Friend Request Read online

  No matter how many times we practise the days of the week he is still none the wiser, each new day a delicious surprise.

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Is it a Daddy Saturday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  One of the only things I am grateful to Sam for is his timing. Henry was just two when he left and has no memory at all of Sam and I living together. He was recently invited to play at a new school friend’s house, the first time he has had an invitation that didn’t include me. At bedtime that night as I arranged the cuddly toys in their correct rows, he told me in great wonderment that Josh’s mum and dad were both there, that they all lived together. I sold Henry the fantasy that he was lucky, he had two homes, and extra people to love him, but it was hollow on my tongue.

  The wine I had with Polly has left me dry-mouthed and headachey. I leave Henry in my bed watching TV and stumble into the kitchen to make his jam toast. My laptop is still open on the table, a physical reminder of how the past won’t let me go. I want so much to call Polly and tell her everything. The desire to unburden myself is like a hard stone in the pit of my stomach. But I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t, I can’t risk alienating Polly. She’d never understand, especially given what’s going on with Phoebe.

  What I wish more than anything is that my life could go back to the way it was before I got the Facebook request, to the time when everything was put away in its proper place inside my head. It has taken me so long to get everything into those compartments. I’ve only recently got back on track, got the things back in their boxes, made some new slots. And this time it’s Maria who is in there, rummaging around, taking things out and holding them up in the cold clear light of day.

  As the milk froths energetically away and the machine flashes, heralding the imminent arrival of my coffee, my phone starts ringing in my bag which is hanging from the back of one of the kitchen chairs. I rummage through old tissues, train tickets and broken pens, reaching it just in time before the voicemail kicks in. It’s a mobile number, one I don’t have in my phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Louise? It’s Esther. Esther Harcourt.’

  I stand very still, feeling my heart beating close to my skin. The toast pops up but I ignore it. Is it a coincidence that she has phoned the day after I receive another message from Maria? I’ve been thinking about Esther, and the fear that I saw on her face when I told her about the Facebook message. She seemed genuinely shocked, but that could have been merely because she wasn’t expecting me to turn up on her doorstep. Hearing her voice, I realise how much I’ve wanted to see her again, but I’m so used to deceiving myself that I can’t tell why. Is it because I think she might be the one sending the messages? Or do I need to be with someone who understands, even if she doesn’t know the whole story?

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘There is something I haven’t told you, but I don’t know if it’s relevant to what’s happened.’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘I’m meeting a friend in London today. We’re spending the afternoon together and then having an early dinner, but we should be finished by eight at the latest. Do you… could we possibly meet afterwards? We could talk about it properly.’

  I am glad to have a real excuse to get away early from my date tonight, so we arrange to meet at 8.30pm in a pub near Seven Dials. I always feel more at ease in a proper pub as opposed to a fancy wine bar, and I sense that Esther feels the same, despite her expensive suits and general high-powered-ness.

  I stick some more bread in the toaster for Henry and scrape butter onto the cold toast, the knife unwieldy in my hand. I stand at the counter eating it, staring mindlessly out of the French windows. A pigeon struts around the garden, pecking at unseen crumbs on the patio and I wonder vaguely what he could be eating.

  I call Henry into the kitchen for his toast, and he comes ambling out holding Manky. One piece of his hair is sticking straight up from his head like a horn and his pyjamas are inside out and back to front. My heart swells with love for him.

  ‘Thank you very much for my toast, Mummy,’ he says gravely as he sits down, placing Manky carefully on the chair beside him. They’ve been talking about manners at school and, as in everything he does, he has taken it very seriously.

  ‘You’re welcome, Henry,’ I reply, equally seriously. I wonder briefly, as I sometimes do, how different this scene would be if I had a brood of unruly children, pulling cereal boxes from the cupboard and knocking their drinks over, fighting with each other and answering me back. We had wanted to give Henry a sibling (as a pair of only children, neither of us wanted the same fate for him), but it had taken us so much time and money and heartache to conceive Henry, the thought of starting that journey again had been daunting, like finishing a marathon and then being told you’ve got to run another one straight away. My inability to grow a baby in my womb had made me feel like a failure. The one thing women are supposed to be able to do effortlessly, and I couldn’t do it. When you first learn about sex, and pregnancy, all they tell you is how easy it is to fall pregnant. Nobody ever talks about when it’s hard. Sam tried not to blame me, but I knew he secretly did. How could he not, when month after month there was no line, no big fat blue cross?

  Now though, I love our tight little unit, the two of us against the world. Wherever we go, Henry holds tightly to my hand, as if to stop me from slipping away. If we’re at the park, or soft play, he’ll go and play with his friends but every now and then he’ll come back to tell me he loves me.

  I wasn’t sure, before he was born, what sort of a mother I was going to make. Although things changed once it became apparent that we were going to struggle to conceive, prior to that I had never particularly wanted children, never felt that overwhelming biological urge that I’ve read about. But when he was born I surprised myself with my patience and my instinct, the way that, in spite of my inexperience, I knew what he needed and how to soothe him. The love that I feared wouldn’t come consumed me entirely.

