Chloe releases Josh just as abruptly as she embraced him, distracted by the urgent need to check her phone. At least when I was their age I didn’t have to compete for a girl’s attention with five hundred other friends.
Alex, for no apparent reason, suddenly pulls Josh into a headlock and rubs at his hair, making Josh whine. The threat of having his hair messed up infuses Josh with enough strength to push the heftier boy off, and after running his fingers through his fringe a couple of times, Josh raises his fists, pretending to square up to his aggressor. In a flash, Alex’s fists are up as well, and they start to circle each other as best they can in the narrow hallway, Sam and Joel now cheering on their chosen contestant. Josh and Alex pretend to throw punches at each other, until Alex pulls his fist back too fast and knocks his elbow hard on the wall behind him, drawing a silently mouthed expletive and hoots of laughter from the other three boys.
The camaraderie, the rough-and-tumble closeness of these boys, is in some ways even more painful to watch than the slow-burning relationship between Josh and Chloe. Because despite the passage of time, whenever I see Josh and his three mates, it’s like I’m seeing us all over again – me, Max, Tom and Michael. The shoving and piss-taking, the mocking and name-calling, it’s the stuff of male bonding that endures throughout the ages. And whereas the rituals between teenagers of the opposite sex seem to mutate from one generation to the next, the glue that bonds boys together is always made of the same ingredients: solidarity, team spirit, a sense of brotherhood, loyalty and even love, all carefully concealed beneath a veneer of ridicule, mockery and tomfoolery.
But then maybe I’m not giving these boys enough credit, maybe things have shifted with time. Josh and his mates are capable of serious conversations in a way we never were – exams, potential careers, terrorism, politics… Perhaps kids have more to worry about now, constantly being exposed to social media and all its accompanying misery. So much has changed in such a short space of time. Or perhaps it says more about the four of us that at fifteen we never discussed anything much more serious than football and breasts. If we’d been capable of discussing even ten per cent of our true feelings then surely it would have helped us cope with what happened back then. As it was, we kept it all inside and tried to act like everything was fine, even though it was anything but.
“Are you even listening to me?” asks Laura.
I try to speak, but no sound comes out. How can you talk without breath?
“Jay? Are you okay, because you’ve been acting really weird lately. You just seem really distracted. I mean, not that you ever don’t seem distracted, but even for you… Michael said the other day that you seem like you’re not with it. He asked if I thought you were okay, but I said he was way more likely to know the answer to that than me, because God knows you never tell me anything.”
The thing about memories is they come whether you want them to or not. When they were little, I used to watch Josh and Alex kicking a football around the park and suddenly I’d be seeing Tom and myself, whooping and yelling and punching the air when we scored a goal. Years later, I’d see them lounging on Josh’s bed playing video games and suddenly I’d be transported back in time to those lazy Sunday afternoons we spent at Max’s house. And as Josh has grown older the memories have just kept on coming, more vividly, more painfully. In the last couple of years, his male friendship group has settled into a nice little crowd of four – him, Alex, Joel and, most recently, Sam, and the similarity is at times almost too much to bare. I hope he’ll be friends with these boys for ever, that nothing ever drives them apart. For me, there were things that even the closest of friendships couldn’t withstand.
“I’ve gotta go, Laur,” I say, my voice barely more than a whisper.
“Okay, so I’ll see you Monday, yeah? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Monday,” I manage, and hang up.
Josh is the youngest of his friends, born at thirteen minutes to midnight on a sticky July night. So he’s not fifteen yet, I remind myself, as if it really makes any difference. I even glance at the time on his phone. Almost five hours still to go. I want the seconds to stop ticking by, I want him to stay fourteen. Because at fourteen everything was good. I was fifteen when it all went to shit, and even though I tell myself that was me, not him, I can’t seem to shift the dread of him turning a year older.
“Dad. Phone,” Josh orders, suddenly spying me in the doorway. He holds his hands up to catch his mobile, too pressed for time to take the five steps towards me. I throw it to him and he catches it, stuffs it in the back pocket of his jeans.
“Let’s go!” he calls, and Joel opens the front door.
I want to step towards him, envelop him in my arms, ask him for the tenth time exactly where he’s going tonight and at what times, and to please text me when he gets there and when he’s leaving, and who will he be walking home with, and does he have enough money. But I can’t even move. I can’t even speak anymore. The oxygen won’t come.
“See you later, Dad!” Josh calls, followed by a cacophony of goodbyes and thank-yous from his friends.
I step towards the front door, my body making the automatic movement to go
