April Fools' Day

It was Monday 1st April, after my maths class, and I was sitting in the canteen, eating my way through a dull peanut butter sandwich. Smooth, not crunchy. Briony really hated smooth peanut butter, just on principle she said. Peanut butter should always be crunchy, it was one of her rules in life. She had a friend who hated nachos in much the same way. He used to always get really angry, she said, going on about how he’d never pay for someone to warm up some crisps for him. Some people might call it overreacting, irrational even. But Briony liked people with strong opinions like that. Real strong convictions about what they liked and disliked, and a voice to express those convictions. It kept you in good practice for real world situations, when you needed to fight against something a little more urgent than the tyranny of nachos and smooth peanut butter. But here I was sitting my peanut butter sandwich, even though I didn’t even like peanut butter.

I’d barely seen Briony since that day at Boston Tea Party. Two months had passed. It dragged, every night a long walk home, kicking up stones on the pavement, jeering at cars in the dark, faltering on doorsteps, not wanting to go inside and face reality. We were like shadows, clinging to the streetlight on which we were dependant. It was a dark existence, but we needed the light to exist, so we stayed out, we slunk like foxes round the night time alleys, basking in the orange glow of the streetlamps. Things at home had become unbearable. I would stay at Alison’s sometimes, curled together downstairs on her sofa. I never told her about what was happening though. And she never asked. It was always Briony who I spoke with.

Briony was a surprisingly patient confidante, in her way. We’d talk maybe twice a week on the phone, sometimes she’d just call because she was feeling fed up, sometimes she’d have a real dilemma she needed help solving, she’d ache down the phone to me, her oh-so-tragic life. But she listened to me in turn, she bore my talk, and you really felt that she was engaged with the conversation, that she was nodding down the phone, always responding at the correct times with gasping, sympathetic little gushes. We shouldered each other surprisingly well. Leading such separate lives meant impartiality in our advice, a reassurance of our incapacity to really interfere. And in any case, we weren’t really looking for advice. We both just wanted to talk and moan and not have someone belittle our problems, not have someone try to helpfully pack them up when really we just wanted to wallow. We didn’t pretend to understand each other’s situations, and so in that way we stood far apart, never tangling ourselves up, just two walls with words bouncing off one and other. Or at least, that’s how it should’ve been, how it could’ve been. Theoretically. That’s how it was for her.

But I was in love with her, and so it didn’t quite work out like that. She needed me though, I know she did. She wasn’t just dragging me along, she really needed me, she understood the connection we had. And god knows, she tried. She tried so hard to skirt over the fact that I was so crazy about her. But with a skirt as short and flippy as hers it was a little difficult.

I only saw Briony maybe a couple of times between February and April, with Emma tagging along too. Briony refused to see me on her own, and when we walked home from Emma’s she would always rush along in the dark, claiming she had a curfew, but I knew she didn’t want to be alone with me, she made it obvious. Our meetings with Emma were always pointless, frustrating affairs, unplanned and lacking any kind of significance. They were hurried, too. Always cut short by some impending essay due, or some shoes to shine. Dumb excuses like that. Briony was full of them, she offered them with the air of a princess in a Disney film throwing flowers to a great crowd of people, scattered the petals skywards. But we talked a lot on the phone, so at least I had that as some consolation. I really held onto that as having some kind of meaning, I really believed it. I had no idea she’d replace me in the blink of an eye and someone else would be answering the phone and hearing her stories once I was gone. Because of course, they weren’t for me, those phone calls. They were all to satiate her love of chattering away. She hung up the phone when she was done, never talked until she was falling asleep, desperate to stay on the line, oh no, that was never Briony. Not with me. Not with a lot of guys. Just the one –

But in any case, it was April Fool’s Day, and something was stirring at college. Plans were being made to walk into town during last period. Most people had a free. I shrugged saying I had a class, even though I didn’t. But I wasn’t really interested in walking all that way on a rainy day, and in any case I didn’t have the money to lounge about in Costa, eating overpriced brownies upstairs in the old roof-raftered building opposite the Guild Hall. I started doing my homework for the next class, yawning quietly through a chapter of my history book. But then my ears pricked up. Sleight of hand and twist of fate. Briony.

