wasn’t looking at me, absently patting her pockets for her tobacco tin, unaware she had verbally stabbed me with an eight-inch serrated knife.
A girlfriend a girlfriend what the fuck – A WHAT?! my inner monologue screamed, deranged.
Susie was busy rolling her roll-up on the fag-ash-strewn metal table in front of the chain bar in town we’d chosen for our reunion. It was a ‘pitchers of Sea Breeze for a tenner’ rowdy kind of place that you never see the inside of again after the age of twenty-three. TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ billowed from the doorway.
Funny how trauma gives you a pin-sharp recall for detail.
My heart boom-boomed like the bass from a passing car.
‘Girlfriend?’ I asked, in a tiny voice.
A vain hope: by ‘girlfriend’, did she mean me? Had Ed presumptuously taken it upon himself to break our news, omitting my identity for a shock reveal? My gut already knew the answer.
I had been frightened he’d cooled on me, but I had been too naïve, too trusting, too mutually in love, I thought, to imagine there could possibly be a usurper.
My nervous smile felt like a jagged line on a polygraph as I took a shaky drag on my Vogue Superslim Menthol. (I was trying out being a smoker for six months, until I got a cough and decided I had lung cancer. Susie banned me from then on. ‘You like to think you’re the risk-taking sort but you’re not, Eve. You like the uniform but not the hours.’)
‘Yeah, didn’t he say to you, too? Hester. There’s something so very Ed about going off and obtaining a future wife as an undergrad, isn’t there. It was written. It was bound to be. Like him ending up president of all the societies.’
Hester. Hester? I was speechless, I couldn’t respond. The casual cruelty had disembowelled me. Ed had my heart, and he’d behaved like Hannibal Lecter with it.
My mum liked to tell me I had no idea what bastards men could be – I thought my dad abruptly emigrating upon divorce had made it pretty clear, but apparently my mum thought being on the daughter rather than wife end of that decision made it less hurtful.
Right now, I felt the full force of that maternal threat, made good.
That someone as gentle, known to me, and, I thought, sincere as Ed Cooper could do this? It was unfathomable. It was savage.
‘Ah, there they are, our common-law husbands!’ Susie said, as Ed and Justin lad-swaggered towards us, through the Friday night throng. Yeah, my bigamous common-law husband.
Ed could barely meet my eyes, even as we hugged hello, somehow managing not to make any bodily contact. He radiated pure culpability.
‘It’s brass bollocks out here,’ Justin said, blowing on his hands. ‘Never mind you two’s filthy habit, we’re going inside.’ (He started smoking a month later, following the law that anything Justin claims to be censorious about, he is usually thinking of doing.)
‘Eduardo, how can you have coupled up this fast?!’ Susie said, not missing a beat, once we had drinks. Ed mumbled indistinct, U-rated things about having lots of tutorials together and I stared furiously at the rosy phantom of lipstick mark that wasn’t mine, on the side of my glass.
‘And you’re going down to Cornwall to spend Christmas with her family?!’ Wow. Ed had sure kept me carefully out of the loop.
‘Dum dum dum da-da-dum,’ Justin hummed Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’.
I had a hard lump in my throat, and rocks in my stomach.
‘Her older sister’s really sick with encephalitis and her parents are up at the hospital all the time. I said I’d cook Christmas lunch for them.’
Oh, how Ed. How wonderful of you.
‘It’s touch and go whether she’ll make a full recovery, apparently,’ Ed said.
He risked looking directly at me, possibly hoping I’d see this was a good and necessary endeavour. I nearly spat: she could have seven sick sisters and you’d be still be a lying arsehole traitor.
‘Do you have a photo? Let’s see her! I can’t even picture this otherworldly femme fatale who’s got you settled down this fast,’ Susie said.
Susie had no idea how she was ratcheting up my agony as surely as if she was tightening the screws on a rack. I took some small, sour comfort in the fact that Ed was also clearly wishing a whirling portal to another dimension would open up outside, by the bar’s happy hour specials A-board.
He reluctantly flashed a wallet Polaroid at us and I glanced, blank expression, at a blob of pale golden light, a