A thought-provoking, controversial and immediately gripping story with a tangled and messy moral dilemma at its heart.
Two couples. One reckless night.
In the time they've known each other, Sally, Al and Mike have shared—well, almost everything.
Sally and Al have been married for seven years, though now their relationship is hanging by a thread.
Sally and Mike have been best friends since university. And on many occasions something more.
Mike and Al have been friends and colleagues for many years. Yet with Al poised to become Mike's boss, their friendship comes under threat.
And now there's Mike and Faye. They haven't been together long, but Mike's pretty sure that this time it's the real deal.
As the three old friends sit on a train heading towards Brighton to meet Faye, little do they know that after this weekend, the four of them will have shared...
...everything.
They all know they have made a mistake. But they could never have imagined the consequences.
Release date:
July 26, 2018
Publisher:
Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages:
288
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The train hit a clockwise bend in the tracks, and Sally watched her plastic glass of champagne glide across the table . . . drifting in relentless centimetres towards the window, where it would either topple or come to a gentle halt.
The journey from London to Brighton was scheduled to take a little under one hour, but as the train barrelled through the spectacular countryside of High Weald, Sally found herself wishing the journey were perhaps half as long again. Autumn was waiting in the wings, and it would be dusk by the time they arrived, but now, with sun still visible above the treetops, the landscape was etched with layered greens and deepening shadow.
Sally’s glass reached its own destination now, bumping up against the glass, tottering on its stem and coming to rest with not a drop spilled. She picked it up and took a sip, savouring the still-cold bubbles as the scenery receded away from her.
They had just departed Three Bridges station, marking an approximate midpoint in their trip south, but Sally would have welcomed an extra hour to fully decompress from the week at her back. She’d been in the surgery since nine this morning – a conveyor belt of imagined pathologies, repeat prescriptions, intimate examinations and hopeless cases; the anxious, the ill, the lonely, the depressed. In a pair of three-hour sessions bracketing two and a half hours for paperwork and a rushed sandwich, she had seen upwards of two dozen patients today; well over a hundred throughout the course of the week.
It was her imagination, she knew, but as Sally raised the champagne to her lips, she fancied she could smell the succession of latex gloves she had pulled on and off throughout the day. She recalled her penultimate appointment – a smiling and quietly charming Indian gentleman in his mid-forties.
Mr Johara had been suffering with intermittent stomach pains for several weeks and had only made the appointment at his wife’s insistence. ‘Probably nothing,’ he’d said, but after palpating his stomach Sally didn’t share the man’s optimism. He was borderline obese and almost certainly pre-diabetic, but what had concerned Sally was the possible lump she had felt in the region of his pancreas – although his weight made it hard to be either sure or precise. She’d sent him to the nurse with paperwork for a thorough set of blood tests, including those for jaundice, liver function and various tumour markers.
Mr Johara had two children, both girls under the age of ten, and if Sally’s suspicions were correct, it was unlikely he’d see them into their teens. It was tragic, cruel and indiscriminate but, in the way a labourer’s hands thicken with callouses, Sally had long since acquired the tough layer of professional indifference that is no less important to a general practitioner than her knowledge, training and the standard trick-bag of diagnostic equipment. In truth, she had stopped worrying about Mr Johara before she had arrived at Victoria to meet Mike and Alistair, and it was only the phantom whiff of latex that dragged her mind back to him now.
Her need for decompression was based on more personal concerns, but it was going to take more than an extra hour’s train ride to work through those. She and Alistair had attended their third session at couples’ counselling last night. They’d both gone through a lot of tissues – although certainly not £100 an hour’s worth – and Joyce, their counsellor, had said things were likely to get worse before they got better. But Sally couldn’t help wondering if, rather like for Mr Johara, things would instead continue to decline as the sustaining systems, restorative mechanisms and vital processes broke down, and the thing they were trying to save faded and died. Maybe that was the real reason her thoughts had returned to the smiling man who insisted his cancer was nothing more serious than indigestion.
She turned her gaze from the window to Mike and Alistair, who had been picking over some titbit of office scandal – infidelity, stupidity, humiliation; the usual. Alistair was animated with laughter and you’d never guess he’d been sobbing into a Kleenex at marriage guidance just twenty-four hours earlier.
We find our own ways to cope, Sally thought.
