The Other Us: the RONA winning perfect second chance romance to curl up with. Fiona Harper
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Reality dashes over me like a bucket of ice water, and I know the next thought that enters my head to be the absolute and inalterable truth: I’m not dead at all. And this definitely isn’t heaven.
One week earlier
I arrive at Bluewater, the huge triangular shopping centre sitting in the middle of a disused quarry just near the Dartford crossing. Becca and I have been meeting for a monthly shopping trip here for a couple of years now. We could take it in turns to go to each other’s houses, I suppose, but she says, as much as she loves me, the coffee here is way better. And then there’s the shopping. Becca loves shopping.
I head for our usual cafe and order a coffee. I could wait for Becca before I order, but I don’t. Ever since I’ve known her, if we’ve arranged to get together, I’m always ten minutes early and she’s always twenty minutes late. I know I should just adjust my arrival time and turn up late as well, but somehow I can’t make myself do it.
I’ve just reached the silky froth at the bottom of my cup when Becca arrives – an uncharacteristic ten minutes before her usual time – and collapses into the chair opposite me. She has a collection of shopping bags with her: things she needs to return to Coast and Karen Millen that she picked up on our last shopping outing and has decided don’t suit her. I also have something to return, but it’s a shower curtain that needs to go back to John Lewis.
‘Shall we get a table outside?’ she asks, after scanning the restaurant. ‘The weather’s glorious.’
I sigh inwardly, reach for my bags and stand up. Becca always does this. It doesn’t matter where I choose to sit, she always wants to move to a better spot. I wouldn’t mind so much but I specifically chose this table because it’s the one she wanted to move to last time.
Becca is practically glowing. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off her since she walked through the door, and since a few male heads turn as we move tables, I guess I’m not the only one.
She’s the same sort of size as me: slightly overweight, with the usual forty-something bulges and curves, but somehow she wears it better. I bought some long boots like hers in the sales last year, but every time I try them on I just end up peeling them off again. I wanted to see a stylish, mature woman staring back at me in the mirror, but all I could see was pantomime pirate. They’ve sat in their box at the back of my wardrobe since January.
‘You look nice today,’ I tell her once we’ve relocated. I usually greet people with a compliment, but today it isn’t an automatic response pulled from my mental library at random.
Becca grins back at me. ‘Thanks! I’m feeling great, too.’
I can’t help smiling with her. If happiness is a disease, it’s about time Becca caught it. For a long time I thought her lousy ex had inoculated her against it. ‘I take it things are going well with the new man?’
‘Pretty good,’ she says, and orders a coffee from a passing waiter. It’s very odd. Becca used to gush endlessly about her latest squeeze when we were younger, but she’s being a bit cagey about this one. The only thing I can think of is that it’s because this is the first proper romance since her divorce. ‘We might get away for a weekend soon. If he can work out getting time away from … I mean, getting time off.’ She looks down at the table again, but I see her secret smile.
‘It sounds as if it’s getting serious.’
Becca flushes. ‘I know. Ridiculous, really. I mean, it’s early days and we’ve only been seeing each other a couple of months and I really should be dating and having fun, but he’s just so amazing.’
I want to jump in and tell her that, while I understand how wonderful this is for her, how I’m truly pleased she’s happy again, maybe she shouldn’t leap into this relationship quite as hard and quite as fast as she has done all her others – but the words keep tumbling out of her in a breathless stream, as if, instead of filing up neatly behind one another to make sensible sentences, they’re all racing each other to see who can get out first, and I can’t get a word in edgewise.
The gushing carries on as we leave the cafe. She instinctively heads in the direction of her favourite shops and I trail along with her while my shower curtain gets heavier and heavier. I mention this after we’ve dropped off both her returns.
‘Of course,’ she responds, but then, when we’ve turned tail and are heading back towards John Lewis, we pass Hobbs. She gives me a sugary smile. ‘You don’t mind if we pop in here, do you? It’ll only take a minute, and they had this gorgeous blouse that’d be perfect for work now the weather’s finally turned warmer …’
I shake my head, but after Hobbs it’s Laura Ashley and then it’s Massimo Dutti.
I honestly don’t know if she does this on purpose, or whether her memory is really goldfish-short. There are times at the end of our shopping trips where Becca has had to dash off again and I’ve had to stay behind to do the essential errand she promised we’d get round to an hour earlier.
This makes her sound like a horrible friend, but really she isn’t. She’s had a tough time in the last couple of years. Her ex, Grant, turned out to be a manipulative, controlling creep. I always worried he hit her, but she always denied it. Even so, it took her far too long to muster up the courage to leave him, which she did eighteen months ago.
He hardly let her out his sight, our shopping trips being one of the few exceptions, and the least I could do then was to let her have some power and control over what she did for a few hours. I suppose we’ve just fallen into a pattern now, one that’s hard for me to change without bringing it up and sounding whiney.
Becca is a theatre manager now and as we shop she gives me an in-depth report on the antics of a well-known soap star who was appearing in the play that was on last week. My shoulder develops a nagging little niggle from the weight of my John Lewis carrier bag.
At first I’m nodding and smiling at her blow-by-blow account of his excessive vodka-drinking to get over his opening-night nerves but, funny as it is, after a while, I start to tune out. I mean, we’ve been talking about her stuff since we sat down for cappuccinos and it hasn’t even occurred to her to ask if anything much is going on in my life, even if I do usually just wave the question away and say, ‘Oh, just the same old same old …’
But today I do have something to say. Something big. Or at least I think I might. I really can’t work out if I’m just being silly, and I could do with a friend to help me sift through the facts and sort out the truth from the muddy paranoia.
But Becca is too full of ‘glow’ to notice the worry in my eyes. She just barrels on. It’s only after I’ve hauled my shower curtain onto the sales desk in John Lewis’s homeware department (and almost kissed the sales lady for taking it off my hands), and completed the transaction, that she finds a new topic.
‘Did you see that thing on Facebook?
I’m tucking my returns receipt back into my purse. When I finish I look at her, frowning slightly. ‘What thing?’
‘The reunion. Oaklands College. Some of the guys are planning a get-together, seeing as it’s twenty-five years since we graduated.’
Even