Cloudy with a Chance of Love: The unmissable laugh-out-loud read. Fiona Collins

I replied. And she went off to her bus queue.

      The following Friday there was a school disco. Gabby was there. She spent the whole night sharing her contraband Hock with me and regaling me with tales of her five current boyfriends. We became inseparable.

      We were the best of best friends. She was always up for high jinks and I was her accomplice. Her jinks included: smoking where she shouldn’t have been smoking; bunking off to go to the chippie; pulling the wrong sort of boy. I was the more sensible one, the one who was able to pull her back from the brink of complete rebellion and law breaking. She was the boss but I could be a persuasive employee. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t?’ I used to offer, on a regular basis. ‘Perhaps we should go back in now? It’s assembly in a minute.’ ‘Perhaps you should pay for those.’ Or I would make a joke and she would laugh and stop whatever near-criminal thing she was doing:

      ‘I really don’t want to have to visit you in Wormwood Scrubs, Gabby. I don’t think they let you wear make-up.’

      ‘That’s a men’s prison – I’d be in Holloway – but, okay, Daryl. I won’t do it then.’

      I had to talk her out of serious trouble so many times. She would listen to me. It seemed I was only one she would listen to. She was blisteringly funny. We shared the same sense of humour and saw the funny side in everything. We laughed like drains at everything. We even had catchphrases. Lines from films like Ferris Beuller and Back to the Future and Thelma and Louise.

      ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’

      ‘You’ve always been crazy, this is just the first chance you’ve had to express yourself.’

      ‘Party on, dudes.’

      I bloody well missed her.

       Early morning the clouds will dissipate briefly, only to move back in mid-morning when we can expect more rain…

      She calmed down when she was older, she even became an accountant, mostly part-time, but she was still a brilliant laugh. And she was still pretty feisty when it came to men. She never got married; she just dated constantly, from seventeen. Only one, Martin, stuck around long enough to have a child with her. The rest were briefly brilliant love affairs and she always liked the same type: super rich but a bit flabby and a little bit dim, so she could feel superior (cherubs in chinos, she called them, Brideshead Revisited types with curly blonde hair). And, my, could she make me laugh when she told me all her stories about them. She was funny; it was why you could forgive her anything.

      ‘Oh my god, that total loser?’ she’d laugh when I reminded her of one of her hapless suitors. ‘Mr Bean in Burberry?’

      ‘You liked him, at first! You said you liked the way he drove!’

      ‘Did I? Did I actually say that? I must have been deluded – he drove like Mr Magoo. And I liked all of them, at first.’

      ‘Even Martin.’

      ‘Oh lord, Martin. That albatross. Still, at least he gave me Maisie… Come and sit next to me and I’ll do your eye make-up for you.’

      It was such a massive surprise when she stole my husband. He’s thin and fiercely intelligent. He wears glasses and looks like Tim Robbins. He was not her usual bag. Her usual bag, which she swung casually from her shoulder, not caring if it got scratched or scraped in the dirt, was thrown in a skip and she came after mine. My bag. Which I had always clutched tightly to my chest.

      ‘I could never fancy Jeff,’ she’d once said to me, as she’d sat smoking on her back porch, doing my tax return for me – it was balanced on her lap, on top of a place mat. ‘He’s a bit too weedy for me.’

      ‘Well, thank god for that,’ I’d replied. ‘You’d probably eat him alive.’

      ‘That I would,’ she’d laughed, and I’d giggled. Jeff was safe from her. Serial dater and man-rejecter. Queen of the gilet and the put down. Glamorous heartbreaker. My funny and brilliant best friend. She would have been the first person I’d gone to, if Jeff had ever cheated on me. I’d even confided to her once, near the end, that he seemed distant and I wondered if anything was going on.

      ‘Jeff? No, don’t be silly!’ she’d protested. ‘He wouldn’t have it in him.’

      He did, though. And so did she. She stole him. Right from under my nose, but she was round at ours a lot, at the time. She was single again. She’d pitch up with Maisie, on a Saturday night, a stack of duvets and pillows so high you couldn’t see the top of her glossy head, and a bottle of vodka hanging off her wrist in a Tesco carrier bag, declaring, ‘Staying in is the new going out!’

      ‘For now,’ I’d retort. ‘Until the next Chinless Chino comes along.’

      Gabby and Jeff were both smokers. They’d go out through our conservatory doors and puff away. Giggles from her, a low rumbling laugh from him, and the mingled smoke from their fags would spiral through the air and into our bay tree. They would then stamp on their fags in unison and come back in. I don’t smoke. While they smoked I’d be washing up. Or picking up satisfying, molten pieces of wax from the tablecloth and flicking them into the bin. I never thought they were out there plotting to leave me.

      She came over for dinner just a week before they went off together. I had no bloody clue. Not an inkling. I’d thought she only liked her men thick, but clearly she liked her friends that way too. Thick as mince. I had no idea they’d been shagging for a year – a year! That means that the Christmas before last they were at it, too. I’d been given the equivalent of the Joni Mitchell album in Love Actually, while Gabby got the heart-shaped necklace, and I hadn’t even known it.

      I sighed and foraged for half a Twix from my desk drawer. Temperatures tomorrow will be low for this time of year with them reaching the dizzy heights of only seven or eight degrees…

      It’ll end in tears, I thought, when I first found out. It won’t last. But it had lasted – they were still together, living in Gabby’s neat house in South Wimbledon – and tears had been shed, but they were all mine. So bloody many of them.

      I’d popped over to see Gabby, after the school run that morning, a year ago. I knew she had a day off, and so did I, but I’d forgotten to tell her; I’d forgotten to tell Jeff, too. He wasn’t interested in what was happening at my work. He wouldn’t be interested in the fact that the studio had to be closed that day for an emergency fire and safety check (it was going to play piped-in pop classics, all day, from the sister station in Stevenage). I’d texted Gabby before I’d left but hadn’t waited for a reply – friends like us never had to. I expected her to be surprised to see me, but I thought I’d get a warm hug and a load of gossip, not the weird, shocked face that actually came to the door and peered wanly through the glass. She acted weird the whole time I was there, too, so I didn’t stay long.

      ‘I’m not feeling very well,’ she told me.

      ‘Oh? That’s not like you,’ I said. ‘You’re normally made of cast iron.’

      ‘Not today,’ she’d grimaced.

      She’d disappeared off to the loo about three times while I was left sat staring at the telly. Eventually I left.

      When I got home, I saw it. The letter. It was propped up on the sitting room mantelpiece. I only went in there to pick up a book I needed to return to the library. If Jeff wanted to guarantee I’d see it, he should have put it in the kitchen. By the kettle or on top of the fridge. But he must have thought the marble mantelpiece was the appropriate place to put it – solemn, formal, cold. He thought I’d read it when I got home from work tonight, but I was reading it now. It was cool to the touch as I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. My name written in Jeff’s best black pen. And inside his words wrapped a cold, hideous claw around my heart and squeezed it so hard I could hardly breathe.

      He was leaving me. He’d fallen in love with Gabby.