The advertising agency where Mike and Alistair worked opened the beer fridges at four-thirty, and the boys were at least two bottles in by the time Sally met them at the station. Alistair had opened the champagne as soon as they took their seats, and was now debating with Mike whether to open a second. Probably Sally should have travelled down on her own, meeting the boys at the house they had rented for the weekend. But it would have offended Alistair and disappointed Mike. She smiled inwardly at the expression – the boys. Both approaching forty, but still and forever the boys. She had known Mike for over half her life now, since meeting him – God, twenty-one years ago – during their first week at university. Twelve years on, Mike had introduced her to Alistair, the man she would marry three quick years later.
‘It was the Queen Mum’s favourite,’ Alistair said, tapping the cork of the unopened champagne.
Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top, the same brand they’d served at their wedding, and Sally wondered if it was a deliberate romantic gesture for her benefit.
‘You’d think they’d make more of the fact,’ Mike said. ‘Imagine the poster: the Queen Mum’s dentures floating in a glass of Heidsieck while the old girl sleeps in her four-poster. She’s wearing a blue nightcap and the headline reads: ‘‘One’s favourite Blue Top’’.’
Alistair clapped his hands together. ‘I knew there was a reason we paid you so much.’
A man standing in the aisle – a plasterer or decorator, judging by his clothes – looked down on Alistair, taking in the champagne, the haircut, the attaché case, then looked away, rolling his eyes.
Sally saw her embarrassment echoed in Mike’s face, and again found herself wishing she’d travelled down on her own.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I thought the Queen Mother was dead.’
Alistair sighed. ‘Fair enough. So’ – he tapped the cork again – ‘what does the doctor suggest?’
Sally checked her watch; the train would arrive at Brighton in around twenty-five minutes. Not long enough to properly enjoy a bottle of champagne, plus they had a long night ahead of them so it didn’t make sense to peak too early. They were meeting Mike’s new squeeze, the glamorous actress, and Sally didn’t want to do it smashed. They were going to watch her in a play – This Life, she seemed to recall – and Sally knew that if she drank too much she’d end up sleeping through most of it. She quite liked dozing in the cinema, thought there was something innocuously decadent about it, but snoozing through your best friend’s girlfriend’s play, well that was just rude.
But Alistair had laid the decision at her feet. If she suggested they wait, then she’d be cast as the killjoy. Who knows, maybe she was. Ten years ago she wouldn’t have hesitated to open the second bottle – so what had changed? Was it growing up or growing old?
At counselling, Alistair had chosen his words carefully: he wanted them to ‘get back to the way they were’. But the way they were was thirty years old and no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t talk the clock backwards. The counsellor had smiled indulgently at Alistair’s declaration. As if she’d been expecting it, waiting for it so she could deliver her well-worn response:
‘You can’t go back to the way you were,’ she’d said. ‘You have to build something new.’
Counselling had been Al’s suggestion, but Sally, whose job it was to send people along this path, had modest expectations. This idea, though, of building something new, had resonated with her. She wasn’t happy, hadn’t been for years, and to some extent – great or small – she had to accept that she was responsible for her own dissatisfaction. Maybe she had lost her way; her spontaneity, her compassion. Perhaps she needed to open herself up again, to let go.
On the train now, Al smiled at her warmly. He sat back in his seat, half winked at her and gently placed the bottle on the table – deferring graciously to Sally’s common sense.
Sally slid her plastic glass towards him. ‘Well we’ll have to drink fast,’ she said.
Alistair’s smile broadened, not from getting his own way, she thought, but out of gratitude, or maybe even love.
She smiled back, the expression feeling like an old item of once-loved clothing that may or may not fit any more. ‘And if I pass out in the theatre, I’m blaming you.’
Al dropped his voice and leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Not much chance of that.’
‘What do you mean?’
They were sitting at a table for four, Mike and Al facing forward, Sally in the window seat on the opposite side. A boy of about eleven sat to her right, buried in his headphones while the rest of his family sat at the table across the aisle. Alistair glanced at the kid to make sure he wasn’t earwigging, then tapped the side of his nose. ‘Little cheeky-beaky to keep us going?’
Mike glanced at Sally and half grinned, half smiled – a gesture of complicity and apology. She wondered if he knew they were in counselling. Al had asked her to keep the information private, but the boys went back a long way and she wouldn’t be surprised if Al decided to confide in Mike. Staking the first claim on their mutual friend.
Sally mouthed the word across the table: Coke?
She could see Alistair wondering if he’d made a mistake. She knew he occasionally dabbled with recreationals, but they had come to a tacit agreement that he would pretend he didn’t and she would pretend not to know any better. Perhaps he’d been emboldened by Sally’s agreement to an additional bottle of champagne.
‘Molly,’ he whispered.
‘Who?’
‘MDMA,’ Mike said. ‘It’s cleaner.’
‘Really?’
