Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (11 page)

As it was, I blurted it out. Someone bumped him in the club we ended up in, his drink went all down my white T-shirt, making it instantly see-through as it clung to the lacy edges of the black bra I wore underneath. He grabbed some napkins from the bar and started to dab me down, apologizing profusely as though I was a stranger, not the person he’d actually been throwing food at for most of his life.

“God, I’m sorry,” he said, dabbing at my right breast again. “We have to go home, get you changed.”

I smiled up at him. His beautiful, honey-blond hair, his dark eyes so genuinely concerned, his beautiful mouth.

“I love you so much,” I said without thinking.

He blinked, like he had blinked when he saw me naked. “I love you, too,” he said.

I grinned, warmed by the heat of his easy, instant reply; wobbly and giddy with happiness.

“You’re the best friend I’ve got,” he added. “It’s funny, someone was talking about this new film that came out just before Christmas.” He spoke quickly, not giving me space to speak. “It’s about how men and women can’t be friends without sex getting in the way. One of the girls in my class was going on and on about it and saying it was true. And I said to her my best friend is a girl and it’s never been an issue. And it never will be. Because the quickest way to damage a great friendship is to talk—or even think—about sex. But the most certain way to end that friendship is to talk about love in any other terms.”

He stopped then, but wouldn’t look at me, instead choosing to fiddle and play with the sodden napkins wadded together in his hands. I said nothing, just watched his bowed head, his nervous hands.

“No sensible people would ever do that,” he eventually continued. “I told this girl, the one in my class who’s so opinionated, I’d never do that. I could never be interested in that way in a girl who is my friend. I would never confuse friendship for
that
love. Because friends aren’t meant to be lovers. If they were, they’d be frovers. Lo-ends. Don’t you think?”

I had the sudden urge to run. To tear blindly out into the street and not stop running until I was as far away from here as possible. My next urge was to crawl under the nearest table and
hide. My final urge, the one I went with, was to say, “I need to get out of this top before I catch my death of cold.” I had substituted the word “top” for “club” and “cold” for “humiliation.”

“Oh, yeah.” He dumped the napkins on the bar, brushed his hands clean on his trousers. “You wait here, I’ll go get the coats.”

“You don’t have to leave now,” I said. “I’ll be all right getting home by myself. I do it all the time in Oxford.”

“What kind of friend would I be if I let you go home all alone?” he replied.

“One who’s as subtle as a brick smacked around your head,” I mumbled as he disappeared into the crowd.

We got the night bus home and we tried. We really tried to be normal. To be us. But the magic that had showered our day with happiness, fun, laughter and all that hope I had for the future was gone. In its place gestated the uncomfortable creature that had finally been born this morning, and had named itself “Last Night.”

“You know that you’ll always be my number one girl, yeah?” Mal said to me as we stood by the coach I would be catching, the two of us still and awkward amongst the frantic comings and goings of the coach station.

I stood on tiptoes, took his face in both hands. “And you’ll always be my number one cutey doggy, yeah?” I replied, shaking his head as I would a dog. I’d started doing that to him when Mum and Dad said we couldn’t get a dog. “What do you need a dog for, we’ve got Malvolio?” Cordy had said. I’d decided the instant she said it that he probably was a pooch in a previous life: I could vividly picture him as a big, gangly Labrador that would bound all over you to cheer you up when you were sad, or would lie mournfully by your side, its features drooping to show it was sad, too, depending on the type of sadness it was.

We had to joke about it. I had read the whole thing wrong,
and if I wasn’t careful, this could come between us. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t feel that way for me. That I wasn’t good enough in his eyes. We had so much else—a shared history, a family, so many years together—that was far more important than some misguided romantic notion of us getting together, having a long-distance relationship for the next two years and then what, getting married? At our age? No, he was right. Friends shouldn’t be lovers. Friends shouldn’t even entertain the idea of it.

If I could keep doing that, keep rationalizing it, then I would be safe, at least until I got away from London. If I dared to feel about it, for even a fraction of a second, the chasm of pain would open up and swallow me whole. I had to consign it to the realm of the mind. To logic. To seeing the bigger picture. And make a joke of it.

