Friend Request(12)

‘Oh, you know how these things get around,’ she says. ‘I still see a few of the old gang – Matt, Claire. People talk. I think it was Matt who told me actually – he came to your wedding, didn’t he?’

He came alone, standing awkwardly around in his work suit, not knowing anyone. I remember Polly talking to him, saying afterwards that he was nice. I think she fancied him a bit. Before she was married, obviously.

What did he say to Sophie about Sam and me, I wonder? There’s nobody who knows the intimate details of our relationship. Nobody who knows how we used to spend whole weekends in bed, totally absorbed in each other, turning down invitations to see friends, being everything to each other.

‘You had a baby too, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘We had a baby. Although he’s not a baby any more; he’s four now.’ I suddenly wish desperately that I was at home, peering in through the gap of Henry’s door to check if he’s asleep, going in to kiss him, to breathe in the sleeping scent of him.

‘Oh, sweet.’ She couldn’t be less interested, and anyway Henry is the last thing I want to be talking about with her.

‘What about Tim? Tim Weston?’ I ask, as if the name has just occurred to me. ‘Do you ever see him?’

Sophie looks at me sharply. ‘No, I’ve not seen him for years. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I noticed that he was listed on Facebook as going to the reunion and I know he was friends with Matt’s brother, so I thought…’ I tail off. As an introduction to the thing I want to talk to her about, it’s been a spectacular failure.

Sophie starts listing all the others that are going, filling me in on the lives of various people of whom I’ve heard nothing since I left school in 1989. There was no sixth form at Sharne Bay High, although even if there had been there was no way I would have stayed on for it, not after what happened. I went to sixth-form college in a neighbouring town to do my A levels, and after I left home for university, I never looked back. My parents moved to Manchester to be nearer my grandparents during my first year away, so I never spent any holidays in Norfolk and didn’t keep in touch with anyone, throwing myself determinedly if unenthusiastically into university life. By the time Sam and I got together, which was well after our university days, I had completely lost touch with everyone from school, and although I knew Sam saw Matt Lewis from time to time it was very rare and I never joined him.

Maria’s friend request sits in my stomach like a lump of undercooked pasta, preventing me from engaging fully in the conversation – not that it matters as I can barely get a word in. I have that shaky, breathless feeling you get when you know that there’s a huge conversational bomb upcoming, but the other person has no idea. I’ve got my finger in the pin of the grenade, but she can’t even see it.

Eventually there is a lull, so I seize the moment and launch in.

‘Sophie, there’s actually a reason I got in touch… something I need to talk to you about.’

‘Yes?’ she says cautiously, taking a sip of wine.

‘I got a rather… strange friend request on Facebook.’ I take a beat, wanting to give myself a few more seconds of normality. Once I say it, once I let someone else in to this… whatever it is, that’s it, game over. Things will never be the same. ‘It was from Maria Weston.’

I don’t think it’s my imagination that Sophie pales and her eyes widen for a millisecond, before she slips her mask smoothly back into place.

‘Oh, did you get that too?’ She laughs. ‘From the girl who drowned?’

So it’s not just me. There’s a certain comfort in that. But surely even Sophie can’t be so heartless as to be laughing about this. The only possible explanation is that she is faking it, pretending a nonchalance that you might feel about a girl with whom you had had nothing to do, a girl whose life never touched your own.

‘Yes, of course the girl who drowned.’ This comes out rather more forcefully than I intended, and Sophie looks taken aback, perhaps even a little frightened, although she hides it quickly.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ she says, laughing again. ‘It’s obviously a sick joke, probably from someone who’s going to the reunion. I bet everyone’s had the same request.’

‘I suppose so,’ I say. This is in fact the supposition I have been clinging to for four days like a shipwreck victim to a broken piece of the hull. ‘But who would do something like that? And why me? I didn’t even know about the reunion when I got the request. Mind you, I suppose it’s obvious.’

‘Why obvious?’ Sophie asks, getting up from the sofa and pouring herself another glass of wine from the bottle on the coffee table without offering me one. She sits down in the armchair on the opposite side of the table and sips her drink, her face unreadable in the shadows.

‘You know. The way I treated her… and what we did…’ I blunder on. ‘Although hardly anybody knew about that. Did they?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Louise. I barely knew her.’ She places her wine glass firmly on the coffee table.

I can hardly believe what I am hearing. I have lived the last twenty-seven years in the shadow of what we did, of what I did. Of course my life has carried on – I have studied and worked, shopped and cooked; I’ve been a friend, a daughter, a wife, a mother. Yet all the time, in the back of my mind, this one unforgivable act has loomed – squashed, squeezed, parcelled, but always there. The awkwardness I have been feeling all evening subsides and is replaced by anger. I thought I would be able to talk to Sophie about this.