One Thing Led to Another. Katy Regan

and seagulls fat as milk jugs squawking round our feet. I remember the vinegary smart of fish and chips in the air, the lull of bobbing boats, the warmth of the sun on my chest and the feeling that I’d not been so happy for a long time. I told him all about my childhood holidays spent here in Whitby. He told me about endless summers holed up in Stoke-on-Trent, playing Connect Four in his front porch, bored out of his mind.

      One pint turned into two, into three, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty glasses and a sense of anticipation as sharp as salt air.

      Jim sighed. ‘This rocks.’ he said, lifting his face to the sinking sun. ‘I’ve had the best day I’ve had in ages.’ Then he turned, his head resting on the wall and he added, ‘With you’. And it didn’t feel awkward. I didn’t get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my glass down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we’d been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.

      We’d kissed now, what the hell – sex back at the caravan seemed like the most obvious next step. Afterwards, we sat and talked on the beach until a red dawn flooded the water. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Jim. ‘I’m probably closer to you than I am to anyone.’ And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.

      When I opened my eyes late the next morning to find the sun in slices on the floral duvet and the North Sea wind whistling in through the windows, I felt strangely and yet wonderfully at home and at ease.

      ‘So, Jarvis, that was going to happen all along, was it not?’ I remember Jim muttering as he stood in his palm tree underpants pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. ‘Predictable as death,’ were the words I mumbled from underneath the duvet.

      After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are, if you’re opposite sexes, it’s only a matter of time. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. A quick scan of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers gusset-side-up on the caravan hob. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We’d danced to Take That, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I’d made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Gavin Stroud and yet I wasn’t one bit embarrassed.

      I don’t know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Jim made that decision for me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated.

      I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. ‘I had a brilliant time this weekend,’ I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn’t agree more and asks me out?

      Or not.

      ‘Me too,’ he giggled. ‘It was right laugh. I have particularly fond memories of you doing a routine to ‘Relight My Fire’ wearing only your pants.’

      

      Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?

      

      But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there’s a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later, we seem to have fallen into a habit of just ‘doing it’ whenever the need for a little no-strings nookie grabs us.

      ‘Think of it as a way of extending the fun we’re having,’ Jim always says, usually naked which doesn’t exactly help, ‘like going to an after-hours bar.’

      And this suits me too, because I don’t think I know what I want. I can’t fathom the workings of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Jim Ashcroft and I have crossed the line. We are no longer purely platonic, nor lovers either. We’re just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah-sized space commonly known as ‘The Grey Area’.

      

      It’s a week since the pregnancy scare and frankly it’s a good job it was just a scare since all I seem to have done since then is accompany people to the pub. Such is the curse of the unattached I’ve always thought. What with no fall-back plan – no flat/wedding/dog to save up for – we, The Unhooked, are expected to attend everything.

      Take tonight for example. ‘I may kill someone if I don’t get drunk this very evening,’ was Vicky’s raspy threat down the receiver that I, in a mid-afternoon slump, had cradled between my head and the desk. Dylan had decorated the walls with macaroni cheese, she said, Richard had come home from a hard day’s work as zoo keeper at London Zoo chatting to kids about the mating habits of camels to find his own kid, the two foot rhino, bulldozing around the house in a toddler rage and his dear, lovely wife, coiled like a cobra, ready to pounce at any time.

      I love Vicky, which is weird because it was far from love at first sight. In fact, thinking back to that first day we met in Owens Park Halls when she introduced herself in her Yorkshire, ‘this-is-me-like-it-or-lump-it’ way, I’m ashamed to say a little part of me withered with disappointment.

      How could I, Tess Jarvis, owner of:

       Old Skool Trainers (various)

       New (but artfully battered) leather jacket

       Entire works of Bob Dylan

       Ministry of Sound: The Annual, volumes two and three (because at eighteen years old I am both artily intellectual and just mainstream enough, you understand)

       Poster of Che Guevara (because I care about other countries and Politics)

       Obsession with Ewan MacGregor

       Occasional marujana habit that I fully intend to upgrade to ‘moderate’

      possibly be sharing a room with Victoria Peddlar, owner of:

       Fluffy penguin slippers

       Fake designer sweatshirts worn over stone washed jeans (various)

       Entire works of Take That

       That’s What I Call Power Ballads 1, 2 and 3

       Poster of Patrick Swayze (because nobody puts Vicky Peddlar in the corner)

       Obsession with Dirty Dancing

       Moderate horoscope-reading habit (soon to be upgraded to borderline obsessional).

      But it was true and I was utterly gutted. Especially since I’d just met a girl called Gina who had already designated her room as Smoking HQ. A room I wished I was sharing more than anything else in the world. Gina was the coolest girl in our halls and a guaranteed route to mischief, every night of the week. She had big curly hair that she wore in low bunches, boasted a dragon tattoo that snaked across her stomach, said ‘wicked’ a lot and owned a bong. And as if that wasn’t enough to make your average eighteen-year-old fresher practically pay to be her friend, she had about a million of her own friends from boarding school who were all as cool as she was.

      It’s easy to see how this Peddlar girl didn’t even get a look in during those first few days at university.

      ‘Rich says I can go out…I just need someone to go with and guess-what? You’re the lucky lady!’ Vicky shouted over Dylan. I don’t mind really, Vicks often inspires in me selfless acts of love. When she was holed up in hospital, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, ankles as fat as an elephant’s, blood pressure soaring, I travelled half way across London to bring her the only thing that would satiate her queer, hormonal taste buds. Deep fried aubergines served up on a silver platter (well, a polystyrene tray, anyway).

      I’d soon found out there was far more to this girl from Huddersfield than first met the eye. She could really put it away, for one. A childhood spent pulling pints in her parents’ pub saw to that. She had real talent too, which