To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

Nicci was moved to the hospice. The night she said her real goodbyes.

      Easing the cork from the champagne as silently as possible, Jo poured three glasses and handed one each to Mona and Lizzie. ‘I thought we should do this properly . . . for Nicci and for the girls,’ she said. ‘But I think we’ve already lost our audience. I’m sorry I missed them awake. How did they seem?’

      ‘OK. A bit hyper. But I guess that’s better than the alternative. Better than David, anyway.’ Lizzie stared pointedly at Mona, but her friend was making a show of rearranging the large cardboard boxes lined up along the bedroom wall. Each had a scribbled yellow Post-it note attached: the first ‘Chuck’, the second ‘Cherish’, the third ‘Charity’.

      ‘Do you want to do the honours?’ Lizzie pointed to the mirrored double doors that led to the walk-in wardrobe.

      ‘No, it’s OK,’ Jo said.

      ‘I’m not doing it,’ Mona put in, too hastily. ‘It’s all yours.’

      Anyone would have thought they were opening a long-sealed family crypt, not the spot-lit inner sanctum that housed Nicci’s fashion collection, Lizzie thought.

      She sighed, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to do it. Didn’t see why she should. It wasn’t as if she was Number One Friend, anyway. That was Jo’s domain. But Lizzie had always been the tidier-upper, the smoother-over, the peace-maker. Where Nicci had been the leader, forging ahead with plans and ideas, Lizzie had always trailed at the back, shutting doors behind them, unable to come up with a good reason not to be the one to clean up after the others. She even helped mop up the trail of emotional devastation a much younger Nicci had left in her wake.

      ‘Looks like it’s down to me then,’ Jo said. Positioning herself by the double doors, her right hand on the handle, she lifted her glass stiffly. ‘To Nicci,’ she said, raising it higher and pulling the door open.

      ‘To Nicci,’ Lizzie and Mona echoed.

      Ceiling-set spots had come on automatically as the doors opened, lighting the eight-by-twelve room lined with rails, one row of full height on the right, two of half height on the left. A wall of drawers faced them, and a double row of shoe shelves skirted the room from floor level. More shelves piled high with bags and hatboxes lined the top. There, any suggestion of order stopped. The room was stuffed.

      ‘I had no idea it was such a mess!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘I was expecting, you know, neat colour-coded piles. The law of the wardrobe, copyright Nicci Morrison.’

      ‘Are you telling me,’ said Mona slowly, ‘that when it came to her own clothes the queen of clean was the world’s biggest hoarder?’

      Jo shrugged. ‘Looks that way.’

      ‘How the hell did she collect so many?’

      ‘It was her life’s work,’ Jo said, ‘her passion. You know that. Her job and her hobby. Some people collect books or works of art, Nicci collected clothes. This isn’t even the whole lot. David says there are about eight suitcases in the attic, maybe more. He reckons there’s nothing of value in them; Nicci was too worried about moths and damp for that. We should have a quick sort through just to be sure. But I reckon those can go straight to the charity shop.’

      ‘The question is,’ said Mona, putting her glass on Nicci’s dressing table and joining Lizzie in the doorway, ‘where the hell do we start?’

      ‘Knowing Nicci,’ Lizzie said, ‘there’s an arcane filing system. Nothing as straightforward as “what goes with what”.’

      ‘Alphabetical by designer?’ Mona suggested.

      Jo scanned the wardrobe. The air was far cooler in here than in the bedroom. On the wall beside her, just inside the door, a thermostat was set at fifteen degrees Celsius. Typical.

      ‘Good guess,’ Jo said. ‘But I don’t think so. It’s too much of a mishmash. If all the McQueen, for instance, was in one place, the Prada in another, the rails would look more uniform.’

      Mona frowned. ‘By style?’

      ‘I’ve got it!’ Lizzie announced loudly, glancing over her shoulder at the sleeping girls almost before the words were out of her mouth. ‘It’s autobiographical!’

      ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Jo. ‘That would be chaos.’

      ‘And your point is?’ Mona laughed. ‘Lizzie’s right. Look.’

      In the left-hand corner, tucked at the back, was a pair of beaten-up Doc Martens, the fluro-pink that graffitied them now almost invisible. Above them hung a familiar cracked and faded leather jacket.

      Jo blinked and stared hard at the thick-pile carpet, determined not to let the others see her cry. Tears rolled down the side of her cheeks, dampening her neck.

      ‘I guess we start at the beginning then,’ Lizzie said, taking charge. Pulling a small wooden stepladder from its place at the back of the closet, she lifted a yellowing hatbox from the uppermost shelf, set it on the floor and removed the lid.

      ‘Omigod,’ she said, wrinkling her nose as she stepped back from the box. A piece of something unquestionably dead was suspended between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Gross. Can you believe she kept this?’

      ‘What is it?’ Mona asked.

      ‘Dead bunny,’ Lizzie said. ‘It was dead as a doornail then, and it’s even deader now. And it smells rank.’

      ‘Bin!’ Mona wretched. ‘Where it should have gone long ago. Why haven’t we got an option for bin? I’ll go and get a black bag.’

      ‘You can’t,’ Jo said. Taking the rabbit fur shrug from Lizzie’s hand, she laid it carefully on the bed and stood in front of it, as if guarding it from Mona’s malign intent. ‘It’s cherish, definitely cherish. Is there a peach satin slip in that box, too?’

      Peering through folds of aged tissue paper, Lizzie nodded.

      As soon as she saw the slip she remembered exactly what Jo had known the second she saw the shrug. Almost reverentially Lizzie handed the delicate fabric to Jo, who folded it neatly and put it on top of the shrug.

      Mona watched, her expression one of revulsion. ‘If you apply the principle to everything,’ she said, ‘that if-Nicci-kept-it-it’s-significant, then the chuck-stroke-sell pile and the charity shop pile are going to be non-existent.’

      ‘It won’t apply to everything,’ Jo said. ‘But if it’s twenty years old and has no obvious value – like, it’s not the first piece of McQueen she saved up for, or those original Vivier shoes she bought in a junk shop on The Lanes in our second year, or her Helmut Lang suits – then it has a different value. A sentimental value. Like this.’

      ‘Why that particularly?’ Mona asked.

      ‘You must remember?’ Jo said.

      She could still see Nicci in the living room of their rundown student house, drumming her newly graffitied docs impatiently while they waited for Lizzie to decide what to wear. ‘It’s what she was wearing the night we . . . The night she met David.’

      Chapter Eight

       The Rabbit Fur Shrug

       Sussex University, Brighton, 1994

       The evening hadn’t got off to the best of starts.

       ‘Lizzie, c’mon!’ Nicci bellowed up the stairs. ‘We’re gonna be late.’

       Silence.

       Late wasn’t Nicci’s thing. She affected casual insouciance but she was scrupulously punctual. Lizzie was always late, a reaction to her mum, who would always rather arrive two hours early than be two minutes late. And this involved clothes. Clothes and Lizzie just didn’t go together.