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In the shock of my sudden singlehood, my best friend Caroline and our mutual friends Mindy and Ivor rally round and ask the question of the truly sympathetic: ‘Do you want us all to go out and get really really drunk?’
Rhys wasn’t missing in action as far as they were concerned: he’d always seen my friends as my friends. And he used to observe that Mindy and Ivor ‘sound like a pair of Play School presenters’. Mindy is Indian, it’s an abbreviation of Parminder. She calls ‘Mindy’ her white world alias. ‘I can move among you entirely undetected. Apart from the being brown thing.’
As for Ivor, his dad’s got a thing about Norse legends. It’s been a bit of an albatross, thanks to a certain piece of classic children’s animation. Ivor endured the rugby players in our halls of residence at university calling him ‘the engine’ and claiming he made a pessshhhty-coom, pessshhhty-coom noise at intimate moments. Those same rugby players drank each other’s urine and phlegm for dares and drove Ivor upstairs to meet the girls’ floor, which is how we became a mixed-sex unit of four. Our platonic company, combined with his close-shaved head, black-rimmed glasses and love of trendy Japanese trainers led to a frequent assumption that Ivor was gay. He’s since gone into computer game programming and, given there are practically no women in the profession whatsoever, he feels this misconception could see him missing out on valuable opportunities.
‘It’s counter-intuitive,’ he always complains. ‘Why should a man surrounded by women be homosexual? Hugh Hefner doesn’t get this treatment. Obviously I should wear a dressing gown and slippers all day.’
Anyway, I’m not quite ready to face cocktail bar society, so I opt for a night in drinking the domestic variety, invariably more lethal.
Caroline’s house in Chorlton is always the obvious choice to meet, as unlike the rest of us she’s married, and has an amazing one. (I mean house, not spouse – no disrespect to Graeme. He’s away on one of his frequent boys’ golfing weekends.) Caroline is a very well paid accountant for a large chain of supermarkets, and a proper adult: but then, she always was. At university, she wore quilted gilets and was a member of the rowing club. When I used to express my amazement to the others that she could get up early and exercise after a hard night on the sauce, Ivor used to say, groggily: ‘It’s a posh thing. Norman genes. She has to go off and conquer stuff.’
He could be on to something about her ancestry. She’s tall, blonde and has what I believe is called an aquiline profile. She says she looks like an ant eater; if so, it’s kind of ant-eater-by-way-of-Grace-Kelly.
I have the job of slicing limes and salting the rims of the glasses on Caroline’s spotlessly sleek black Corian worktop while she blasts ice, tequila and Cointreau into a slurry in a candy-apple red KitchenAid. In between these deafening bursts, from her regal perch on the sofa, Mindy is gifting us, as usual, with the Tao of Mindy.
‘The difference between thirty and thirty-one is the difference between a funeral and the grieving process.’
Caroline starts spooning out margarita mixture.
‘Turning thirty is like a funeral?’
‘The funeral for your youth. Lots of drink and sympathy and attention and flowers, and you see everyone you know.’
‘And for a moment there we were worried the comparison was going to be tasteless,’ Ivor says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He’s sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, one arm similarly outstretched, pointing a remote at something lozenge-shaped that’s apparently a stereo. ‘Have you really got The Eagles on here, Caroline, or is it a sick joke?’
‘Thirty-one is like grieving,’ Mindy continues. ‘Because getting on with it is much worse, but no one expects you to complain any more.’
‘Oh, we expect you to complain, Mind,’ I say, carefully passing her a shallow glass that looks like a saucer on a stem.
‘The fashion magazines make me feel so old and irrelevant, it’s like the only thing I should bother buying is TENA Lady. Can I eat this?’ Mindy removes the lime slice from the side of her glass and examines it.
She is, in general, a baffling mixture of extreme aptitude and total daftness. Mindy did a business degree and insisted throughout she was useless at it and definitely wasn’t going to take on the family firm, which sold fabrics in Rusholme. Then she got a first and picked the business up for one summer, created mail order and online sales, quadrupled the turnover and grudgingly accepted she might have a knack, and a career. Yet on holiday in California recently, when a tour guide announced, ‘On a clear day, with binoculars, you can see whales from here’, Mindy said, ‘Oh my God, all the way to Cardigan Bay?’
