely hold the flame to the tip of the first cigarette. But, finally, I lit up.
I smoked cigarette after cigarette, littering the flagstones at my feet with fag ends and burnt out matches, breathing smoky poison into the still night air. My eyes stung, moisture gathering at the corners. It must have been the cold. Or the cigarette ash.
“I don’t understand.” Niall stepped through the doorway. “Why would you go to all that trouble for him, and then do that?”
I gave a startled, sobbing hiccough, and dropped my last cigarette. I cursed, extinguished it with my foot, and tried surreptitiously to dash away my tears with the heel of a hand. I’d meant it when I’d told Niall that I never wanted to see him again, but right now I couldn’t find the energy to argue about it. In some strange way, it was almost nice to see him. At least I wasn’t alone in the dark, with nothing but an empty packet of cigarettes. “I don’t know either.”
“You should go after him.”
I scraped out a mirthless laugh. “I don’t know where he is and this isn’t a fucking romcom. I’m not going to catch up with him just as he’s getting onto a plane, kiss him in front of a crowd of applauding strangers, and live happily ever after. Besides, what am I going to say to him? I’m just a manic depressive standing in front of a moron, asking him to love me?”
“Well, no,” said Niall, “but you could say you’re sorry for being a prick.”
“Oh, fuck off, Jiminy Cricket.”
He sat down on the step, hands folded loosely between his knees and, after a moment, I crumpled down next to him. This felt almost like being back at university except for the gulf of time that stood between the eighteen-year-old I used to be and what was left of him. Though perhaps, for Niall, nothing had changed at all. He was still longing for Max and stuck looking after me.
“I thought a lot about what you said,” he said finally. “You were right about all of it. But I wasn’t lying when I said I went out with you because I loved you. And that I still love you.”
It had been so long that I’d been anything but an obligation to Niall that the words sounded almost like a foreign language.
“And that makes everything all right, does it?”
“It really doesn’t. I’m so sorry, Ash. I lost sight of you. Not because of your illness but because of me.” He stared at his interwoven fingers. “The truth is, I’ve spent half my life loving men who didn’t want me. It’s stupid, but there it is.”
“God. We really do have first-world problems, don’t we?”
Niall gave a soft sigh. “Yes, we do.” He unlocked his fingers and laced them with mine. It wasn’t until he touched me that I realised how cold I was. “Unfortunately, they still hurt.”
I nestled my hand into his. It felt . . . nice. So nice that I had to say ungraciously, “What did I do to deserve the pep talk? Or can’t you break the habit of trying to save me?”
But he only smiled. “I’m just pointing out that you’ve acted like a complete dick. Because that’s what friends do.”
I pressed my free hand to my heart. “Oh, stop. Before I cry.”
“Wanker.”
“But you wuv me.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Suddenly I blurted out, “I don’t have his number. I don’t even know where he lives.”
“Facebook? Twitter?”
I realised I was digging my ragged nails into Niall’s hand and forced myself to relax. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t bother to ask. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over.”
“Look, I’m not trying to be your fairy godmother, and, for the life of me I can’t understand it, but it seemed to me you really liked him.”
“I didn’t like him. He just made me feel good. It wasn’t real. It was a biochemical blip.”
Niall shrugged. “When you put it like that, so is everything. That doesn’t make it worthless. Or any less real.”
“Then we’re all mad here,” I muttered.
“We must be,” he said, smiling a little, “or we wouldn’t have come.”
We sat for a while in silence. A round, fat moon, jaundiced by the lights of the city, floated in an ink-blue sky.
“We’re probably missing the dinner,” I said at last.
“It’ll be fine. As long as we don’t miss the real thing.”
I stole a glance at Niall. His face was so familiar to me that I had long since ceased to pay it any attention. Once we had been friends, once we had been lovers. And now we were just two people who knew each other too well, who had—through carelessness, not malice—hurt each other too much.
Finally, I said, “I know I never told you, but . . . I did care about you.” There was a pause. “I mean, as much as I’m capable of it.”
“Wow.” He looked thoughtful. “You are really bad at expressing your feelings.”
“Shuh . . . err, shut up. And,” I swallowed. “I did want you. You’re, um, not entirely unwantable. And I’m sorry if I ever made you feel . . . like. Not.”
Niall made such a strange noise that I thought I might have made him cry. But, no, he was laughing. And, laughing, he dragged me into a hug.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I protested. “Let me go!”
Eventually, he did. He shook his head. “Not entirely unwantable. Be still my beating heart.”
“Oh, leave me alone.” I stared at the flagstones between my feet. “There’s . . . there’s one more thing.”
“My hooks are tentered.”
I’d always been certain this would be an admission of weakness, that it would lessen me somehow, or that it was a truth so fragile that utterance would shatter it. But the words slipped out, as they had in my whispered confession to Darian some days that felt like a lifetime ago, effortless as honey.
“Thank you for, you know, everything. And I’m glad you came back that day.”
They did not break. I did not break. And I felt not mortified, but free.
Niall stared at me. And then began to cry.
“Will you stop it, you big nancy?” I patted him awkwardly between the shoulders. Typical, really, that I’d fucked and been fucked by this man six ways to Sunday and I didn’t have a clue how to comfort him. “No wonder you can’t get a boyfriend.”
“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, sniffling, “but going out with you was okay. When we broke up, for ages afterwards, all I could think about was the bad stuff. But there was good too, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. You saved my life at least twice, once literally.” I took a deep breath. “You’re kind of a muppet but I meant what I said.”
