Later, when Layla has left, Cleo sends the picture straight to Daniel. His response is almost instant – Wow, you’re so beautiful! – and happiness fizzes inside her. Then she hears her mum calling from downstairs. ‘Cleo? Sammy and Ted are here. Come down!’
G2g xx, she writes, then runs to the bathroom and scrubs the make-up from her face, before returning the T-shirt to her mother’s closet and heading for the stairs.
In the kitchen, Samar is telling Vivienne and Ted a story about a well-known theatre actress he’d once worked with. A long career in stage management has provided him with a seemingly endless supply of salacious gossip, but even by his standards, today’s tale is pretty hair-raising. ‘But I mean, how is that even possible?’ Viv muses when he’s finished. ‘And with a Great Dane, for Christ’s sake?’ She sighs wonderingly and pours Samar a glass of wine, then offers the bottle to Ted. ‘How about you, Ted? You joining us today?’
‘Oh, better not, I’m on a diet.’ He pats his round stomach regretfully.
When Viv turns back to Samar she’s surprised to see the wistfulness in her friend’s eyes as he gazes over at Ted. It occurs to her suddenly that they’d both been quieter than usual today and she wonders if they’ve had a row. Samar has always been uncharacteristically unforthcoming about their relationship. When he’d first introduced him to her she’d been dubious; Ted hadn’t seemed the most obvious match for her friend. While Samar was skinny as a whippet, habitually dressed in black and had a sense of humour verging on depraved, Ted had a lilting Welsh accent, was balding and overweight, and favoured comfortable clothes in various shades of beige. He’d always struck her as a bit staid for someone as extrovert as Samar.
She also couldn’t help feeling that Ted didn’t entirely approve of her and Samar’s close friendship. He often avoided joining them whenever they got together, sending Samar with an apologetic excuse that never quite felt authentic. When he did appear she sometimes had the nagging sense that he was there under sufferance and couldn’t help wonder if he might not like her very much. She takes a sip of her wine and tries to push the thought away. Samar is clearly head over heels, things have moved fast between them and on the whole they both seem happy together. The slight atmosphere today is probably down to a lover’s tiff, she decides, as she catches Samar’s eye and smiles. She gets to her feet and, sliding the chicken from the oven, bastes it with sizzling fat before slamming it back in. ‘So, tell me about this trip to Paris,’ she says to Ted. ‘Can’t believe you’re whisking him off again.’
‘What can I say? I like to spoil him.’
‘God, you lucky sod,’ she says to Samar enviously.
Ted shakes his head. ‘I’m the lucky one.’ At this she sees Samar beam with pleasure, whatever tension there’d been between them apparently forgotten.
Samar and Viv had met aged fourteen when he joined Deptford Green Comprehensive in Year 9. Both of them had been easy targets for the school’s bullies – Vivienne for wearing handmade clothes courtesy of Soren, having her hair cut by Hayley with the kitchen scissors, and for living in a house with ‘a bunch of weirdo lezzers’ that ‘didn’t even have a telly’, and Samar for being Pakistani, gay and seemingly unapologetic about both. Together they’d bunk off to hang out in Nunhead cemetery where they’d sit within its vast, overgrown sprawl amidst the broken angels and mausoleums, smoking spliffs pilfered from Hayley’s stash and pouring over copies of The Face and i-D, dreaming about what better, cooler, well-dressed people they’d be when they grew up.
Samar never said much about his home life but it hadn’t taken Viv long to get the gist – three sisters and an unhappy mother in a two bedroom flat in New Cross, a father who was perpetually drunk and full of a nameless rage that he liked to take out on his skinny, rebellious son. Samar had loved the commune, loved Stella with a fervour close to hero worship. He’d become one of her original devotees, first in the long line of waifs and strays she’d counsel over the years, and even now remained one of her most ardent fans.
Aged seventeen, in the mid-nineties, they’d discovered London’s gay scene, embracing every bar and club the city had to offer, returning faithfully every Saturday night to be transported to a world where neither Ruby’s death nor Samar’s dad could follow them.
When, after barely scraping through her A-levels, Vivienne inherited her grandparents’ money, life had been wonderful at first. Viv found them a flat to rent in Deptford and she and Samar partied by night and slept by day, their lives an exciting whirl of recreational drugs, booze and men. But then, suddenly, things had changed. Samar landed his dream job as a stagehand in the West End, and didn’t want to go out quite so much any more. He began to nag Viv about the drugs and drink she was consuming, the strange men waking up in their flat every weekend. In turn, she thought he was a boring, nagging hypocrite who needed to lighten up. Eventually, they’d had a major falling out. Samar had moved out of the flat and Viv had carried on partying without him.
And then, entirely out of the blue, or so it had seemed at the time, Vivienne, now twenty-two, had fallen into a darkness so thick and bottomless that she could find no way of dragging herself out. For weeks she’d stayed at home, sinking lower and lower, a sadness pressing on her chest that made her unable to eat or wash or countenance the world outside her flat. When she slept her dreams were plagued by horrors from which she’d wake breathless with fear, tears in her eyes, her sister’s name on her lips.
Finally, wanting to build bridges and concerned when she didn’t answer her phone, Samar had called around, using his old key to gain entry when there was no response to his knock. Within minutes he’d bundled Viv into a cab and taken her straight to Stella’s, and over the next year the two of them slowly helped put Vivienne back together. When Viv thinks back to that time she shudders to think what would have happened if Samar hadn’t rescued her, if her mum hadn’t been there to take charge.
It was a time in her life she never wanted to return to, especially since having Cleo. Sometimes though she feels the darkness like a black beast circling her, waiting for its chance to pounce. Only her need for alcohol remains from those dark days and nights of sex and booze and drugs; wine was the one thing she’d not managed to relinquish, not while her nightmares continued to haunt her.
The chicken out of the oven, Viv is about to call Cleo down to eat when Samar says quietly, ‘It’s the anniversary on Monday, isn’t it?’
She nods, touched that he remembers every year.
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Oh, you know. I’ve no idea why I still get so upset every time. Why I can’t just move on. She died thirty-two years ago, for God’s sake.’
‘Have you never had therapy for it?’ Ted asks.
She glances at him. ‘No, but I’ve always had my mum to talk to, and you know how brilliant she is.’ Even as Viv makes this remark it occurs to her that Ted, in fact, hasn’t met Stella yet. Before he came on the scene she, Stella and Cleo would enjoy frequent Sunday lunches around at Samar’s flat, but that hadn’t happened in months. Again the worrying thought occurs to her that Ted, though perfectly polite to her face, might not quite approve of her and Samar’s closeness and she feels a lingering disquiet that the friendship that had survived since their schooldays might not endure if he tried to come between them.
But Ted merely nods. ‘Even so, maybe someone totally neutral wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
‘Oh, don’t bother,’ Samar tells him. ‘She won’t go. I’ve tried to talk her into it a billion times.’
Viv smiles and shrugs. The thought of talking to a stranger about her sister’s death has always made her feel intensely uncomfortable, though she’s not sure why. She’d been grateful that her mother had never insisted on it when