‘Lime? Er … not usually,’ I say.
‘Oh. I thought you might’ve infused it with something.’
I collect another glass and deliver it to Ivor, then Caroline and I carry ours to our seats.
‘Cheers,’ I say. ‘To my broken engagement and loveless future.’
‘To your future,’ Caroline chides.
We raise glasses, slurp, wince a bit – the tequila is quite loud in the mix. It makes my lips numb and stomach warm.
Single. It’s been so long since the word applied to me and I don’t feel it yet. I’m something else, in limbo: tip-toeing round my own house, sleeping in the spare room, avoiding my ex-fiancé and his furious, seething disappointment. He’s right: this is what I want, I have less reason than him to be upset.
‘How’s it going, you two living together?’ Caroline asks, carefully, as if she can hear me think.
‘We’re not putting piano wire at neck level across doorways yet. We stay out of each other’s way. I need to step up the house hunt. I’m finding excuses to be out every evening as it is.’
‘How did your mum take it?’ Mindy bites her lip.
Mindy understands that, as one of the two slated bridesmaids, she was the only other person as excited as my mum.
‘Not well,’ I say, with my skill for understatement.
It was awful. The phone call went in phases. The ‘stop playing a practical joke’ section. The ‘you’re having cold feet, it’s natural’ parry. The ‘give it a few weeks, see how you feel’ suggestion. Anger, denial, bargaining, and then – I hope – some sort of acceptance. Dad came on and asked me if it was because I was worrying about the cost, as they’d cover it all if need be. It was then that I cried.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just, you never said …’ Mindy asks. ‘What actually caused the row that made you and Rhys finish?’
‘Oh …’ I say. ‘It was Macclesfield Elvis.’
There’s a pause. Our default setting is pissing about. As the demise of my epically long relationship only happened a week previous, no one knows quite what’s appropriate yet. It’s like after any major tragedy: when’s it OK to start forwarding the email jokes?
‘You shagged Macclesfield Elvis?’ Ivor says. ‘How did it feel to be nailed by The King?’
‘Ivor!’ Mindy wails.
I laugh.
‘Oooh!’ Caroline suddenly exclaims, in a very un-Caroline-like way.
‘Have you sat on something?’ Mindy says.
‘I forgot to say. Guess who I saw this week?’
I’m trying to think which famous person is meant to be my top spot. Unless it’s someone I’ve done a story on, but I spend all day looking at people who are only ever celebrities for the wrong reasons. I doubt a sex attacker on the lam would provoke this delight.
‘Coronation Street or Man U?’ Mindy asks. These are the two main sources of famous people in the city, it’s true.
‘Neither,’ Caroline says. ‘And this is a quiz for Rachel.’
I shrug, crunching on some ice with my back teeth.
‘Uh … Darren Day?’
‘No.’
‘Lembit Opik?’
‘No.’
‘My dad?’
‘Why would I see your dad?’
‘He could be over from Sheffield, having a clandestine affair behind my mum’s back.’
‘In which case I’d announce it in the form of a fun quiz?’
‘OK, I give up.’
Caroline sits back with a triumphant look on her face.
‘English Ben.’
I go hot and cold at the same time, like I’ve suddenly caught the flu. Slight nausea is right behind the temperature fluctuation. Yep, the analogy holds.
Ivor twists round to look at Caroline.
‘English Ben? What kind of nickname is that? As opposed to what?’
‘Is he any relation to Big Ben?’ Mindy asks.
‘English Ben,’ Caroline repeats. ‘Rachel knows who I mean.’
I feel like Alec Guinness in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker turns up at his cave and starts asking for Obi Wan Kenobi. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time …
‘Where was he?’ I say.
‘Going into Central Library.’
‘How about telling old “Two Legs Ivor” who you’re on about?’ Ivor asks.
‘I could be “Hindi Mindy”,’ Mindy offers, and Ivor looks like he’s going to explain something to her, then changes his mind.
‘He was a friend at uni, remember,’ I say, covering my mouth with my glass in case my face is betraying more than I want. ‘Off my course. Hence, English. Ben.’
‘If he was a friend of yours, why is Caroline all … wriggly?’ Mindy asks.
