in the country 1

“If you’re so fucking clever, you tell me how long then”

I glared at Joel. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t have any idea how long to boil an egg – why on earth would I know something like that? The question was rhetorical anyway – I knew he didn’t know either. He could cook a steak and that was it. I could cook nothing.

Unfortunately for us we had no steaks, nor did we have the money to buy any, nor the transport to get to a shop that sold them. We were in the middle of nowhere, at the cottage, one and a half miles from the nearest public road. We had one rusty orange chopper bike between us and we needed our money for the pub anyway. I wandered off to see if I could find a book that would tell me about eggs.

T. wasn’t there; he had a girlfriend and he was on her dad’s yacht. We missed him, but we didn’t really mind – it was what happened. We all three of us drifted off with girlfriends and boyfriends occasionally, but then we came back together again in the end, and it was as if nothing had happened. No one bore a grudge; nothing seemed permanent except the three of us.

It was idyllic where we were; Capability Brown grounds, with baby pheasants that came right up to the back door, and deer you could sometimes spot further off in the little copses dotted around the estate; a pretty white house, with little windows from which nothing could be seen but trees and faded tall summer grass. We were all alone, just being lazy; I looked over at Joel – he’d grown even taller since he’d got ill – it was weird. He was a lot thinner too, like me; I think that was in the middle of my not eating phase.

It was very hot, but Joel still wore black – it made him look a bit like a giant-sized daddy long legs. I had a pair of ripped old Levis I’d found at Flip in Covent Garden; they were more holes than denim, but I liked them because they made the bits of my legs that showed, which was most of them, look extra brown.

We didn’t do much together that time at the cottage. Joel was supposed to be resting; it’s the only cure for glandular fever, and I was keeping him company. Some nights we would get on the bike and balance our way off the estate to the village pub, but coming back drunk in the dark was problematical and it took forever to get home – squabbling, giggling, falling off the bike, getting lost in the unfamiliar inky blackness of a country night.

Poor Joel, I felt so sorry for him. He tried his best to make light of everything but it must have been hard when he’d had to stop work as a runner at the record company. He had loved it there so much, and they’d loved him – he’d become the company pet – they had showered him with presents when he’d had to pack it in.

I remembered going with T. to meet him after the goodbye party, and sitting on a bench in Soho Square while he showed us excitedly what they’d given him, his face flushed red with pleasure. He was never smug; it always came as a surprise to him how much he was loved. I think he’d spent so long at school being told he was useless because of his dyslexia, that he never thought of himself as anything worthwhile; it was why he tried to make people laugh instead.

Lying on my stomach next to him, in that rough grass with my legs in the air, doing nothing in particular, I thought about how different it had been only six months or so before, when we’d danced around his bedroom in London with joy. Joel had seen the big black car and had grabbed my shoulders, his eyes dancing with excitement,

“A Limo – look! They’ve sent a fucking Limo for me!”

I had looked, and there it was, taking up half the Finchley Road, waiting for Joel. We hadn’t believed it at first, and kept stopping our triumphant waltz around the room, checking and re-checking in case it had vanished while we’d taken our eyes off it. Marnie had watched from the door, smiling at us.

I’d been there to see him off – he was to be gone for months, which I wasn’t looking forward to, but I was thrilled about his stroke of unbelievable luck. Ok, so it was two heavy metal bands that neither of us were that into, but who gave a fuck? It was a big US tour – stadiums all over the country, and the support band had met Joel at the record company and asked for him, by name, to be their assistant. How cool was that?