Friend Request(67)

We spent the whole evening together, one of those magical nights that you don’t want to end. The warmth of the day still lingered in the air, and we sat knee to knee in the beer garden, drinking and swapping stories. Alone together in a crowd. Lucy and the others and his friends faded away until we found ourselves out on the street at closing time. When he bent to kiss me my insides turned to molten liquid, and I pulled him closer, my hands twisting and pulling his hair, his arms around me so tightly I could barely breathe. I grasped this second chance at happiness with him with both hands, and although it wasn’t always easy, I held on to it for fifteen years. Until one day, two years ago, I found a text message on his phone that shouldn’t have been there, and I felt it slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.

‘And you ended up married?’

‘Yes.’ It seems wrong to parcel up those fifteen years of my life into such a brief conversation, but I don’t have the words to explain it to Esther even if I wanted to: the breathless exhilaration of being with him; the thrill of the things he did to me; how he became everything to me, at least until Henry was born; the pain he put me through.

‘And your little boy… Sam is his father?’

‘Yes.’ The sort of father who swings him up in the air until he’s giddy with excitement, but doesn’t want to clear up the mess when he’s sick on the floor.

‘So, do you think it was that bloke Sophie was with?’ she asks, sensing that I don’t want to say any more. ‘That did it, I mean? You were talking to him, weren’t you?’

‘We chatted for a bit, that’s all,’ I say, careful not to sound too defensive. ‘He seemed nice. I can’t imagine him… doing that. But then I can’t imagine anyone doing it, but somebody did, didn’t they? It makes you realise, all these things you see on the news, in the papers – they’ve happened to ordinary people like us. They aren’t special, they were just going about their everyday lives until something turned them upside down.’

‘What about Matt Lewis?’ she says. ‘He always had a thing for Sophie, didn’t he?’

For someone who wasn’t part of our crowd, Esther is certainly very well informed. ‘Well, yes, I think he did, but that hardly means he’s going to murder her twenty-seven years later, does it?’

‘I suppose. You don’t think…’ she hesitates. ‘The Facebook request, the birthday presents?’

‘I don’t know, Esther. That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve had some more messages from her.’

‘Saying what?’

I outline the content of the messages briefly. ‘But Esther, are we actually saying that she could still be alive? Where could she have been?’

Esther stops and leans against the railings, gazing over the river towards St Paul’s, resplendent in the sunlight. ‘I don’t know. They never found her body, did they? But why come back now? How, even?’

‘I don’t know. But what Tim said, talking about her in the present tense… I saw him, you know. Outside the reunion. He told me when I saw him in Sharne Bay that he was going to go on her behalf, but then he didn’t show up. Except… he did, sort of. I saw him outside, talking to someone.’

‘Tim was there?’ She looks at me questioningly.

‘Yes. Well, not actually at the reunion. I saw him at the top of the drive, when I was outside smoking.’

‘That’s weird. I wonder why he didn’t come in. I suppose maybe he changed his mind when it came to it? It’s a pretty weird thing for anyone to do, when you think about it. Go to a school reunion, I mean. If you really cared about any of those people they would still be friends, and if you don’t care about them, what on earth are you there for? Curiosity?’

‘You went,’ I say, stung by her words.

‘Yes, and I wish I hadn’t now. For starters I wouldn’t be mixed up in all this. And it would have meant that I was able to leave the past in the past, but I couldn’t. I can’t. I had to show everyone – look at me now with my great career and my husband and my children. How bloody stupid. I should have just put it all on Facebook like everyone else.’ Her hands tighten on the railings.

‘It’s not stupid, Esther. I didn’t find out about the reunion until months after it was organised. Nobody had thought to let me know, and I felt crushed. If anything’s bloody stupid, that is. Why should it even matter?’

‘It shouldn’t. But it does,’ Esther says. ‘It all matters. Part of me feels hurt that if she is still alive, she hasn’t let me know. We were close, you know, before she died. She talked to me about a lot of stuff. Do you know about what happened to her at her old school? Did she ever talk to you about it?’

‘She tried once, I think.’ Slatted wooden sunbeds in the dark, breath rising in the night air. Two little fingers, linked.

‘That boy that was obsessed with her – it was pretty bad. You’d call it stalking now, there’d be restraining orders and all sorts, but back then there wasn’t much they could do unless he physically hurt her.’

She turns and we walk along the river in silence for a while.

‘What is it you want, Louise? Why did you call?’

I want a night of untroubled sleep. I want to change the past. I want to stop looking over my shoulder on the tube platform, stop thinking about jumping or being pushed every time I cross a bridge.