Read the book: «One Thing Led to Another»

CHAPTER ONE

‘Seven weeks before I was due, the silly bugger got down on one knee whilst I was washing up. We tied the knot at Lancaster Registry Office, with a lollipop lady as the witness and Eddie with a daffodil in his buttonhole. My waters broke, just as we were about to consummate our wedding in a B&B in Lytham St Anne’s. Eddie has never forgiven Joel for the timing, and he’s thirty-three now.’

Linda, 56, Preston

I’d always believed that sleeping with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be a unanimous disaster, from which your friendship would never recover. Or it would be an epiphany. You’d wonder why on earth you’d never done this before.

I’d experienced the first: Gavin Stroud, Manchester University, 1998. Gavin was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of inebriated madness – round about the four-pint point, the point at which I obviously believed I was irresistible to all members of the opposite sex. That’s also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity still intact. But no, it was at this point I decided Gavin Stroud needed to know this: that my French oral in class wasn’t half as good as that in the bedroom and that I looked erotic dancing to Purple Rain. We went back to my room in halls, shut the orange and brown curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I’d ever possessed. After an hour of Purple Rain on repeat play and even longer trying to get a comatosed Gavin to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, head feeling like someone had mown over it, the blackheads on his nose rather too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. The five-minute walk across campus to our first tutorial that day was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. How can you act normally when you’ve just spent the night wrestling with your (I think I could now safely say) ex friend’s uncooperative penis? Trust me. There’s no coming back from there.

But Jim is different. Sex with him is never a disaster, it’s just it has never been a light-bulb moment either. It’s just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty pound note in your jeans pocket.

We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!

‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.

Jim looked up.

‘I.e. none whatsoever?’

‘That’s the one!’

He smiled, broadly.

‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’

‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’

‘Semiology,’ he corrected.

‘Yeah, that’s what I meant,’ I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

That was it, we were off. Couldn’t shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off work and went for a pint in the end because neither of us could fathom what ‘Barthes Simpson’ as we christened him that day was on about and we were having too much of a good time chatting. When I stepped out of the student union into the crisp November air, I felt like we’d cracked the secret to something that afternoon, Jim and I. Life, probably, or maybe that was just the beer. But for all the personality fireworks I didn’t fancy Jim that day, still don’t, maybe that’s why sex with him has never been a big deal. It’s not that Jim’s un-fanciable, far from it, he’s just not my type. He’s cigarette-thin with Scottish skin and dark hair that flicks out at the sides and on top due to cow licks and various double crowns. He’s got nice full lips – if a little gormless on occasions; a sturdy, prominent nose – attractive on a man I’ve always thought; and green, sparkly eyes that crinkle up so much when he laughs they almost disappear. But I’ve never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.

And so if you had told me on that day we met (or any other day during the next eight years and six months which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex: hardly a whirlwind romance) that one day James Ashcroft and I would be occasional shag partners, I’d never have believed it. But we are and it’s strange, most of all because I don’t really get why it did take us so long. Until one warm weekend last May to be exact.

It was supposed to be two days’ hard graft cleaning up my parents’ caravan, which along with fifty or so other caravans on the tiny site in Whitby hung precariously off a cliff like a stranded sheep. I’d agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred quid from my dad and Jim was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.

I’ve never known lager taste so good as that first, exhausted pint drunk with Jim at the end of day one. We sat on a bench outside a pub in the town – the Flask and Dolphin – a prime spot with harbour views, and seagulls fat as milk jugs squawking round our feet. I remember the vinegary smart of fish and chips in the air, the lull of bobbing boats, the warmth of the sun on my chest and the feeling that I’d not been so happy for a long time. I told him all about my childhood holidays spent here in Whitby. He told me about endless summers holed up in Stoke-on-Trent, playing Connect Four in his front porch, bored out of his mind.

One pint turned into two, into three, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty glasses and a sense of anticipation as sharp as salt air.

Jim sighed. ‘This rocks.’ he said, lifting his face to the sinking sun. ‘I’ve had the best day I’ve had in ages.’ Then he turned, his head resting on the wall and he added, ‘With you’. And it didn’t feel awkward. I didn’t get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my glass down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we’d been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.