“Are you getting on this coach, love?” the driver asked.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. Mal slung my rucksack off his shoulder and handed it carefully to the driver. The middle-aged, portly driver, with his white, short-sleeved shirt and tie, took my bag as though it was the most precious item he’d ever been handed, then flung it into the coach’s luggage compartment, before approaching another couple to ask if they were getting on board. I shook my head and looked away, unable to believe what I’d just seen. The framed photos Aunt Mer gave me would be in pieces, as would the Pyrex bowls of food, while the Vimto bottle Mum had pressed upon me would be leaking sticky liquid all over my clothes. All in all, a wonderful thing to be taking back to Oxford after everything. I could hear Last Night smirking at me.

“Now, does the cutey doggy want to play a quick game of fetch before I leave, or give me a hug?” I asked in my speaking-to-a-dog voice.

Rolling his eyes, he came into my open arms. We hugged and
I counted the seconds, each one a lifetime, before I could reasonably end this part of the torture. I had to play the game. Be normal. If I tried hard enough to be normal, it would be normal again. Soon. Soon I wouldn’t have to think twice about hugging him, touching him, looking him in the eye.

“I’ll come see you soon, yeah?” he said as we came out of the hug.

“No, don’t,” I said.

His eyes searched mine, desperate to know why I was rejecting him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, with a huge grin. “And you’re completely right. I don’t want you to visit because no blokes will come near me because they think I’m attached. And all the really annoying girls want to be my friend because they think they’ve got a chance with you. I don’t need that nonsense, to be honest.” I added a laugh, hollow and pitiful, but necessary.
Please give me space
, I was subliminally begging him.
Please let me go away and have the chance to get over this.

The bulge of his Adam’s apple moved up and down as he swallowed hard, and he pressed his lips together as he nodded.

“I’ll be home for summer,” I said. “That’ll come around in no time.”

“But it’s Easter in a few weeks,” he protested.

“We’re thinking of staying up there, a group of us. Someone’s got a houseshare that will be free over the holidays. We’re going to move in. It’ll be a laugh.” For a moment I thought he might ask if he could come, so I added, “But room will be tight. I’ll see you during the summer, all right?”

“Look—” he began.

“All right?” I insisted.

He pressed his lips together again; they whitened under the
pressure, his eyes narrowing. It wasn’t all right. Slowly, he shook his head, once, twice, three times. “All right,” he eventually said.

I ruffled the sides of his head. “Good dog,” I said. “There’s a good Mal. There’s a good Mal.”

“Ah, gerroff,” he said, brushing my hands away. “One of these days I will actually bite you, and then you’ll have to go for a rabies injection. Then you’ll be sorry.”

“But then they’d have to lock you up so you’d be more sorry.”

Unexpectedly, because we’d already hugged, he scooped me into his arms, lifted me off my feet. “I miss you,” he whispered, soft as an angel’s sigh. “I miss you so much it hurts.”

So why don’t you love me?
I asked inside.
Why don’t you love me?

“Any more, for any more?” shouted the coach driver, resting his foot on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to the coach. He was shouting at me, I realized; he was glaring his impatience right at me. I glanced up at the coach: every window seat seemed to be taken, no one else was getting ready to board. Everyone else was ready to go. Except me, of course.

“Oh, yes, me!” I called.

“I knew that,” he mumbled loudly.

I spun back to Mal. “I’ll see you in the summer,” I said, then hurried toward the coach driver. Mal raised his right hand, the one that had slid below the waist of my pajama trousers three weeks ago, but he didn’t wave when I paused to smile at him at the top of the steps.

The next time we saw each other, everything would be different, I decided. I wouldn’t be a virgin, I was determined about that. I would find someone to take that first bite with. They didn’t have to be special, that special person didn’t want me, didn’t love me, and no one would ever live up to him, so someone nice enough would have to do.

I would make more friends, now that I needed more people in my life because I wouldn’t be able to run back to London on a whim any longer.