  Perhaps I went too far in fact, subsuming my needs and Sam’s in favour of Henry’s. Sam certainly thought so. He wanted more of me than ever after Henry was born, but I didn’t have much left for him. I don’t know why he couldn’t see that we were adults, we could look after ourselves; it didn’t matter whether we were happy or not. All that mattered was that Henry was OK. That’s still all that matters to me.

  ‘Do you want to go and get dressed then?’ I ask, smoothing down the sticking-up bit of hair. ‘Then we’ve got a bit of time to play trains before I take you to Daddy’s.’

  His face lights up. ‘Have we got time to make a really big track?’

  ‘A huge one,’ I say, smiling. He hugs me, and I don’t mind that his sticky fingers are entwined in my hair. I just hold him very tight, the thought of leaving him at Sam’s later sitting heavily on me, weighing me down like rocks in my pockets.

  Whilst he’s getting dressed, I pick up my phone with a heavy heart and scroll through the contacts until I find Phoebe’s mobile number.

  ‘Hi, Louise.’ She sounds pleased and surprised to hear from me. I don’t think I’ve ever called her before, although sometimes we chat on text.

  ‘Hi, Phoebs. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she says cautiously.

  ‘Did Mum tell you I might call?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen her this morning. I’m still in bed.’

  ‘Oh, right, well.’ I steel myself to lie to Phoebe, who I held in my arms as a baby. ‘She told me you’ve been having some trouble with a girl at school.’

  ‘Oh my God! Why did she tell you that?’ Phoebe’s clearly taken the ‘teen’ part of pre-teen to heart.

  ‘She’s worried about you,’ I say. ‘And we were talking, and I mentioned that I’d had something… similar happen to me, and she asked me to talk to you.’ It was similar, but not in the way I am allowing her to believe.

  ‘Right,’ says Phoebe, unconvinced. ‘I can’t be
lieve she was talking about me behind my back.’

  ‘She just wants to help you. And so do I.’ I do want to help, desperately. Is there part of me that thinks I can somehow atone for what I did to Maria in some great cosmic trade-off?

  ‘So what happened to you then?’ asks Phoebe, curiosity getting the better of her.

  ‘Oh, I won’t go into all that,’ I say, trying to sound light-hearted. ‘But what you have to remember is that most bullying comes from insecurity. Even though this girl… what’s her name?’

  ‘Amelia.’

  ‘This Amelia, she probably seems untouchable, full of confidence, she’s actually probably massively insecure, that’s why she feels the need to play you and the others off against each other.’ If only I’d been able to see this myself when I was at school. If I could have seen that Sophie’s unkindness sprang from insecurity, I might have been better able to keep myself from being sucked into it. If I had had more confidence myself, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so easily persuaded to cruelty, so frighteningly keen to distance myself from anything and anyone even slightly tainted with the possibility of unpopularity.

  ‘She’s not insecure.’ Phoebe is definite about this. ‘Seriously, Louise, she’s not.’

  ‘Well, OK. The thing is the other girls probably feel like you do – scared of getting on the wrong side of her, scared of being left out. But if you can somehow band together with some of the others, you’ll have more power, as a group. If she can’t isolate you, she won’t have such a hold over you. Is there anyone else, any of your other friends, who you can try and make more of an effort with, do things on your own with? Anyone who you think is maybe less in awe of Amelia than the others?’ I wonder about Claire and Joanne, lip-glossed and bouncily confident in my memory. Were they struggling too? Was anything as it seemed to me then?

  ‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘there is Esme. And maybe Charlotte.’

  ‘Great! There you go. Why don’t you invite them over, or arrange to meet up with them without her. Once Amelia sees that you’re not all going to roll over and do exactly as she says – well, maybe then you can all be friends.’ I wonder whether Maria ever confided in anyone about what was happening to her, how different things might have been if she had had a concerned adult in her life to offer advice and comfort.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she says. ‘I don’t think she’s a normal human being. She’s just a cow.’ She giggles and I hear a glimpse of the old Phoebe, the one I used to push high on the swings as she whooped and squealed with delight. ‘But I might try what you said about Esme and Charlotte.’ She pauses, and then says almost shyly, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say. ‘The other thing to remember is that school, and your friends there, are just a small part of your life. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, it feels like everything. But you’re going to go on and do amazing things, and this Amelia, well, she may not.’ I think of Esther with her high-flying career and her impeccably groomed hair; and of the look that flashed across her face when I told her about the reunion that no one had thought to invite her to. Will we hold them for ever, these hurts we bear from our teenage years?

  I say goodbye to Phoebe and lay my phone carefully down on the table. What I have said to her is good advice, I remind myself. So why do I feel so guilty? I know why. It’s because I’ve let her think I was the victim, not the perpetrator. Allowed her to imagine that I am like Esther, still bearing the scars of the humiliations I suffered at the hands of others, when in fact the opposite is true.

