The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

Me and Mark, Miranda and Julien, Nick and Bo, Samira and Giles, their six-month-old baby, Priya. And Katie.

Food brings people together, doesn’t it?

They seem to be able to fall back into the easy camaraderie of years gone by no matter how much time has passed since they last saw each other, especially with the help of a couple of beers.

The mousy nobody—me—would be the kind, clever, pitifully misunderstood character who would ultimately save the day. But real life isn’t like that. People like them don’t need to be unpleasant.

And the ones like me, the mousy nobodies, we don’t always turn out to be the heroes of the tale. Sometimes we have our own dark secrets.

Because there is something unnerving about the isolation, knowing how far we are from everything.

Heather is a good person. He is not. Before he came here, he did a terrible thing. More than one thing, actually. A person like her should be protected from someone like him.

He has taken lives, many of them in fact. And not just animal. He knows better than anyone that it is not something to boast about. It is a dark place from which you can never quite return. It does something to you, the first time. An essential change somewhere deep in the soul, the amputation of something important. The first time is the worst, but with each death the soul is wounded further. After a while there is nothing left but scar tissue.

Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.

Surviving, existing—just. Not living. That is a word for those who seek entertainment, pleasure, comfort out of each day.

Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself. That’s the lizard brain, too.

But that’s the thing about old friends, isn’t it? Sometimes they don’t even realize that they no longer have anything in common. That maybe they don’t even like each other anymore.

I’m not saying that I have a drinking problem; I don’t. But I don’t ever drink for pleasure. I do it out of necessity. I use it as another painkiller: to blunt the edge of things, to alleviate the chronic, aching torment of memory.

when some people have kids it’s like they’ve had a personality transplant. Or a lobotomy.

After uni you spend the next few years winnowing those remaining friends down, realizing that you don’t have the time and energy to trek across London or indeed the country to see people who have barely anything in common with you anymore.

Wounds inflicted at that sort of raw, unformed time in our lives tend to cut the deepest—and leave the worst scars.

She’s like one of them, one of the adults who tried to diagnose me, so long ago. Not a psychopath, actually. Personality disorder. That’s the “official” term for what I supposedly have. But I know the real definition.

Love. That’s all it is.

My whole pregnancy has been tangled up with my grief for Miranda. Yes, grief. I know it might be almost hard to believe, considering what a terrible friend I had been to her of late. And the way she could be with me.

It’s true, I didn’t always like Miranda. Sometimes I positively hated her. But I did love her. That’s what happens when you have known someone for such a long time. You see all their faults, yes, but you know their best qualities, too—and Miranda had so many of those.