Later, when I was lying in bed unable to sleep, I found my eyes wandering in the dark to the top of the wardrobe where I could just make out the shapes of the two plastic boxes up there. One box contained all the diaries and journals I’d kept since I was seven years old, the other was full of photographs. Everything that was in those two boxes was so tied up with Rupert, with my father and with everything that happened the summer after we graduated that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at them for years.
Until tonight.
I turned on the bedside light and got out of bed, dragging a chair over to the wardrobe so I could stand on it and pull the boxes off. It was a struggle to do it quietly but I didn’t want to wake Mum. I didn’t want her asking questions.
I could still remember the long hot summer of 2003 when Rupert and I were seventeen, the summer I first met Dan. I could still remember the sound of Gemma and Caitlin bickering and the sensation of the sun on my skin as Rupert, Dan, Camilla and I lay by the river. I could still feel the coolness of the water as we swam lazily in the river in the afternoons and the feeling of Rupert’s hand in mine. I could still remember the way Camilla used to look at him, the way she would touch his arm or his knee when she talked to him.
Camilla and I were at school together, but we were never close. Sometimes she’d turn up with Gemma and Caitlin; sometimes she’d seek us out on her own. I knew it wasn’t me she came to see though – I knew it was Rupert and I was glad of Dan that summer. He was Rupert’s friend but he always felt like my ally. I can still remember the sense of inevitability I felt when he and I went to London together and Rupert and Camilla stayed in Cambridge.
So many memories, but the one thing I could never remember, no matter how hard I tried, was the sound of my father’s voice. However tightly I had tried to hold on to it, it had faded over the years.
My memories, like most nostalgia trips, were rose-tinted. I’d almost forgotten how angry I used to feel whenever Camilla touched Rupert. That underlying sense of jealousy and rivalry that I felt back then had melted into adulthood and an understanding of the complexities of life, of the shades of grey – teenagers seem to have an almost over developed sense of black and white, of right and wrong.
It seemed that things hadn’t worked out between Rupert and Camilla after all but I wasn’t sure that changed anything. The past has gone and the years in between have been too long and too full of difficulties for the reunion Gemma seemed to think Rupert and I deserved.
Haven’t they?
I sat down on the floor next to the boxes and pushed the one with the photographs away. I wasn’t ready for that yet. I opened the box containing the journals and found the first one and I started reading.
… A few days after we turned seven, my grandmother died.
At her funeral I cried big fat tears. I hated that I couldn’t stop them from falling in front of everyone. I hated that I couldn’t be stronger for my mum. You stood beside me in your school uniform, your jaw set stoically – a baby version of the way you set your jaw later whenever anyone disagreed with you.
You refused to go to school that morning, insisting on being at the funeral, on being with me even though your parents didn’t want you to. They told you that you were too young to go but you said you were twelve hours older than me and you came anyway. Halfway through the service, when I thought my tears would never stop and Dad had run out of tissues, I felt your hand slip into mine, hot and sticky and reminding me that you were there. Everything would always be all right as long as you were there. You may only have been twelve hours older than me but you always understood the world better than I ever did.
We were born twelve hours apart – you at 6 p.m. and me the following morning – in the same hospital, our mothers recovering in beds next to each other, an odd but lifelong friendship developing from that initial bond. You were early and I was late, which was the pattern that continued for the rest of our lives. You were always waiting for me to catch up with you.
Our parents’ houses stood back to back and our mothers’ friendship transferred to us. We grew up together, in one another’s pockets. We made a hole in the back fence so we could cut through into each other’s gardens instead of walking around the block to the front door. We wandered in and out of each other’s houses as though we owned the whole street. We did everything together from the moment we were born.
Our first day of school seemed less daunting because we had each other. We were always in trouble for talking, or for reading some book or other that we weren’t meant to be reading, both of us so ahead of the rest of the class even then. Sometimes, when they made us work in pairs, the teachers would separate us, make us work with other people. But you were always looking over your shoulder, making sure I was OK.
When you were six you punched the boy who used to bully me. You got in a lot of trouble for that. Afterwards you told me you were going to marry me one day, and always look after me. You were the only six-year-old I’ve ever known who tried to stick to that promise.
The autumn after my grandmother died we were sent off to separate schools, hothousing us in single-sex environments, prepping us for the ‘great things’ our parents had planned for our futures. I missed you desperately. I was so used to you then that I missed the testosterone in my every day, even if I wasn’t really aware that’s what it was that I was missing. Every evening when we got home we ripped off our expensive school uniforms and pulled on the dirty, scruffy clothes we preferred wearing to sit in my mother’s apple orchard, catching up on our days, daydreaming.
And then, when we were eleven, the unthinkable happened.
They took you away from me …
‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Gemma said in the voice of someone who had done something that would make me mad.
The two of us were lying on our backs listening to soothing music as two beauty therapists performed a procedure known as Billion Dollar Brows on us.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What have you done other than make me undergo this torture?’ I wasn’t sure I was a Billion Dollar Brow sort of person. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot in a beauty salon. It must have been over six years ago and I was sure eyebrows had been much less complicated back then.
‘You’ll thank me for it,’ Gemma said.
‘For what? The eyebrows or whatever else it is you’ve done?’
‘You’ll thank me for both in the end,’ she said.
‘Gemma, what have you done?’
‘I invited Rupert to my wedding and he’s RSVP’d yes,’ she replied very quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth.
‘You’ve what?’ I felt my stomach lurch at the thought of it. After spending the last few nights going through my old diaries, reading through my memories of Rupert as a child, a teenager, our first kiss and everything that happened afterwards, I had