Briony was the reason they were all so keenly making plans for town. Alison was off sick, so they had pounced on the opportunity to contact Briony and meet her without Alison sulking and whinging. It had just been Charlotte, Emma and Sarah’s little plan at first, but then Nick and Stew had wanted to be involved, and Leila said she needed to go into town anyway for more mascara, and Sam decided then that not going would be missing out on the fun, so they were all going to invade Costa in their pack, they were all going to see Briony. And how excited they were! Few people had seen Briony in weeks, and in that time they had forgotten what a monster they’d turned her into, she was allowed once more to be the fun, chirpy girl who squealed at pigeons in the street, who hiccupped loudly and sneezed quietly.

I haltered, flustered, trapped in the pages of my history text book. How was I to turn things around and agree to come to town without it being obvious I wanted to see Briony? Or would it be okay to be keen to see Briony, I mean, we were all friends after all. Maybe it would be suspicious to not see her, like I was hiding something, when everyone knew I spoke to her fairly often. But did I really want to see her? Once more I was cleaved in two and I felt my eyes burn in a sudden migraine headache; better, worse, blessing, curse. But then it was gone and Leila was saying ‘Are you sure you won’t come, Alex?’ and I shrugged down at Napoleon and said ‘You know, what? Fuck it’ and closed him away with Churchill and Hitler and Stalin and that was that. I was off to Costa.

She was sitting alone when we arrived, in a bluebell blue two piece suit, a German text book open gently in her lap. She looked up as we swaggered in and she opened her mouth slightly in surprise, this troop of colours here to greet her when she was only expecting Charlotte, Emma and Sarah.

‘Jesus guys! We best move to a bigger table, quick, shove on that sofa…’

Leila pounced on it, cat-like claws scratching on the deep brown leather. We piled into the tiny space and I was next to Briony, squashed up close on the settee, my arm gently resting behind her, my shoulder wedged between her angel wings. She held herself very stiffly next to me, not lounging lazily like she might on the sofa at Emma’s house, head on my shoulder. In public she didn’t risk looking so intimate.

‘How come you’re all here?’ she said. I guess she looked pleased, but also a little suspicious, a little sceptical, Chelsea daggers glinting in laughing eyes.

‘Fancied saying hello,’ said Stew and everyone nodded in agreement. Briony stirred her tea and looked pleased with herself.

Light chatter ensued, a perfectly civilised tea party. Brownies and carrot cake, cups and saucers.

‘Alex,’ she said, turning to me with her catlike green eyes. ‘I had the most amazing English lesson today, honestly, I just have to tell you about it…’

‘YAWN! You sound like such a loser…’

‘I wasn’t talking to you Leila, shove off and let Nick and Stewie entertain you,’ laughed Briony. ‘Anyway, Alex. So basically, he was a visiting university lecturer, I can’t remember where from or who he was, apparently he’s just had a book published – oh, an academic book, not a real book – and yeah, he came to talk to our English class. And basically he opened the lesson by writing a whole bunch of colours on the board and he asked us to brain storm what we associated with those colours. So we all settle down and write your typical stuff like black is depression, red is anger or love, all passionate emotions, yellow is danger and warnings, blue is depression et cetera, et cetera. And so he got us all to share, pretended to look all interested, but then turned around and was like “So every time you see the colour yellow you get all tense and alert?” and then he pointed to me and was like “Did you put on that jacket because you were feeling sad this morning?” and of course we all were like nooo….’

‘Right…’ I said, because I felt like I should say something to show I was listening.

‘So then he stood up and got his pen and started brain storming himself, for the colour orange. And he wrote all sorts of things, like Penguin Classics and maths books and marigolds and Ed Sheeran’s album – he was a pretty cool guy if you hadn’t figured – and he wrote ‘Jill’ as well, which is the name of one of Philip Larkin’s two novels and I practically jumped out of my seat because every time I see the colour orange I think of that book, it’s one of my favourites, with its bright orange colours and he was really impressed that I had read it… You should read it too, it’s just perfect, honestly. But anyway, then he did red as well, and wrote things like phone boxes and buses in London, and his daughter’s wellies and Lindt chocolate, and Asia and Christmas. Then he turns round to us and says “Look, these colours aren’t just symbols for emotions in a novel. They are the keys for much deeper ideas that are individual to all of us. When I see the colour purple, I can’t but shake the thought of my grandma with feet too fat for her shoes. When my wife sees purple however, she sees a group of girls in indigo tracksuits, she smells hairspray, tastes its residue on bobby pins as she puts up my daughter’s hair for a ballet exam. For a Chinese person, white isn’t the colour of purity and innocence. It’s the colour of death and absence.” Do you see what he’s trying to say? He explained it much better than I have, but he was making the point that there is so much complexity behind all the images a writer uses…’

