My Best Friend's Girl (3 page)

Del’s face brightened. “You’ll do that?”

“I’m not saying I’ll adopt her or anything, I’ll just go see if she’s all right. OK? Just a visit.”

“Thank you,” Del smiled. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Will she even remember who I am?” I asked.

“Course. She still draws you in pictures. Talks about you. And those anonymous cards and presents you send on her birthday and at Christmas, I always tell her they’re from you. She always asks when you’re going to come back from holiday.”

“Holiday?”

“You left so suddenly I told her you had to go on holiday for a long time. Because then she’d think you were coming back. Neither of us could’ve stood it if there wasn’t at least the hope that you’d come back,” she said. Her eyelids suddenly shut and stayed closed.

Anxiety twisted my stomach as time ticked by but she didn’t open her eyes. The machines were still rhythmically bleeping so I knew she wasn’t…But what if this was the start of it? What if this was the decline into…

Del’s eyelids crept apart until they were thin slits, her sallow skin was grayer than it had been when I arrived. I was tiring her out. I should go. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay with her. Be with her. Just in case…I wanted to sit here all day. All night. Forever.

“I’d better go,” I said, forcing myself not to be so silly. I couldn’t do anything here. I’d do more good by bringing news of her baby. “If I’m going to see Tegan today I’d better be making tracks.” I stood up, hoisted my bag onto my shoulder.

“Give her my love.” Del’s voice was as weak as tissue paper. “Tell her Mummy loves her.”

“I will,” I said. “Course I will.”

I paused at the doorway, waiting for Del’s reply. I got nothing. I turned to her and saw from the slow rise and fall of her chest that she was asleep. I watched her sleep for a few moments, fancying myself as some kind of guardian angel, watching over her, keeping her safe. Again I told myself off for being silly, then I walked out of the room. Walked out of the room, out of the hospital and into the nearest pub.

chapter 3

A
dele and I had known each other for nearly half of our lives—fourteen of our thirty-two years. We’d met in the first year at Leeds University, when we were assigned to work on an English assignment together.

I’d internally groaned when I heard that I was going to be studying with Adele Hamilton-Mackenzie. At eighteen I was a staunch working-class citizen and now I was being forced to team up with someone who was clearly from a well-to-do family, what with her having a double-barreled surname and everything. She turned her blond head and sought out Kamryn Matika across the class. She smiled and dipped her head at me, I did the same before she turned back to the front.
God,
I thought bitterly,
she’s bound to think the world revolves around her. And she’ll try to order me about. No doubt about it, I’m cursed. And that curse involves me working with some silly slapper with an accent.

At the end of the class, I gathered up my books and pens, planning to make the quickest getaway known to womankind, but as I straightened up from stuffing my belongings into my cloth rucksack, ready to hightail it out of the lecture hall, I was confronted by a slender eighteen-year-old who was dressed like a fifty-year-old in a blue polo neck and blue polyester slacks. I was taken aback by how quickly she’d appeared in front of me; it was almost as if she’d popped out of thin air.

She grinned at me with straight white teeth, and tossed her mass of silky blond hair.

“Hi, I’m Adele,” she said, her voice bright and lively.
She’s perky as well as posh, can my life get any worse?
I thought. “How about we nab a coffee and talk about the assignment.” It wasn’t a question, more a vague order.

“I think we should go away and think about it and meet up in a few days,” I replied through a teeth-clenchingly fake smile. No one ordered me about—vaguely or otherwise. Besides, which eighteen-year-old in her right mind actually worked on a project on the day they’d been given it? Not me, certainly.

In response, Adele’s poise disintegrated until her shoulders were hunched forward and her gaze was fixed desolately on the parquet floor. She wasn’t as self-assured as she acted, and I wasn’t as brazen and hard-faced as I pretended. I might start off giving that impression, might act cold and unapproachable, but I always let myself down when my conscience kicked in—I had no bitch follow-through.

“Not a fan of coffee to be honest,” I said, trying to sound friendly. “How about we go get a drink in the college bar instead?”

“If you’re sure?” she replied cautiously.

“Yup,” I muttered, feeling suitably manipulated, “I’m sure.”

“What kind of a name is Kamryn, anyway?” Adele asked me without shame.

“A made-up one,” was my terse reply. I’d spotted her student union card when she’d been hunting for change in her purse earlier and knew for a fact that I was sharing valuable drinking and conversation time with Lucinda-Jayne Adele Hamilton-Mackenzie. So, her asking about my moniker when she was Girly Two-Hyphen Name was an audacious step too far.

