A junior brings me a coffee and a stack of magazines. It’s pointless. I won’t read one of them with Emma talking the ear off me, but I love it really. It’s been too long since we had a good natter.
‘Have you seen Karen?’ Emma focusses on wrapping my hair in foil as she speaks.
‘Not in about a week.’ Callum consumes so much of my thoughts and attention, I haven’t been the best of friends lately, considering all that she’s going through. I’m still receiving the impression she’s avoiding me, maybe because our lives are going in the complete opposite direction. Maybe Karen’s finding things harder than she lets on, and maybe my new relationship status does rub salt in fresh wounds.
‘Such a shock, her and Dan splitting,’ I say.
‘Really?’ Surprise taints Emma’s tone. ‘We weren’t shocked at all.’ She refers to herself, Kerry and the rest of the girls they went to school with.
‘They were together so long. I thought they were happy.’ I take a sip of coffee and pull a packet of sweeteners out of my bag.
Emma stands back from what she’s doing and looks at me like I have two heads.
‘Did you never wonder if Karen was…?’
‘What?’ I have no idea what Emma’s getting at. She stands deathly still and stares at me incredulously. She doesn’t normally beat around the bush. Whatever she’s trying to say, I wish she’d just come out with it.
‘Gay?’ she hisses lowly.
‘What? No way.’ My mouth falls open in total shock. I’d have known.
Wouldn’t I?
‘At school, we were absolutely convinced. She had zero interest in the opposite sex at all.’ Emma resumes her position wrapping foil, glancing round her salon occasionally to check on her employees and their clients.
‘Nobody has the same level of interest in the opposite sex as you do,’ I remind her. But I was re-evaluating every relevant conversation we’d ever had now the seed had been sown.
Karen’s a girly girl, quirky and feminine in her appearance. She loves Tina Turner, floral headbands and skirts. I immediately chide myself for stereotyping people’s sexuality by their appearance. It’s so wrong. It’s just, Candice for example, is so openly gay, literally wearing it on her T-shirts. Karen doesn’t seem to fit the bill. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to.
‘She was the biggest tomboy of all. Then all of a sudden, she got the job at the hotel, met Dan and started wearing those crazy hairbands and skirts all of a sudden. It was like she’d had a personality transplant.’
Were the eccentric clothes a camouflage to disguise her underlying sexuality?
I honestly can’t believe it. Karen’s my best friend. I would never judge. In fact, it physically pains me to think that she couldn’t be honest with me.
She did have a friend once though…
When she and Dan parted company for a couple of months, Karen had been very friendly with a girl called Eve, the one she travelled Europe with. She used to stay at our apartment a lot, then when Dan came back on the scene Eve just disappeared.
How could I have missed this?
Karen could’ve dropped a hundred hints and I wouldn’t have picked up on it, because to me she’d always been ‘Karen and Dan’. She’s forever asking after Candice, with a previously unexplained sense of admiration.
Deep down, a part of me acknowledges Emma’s right. It’s the reason she couldn’t marry Dan. Snippets of four years’ worth of conversation flash through my mind, about fate, about identity. He’s a good man. That’s the problem.
Though a part of me is shocked, I know with a sudden certainty that it’s true.
I wish Karen could have told me. It must be eating her alive. Esmerelda’s parting words to her ring eerily through my ears. Admit your truth. I thought she was spouting mumbo jumbo, or at the very best, referring to her relationship with Dan. She was actually referring to Karen’s relationship with herself. The first thing on my to-do list when I return from Carrick is to hunt Karen down and make sure she knows we’re all here for her. I don’t care if she’s gay, straight or indifferent. She’s my best friend. Everything else is irrelevant. She undoubtedly needs a friend right now, just not for the reason I imagined.
