BEX
The worst that can happen? Well, where do I start? An image of Jen slumped on my sofa, looking like the mere shell of a person, her blue eyes dead and empty, comes back to me. It was the morning after she’d heard the news that she was being let go by her newspaper. She’d insisted on drowning her sorrows with bottle after bottle of white wine, but the next day the hangover and the harsh reality of the situation had kicked in. Laurence knew she was going to stay the night at my place, but he didn’t know the reason why Jen had got so drunk. She said she felt too ashamed to tell him.
She couldn’t see a future for herself, she said. She was worthless. She hadn’t been given a pay-off due to the nature of the dismissal, and she was worried sick about money. She felt so embarrassed that she said she would have to leave London and perhaps even go back up north. It was the end. She felt that she had shared so much in her column – she’d talked about so many intimate aspects of her life – and for what?
As she sat there, looking into the void that was her future, I felt seriously worried about her. I refused to let her out of my sight. I rang Laurence and told him that Jen was feeling the worse for wear after a particularly heavy night – he was used to her marathon drinking sessions – and that she would spend the day with me. He knew that I’d look after her. After all, I was her oldest friend.
I remember the first day we met in the autumn of 1995. We’d both arrived in London from the provinces – Jen from the north and me from Essex. That day, I was sitting in my room at the halls of residence feeling at a loss to know what to do with myself when I heard the sound of crying coming through the thin walls. I got up, peered into the corridor, listened again. There was a stifled sob drifting out of the room to the left. I knocked gently on the door and a moment later a girl with greasy, mousy hair, terrible acne, and thick glasses appeared. She looked like she was itching to get out of her own skin. It was obvious she was crying out to be helped by someone like me.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
The frightened-looking girl wiped the tears away and nodded her head.
‘My mum and dad have gone and I’m feeling a bit low,’ I said. My words were more for her benefit than my own.
The mousy-haired girl looked nonplussed, but I continued. ‘I’ve got some cider if you want some?’
And with that the girl, who told me her name was Jennifer Hesmondalgh, smiled. She came back to my room and, as the sweet cider took effect, she started to seem a bit happier.
‘I’m so pleased you’re here,’ I said. ‘I was feeling pretty low when my parents left. Did yours drop you off?’
Jennifer lowered her eyes. ‘I don’t have any,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’ I asked.
‘Parents – they’re both dead,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
‘But it’s okay, I’m fine about it,’ she said in a way that suggested the opposite.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘They died in a car accident when I was fourteen,’ she said. Her eyes blinked a little too quickly. Her fingers reached up nervously to her face. ‘I don’t like to go on about it, but my life changed overnight.’
‘Who’ve you been living with since then?’
‘My mum’s sister,’ she said. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk any more about her past. She gulped down her cider and said, ‘I could get used to this. Any more?’
And with that we moved on to talk about where we’d grown up – she in Lancashire, me in the countryside just outside Colchester – our taste in music (she liked stuff like Take That and Celine Dion, while I couldn’t get enough of the grungier Oasis, Blur and Pulp), and our politics (we both agreed how much we hated the Tories and John Major). We discovered we had other things in common too: neither of us had any brothers and sisters, and both of us were doing English, but at different London colleges. By the end of the night she told me that I could call her Jen. Later, some of the cooler girls on the corridor asked me why I spent so much time with ‘that weird freak’ as they called her. But I felt sorry for her, I guess. I’d always had a soft spot for the underdog. For the runt of the litter.
Jen seemed so vulnerable, so helpless. And she’d lost her parents when still so young. But gradually, as Jen learned to trust me, she opened up about her bulimia. Her low self-esteem. And so I made it my mission to try to bring her out of herself a little. I started by persuading her to ditch some of her frumpier clothes, and took her to Topshop. Then we addressed her diet, swapping junk food for healthier options. I persuaded her to get rid of the thick glasses and replace them with contact lenses. I took her to a nice hairdresser, who suggested she go blonde.
Jen got the bulimia under control, her acne began to melt away, and, with her new highlights, by the end of the second term she looked like a completely different girl. With her new appearance came a new personality, one that was funnier and more confident, able to engage with the world instead of retreating from it. The other students in the halls noticed it too. She started to get asked out by boys, some of them really quite good-looking too, and the bitches who’d been mean to her behind her back began to invite her for coffee and drinks.
And how did she repay me?
The trouble started soon after Jen began to work for the student newspaper and she fell in with a new crowd of people. Initially, she helped with production, checking copy and proofs, occasionally coming up with a witty headline. Then, at the beginning of our second year, the star writer of the paper, Samantha King, did not file her usual column. Guy Davies, the editor, was going mental, ringing Samantha repeatedly and, when he got no answer, he sent someone around to her house. But the news came back that Samantha wouldn’t be filing her column. She’d taken too many drugs and was in a psychiatric unit after suffering a psychotic episode. There was a panic in the office – what was going to fill the empty space? Jen, there doing some subbing, offered to write the column.
I learned all this when we met up for coffee so she could explain what the fuck had happened.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said.
‘Pleased? How exactly would I be pleased?’
‘Because you helped me so much,’ she said. ‘Without you I’d still be the tongue-tied, weird-looking girl that everyone avoided.’
‘But this, Jen. Seriously?’ I said, holding up a copy of the newspaper. I looked down at her column and read out a sentence from the first paragraph. ‘“Bex came along and set about transforming me from an ugly duckling if not into a swan then at least a passable cuckoo or magpie. She gave me the confidence to be me.” I mean, really?’
‘I’m sorry, Bex, but I just panicked,’ she said. ‘It’s just that when Guy told me to write about something that would appeal to freshers, the first thing that came into my mind was how unhappy I was when I arrived at uni. And it’s all true, you know what you did for me.’
‘I don’t care a fuck about the truth!’ I said, my rising voice attracting the attention of strangers in Starbucks. ‘And why did you have to go and use my real name?’
‘I honestly thought you wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘And it’s only your first name.’
‘And what’s with your new name?’ I asked.
The story carried not her own last name, that of Hesmondalgh, but Hunter; later, when she started work as a journalist, she changed her name by deed poll, a sign perhaps that she wanted to rid herself of the past.
‘Guy said that they didn’t have time to redesign the page and so I had to choose a new byline that was shorter and which would fit into the space.’
I didn’t say anything, knowing that my silence would hurt more than any words.
‘Just looking at it now makes me feel sick,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d never written it. But Guy was looking over my head, asking me whether I’d finished, and when he read the first couple of paragraphs he told me that it was great, told me to keep going. Before I knew it he was sending it off to the printers.’
‘You should have asked me whether I wanted to be in it,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see that?’
We fell into another horrible, moody silence before finally Jen began to speak. ‘What I did was unforgivable, and I can understand it if you don’t want to be friends with me. I’ll do anything – anything – to make it up to you.’
I took one look at her quivering lip and the tears forming in her eyes. I couldn’t be angry with her any longer.
‘Never do anything like that again,’ I said. ‘Okay? Never write about me ever again. Promise?’
‘I promise,’ she whispered.