The Best of Friends by Alex Day

Author:Alex Day [Day, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-01-22T17:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires.

— Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Chapter 21

Susannah

Charlotte’s gone to Corsica after all, despite all the vacillating and hand wringing about whether she should leave Dan alone. I know that she was about to say something, to reveal something, when the boys exploded into the room with the force of a hurricane, begging permission to go swimming in the river. Once they’d disappeared she denied it. But I’d spotted the signs of a confession coming on. The lowered eyes, the husky voice, the contrite expression. I’d seen them all in Justin, after all, when he finally came clean about the extent of his debts and the trouble he was in.

And not just in him.

Because the thing is that, long before Justin, I’d been there before. My husband isn’t the first man who has abandoned me, nor the first who deceived and dissembled. Oh no, not at all. Even after all these years, I still think about him all the time … My first love. Mourning him, cursing him, missing him.

His name was Charlie.

I met him at university. He was sitting at the bar in the Malet Street student union building, incongruously drinking a pint of milk. Everything he did was unconventional, unusual, unique. I fell completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with him. He was my protest boyfriend, my beautiful, clever, funny, intelligent bad-boy from the rough end of Bristol, brought up in a tower block on the wrong side of the tracks by a drug-addicted and depressed single mother.

The first date we went on, he took me to Pollo Bar in Old Compton Street, famous for being the cheapest eaterie in town. Even now, I clearly recall the crowded space, rammed with booths in oxblood leatherette, all occupied by people talking at the tops of their voices. My eyes swivelled from side to side as I tried to take in the assault on my senses, the mural-covered walls and the dusty 1960s light fittings, everything shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of sitting down anywhere and it was hot as an inferno. Charlie ploughed on nevertheless and eventually, after much sliding sideways and avoiding legs and arms, we arrived at a narrow, twisting staircase that led down to a basement almost as packed as the level above. Formica tables and chairs jostled for position in the cramped, low-ceilinged space, all so close together there was scarcely space to move between them.

Somehow Charlie found somewhere for us to park ourselves. He ordered and the dish arrived within minutes, a huge, overflowing plate of spaghetti puttanesca, the sauce staining the yellow pasta strands red, forming the combined colours of a sunrise.

Or a massacre.

The waitress plonked it down between us, handing us both a spoon and fork wrapped in a translucently thin paper napkin.

‘The servings are big enough for two here,’ Charlie grinned. ‘No point in paying for one each.’

He picked up his fork,

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