now. The doc gave me some pills and I go and talk to someone about my head and see my mum a bit more in case she’s lonely.’
‘Fucking hell, yeah,’ Jonny had said. ‘I’ve only been married eighteen months but fuck me, if anything happened to Tilly I don’t know how I’d get up in the morning.’
‘We’re here for you, pal,’ Dean said, raising his beer can towards him so that all of them saluted the memory of Mr Weissman, silently saying a prayer that it hadn’t been them to lose their father. It was a strange rite of passage to pass through first: Terrence had been the first to get married, and Jeremy the first to become a dad, but Daniel was the first to have lost a parent.
He felt better just for being with the people who made him feel safe. The ones who’d seen him pull an all-nighter because he left essays until the last minute and the ones whose sisters he’d snogged when they’d come to visit and the ones who’d got so drunk with him the night of their graduation ceremony that they’d all ended up in the hospital while Taz got his stomach pumped, eating McDonald’s and sobering up as they talked about what they wanted for their lives. For all of them, the answer was the same: to lead better lives than their parents had. They’d all managed it.
Daniel got up to go to the loo, and Dean said, ‘Your round on the way back, mate!’ Daniel flipped up his middle finger at him good-naturedly as he walked to the Gents. He peed and noted in the mirror as he washed his hands how bright-eyed he looked. He was still buzzing about his latest advert getting published so fast. He was able to enjoy being where he was, in the moment, with his mates, because he knew that right now she could be reading his reply and that at half seven on Monday morning something brilliant could happen. Would happen – he could feel it. Life was good. He could honestly say, for the first time in ages, that he felt positive about what was coming next. About the future.
He stood beside a couple at the bar of the country pub as he waited to put in an order for the next round. It was hard not to eavesdrop, really, and it sounded like their first mini-break. The first mini-break is, as Daniel and his friends had long concluded, a relationship rite of passage, especially for young professionals from a city where house-shares were the norm. The first mini-break was normally the first time you’d get totally uninterrupted time together, with sex that didn’t have to be quiet in case the person in the room next door heard, or saw you nip to the loo in the buff in the middle of the night. Daniel thought about his first weekend away with his ex, Sarah. He’d planned a whole schedule around what he thought would be romantic – a country hotel, afternoons in a rowing boat on the lake, champagne in the room on arrival. As it turned out they’d had a horrible fight on the train ride there and then erroneously assumed there’d be a line of cabs waiting at the station to take them to where they were staying, but there weren’t. They’d stood in the drizzle that would later make rowing on the lake a write-off for forty-five minutes until a car they’d ordered from the number stuck to the information board arrived. They’d made the best of it, each trying to put on a brave face. But they’d both been a little crestfallen that it hadn’t all rolled out as perfectly as they’d imagined. Was it strange to imagine going away with Nadia? They could even come here, to this exact pub, and after sharing a bottle of red wine by the fire he could tell her, a little tipsily, that he’d come here right after he’d written to her again and he’d promised himself there and then that he’d come back, and with her. He looked over his shoulder at his buddies. He wanted what they all had – happy marriages that meant they had somebody to share the highs with, and hold the hand of when things were less good. He loved all of their wives – even Rashida, who could be a bit bossy, a bit strident – and he was so excited to one day