Wish You Were Here Read Free Page A

He was at the station and needed me to pick him up. As I put down the phone, picked up my car keys, grabbed my coat and locked the front door I remember quite clearly feeling happy for the first time in a long while. Tom’s arrival meant that my holiday plans were in motion. There was now an implied momentum to my life. I was no longer stationary. Instead I was hurtling towards the unknown.

    At the station I spotted Tom instantly amongst the crowd of recently arrived travellers. Though we were roughly the same age, Tom had always looked a good few years older than me. It was his lack of hair that did it. Tom had begun losing his hair in his early twenties and now that he was in his thirties I barely registered his lack of hair. There’s something about men whose hair loss comes earlier in life that makes them cooler than the rest of us. It’s as if they’ve had an entire decade to come round to the idea that their hair has gone for good and so by the time they reach their third decade it’s quite clear that they patently don’t give a toss about what’s going on on top of their skulls. Possessing a full head of hair is no longer linked to their masculine identity. It’s just the way things are. And when women say that they find bald guys sexy (and there are quite a few out there) it’s this lot that they’re talking about and not the late arrivals who are always too panicked by their hair loss to do anything other than look mortified.
    â€˜How long do you think we’re going for?’ I asked, staring at Tom’s hulking suitcase and marginally smaller rucksack as I helped him load his luggage into the back of my car. ‘We’re going for seven nights. Not seven years.’
    â€˜And I bet you haven’t even packed yet,’ laughed Tom.
    â€˜You know me too well. How are you, mate?’
    â€˜Good,’ he replied. ‘Really good. And you?’
    â€˜Me?’ I paused and thought about it for a few moments. Tom didn’t know that Sarah had gone because I hadn’t told him, although I reasoned that the situation would be pretty much self-explanatory once he saw the absence of furniture in the flat. ‘All the better for seeing you,’ I concluded.
    In the past few years I must have seen Tom only a handful of times at best. This had more to do with conflicting timetables than a lack of desire. As far as I was concerned, even if I didn’t see him for an entire decade he would remain, along with Andy, one of my closest friends in the whole world.
    One Saturday afternoon about six years ago, when we had both managed to get our schedules straightened out, we finally managed to set up a weekend to see each other. Sarah had gone away to see her parents in Norfolk so I’d driven up the M40 to Coventry to stay with Tom for the weekend. It had been a while since we’d had a proper chat on the phone and even longer since we’d seen each other in the flesh, so this trip was in a lot of ways long overdue. It was great to see him. We spent the afternoon visiting hifi shops because Tom was in the market for a new system and in the evening we’d gone for a drink at what I assumed was his local pub. Anyway, we’d been doing the catching-up thing over a couple of pints of bitter in front of a roaring log fire when Tom suddenly gave me this oddly solemn look and told me he had some important news.
    â€˜I’ve become a born-again Christian,’ he told me sombrely. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’
    He then took a sip of his bitter and looked at me expectantly, as though this was my cue to tell him my reaction. And if I’m honest I really didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t help thinking that it would’ve been easier if he’d told me he was gay, because at least then I could’ve given him a great big hug and thanked him for confiding in me. I could’ve shown him how accepting I was of this