smoothie for breakfast, and much as I revel in our regular secret back channel comms about Hester, I know I shouldn’t.
As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are intolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back.
Option two might not be assertive or noble but it has a lot less impact on the social contract.
None of us have ever really doubted that pushing back on Hester would badly damage our friendship with Ed. You don’t get a veto on your friends’ and relatives’ partners. Don’t I know it. Could’ve avoided my mum’s second husband disaster if I did.
When I return to the table, I can sense, at the pace we’re drinking, we’re beginning a messy descent from general knowledge acuity. Leonard has wisely curled up and gone to sleep. There’s only Friday at work to struggle through tomorrow.
‘You can tell you’re on half term,’ Susie says to Ed. ‘Hey. Eve. Did you mention the other day that Mark has had a kid?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say, taking a hard swallow of my fresh Estrella. Ah, lovely numbing beer. ‘He posted the photos last week. Ezra. Cool name.’
Mark is my ex and my only serious boyfriend. He went off to be successful in journalism in London when we were twenty-nine and I didn’t move with him, we long-distanced. Pretty soon he decided my reluctance to relocate meant I wasn’t sufficiently committed – he was right – and finished it. He now works for Time Out in San Francisco, is married, an American citizen, and a father. Meanwhile, I got a cat.
Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot. Coincidentally my mum says that too.
‘Weird to think he used to be in here with us so often, and now he’s over there, forever. You’re not bothered?’ Susie says.
‘Uhm, no. It feels very distant to me, you know? In every sense.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘He popped up following me on Instagram a few months ago and I followed him back.’
‘Aha. He’s not entirely over you, then,’ Ed says. ‘He wants you to see he’s moved on, and check what you’re doing. Which is a sure sign of his not having fully moved on.’
‘Hah. I doubt it. The fashionable neighbourhood of Lower Haight, five thousand miles away, is the very definition of moving on.’
(Yes of course I know these things from 1.30 a.m bleary tap-tap-scroll research.)
‘I’m sure of it. Moving on has to happen here and here,’ Ed says, pointing at head and chest. He looks at me levelly and I blink at him and a tiny, near-imperceptible moment passes between us, and I mentally put it in one of my specimen jars.
‘… I bet he browses photos of you and Roger and thinks, hell, I miss that walking essay crisis with the Cleopatra eyes.’
‘Crisis!’ But I glow, a bit.
‘Hey – that’s good. “Walking essay crisis with Cleopatra eyes”, that’s like a Lloyd Cole lyric or something.’
‘It’s funny we use social media to spy on each other really, given everyone’s telling some degree of lie on there,’ Justin says. ‘There was a photo of a hotel on Trivago doing the rounds because they’d cropped out the nuclear power station behind it. But don’t we all, in a sense, crop out our nuclear power stations?’
I laugh.
‘Yeah, everyone presents their life like it’s a holiday destination,’ I say. ‘I mean, where Mark’s living is a holiday destination.’
‘I always think when an ex is super happy with someone else they should be thanking you for ending things,’ Susie says. ‘Clearly you were right to split up. Why is it all “yeah suck it, in your face, I’m thriving!” No shit John, that is why I suggested we were both better off apart while you screamed at me that it was the end of your world. Perhaps in fact an apology is in order. Why do they think they’ve proved their point, not yours?’
I laugh, partly at how quintessential Susie Hart this is.
‘Technically Mark dumped me, so he only has himself to congratulate,’ I say.
‘Yes but only because you chose to stay here.’
‘Who would leave all this?’ I say, toasting the room, and then Leonard. And we laugh, but I know, as we