We’d kissed now, what the hell – sex back at the caravan seemed like the most obvious next step. Afterwards, we sat and talked on the beach until a red dawn flooded the water. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Jim. ‘I’m probably closer to you than I am to anyone.’ And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.

When I opened my eyes late the next morning to find the sun in slices on the floral duvet and the North Sea wind whistling in through the windows, I felt strangely and yet wonderfully at home and at ease.

‘So, Jarvis, that was going to happen all along, was it not?’ I remember Jim muttering as he stood in his palm tree underpants pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. ‘Predictable as death,’ were the words I mumbled from underneath the duvet.

After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are, if you’re opposite sexes, it’s only a matter of time. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. A quick scan of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers gusset-side-up on the caravan hob. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We’d danced to Take That, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I’d made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Gavin Stroud and yet I wasn’t one bit embarrassed.

I don’t know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Jim made that decision for me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated.

I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. ‘I had a brilliant time this weekend,’ I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn’t agree more and asks me out?

Or not.

‘Me too,’ he giggled. ‘It was right laugh. I have particularly fond memories of you doing a routine to ‘Relight My Fire’ wearing only your pants.’

Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?

But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there’s a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later, we seem to have fallen into a habit of just ‘doing it’ whenever the need for a little no-strings nookie grabs us.

‘Think of it as a way of extending the fun we’re having,’ Jim always says, usually naked which doesn’t exactly help, ‘like going to an after-hours bar.’

And this suits me too, because I don’t think I know what I want. I can’t fathom the workings of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Jim Ashcroft and I have crossed the line. We are no longer purely platonic, nor lovers either. We’re just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah-sized space commonly known as ‘The Grey Area’.

It’s a week since the pregnancy scare and frankly it’s a good job it was just a scare since all I seem to have done since then is accompany people to the pub. Such is the curse of the unattached I’ve always thought. What with no fall-back plan – no flat/wedding/dog to save up for – we, The Unhooked, are expected to attend everything.

Take tonight for example. ‘I may kill someone if I don’t get drunk this very evening,’ was Vicky’s raspy threat down the receiver that I, in a mid-afternoon slump, had cradled between my head and the desk. Dylan had decorated the walls with macaroni cheese, she said, Richard had come home from a hard day’s work as zoo keeper at London Zoo chatting to kids about the mating habits of camels to find his own kid, the two foot rhino, bulldozing around the house in a toddler rage and his dear, lovely wife, coiled like a cobra, ready to pounce at any time.

I love Vicky, which is weird because it was far from love at first sight. In fact, thinking back to that first day we met in Owens Park Halls when she introduced herself in her Yorkshire, ‘this-is-me-like-it-or-lump-it’ way, I’m ashamed to say a little part of me withered with disappointment.

How could I, Tess Jarvis, owner of:

 Old Skool Trainers (various)

 New (but artfully battered) leather jacket

 Entire works of Bob Dylan

 Ministry of Sound: The Annual, volumes two and three (because at eighteen years old I am both artily intellectual and just mainstream enough, you understand)

 Poster of Che Guevara (because I care about other countries and Politics)

 Obsession with Ewan MacGregor

 Occasional marujana habit that I fully intend to upgrade to ‘moderate’

possibly be sharing a room with Victoria Peddlar, owner of:

 Fluffy penguin slippers

 Fake designer sweatshirts worn over stone washed jeans (various)

 Entire works of Take That

 That’s What I Call Power Ballads 1, 2 and 3

 Poster of Patrick Swayze (because nobody puts Vicky Peddlar in the corner)

 Obsession with Dirty Dancing

 Moderate horoscope-reading habit (soon to be upgraded to borderline obsessional).

But it was true and I was utterly gutted. Especially since I’d just met a girl called Gina who had already designated her room as Smoking HQ. A room I wished I was sharing more than anything else in the world. Gina was the coolest girl in our halls and a guaranteed route to mischief, every night of the week. She had big curly hair that she wore in low bunches, boasted a dragon tattoo that snaked across her stomach, said ‘wicked’ a lot and owned a bong. And as if that wasn’t enough to make your average eighteen-year-old fresher practically pay to be her friend, she had about a million of her own friends from boarding school who were all as cool as she was.

