‘Remember they always played Rage Against the Machine? “Killing in the Name” came on, and somehow,’ he blows air out, ‘one thing led to another …’
‘Oh don’t “one thing led to another” me, Ed,’ I snap, in my embarrassment as much as his. ‘You’re not telling the kids in class that your wife’s having a baby.’
Ed flushes.
I’m a paper tiger. I’m interrogating a man who is engaged to be married to someone else, not me, about sex that happened a decade ago, with another someone else who is no longer here. My rights here are far from clear. It wasn’t me who Ed cheated on, yet I feel jealous, betrayed and gut-twistingly angry. I’m presenting as indignant and righteous but, in actual fact, I’m drowning in shame and confusion of my own.
This is why you don’t stay in dysfunctional unspoken love with spoken-for people. A few chess moves later, it looks completely mad. I guess it always was completely mad.
‘You know, drunk air-punching during the chorus, turned into hugging, then woah, somehow, without knowing who started it, we’re kissing,’ Ed says, ‘It was one of those spur-of-the-moment total pieces of insanity that seems to make sense to you when you’ve had five pints of lager on an empty stomach and you’re twenty-four years old.’
‘So you kissed, and …?’ I say.
‘We went back to Suze’s to get drunker. Remember when she had the flat for debauchery in Lace Market? It was a getting-smashed escalation where doing the next thing, and the next, seemed a good idea, we were almost daring each other. We were off our faces. Neither of us left the house that night intending it.’
I prepared for tonight, as much as I could, and I force myself to ask (or I’ll be condemned to forever wonder): ‘Susie’s description of it was “torrid”?’ Well, Becky’s. Same-same.
Ed’s face has gone from shrimp pink to shrimp pink tinged with sickly white. I really hope he’s not about to admit to an act I’ll have seared on my imagination’s retina forever.
‘We did it in the loos at the club,’ he says, after a pause, and I swallow.
The severe crush I have suffered for ten years is dealt a body blow. A two-body blow.
I will always have to have this as part of my mental landscape of Susie, and Ed: a frantic coupling in a graffiti-strewn toilet stall, Arctic Monkeys pounding through the walls. As a definition of torrid, I suppose it’s preferable to some degenerate activity I’d never heard of involving orifices and water-balloon animals, as if the world is some huge gangbang I’ve not been invited to. If I’m placing it on the great sliding scale of ‘the best to worst sort of unusual sexual activity for two friends to partake in, when breaking a third party’s heart’. A third party. That’s me.
‘Susie led me into the ladies. We did it again at hers. We passed out. We woke up in the morning to the worst hangovers of our lives, absolutely crucified with horror by it. Believe me, a huge motivation for hiding it was how badly we both wished it had never happened. We agreed not to tell you and Justin …’
‘Justin doesn’t know either?’
That’s something. I’m not alone.
‘Yeah, he does. I told him, down the line. Susie didn’t know that.’
‘What?!’
‘Man-to-man, late-night-confessional kind of thing. To get it off my chest when I felt guilt over Hester.’
‘Great, so I was the only one. Susie never told me.’
The sense of having been made a fool of, sitting there as the sole member who didn’t know this thing, who wasn’t mature enough somehow to be told this thing, gives me a feeling of intense rejection. It’s like what Ed did when we were eighteen, squared.
‘She bottled it. As time passes it gets harder and harder to come clean. Bottlings only get bigger. It’s the cost of cowardice. The price of making the wrong choice at the outset.’
Ed stares at me heavily, as if there might be a double meaning, and I’m grateful for Roger’s sudden screech for a second chew stick, breaking the tension. Ever resourceful and charming, Ed has another one, of course.
Amid the noise of eager feline mastication, Ed continues: ‘After Susie had finished throwing up that morning, we discussed what we stood to damage or lose entirely by being a pair of twats. I’d been unfaithful to Hester. We’d potentially upset this –’ Ed says, gesturing at me, but meaning our group. ‘For what? For something animal we’d done