“Why,” asked Priya, “is Bridge on the Millennium Bridge at— This is your fault, isn’t it, Luc?”
“Yes. Obviously. But we can’t get a taxi, so if you’re anywhere nearby, can you please get here now because otherwise our friend will have to name her child A3211 after where they were born.”
Bridge gave a low cry. “Nooo. I am not calling my child A3211.”
From down the phone came the sound of an angry lesbian pulling on her boots. “I am on my way, you fucking, fucking dick.”
“I’m sor—”
She’d already gone.
“Okay.” I turned back to Bridge, doing my best impression of someone who knew what the fuck he was doing. “Priya’s on her way. Should I…I don’t know…get some towels or boil a kettle or something?”
“I want to say yes,” Bridge told me, “just to see what you’d do.”
“There’s probably a Tesco’s that’s open?”
“I don’t need towels, Luc. I need—fuck, I’ve forgotten. I had this written down. Probably it involved not being on a bridge.”
It would have been churlish to remind her that this had been her idea. Even though it had totally been her idea. Oh my God, I was the worst friend in the world. “Don’t worry, we can google. This is just like that time at university when you were driving me back from that party in Slough and your tyre went out and neither of us had any idea how to replace it, but we looked it up and it was fine.”
There was a long silence, partly because Bridge was in the middle of another contraction, and partly because she was mustering a particularly epic boggle. “That wasn’t fine. We were in the middle of nowhere, so we were trying to learn how to change a tyre from a YouTube video that kept buffering on a phone with two percent battery and a cracked screen in the dark and none of the bits of thecar looked like any of the bits on the video and then you freaked out because you saw a badger and you thought it might have rabies.”
“I don’t remember that at all. I remember being really calm and collected.”
Bridge’s boggle became a…whatever was bigger than a boggle. An omniboggle. “You were drunk. You were so drunk.”
“Was I?”
“Yes. That’s why you don’t remember how drunk you were.”
This was piecing itself together in ways I didn’t like. On the plus side, it was keeping Bridge from either panicking or getting too angry at me. “Why would I have been drunk at a random party in Slough?”
“You’d had a fight with Miles over some play he was in.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
Bridge took another contraction-induced pause. “I think it was one of the Pratchett ones?”
I gave a bitter sigh of reminiscence. “Oh yeah. The ones where he always played Vetinari.” It was falling into place. “That’s right. He’d been all ‘You have to come on Saturday night’ and I’d been all ‘It’s fine, I’ll catch the matinee’ and then he’d been like ‘You care more about our friends than you do about me’ and I’d been all ‘It’s just student theatre,’ and he hadn’t spoken to me for two days. So when I went to the party anyway, he got super pissed off. SoIgot super pissed, and I ended up talking to some guy in second year about infectious diseases, which is probably how the whole rabies thing got in my head.” I was sure I’d had a point when I’d started, but fuck knew where it was now. “Anyway,” I concluded valiantly, “what matters is we got in a mess and we got out of it together.”
“No, we didn’t. You called Priya. And she came to pick us up in her van.”
“Truck,” I said reflexively.
“Van. It was back when she had the transit.”
“And,” I continued, even more valiantly, “it worked then and it’s going to work now and I’m going to be with you the whole time.”
Bridge blinked at me tearfully. “I’m probably just having a lot of hormones right now, but that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
Riding the high of this positive moment, hoping it would eclipse the three different ways this was still all my fault, I unlocked my phone and googledmy friend is in labour what do I do. “Bridge,” I said, “you’re fucked. This website is telling me the most important thing is for me to be kind and offer support.”
“But youarebeing kind and offering support.”
“It also says I should stay upbeat and keep negative commentary or snarky remarks to myself.”
She hummed thoughtfully. “Youmaybeshouldn’t have started off by telling me I’m fucked then.”
