‘Go on, then,’ Marek smirks. ‘Would you care to enlighten us with some examples?’ Daff opens her mouth to speak, but he shouts over her before she can get a word out: ‘Because, to be honest, I’m not sure I’d even want to be commercially successful anyway.’ She tries again, but Marek is way too loud for her. ‘Anything of any real artistic merit has always been scorned or ignored by the masses,’ he proclaims. ‘Like, look at the Dada movement, right …’ – and at this point, I stop listening and focus on watching Daphne.
She doesn’t seem particularly cross at being interrupted; she just sits there looking at Marek with one eyebrow raised, and it hits me again that I haven’t seen this playful, feisty spark in her in years. If we hadn’t got together – got married – maybe she’d still have it.
‘But isn’t that the ultimate dream?’ she says, when Marek finally breaks off for a swig of snakebite. ‘To make something really good that also resonates with lots of people?’
Marek slaps his glass down. ‘Not achievable, I’m afraid, because most people are idiots. I mean, seriously: can you name one decent writer – in any genre – who’s also commercially successful?’
Daff takes a deep breath and starts counting them off on her fingers. ‘Nora Ephron, Stephen King, Sue Townsend, Armando Iannucci …’ She puffs her cheeks out. ‘That’s four, for a start.’
There’s a beat of embarrassed silence while we all watch Marek consider arguing that these good and successful writers are not good and successful. In the end, he gives up and reaches for a Big Lebowski quote: ‘Well, that’s just like … your opinion, man,’ he drawls.
Daphne holds up a fifth finger. ‘Ah, yeah, and the Coen brothers. Thanks. That’s five. Or six, if we’re counting both of them.’
There are a few laughs at this, and Marek takes out his phone and starts jabbing at it to indicate that the conversation is over.
‘Sorry about that,’ Daphne murmurs to me, not looking in the least bit sorry. ‘I hope I didn’t upset your friend.’
‘He’s not really our friend,’ Harv whispers, leaning across. ‘He’s more a bell-end that happens to live on our corridor.’ Daphne laughs hard at this, and Harv stands up to address the whole table. ‘Right, I’m getting more shots. Who’s in?’
‘Fuck shots,’ says Marek, snapping his phone shut and assuming leadership once again. ‘Let’s play Sardines!’
Chapter Ten
A dozen chairs scrape backwards noisily, and the cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Let’s do it!’ instantly drown out the Kaiser Chiefs’ riot predictions on the stereo.
I can feel beads of sweat starting to prickle on my brow, so I excuse myself and barge through the last-orders throng at the bar, towards the bathroom.
I slip into a cubicle and slump down on top of the toilet lid, my heart pounding in my chest. Playing Sardines in the campus maze was an end-of-term Drama Soc tradition, one that Marek had always insisted we should keep up tonight. But this evening’s game represents something way more significant than a bit of random boozy fun: it was the first time Daphne and I ever kissed.
I take a deep breath and try again to make some sense of the situation. I’ve spent the past half-hour being reminded of how brilliantly Daff and I once got on; how right we once seemed for each other. But while I may not have a clue why this is all happening, one thing I do have is hindsight. And that means I now know exactly how we’ll end up. How far we’ll eventually drift from our hopeful, happy, seemingly perfect-for-one-another teenage selves.
Fifteen years ago, it was just a random quirk of fate that Daphne found me first in the maze. And that quirk has gone on to define the rest of our lives. So maybe this time … will it be Alice who finds me first instead? The idea makes my heartbeat instantly double its speed. Will I get to see what my life would look like if she and I had got together tonight?
There was always something between us, and over the years, it’s like fate has constantly found ways to bring us back together. There was Paris, then Marek’s wedding, and now this drink we’ve arranged back in 2020. Maybe this – tonight – is where it was all supposed to start? But instead, Daphne found me first during the game of Sardines, and all three of our lives were sent spiralling off in the wrong direction …
I must be breathing pretty heavily as these thoughts ricochet around my head because the bloke in the next cubicle thumps the wall and shouts, ‘You all right in there, mate? Tactical chunder?’
I unlock the door and splash some cold water on my face. As I walk out, still dripping and borderline hyperventilating, I bump straight into Alice on her way to the ladies’.
‘Bloody hell,’ she laughs. ‘You look like you’ve just done fifty lengths. You all right?’
I nod.
‘Oh-kay.’ She tilts her head at me. ‘Hardly chatted to you all night, Benjamin. Impossible to tear you away from the sexy props girl … who clearly fancies you, by the way.’
Telling me that random girls clearly fancied me was something Alice did quite a lot over this first term. I would estimate that ninety-eight per cent of the time it was utter bollocks, but still, it always made me feel pretty good. Probably because, even at nineteen, I realised that ‘so-and-so clearly fancies you’ can usually be translated as ‘I clearly fancy you’.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I tell her.
‘Soooo modest.’ She rolls her eyes, mock dramatically, and gives me a coy smile. For a second, it’s like I’m right back at that wedding with her, feeling the words WHAT IF? burn themselves onto my brain.
‘What’s her name again, the props girl?’ Alice asks, fiddling with her fringe. ‘Daisy?’
‘Daphne.’
‘Daphne, right.’ Getting Daphne’s name wrong was something Alice did quite a lot from this night
