Friend Request(38)

I’ve just taken my first sip when I see her at the door, looking around for me. She’s dressed in a bright red full-length coat, with her hair in a shining plump bun, cheeks flushed from the cold. She looks ten years younger than her age and has no idea that some middle-aged men are eyeing her admiringly. She spies me and waves, miming a drink. I shake my head, so she goes to the bar and two minutes later she’s sitting opposite me, her G&T fizzing on the table between us.

‘How was your day?’ she asks, more as a conversational opener than because she wants to know, I imagine.

‘Oh, you know…’ I say, not meeting her eye. Where would I even begin? ‘Yours?’

‘Yes, good, thanks.’ She’s not interested in telling me about her day. She has her guard up around me; I felt it that day in her office. She doesn’t want to let me in, and I can’t blame her. I feel an urge to clear the air, to make the unspoken, spoken.

‘Look, Esther, what we spoke about last time, when I came to see you. About how I treated Maria. I know you probably think I’m just saying it because I don’t want you to think badly of me, but I am a different person now. I know what I did to her was awful, unforgivable. I know I made her life miserable, and I wish so much that I could go back and change that, but I can’t. All I can do is acknowledge how wrong I was, and, well… try to be a better person now.’

Esther fiddles with the straw in her gin and tonic, the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass.

‘OK,’ she says finally, ‘I can understand that, although I have to admit I can’t always think rationally about our school days.’

Panic rushes through me again at the mention of school and I look around. A man waiting at the bar catches my eye and half-smiles. My chest tightens and I drag my gaze back to Esther.

‘When I think about that time, I’m plunged back into it somehow,’ she says. ‘Everything I’ve achieved since pales into the background, and I’m back there, sitting on my own in the dinner hall, pretending to read a book. They stay with you, experiences like that. Change you. I know I’m successful now, and…’ she gestures to her appearance, unwilling to say the words, but I understand. ‘But inside, there’s a part of me still hovering there, on the outside looking in.’

I know what she means because despite our very different school experiences, I feel this too.

‘Sometimes I’m talking to a woman I’ve met as an adult,’ she goes on. ‘Maybe a school mum, or someone at work, and they say something in passing about their school days, and it makes me realise that they were one of the popular ones. You know, they’ll mention a party they went to, or their football captain boyfriend, and I just think, My God, you’re one of them. And part of me —’ she falters, reddening ‘— part of me feels ashamed. So I don’t tell them who I was at school, I just laugh along and allow them to think that I’m the same, that my adolescence was filled with drunken escapades, giggly sleepovers, pregnancy scares. But it wasn’t, was it? My experience of being a teenager would be like a foreign country to them.’

‘I know this will seem hard to believe, but I understand a little bit of how you feel. My time at school was…’ I trail off, unable to put it into words, especially to her.

She smiles, running a fingertip up and down her glass, making tracks in the condensation. ‘Not the happiest days of your life? I’ve actually been thinking about that, since you came to see me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Time slows down a fraction. What does Esther know? What did she see?

‘I knew you at primary school, remember.’

‘Yes, I remember.’ Wisps of cloud, floating across an azure blue Norfolk sky. Running through woods, breathless, to emerge on a huge expanse of sand, stretching on and on until it reaches the sea, and then beyond that the mysterious blue line where the sea meets the sky. Endless days spent on the beach, returning home at night with warm, salty skin, and sand in our shoes. Me and Esther, lying on our backs, side by side in her garden, not touching, unbroken blue sky above us, insects buzzing, the warmth of the rays on our sun-kissed limbs. Lying out as long as we could until the shadow of the house reached the last bit of grass, taking away the sun’s warmth and turning the ground, and our bodies, cold. I remember all these things.

‘I saw how you changed when we started at Sharne Bay High,’ Esther says. ‘You grew up faster than me. I was still a child at eleven, twelve, even thirteen. You went into yourself very early on, in the first year I think. And when you came out again, it was as if you’d made a conscious decision to be someone else. So anyone who’d known the old you… well, we had to go. It was all about Sophie, and the others. But you always seemed like you were on the fringes, never really part of the gang. Until the leavers’ party. Something was different, wasn’t it?’

I nod, hardly able to speak. Once I had moved on from Esther (and she was right, it had been a conscious decision), I had hardly given her a second thought, apart from making sure our past association was as little known as possible.

‘I was different. I felt different. Like I was changing again, I suppose, or becoming the person I’d wanted to be all along.’ I am feeling my way here, the truth stumbling clumsily out, unfamiliar on my tongue. My mind is whirring, unable to silence the nagging fear that I am still being watched.