I remember the ambulance arriving, pulling up beside us, its siren screaming. It was quickly muted; I recall the sudden absence of noise where before it had been deafening, but the flashing continued, red and blue and red and blue. Paramedics jumped from the van, two of them, both dressed in green, and marched towards us, shouting over the bonnet of the ambulance. Everything was unfolding in half time: she snapped on white latex gloves, her right hand first, and then her left, pulling at each fingertip. A bag was swung over his shoulder. There was a policewoman wearing a hat and I can still see her now, gesturing at the crowd to please take a step back, move along now please, nothing at all to see here.
The paramedics fussed around us, taking Jonathan’s pulse, spreading their hands over his body, cutting off his T-shirt, shining a bright white light into his eyes.
‘If you could just …’ the woman said, and I sat back on my heels and out of their way. Their arms stretched around me, the reflective strips of their uniforms redirecting the van’s headlights into my eyes. I squinted and I realised that they were wet.
They slid him on to a stretcher, a strange plastic slab, and lifted him into the back of the ambulance. We crawled through the streets of London and south to St George’s Hospital. The police car followed and the policewoman – still in her hat – reached for my elbow as I stepped down from the back of the ambulance and she sat with me in the waiting room. She told me to keep breathing: in through my nose for six, and hold for six, and then out through my mouth for six. And then she left and then I was all alone, still waiting. It was dark outside when a doctor called me into a side room to tell me what I already knew, to confirm that Jonathan had died.
He offered to call someone for me, and I don’t remember if I answered his question. I left and hailed a cab and recited the address for the flat in Vauxhall. When I arrived, there were three young men in shorts and T-shirts sitting around a picnic table at a pub on the river, gold marathon medals hanging around their necks. A bubble burst within my chest and I pictured Jonathan sitting there with them, his shorts and his T-shirt, his medal, celebrating his victory. I felt bile rising in my throat and I swallowed it because it wasn’t time, this wasn’t real, and yet I couldn’t remember what I ought to be doing or how to be me in that moment.
I sat down against the entrance to the building. I pictured him standing up, rubbing at his elbow, brushing his hands down his chest to release small specks of tarmac. I imagined him shocked, and sort of angry, and a small cut beneath his right eye where he’d landed, but otherwise fine: walking, talking, moving, alive. I closed my eyes and saw his hair, too long, his arms crossed over his chest, and his chin, slightly pointed, freckles scattered on the bridge of his nose, from all those afternoons running for hours in the sunshine.
I retched because it wasn’t real – there was no small cut beneath his eye, no hair too long, no freckles, no more hours of running – and I would never see him again and he would never again be seen and that was simply too big, too impossible, to be a thing.
Chapter Four
For a time, I was winning. And I mean that in the simplest sense of the word. If life is a competition, something that can be lost – and I am certain that it can be lost – then it must also be something that can be won.
Marnie was going on dates with a never-ending barrage of unsuitable men, who drank too much and got stoned in children’s playgrounds at weekends and snorted coke off toilet cisterns, and I was falling in love with a brilliant man. While her university friends were spending their Friday nights in horrible clubs with loud music and neon lights and sticky floors, I was planning a honeymoon. While they grew despondent, lamenting the failure of yet another dead-end relationship, drowning their heartbreak in gin and feeding it takeout, I was married. I had a husband. And – even better than that – I really, truly loved him. They were arguing over small bedrooms and split bills and spilt milk, tackling the build-up of pubic hair in the drain, the shower overflowing, the piles of dirty dishes sitting just above the dishwasher. Whereas I was living in a lovely maisonette with high ceilings and big windows. I had paint samples in patches on the walls and framed prints propped against the fireplace, waiting to be hung.
Marnie had handed in her notice. Others were being made redundant and sometimes fired and bitching about their bosses and the menial tasks that made up their day-to-day: fetching coffees and booking taxis and ordering reams of paper for the printer. I was being promoted. I had started in an administrative role for an online retailer – they sold everything: books, toys, electronics – and they offered me a position in a new team sourcing furniture. I was in a role that I liked, in a job that I felt had a future, in a growing company.
I was better than all of them. I was happier than all of them.
I suppose I liked that I had found love first. I feel uncomfortable saying that now, because it sounds so stupid, so childish, but it’s the truth and that’s what I’ve promised you.
Marnie was the first of us to find a boyfriend. We were thirteen and Richard was a year older. His parents were divorced and he lived with his mother. He had bright orange hair and his cheeks were speckled with freckles. He and Marnie went to the cinema and their fingers touched in a box of popcorn halfway through and they held hands for the rest of the film. She went to his house for their second date and his mum cooked them chicken nuggets. But Richard broke up with Marnie the following day. He had decided that he had feelings for another girl in our year – I think her name was Jessica – whose hair was similarly orange and who was consequently much more compatible.
I was determined that I, too, needed a first boyfriend and so, in the midst of Marnie’s heartbreak, I negotiated a date with a boy called Tim. We didn’t go to the cinema, but instead on a walk and he bought me an ice cream and I was quite sure that I had found my soulmate. It helped that he was, by quite some margin, more attractive than any of the boys that my classmates had dated. He increased my popularity dramatically and suddenly I was very much the go-to for everyone’s dating conundrums. Unfortunately, I wasn’t having quite such a positive influence on his reputation, so he called things off after a week and a half.
Marnie and I grieved together, determined never to fall in love again and to become lesbians instead.
Which in itself is sort of curious, don’t you think? Already we were very aware that a simple friendship wouldn’t suffice into adulthood, that it wouldn’t be enough. We knew – from our early teenage years – that romantic love would always become the most important.
I couldn’t tell you quite when everything changed. For years – over a decade – we were at the epicentre of each other’s lives. We told each other everything, and that included boys and then men, and dating and then sex, and relationships and then love. And then, at some point, a chasm opened between us and our romantic lives became something that existed outside of our friendship. It was something we filtered in conversation, pulling out highlights or updates, rather than living through it together.
I suppose this too was a situation of my own making. Did I tell her how it felt to fall in love with Jonathan? Did I tell her how it felt that first night? I don’t think that I did.
Instead, I abandoned her. I had been to visit Jonathan after work, and he had cooked me dinner, and commented on all the spare storage in that flat, the empty shelves, the half-filled drawers, and he’d asked if I’d like to fill them. The promise of a home like that – a home with him – was simply too enticing.