Katherine Powlett

Friend for Life

Friday

If I’d known it was the last time I would meet Naomi off a plane I would have jumped higher, waved harder, hugged her for longer.

I spot her manoeuvring three dayglo pink wheelie cases along the glistening floor of Exeter Airport. One is sandwiched between the other two and they form a luminous wall dwarfing her and pricking me with a sharp memory of the day we met. My enthusiastic waving stretches me onto tiptoes. When she sees me, she releases the cases, flings out her arms, and shrieks Lexi!

No one else calls me Lexi. A bubble of joy swells in my chest propelling me to dive under the barrier. We collide in an embrace, and I inhale a waft of watermelon. She feels wiry in my arms.

The cases have scattered like ducklings. Laughing, we scoot after them.

‘What on earth have you got in here?’ I ask, grabbing two by their long handles. It’s a lot of luggage, even by her standards.

‘My men for our week. Saves on tickets!’

I glow at her reference to our week and let it melt the nagging umbrage that she’s been elusive these last months, beyond physically distant. I had an incoherent voice note at New Year, unclear if it was intentional. Then instead of the usual January WhatsApp exchange pinging ever more elaborate destination ideas for our annual trip, I got a missed call. Looking out at the winter trees spiking their empty branches into the flat Kent sky, I rang her back, picturing meeting her in the vivid colour and luxurious warmth of the Caribbean. But she announced that she’d already booked a Tudor mansion in Devon, said she was having her sixtieth a year early, and proceeded to inveigle me into organising it.

I was put out that she was turning our special week into a busman’s holiday. And yet, by the end of the call, I’d agreed. I couldn’t help myself conjuring up a Tudor-themed birthday party – a glazed suckling pig with an orange in its mouth, a sugar confection worthy of Hampton Court, the men in breeches with yellow tights and codpieces, the women bejewelled.

Hefting the cases into the boot of my Skoda estate, I catch the scent of the lilies for tomorrow’s party that had perfumed my journey over from Tunbridge Wells, now in buckets in the mansion’s flower room. She coughs a little and bounces with excitement. The car fills with the fizz and crackle of her vape and I realise where the watermelon smell emanates from.

‘What’s it like? Is it as good as in the pictures?’ She winds down the window and a white vape-cloud billows into the cold March air.

‘You’ll see, not far.’ I don’t want to waste time describing the mansion. ‘How’s Barbados life?’ Why have you barely called me in months?

‘Can’t wait to see it.’

She’s evading my question. The uneasiness that surfaced after I called her back that day revisits me like ink spreading across blotting paper. After the call, I couldn’t remember if I’d heard the slow beep of a foreign dial tone. I decided I must have – if she’d been in England she would have told me. Now I’m not so sure.

She draws deep on the vape. ‘I’ve always fancied myself as a dowager. Sebastian’s lot gave me a taste for it. I used to love visiting his grandmother in her castle. Best bit about that marriage.’

Despite her caginess, I smile imagining her playing Lady Muck and lording it over everyone. ‘You’ll be in your element. It has portraits of dead people. A whole gallery of eclectic heirlooms. It feels like the family of aristocrats never quite moved out.’

‘I can project posh.’ She tilts up her chin and cups her hand in a royal wave at a field of sheep with their new lambs.

I let out one of my embarrassing snort-laughs and she begins to shudder with giggles. It’s like we’ve never been apart. She flips down the mirror and tops up her lipstick, reminding me again of that first day at university. Relieved of her charity shop rucksack, so huge it threatened to topple her, she marched into my room and applied lipstick mid chat while examining the photos on my cork board. Shame, she said when I told her my brother Felix – looking dashing in a suit – was only fourteen. She nestled onto my window cill and lit up a cigarette, tapping the ash into the courtyard below. I saw her then as everything I was not – sexually experienced, confident, fiercely intelligent, and brimming with charisma. All I could offer was a weighty fruit cake in a tin left by my mother. She stubbed out the cigarette in my sink and wolfed two slices telling me with her mouth full that her mum only ever made packet cakes. I had no idea what a packet cake was and didn’t dare ask because I was trying not to let slip how eager I was to have a friend like her.

I turn the car into the avenue of towering lime trees and the front of the house presents itself to our left through their lacy branches like a flickering cine film. Honeyed in the evening light, it rises from a carpet of green. For a moment the sun sparkles between the chimneys like a solitaire diamond spreading its rays over the slate roof. She gasps.

I pull up by some stone blocks.

‘Ooh! Those are for mounting horses.’ She springs out of the car and steps up with an air of triumph. ‘Imagine the hunt meeting here!’

And I am caught up in her. ‘Come ma’am let’s explore. You need to choose which of the four-poster beds is yours.’ We scrabble into the house like a pair of children released into the fairground. She’s breathless with the thrill of it.

