‘You all right? What d’you want?’
‘Just a beer. Whatever you’re having.’
He wrinkles his forehead. ‘I’m not having a beer, mate. D’you know there’s two hundred calories in a pint of beer? You might as well have a Zinger Burger.’ He taps his stomach, which looks impressively washboardy even through his T-shirt. ‘I’m seeing this girl at the moment who’s a fitness instructor,’ he says. ‘She’s full of these facts and figures. We were talking last night about how drinking Guinness is literally like drinking a pint of lard.’
‘Sounds like a very erotic relationship.’
‘Yeah, the conversation can get quite boring,’ he admits. ‘But the sex is pretty great.’
I look again at Harv’s perfectly flat stomach. I still can’t get my head around how all blokes nowadays are suddenly insanely ripped. It seemed to happen pretty much overnight, about eight years ago, and I was apparently the only male on the planet who wasn’t forewarned. When I met Harv at university, he was fifteen stone and subsisted entirely on Carling Black Label and chicken nuggets. Now he looks like Ryan Gosling’s stunt double.
It’s fine for guys in their twenties, who were raised on Instagram and Love Island; they don’t know any different. But these mid-thirties blokes who suddenly become protein-guzzlers – they’re old enough to remember the halcyon pre-David Beckham days, when young men were all pigeon-chested and Twiglet-armed. They’re selling the rest of us out, I reckon.
I order a Guinness just to piss Harv off.
We sit down at a table by the window, him sipping his vodka and tonic and me slurping my black lard. Another office Christmas party comes barrelling through the doors, all wearing badly torn cracker hats.
‘You going to your parents’ tomorrow, then?’ I ask Harv.
He nods. ‘My sister’s giving me a lift to Suffolk first thing. Are you round at your …’ He flinches and shakes his head. ‘Sorry, man. Wasn’t thinking.’
‘No, no, don’t worry.’
It’s been two years now, and I still forget myself from time to time. I’ll read some book or see something on TV and think, oh, Mum would like this, and then crumple as the realisation gut-punches me.
I wonder if that ever goes away. Probably not.
‘Are Daff’s lot coming to you, then?’ Harv asks.
‘Yep. I’m supposed to be doing the tree and the presents right now, but y’know …’ I hold up my pint and take a big sip.
‘Where is Daff?’
‘She’s at a work thing. I thought she wanted me to come, actually, but maybe not. She’s always on at me to meet new people.’
‘But you hate new people.’
‘Exactly.’
We both laugh. It feels comforting to fall back into our old groove: me as the grumpy, shy one, Harv as the buoyant extrovert. It’s a dynamic that’s been in play since we first met at uni. Occasionally I worry that it’s become a crutch; a performance we put on for each other because we don’t have anything else to talk about. I wonder whether if we met today – stripped of all our shared memories and in-jokes – we’d have anything in common at all. But right now it feels nice to slip back into that tried-and-tested role play – like pulling on an old jumper or something.
Harv starts rambling on about work – he does something in social media, though I’ve never been exactly sure what – and I suddenly want to tell him everything. I want to spill my guts about Daphne and Mum and the messages from Alice, and how I’m starting to feel like my whole life has frozen on screen and I’ve no idea which combination of keys will reboot it. But I don’t know how to even start that conversation. I’ve known Harv fifteen years – he was my best man, for God’s sake – but we never really talk about stuff like that. I don’t think we ever did.
When I overhear Daff speaking to her female friends I’m always amazed at the sheer range of topics they cover. They can get from small talk to deep-and-meaningful within seconds. Whereas when I went on holiday last year with Harv and a couple of other mates, we spent all four days testing each other’s knowledge of football and films and nineties hip hop. I’m not complaining; it was brilliant. I guess women see their friends as profound, complex human beings, while men see theirs as walking quiz machines.
Still, I’m half a pint of Guinness down and Harv has paused to look at his phone, so I decide to give it a go.
‘Yeah, thing is, actually, Harv, I’m sort of feeling a bit … down at the moment, mate.’
He looks up at me. For some reason – possibly to cushion its emotional bluntness – I’ve delivered this statement in a comedy Scouse accent. I have never even been to Liverpool.
‘Ah, don’t be down, mate,’ Harv says, mimicking my Steven Gerrard twang.
‘Well … I am a bit,’ I reply, still inexplicably Liverpudlian.
‘Ah, mate …’ He sips his drink. ‘Don’t be.’
This isn’t really going anywhere. This is just two men having the world’s dullest conversation in an accent neither of them can pull off.
But I suddenly, desperately, want to find a way to actually talk to him. Because it’s too much, keeping all this stuff locked up in my head. It feels like a dam is about to burst somewhere inside me, and fifteen years’ worth of suppressed emotions are about to stream out onto the table between us.
I’m mentally scrambling about for a decent inroad to this outpouring when Harv smirks and shoves his phone in my face.
‘Look at this … Honestly, Mourinho is such a dick.’
I scan the news story, in which Mourinho does, to be fair, come off quite dickishly. Harv slips his phone back into his pocket and grins. ‘OK, random one: d’you reckon, off the top of our heads, we could name every World Cup winner from 1930 on?’
I stamp a smile across my face, and manage to shove down all the sadness and guilt and grief that was about to come spilling out of my mouth. ‘I reckon we could give it a go,’ I say.
He thumps the table. ‘Right. I’ll get another round in first. Although technically, it’s your turn …’
I hand him a tenner and watch as he squeezes through the crowd towards the bar.
And that’s when I hear a gravelly chuckle from over my shoulder: ‘Unlucky there, my friend. You were so close …’
Chapter Three
I turn around to see that the scraggly-bearded Rolex salesman is now sitting in the booth behind us.
He’s wearing an ill-fitting electric-blue suit that has definitely seen better decades, and a tie covered in little cartoon reindeer. His box of moody watches is on the table in front of him, next to a half-drunk pint. He’s spinning a beer mat on its side and grinning broadly at me through his rust-coloured tangle of facial hair.
‘Sorry … what was that, mate?’ I say.
He takes a sip of his beer. ‘It just felt like you were right on the brink of opening up to your friend there. And then he walked off. Rotten luck.’
‘Right, yeah. I mean, it was sort of a private conversation, but …’
The watch-seller shrugs. ‘Oh, I wasn’t listening or anything. Just couldn’t help overhearing, that’s all.’