‘Caroline always fancied him,’ I say, glad this is the truth, if nothing like the whole truth, so help me God.
‘Ah.’ Mindy gives me an appraising look. ‘You can’t have fancied him then, because you and Caroline and taste in men – never the twain shall meet.’
I could kiss Mindy for this.
‘True,’ I agree, emphatically.
‘He still looks fine,’ Caroline says, and my stomach starts flopping around like a live crustacean heading for the pot in the Yang Sing kitchen. ‘He was in a gorgeous suit and tie.’
‘A suit, you say? This man is fascinating,’ Ivor says. ‘What a character. I’m compelled to know more. Oh. No, hang on – I’m not.’
‘Did you and he ever …?’ Mindy asks Caroline. ‘I’m trying to place him …’
‘God, no, I wasn’t glamorous enough for him, I don’t think any of us were, were we, Rach? Bit of a womaniser. But somehow nice with it.’
‘Yep,’ I squeak.
‘Wait! I remember Ben! All like, preppy, smart and confident?’ Mindy says. ‘We thought he must be rich and then it was like, no, he just … washes.’ She looks at Ivor, who takes the bait.
‘Oh, rings a vague bell. Poser who was …’ Ivor flips his collar up ‘… Is it handsome in here or is it just me?’
‘He wasn’t like that!’ I laugh, nervously.
‘You lost touch with Ben completely?’ Caroline asks. ‘Not Facebook friends or anything?’
Severed touch with him. Touch was torn in half, like chesting the ribbon at the end of a race.
‘No. I mean, yeah. Not seen Ben since uni.’
And my seven hundred and eighty-one Google searches yielded no results.
‘I’ve seen him at the library a few times, it’s only now it’s clicked and I realised why I recognised him. He must be staying in Manchester. Do you want me to say hello if I see him again, pass on your mobile number?’
‘No!’ I say, with a note of panic not entirely absent from my voice. I feel I have to explain this, so I add: ‘It could sound as if I’m after him.’
‘If you were only friends before, why would he automatically think that?’ Caroline asks, not unreasonably.
‘I’m single after such a long time. I don’t know, it could be misinterpreted. And I’m not looking to … I don’t want it to look like, here’s my single friend who wants me to auction her phone number to men in the street,’ I waffle.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to put it on a card in a phone box!’ Caroline huffs.
‘I know, I know, sorry.’ I pat her arm. ‘I am so, so out of practice at this.’
A pause, with sympathetic smiles from Mindy and Caroline.
‘I’ll hook you up with some hotness, when you’re ready.’ Mindy pats my arm.
‘Woah,’ Ivor says.
‘What?’
‘Judging from the men you do date, I’m trying to imagine the ones you pass over. I’m getting a message from my brain: the server understood your request but is refusing to fulfil it.’
‘Oh, considering your rancid trollops, this is rich.’
‘No, it was that thundering helmet Bruno who was rich, remember?’
‘Aherm, he also had a nice bum.’
‘So there you go,’ Caroline interrupts. ‘Have we cheered you up? Feeling brighter?’
‘Yes. A sort of nuclear glow,’ I say.
‘More serious Slush Puppy?’ Caroline asks.
I hold my glass up.
‘Shitloads, please.’
3
I met Ben at the end of our first week at Manchester University. I initially thought he was a second or third year, because he was with the older team who’d set up trestle tables in my halls of residence bar to issue our accommodation ID cards. In fact, he’d started off as a customer, same as me. In what I’d later discover was a typically garrulous, generous Ben thing to do, he’d offered to help and hopped over the tables when they’d complained they were short-handed.
I wouldn’t have been upright myself, but my hangover had woken me and told me it desperately needed Ribena. The grounds of my halls were as deserted at nine a.m. as if it was dawn. Draining the bottle as I walked back from the shops in the autumn sunshine, I saw a small queue snaking out of the bar’s double doors. Being British, and a nervous fresher, I thought I’d better join it.
When I got to the front and a space appeared in front of Ben, I stepped forward.
His mildly startled but not at all displeased expression seemed to read, quite clearly: ‘Ooh, and you are?’
This startled me back, not least because it somehow wasn’t leery. On a good day (which this wasn’t) I thought I scrubbed up reasonably well but I hadn’t had many looks like this before. It was as if someone had cued music, fluffed my hair, lit me from above and shouted ‘action’.