‘Yeah, I see what he’s getting at. Sometimes when I read I wonder how much the author has taken from the real world. You know, whether that place ever really existed. Whether the clothes they’re describing, did someone actually wear those? It’s weird to think that every time we read a book, we’re distorting what the writer intended, you know, we’re seeing it through a hundred different filmy layers.’

‘That kind of scares me a little, you know? I’ve always preferred unanimity, the idea that we’re fundamentally all the same, going through the same motions. You read a book and you really feel like it’s speaking to you, but you’re just kidding yourself. You’re taking someone else’s story and making it your own. But then again, I guess words just die on the page once you write them.’

‘What do you mean? How can you say that, I thought you were a great believer in the power of words!’ I said.

‘No, I am, I am. I’m just getting confused. When you write a word, only half of what you mean is transmitted to the page. Maybe not even half. You just have a word, and it’s up to the reader to take from it what they will. Isn’t that scary in some ways?’

‘Briony, what, no,’ I laughed. ‘Just write clearly, write so that your point isn’t cloudy and open to interpretation.’

‘I guess. But I hate the thought that if I were ever to write something, it would stop being mine. It would be someone else’s to misunderstand, like my teacher thinking I wrote about lesbians, remember that? Oh, I don’t know. I’m just full of confusion right now. I’m trying to be philosophical about literature but I’m just making a mess of it.’

She looked up from her tea at that moment and realised that everyone was watching us, listening, torn between bewilderment, exasperation and smugness.

‘What?’ she said, with reproachful eyes.

‘Oh, nothing. Just get a room already guys,’ smirked Sam.

An awkward silence. Briony smiled that kind of smile where your teeth are jammed together and clenching and all your lips want to do is find each other once more and close together safely. Another photograph of Briony, sitting there in Costa, bluebell Briony with her Bobbi Brown lashes bought in a tube from Boot’s, smiling that awkward smile.

‘Anyone want this last bit of brownie?’ said Emma, holding the plate up with a mumsy little smirk.

‘But seriously guys…’ said Sam again, and Briony shot her daggers like I’ve never seen before, shutup shutup shutup. Then she looked at every single person in turn: Stew, Nick, Charlotte, Emma, Sarah, Sam, Leila. A sweeping clockwise movement, catching them each in turn. Then she rolled her eyes very pointedly. Don’t try me, it said.

Stew snorted and drank the last of his coffee. He always had that air of being so over the immature little lives the rest of us led. He had Briony’s back though, standing up and announcing that he had to ‘split’.

‘You still want a lift Queen B?’ he said.

‘Yes please buddy,’ she replied, smiling brightly again, flick of a switch.

‘Why’d she get a lift, she barely lives half a mile away!’ huffed Leila.

‘I said I’d swing by Staples so she could pick up some printer cartridges for her mum. Gotta be helping out Mrs P, my number one gal!’

‘Oh stop, please don’t call my mum that. I don’t want her thinking she’s all cool or anything…’

‘Your mum is cool, please!’

‘Stew, stop. The nicer you are to her, the more heartbroken she’ll be that you’re with Estella and not me…’

‘Nah, you’re just saying that because it’s you who’s heartbroken. I know you want me Bry-Bry.’

‘You wish Pitbull! Come on, we better be off… Oh shit, yeah thanks Nick, don’t want to be losing that!’

‘Only you would leave a lacrosse stick in Costa…’

‘Yeah, I know. I feel like such a tit carrying it around, but Griggs had the biggest go at me for leaving it in the house room, and then Flem got all funny at me for leaving on top of the lockers, such a pain in the ass.’

‘Calm your titties Bry, on y va, chop chop.’

‘Alright, alright. I’m coming. Bye bye my lovelies,’ she said, addressing us with a regal wave of the hand before tripping over her own bag and collapsing laughing against the sofa.