She turned to look out of the window. The day was fading into grey, turning the glass into a weak mirror and showing Sally her expression of weary exasperation. She adjusted it to one of nonchalance and took a sip of her champagne. ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘In for a penny and all that.’
Mike tapped his glass against hers. ‘Well put.’
Sally laughed, and now all three touched glasses across the table.
She glanced at the man standing in the aisle, not really caring what he thought any more, but curious nevertheless. The man caught her eye, winked, then went back to talking on his phone.
‘So, tell me about this actress.’
‘Faye,’ Mike said, his face opening in a broad smile. ‘You’ll like her.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Al said.
Sally turned to her husband. ‘You haven’t met her?’
Al shook his head. ‘I thought he was making her up to compensate for his shallow lonely existence.’
For the second time in ten minutes, Sally cringed at her husband’s lack of tact. Mike had been divorced for more than four years, but it seemed to Sally it had aged him by eight. As if every year after the break-up, his ex-wife Kim had found a new way to keep the wounds open – remarriage, a new baby, and approximately one year ago, moving back to the States and taking Jojo, Mike’s then five-year-old daughter with her. And as much as Sally wanted to hate Kim for doing this to her closest and most enduring friend, she couldn’t. She had always liked Kim and found her funny, generous and engaging. Not that she thought Kim and Mike were particularly compatible – they were too similar for that; both a little needy, driven by their insecurities and need to be liked. Wanting support and reassurance to a greater extent than they were wired to give it, perhaps. She was playing amateur psychologist, but you learn a lot about a person in twenty-one years.
In the months following Jojo’s departure, Mike retreated into himself, and when Sally did see him, it felt to her that he was fading, losing colour and definition, his optimism and spark. He started smoking again, drank too much, talked about pointlessness – the latter point worrying Sally more than the rest. She took him to his own GP, not revealing her professional credentials but gently steering the conversation towards a low dose of Seroxat.
On the pavement outside, Mike had hugged her for a long time, wetting her neck with his snot and tears, before disengaging and giving the prescription to Sally for safe-keeping. ‘You can’t trust doctors,’ he’d told her, and it had been the first time she’d seen him laugh in months. He joined a gym, bought a cookbook, stopped drinking from Sunday to Thursday. And, of course, had started dating. Maybe that was the trick. He looked healthier and happier than he had done for years. He looked good.
Sally leaned across the table now and kissed him.
‘What’s that for?’
‘I’m happy for you. That’s all. So, how long’s it been? You and this actress.’
Mike held up six fingers.
‘Weeks?’
Mike shook his head and smiled. ‘Months.’
Sally punched him on the shoulder. ‘Mike!’
‘Ow! Make your mind up.’
‘Well why haven’t we met her yet?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s been busy. We’ve been . . .’ A smirk. ‘. . . busy.’
Al elbowed him a little harder than necessary. ‘I bet you have.’
‘How old?’
Mike screwed up his face in a faux-wince. ‘Have you heard about the half plus seven rule?’
‘No. Wait. Half what? Your age?’
Mike took a sip of champagne, nodded.
‘Plus seven,’ Sally went on. ‘So in your case—’
‘In all of our cases.’
‘Twenty-seven!’ Alistair’s eyes went wide – like a kid coveting his best friend’s new toy, Sally thought. ‘Are you telling me you’re f—’ and then, lowering his voice to a whisper, ‘you’re fucking a twenty-seven-year-old?’
‘Actually, I’m living with one.’
‘Shut up, Michael Doyle. Shut. Up.’
Mike shrugged. ‘What can I tell you, I’m a catch.’
‘When?’
‘Two weeks ago. We even bought cushions.’
Sally tilted her head to one side. ‘You look happy.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I am.’
Alistair downed his champagne and then tilted the empty tumbler first at Sally and then at Mike, inviting them to follow suit.
‘So,’ he said, as he went about refilling their glasses, ‘any pictures?’
‘You’ll see her for yourself in an hour.’
‘How will I know which one she is?’
‘She’ll be the one with no clothes on.’
Chapter 2
Faye twisted the spoon into the ice-cream, raising her elbow to shoulder height to generate the necessary downward force. She was wearing a fawn-coloured vest top, no bra, and the muscles in her arm – fine, downy hairs from wrist to elbow – flexed as she attempted to dig into the goods. ‘Mother . . . fucker.’
‘Still frozen?’
Using the spoon as a handle now, Faye banged the tub against the table – the resulting thud rattling the glassware. ‘Like concrete.’
‘Rocky road?’ Sally said.
‘Funny.’