Ben wasn’t at all my type. Bit skinny, bit obvious, with those brown doe-eyes and that squared-off jaw, bit white bread as Rhys would say. (He had recently come into my life, along with his definitive worldview that, bit by bit, was becoming mine.) And from what I could see of Ben’s upper half, he was clad in sportswear in such a manner that implied he actually played sports. Attractive men, in my eighteen-year-old opinion, played lead guitar, not football. They were scruffy and saturnine, had five o’clock shadows and – recent amendment due to research in the field – chest hair you could lose a gerbil in. Still, I was open-minded enough to allow that Ben would be plenty of other people’s type, and that made the attention pretty damn flattering. The low clouds of my hangover started lifting.
Ben said:
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
A beat while we remembered what we were here for. ‘Name?’ Ben said.
‘Rachel Woodford.’
‘Woodford … W …’ He started riffling through boxes of cards. ‘Gotcha.’
He produced a rectangle of cardboard with the name of our halls and a passport photo affixed to it. I’d forgotten I’d sent a handful from a not very flattering session in a shopping centre photo booth. Really bad day, Meadowhall, pre-menstrual. Face like I’d woken up at my own autopsy. Might’ve known they’d come back to haunt me.
‘Don’t laugh at the picture,’ I said, hastily, and potentially counter-productively.
Ben peered at it. ‘I’ve seen worse today.’
He clamped my card in the machine, took the plasticated version out and inspected it again.
‘I know it’s grim,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘I look like I’m trying to pass a dragon fruit.’
‘I don’t know what a dragon fruit is. I mean, other than a fruit, I’m guessing.’
‘It’s spiky.’
‘Ah OK. Yeah. I ’spose that’d sting a bit.’
Well. That had gone beautifully. Seduction 101: make the attractive boy imagine you straining on the toilet.
This was straight from my greatest hits back catalogue, by the way. Quintessential Rachel, The Cream of Rachel, Simply Rachel. When put on the spot, the linguistic function of my brain offers the same potluck as a one-armed bandit. Crank the handle and ratchet the tension, it rings up any old combination of words.
Ben gave me a smile that turned into laughter. I grinned back.
He kept the card out of my reach.
‘You’re on English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. I haven’t got a clue where I’m meant to be for registration tomorrow. Have you?’
We made an arrangement for him to stop by my room the next morning so we could navigate the arts block together. He found a pen. I scribbled my room number down for him on the nearest thing to hand, a spongy beer mat. I wished I hadn’t spent last night painting every one of my fingernails a different colour, which looked pretty silly in the light of day. I printed ‘Rachel’ in un-joined up letters neatly below, as if I was writing out a label for my coat peg at primary school.
‘About the picture,’ he said, as he took it. ‘You look fine, but you might want to jack the seat up next time. It’s a bit Ronnie Corbett.’
I slid it out again to check. There was an acre of white space above my dishevelled head.
I blushed, started laughing.
‘Spin it,’ Ben mouthed, rotating an imaginary photo booth stool.
I went redder, laughed harder.
‘I’m Ben. See you tomorrow.’
In the style of a policeman in traffic, Ben waved me away with one hand and the next person forward with his other, mock imperiously.
As I dodged round the rest of the queue, I wondered if the well-spoken girl in the room next door to me was too upper middle class to go for a restorative greasy spoon breakfast. On impulse as I left, I glanced back towards Ben, and he was watching me go.
4
In some workplaces, everyone has clusters of framed family portraits on their desk, a tumbler of those novelty gonk pens with tufts of fluff at the end and a mug with their name on. From time to time they cry in the loos and confide in each other and any personal news is round the office in the morning before the kettle’s gone on for a second time. Words like ‘fibroids’ or ‘Tramadol’ or ‘caught him trying on one of my dresses’ are passed about in the spirit of full disclosure.
Mine isn’t one of those workplaces. Manchester Crown Court is full of people moving briskly and efficiently about the place, swishing robes and trading critical information in low voices. The mood is decidedly masculine – it doesn’t encourage confidences that are nothing to do with the business in hand. Therefore I’ve masked physical evidence of my emotional turmoil with an extra layer of make-up, and am squaring my shoulders and heading into battle, congratulating myself on my varnish-thin sheen of competent poise.
