Just Last Night

by Mhairi McFarlane

You were alive again last night. I wake up with a small startle at sudden consciousness, and lie still in the dark, my brain scrabbling to reassemble reality. It wasn’t a nightmare—and I’ve had plenty of those—it was just another world, exactly like this one, but with a dramatic difference. Your presence. Your presence, which I took for granted.

How about Switzerland? you said. We had plans.

I miss you. I hate inventing you, scripting your lines, instead of having the original.

But the ease with which I can conjure you up, it feels like a curse. A parlor trick, but it’s ghoulish, a parody. It’s like waltzing with a mannequin.

Someone threw cold water at him from the sky,

Someone once said to me birth was the most ordinary and extraordinary thing you’ll ever experience, simultaneously, and death is the same. The fact of yours sits there, implacably, being so banal and so mind-blowingly strange at the same time. It will always be like this, I have come to realize. The ache is permanent, it must be accommodated. It’s part of my body now. I keep waiting to get past it. To “move on,” to absorb it, to set it aside, to make sense of it, to process it. For it to be, somehow, “behind” me. What next? I keep thinking, with a pain in my stomach like it’s been slit open. And—there is no next, stupid. That’s the point. Someone has gone, forever, and you have to stop waiting for them to come back. Without realizing it, you are stuck on pause, as if their not being here might change. This is what I never knew about loss—it’s also about what you gain. You carry a weight that you never had before. It’s never behind you. It’s alongside you. “Forever”: people say it in wedding vows all the time like they understand what it means, but actual forever is fucking huge.

Leonard, an omnivorous eater and troublesomely impromptu urinator,

“And we are always fucked by the same five determined men in Lands’ End packable anoraks.”

Justin is a self-proclaimed “tiresome show-off and performative middle child”

Ed whispers, faux-earnestly.

Ed laughs. I love the way he laughs: it starts in his shoulders.

Justin says, pulling an “old geezer” rubbery face.

“A ‘stormzy,’ you say,” Ed says, in a creaky High Court judge voice. “Whatever a Stormzy is,” and writes “Mr. Storm Zee” on the paper.

Ed has really nice hands; I’m a sucker for nice hands. He cycles a lot and can mend things, and I am now mature enough to app...

Ed looks like a teacher—a film or television, glossy young teacher—with his unthreatening, handsome solidity, strawberry-blond, close-cropped hair. In a crisis in a situation full of strangers, Ed’s would be the kind, reliable face you’d hope to see. He’d be the guy offering his necktie as a makeshift tourniquet.

Part of the pleasure of this weekly pub appointment to lose the pub quiz, I think, is it brings out and defines all the roles in our foursome. Ed and I clowning around together, Justin refereeing, with his caustic wit, Susie playing exasperated mother.

Sometimes I stop participating in the conversation and just hum happily inside myself, enjoying our togetherness, reveling in the way we all broadcast on the ...

My heart sinks a notch, but I ignore that it has done this and paste on a strong, welcoming smile.

Serious hygge to be had, on this side of the window.

She’s like a human Bellini.

she says, bullishly.

I always respect Ed for leaping chivalrously to Hester’s defense, while wishing it was for someone who better deserved it.

I never know how much of my dislike is plain old envy.

Justin and Susie are both personality types who, by and large, don’t do guilt. It would slow them down considerably. I drink guilt like a smoothie for breakfast, and much as I revel in our regular secret back channel comms about Hester, I know I shouldn’t.

As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are intolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back. Option two might not be assertive or noble but it has a lot less impact on the social contract.

When I return to the table, I can sense, at the pace we’re drinking, we’re beginning a messy descent from general knowledge acuity.

Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot. Coincidentally my mum says that too.

and a tiny, near-imperceptible moment passes between us, and I mentally put it in one of my specimen jars.

Why do they think they’ve proved their point, not yours?”

And we laugh, but I know, as we hit our mid-thirties, it’s feeling just a trifle hollow.

God, she’s a joy.

The thing with Hester is, there’s a big whistling gap where her niceness is meant to be, but she’s absolutely everything else. Good-looking, energetic, high-earning, organized, confident, effortful, sociable, homemaking, birthday-remembering, smart.

Sometimes naturally loyal people fail to spot when they shouldn’t be loyal.

God, I am way too British not to find this excruciating.

The room’s part-liquid.

Susie, Justin, and I all realize we should be doing the same, as we look around us, and join in, in mechanical fashion.

and Justin, Susie, and I drink our drinks and say nothing in the din.

Justin says, in that quick, light way that gets him away with murder.

“It struck me as a really nice thing for you two to do, to make you feel part of it,” Hester says to me and Susie, as if we’re the ones on a school trip by grace of a special hardship fund.

Dirk is a rugged individualist, a white-whiskered supervillain, and no one’s going to take his liberty, or his bollocks.)

a conscience weighs too much.

It interacts with the alcohol in my bloodstream and makes me feel defiant, and I have an idea.

Zack said, with the insouciance of being male and twenty-four and having a taut stomach:

It was as if God knew I was acting out of character and decided to prank me.

I need validation tonight. I want to do something that says I’m still desirable.

You are doing something just so you can tell him about it and make him feel something back,

The reply is near immediate, so my fate is written.

My silent house is full of reproach.

I’m carried on fumes to the door of the bar, but seeing it mostly in darkness, and realizing my friends are asleep—or celebrating engagements, but either way, in bed—by now, brings my folly home to me.

Given none of my friends are likely to see any message until tomorrow, it’d help with the investigation more than save me.