I down my glass of champagne and take another off a passing waitress. I’ll drink this one quickly, too, then maybe I’ll feel more – I dunno, myself. This morning, seeing all of this, seeing everything Will has … well, it’s made me feel a little shitty. I’m not proud of that. I feel bad about it, of course I do. Will’s my best mate. I’d like to just be happy for him. But it’s dredged it all up, being with the boys again. It’s like none of it affected him, none of it held him back. Whereas I’ve always felt, I don’t know, like I don’t deserve to be happy.
There are so many familiar faces in the crowd outside the chapel: blokes from the stag and others who didn’t go but who were at school with us. ‘No plus-one, Johnno?’ they ask me. And, ‘Gonna be putting the moves on some lucky lady tonight then?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’
There’s a bit of betting about who I’m going to try to crack on with.
Then they’re off talking about their jobs, their houses. Share options and portfolios. Some story about the latest politician who’s made an arse of himself – or herself. Not much I can add to this conversation as I can’t catch the name and even if I could I probably wouldn’t know it. I stand here feeling stupid, feeling like I don’t belong. I never really have.
They all have high-powered jobs now, this lot. Even the ones that I don’t remember as being all that bright. And they all look pretty different to how they did at school. Not surprising, considering it’s not all that far off twenty years ago. But it doesn’t feel that way. Not to me. Not right now, standing here, in this place. Looking at each face, it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, or that there are bald spots where there was once hair, or dark where there was once blond, or contacts now, instead of glasses. I can place them all.
See, even now, even though I’ve been such a fucking disappointment, my folks have still got the school photo in pride of place on the mantelpiece in our living room. I’ve never seen it with a speck of dust on
it. They’re so proud of that photo. Look at our boy, at his big posh school. One of them. The whole school out on the pitches in front of the main building, with the cliffs on the other side. All of us perched on one of those metal stands, looking good as gold, with our hair brushed into side-partings by Matron and big, stupid grins: Smile for the cameras, boys!
I’m grinning at them all now, like I did in that photo. I wonder if they’re secretly all looking at me and thinking the same old thoughts. Johnno: the waster. The fuck-up. Always good for a laugh – not much more. Turned out exactly how they thought. Well, that’s where I’ll prove them wrong. Because I’ve got the whisky business to talk about, haven’t I?
‘Johnno, mate. Can’t believe how long it’s been.’ Greg Hastings – third row, second from the left. Had a hot mum, whose looks he definitely didn’t inherit.
‘Ha, trust you, Johnno, to forget your bloody suit!’ Miles Locke – fifth row, somewhere in the middle. Bit of a genius, but not too much of a geek about it, so he got by.
‘Didn’t forget the rings at least! Wish you had done, that would have been the ultimate.’ Jeremy Swift – up in the far-right-hand corner.
Swallowed a fifty-pence piece in a dare and had to go to hospital. ‘Johnno, big fella – you know, I have to tell you, I’m still recovering
from the stag. You did a number on me. Christ and that poor bloke! We really did a number on him. He’s here, isn’t he?’ Curtis Lowe – fourth row, fifth from the right. Nearly played tennis professionally but ended up an accountant.
See? They call me thick. But I’ve got a pretty good memory, when it comes down to it.
There’s one face in that photo I can’t ever bring myself to look at.
Bottom row, with the smallest kids, out to the right. Loner, the little kid who worshipped Will, would do anything to please him. Anything we asked. He’d steal extra rolls and butter from the kitchens for us, brush the mud off our rugby boots, clean our dorm. All stuff we didn’t actually need or could’ve done ourselves. But it was fun, in a way, to think up things for him to do.
We’d find ourselves asking for more and more stupid things. One time we told him to climb up on to the school roof and hoot like an owl, and he did it. Another time we got him to set off all the fire alarms. It was hard not to keep pushing, to see how far he would go. Sometimes we’d go through his stuff, eat the sweets his mum had sent him or pretend to
get off from the photo of his hot older sister on the beach. Or we’d find the letters he’d written to send home and read them aloud in a whiney voice: I miss you all so much. And sometimes we’d even knock him about a bit. If he hadn’t cleaned our rugby boots well enough, say – or what we said wasn’t clean enough, because he always did a pretty good job. I’d get him to stand there while I hit him on his arse with the studded side of the boot as an ‘incentive’. Seeing what we could get away with. And he’d have let us get away with anything.
I grab another glass of champagne, down it. This one hits home, finally; I feel myself float a little higher. I move into the big group of Old Trevellyans. I want to tell them all about the whisky business. Just for the next half an hour or so. Just so they might finally realise I’m as good as any of them. But the conversation has moved on and I can’t think of a way to get it back.
Someone taps me on the shoulder, hard. I turn round and I’m face to face with him: Mr Slater. Will’s dad – but first and foremost, always, headmaster of Trevellyan’s.
‘Jonathan Briggs,’ he says. ‘You haven’t changed one bit.’ He doesn’t mean this as a compliment.
Shit, I’d been hoping to give him a wide berth. The sight of him has the same effect on me it always did. Would have thought now, my being an adult, it might be different. But I’m as shit-scared of him as ever.