Most importantly, the next time I saw Mal again, I wouldn’t be in love with him anymore. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I knew if I still wanted him to be in my life, if our friendship was going to survive this, then more than anything I had to make that true. Or hide it so well it would be as if it had never existed.

One time, I found a note Leo wrote. I don’t know why he wrote it, but it had made me sit down on his bed in shock and read it over and over.

He must have written it a while ago because his spelling is so much better now, but I couldn’t work out how he knew so much. He’s always known that Keith isn’t his “real” dad, even though he chose to call him Dad straightaway. I hadn’t guessed he gave much thought to who his “real” dad was. That he knew this dad person wasn’t dead. That he assumed I loved this other dad.

I hadn’t been sure what to do about it. Leo had never shown any real interest in his father, had never asked any questions about him. But it was clearly something he thought about.

I’d never wanted it to be like this. I’d never planned for him to grow up without knowing his father. He was meant, when he was conceived, to have two parents who would love and care for and raise him. I wasn’t meant to be one of those parents, of
course: I was going to be the aunt, the birth mother, the person who had helped give him life—but he was always meant to know his father.

And then I became his mother, and Leo was left wondering about his dad. He was left thinking about his uver one but never saying anything. Maybe because he thought it’d make me cry. Maybe because he wasn’t sure if I would tell him. If he asked, I don’t know what I would have told him. It’s not as if I had told anyone else. My family all suspected, but no one had ever asked, so I had never told them.

It wasn’t as if, once I told Leo about his dad, I could finish it by saying, “You can go and see him if you want.”

I hadn’t been sure what to do, so I did what I did every time I didn’t know what to do for the best, I put the note back where I found it, and blocked it out by making us all something to eat.

I stand in the doorway of Leo’s room, wondering if there are any other notes he has written.

His plane landed hours ago.

OK, it wasn’t quite hours ago, but it felt like it. Every minute that he was queuing up to get through immigration, to get his passport stamped, waiting for his bags (how many can he have when he’s a boy who’s always traveled and lived light?) to appear on the carousel and wrestle them off, felt like an hour to me.

Put in context, the fact that I hadn’t seen him in eight months, three weeks and four days should have stayed my impatience. But this was Mal. Mal. My most favorite person in the whole world. The person I had known longest in the whole world. I was barely restraining myself from climbing over the barrier
and running through the double doors of the Arrivals lounge, leapfrogging over a couple of (armed) security guards, whilst shouting his name. I had visions that he’d missed his plane. He’d called me two days ago to make sure I could still come and meet him at the airport. It was all meant to be a big surprise for our family; they weren’t expecting him back for another five months at least, so I was to meet him, then we’d show up at his mother’s. Bless Mal, though, he wasn’t exactly the most organized of men when there were women involved. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gone out for a few beers the night before his plane left, got talking to someone pretty and Antipodean and decided that his future did indeed lie in Australia, and that he might just stay. Then in a week or so, he’d be back on the phone, telling me that he’d changed his mind and was coming home after all.

That was the thing about my pal Mal, he fell in love at the same rate he fell in lust, then he spent an inordinate amount of time—usually longer than it took for him to fall for said woman—trying to make it work, before giving it up as a bad lot and leaving.

The last time I saw him, it had been at this very airport, but I hadn’t been able to see him properly because I was crying so much. I don’t think his mother had cried that much, and she, Victoria, Cordy, Mum and Dad had all discreetly blended into the background whilst we said our goodbyes. He’d put down his small rucksack and gathered me up in his arms. “Please stop crying,” he whispered into my ear.

I nodded, tears still streaming down my face despite my valiant effort to hold them in, which involved sniffing back a large globule of snot before it left my nose. “You’re going to make me cry,” he said.

I hadn’t approved of this plan to go off and explore the world. Who did he think he was, Christopher Columbus? Captain Cook? Captain Kirk? What did he need to see out there that he couldn’t find right here in London? What was so great about “out there”? Beautiful beaches, glorious sunshine, an outdoor lifestyle, stunning scenery and the chance to reinvent yourself—yes, Australia had all that going for it, but still.