Page 99 of The Fall-Out

And, when Patch got in from work, the children asleep and the dinner things cleared away, I suggested he join me at the table, and got my laptop out again.

‘We need to talk,’ I said.

I knew that the conversation would take all my resolve and courage, and that it would be only the first of many. But I was prepared. I had my ducks in a row.

And even more importantly, I had three responses to the message I’d sent earlier to Kate, Abbie and Rowan in a new WhatsApp group using exactly the same words.

Naomi:

We need to talk.

THIRTY-SIX

I looked at the three faces sitting with me around the table at the Prince Rupert. Actually, thanks to a mirror on the wall next to me, I could see my own face, too, and it bore the same expression as the others’ – unsmiling, wary, a bit sad. If I looked the other way, I could see a slice of green space, lit by the lowering sun – the football pitch where our men had played all those years ago.

It was almost two decades since we’d first drunk in that pub, and the first time we’d returned to it for ages – the Prince Rupert, as I remembered now we were actually there, had never been the most salubrious of places, which was why (once we’d dropped any remaining pretence of actually watching our menfolk play football on Wednesday evenings) we’d made the decision to decamp to other, nicer venues.

But now, here we were again, at my instigation – in fact, my insistence.

I couldn’t help thinking of that first night – how we’d abandoned the rainy, freezing football pitch in search of warmth and alcohol, none of us with high expectations of how the evening would unfold. And how, in the end, we had found so much more. How, from more or less the first drink, the first shared laugh, the first tentatively offered confidence, we’d been friends.

I thought of all the monthly get-togethers, bright beads on the intertwined chains of our lives. Everything we’d been through: the births of Clara, Meredith and Toby; Abbie’s wedding and mine; new jobs and new homes and new cats; and, of course, our shared grief over losing Andy. The stream of our daily chats with requests for support with everything from a domestic squabble to a broken Hoover, trivial speculation about whether metallic jeans would still be around next season or were a waste of fifty quid and made your legs look like leftover sausages wrapped in foil.

I imagined it all falling silent: no more ‘Good morning’s, no more ‘Night all, love you’, just a blank screen.

Tumbleweed.

Kate had her phone on the table in front of her, and occasionally glanced down at it impatiently, as if she had better things to do and places she’d rather be. Abbie’s mouth was turned down at the corners like a sad emoji, her shoulders slumped as mournfully as they’d been at Andy’s funeral. Rowan looked close to tears. And I – my reflection in the foxed surface of the mirror told me – looked like I was sitting face to face with an interview panel, rather than my closest friends in the world.

We’ve had a good innings, I told myself. Nothing lasts forever. At least you’ve tried.

But I didn’t want to be philosophical about it. I didn’t want to accept that people change, friends move on, life comes at you fast. I wanted to fight with everything I had for the survival of us as a unit, for what I knew the Girlfriends’ Club had meant to us all.

‘Shall I get a round in?’ Abbie asked, smiling hesitantly. ‘What did we drink that first time, mulled wine?’

‘They won’t be serving it now,’ Kate pointed out. ‘It was November then and it’s summer now.’

‘Mulled wine’s pretty gross anyway,’ Rowan said. ‘And it’s even grosser when it’s cooling so you have to drink it really quick.’

‘And then you end up puking up your mini stollen bites all over Father Christmas’s boots,’ I agreed.

They all looked at me, their faces still. Shit, I thought, that one didn’t land. Tough crowd.

Even the way we were sitting felt alien. Usually, we’d be leaning forward across the table, our elbows propped on its surface, our faces so close I’d notice if one of my friends was wearing new perfume or had had her eyebrows reshaped. Today, we were upright in our chairs, our hands in our laps, like board members negotiating a hostile takeover.

Always the peacemaker, Abbie tried again. ‘They’ve got Pimm’s. It might be drinkable.’

‘So long as we get them to make it with soda water instead of lemonade,’ Kate agreed reluctantly.

‘And slosh in some extra gin,’ suggested Rowan. ‘I think we all need it.’

‘I’m on it.’ Relieved that the ice was, if not broken, at least perhaps beginning to crack, I hurried to the bar. I strained to hear their voices behind me but there was nothing – no hum of chatter, no bursts of laughter, no snap of a camera as someone took a group selfie. A few minutes later, I returned with a tray holding a jug, four glasses and two packets of pork scratchings.

‘I see they still haven’t raised their bar snack game here,’ Kate observed, carefully pouring the amber liquid into our glasses, slices of cucumber and strawberry splashing after it.

‘I guess it’s better than a Scotch egg with extra salmonella.’ Rowan ripped open the bags of snacks and pushed them to the centre of the table, but no one ate.

‘Well, cheers, I guess.’ Abbie reached out across the table and we all followed suit, the rims of our glasses clinking together in a ritual as old as our friendship. I wondered if I’d ever hear that sound again without longing for these women.

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