Surveying the grandest of the bedrooms, she pulls on the bedposts as if testing them for strength and pushes her hand firm onto the mattress. Her eyes rove around the room passing over a Dutch still-life with decaying fruit and a sheep’s skull, a silk screen, and the door to the long gallery. I have the weirdest sensation that she’s inspecting the room for some purpose other than sleep, but her attention snaps back to me.

‘Golden hour!’ She whips out her phone capturing us with the canopy of the bed in the background. With her nut-brown skin and beaming grin, she could not look more beautiful in that moment. ‘That’s done. There you go,’ she says, with an air of finality, pinging the photo over to me as if I’d asked for it.

Out of the sunset glow, she is pale beneath her tan. We flop onto her bed and look up at the pleated canopy.

‘Just the two of us tonight,’ I say.

‘And for most of the week. My extravagance, my treat. You can’t put a roof rack on a coffin!’

I laugh. ‘If anyone could, you would. But OK, if you insist.’

She squeezes my hand and says, ‘Thank you, Lexi, this is perfect for everything I’ve planned.’

‘I thought I was the party planner!’ I say, trying to sound glib to deflect from my bafflement.

‘Yes, yes, that’s what I mean.’ She flushes. ‘Everything you’ve planned.’ She shields a wider-than-necessary yawn and looks away.

‘I’ll leave you to rest.’

A chill follows me down the carpeted back stairs and the ink blot makes its way towards my heart. Pausing on the third step I half turn but shake my head and descend the remaining stairs briskly. I’m reading something into nothing.

In the cavernous kitchen, an Aga sends out a gentle warmth and wind rattles the windows. Rested, she wafts in looking divine in a silk kaftan. Her glossy hair forms a cloud of curls around her glittering eyes.

At the scrubbed pine kitchen table I dish up shepherd's pie, peas, and dollops of tomato ketchup – her favourite. There is an intimacy to being in such a big space with one other person. She, although petite, could always fill a room. I pour her a glass of wine – some red that my husband George recommended. He’s good at that stuff and more relieved than offended at the absence of a party invitation.

‘So did everyone accept their invites?’ she asks, pulling up a chair.

‘They did. I noticed they’re all women.’

‘Not all. Blake’s coming, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’ I’ve been trying not to think about Blake. I don’t see the wisdom in inviting her son-in-law as a guest while his estranged husband is confined to the kitchen cheffing for her.

‘Does Zack know you’ve invited Blake? There’s still a lot of pain.’

‘I’m in pain! They were perfect together. I loved their wedding. All those lanterns and the streamers. Their first dance. You did such a good job.’

‘I wasn’t the choreographer!’

‘No, but you know what I mean. You always make the wedding fit the couple. Even mine and Seb’s which must have been a challenge – we didn’t even suit each other!’

I think back to her wedding, one of the first I did after I set up on my own. I’d no idea what I was doing or how easy Felix made it, bringing his style and pzazz to my fledgling business. How I missed him for Zack and Blake’s day.

‘It was easy for Zack what with knowing him from birth.’

‘Me too.’ She chuckles and the chuckle turns into a cough that won’t stop. I leap up and fill a glass of water for her at the cracked Belfast sink. When the wave of coughing subsides, she says, ‘I just want Blake to know there are no hard feelings.’

It’s too soon for that, but I don’t want to argue with her.

‘OK, apart from Blake, the other nine are women.’

‘I’m done with men. What good have they ever done me?’ She stops chasing a pea around her plate and rests her cutlery on the side. ‘I thought, Who do I really want at my special birthday? and apart from dear Blake, only women came to mind.’ She shoves her half-full plate aside and unzips her vape bag. I press my thumb into a tangerine from the fruit bowl and the sharp citrus smell counteracts the vape.

‘So you chose your top ten?’

‘Top eleven but you’re in a different class. You know that.’

‘Do I?’ Despite the warning pounding in my chest, I say, ‘You’ve been distant lately.’

Almost imperceptible but I see her shudder. She flicks her head like a ballet dancer after a pirouette. ‘Lexi. Darling. Have I? I haven’t meant to. I’ve just been…’

‘I thought there might be a new man.’

‘I told you I’m done with men. You’re so lucky to have found George.’

I put both hands to my chest in mock horror. ‘Is there cannabis in that vape?’

‘He’s solid Lexi, and he loves you.’

I raise an eyebrow.

‘I’m just pleased for you, that you found George in the end.’ she says, not quite looking at me.

‘You’re getting very sentimental in your premature old age. I don’t know why you’re so determined to be sixty when you’re only fifty-eight.’ Her expression freezes me, and tangerine peel drops to the floor. I bend down to scoop it up and hide my distress. A vaporous cloud streams from her nostrils. When her face emerges, it’s taut. She looks away. Dread belts me in the stomach and almost unseats me. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. Why can’t I have my birthday early? All you posh lot who took gap years get to have your big birthdays before me. This way, I get to be first.’

‘Naomi?’

