Chapter Fifteen: Pub Quiz

Dee came down from Manchester on the twentieth of March with a bag of Haribo, a rucksack that smelled faintly of hand sanitiser, and the grey, glittering look of a woman who had worked a twelve-hour night shift and then caught a train out of sheer force of character.

"Don't say I look tired," she said, on the doorstep. "I'm aware."

"You look wonderful."

"I look like a haunted lamp." She dropped the rucksack in the hall, put both arms round Poppy and squeezed so hard that it hurt. She was a small, solid, dark-eyed woman with a laugh like a trumpet and a way of holding on to people that made them feel they'd been rescued. They had met at eleven, on the first day of secondary school, when Dee had punched a boy for calling Poppy Poppycock and been given a detention for it. They had been in each other's pockets ever since. "Right. I want tea. I want crisps. I want to hear everything. And I want to see this radiator that I've heard so much about, because I've decided I don't believe in him."

Kevin knocked, on cue, three times, from the kitchen.

"Oh, hello," said Dee, delighted.

It should have been a perfect weekend. It was supposed to be, anyway. Poppy had marked it in her diary six weeks ago in green pen, with a small drawing of a teapot, and she had told Samir, and Theo, and Sade, that she was not available, under any circumstances, from Friday evening until Sunday night. She had said it quite firmly. Sade had raised one eyebrow and written it in her own diary, which was the same as a legal document.

At twenty to eight on Friday, as Dee was unpacking her toothbrush, Poppy's phone rang.

---

It was Hester Quill, from Marlowe, in the clipped, courteous voice of a woman announcing a death in the family. A supplier in Gloucestershire had gone into administration. The marquee, the big white one, for the launch at Larkhill on the first of April, was now in the possession of a man in Cirencester who had stopped answering his phone. She was sure it would be fine. She was sure Poppy would know what to do. She would be on her mobile all weekend.

Poppy said she'd look into it. She put the phone down, and then, because she was Poppy, and because it was the biggest event of her working life and she hadn't slept for a week, she picked it up again and made six calls from the bedroom with the door half shut. She found a tent in Oxford. She found a man in Stroud with another tent. She argued with a woman about a deposit. She sat for a while on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands, listening to the sound of Dee in the next room opening and shutting the fridge, and felt the weekend she had planned quietly slide off the table and break.

"I'm so sorry," she said, coming out. "I'm so, so sorry. It's the marquee. It's just a few hours. I'll be done by ten."

"It's fine," said Dee.

"It's the launch. It's literally the—"

"Pops. It's fine." She'd found a packet of custard creams and was eating them with great deliberation. "Go. Rescue your tent. I'll sit here and watch your dreadful television and have opinions about it."

It was a quarter to midnight before Poppy came out of the bedroom for the last time. Dee was lying on the sofa with her feet on the arm and a blanket pulled to her chin, looking at the ceiling. She hadn't put the television on.

---

Saturday was better.

They took the bus to the market and bought three kinds of cheese. They walked through Lloyd Park in a thin spring sunshine with a bag of chestnuts, and Dee did her impression of Gregory Pemberton, which had been getting better for five months and was now so accurate that a passing man with a spaniel crossed the road. They sat on a bench and Poppy told her about Charlotte, and the lift, and the coffee, and the word routine, and, a little ashamed, about the click.

"Hm," said Dee.

"What does hm mean?"

"It means I'm thinking." She was frowning at a duck. "I watch people for a living, Pops. When someone's lying to you in a hospital, they do a thing with their breathing. They hold it. It's tiny. You'd never see it unless you were looking." She chewed a chestnut. "When someone suspects a lie, they do the same thing. They go very still, because they don't want to find out."

"I'm not holding my breath."

"You've held it for about ten minutes."

Poppy let it out. It came as a sigh. "He said he'd tell me if there was anything. We've got a rule. It's on my fridge."

"A rule's not a magic wand."

"I know."

"I'm not saying he's lying. I haven't even met him. I'm saying if your stomach's telling you something, then be a grown-up and ask him straight." Dee brushed shell off her knee. "You're the one who sent a rant to four hundred people because you couldn't say it to one man's face. Maybe say it to one man's face."

It was good advice. Poppy resolved to take it. She took it, in fact, all the way home, and then lost it somewhere in the kitchen.

---

The quiz was at the Bell and Compass at eight.

It was Meera's idea. She had been to it before, every second Saturday, with a team of friends from design school who called themselves The Kerning Gang and who had never won a thing. She had asked Poppy shyly in the lift on Thursday whether she'd like to come, and had added, after a pause, that Samir would be there too, and that she'd heard Dee was visiting, and that of course it didn't matter if she didn't want to.

"I'd love to," Dee had said at once, when Poppy told her. "I haven't been out on a Saturday since Brexit."

It was a low, warm, noisy pub with a sticky carpet and a quizmaster in a sequinned waistcoat who spoke into the microphone like a man announcing the end of the world. Meera was already at a corner table in a green cardigan, with a pencil behind each ear, and Samir beside her in an enormous hoodie, looking about fourteen. She stood up when they came in. She stood up a little too quickly, in fact, and knocked a beer mat off the table.

"This is Dee," said Poppy.

"Hi," said Meera.

"Hi," said Dee.

There was a short silence. It went on, perhaps, a second longer than it should have. Poppy, who had spent a lifetime reading small movements, watched Meera go pink to the ears, and Dee, who was never silent for anything, give a small, odd, startled laugh, as if something had been handed to her and she wasn't quite sure what it was.

"Right," said Dee. "What are we called?"

"The Kerning Gang," said Meera.

"That's dreadful. We're changing it." She pulled out a stool and sat down so that her knee touched Meera's under the table. "We're Fluent in Quiz Nothing."