“You mean all that deeply sentimental, mushy stuff about you maybe caring about me just a little bit?”
“Look, I need to stop having this heart-to-heart before I throw up. My heart gets claustrophobic.”
He smiled in such a soggy way that I felt obliged to give him my pocket square. “I can’t blow my nose into this.” He held it up in the moonlight like it was a priceless objet d’art. I sensed he was mocking me, which was a vast improvement on crying. “It feels like sacrilege.”
“Gucci will never know.”
Niall snuffled into my handkerchief. And then tried to hand it back to me.
“You can keep it. Really.”
“Well.” He somehow contrived to smirk, even with a red nose and swollen eyes. “Little Timmy won’t starve this winter.”
“Fuck you. I’m clinically depressed. I’m allowed to buy nice things.”
“You mean you’re a vain git with too much money.”
“That too.”
There was another silence. It was oddly comfortable. I let my shoulder rest against his, just a little bit, and we leaned against each other.
Eventually, he asked, “So, it’s definitely a no to the Notting Hill moment?”
I nodded. “Even putting aside what an almighty fool I’d look, he deserves better than me. All it needed was a crowing cock to end the scene.”
Niall choked. “Did you just draw a direct comparison between you being a bit rude at a wedding and Peter’s denial of Jesus Christ?”
“I . . . might have gone too far there.”
“You think?”
“Well, I’m an atheist. They’re both just characters in a book I haven’t read.”
“Stop trying to dodge the issue.” He poked me in the leg. “Ash, I’m not trying to be your conscience or anything, but you can’t just ditch Darian in the middle of Cambridge.”
I hunched over my knees. “He’s probably already gone.”
“Then go check. Seriously, it’s the least you can do.”
“I can’t face him, I can’t. And, look”—my voice rose—“can you stop fucking judging me for five fucking seconds? It’s all you’ve ever done.”
Niall held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry. I just think it’s a shitty thing to do to someone.”
“No shittier than what I’ve already done.”
“Actually, I think it is. And you’re better than that, Ash. I know you are.”
“I’m not.” I shook my head. “Maybe once, but not anymore. Deal with it or don’t. But, if you’re going to try to be my friend again, stop pretending I’m someone I’m not.”
There was a long silence.
“That’s fucking unfair, you know.”
I shrugged. “It’s the way it is.”
“Why are you trying to push me away? Was Darian not enough for one night?”
He was right, of course. Whatever the broken things we had scattered across the years, Niall knew me. And tonight I was wielding his kindness like a blade to my skin.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Wow. Progress.”
“Fuck off.”
He laughed. “So what now?”
“I don’t know. Back to the dinner, I guess. And, after the wedding, I might go home and watch Notting Hill. While crying manly tears and eating handful after handful of wasabi peas.”
The worst of it was, even I couldn’t tell if I was joking.
“Want company?”
“No.” My response was instinctive. But then I thought about it. “Actually. Yes. All right.”
He grinned. “You know, you’re shockingly sentimental, sometimes.”
I shrugged. “All cynics are.”
I stood on the Mathematical Bridge watching the moonlight curl over the dark waters of the Cam and tried not to think where Darian might be.
I walked cobbled streets, ankle-deep in shadows, trying to find the courage to return to our room, but there was only an emptiness, as unchanging as my tearless eyes.
I took a ludicrously expensive room in a hotel on Thompson’s Lane. A lavish glass-walled box overlooking a gleaming toy city. Somewhere beneath the spires and gables, Darian Taylor was hating me.
I lay, fully dressed, on top of the bed and watched broken pieces of light skittering across the ceiling. I simply couldn’t face his disappointment. The damage I knew I’d done. I’d ruined Darian, just like I’d ruined Niall. It was better this way, for both of us. Darian would get on with his life, and I would drag myself through the ashes of mine.
When Niall had left me, it had felt so inevitable. I can’t bear it, he’d said. I can’t bear you. I’d known for a long time how futile it was. He might as well have tried to love a parasite. I’d picked up the knife because I’d understood, at last, that there was no changing. No going back. And going on had seemed not only unbearable, but pointless. My whole life, an exercise in treading water simply not to drown.
And yet here I was, having made the same mistake all over again. I should have learned, even if I was incapable of anything else. But Darian had slipped past me somehow, like light through fractured glass. For some bright, fleeting moments, he had made me happy, and all I had done was hurt him.
Cambridge drenched in a bloody dawn. My world without Darian.
Sleep, of course, had proven elusive. Somehow, I had grown too accustomed to his body and the murmur of his breath.
I thought about going back to the room, but it was too late, and he would not have waited.
He would not have waited.
Darian had gone. There was nothing left in the room but my suitcase and the heavy perfume of the wisteria.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, which was still rumpled from our exertions yesterday. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
But it was better this way.
His last gift would not be his reproach.
I could remember him laughing, sparkling, my dear, precious glitter pirate. And I could keep deluding myself that, for a little while at least, I’d been the man he’d believed I was, instead of the man I am.
Dizzy, a little sick, I staggered to the window. Yanked up the sash. I still couldn’t catch my breath. Oh God, fuck, I was going to die and, for once, I didn’t want to. I was choking on fucking wisteria. I braced myself against the casement and just about managed not to have a panic attack. I kept thinking I’d get used to them someday, but no. They thundered over me like a train, like a fucking train, every fucking time.
In the quadrangle below, the wedding guests wandered aimlessly back and forth. I should have been with them.
From a nearby window, open like mine, drifted the opening bars of “F**kin’ Perfect.”
I put my head in my hands and felt like crying.