I’m getting myself one of the Crown Court vending machine’s famous dung-flavoured instant coffees, served in a plastic cup so thin the liquid burns your fingertips, when I hear: ‘Big weekend was it, Woodford? You look cream crackered!’
Ahhhh, Gretton. Might’ve known he’d burst my bubble.
Pete Gretton is a freelancer, a ‘stringer’ for the agencies as they’re known, with no loyalties. He scours the lists looking for the most unpleasant or ridiculous cases and sells the lowest common denominator to the highest bidder, often following me around and ruining any hope of an exclusive. Misdeed and misery are his bread and butter. To be fair, that’s true of every salaried person in the building, but most of us have the decency not to revel in it. Gretton, however, has never met a grisly multiple homicide he didn’t like.
I turn and give him an appropriately weary look.
‘Good morning to you too, Pete,’ I say, tersely.
He’s very blinky, as if daylight is a shock to him, somehow always reminding me of a ghostly, pink-gilled fish my dad once found lurking in the black sludge at the bottom of the garden pond. Gretton’s evolved to fit the environment of court buildings, subsisting purely on coffee, fags and cellophane-wrapped pasties, with no need for sunshine’s Vitamin D.
‘Only joking, sweetheart. You’re still the most beautiful woman in the building.’
After a conversation with Gretton you invariably want to scrub yourself with a stiff bristled brush under scalding water.
‘What was it?’ he continues. ‘Too much of the old vino collapso? That fella of yours tiring you out?’ He adds a stomach-turning wink.
I take a gulp of coffee with the fresh roasted aroma of farming and agriculture.
‘I split up with my fiancé last month.’
His beady, rheumy little eyes lock on mine, waiting for a punchline. When none is forthcoming, he offers:
‘Oh dear … sorry to hear it.’
‘Thanks.’
I don’t know if Gretton has a private life in any conventional sense, or if he sprouts a tail and corkscrews into an open manhole in a cloud of bright green special effects at five thirty p.m. This topic of conversation is certainly uncharted territory between us. The extent of our personal knowledge about each other is a) I have a fiancé, now past tense, and b) he’s originally from Carlisle. And that’s the way we both like it.
He shuffles his feet.
‘Heard anything about the airport heroin smuggling in 9 that kicks off today? Word is they hid it in colostomy bags.’
I shake my head.
‘For once they really could claim it was the good shit!’
He honks at this, broken engagement already forgotten.
‘I was going to stick with the honour killing in 1,’ I say, unsmiling. ‘Tell you what, you do the drugs, I’ll do the murder and we’ll compare notes at half time.’
Pete eyes me suspiciously, wondering what devious tactic this ‘mutually beneficial diplomacy’ might be.
‘Yeah, alright.’
Although I can get ground down by the bleak subject matter, I enjoy my job. I like being somewhere with clearly defined rules and roles. Whatever the grey areas in the evidence, the process is black and white. I’ve learned to read the language of the courtroom, predict the lulls and the flurries of action, interpret the Masonic whispers between counsel. I’ve built up a rapport with certain barristers, got expert at reading the faces of juries and quick at slipping out before any angry members of the public gallery can follow me and tell me they don’t want a story putting in the bloody paper.
As I swill the remains of the foul coffee, bin the cup and head towards Court 1, I hear a timid female voice behind me.
‘Excuse me? Are you Rachel Woodford?’
I turn to see a small girl with a halo of straw-coloured, frizzy hair, a slightly beaky nose and an anxious expression. In school uniform she could pass for twelve.
‘I’m the new reporter who’s shadowing you today,’ she says.
‘Ah, right.’ I rack my brains for her name, recall a conversation about her with news desk which now seems a geological era ago.
‘Zoe Clarke,’ she supplies.
‘Zoe, of course, sorry, I’m a bit brain-fugged this morning. I’m doing the murder trial today, want to join?’
‘Yes, thanks!’ She smiles as sunnily as if I had offered her a walking weekend in the Lakes.
‘Let’s go and watch people in wigs argue with each other then,’ I say. I point at the retreating Gretton. ‘And beware the sweaty man who comes in friendship and leaves with your story.’
Zoe laughs. She’ll learn.
