We had a conversation about middle names and Ed’s was ‘Randall’. I said: ‘Edward Randall Cooper. You sound like a 1930s newsreader.’
I mimicked a stiff, buttoned-up posh male voice: ‘Hello we are in crisis, the King has abdicated, long live the King I am Edward Randall Cooper good night, God bless you all.’
‘Didn’t I say the one who looks like a cross between Little My from The Moomins and Winona in Heathers would be sassy?’ Justin said to Ed, and Ed grinned at me.
I’d never heard myself described before. Assigned a character, as if we were in Cluedo. I liked it.
‘What do I look like?’ Susie demanded, with the nerve-free confidence of the terminally photogenic.
‘Hmmm,’ Justin narrowed his intense, pale grey eyes. Justin himself had a buzz cut and a rascally-handsome face, like a charming Victorian pickpocket. ‘Jane Austen’s Emma meets the Laura Palmer they couldn’t kill.’
Susie screeched with mock-outrage and joy and I swear I saw her fall in platonic love in a single second.
We spent much time laughing in the following hour, our first encounter with four personalities that tessellated perfectly as an ensemble.
‘Hey, this works. Ally Sheedy,’ Justin said, pointing at me, ‘Molly Ringwald’ (pointing at Susie) ‘Anthony Michael Hall’ (pointing at Ed) ‘and me. Queer Judd Nelson. The Dog’s Breakfast Club.’
I remember tripping off to my sociology class with a foolish grin on my face, thinking that making friends in adult life was clearly a piece of piss. The thing about being young is, you don’t have much else to compare anything to.
But as the months rolled by, I had an inkling we’d stumbled onto something rare, in our tight quartet. There were no rivalries, no real arguments, only magic chemistry where each personality balanced out and complemented the other. The most I’d ever hoped for at school was to be left alone, but I became vaguely aware the four of us were considered both cool, and unassailably not to be messed with, now we were a team.
It helped none of us fancied each other.
Justin was not in play, and Ed – well, Ed was a mate.
I only went for wasted, cheekboney, brooding bastards. My infatuation was Jez the premier weed dealer, a bedraggled River Phoenix lookalike at a neighbouring college with whom I’d had my deeply unfulfilling loss of virginity months prior. (‘River Phoenix?! Canal Phoenix more like,’ I can still hear Susie saying. ‘Canal Pigeon.’) I was honestly still in a mild state of shock that an act that was the obsession of ninety per cent of popular culture was so underwhelming.
Susie and I once discussed the Edness of Ed, musing that he was, on paper, technically wholesomely good-looking – he’d get a role in Dawson’s Creek – and pleasingly tall, and we loved his company. So why no ‘grunt’, as we delicately termed it?
‘He’s too straightforward, isn’t he?’ Susie said, picking the chocolate cladding off a Magnum ice cream as we sat on sunloungers in her giant garden. It had one of those lawns like a huge pool of green with an undulating perimeter, the border full of lipstick-pink hydrangeas.
Susie had no truck with any peer group boys whatsoever, and was involved with a twenty-seven-year-old doctor at the time, an age we thought sounded impossibly mature. He let her try some morphine, which we thought was an absolute hoot. Now I look back and realise he was a borderline sex offender who should’ve been struck off.
‘It’s like there’s no twist, no secret. No edge to Ed.’
‘Hmm, yeah,’ I said, to Susie’s shadowy outline, as I tired of squinting and put on my large sunglasses.
‘Plus he says he’s strawberry-blond but, in certain lights, its very dishwasher mouse,’ Susie concluded. Susie wasn’t at all equal opportunities, when it came to men and the physical standards they had to meet.
‘He’s almost ginger in some lights. I like fully red, flame hair,’ I said. ‘Young Henry the Eighth was hot you know.’
‘Ugh, he looked like a Christmas ham! You are so obtuse,’ Susie said. ‘You are guaranteed to make the oddest choices of man in the future. I bet your husband is a genius recluse who wees in Kilner jars.’
We honked.
‘He’s like an ideal brother,’ I continued. ‘He’ll make someone a great boyfriend. He’s so easy-going and such a good listener. You feel like you can tell him anything.’
This was also one of the ways I knew Ed wasn’t a prospect – we would share all kinds of embarrassing things and laugh raucously. When I was interested in a male, I tried to be a riddle, I was tense. I didn’t admit to having once done a ‘fizzy poo’.
‘But you can’t imagine ever having your ankles either side of your face with him,’ Susie concluded, as I screamed in self-conscious horror and embarrassment. That’s Ed. Our friend. He doesn’t have sex, and neither did my parents. (Actually, that had turned out to be true.)
6
God laughs when we tell Him our plans, and He also has a good old chortle when He overhears us saying we know things for sure, like who we know we’re never going to feel feelings for.
(Yeah, my God is a man, I feel more comfortable blaming Him then.)
The four of us got places at university – all up north apart from Susie, who had to be Susie and go to London – and we were excited and anguished at our separation, homesickness, the big wide world.
Due to quirks of the different institutions, Justin and Susie left days before Ed and I did. Those days might as well have been months of desolation and a montage of trudging with pack ponies through blizzards and deserts for how well Ed and I bore it.
‘Left behind, they’ll have forgotten us already!’ we wailed, having killed a lot of time with coffees, and barrel-scraping action films at the multiplex, and comparing who’d had the most gnomic texts as bulletins from Justin or Susie. (I think Ed won, with Justin’s report that only said: ‘GRAVY AS PASTA SAUCE!’) Our city was a ghost town without our counterparts, all our contemporaries had vanished to halls of residences around the country. There’s no self-pity like a teenager’s self-pity.
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ I asked Ed, before our final day lingering in purgatory. We were eating chips from paper cones, our breath making ghosts, and I thought how grateful I’d been for Ed being around. He was dependable solidity itself.
‘Oh, big game with my Five-a-Side team and then we’re going to get drunk at The Trip.’
‘What?! What will I do?!’ I wailed, and Ed replied: ‘Come! Come along. The game won’t take that long.’
I’d usually not want to be that superfluous at an occasion, or so openly needy, but the prospect of sitting indoors doing nothing but bickering with my mum and my younger brother Kieran was worse.
The kickabout was in a park on a hill, north of the city and near where I now live. The field was on a slope, rolling down to the main road, and I languished at the upper end of it with a copy of Viz while they ran around.
I watched Ed with his team mates – his good humour, his natural leadership, his powers of concentration. His muscled legs. Seeing someone you know well in a totally different context is always disorientating and vaguely impressive. You realise you have them on loan from the other lives they lead.