She thrusts her chair out across the brick-coloured linoleum with a sharp scrape and clacks off down a flagstone corridor towards the living hall. The grandfather clock strikes the quarter hour. The chill of the room prickles my nostrils when I arrive with mugs of tea. I haul two heavy armchairs closer to the fire and tug at the yellow damask curtains. Their rusty brass rings grate on the pole. Opening the wood burner, I am blasted by a waft of smoke which makes my eyes water as I poke a couple more logs in. Neither of us speaks. She coughs that half-cough. The fire crackles. Her vape fizzes. She coughs again.

We watch the fire flickering, our hands wrapped around the mugs of tea. ‘So, is there anything you need me to do for tomorrow?’

I swallow hard and stare at her. She averts her gaze, shifts in her chair and starts fiddling with the zip on her vape bag.

‘Naomi, stop!’

‘Stop what?’ Her face twists.

‘Stop hiding whatever you’re hiding from me.’

She puts her petulant face on and goes quiet. I raise a questioning eyebrow, arms folded. The smell of woodsmoke merges with the cloud from her vape, now caramel. I shift to avoid a spring in the lumpen chair digging into my thigh.

She stares into the fire and speaking more to it than to me, says, ‘We don’t have to tell each other everything.’

I think of the things I don’t tell her. The private parts of me that I keep even from George, and the sides he alone knows.

‘I get that. But… Have I offended you? Not returning that New Year’s Eve call?’

She turns to me with a half frown and a quick shake of the head. ‘Of course not!’

‘I’ve not seen you since our madcap attempt to ski last year.’

‘Hah! That was a blast. What a hoot flirting with the hot instructor. What was his name again? Hervé?’

‘You’ve been avoiding my calls.’

She looks down at her fists clenched in her lap and presses them between her thighs. ‘I don’t want to spoil your weekend.’

I grit my teeth to stay a sudden bout of chattering. ‘So there is something?’

Silence.

I want to break it, but the grandfather clock does that for us. Ten chimes ring out echoing across the room. We both look at it, standing like a sentinel in the corner. The last ding dissipates and is replaced by the sharp click of the second hand biting through time.

‘Naomi?’

She is fixated on the clock. I reach over, shake her knee, and say with forced calm, ‘It’s going to spoil my weekend knowing and not knowing.’

Her wide eyes hold mine for a moment then she half closes them, breathes out a long breath, and says with quiet firmness, ‘Lexi. Darling Lexi. I seem to have an appointment with the grim reaper.’

I bark out a nervous laugh. ‘He’s coming for us all! I’ve been staving off death by exercising and eating lentils more often than I’d like. Is that why you’ve switched to vaping – a last-ditch attempt to steer the doctor towards health.’ A mushroom cloud of panic is expanding through my chest.

She glows orange in the firelight. My jaw is clenched. I’m pressing my nails into my palms.

‘I mean I’m going to die soon.’

‘No, you’re not. That’s not allowed. I’ve got a party organised for tomorrow.’

‘Not that soon.’

‘Phew, it would be such a waste of a suckling pig.’

She leans across and puts her hands to my cheeks, stilling me. Holding my face to look directly at her, she says, ‘Lexi, I have stage four aggressive lung cancer.’

Her words slice through my levity. She slumps back in her chair as if the effort of the confession has emptied her.

‘OK,’ I say, very slowly, leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped as if in prayer. ‘But given how many runs for life I’ve done, I assume that’s one of the ones they have a cure for?’

I’m flailing for a non-existent life raft.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I finished my second round of chemotherapy two weeks ago. The first was in January. It shrunk the tumour… for a while.’

My world is tumbling away from me, splintering as it goes. I’m shaking.

‘But the vaping? Surely, if there was something wrong with your lungs…’

She shrugs. ‘They told me not to. What the hell?! I need some pleasures.’ But she slides the vape onto the oak chest.

‘You were here in January?’ I crumple inside.

She gives an apologetic shrug. ‘I just wanted it to go away.’

‘And it hasn’t?’

‘It went for a bit, but it loves me so much it came back. So, I thought I’d have one hell of a party before it takes over and then…’

‘And then what?’

‘The end isn’t going to be pretty if I don’t take control of it.’ She is looking at me with an unsettling steadiness.

‘With pain killers? Morphine?’ I’m shaking so violently that my foot is vibrating on the floor. I press it hard down. My mouth is dry. I gulp at the cooling tea. When I put the mug down, she leans forward in her chair, takes a deep breath and says,

‘I want to check out early.’

‘You mean check-in? To a hospice?’

‘No.’

Her brow furrows, trying to assess if I’m getting her meaning. I don’t want to get it.

‘That four-poster is the perfect place to absent myself.’

‘Absent yourself?’

‘Are you being deliberately obtuse?’

‘Are you?’

‘I want to shorten my death and Lexi—’

‘You want to kill yourself? Here?’ My tone is shriller than I intend.

She nods, deliberate and slow, never taking her eyes from mine. ‘Please help.’

I fall forward and start to rock, clutching my midriff. An unearthly groan rises from my core. She is stone still. Her lips are pressed tight and cut a determined line across her face.