I ducked my undoubtedly beet-red face and straightened my rucked-up skirt. The jeers from the rugby table continued, although now they were shouting ‘Denied Longley!’ and ‘Unlucky mate!’ Lou cast them all killing looks, straightened up to her full five foot ten (given her four inch heels), grabbed my hand and dragged me away.
We retreated over to a table of our friends, which was luckily about as far as you could get from the rugby boys. I was relieved that we hadn’t shared our stupid crush with the others over the last two years. It was mortifying enough that I had allowed a bloke so obviously plastered to stick his tongue down my throat and his hand up my skirt, exposing me to the whole bar moments before he had to be dragged away to throw up. If everyone had known the perfect being I had built him up into before this happened, I would never have lived it down.
‘Buck up, Frankie,’ my friend Georgia said in my ear. ‘We all know that lot can be complete bell-ends, just ignore it.’ I gave her a weak smile and looked down into my pint of snakebite to avoid the concerned looks from the others.
Just as I was starting to feel a bit better, Dylan came up to our table.
‘You okay, Frank?’ he asked, crouching down next to me.
‘Fine, Dyl, no worries,’ I chirped in a voice that sounded falsely bright, even to me.
‘Drinking games got a bit out of hand, see,’ Dylan explained in his Welsh lilt. ‘Longley got too many wets in and they’ve all decided that tonight is “fuck a fresher night”.’
I looked at Dylan in horror, ‘But I’m not a fresher.’ Dylan shifted uncomfortably and ran his hand through his hair before he answered.
‘I guess he hadn’t noticed you before, Ladies.’ (‘Ladies’ was Dylan’s bizarre name for me; I had no idea why, and presumed it was a Welsh thing).
‘Oh right, of course,’ I replied in a small voice, feeling like an idiot. Of course Tom hadn’t noticed me before, despite the small size of our medical school, our frequent proximity, and even the ‘Library Incident’. I was an expert in blending into the background, being only five foot four, with dark hair and eyes (inherited from my Italian parents), and a conspicuous lack of curves. No wonder he hadn’t recognized me.
With a hot crushing pain in my chest and my nose stinging as tears threatened, I looked away from Dylan and continued my contemplation of my snakebite. I think Dylan had caught sight of the unshed tears before I looked down, and he bumped my stool with his hip.
‘Come on, Ladies, make some room for your favourite valleys’ boy.’
I smiled and stood, letting him slip onto my stool and pull me down into his lap. He was tall, with a bulky frame and hair almost as dark as mine. I knew lots of girls panted after him, but I thought of him more like a brother. Although he was always flirting, I never took it seriously. He’d even tried to snog me a couple of times, which was probably more a drunken mistake on his part, and we were firmly in the friend zone now.
He swept my hair back over my shoulder so he could talk softly into my ear. ‘Want my opinion, he’s more than a bittwpnot to have noticed you before, Ladies. Forget him.’ I had been around Dylan enough to know that ‘twp’ meant ‘daft’. I didn’t think Tom was daft though, just drunk and thoughtless.
‘Yeah, Frankie,’ Lou said from my other side. ‘In fact I’m going to officially rechristen him Thomas “Gankface” Longley, Weasel Gankface for short.’ I sniggered into my drink and took a decent swig. Gank was Lou’s very favourite word of the moment (what can I say? We were students) and she used it at every available opportunity.
‘Perfect. Weasel Gankface it is.’
We didn’t see Weasel Gankface for the rest of the evening, and I put a brave face on my humiliation. But it proved impossible to completely avoid the rugby boys, a couple of whom stumbled up to us on the dance floor. After disengaging a second time from their wandering hands, I got another demonstration of why Thomas G. Longley’s new nickname was well earned.
‘Bloody hell,’ the drunken prop forward slurred, after I had slapped his hands away from my bum. ‘Longley’s right, you are frigid.’
‘Yeah,’ his friend put in. ‘Frigid Frankie!’ They both burst into gales of laughter at their joke, but were cut short when a furious Lou whipped her blonde head around, stormed up to them, grabbed them both by an ear and banged their heads together. They stood frozen in place and stared at her, shocked.
‘Jog on, you pathetic Gankensteins,’ she bit out, her beautiful face flushed with anger. ‘Mark, I know for a fact that you have a pin-dick, and Harry, I know that you came in your pants from justsnoggingMilly Jones. How on earth you think you can try it on with Frankie, who is so out of your league it’s not even funny, I don’t know.’ With that she grabbed my hand and stalked off the dance floor with me in tow having to jog to keep up with her long strides. Once we had made it out of the bar and into the car park she slowed to a stop, snatching me into a fierce hug.
‘Hey, Lou-Lou,’ I wheezed whilst being crushed to her ample chest. ‘I’m okay, it’s fine.’ She pulled back so that she could look down into my eyes, and framed my face with her hands.
‘You’re not bloody well okay,’ she informed me, her tone still fierce. ‘Don’t you dare let those tossers push you into your shell. We’ve only just managed to extract you from it and I won’t have them setting you back.’
I had been painfully shy and homesick when I arrived at medical school, and Fresher’s Week had been a terrifying experience. Luckily Lou had been on the same floor as me in halls. She had noticed my rabbit-in-the-headlights expression on the first day after Mamma left, and took me under her wing.
Loud and outrageous, with a particular talent for creative swearing, she was the yin to my yang. Fortunately for me, Lou and I became part of an extremely close-knit group of friends in our first year. The bonds of friendships forged at medical school are strong, owing to the intense environment and pressure pushing you together. Generally the ethos was work hard, play harder, and my friends had made sure that I didn’t let my shyness and fear of big social situations hold me back from having fun.
I gave Lou a reassuring squeeze and managed to fake a small smile. ‘Really, Louey, no probs – okay? I’m tougher now than I used to be, remember?’ I lied. Lou narrowed her eyes but I could see that she was going to let it pass. She heaved out a sigh and released me so that we could link arms to walk through the car park together.
‘God,’ she said in a dejected tone. ‘Thomas G. Longley, what a sodding disappointment.’ I could tell that the death of that particular dream had cut her deep too.
‘Weasel Gankface from now on, Lou, don’t forget.’ Thankfully the heavy atmosphere was broken by our giggles as we made our way to the night bus.
Once we were on the bus, however, and meandering through the busy London streets, my mind replayed the events of the night. I had to turn away from Lou and look out of the window so she couldn’t read my expression, but I couldn’t help letting out a small sigh.
‘Hey,’ she said, grabbing my hand and squeezing, ‘don’t let him give you a raging case of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. ’
I rolled my eyes and grinned despite the churning in my stomach. ‘Wow, Lou. That might just be the saddest joke I’ve ever heard. You do realize you’re a huge nerd for cracking that one.’
