“Yes.”
That had been a silly question. “Okay, but are you sure the fact you’re one hundred percent certain it’s a good idea actually makes it a good idea?”
“Well, I don’t see how it can make things worse.”
The beautiful thing about Bridge was that she genuinely didn’t. And I suppose I didn’t see how it could make things worse either. Only that didn’t stop me from having the clagging, all-pervading feeling that it definitely could anyway. Except that was the difference between me and Bridge. Well, that along with gender, sexual orientation, taste in Christmas movies, and whether or not Tom could stand going out with us. She really, truly believed, deep down, that people were good and the world was good with them.
“Tom,” I heard her calling in a muffled, hand-over-the-microphone kind of voice, “I’m going to see James.” Tom’s reply was too distant to hear, so I just got, “That’s what Luc said.” Then, “No, he isn’t. And I’m going to see Jennifer afterwards.”
“You know,” I said. “You don’t have to do this alone. I can come with you if you want.”
I thought I heard Bridge makinghang onnoises in the background. “You think you should ditch Oliver to come running around our friends’ houses with me the day after you threw the world’s worst dinner party and your foster daughter slipped lamb into his vegan main course, trashed your bathroom, and stole your car, forcing him to compromise his professional ethics to save her from a criminal record?”
I thought about that for the half a second it took me to realise how right she was. “Okay yeah, good point.” Then I said, “But, fuck, it feels weird not to be coming with you.”
Bridge sighed wistfully down the phone. “I think we might have to accept that our days of being there every time something interesting happens to one of our friends are behind us.”
That sucked. “That sucks.”
“In a way.” I heard the click of Bridge’s door opening. “But it’s not all bad. Yes, you probably won’t be here when Autumn says her first word, and I won’t be with you when Jaz gets her GCSE results—”
“Honestly,” I said, “weprobably won’t be with Jaz when she gets her GCSE results. It seems really unlikely that we’ll be able to keep her after the whole car-stealing thing.”
This bounced off Bridge’s bulletproof optimism. “The fostering people will understand. Very few people are evil, Luc.”
“I don’t think it’s about being evil,” I told her. “I think it’s more about being, like, busy and part of a big bureaucratic system?”
“My pointis”—I heard another door open, a car door this time—“even if you’re not here to share every moment with me and Tom and Autumn and I’m not there to share every moment with you and Oliver and Jaz, we’re still part of each other’s lives. And our lives arebiggernow than they were when we were in our twenties because we’re older and we have more important jobs or larger families or justother friendswe’ve met over the years.” I heard a seat belt and an engine. “Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker.”
I hung on.
“And I don’t just mean,” Bridge went on, “because some of us have got children. Brian and Amanda have more going on than they did ten years ago too. So do Priya and Theresa and Andi. You pick stuff up as you go, and if you don’t put any of it down, you just get…stuffed. I suppose.”
The way she put it, it almost sounded comforting. “I suppose,” I echoed, noncommittally. Then I added, “Anyway, I should let you go. Being on hands-free is almost as dangerous as talking on a mobile normally.”
Bridge laughed. “Oliver really did change you, didn’t he?”
I couldn’t dolittle bitfingers down the phone, so I just said, “Yeah. Yeah he did,” and left it at that. Then, once Bridge had safely hung up—only, I was sure, to immediately call somebody else because Oliver and I were probably the only people in the world who took the no-hands-free-while-driving thing seriously—I schlumped downstairs to see how Oliver was doing in the kitchen.
And also to see what had happened to that bloody plumber.
Which meant Sunday ended very much as it had begun, apart from the slight inconvenience of an emergency tradesman charging us way too much to whack a bit of sealant on a cracked toilet and tell us we should arrange to get a new one installed sooner rather than later. By the evening, Oliver and I had curled up downstairs in the front room in our usual me-on-Netflix-him-on-laptop configuration. I’d heard no more from Bridge, at least not directly, but Are the Straights Okay (Dinner Party Remix) had been renamed Dinner Party Survivors’ Club, which I thought was a good compromise between whimsical, not sweeping things under the rug, and also not overly reminding everybody of a deeply upsetting argument about our various friendship circles’ overlapping traumas, marginalisations, and identities.
“I think things’ll shake out,” I told Oliver idly between episodes ofPerfect Match.
Oliver glanced up from his laptop. “I very much doubt it. I have no idea what Francesca sees in Damian, and he seems somewhat threatened by her bisexuality.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. Clearly that. But I was talking about our actual friends we know in real life.”
He got thatI’m teasing and you haven’t noticedsmile. “Ah. Then yes. I’m sure it will shake out. It wasn’t the first time any of those people have fought with each other, and it won’t be the last either.”
“It feels like the first time we all fought each otherat once.”
Putting his laptop aside, Oliver replaced it with me. And it was never going to be particularly dignified for me to sit in my boyfriend’s lap, but I was never stopping. “I think, in this regard, found families can be much like any other kind of family. Sometimes special occasions end in massive rows.”
“Wow, that’s going to be fun for the next forty years.”
“I saidsometimes. Not all the time. And, while I’m aware this is deeply saccharine, what matters isn’t whether we fight; it’s whether we can move past those fights with love and compassion.”
