To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ that?’ Lizzie asked. ‘He’d say something, wouldn’t he? If he did.’

      ‘We know,’ Jo pointed out. ‘And we haven’t.’

      ‘Of course he knows,’ Mona said. ‘When has it ever been that awkward with David? He’s known us as long as he’s known Nicci. It’s never been awkward. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago I’d have said I was closer to him than my brothers, by a mile. Dan certainly is. I’ve seen a lot more of David in the last fifteen years than I have of them.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, when we lived in that dive in Hove he probably saw us naked almost as often as Nicci.’

      A memory of David walking in on her in the bathroom came to Mona and her grin slipped as fast as it had arrived. His appraising glance, before embarrassment hit them both. Nicci’s forty-eight hours of coolness, David’s mumbled apology in Nicci’s presence, and the wariness with which she watched David and Mona for a few weeks after that. It was unnecessary. Even if Mona would have, David wouldn’t.

      ‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘He knows.’

      ‘The awkwardness could be coming from us,’ Lizzie said. ‘I know I’ve never felt uncomfortable around him before, but look at what we just did. We barged in on him in his own shed – a shed to which I now have the key – like we owned the place.’

      ‘Which you do,’ Mona said. ‘If those letters mean anything. Which is a whole other conversation.’

      ‘Look,’ Jo interrupted, ‘suppose Mona’s right?’ She’d been standing at the small window watching David’s back recede in the darkness. His drooping shoulders and scuffing walk radiated anguish. ‘And given that we just let ourselves into his shed – with his wife’s key – and he didn’t bat an eyelid, I think she is, then he’s waiting for us to make the first move.’

      It took a while to sink in.

      ‘What did he say?’ Lizzie turned to Mona. ‘When he delivered your letter, I mean. How did he look?’

      Mona shrugged. ‘Rough as hell. Like he hadn’t slept in days. Which he probably hadn’t. And he didn’t say anything much. Certainly wasn’t up for a cup of tea and a chat. He just handed me the envelope and said something like, “Nicci wanted me to give you this.” We hugged, just barely, now I think about it. He definitely wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Said he had the girls in the car.’

      ‘Which he did,’ Jo pointed out.

      ‘I found this,’ she said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from her coat pocket. ‘After I’d read the letter – about a hundred times – I went up in the attic and dug out the copy of The Bell Jar Nicci gave me for my birthday.’

      Mona and Lizzie groaned.

      ‘She was obsessed with that damn book for a while,’ Lizzie said.

      ‘Bloody depressing,’ Mona added. ‘I’m pretty sure I binned mine years ago, before I went to Australia.’

      ‘Anyway,’ Jo interrupted them, ‘this fell out. I must have been using it as a bookmark and forgot all about it.’

      Smoothing the square of paper flat with her hand, Jo held it up. The picture was faded where the flare of the flash had turned pink. Blu-Tack stains still speckled its back.

      ‘I remember that night!’ Mona exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t long after I moved in with you.’

      Jo glanced at her friend anxiously. She knew the fact that Mona had joined their little group a year after the others still smarted, but if Mona was thinking that it didn’t show.

      The photograph was of the four of them, just before a party. Snarls and pouts and grins for a camera on self-timer and balanced on a bookshelf. All with that early nineties hair, which was still really late eighties. Except for Nicci, of course. She had a bleached crop, the kind that looked like she’d cut it herself, which she had.

      ‘Look at you!’ Lizzie laughed, and Jo was embarrassed to see she was hoisting her boobs for the camera. As if they weren’t big enough already in those days. She wore a towel and nothing else. Lizzie was all wild red hair, in an over-large man’s shirt and Levi’s 501s, a look she adopted in their first term at university, under Nicci’s tuition, and wore for years. As ever, her hair hid her face.

      Mona was in the hippy phase that presaged her wander-lust. A long Indian skirt and a mirror-beaded waistcoat over a puffy shirt. On anyone else it would have looked like a sack, but she looked as lean as always. Only Mona would hide the slim-hipped, long-legged figure of a model under that outfit.

      And Nicci? She was channelling Courtney Love.

      Doc Martens, with her original sixties biker jacket, over a peach satin slip, her hair spiky. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jo was pouting, Mona was inscrutable and Lizzie was grinning, more or less. As for Nicci, she had a rock star snarl and that wildness in her eyes. The wildness that had only started to fade when she met David.

      Lizzie’s sniff broke the silence. ‘Still no tissues, I suppose?’ she asked, glancing around the shed. Her gaze fell on the remains of a kitchen roll. She tore off a square and passed the roll to the others.

      ‘Nicci lived in that leather jacket,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was wearing it the very first time I met her.’

      Chapter Three

       The Sixties Vintage Biker Jacket

       Sussex University. Brighton, 1992

      Lizzie barely opened her mouth in the Hardy seminar. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what she thought; she’d read Jude the Obscure three times to be sure. But why would anyone care what Lizzie O’Hara thought? And anyway, she was too intimidated by the peroxide blonde in the charity-shop nightie and battered motorbike jacket who’d been holding court for the last ten minutes. Where did she get her self-confidence, Lizzie wondered. At least she wasn’t afraid to express her opinions, even if Lizzie wasn’t convinced they were entirely accurate.

       When the blonde came up to Lizzie as she waited for a lift after the seminar, Lizzie couldn’t have been more amazed if Damon Albarn had asked her out. ‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m gasping for a coffee. Fancy one?’

       Dumbfounded, Lizzie just nodded, and found herself walking beside – well, slightly behind – the coolest and fastest-walking person, she’d ever seen, let alone spoken to, in her entire eighteen years of small-town life.

       They looked like chalk and cheese.

       Despite her best efforts, Lizzie’s long reddish hair was frizz rather than curls. Her skin was white and freckly, what little of it could be seen beneath her floor-length black jersey skirt, which bagged at the knee where she’d crossed her legs in the tutorial. An over-sized man’s shirt was meant to disguise her pear-shaped – and much-loathed – size fourteen body. In Lizzie’s eyes, it did the job adequately.

       Apparently not . . .

       ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Nicci, sliding into a corner table in the Students’ Union café, laden with plastic cups of nasty, lukewarm machine coffee. Allegedly СКАЧАТЬ