They were, as it turned out, hopeless. Samir knew every capital in Africa and no sports at all. Poppy knew who had written Middlemarch and nothing about football. Meera knew art, design, typefaces and the entire discography of a band nobody else had heard of, and said so, apologetically, to the table, every time she knew one. But Dee was a revelation. Dee knew medicine. Dee knew obscure bones. She knew how many chambers a squid's heart had, and she knew it loudly, and by the end of the second round their table was in third place, which had never happened to The Kerning Gang in the history of the Bell and Compass.

"That's cheating," said a man from the next table.

"It's anatomy," said Dee.

It was the tie-break that did it. The quizmaster read the question in a slow, portentous voice: What is the name of the small bone in the middle ear that is shaped like a stirrup? A silence fell. The whole pub bent over its pencils. Meera, at Dee's shoulder, wrote something and tilted her paper so only Dee could see it. Dee looked at it. She looked at Meera. And something happened in her face that Poppy had not seen in a very long time, which was that it went soft.

"Stapes," said Dee, and then, quietly, "how did you know that?"

"I drew a poster for an audiology charity," said Meera. "It took a month."

"You're very good," said Dee, and there was a pause so complete that Samir looked at Poppy, and Poppy, with great presence of mind, looked at the ceiling.

They won by a point. The prize was a bottle of warm prosecco and a small plastic trophy shaped like a quiz bowl. Meera carried it home in both hands, as if it were a baby, and at the corner of Hoe Street, with the night wind in her hair, said to Dee, rather quickly, "Can I have your number? Only for— only so we can agree about the rematch."

"Absolutely," said Dee.

---

It was one o'clock in the morning when they got in. Poppy was a little drunk and extremely happy. She put the trophy on the mantelpiece, where it looked ridiculous, and she turned to say so, and found that Dee had sat down on the edge of the sofa without taking off her coat.

"Pops," said Dee.

"Mm?"

"I've had a bad few weeks."

It was said very lightly. It was the sort of thing one says in passing, on the way to the kettle, so as to be able to say later that one had said it. Poppy was bending to pick up her shoes. She heard it, and she began to say oh, love, and then her phone buzzed in her pocket.

It was Hester Quill. So sorry, one more thing, the man from Stroud has said he'll need payment by Monday. She looked at it. She looked up, with one shoe in her hand.

"Sorry," she said, "it's Marlowe. Two minutes. Can you— Hang on, I'll just—" And she took the phone into the hall and answered the message and answered the next one, and then a call came in from Sade, and when she came back into the room, eleven minutes later, with her face apologetic and her mind half in Gloucestershire, Dee was standing in the kitchen with the kettle on.

"Sorry," said Poppy. "What were you saying?"

"Nothing." Dee smiled. "It's fine. Honestly. Tell me about the tent."

---

She went at eight on Sunday morning, a full seven hours before she'd said she would, with a story about a double shift that Poppy didn't quite believe and didn't have the nerve to question. At the door, with her rucksack on her shoulder and her face gone a little tight, she stopped and looked at Poppy for a moment, a long, clear, tired look.

"Can I say something? As a friend."

"Of course."

"You tell the truth to everyone except the people who love you."

Poppy flinched. It was like being slapped with a wet cloth. "That's not fair."

"I'm not saying it to be— I'm saying you were brilliant with the whole building. You told four hundred strangers the truth, and you told the board, and you've told your mum everything. And you haven't asked Theo one straight question since you noticed he was clicking his pen."

"I'm working on it. You've no idea how much is going on. And you're hardly—" She stopped. She'd heard the words before they left her mouth, and she'd said them anyway, because she was tired, and because her friend had touched the one thing in the room that was sore. "So do you."

Dee didn't move.

"What?"

"So do you. You've said I'm fine to me for a month. You said it last night with a face like a funeral."

They stood in the narrow hall, two feet apart. A bus went by outside. Kevin the radiator was quite silent.

Then Dee laughed. It was short, and a bit cracked, and her eyes had gone very bright.

"Touché," she said. "Fair. I'll tell you next time. I promise. I'm just— Not today." She put her arms around Poppy, quickly and hard, and let go. "I love you, Poppy Whitlock. Go and have your lie-down. Ring me."

The door shut. Poppy stood in the hall for some time, listening to the sound of her best friend's footsteps going down the road, getting smaller.

---

On the 8:41 from Euston, in a window seat, with her forehead against the cold glass, Dee took her wallet from her coat pocket and turned it over in her hands.

Behind a layer of clear plastic was a small white card with a photograph on it, her own face, grinning, in a scrub cap. Delilah Reyes. Paediatric Nurse. Royal Manchester Children's. She looked at it for a long while, rubbing the corner with her thumb.

In her other pocket, folded in four, was a letter on thick NHS paper. She'd read it six times on the platform. Following our conversation on the sixteenth, we are agreed that you should take a period of leave, effective Monday.

She had not told anyone. She hadn't told Poppy. She had meant to, all weekend, in the park and the pub and the kitchen at one in the morning. She'd had the words ready. She had said, I've had a bad few weeks, and watched her best friend look at a phone.

The train pulled out of the station. Dee put the card back in her wallet, very carefully, and the letter back in her pocket, and sat looking out at the grey back gardens of North London sliding by, and she did not cry, because she was a professional.

She did not text Poppy, either.

But at Milton Keynes her phone buzzed, and it was a message from a number she'd saved only a few hours before, under the name Meera (Stapes). It said, Home safe? Enjoyed the quiz. Enjoyed you more. Hope that's not weird. x

Dee read it three times. She laughed, helplessly, in an empty carriage, with her hand over her mouth.

Then she did cry, a little, after all.