Georgia parked
outside the train station and the back door opened. First Tricia’s bags, then
Tricia herself, were flung into the back seat. She slammed the door behind her
and started rooting around the biggest of her bags, shivering. After pulling
out a towel and wrapping it round her drenched self, she finally sat back in
her seat and clutched her legs to her chest, trying to stay warm and get dry.
“I am going to abso-bloody-lutely murder Clive,” was the first thing she said out
loud.
“And hello to you too, babe,” Georgia
resisted the urge to chuckle.
“Hey, Tricia!” came a chorus of voices
from the car’s dashboard. It was then that Tricia realised that the
speakerphone was on and she had just expressed her anger to people in three
different counties.
“We should probably hop off now,” said
Joe’s voice, “Our pizza and should be here in a couple of minutes anyway.”
“And cheesecake!” Lucy added almost
gleefully.
“Yeah, exactly,” said Joe, “It’s pizza
and cake time down here. Who knows, if we’re feeling adventurous we might even
have something healthy.” Everybody laughed and the voices of Lucy, Joe and
Steve all said goodbye, with a lot of emotional thanking on Lucy’s part and
more than the usual amount of “I love you”s from everyone. Then there was a
swift, “Gotta go too, love you, bye!” from Claire’s voice when the sound of the
door to her flat opening and Jill’s voice crowing “We’re baa-aack” came through
the phone. Georgia hung up the phone, checked if Neil was still okay and then
turned to the soggy girl in the back seat.
“So what exactly happened?” she asked
the scowling-slightly-less-than-before Tricia.
“Clive promised he would pick me up and
he never did. He rang me after I had already left the station to say that
something had come up and he couldn’t make it but he would pay for my taxi. So,
I couldn’t get back into the station, there are no taxis because it’s Sunday
evening, my bags are super heavy and it started to rain after about two
minutes.”
“Is that when you rang me?”
“No, I rang you just before the heavens
opened. When I was still slightly happy and had a little dignity left. Did you
know that people in cities just drive past and stare at you when you’re
drenched outside a train station?”
“In London, they drive past and laugh.
Or ignore you altogether.”
“I miss my village.”
The two girls and Neil spent the drive
back to the house comparing country folk, city folk and London folk, whom
Georgia maintained were altogether an entirely different species. Every time he
laughed Neil groaned in pain, which only made the girls laugh harder. They
passed their favourite cafĂ© on the way and Tricia said, “Wow, do you know what
I really fancy? A sandwich. Neil, do you have any suggestions? I think prawn
and taramasalata sounds pretty good right about now.” This caused Georgia to
laugh so much she had to pull over to the side of the road to avoid having an
accident. Neil, on the other hand, did not find it so amusing. Then, Georgia
stopped laughing abruptly and gasped. She pointed out of the car to an umbrella
sheltering two figures with their arms wrapped around each other.
“What?” asked Tricia confusedly,
looking in the direction Georgia was showing but only seeing the umbrella,
“Gee, do you need a new umbrella or something?”
“No, look!” Georgia nearly yelled.
Tricia looked. She saw the umbrella adjust slightly, just enough so that she
could see the faces of the people beneath it. Georgia didn’t even have enough
time to cry, “Trish, wait!” before Tricia had flung open the car door, thrown
herself out onto the street and planted her feet firmly on the pavement in
front of the couple under the umbrella. It was still pouring.
For Clive, time stood still. Or at
least, it slowed down so much that it seemed as if it as standing still for a
moment. He looked up from under his umbrella and saw Tricia, face like thunder,
tongue like lightning, drenched with rain. A storm of a girl he did not want to
face. Then, within the same millisecond he became acutely aware of the fact
that he was strolling leisurely down the street with his arm wrapped tenderly
around the waist of someone he should not be seen in that position with,
especially not by Tricia and especially not by Tricia when she was in this
condition. Then, time started up again but still felt like it was going all too
slowly as he tried to disentangle his arm from his companion’s body and put a
respectable amount of distance between them. By the time he had finished doing
this, Storm-Tricia was being joined by Confused-Yet-Sympathetic-Georgia, who
had acquired an umbrella from the back seat of her car, which he now realised
was parked right next to them. Georgia sheltered her already-soaking friend.
Time sped right back up to normal when Tricia started shouting at him.
“So this is what you leave me stranded
for? So that you can go and hang out with Thomas, who broke my heart? I was
cold, soaked, tired, miserable, unhappy and alone and you were just about town with my ex, like you were the
best of friends?” she screamed at him. Clive was lost for words. He wasn’t sure
whether it was that he couldn’t respond, that he didn’t know how, or that he
didn’t want to. As the silence grew, though, so did the anger inside Tricia,
who continued to scream, “Do you seriously have nothing to say for yourself?
Nothing? Seriously?” while Georgia attempted to calm her down. Finally, Georgia
gave up trying to be the calming influence and chose to shout over her instead.
“Tricia for goodness’ sake we
understand that you’re angry but isn’t there something else about this
situation that seems like an important thing to ask about?” she yelled, grabbing
Tricia by the shoulders (as well as she could whilst holding an umbrella) and
turning her so that they were facing each other, before turning her back
towards Clive and Thomas. Tricia looked confused, she had been too blinded by
her own fury to notice what Georgia had, and what Clive had been the most
afraid of her noticing.
“Clive, Thomas. Are you two on a date?”