“It’s not a spelling mistake? Your name is Kamryn. K-A-M-R-Y-N,” she spelled it out. “Not C-A-M-E-R-O-N, Cameron like the boy’s name?”

“Actually, it is. I thought it’d be fun to pretend it was spelled differently. I love people asking me about it. You’re so wise, you caught me out. You’re clearly Miss Marple’s clever younger sister.”

Adele raised her left eyebrow slightly and twisted her lip-glossed mouth into a wry smile. “You’re not very friendly, are you?” she commented.

“I guess not,” I agreed. It’d taken her four drinks to discover I wasn’t the sharing kind. Far too many people opened their hearts and lives at the drop of a hat, as far as I was concerned. Why give someone that power over you? Why endow them with the ability to hurt you that much? Let someone in and you were asking for an emotional kicking someday.

“At least you know it,” she said, and knocked back half her Malibu and Coke in one dainty, ladylike gulp. “But despite that, I like you.”

“I’m honored.”

“No, I am.” She placed a slender hand above her left breast. “I truly am.”

She stared at me with such a friendly, open expression that I couldn’t help but bite the proffered bait. “Why’s that, then?” I asked.

“You’re lovely.” She even sounded truthful. “I haven’t met many lovely people in my life. So, when I do, I feel honored. When I first saw you across that classroom I got an instant feeling of how lovely you are. You pretend you’re all prickly but underneath, not even that far underneath, you’re simply gorgeous.”

“Are you a lesbian or something?” I asked brusquely.

“No, I’m not,” she laughed. “But if I was, I’d definitely fancy you.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” I lied. Not even short, fat, ugly men fancied me. And I couldn’t blame them: I wore baggy clothes to hide my weight; I had never applied makeup to my dry, spotty skin; I only tamed the mass of frizz masquerading as my hair by plaiting it into shoulder-length black extensions. I had no illusions at all that I was beautiful, pretty or even able to attract the right sort of attention from men. Especially when on top of the paucity in the looks area, I was lacking the je ne sais quoi that attracted men to ugly girls: I wasn’t funny, wasn’t friendly and wasn’t going to use sex to get attention. In short, the Wicked Witch of the West probably saw more duvet action than me.

“You’re so full of shit,” Adele laughed. (Shit sounded odd,
wrong
, coming out of her mouth. From me, with my London accent, swearing sounded like any other word unless you emphasized it. From Adele’s posh mouth it sounded like a mini rebellion. She spoke like she should be saying “phooey!” or “sugar!” instead of “shit.”) “You don’t believe that for a second,” she continued. “That’s why you’re so prickly. You think people don’t like you, so you exude the impression that you don’t care what others think. I’ve seen your type before. I’d say you were bullied at school by boys. And you were probably bullied because you’re different from other people. And unlikely to change to fit in.”

I recoiled from her.
How did she know that? How? Is everything that had happened written on my face?
Were the taunts, notes, phone calls, scrawls on walls all there, plain for any passing posh princess to see? What would I do if it was? College, two hundred miles from where anyone knew me, had been my escape. My getaway. My chance to leave all those hideous years behind and reinvent myself. Was it all a waste of time? Did I have “misfit” imprinted on my forehead?

I forced a smile so Adele wouldn’t know how close to the bone her words had sliced.

To my smile she said, “One of my friends from school was like you. Bullied to the point where she had no confidence in herself at all and shut out all her friends because she didn’t think she could trust them. Actually, she wasn’t really a friend. I don’t have that many friends if I’m honest.”

“Well, you’re bound not to if you keep saying things like that,” I sniped.

“I was simply saying,” she protested.

“Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t be ‘simply saying,’ especially when you know nothing about me. And what makes you such an expert when you’ve clearly come from a perfect life with rich parents who could send you to all the best private schools?” I was being a bitch and I didn’t care. I wanted her to back the hell off. “Huh? What makes you such an expert on crap lives?”

She picked up her drink, slowly swirled it around, making the melting ice cubes bump together. She looked at me for a long while, then stared down into her drink. “My mother died not long after I was born because of complications from childbirth. My father never wanted children, as he told me almost every day of my life, and he blamed me for my mother’s death. He wanted nothing to do with me. I spent a lot of time with a childminder until my father married again. His wife is not my biggest fan and she’s never made a secret of it.” Adele looked up at me, smiled. “I don’t have many friends because I’m too much, I try too hard, that’s what my last best friend told me. I try too hard, which makes me hard work. But I can’t help it. I don’t know how not to be who I am. I’ve spent so much time with people who don’t like me, I try to avoid upsetting them. I do know a bit about crap lives. Mine’s not as bad as some but it’s certainly not perfect.”

