Will Harris on the horror of a sartorial doppelganger

There is a moment at every house party when it all starts to go a bit downhill. On some nights it’s the ominous swing of the conversation towards politics. On others it’s the bright spark who digs out the apricot liqueur and shouts: “Let’s do shots!” At my friend M’s house party, thrown to celebrate his offer of a new job in Chicago, it is the moment a boy arrives wearing the same T-shirt as me.

“Honestly, it’s not that bad,” says M, who can hardly judge how bad or not bad the situation is from behind two inches of bathroom door. I double-check the lock and consider my options.

“Not that bad?” I fume. “Do you know when I bought this T-shirt? Six hours ago. All I wanted to do was make a good impression at your party; now I look like one of those ghost twins from The Shining. No wonder Philip Green’s a billionaire.”

“No, well you’ll have to go outside,” M is muttering to unseen voices behind the door. “Will! If it’s any consolation, he’s wearing it in a totally different way to you.”
I grip the sides of the wash basin and raise my face to the mirror. A note of hope creeps into my voice. “Inside out?”

“There’s a boy in the kitchen who’s wearing your top”

Downstairs, the party is in full swing, and I take advantage of the crowd to make a covert survey of the room. No sign of my sartorial doppelganger.

Can he have left? “There’s a boy in the kitchen who’s wearing your top,” says my friend T, reclining against a mantelpiece with a glass of Campari in each hand. All he needs is a black Stetson pulled down over his eyes, and we might be in the world’s gayest spaghetti western. “He says to tell you he’s going to stay there, and you can have the lounge and the hallway.”

“What about the garden?” I ask. T pulls an awkward face. “Difficult. Technically it’s a kitchen garden, but I think we could get you access to the top patio, providing you went out through the French windows.”

“No-one’s going on the top patio,” interrupts M, pushing between us and handing me a glass. “I mean it. We think the fox is still there.”

If I’m being honest, of course, none of this is about the T-shirt. Not really. The T-shirt is a symptom of a wider malaise, namely that I don’t want M to move to America. Good friends are hard to find, even more so when your movements are confined to two rooms of a party and you need them to keep running you drinks so you don’t die of shame.
“I mean what am I supposed to do when you move to Chicago?” I huff.
M takes my hand and pats it gently. “Get cabs,” he says.