The Best of Friends by Alex Day (english novels to read .TXT) 📗

Somehow Charlie found somewhere for us to park ourselves. He ordered and the dish arrived within minutes, a huge, overflowing plate of spaghetti puttanesca, the sauce staining the yellow pasta strands red, forming the combined colours of a sunrise.

Or a massacre.

The waitress plonked it down between us, handing us both a spoon and fork wrapped in a translucently thin paper napkin.

‘The servings are big enough for two here,’ Charlie grinned. ‘No point in paying for one each.’

He picked up his fork, swirling it around and around in the dish until it was wrapped in a huge tomato-blood-spattered spaghetti bandage with multiple trailing strands, at which point he plunged it into his mouth. I watched, mesmerised, stabbing ineffectually at a few strands of pasta when he asked me why I wasn’t eating.

Despite how fast Charlie was ploughing through the food, it seemed to take forever for it to be finished. We forced our way out of the restaurant and onto the brightly lit, buzzing street. I’d been feeling choked by the heat and cigarette smoke and steam in the basement and I remember how relieved I was to take a deep breath of fresh air.

‘I should be going,’ I said.

‘Don’t you want to come back to mine,’ he replied, and it wasn’t a question.

Having sex with Charlie at his digs was awkward to say the least. He shared a bedroom with a pot-smoking philosophy student named Ptolemy who never seemed to go out but rather spent the majority of his time lying flat on his back on his bed, eyes closed, puffing on a joint. To any casual observer he looked like a complete no-hoper, a student who would – literally – burn through his grant and leave uni with no more qualifications than he started with. But of the two essays he’d handed in so far, he had achieved firsts in both, Charlie said, despite the fact that he never attended lectures. He was just naturally brilliant and the dope appeared to magnify his genius. In the end, he graduated with a first.

‘Like Coleridge and Shelley on laudanum,’ I suggested, hoping that the comparison with such literary heavyweights might help me convince myself that a more or less permanent bedroom companion was something other than inconvenient.

‘I guess,’ replied Charlie. ‘Although I think he takes his inspiration more from Bob Dylan.’

That night, the first occasion of love making, we had to throw Ptolemy out and make him go and sit in the kitchen. The flat’s sitting room had been turned into a bedroom for another two students, so there were four people living in a space designed for one or two at the most. Ptolemy thought it unnecessary that he should leave; he wasn’t interested in sex – it was too elemental and messy, too real. His interests were purely esoteric and never involved the intermingling of body fluids. We could do what we liked, he would take no notice. If we didn’t mind him being there then he didn’t mind us.

I most emphatically did mind. Ptolemy was duly banished.

‘The ice queen melteth,’ whispered Charlie in my ear after I had climaxed. I nodded, replete, a goal achieved, a triumph recorded. It was my first time.

After a few months, I moved out of my student accommodation on the Camden Road, a four-lane highway permanently choked with traffic, and Charlie and I moved into an apartment high above the Finchley Road, a six-lane highway permanently choked with traffic. We shared with the pot-smoking Ptolemy and a couple of other lads, cramming everyone in to save money. It was cramped and noisy and messy, and Marjorie, on her one visit, was horrified. Her righteous disapproval only made me more sure I’d made the right choice.

Charlie was my rebellion and as such no one, apart from me, was surprised when it didn’t work out.

He cheated on me and then left me for a petite and immaculate French girl he met on his year abroad. Clichéd, right? But true. All too true.

The betrayal was complete, the cruelty absolute. To be treated like that by the man I loved through and through broke my heart.

It took a long, long time to get over Charlie.

Eventually, nearly a decade later, I met Justin and began what was my second, and as it stands right now, last relationship. I’m sure my parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and every member of my extended family breathed a sigh of relief that I’d finally come to my senses, found someone suitable and sensible, and hopefully put the past behind me. My mother and father were on tenterhooks until Justin finally proposed; when he did so, they could hardly believe it was true. I don’t think I could, either.

After Charlie, it was hard to trust anyone.

So in Charlotte (a name, I note, that is often shortened to Charlie) I recognise all the signs of what suspicion does to you; I’ve been there myself. Now that she’s out of the way for a while I can do some digging, see if I can shed any light on what’s wrong, what it is that’s eating away at her. Sometimes she has a look about her, as if she’s petrified about what’s behind her. Every now and again she’ll glance over her shoulder and I know, at those times, that she’s not listening to me anymore.

It’s as if she’s being hunted.

And I too, because of Charlie, am being pursued.

Perhaps Charlotte and I are more similar than either of us realises. I look down at the letter in my hands, pulled out of the bunch of bank statements and circulars that have just been deposited on the doormat. The tell-tale franking stamp of the production company leaps out at me and, as always, it’s addressed to my maiden name. I don’t need to open it to know it’ll be from that researcher again.

I rip up the letter and bury it in the bin, pulling a banana skin and piece of cellophane over the top of it as