  We leave late, what with the phone call to Phoebe and Henry being unwilling to leave our train game, and the traffic is awful so it’s after 11.30am by the time we get to Sam’s. I get out of the car to open Henry’s door and unstrap him, loading his Thomas the Tank Engine rucksack onto his little back.

  I lift him up so he can ring the bell, and as always it’s Sam who comes to the door. His hair is messy and he’s wearing jeans and an old T-shirt he’s had for years, made of a faded soft cotton I’ve laid my head on a thousand times. You’d think I’d be used to it after two years, but it still takes me aback to see his face, so familiar, so much a part of me, in this unfamiliar context. I’m still poleaxed by what has happened to us, by the fact that I’m handing over our child to him, exchanging pleasantries at a front door that is Sam’s but not mine.

  ‘Can I go straight in?’ Henry says to me.

  ‘Yes, OK.’ I kneel down to cuddle him, but he’s already gone, slipping from my outstretched arms like an eel. I still hate leaving him here, my stomach knotted with anxiety the whole time he is away, the clock inching its way to handover time agonisingly slowly.

  I honestly think Henry is OK with parents who are not together, but I don’t think I will ever get used to watching him walk away from me to a world I know nothing about. I always knew that when he was a teenager he would have an unknown life away from me that I couldn’t control, but it feels so terribly wrong that he should have that now, aged four. There are people intimately involved in his life about whom I know practically nothing. A stepmother who doesn’t come to the door. A little sister I’ve never seen. When he’s not with me, how can I know if he is safe?

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ says Sam.

  ‘I know, sorry, we were playing trains, and then the traffic was bad…’

  ‘It’s OK, Louise, I don’t mind.’ He looks at me closely. ‘But… is something wrong? Anything I should know?’ He leans against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Has he had the Facebook request too?

  He is silent for a moment, as if weighing something up.

  ‘Nothing. It’s just you’ve seemed a bit… distracted lately. And you’ve been late with Henry a couple of times. I just wondered… Is everything OK?’

  ‘Yes, everything’s fine.’ I fight the urge to run into the house and gather Henry up, take him away somewhere it can just be the two of us, for ever. Somewhere where I never have to watch him walk away from me into the unknown again.

  ‘Are you sure, Louise? You seem…’ he trails off.

  ‘I’m fine. It’s none of your business anyway, is it? How I seem?’ I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t stop myself.

  He holds his hands up. ‘OK, OK. I was only asking. I do still care about you, you know. I know things haven’t worked out the way we planned.’ I raise my eyebrows at this, the understatement of the year, but he ignores me and carries on: ‘But I’ll always care about you, whether you want me to or not.’ I hear Polly’s voice in my head, snorting: care about you? He had a funny way of showing it. How long would I have gone on pretending everything was OK, if I hadn’t found the text message from Catherine on his phone that forced his hand?

  I turn to go, but Sam stops me.

  ‘Wait, Louise.’

  I turn, confused. ‘What?’

  ‘Have you heard about this school reunion?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ Why is he suddenly asking me about it now?

  ‘Are you going?’ he asks, and I think I can detect a dangerous note of hope in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know. Are you?’ I think of his name on the Facebook page. I know he is going.

  ‘Yeah, why not? Should be a laugh.’ He’s aiming for levity, but I’m not fooled. I think of the sixteen-year-old Sam, so cool, so popular. Is he hoping to have a night where he gets to be that boy again, with the world at his feet?

  ‘Maybe,’ I say as I walk away from him down the path. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at five.’

  ‘OK, see you then.’ He closes the door softly and I get back into the car, struggling to breathe normally. How is it that he can still do this to me? When am I going to get to the stage where he can’t hurt me, where his words slip over me without even touching? As I drive away, I wonder whether I will ever be able to leave Henry with him without this terrible, gnawing sense of dread.

  Chapter 15

  2016

  The rest of the day drags by. This is anot
her part I haven’t got used to: the empty weekends. When Sam and I were together, I relished the rare occasions when I got to spend time alone. Sometimes, despite my all-encompassing love for Henry, it felt as though they were the only times that I was truly myself, when I got rid of this interloper who had entered my life at the same time as Henry had, this mother. But when Henry is at Sam’s now, I am lost. I know there are galleries and cinemas and museums I could be visiting, but I also know that if I do I’ll see some nuclear family going to see a Disney movie, or following the signs for the interactive family museum workshop, and I’ll feel a physical pain at the absence of the small hand that should be in mine.

  I could see friends, I suppose, but Polly is often busy at the weekends ferrying the girls to their various activities, and even if she isn’t I don’t want to intrude on their family time – the spectre at the feast, reminding her and Aaron what life could look like if they’re not careful with each other. I do have other friends, but it’s frightening how easy it is to let them drift away. Turn down enough invitations and eventually even the most determined will stop asking. It would take a Herculean effort now to weave myself back into their lives and I don’t have the energy for it. Instead I watch from the sidelines on Facebook, liking photos of barbecues, birthday parties, days out, knowing that I only have myself to blame for not being there in the pictures.