contemporaries had vanished to halls of residences around the country. There’s no self-pity like a teenager’s self-pity.
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ I asked Ed, before our final day lingering in purgatory. We were eating chips from paper cones, our breath making ghosts, and I thought how grateful I’d been for Ed being around. He was dependable solidity itself.
‘Oh, big game with my Five-a-Side team and then we’re going to get drunk at The Trip.’
‘What?! What will I do?!’ I wailed, and Ed replied: ‘Come! Come along. The game won’t take that long.’
I’d usually not want to be that superfluous at an occasion, or so openly needy, but the prospect of sitting indoors doing nothing but bickering with my mum and my younger brother Kieran was worse.
The kickabout was in a park on a hill, north of the city and near where I now live. The field was on a slope, rolling down to the main road, and I languished at the upper end of it with a copy of Viz while they ran around.
I watched Ed with his team mates – his good humour, his natural leadership, his powers of concentration. His muscled legs. Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realise you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.
Every so often he’d give me an RAF-style salute and I’d wave back. Separation makes you value something more and I was acutely aware of how fond I was of Ed, and how badly I’d miss him. It had thrown the big light on, in a room inside me.
I realised, at a subconscious level, I’d complacently assumed my future was full of Eds – what if it wasn’t?
Ed changed his t-shirt at the end of the match and I found myself curiously transfixed by upper-body definition I didn’t know he had, and the way he yanked the fresh one over his head. Something stirred. Obviously, I must be in a heightened emotional state to be ogling Ed Cooper’s milk-pale – if unexpectedly sculpted – abdomen. Susie would laugh when I told her.
We went to The Trip to Jerusalem and drank foamy sour things from casks, served in dimpled tankards, and felt brimful of cheer and anxiety and poignancy, at our imminent parting, to futures unknown. At eighteen, you’ve not experienced poignancy before.
Ed’s mum had insisted on picking him up to check he wasn’t too wasted, the night before the drive up to Newcastle. As we walked out of the pub I saw her car pulling in at the bottom of the road. We were too far away for her to see us.
‘Sure you don’t want a lift?’ Ed said. ‘It’s quite late to get the bus?’
‘Yeah. No bother. I want the fresh air,’ I said. The real reason I didn’t want their lift was because I knew I was going to cry, and I didn’t want the audience.
‘Ack. This is it, then,’ Ed said, gazing at me in the twilight, with a sad smile.
I felt the tears rise up and threaten to close my throat, and I said in a thick voice, flapping my hands at my face, as if cooling myself in heat: ‘Oh God, this is so silly, we’ll be home again in a few weeks!’
Our parting hurt so acutely, I realised, not because we thought the geography was insurmountable or that the Christmas break was so far away, but because we didn’t know the people we were about to change into.
Maybe we wouldn’t be friends any more, or not close ones. What if everyone returned, being all ‘had such a great time’ and behaving subtly differently, to make it clear priorities and intimacies had shifted? Acting like things were the same, but there was a new distance around each of us, like castles with moats? Name-dropping strangers with whom we’d forged mysterious, exciting, impenetrable new alliances? Nothing held the same power and mystique that the unknown did.
‘Fuck, I am going to miss you so much, Evelyn Rose Harris,’ Ed said. His face had fallen and his flat tone of voice was not one I’d ever heard him use before. Ed was usually Mr Laidback Sunshine.
Not many people knew my birth certificate name. There was a particular tenderness to him using it at this moment.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me cry!’
‘Will you? Miss me, I mean.’
‘Yes, of course.’
I swallowed and tried to read his intent expression.