Friends Like Us
Authors: Siân O'Gorman
Siân O'Gorman
About
Friends Like Us
Is it ever too late to take charge and live your life on your terms?
Life for school friends, Melissa, Steph and Eilis, hasn't quite worked out the way they once imagined it might. Melissa may be professionally successful but inside she's a mess of insecurities.
Steph is lonely and lost, balancing the fragile threads of family life and walking on eggshells around her philandering husband and angry teenage daughter.
Finally, Eilis, a hardworking A&E doctor, utterly exhausted by the daily pressures of work and going through the motions with her long-term partner Rob. It's crunch time for all the friends...
A light-hearted and emotional novel about family, friendship and coming to terms with your past.
For Ruby
1
Melissa
Of course the crash was her fault. Melissa wasn't concentrating on the road when she whammed into the back of a Mercedes, as she was too busy having an out-of-body experience, thinking about herself; this woman who should have been all grown-up but was as unsorted as a tube of Smarties.
She was driving along the Grand Canal in Dublin, had just arrived back in the city after an unsuccessful weekend in Paris. It was a busy road at the best of times, filled with the usual battered and beaten up vehicles, the odd articulated lorry, the cyclists who only look up to raise two fingers to traffic that skims too close.
And there was Melissa in her orange Beetle thinking about Alistair and the fact he had just given her the old heave-ho. In the airport. After a weekend in Paris. So that was nice, wasn't it? At the age of thirty-eight, shouldn't she have achieved a little bit more, relationship wise?
But what was really bothering her wasn't just the fact that she had been dumped â again â but because she had persisted in pursuing a relationship which had, if she was entirely honest, lacked lustre from the very beginning.
I
should
have children, she thought, buckets of them. Mr Perfect in the corner, smiling, as one child smears Nutella on the sofa, while the other saws away tunelessly on a violin. Isn't that what women should have? Isn't that what we're told life should look like?
But there was no getting away from it; Melissa had had a truly
terrible
weekend, the
least
romantic since her school leavers' do when Tony Tierney puked all over her dress and she walked home crying and covered in vomit. However, being an imaginative type, she preferred to think the weekend's failure was because poor old Alistair had been under the weather and not at his sparkling best. But, come to think of it, she had never seen him at his sparkling best. Maybe he didn't have one.
Flu, Alistair had muttered darkly â and kept re-tucking his scarf, sniffling and snuffling throughout the weekend. She had managed to steer him away from Molly Malone's near the Champs Elysée and instead they ate in a restaurant in the Marais. However, he complained about the steak (too bloody), refused to be amused by the grumpiness of the waiters and blew his nose in the napkin. Crimes on the lower end of the scale and ones Melissa had been certainly determined to overlook.
She remained stoic. Remember Stalingrad, she had kept thinking. It was colder then, surely, and they were hungrier. But although she may not have been
actually
freezing her arse off in a Russian winter in 1943 and fearing for her life, those soldiers at least didn't have to put up with the snufflings of Alistair. Amazingly, he was able to reach out for his pint of lager and shiveringly bring the vessel to his blue lips. Undeterred, she threw back the red wine and the whole weekend became not a romantic cliché but an alcoholic blur.
You can't have it all, she had thought, consoling herself. And it is
Paris
; he's ill and no one can help that. Maybe she just had to try harder, be funnier, nicer, attractiver. With a little helping of Florence Nightingale on the side.
Okay, so it may not have been a success but even if he was a slight hypochondriac, she hadn't
actually expected him to finish with her
.
At the airport
. They were heading through arrivals, both pulling their little wheelie cases, him still snuffling and she smiling winningly, hoping he would say he had had a lovely time, but instead there was silence from Alistair. Well, apart from the sniffing and the sneezing.
âHow are you feeling now?' she said, trying to prompt a response. âGlad to be home?'
âGoing to go straight to bed,' he mumbled. âSleep this thing off.' She wondered if he was confusing a hangover with flu. Whatever it was, he was in Garbo-mode.
âGood idea,' she said, masking devastation. âYou do that.' An awkward silence hung in the frozen air. And then she realized her smile was full of hope and desperation but she knew how transparently pathetic she was so instead tried to look frowny and concerned. And, crucially, grown-up.
âMelissa⦠listen.' He dropped his voice. âListen, umâ¦' A taxi had pulled up⦠it was as if he had actually planned the swift getaway.