Funny, considering he was the one that once saved my bacon, really. ‘Hello, sir,’ I say. My tongue feels like it’s stuck in my throat. ‘I mean,
Mr Slater.’ I think he’d prefer it if I called him ‘sir’. I glance over my shoulder. The group I was in before has closed up, so we’re stuck on the outside of it now: just him and I. No escape.
He’s looking me up and down. ‘I see you’re dressed in the same unusual way. That blazer you had at Trevellyan’s: too large at the beginning and far too small at the end.’
Yeah, because my folks could only afford the one.
‘And I see you’re still hanging around my son,’ he says. He never liked me. But then I can’t imagine him liking anyone much, not even his own child.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘We’re best mates.’
‘Oh is that what you are? I was always rather under the impression you simply did his dirty work for him. Like when you broke into my office to steal those GCSE papers.’
For a moment everything around me goes still and quiet. I’m so surprised I can’t even get a word out.
‘Oh yes,’ Mr Slater continues, unfazed by my silence. ‘I know. You think that simply because it wasn’t reported you’d got away with it? It would have been a disgrace on the school, on my name, if it had got out.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’ But what I think is: you don’t know the half of it. Or maybe you do and you’ve got an even better poker face than I realised.
I manage to get away after this. I go and search for more drink.
Something stronger. There’s a bar they’ve set up, near the marquee. They can’t pour the stuff fast enough. People are asking for two, three drinks, pretending they’re for friends and plus-ones when really I can see them necking them as they walk away. It’s going to get loose, this evening, especially with the gear Peter Ramsay’s brought. When I pick up my whisky – the stuff I brought – I notice that my hand is trembling.
Then I see this bloke I recognise, across the crowd of people. He looks at me, frowning. But he’s not from Trevellyan’s. He’s about fifty, anyway, way too old to be in that photo. And it annoys me at first, because I can’t work out where I knew him from.
He has a too-fashionable hipster haircut, even though he’s grey and going a bit bald and wears a suit with trainers. He looks like he’s stepped out of some wanky Soho office and isn’t quite sure how he ended up here in the middle of nowhere on some random island.
For a few minutes, genuinely, I haven’t got a single clue where I could have met someone like him. Then I think we both work it out at the same time. Shit. It’s the producer of Survive the Night. Something French and fancy-sounding. Piers. That’s it.
He walks towards me. ‘Johnno,’ he says. ‘It’s good to see you.’
I’m kind of flattered that he remembers my name, that he recognises my face. Then I remember that he hadn’t liked my face enough to put me on his TV show, so I dial down my enthusiasm. ‘Piers,’ I say, sticking out a hand. I have no fucking idea why he wants to come and speak to me. We only met the once, when I came to do the screen-test with Will.
Surely it would be less embarrassing if we just raised a glass to each other over everyone’s heads and left it at that?
‘Long time no see, Johnno,’ he says, rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘I hardly recognised you … with all that hair.’ He’s being polite. My hair’s not that much longer. But I probably look about fifteen years older than the last time we met. It’s all the drinking, I guess. ‘And what have you been up to?’ he asks. ‘I know there must have been something very worthwhile keeping you busy.’
I feel like there’s something strange about how he put that, but I gloss over it. ‘Well,’ I puff myself up. ‘I’ve been making whisky, Piers.’ I try hard to do the big spiel, but to be honest I can’t stop thinking about the way this bloke rejected me with a few lines in an email.
Not quite the right fit for the show.
People don’t realise this about me, you see. They see old Johnno, the wild one, the crazy one … without much going on backstage. And of course I like them thinking that, I play up to it. But I do feel stuff too, and I am embarrassed by this conversation, just like I was when the production company dropped me. At least I got paid a couple of grand for the concept, I guess.
See, the idea for the show was mine. I’m not saying I thought up the whole thing. But I know it was me who planted the seed. A year or so ago Will and I were sitting in a pub, having a drink. It had always been me who suggested we meet up. Will was always too busy, even though he didn’t have much of a TV career to speak of in those days, just an agent. But even if he puts me off a couple of times he never cancels.
There’s too much of a bond between us for this friendship to die. He knows that too.
I must have got pretty drunk, because I even brought up the game we used to play at school: Survival. I remember Will giving me this look. I think he was afraid of what I might say next. But I wasn’t going to go into any of that. We never do. I’d been watching this show the night before with some adventurer guy and it seemed so soft. So I said, ‘That would have made a much better idea for a TV programme than most of the so-called survival stuff you see, wouldn’t it?’
He had looked at me differently, then. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘Johnno,’ he said. ‘That might be the best idea you’ve ever come up with.’
‘Yeah, but you couldn’t actually do it. You know … because of what happened.’
‘That was a million years ago,’ he said. ‘And it was an accident, remember?’ And then, when I didn’t respond: ‘Remember?’
I looked at him. Did he really believe that? He was waiting for an answer.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah it was.’
Next thing I knew, he’d got us both the screen test. And the rest, you could say, was history. For him, anyway. Obviously they didn’t want my ugly mug in the end.
I realise that Piers is looking at me a bit funny. I think he’s just asked me something. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘What was that?’
‘I was saying that it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.
I suppose at least our loss is whisky’s gain.’
Our loss? But it wasn’t their loss: they didn’t want me, full stop.
I take a big swig of my drink. ‘Piers,’ I say. ‘You didn’t want me on the show. So, with the greatest possible respect, what the fuck are you talking about?’
