Friend Request(73)
‘Back to my car. It’s parked near the police station.’ I wave my hand in the general direction of Bethel Street.
‘I’ll walk with you, if that’s OK?’
It’s not OK, really. There’s so much that’s unspoken between us, not just on my side but on his too. I am uncomfortably conscious of how little I know him, and how I don’t want him to know too much about me. We stand on the pavement waiting to cross a one-way street. Unfamiliar with the roads, I am looking the wrong way and as I step out, a car rockets towards me. My brain is moving slower than the car and as I hover in the road, I feel Tim’s fingers close on the top of my arm and haul me back to safety.
‘Sorry,’ he says, seeing me rubbing my arm. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I give a shaky laugh. ‘I think I’d be worse off if you hadn’t grabbed me.’
‘They’re nutters, some of the drivers round here. Think they’re at Brands Hatch.’
We cross carefully, and continue on our way in silence. I can’t help thinking of the figure at the top of the school drive.
‘So, you decided against going to the reunion then?’ I ask eventually. I see Tim in my mind’s eye, waving his arms and shouting, and then leaving with his arm around the small figure in black. Tim’s face closes down.
‘Yeah, I realised it would be a really bad idea. I’ve got my own life now. Best left well alone.’
Then what was he doing at the top of the drive? And who was he with?
‘All that Facebook stuff,’ he goes on. ‘People from the past contacting you… it’s so easy to get sucked in, but what does it all mean, really? You’re better off focussing on your actual life, the one you’re living. Our family was never the same, after what happened… to Maria.’
‘Mmm.’ I don’t trust myself to speak, certain my voice will betray me.
‘I felt like I’d be dragging it all up again for no reason, if I went. So you’ve… have you got no idea what happened to Sophie?’
‘No, none at all.’
‘I heard she brought some bloke to the reunion? Someone she hardly knew?’
‘Yes, she was with a man. I’m not sure how well she knew him.’ There’s something about his interest in the details that makes me reluctant to share more than I have to with Tim.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was gossiping, or making light of it,’ he says as we walk, having clearly picked up my signals. ‘I didn’t realise you and Sophie were still close.’
‘We’re not. I mean, we weren’t. I hadn’t really seen her since school.’
‘Oh, OK. It’s ironic, I didn’t go to the reunion because I didn’t want to drag up the past, and then this happens and I feel like the past has given me a big old slap in the face anyway.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I say. However this situation is resolved, I cannot see how I am ever going to feel any differently to the way I do now. I’ve spent a lifetime with this weight on my shoulders. It has shifted and turned, been heavier at certain times than at others, but it has never lifted completely and I can’t see how it ever will.
‘I know what Mum thinks,’ Tim says, ‘but I’ve never believed that Maria killed herself. She was stronger than that, you know? Even when she had all that trouble at her old school in London, I never thought for a moment that she’d give up.’
For a heart-stopping moment I think he means that he suspects someone else had a hand in her death, but he continues speaking. ‘I’m sure the police were right. She must have drunk more than she was used to, and got confused about where she was, or maybe she went to the cliffs to get away from everyone for some reason, to be alone. And then she must have stumbled or… I don’t know. I thought I’d been able to stop turning it over and over in my mind, but this thing with Sophie, it’s got it all churned up again.’
‘What did happen, in London?’ I’ve still never got to the bottom of this. Maybe it’s time I did.
‘Did she never tell you?’
‘No, not really.’ She had tried, but I hadn’t let her. I knew if I let her get too close I’d never be able to pull back if I needed to.
‘There was this boy in her year who she was friendly with. But then he started to want more, told her he was in love with her. She told him she wasn’t interested, just wanted to be friends. But she felt a bit uncomfortable around him after that and pulled back, started spending less time with him. That’s when it started.’
‘When what started, exactly?’
‘Notes in her bag at first, things like that: “Why won’t you see me any more?”; “I know we’re meant to be together”. Then he started waiting outside our house in the mornings before school, wanting to walk with her, and then when she wouldn’t he’d walk a few metres behind us all the way.’
‘Did you tell anyone? Your parents?’
‘Not at first. I mean, we used to laugh about it when it began. Also, I don’t know, teenagers didn’t tell their parents things in the eighties, did they? Not like they seem to now. The idea was that we got on with things ourselves. I hope my daughter’s not like that when she’s older.’
I know exactly what he means. Henry’s still so little that he tells me everything that happens to him, his life an open book, but even Polly’s daughters are much franker with her than I was with my parents. When I was a teenager, even before Maria disappeared, the life I had with my parents was completely separate from the rest of my existence – my real life, as I thought of it. When Polly asks her daughters how their day has been, she gets it all – the rivalries, the disagreements, the small kindnesses. She knows them. What my parents knew, and still know, is a highly edited version of me, a composite of who I was as a child and what I chose to show them of the person I was becoming.