It’s easy to see how this Peddlar girl didn’t even get a look in during those first few days at university.

‘Rich says I can go out…I just need someone to go with and guess-what? You’re the lucky lady!’ Vicky shouted over Dylan. I don’t mind really, Vicks often inspires in me selfless acts of love. When she was holed up in hospital, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, ankles as fat as an elephant’s, blood pressure soaring, I travelled half way across London to bring her the only thing that would satiate her queer, hormonal taste buds. Deep fried aubergines served up on a silver platter (well, a polystyrene tray, anyway).

I’d soon found out there was far more to this girl from Huddersfield than first met the eye. She could really put it away, for one. A childhood spent pulling pints in her parents’ pub saw to that. She had real talent too, which whoever you are, I’ve always thought, can only add to your credibility.

I will never forget the last night of Freshers’ Week, the night of the Owens Park talent competition. Vicky stood up, dressed in her Benetton sweatshirt, swinging her mousy ponytail. She took the mike in one hand and holding a pint of cider in the other, she began to sing. It was ‘Cry Me a River’, and it was utterly brilliant. Nobody moved or spoke, everyone just stared at this girl, this Big Bird of a girl who was suddenly possessed by the ghost of Ella Fitzgerald. She finished the song, put the mike down on the table, gulped down the rest of her cider and sat down. There were five seconds of dumbfounded silence, save for Gina whispering ‘fucking hell’ next to me. Then we began to clap, first slowly and then uproarious applause. It was brilliant, mind-blowing, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and even then, as stupid and self-absorbed and inexperienced at life as I was, I knew that you didn’t sing a song with soul like that if you hadn’t experienced things which, I knew instinctively, I hadn’t. Things like your mum walking out on your dad for a man half her age and then dying of ovarian cancer two months later; things like watching your dad go from jovial pub landlord to suicidal recluse; things like bringing up two little brothers pretty much single-handed as well as singing in your dad’s pub in the evenings for the tips. So yes, there was a lot more to Victoria Peddlar. Gina got the Vicky thing too, eventually, and we had things to teach each other back then. Gina and I taught Vicky how to skin up, accentuate that splendid bosom with something other than sweatshirts and basically be an irresponsible teenager – something she’d kind of missed. And Vicky was our surrogate mother when we needed one most, I suppose. Always the one with the plan of action, the best hangover cures. And the fact she’d seen a lot in her short life meant you waking up in some inappropriate bloke’s bed with no recollection of the night before was no big deal. ‘Look, nobody died, did they?’ Vicky would say, sitting on my bed as I growled under the duvet with shame. ‘And look on the bright side, at least you didn’t get so drunk you shat yourself.’ (Ever since a girl called Julianne Breeze had, actually, got so drunk she shat herself, this had been the scale against which we measured all mortifying events. After all, nothing could ever, ever be that bad.)

A fortnight into term one, Gina, Vicky and I were pretty much inseparable. By late November I’d brought Jim into the fold and we’d became a proper gang. Or as my dad put it, ‘A foursome to be reckoned with.’

And I loved my friends, I idolized them, still do. Tonight one of them is simply asking me to accompany her to a public house, her first baby-free night for weeks, for a couple of quiet beers on a Thursday night. I can usually think of nothing I’d rather do, it’s just tonight, I could do with a little help. I need Jim.

From: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

To: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk

Peddlar needs beer. I need bed. Help?

It only takes a few seconds for the reply to pop into my inbox which means Jim must be in the staff room.

From: james_ashcroft@westminster.edu.uk

To: tess_jarvis@giant.co.uk

No can do, have hot date. I can come for the first hour to ease the pain but then I have to shoot. Going to see Swan Lake??! (help)

The thought of Jim watching the Dying Swan, whilst wondering when he’s going to fit in a pint and a snog brings a smile to my face. Still, an hour of his support is better than nothing so I call Vicks back and say, ‘You’re on.’