I suddenly felt like an accidental mass murderer. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t realize.” The worst part was that she hadn’t been trying to make me feel guilty for how I’d judged her, she was simply being honest. Adele was lacking in manipulative guile. I had no bitch follow-through and Adele was up-front and open in everything she did.

“It’s all right,” she said, tossing back her hair and flashing me a big, bright smile. “You weren’t to know.”

“Listen, Adele, if we’re going to hang around together you’ve got to cut that out,” I said.

“Cut what out?”

“Being so damn nice all the time. It’s not natural.”

Adele’s steel-blue eyes lit up. “You want to hang around with me, to be my friend?”

I shrugged nonchalantly.

She grinned at me in return. That smile not only lit up her face, it put an effervescent gleam in her eyes and a rosy glow in her cheeks. The radiance of that smile flowed from her to me and I fell for her. Deeply. I couldn’t help but like her. She was going to be an important part of my world. She was going to help shape the person I was to become. I didn’t know how I knew, I simply did. For some unfathomable reason I knew she was going to be in my life for a very long time.

We became almost inseparable because we grew up together. Once Adele settled into college life she settled into her personality. She found herself and who she was. She stopped dressing like a fifty-year-old—slacks never darkened her body again, and she often had a sulk that involved shouting, swearing and throwing things. But she finally killed the timid Adele I’d had that drink with when she had her belly button pierced.

I, meanwhile, lost weight, smiled more and murdered the Kamryn that Adele had that first drink with when I refused sex with a gorgeous man because he was wearing paisley-patterned Y-fronts. But all that was to come. At that moment, Adele was enormously happy that I’d shrugged my consent at the possibility of us hanging around together and I was secretly overjoyed that someone thought I was lovely.

“Anyway, I thought we already were friends,” Adele said.

“Every stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet, and all that.”

“Oh, shut up and get the drinks in.”

I stood up from the pub table, stone-cold sober. I’d intended to drink myself into oblivion, to make all of this reality—returning to London, seeing how ill Del was—go away, but at the bar, instead of ordering a double vodka and orange (my drink of choice when oblivion was required), I’d asked for a double vodka and orange without the vodka.

The barman had been unimpressed, thought I was trying to be funny and glared at me before he reached for a glass.
I’m not being funny
, I wanted to say.
It’s just, I’ve got this mate and she’s never going to drink alcohol again. I can’t do it either, out of loyalty to her.
But he wouldn’t understand. And why would he care?

As it was, the orange juice sans vodka went virtually undrunk as I sat remembering my first meeting with Del.

Now I slipped on my red raincoat. I had to get to Guildford, should have made the move down there over an hour ago. I’d been delaying the inevitable, though. The second I got on that train to Surrey I’d be embroiling myself further in this. I hadn’t intended to do that. I’d meant to come down here, see how ill she was, then get back on the train to Leeds the second I left the hospital. If I missed the last train, then I’d find a cheap B&B for the night and get on the first train back. No hanging around, no visiting friends and family who I hadn’t seen since leaving London two years ago. Now I was getting embroiled right up to my neck.

I hoisted my holdall onto my shoulder.
Come on, bird,
I cajoled myself,
it’s Guildford or bust.

Adele quickly became a member of my family. Christmas, Easter and summer holidays if I went home, she came with me. Her father and his wife weren’t bothered that she never went home. If she called, which I was always amazed she did, she’d come off the phone in tears, always wondering what she could do, how she could change to make him love her even a little bit. I got used to putting her back together, to reassuring her that she was wonderful and lovable because I cared for her, because lots of other people adored her. And that maybe, one day, he’d see sense. I never believed that for a second, but it was what she wanted to hear so I said it, and sounded convincing to boot.

Mr. Hamilton-Mackenzie was never going to change, I knew that. When we first met, Adele would often get falling-down drunk and confess how awful her life had been before Leeds. She’d tell me about her father’s quick-to-discipline attitude. About time spent in the hospital with broken arms, fractured legs, a cracked jaw as a result of being “punished.” Once he’d knocked her through a ground-floor window and a piece of glass had lodged itself in her back, narrowly missing her kidney—the glass had to be removed by surgery. Another time he’d hit her with the buckle end of his belt and gouged out a huge chunk of her left thigh, meaning she rarely wore skirts.