‘Mint choc brick,’ Mike offered. ‘Don’t let me forget to replace it tomorrow.’
‘You already said.’
‘Did I?’
‘Three times.’
‘At least.’
They were renting the house for two nights through a website that connected home-owners with temporary renters. Part of the new ‘shareconomy’, although the terms of the contract hadn’t extended to sharing the contents of the permanent residents’ fridge.
After depositing their bags, Sally had run downstairs to take a shower before the play, while Mike and Alistair went to the local supermarket for bacon, eggs, bread, milk, coffee, pastries. But – big oversight – nothing they wanted to eat at one in the morning, drunk on champagne and wired on MDMA. Faye undertook a search of the house, finding three large tubs of ice-cream in a chest freezer hidden away in the utility room.
Faye pushed the spoon down the side of the tub and began working it around the perimeter. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Never have I ever r—’
Someone groaned. ‘No more!’ This said in a half-joking, half-pleading tone.
The rules of the game stated that if you ever had, you drank.
‘Never have I ever . . .’ Looking across the table, taking in their faces one at a time, holding their eyes for a second before moving on to the next ‘. . . regretted sleeping with someone.’
Sally gave Faye an incredulous stare. ‘Never?’
Faye shook her head slowly. ‘Nuh-huh.’
‘Well you will,’ Sally said. ‘Trust me, you will.’
Mike made a big deal of clearing his throat. ‘Ahem?’
Sally laughed at her gaffe, then gesticulated at Mike. ‘Sorry. Present company excepted and whatnot.’
Mike bowed his head graciously. ‘Apology accepted.’
‘Anyway,’ said Faye. ‘You only regret the things you didn’t do, don’t they say?’
‘Well they,’ said Mike, ‘have clearly never invaded Poland.’
Faye leaned across the table and hugged Sally. ‘You crack me up. Honestly. I think we’re going to be good friends, me and you.’
Sally blushed, and was surprised at the sudden pulse of embarrassment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I hope so.’
‘I know so.’ Faye released the hug then, and inclined her head to the boys in a parody of impatience. ‘Well?’
They answered in unison. ‘Well what?’
‘Never have I ever regretted sleeping with someone?’
Mike took a drink. ‘God yes.’
Al did likewise. ‘Everyone who wasn’t my beautiful wife.’
Everyone groaned, and Al made a show of offence. ‘You saying she’s not beautiful?’
‘Fuck no,’ Faye said. ‘She’s gorge.’ Going up on tiptoes, she attempted again to force the spoon into the ice-cream. Her hand slid down the shaft and her knuckles banged hard against the table. ‘Bastard!’
‘Here,’ Alistair extended his hand towards Faye. ‘Give it to me.’
As Faye reached across the table, her vest fell loose, briefly exposing her breasts. Small and neatly upturned.
Earlier that evening – last night by the pedantic kitchen clock – she had spent ninety naked minutes on stage, every curve and crease of her flesh exposed to the polite audience. From the front row of the theatre (the top floor of a Victorian pub, converted for the purpose, Al could see more than most in the modest audience. The crop of freckles at the small of her back; the geometric asymmetry of her dark areolae; the colour and extent of her pubic hair, grown out at the director’s insistence; the ghost of a tan line across her buttocks.
In spite of which, this fleeting demi-crescent of flesh was somehow more provocative than the full-lit feature-length exposure from three hours ago. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it was something about Faye.
Sally observed Alistair; the furtive glance, the inner struggle as he tried to resist staring too hard, or too obviously. More than anything else, Sally found it endearing. She took another spoonful of ice-cream from the tub she was currently hogging, then slid it across to Faye. ‘Take mine.’
Faye took the tub, licked the spoon clean then dragged it through the ice-cream. ‘Flavour is it?’
Sally shook her head. ‘Everything tastes like MDMA.’
Faye threw back her head and laughed. ‘Ben and whatshisname, Jerry, should get right on that. I’d buy it.’
Sally glanced at Mike and smiled. She cocked her head in Faye’s direction, a small sideways tick seeming to say Get this one. A gesture of approval.
Faye caught the exchange. ‘Don’t blame me, blame the MDwhatsaname. What’s all that stand for anyway?’
Alistair skimmed a small envelope of drugs across the table.
‘You only regret the things you didn’t do.’
The play had, in fact, been called A Still Life. A two-act piece centred on an affair between an A-level art teacher and his pupil, Rose – her name being an allusion, perhaps, to blossoming. The play opens with the couple in an expansive double bed – revealed in dialogue to belong to Rose’s parents. With the benefit of post-coital clarity, it becomes apparent to the teacher that he’s mad. . .
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