Sam Baker - To My Best Friends

‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘We’re neighbours. I thought I’d brave the bar, but, I didn’t really fancy walking in on my own. To be totally honest,’ she said disarmingly, ‘you’re the only person I’ve met here, so I thought we could give each other some moral support.’

Chapter Four

‘That’s what these are meant to be,’ Jo said, pulling a letter out of her bag. The once-pristine vellum was now scuffed, the midnight-blue ink smudged by tears.

She might have expensive highlights and a three-figure haircut where once the mousy-brown split ends and pink scrunchie had been. She might even have a five-times-a-week runner’s body where once puppy fat had reigned, but right now Jo needed Nicci’s moral support more than ever.

‘Moral support?’ Mona snorted, pulling her own letter, minus its envelope, from her jacket pocket. ‘Only Nicci would do this and expect us to call it moral support.’

Ignoring Mona’s comments, Jo stretched out her hand. ‘Swap?’

‘Hey, what about me?’ Lizzie said, pouting. ‘Just because you two think my bequest is a joke.’

Leaning over to hug Lizzie, Jo handed her letter to Mona and reluctantly took Lizzie’s from her. It was true, though. She didn’t really want to read Lizzie’s letter. It was Mona’s she wanted to get her hands on. Mona had to be mistaken, she just knew it.

Mona dropped into the leather chair vacated by David, while Jo perched on the edge of the sideboard and Lizzie sat on a crate. For several long seconds, the women read in silence; the shed was so quiet they could hear voices coming from the kitchen at the far end of the garden.

‘Lizzie!’ Jo snorted, breaking their concentration. ‘I don’t want to be mean, but leaving her garden to you – a woman who famously reduced a cactus to an explosion of dust – what was Nicci thinking?’

‘I know.’ Lizzie’s laugh was mirthless. ‘How did she put it? “I can’t trust anyone else with it”? She might as well have said I’m the best of a bad lot!’

‘Cheers,’ Mona muttered without looking up. ‘What does that make me, then?’

‘That’s not true,’ Jo said, as if Mona hadn’t spoken. ‘Listen to this:

‘I need to make sure the things I love, the people I love, look after one another . . . So I’m leaving you my garden. The most nurturing of my friends. I know you’ll lavish on it the care that I tried to.’

Lizzie smiled. That much, at least, was true. She would try. But she couldn’t guarantee she would succeed, not if her own garden was anything to go by. The twenty-by-twenty square of concrete (inappropriately and not entirely honestly described by the property developer as a ‘private terrace ideal for outdoor entertaining’) was lined with the corpses of slaughtered plants. Not even last summer’s dead plants: most were relics from the summer before, when Lizzie had still believed her green fingers were in there somewhere, their potential just waiting to be discovered.

Returning her attention to Mona’s letter, Lizzie gasped. ‘Oh, Mo! This is excessive, even by Nicci’s standards.’

‘Told you,’ Mona shrugged. ‘Mind you,’ she waved Jo’s letter in the air, ‘talking of excessive . . .’

Jo rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘But if I read this right,’ Lizzie continued, ‘Nicci’s left David to you because you’re “too self-sufficient”. Is that Nicci-speak for lonely?’

Avoiding her gaze, Mona shrugged.

‘Let me see,’ Jo held out her hand for the letter. ‘It can’t be that basic. That doesn’t sound like Nicci at all. There must be some mistake.’

‘There isn’t,’ Mona rounded on her. ‘I know what that letter says – how many times d’you think I’ve read it? How many times have you read yours?’

‘OK, OK.’ Jo held up her hands in defeat.

‘It is,’ Lizzie said. ‘Listen . . .’ And she began to read aloud.

‘The thing is, I worry about you. You’re so . . . self-sufficient. Dan’s growing up fast and I worry you’re both alone. I know Greg broke your heart and then Neil stomped on it, but it’s like you’ve given up. You’re not interested in anyone else, in finding anyone new. It’s over two years now. You have to stop mourning the loss of – don’t hate me, but I have to be honest, it’s not like you can kill me, after all! – the loss of something that never really was. You must move on. For your sake and Dan’s. And I want to help you.’

‘Help?’ Mona spat. ‘Interfere, more like.’

Jo threw her a look, but she didn’t disagree. How could she?

‘Well,’ Mona said. ‘Honestly, only Nicci could interfere from beyond the grave. And I don’t know why you’re sticking up for her. I mean, take a look at this.’

‘I have,’ Jo said. ‘Believe me, I have.’

‘Let me finish this first,’ Lizzie interrupted. ‘She says it. I can’t believe she actually says it: “So I’m asking you to take care of David . . . the love of my life. The man I’ve been with my whole adult life . . . until death us do part.”’ Lizzie looked up, her eyes wide and glittering.

‘Lizzie,’ Mona said, ‘did you think I’d made it up?’

‘No, no. It’s just . . . I . . .’ Lizzie started reading again. “I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I have to – death is about to part us. It will have parted us when you read this, and so I’m bequeathing my beloved David to you.”’

‘Give me that.’ Jo snatched the letter and the others watched her eyes speed down the page.

‘What the fuck?’ she murmured as she reached the end. ‘What. The. Fuck. Nicci, Nicci, Nicci, you can’t just go leaving people to other people. What were you thinking?’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Lizzie put in cautiously, ‘. . . perhaps she wasn’t? Perhaps . . . the drugs?’ Her voice faltered.

‘No!’ Jo said fiercely. ‘Don’t say that. Much as we don’t want this to be happening, Nicci wanted it. We have to . . . we have to try to find a way to cope with it.’

‘And you?’ Mona said, suppressing a shiver. The shed had not got any warmer in the half an hour they’d been sitting there. If anything the temperature had dropped. ‘What are you going to do to “cope with it”?’

‘No idea,’ Jo said, heaving herself off the sideboard and perching on the arm of the chair beside Mona so she could see her own letter over her friend’s shoulder. Not that she needed to. She knew the damn thing by heart. She’d read it so many times it was a wonder her eyes hadn’t worn away the words.

‘“You’ve been such a good godmother, which is why I need you to be more,”’ she read aloud.

‘More? What does that mean, “more”?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Read on.’ Jo nodded to Mona.

Mona did, the words sounding wrong through the remnants of her Aussie twang.

‘I’ve watched you over the years struggling to be a good stepmother to Si’s boys, trying and not managing to have children of your own. Harrie and Charlie are going to need a mummy. And I’d like her to be you. Not literally, of course! But their emotional care I leave in your hands. Under your watchful eye my two girls will find the confidence to grow into fearless, talented, wonderful young women. The women I know they can be. The woman you are. The woman I always strove to be.

‘But what’s she asking, precisely?’ Mona asked, when she’d finished reading. ‘Surely she’s not leaving you custody of Charlie and Harrie over David?’

‘No,’ Jo laughed. ‘No,’ she said again, with less certainty. ‘At least . . . I don’t think so.

‘I think what she’s saying, in her clumsy, bossy, Nicci way is, since, so far, I’ve been unable to have children of my own,’ Jo paused and swallowed hard, ‘I can have first dibs on hers. You know, Christmas, Easter . . . As if I don’t have enough other people’s children to keep me busy on public holidays with Sam and Tom.’ Her smiled dropped. ‘Not that I don’t love Si’s boys, because I do.’