Life and Soul of the Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

friends, but I knew that if I started a conversation with any of them within minutes we’d discover that we had people or places in common. I’m guessing in university towns and cities from Edinburgh to Southampton and from Cambridge to Cardiff there were pockets of people like us – refugees who’d arrived with the intention of finishing off our education but never found the wherewithal to make it back home again.
    I eventually found Vicky and Laura but, conscious of the fact that I hadn’t got a drink in my hands and that my plan for the evening was to drink myself silly, I made an excuse about needing a drink of water, and headed for the kitchen.
    Ed and Sharon’s kitchen, was, like the rest of the house, packed with people but I eventually spotted all the booze lined up on the kitchen counter next to the sink. I’d asked Vicky to give Sharon and Ed my contribution – a bottle of Sancerre that had cost me nearly a tenner – when we first arrived and I was dying to try it. Scanning the various bottles and cans in search of it I eventually found it, minus its cork and empty, poking out of a green recycling box on the floor. Resigning myself to the situation I selected a sophisticated-looking oak-aged Chardonnay with a posh label to open as remuneration, even though there was already an open bottle of Sainsbury’s own-label Chardonnay right in front of me.
    Cringing at how I was letting myself down by three-quarter filling a plastic pint glass with wine (I couldn’t find any others) that to make matters worse I had no proper claim on, a male voice from behind me said: ‘All right, fella, what are you looking so guilty about?’
    I spun round almost spilling the wine all over me only to find Chris and Cooper standing behind me grinning like idiots. ‘Okay, okay,’ I replied. ‘You caught me in the act. Someone drank the whole of that bottle of wine I brought with me. I didn’t even get a sip.’
    ‘So now you’re wreaking your revenge by searching out the most expensive bottle you can find and chucking the lot into a pint glass?’ Chris laughed. ‘What are you? Some kind of student waster?’
    ‘You’re such a git to me sometimes.’
    Chris put his arm around me. ‘You know I only do it because I love you.’
    Chris and Cooper were more like older brothers than friends. The pair of them often teased me mercilessly (their jokes focusing mainly on the notion they had that I was a bit flaky, lacked ambition and was hopeless with men) but the flipside of this kind of abuse is that as their honorary ‘little sister’ it was their duty to protect me. Over the years that I’d known them both I’d lost count of the times that one or the other had walked me home in the rain, picked me up from the airport, put up shelves in my bedroom, even sorted out dodgy guys in bars giving me hassle.
    Obviously I’d known Chris longer than Cooper. In fact it was hard to believe that Chris had ever existed apart from the unit I’d come to know and love as ‘Chris and Vicky’. In many ways he was the complete opposite of Paul. Whereas life with Paul was like being on a rollercoaster with highs that thrilled every nerve ending and lows that took you to the depths of despair, Chris was a lot more even and steady. You always knew exactly where you stood with him and how he would react in any given situation. He just seemed to give off this aura of authority, so much so that whenever any of us had a ‘real world’ problem, like when I was being hassled by a debt-collection agency over an unpaid mobile phone bill a few years ago, I didn’t take my problem to Paul, or Cooper, I took it straight to Chris, and he sorted the whole thing out with a few phone calls.
    Chris picked up a bottle of champagne from behind my back and held it aloft. ‘Still,’ he said giving me a wink, ‘if you’re going to do this revenge thing at all, at least do it properly.’
    ‘You can’t do that!’ I said, outraged as Chris pulled off the