Louise Leverett - Love, and Other Things to Live For

I shook my head.

‘Shame. I like your bag,’ she said, referring to my pink rucksack, spinning the conversation on its head.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I like your shoes.’

Since that night, we’ve both stuck around. It’s not that she’s a good friend per se, it’s that we’ve become a firm fixture in each other’s lives. First we created memories and then memories created a history and with that came the foundations of a friendship. Solid but low maintenance.

I wish I had her brains. I think she even surprises herself with her razor-sharp intelligence at times. She’s a pro-choice, pro-women ball-buster, blazing the path, charging ahead so that the less confident ones, like me, can trot along behind. She’s the one who will convince you that just one more tequila shot won’t kill you, knowing that she’ll also be there to hold your hair back when you’re hanging over the toilet bowl slowly coming to the realisation that it might. For the record: she can hold her drink, I can’t. She is also the friend who will read every text he ever sent you and piece together the scenario like the Robin to your Batman, sharing the burden so you feel like less of a sociopath. She can spot a liar from forty paces, she’ll defend you but never judges, and beneath the attractive exterior she is actually pretty tough – a lot tougher than me – and life is a little less scary knowing she is on my side.

Sean is a different kettle of fish: a jester in a cashmere cardigan. A New Yorker living in London who I’d met at a farmer’s market while embarking on a celebrity-endorsed, high-intensity juice detox. We decided that we would go for sober dinners together and talk about sensible topics like our careers and world affairs. The detox lasted one month, our friendship somewhat longer. On the inside, half an inch beneath the funny, confident exterior, lies a quiet determination, an unyielding passion which leads him to still be in the design studio at eleven thirty, long after his team have gone home. He won’t think twice about spending a month’s rent on a jumper and will somehow convince you to do the same. He is the friend who will sit and listen to your problems without so much as mentioning his own: there’s a resilient enamel that coats a sensitive soul, a soul you have to keep your eye on because deep down you know he isn’t keeping an eye on himself. For years he dated Paul, a man almost twice his age, who would do spontaneously romantic things, like arrange a weekend for two in Europe for a birthday celebration. I remember these fine details, as I was the one roped into hiking up Regent Street looking for a pair of brown-leather ankle boots specifically for the occasion.

‘I never thought I’d be jealous of my best friend, his older lover and a pair of gloriously soft ankle boots,’ I said, pressing my hand firmly inside one. Far from the perfect audience, I watched him walk up and down the carpeted floor of Russell and Bromley one Saturday afternoon as he looked at me for encouragement.

‘Just take them,’ I said, in desperation, perched on the seats designated for customers to try on the shop’s wares, ‘and then you can take me for a cocktail.’

There’s one memory that will last beyond the drunken nights, the cinema trips, the endless stream of gossiping phone calls – the time I got a different kind of phone call one cold, rainy night in November. It was 2.30 a.m. and I was fast asleep when my phone rang loudly on the bedside table. Seeing it was Sean I assumed he’d been partying and had locked himself out again and needed a place to stay. I almost ignored it.

‘What do you want, Sean?’ I snapped. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

There was a silence. I could hear talking in the background as my eyes slowly opened and I came to my senses.

‘Sean, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’

‘It’s Paul,’ I heard, quietly but clearly. ‘He’s been in an accident. I’m at the hospital.’

Thirty minutes later I walked down the long, squeaky corridor that seemed endless and sterile. I turned into the waiting room and saw Sean seated wearing a pale blue jumper and jeans. The sort of outfit you put on in a hurry, I thought to myself. I crouched down and put my arm on his back. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.

He lifted his head, his face reddened and swollen from the tears. ‘He was driving back from work and a lorry clipped the wheel arch. You know how fast he drives.’

I sat there and held him until sunrise.

Paul’s funeral was on a sunny Tuesday morning. It was a small affair, there were no hymns and two readings, and it was over by midday.

Last but not least is Marlowe: graceful swan, mother earth incarnate, encyclopaedia of heaven-sent advice from the sane and grown-up world. She is perfect and I am a mess. We’d met as teenagers – two cocky, know-it-all dreamers, whose backsides were about to be spanked by life right into next Tuesday. While I’d continued this behaviour well beyond its sell-by date, she’d been forced to grow up far quicker than the rest of us. Marlowe is a class act who is seemingly unshakable navigating obstacles that would leave others screaming into their pillow. There’s an apologetic air about her, as with those who have spent their life subject to the jealousy of their peers. It’s as if they need to make it up to those around them for not being clumsy, or slightly chubby or keeping a coat on when they’ve spilled soup down their jumper. Or for being born into success, for that matter. Marlowe is constantly under the watch of her parents who seem to guide the trajectory of her life from the conservatory of their conservative city townhouse. Her dad was a famous journalist and now deep into writing his memoirs, and her mum was an English socialite, whose glamour and impeccable sense of style has been retained well into her sixties.

Marlowe was always going to succeed in whichever field she chose to pursue so you can imagine our surprise when things took a turn for the unexpected, a few years ago, one summer afternoon in July. It was the hottest day of the year and London had quite literally come to a standstill. The smell of Hendrick’s gin filled the air, and for the first time in a long while a drought had threatened to take hold across Britain.

We’d been invited to one of her parents’ infamous barbecues. They owned a townhouse in West London and for one afternoon a year it became home to the who’s who of the slightly elder, more intellectual social scene. At that time, we used these occasions as an opportunity to stock up on free booze before going to a club later that night, but this time things unfolded rather differently. I arrived late, as usual, and expected Marlowe to be in the garden barefoot in jeans amidst a sea of Panama hats and beige summer suits, but this time she was nowhere to be seen. I made my way through the bodies cluttering the house, loud in idle chitchat, and arrived at the bottom of the stairs where I pulled out my phone to text her. As I began to type, I looked up towards the top of the dark staircase to see her seated in a crisp white T-shirt and denim skirt, a distinct shine on her bare shins gleaming through the shadows.

‘Jess, up here,’ she said, signalling me into the bathroom.

I followed her across the marble tiled floor and there it was, lying on the sink, lodged sideways between the hot and cold taps, the end of the future as we knew it and a building block of a dilemma for Marlowe. A pregnancy test that read positive .

‘Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Is it yours?’

‘Of course it’s mine,’ she snapped, grabbing it to shake it.

‘I don’t think shaking it is going to help, Mars.’

She sat down gently on the bathroom floor and drew her legs towards her. I took hold of the test to double-check its result and took a deep breath to replace the ones I’d since lost. She looked up at me with glassy eyes.