She realized, finally, that he was going to finish with her and that his shortcomings were in fact hers and that she was the unlovable one. Please say something nice to me, she inwardly pleaded. Just
want
me again. Just like me. Please
like
me.
âMelissa, it was a fun weekend.' (It hadn't been. They both knew that.) âBut I⦠I don't really feel able to have anything serious at the moment. I'm so sorryâ¦'
She was motionless, heart thumping now, blood coursing around her brain, sirens going off. She was being dumped. You'd think she would have got used to it by now. Searing pain that soon numbed to a throb, the pulsations of which were a reminder of her own essential unloveableness. This was how her life was meant to be, a catalogue of failed flings.
âMelissa, are you okay?' He was looking around now for the taxi.
âOf course,' she said. âTotally. I agree, I'm so glad you said it. I've really enjoyed our time together.'
He looked hugely relieved. âThanks. I mean you are great and everything but you knowâ¦' Ah, there it was, the taxi! He swung his case into its open boot.
âI know.' She smiled again, this time to show what an incredible sport she was.
She waved bravely as the taxi sped off. Was that him waving from the window? She couldn't quite see. And had he promised the driver extra to vroom away as though on a heist? Regardless, she was left alone.
This was how it always played out: the ascent as she was desired, and then the drop, an ignominious free-fall through the air. However attractive she was, she was no girlfriend material. Not the marrying kind; she was too weird, too needy, bordering on neurotic. It never took long, usually around three months for them to realize⦠and Alistair had got out in a record-breaking two months.
There was nothing else she could do except to recover her little orange Beetle from the car park and start driving home, allowing the shame and humiliation to embed itself. No one knows, she thought, as tears streamed down her face, no one knows who I am. I am nothing, no one, worthless.
Other people found relationships easy but Melissa found them torturous. It was always full-on and then over. Keeping her deep unloveableness a secret was taking a strain.
Never again, she thought. No more. A life of spinsterhood loomed. Well, anything had to be better than watching a man blow his nose on a napkin.
And now, here she was, wending her weary, woeful way home along the Grand Canal and about to crash into a Mercedes.
A swan flapping its wings gave her a jolt, granting Melissa a look in his beaky, beady face, as if to say,
who do you thing ye are? Gallivanting again? Well, you've only yourself to blame
.
She saw the bumper of the Mercedes whizz towards her; the swan having a good gawp. âYou were right!' she wanted to shout. âYou were right. I do have only myself to blame. It's all my fault. All of this. Everything!'
In the very short journey from uncrashed to crashed, she heard the screeching of her own brakes (her body had gone into action, as least it wasn't letting her down), and then the terrible crunch, the breaking of glass and the sound of her head hitting the steering wheel. A nice Mercedes, she imagined, would have air bags. An old Beetle wouldn't. And didn't.
Her head against the wheel, Melissa wondered what to do before she heard voices and someone trying to help her out. She staggered, stunned and blinking, out of the car, resting on the arm of an old man, who in different circumstances, would have been leaning on her.
âTerrible traffic,' he was saying. âThere's always accidents along the canal. Too many cars. I always walk into town this way and I say to meself that it's a miracle there aren't more prangs or pile-ups. That's what I always say.'
He led her to the wall alongside the canal. Bloody hell, she thought. Jesus Christ. I've just been in an accident. The dizziness was beginning to clear and she looked around. Her head was hurting but she was, she realized, still alive.
âNow, love, are you all right? No broken bones?' said the man. âEverything in perfect working order?'
âJust a broken heart,' she said, unable to resist the temptation of the drama.
The old man laughed. âOh, now,' he said. âLovely woman like you. Surely not?'
She managed to smile so as not to scare him off entirely. She put her hand to her head and felt it carefully. A huge lump was forming underneath, bubbling Vesuvius-like. But it was her car she was most worried about. She noticed two men had managed to push it up onto the pavement, its bonnet buckled and forced open, bumper hanging off.
And people â passers-by, good Samaritans? â were helping the Mercedes driver out of the other car, a blonde woman, expensive highlights glinting in the rare late-afternoon winter sunlight.
Oh God, Melissa knew this type. Better just hand over her life savings to pay for the dent in the back of the Mercedes. Although it looked perfect, well
perfect enough
, apart from that teeny-tiny-titchy
scrape
. The woman looked perfect enough too, with her swishy blonde hair. Melissa looked away, still shaky and not quite ready to face the inevitable confrontation, and began rifling in her bag for her phone. She wanted to call Cormac. He'd be nice to her.