Don’t You Forget About Me Read Free Page A

the bouquet about how ‘we’ll be next’, turned sour when he said he didn’t believe in marriage. I got all upset and took it personally, even though we’d only been dating for six months and I wasn’t in any rush to get a ring on my finger. But that’s what happens when you’re a hopeless romantic and drink too much champagne . . . God, I’m such an idiot.
    I feel my heart tug. Staring out into the velvet darkness I wonder where he is. What he’s doing. If he’s thinking about me. Missing someone has to be one of the worst human emotions. All the other feelings like anger and fear and horror get so much more airplay, as if their intensity gives them more value, but whereas those emotions come in violent bursts and are gone again, the gnawing ache of loss has to be simply endured. It’s like background noise, it’s always there, it never goes away. You just have to try to block it out, distract yourself, hope that tomorrow the hole they left behind has grown a little smaller.
    Suddenly aware of how cold my fingers are, I unwrap them from the frozen railings and, shoving my icicle fingers in my pockets, cut down from the bridge and head towards a large red block of Victorian mansion flats on the corner. Above the doorway a sign in stained glass reads Arminta Mansions .
    From the outside it looks very grand, very moneyed and very posh, but in reality the communal stairwells are a bit shabby and some of the neighbours are a bit dodgy. Fiona bought her flat years ago, with some money she was left by an old aunt, and it’s up four flights of lung-bursting stairs, is in desperate need of a lick of paint and more than a little bit cramped.
    Which, to be honest, is very Fiona .
    Seriously, she’s just like her flat. Grand on the outside, and anything but on the inside. To the outside world she’s a successful health and beauty journalist, with a column in a national newspaper’s Saturday magazine, where she extols the benefits of exercise, three healthy organic meals a day and SPF45. To those on the inside – i.e. me – she freelances from our kitchen table in her pyjamas, smokes twenty a day and, when she’s not slathering herself in Hawaiian Tropic at the first glimmer of sunshine, she’s trying to lose weight on some crazy fad diet or other.
    I’ve tried telling her she’s gorgeous just the way she is, but she’ll never listen. Last month it was nothing but Tom Yum soup. ‘It’s the cabbage soup diet for the millennium,’ she’d explained enthusiastically, ‘only without the flatulence’, and three times a week she’d walked to the Thai takeaway to collect huge vats of it. Still, I guess that’s regular exercise.
    Fiona is my oldest and closest friend. We met at our local primary school when we were both eight years old, and by way of introduction she told me she could play the piano and that her parents had a holiday home in the south of France. Which they do.
    Sort of .
    If you can count towing a caravan across the Channel every year.
    As for playing the piano, it was more ‘Chopsticks’ on a Yamaha keyboard.
    But that’s Fiona. She’s always been like that. And yes, OK, it can be a bit embarrassing when she puts on her posh voice and tells people she went to Cambridge, but omits to mention it was actually the poly. Or like, for example, the other night when I heard her on the phone saying she must go as she ‘had Pilates’, when in actual fact, what she really meant was she has a Pilates DVD and it’s stuffed underneath the telly gathering dust along with all her other exercise DVDs. Not only that, but I’ve only ever seen her do it once and she switched it off halfway through to watch Dragon’s Den .
    Yet, despite her affectations, underneath it all she’s one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. She’s got a huge heart and when the chips are down, I know she’ll always be there for me – I call her the fourth emergency service; but it’s as if she feels she has to put on