‘So, is that tree for me, or is it just something you carry around with you these days?’
She had done it again, made me laugh even when I was on the cliff edge of crying. No one did that better than her.
She plucked up a box of tissues from a nearby countertop and plonked them down on the table in front of me. ‘Just in cases,’ she said, quoting a line from one of our favourite films, and for some stupid reason that made me want to cry even more, remembering all the late-night popcorn and movie sessions we’d shared. Pulling out a chair painted in a particularly cheerful shade of buttercup yellow, she motioned for me to sit.
I made use of both the seat and the box of Kleenex while Mel scooped up the papers strewn across the table into a haphazard bundle that immediately made me want to volunteer to sort them out. Sensibly, I quashed the impulse.
Mel had taken the olive tree from my arms and set it down in the corner of her delightfully messy kitchen beside a jumbled heap of shoes. The pile was topped with a pair of fluorescent green Crocs that I bet Mel wore even when she wasn’t gardening. They were very her.
Our taste in clothes had always been very different. She was boho through and through, favouring long flowing skirts and floaty tops. She wore a collection of silver rings on every finger and somany bangles on her slender wrists I used to wonder how she found the strength to lift her arms. She wasn’t wearing any today, which was just as well because her wrists looked too thin and her forearms too delicate to bear their weight. The fear that she was sick, seriously sick, muscled its way back into my head, despite Jackson’s assurance that illness wasn’t the issue.
‘I was just about to make a coffee. Do you want one?’
‘Yes please,’ I said, looking around the kitchen I could remember so well, even though I couldn’t remember when I’d last been here.
I waited until she’d brought the coffees over to the table, along with a jar of honey, the same brand she’d always used in drinks instead of refined sugar. She spooned a sizeable amount into her mug and then cocked her head on one side in a question that I answered with a nod. The taste of it took me back to countless nights spent in either her room or mine, cramming for tests or exams, moaning about boys, or binge-watching box sets of the Gilmore Girls, a series I’d enjoyed with a bewildered fascination. Were there really mothers and daughters who got on that well? I gave a small sigh as I remembered how Mel had always said the show reminded her of her own mum, who’d passed away when she was only a teenager.
The fear that something was really wrong with my friend was like a whole herd of elephants in the room. They might trample me to death for interfering, but there was no way I could ignore them.
‘How are you, Mel?’
‘I’m fine.’
I shook my head. ‘No, you’re not.’
It was a tricky card to have laid so early in the game. It could have seen me back outside her front door in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t her.
‘Okay. Well, I’m pretty pissed off with you. Is that better? Is that what you wanted to hear?’
I gave a helpless shrug. ‘I think it’s more honest than “fine”. Pissed off I can deal with. Pissed off I deserve. Because I’ve been a bad friend.’
‘Yes, you have.’
I swallowed uncomfortably, every word of the speech I’d carefully prepared fleeing from my brain.
‘What are you doing here, Ellie?’ She looked pointedly at the watch on her slender wrist. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
I shook my head. ‘Some things are more important than work.’
Her eyebrows rose. ‘Easy to say; harder to prove.’
I flinched like a boxer taking a blow in the ring. I’d been expecting this. I was prepared for it to be way harder than just buying coffee and cake had been. Mel wasn’t Jackson and she had clearly taken my abandonment much harder than he had.
‘So where exactly have you been for the last nine months or so?’
I gave a helpless shrug. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer, it was just that a great deal of that time period was still a hazy mystery.
‘Because to be perfectly honest, nothing short of an alien abduction is going to work for me.’
‘I got lost,’ I said, my voice small. ‘I strayed so far into my own head, into what I thought I wanted to achieve, I forgot what was really important.’ I gave a small laugh that threatened to break into a sob. ‘I stupidly thought a thousand friends online was just as important as my real-life ones.’
She stared at me for a long moment, almost without blinking.
‘I was wrong. So wrong. I was a bloody idiot.’
There was a weighty silence, filled only with the hum of the fridge.
‘Sorry. Was I meant to contradict you there?’ Mel eventually asked.