2

      In the shock of my sudden singlehood, my best friend Caroline and our mutual friends Mindy and Ivor rally round and ask the question of the truly sympathetic: ‘Do you want us all to go out and get really really drunk?’

      Rhys wasn’t missing in action as far as they were concerned: he’d always seen my friends as my friends. And he used to observe that Mindy and Ivor ‘sound like a pair of Play School presenters’. Mindy is Indian, it’s an abbreviation of Parminder. She calls ‘Mindy’ her white world alias. ‘I can move among you entirely undetected. Apart from the being brown thing.’

      As for Ivor, his dad’s got a thing about Norse legends. It’s been a bit of an albatross, thanks to a certain piece of classic children’s animation. Ivor endured the rugby players in our halls of residence at university calling him ‘the engine’ and claiming he made a pessshhhty-coom, pessshhhty-coom noise at intimate moments. Those same rugby players drank each other’s urine and phlegm for dares and drove Ivor upstairs to meet the girls’ floor, which is how we became a mixed-sex unit of four. Our platonic company, combined with his close-shaved head, black-rimmed glasses and love of trendy Japanese trainers led to a frequent assumption that Ivor was gay. He’s since gone into computer game programming and, given there are practically no women in the profession whatsoever, he feels this misconception could see him missing out on valuable opportunities.

      ‘It’s counter-intuitive,’ he always complains. ‘Why should a man surrounded by women be homosexual? Hugh Hefner doesn’t get this treatment. Obviously I should wear a dressing gown and slippers all day.’

      Anyway, I’m not quite ready to face cocktail bar society, so I opt for a night in drinking the domestic variety, invariably more lethal.

      Caroline’s house in Chorlton is always the obvious choice to meet, as unlike the rest of us she’s married, and has an amazing one. (I mean house, not spouse – no disrespect to Graeme. He’s away on one of his frequent boys’ golfing weekends.) Caroline is a very well paid accountant for a large chain of supermarkets, and a proper adult: but then, she always was. At university, she wore quilted gilets and was a member of the rowing club. When I used to express my amazement to the others that she could get up early and exercise after a hard night on the sauce, Ivor used to say, groggily: ‘It’s a posh thing. Norman genes. She has to go off and conquer stuff.’

      He could be on to something about her ancestry. She’s tall, blonde and has what I believe is called an aquiline profile. She says she looks like an ant eater; if so, it’s kind of ant-eater-by-way-of-Grace-Kelly.

      I have the job of slicing limes and salting the rims of the glasses on Caroline’s spotlessly sleek black Corian worktop while she blasts ice, tequila and Cointreau into a slurry in a candy-apple red KitchenAid. In between these deafening bursts, from her regal perch on the sofa, Mindy is gifting us, as usual, with the Tao of Mindy.

      ‘The difference between thirty and thirty-one is the difference between a funeral and the grieving process.’

      Caroline starts spooning out margarita mixture.

      ‘Turning thirty is like a funeral?’

      ‘The funeral for your youth. Lots of drink and sympathy and attention and flowers, and you see everyone you know.’

      ‘And for a moment there we were worried the comparison was going to be tasteless,’ Ivor says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He’s sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, one arm similarly outstretched, pointing a remote at something lozenge-shaped that’s apparently a stereo. ‘Have you really got The Eagles on here, Caroline, or is it a sick joke?’

      ‘Thirty-one is like grieving,’ Mindy continues. ‘Because getting on with it is much worse, but no one expects you to complain any more.’

      ‘Oh, we expect you to complain, Mind,’ I say, carefully passing her a shallow glass that looks like a saucer on a stem.

      ‘The fashion magazines make me feel so old and irrelevant, it’s like the only thing I should bother buying is TENA Lady. Can I eat this?’ Mindy removes the lime slice from the side of her glass and examines it.

      She is, in general, a baffling mixture of extreme aptitude and total daftness. Mindy did a business degree and insisted throughout she was useless at it and definitely wasn’t going to take on the family firm, which sold fabrics in Rusholme. Then she got a first and picked the business up for one summer, created mail order and online sales, quadrupled the turnover and grudgingly accepted she might have a knack, and a career. Yet on holiday in California recently, when a tour guide announced, ‘On a clear day, with binoculars, you can see whales from here’, Mindy said, ‘Oh my God, all the way to Cardigan Bay?’

      ‘Lime? Er … not usually,’ I say.

      ‘Oh. I thought you might’ve infused it with something.’

      I collect another glass and deliver it to Ivor, then Caroline and I carry ours to our seats.

      ‘Cheers,’ I say. ‘To my broken engagement and loveless future.’

      ‘To your future,’ Caroline chides.

      We raise glasses, slurp, wince a bit – the tequila is quite loud in the mix. It makes my lips numb and stomach warm.

      Single. It’s been so long since the word applied to me and I don’t feel it yet. I’m something else, in limbo: tip-toeing round my own house, sleeping in the spare room, avoiding my ex-fiancé and his furious, seething disappointment. He’s right: this is what I want, I have less reason than him to be upset.

      ‘How’s it going, you two living together?’ Caroline asks, carefully, as if she can hear me think.

      ‘We’re not putting piano wire at neck level across doorways yet. We stay out of each other’s way. I need to step up the house hunt. I’m finding excuses to be out every evening as it is.’

      ‘How did your mum take it?’ Mindy bites her lip.

      Mindy understands that, as one of the two slated bridesmaids, she was the only other person as excited as my mum.

      ‘Not well,’ I say, with my skill for understatement.

      It was awful. The phone call went in phases. The ‘stop playing a practical joke’ section. The ‘you’re having cold feet, it’s natural’ parry. The ‘give it a few weeks, see how you feel’ suggestion. Anger, denial, bargaining, and then – I hope – some sort of acceptance. Dad came on and asked me if it was because I was worrying about the cost, as they’d cover it all if need be. It was then that I cried.

      ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, it’s just, you never said …’ Mindy asks. ‘What actually caused the row that made you and Rhys finish?’

      ‘Oh …’ I say. ‘It was Macclesfield Elvis.’

      There’s a pause. Our default setting is pissing about. As the demise of my epically long relationship only happened a week previous, no one knows quite what’s appropriate yet. It’s like after any major tragedy: when’s it OK to start forwarding the email jokes?

      ‘You shagged Macclesfield