I went back, my legs shaking a little bit. My words ran into and over the top of one another, alphabet soup into the bowl of the room. I said like and intense too much, and only just in time stopped myself from putting my feet up on the coffee table. From my bottomless bag of diversion tricks I pulled a packets of Halls, unwrapped one very very slowly and tormented the paper as she spoke. I used to be a chronic tissue-shredder. I remember being very excited about her baby. She said, when I used to go off to Woolworths on my own, that’s when they stopped talking to me.
I left feeling elated and sixteen and stupid. B said over her hot chocolate, you love tupperware too much. And then she told me a secret and I told her a secret, and I felt sixteen even more, like the next thing we might do is camp out at the bottom of her garden and make up games with scraps of paper and a stubby Ikea pencil and talk about boys. Did we do this when we were sixteen? Maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen. I don’t remember what we used to say about them, but I know we used to picture them vividly, perhaps a few gardens down, making their own top-ten lists. What do you look for in a boy? Number nine, good forearms.
I haven’t slept in a tent for years, not since truth or dare went wrong, and B talks as if she might get married next month. J fucks and tells over facebook, or else we are witness and invited to join. (No thank you, I say at five in the morning, I have known you too long.) And if not we end up with our heads under her kitchen tables, woken by the cleaner at 8.30am. I ring her and she tells me she is in bed with Specimen A. We don’t talk for long, she tells me about pills and MDMA at some warehouse rave and I am a little bit scared and her voice is crackly with tension and I can hear Specimen A breathing.
