I freeze with shock.
A strange, high-pitched whine starts up in my head and I think I might faint.
I know the voice.
It belongs to Carol.
How did she … ?
My legs are shaking but I force myself to walk into the room.
And then I exhale slowly.
Of course.
It’s the home movie DVD.
I collapse back onto the sofa, weak with relief. Gee thanks, Fez, for giving me the fright of my life twice in one night!
On the TV screen, Carol is laughing into the camera. ‘You’ve got a message! You’ve got a message!’ She’s in a bar, surrounded by faces I know from my London days, and she’s waving my old mobile phone about. I lean closer to the screen. Her blonde hair was longer then, swinging on her shoulders. She looks relaxed and carefree. And so young.
‘It might be Bob!’ she sings teasingly to the person operating the camcorder, who, presumably, is me.
There are butterflies in my stomach but I can’t tear my eyes away.
I remember the occasion as if it were yesterday. It was a Christmas night out four years ago and for some reason, I’d decided to be the mildly irritating person who records the occasion by pointing a piece of technology in her friends’ faces all night.
Dark-haired Roz, with her exotic Dita Von Teese looks, is loving it, posing and pouting like a B-list celebrity, really playing up to the camera. She nudges Carol out of the way then leans towards me for a sultry close-up, prompting shrieks of laughter from around the table.
God, they’re all there.
I peer closer.
Sally, Nicola and Emma, who shared the flat below Carol and me, sit along a banquette, giggly and glammed up in party dresses with red tinsel in their hair. They raise their cocktails to the camera and begin wailing a flat and drunkenly shambolic rendition of ‘White Christmas’.
Then the camera swings to Carol, in a skinny green strapless dress. She’s trying to access my message.
‘No! Give it here!’
I start at the sound of my own voice.
Suddenly, a blank grey wall fills the screen as the camcorder is hastily put down.
Then one of the girls – Nicola, I think – shouts, ‘Come on, Bobbie, what does he say?’ and the camera wobbles around before settling on me.
Seeing how I looked then makes me catch my breath. My hair is much shorter – sleek and shoulder-length – and I’m wearing a pretty, beaded shift dress in deep turquoise.
I could be looking at a stranger.
‘Get lost, Nic,’ squeals the person who used to be me, holding up her hands to shield her face.
‘Does he want a second date, then?’ she persists. ‘Is he coming back for more?’
Then Carol leans in and shouts at the camera, ‘He’d bloody better be back, or he’ll have me to answer to. Nobody disrespects my best friend!’
And I’m laughing and saying, ‘Oh God, poor Bob. He doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for!’
Carol raises her cocktail. ‘To Bob, who hasn’t the bloody foggiest, bless him.’
I clink her glass and we lean together, smiling broadly at the camera. Two best friends – one small, dark and curvy, the other blonde and reed slim – enjoying a Saturday night out with the girls. Apparently without a care in the world.
I grab the remote and hit the pause button. Then I sit there for goodness knows how long, studying those two faces.
Deeply immersed in memories, I’m suddenly aware the flat buzzer has sounded at least twice.
I stare towards the door, still dazed.
Is it Fez, back again already? Quickly I scan the room to see if he’s left anything behind by mistake.
Then I rush through to the intercom in the hallway.
‘Hi!’ barks a voice. ‘Open up. We’ve got an emergency.’
It’s Carol.
That probably means I’ll be cleaning tomorrow, I think, as I open the door and wait for her to run up the stairs.
‘Hope I haven’t interrupted anything I shouldn’t.’ She runs her eyes over my outfit and hands me a bag with a uniform in it. Then she barges through to the living room without even asking if she should take off her shoes, shouting, ‘So this is Bobbie Central. Very – er – cosy.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ I mutter, following her through.
Never mind cosy. What she really means is it’s tiny. And of course it is, especially when you compare it to her vast, cheerless mausoleum of a penthouse apartment.
Anyway, I was right. Apparently Rona and Violet, two of our regular cleaners, both phoned in sick and we’re a man down – so, yes, tomorrow I will be scrubbing toilets and dredging strangers’ hairs from plugholes, despite the fact it’s not in my job description.
‘What’s this?’ She snatches up the remote and fumbles for the rewind button.
‘Oh, nothing.’ I feel quite faint as I watch our past zipping backwards at high speed. ‘Fez brought it round.’
‘Well, it’s obviously not nothing,’ she says belligerently, plonking herself down in the middle of the sofa.
I watch from the door as she glues herself to the screen, as transfixed as I was a few minutes earlier.
Suddenly I’m gripped by the strangest sensation.
I am soaring through the air, high up in the clouds, looking down on the top of Carol’s head as if I’ve given my body the slip. Moving forward, I grasp the back of the sofa.
It’s only Carol’s second visit here. The first occasion was when I moved in two years ago and she dropped off a box of my old stuff from the London place. That time, she didn’t even bother to cross the threshold.
We reach the part in the footage where we clink glasses and smile into the lens.
Then more people arrive, including Beau, Carol’s boyfriend at the time. He balances his big, rugby player body on the arm of her chair, takes her face in his hands and kisses her as if there’s no one else around. Roz shouts, ‘Get a room!’ and everyone laughs and whistles, and Beau says, ‘Hey, it’s not easy dating a workaholic. I’m just pinning her down while I get the chance.’
I look at the back of Carol’s sleek blonde head. What’s it like for her to see him after so long? And whatever happened to Beau after she ditched him?
Then suddenly, the video leaps to another scene and we’re sitting round the kitchen table in Carol’s London flat; me, Carol, Roz and Sally. There are boxes everywhere – on the floor, stacked by the door and on the table beside the empty mugs and a half-eaten packet of cookies.
Painful feelings rush back.
It’s the day I left London.
Everything had turned sour. I couldn’t afford to stay. So I packed one day and left the next.
It was so rushed that apart from Carol, only Sally and Roz were around to see me off.
Sally must have picked up the camcorder from one of the boxes. ‘I can’t believe you’re going, Bobbie!’ she’s saying. ‘It’s the end of an era.’
The picture wobbles a bit then Roz, queen of melodrama, starts imploring me to stay. ‘We’ll look after you,’ she keeps saying. ‘We will. Won’t we, Carol?’
I’m smiling at them in turn. But it’s a stiff, artificial smile. The sort that eventually makes the muscles in your jaw begin to ache.
I can remember it so well. My heart was breaking but I was determined not to show it.
I was thinking, If I can get out of here now, with my eyes still dry, I can show Carol I couldn’t care less that she’s just sitting there, detached and silent, ignoring me and refusing to join in with the girls’ pleas for me to stay.
I watch her now as she leans towards the screen. What is she thinking as she observes herself, all stiff-backed and stony-faced, on that awful day three years ago? Does she regret the coldness of her send-off? Probably not, otherwise relations between us would surely have thawed during the intervening time.
Why couldn’t she understand that, in the end, I had to step off that terrifying rollercoaster ride? Throw in the towel and retreat back up North.
Trading the stock markets was the most exhilarating experience I’d ever had.
When it was going our way.