The Reunion

he rang Jen’s number from the landline, listened to her calling out, ‘Nat, he’s OK. He’s OK!’ For the second time in as many minutes, he felt like crying. He apologised about the car, but Jen didn’t seem to care. ‘Bugger the car,’ she said. ‘Thank God you’re all right.’
    Nat came to the phone. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then, in the tiniest voice possible, she said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.’
    ‘It’s OK,’ he said. It wasn’t OK at all, but he couldn’t say what he felt, wasn’t even sure what he felt, he hadn’t had time to process what she’d said. ‘I’m OK. I’m at the B&B in Villefranche. It’s actually not that bad. Very comfortable. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get anything to eat here, but… well. We had a lot at lunch. So. Probably no bad thing for me to skip a meal.’ He was talking nonsense, rambling on, jovial, covering the awkwardness. ‘I’m sorry if you were frightened. Are you all right?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ she said, again, her voice barely audible.
    Then: ‘Drew, darling!’ Lilah’s voice called out all of a sudden, clear enough to cut glass. ‘Do you want me to leave the water in for you?’ He closed his eyes, felt his heart sink into his stomach, and prepared himself for the onslaught.
    He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. ‘Huh.’ A little exhalation. ‘She’s there, with you? In your room?’
    Andrew took a deep breath. ‘They only had one room, Nat. The place is full. We have to share.’
    With a click, the phone went dead.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Andrew said miserably.
    ‘What’s up?’ Lilah was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in her underwear, her arms folded across her chest. He turned away from her.
    ‘Did you have to yell like that?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘Now she knows that we’re sharing a room and I’m going to catch seven shades of hell next time I see her.’
    ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit,’ Lilah replied. ‘After what she did to me today…’
    ‘I didn’t do anything to you, though, did I, Lilah?’ Andrew said. ‘Christ, I wish you two would leave me out of it.’ He turned back to look at her. She was still standing there in her underwear, leaning against the door frame, rivulets of water dripping from her hair, her chin tilted up in a pose of defiance, but there was something in her eyes that looked like remorse. Without clothes she was shockingly, painfully thin, hip bones jutting out over the top of her pink knickers, her ribs clearly visible, clavicles sharply defined at the base of her neck. She looked impossibly fragile, breakable. Andrew had the most desperate, overwhelming urge to put his arms around her, he remembered so clearly in that moment what it was to love her. He closed his eyes and turned away.

 
     
    12 September 2009
    Email, from Lilah to Jen
    My darling Jen,
    I was thinking about you today, and I literally could not remember the last time we were in touch. Well, I know you wrote to me at Christmas, and I got your card on my birthday, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I can’t remember the last time I got in touch with you. I am a very, very bad friend. I am a very, very bad person. But then you knew that already, didn’t you darling?
    How are you, anyway? I am having the most terrible time. I got fired from my crappy paid job last month and am now struggling to find freelance PR work. Curse this fucking market. Honestly. Why can’t it be 2002 when everyone was borrowing money hand over fist and chucking it around? Plus Mum’s ill, which is awful. Too awful. She asks after you, she always liked you. You should come and visit.
    You’re not going to come and visit, are you? I don’t blame you, I probably wouldn’t visit me either. Fuck, there was a point to me writing to you and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was now. Yes I do, I remember. I was listening to the radio and
‘White Lines’
came on, and I remembered Andrew, Dan and Conor doing the most cringe-inducing dance routine at that God-awful charity talent show thing at college, and we laughed until we cried, that’s what it was, it made me think about the fact I don’t laugh like that any more and I was thinking how much I wished that I did. I miss you, all of you. Even that back-stabbing cow Natalie.
    Oh, Jen. There are so many things I would have done differently. I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am for