Friend Request Page 13

  What I often do is take the opportunity to catch up on some work. Rosemary has sent me several emails about different problems with one of her projects, and I know she’ll be surprised that I haven’t responded yet, but I just can’t settle to anything today. As soon as the clock crawls round to an hour whereby I can reasonably leave without being absurdly early, I’m out of the flat. I ought to have spent hours choosing what to wear, applying flattering make-up, styling my hair. The fact that I half-heartedly blow-dried my hair, bunged on a bit of mascara and lipstick and threw on jeans and one of my only ‘going out’ tops, doesn’t exactly bode well for the date.

  I get off the bus on Piccadilly and walk up through Soho. For a girl like me who grew up in the sticks, there’s still something about living in London that gives me a thrill; not just the bright lights but the murkier depths too. When I first moved here, I was brimful of excitement at having an actual job in a real design agency, even if I was mostly making the tea. If I didn’t have plans to go out or see anyone in the evening I’d go into Soho and walk around, absorbing the heady scent of garlic and wine, chips and cigarette smoke, rubbish and drains. I felt alive, anonymous but part of something that counted, a heady mix of out-of-towners going to see Les Mis, hen parties and work nights out plus a hint of the old Soho – bon viveurs, sex workers and criminals.

  Soho has changed, even in the last twenty years. There are more chain restaurants, more tourists, less obvious grime. It makes me wonder if I’ve changed too. Probably less than Soho. I’m not so open to change; I have to be on my guard all the time. I’ve created this persona of stability, contentment, a real average Josephine. Sam was the only one who knew the real me.

  I arrive a few minutes early and there’s no sign of Greg in the bar. I’ve been studying his photo to make sure I’ll recognise him. I get a glass of wine and sit on a stool in the window, where I’ve got a good view of everyone coming in. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for dating in general, I begin to feel butterflies at the prospect of this, my first date in seventeen years. Every time a dark-haired man approaches, my stomach gives a little flip, settling back down when it turns out not to be him. By 7.15pm, the flips have been replaced by a churning ache. I didn’t give Greg my phone number as I didn’t feel comfortable before I’d even met him, but he could email me if he was running late. I check on my phone but there’s nothing. At 7.25pm I decide I’ve had enough. There’s a group of younger women at a nearby table and I am sure they’ve clocked that I’ve been stood up and are laughing at me. I suppose this is what I should have expected, what I deserve. I’ve been foolish to allow myself to indulge in this fantasy where I could have a normal relationship. I should have known the past wouldn’t let me go that easily.

  I drain the last of my wine, flushed with humiliation, and stand up to leave. As I come out of the bar my phone beeps, and I take it out, expecting a notification from the email address that Polly set up for me, which I’ve added to my phone. But it’s a Facebook notification. Another message from Maria: Leaving so soon, Louise?

  I stop, stock-still on the pavement, my legs almost giving way beneath me. It’s noisy but all I can hear is my panicked breathing and the beating of my own heart. Someone is watching me. I look around, but the street is busy, filled with ordinary people meeting friends, lovers. There’s a restaurant opposite with outside tables, the diners warmed by patio heaters. I try to scan their faces, but there are too many of them, tables behind tables, and anyway I don’t know who I’m looking for. My phone beeps again:

  You don’t deserve to be happy. Not after what you’ve done.

  I pull the hood of my coat up and hurry away down the street, head down, almost running. She’s right. I don’t deserve to be happy. Of course there was no Greg. A nice, normal man would never be interested in me. And even if he was, I wouldn’t know the right way to respond, how to be with him.

  But how did she do it? It feels as though Maria has crawled inside my head, her fingers reaching out and scraping around inside my thoughts, taking the worst things I think about myself and serving them back to me. Then I remember Polly’s lighthearted Facebook update: matchmaking with Louise Williams on matchmymate.com. Of course. Anyone can download a picture of a good-looking man. Anyone can write an email. Maria was just lucky that all the other responses were so unsuitable.

  I keep walking, staying on busy roads only, constantly looking around for possible danger. I am convinced for several minutes that someone on the opposite pavement is keeping pace with me, until they turn down a side street without a second glance. I double back on myself, switching from side to side of the street. Once I step into the road without looking and a taxi screams to a halt inches from me, the driver gesturing furiously at me. Stupid cow. I avoid the quieter side streets with their dark corners and shadowy, urine-soaked doorways, but even the well-lit, people-thronged areas seem menacing because I don’t know where the danger lies. I don’t know who I am frightened of, who I am running from.

  At 8pm I get a text from Polly: How’s it going? Do you need a pretend emergency phone call?

  I text her back: Didn’t show, on way home. I can’t explain about meeting Esther without going into the rest of it, and I’m not ready to do that. Oh shit, she texts back. Call me when you get home? I can’t, because I’m not going home. Going to pull duvet over head and hide. Will call in morning.

  There’s a pause, so she’s either typing some mammoth reply, or wondering whether she should offer to come over and provide a shoulder to cry on. She obviously decides against, as her next text just says OK. Call me if you need to. Love you x.

  I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting Esther, and a large part of me wants to text her and say I can’t make it, scurry back to the safety of my flat. But something about her voice when she said there was something she hadn’t told me won’t let me cancel, so I walk on, down street after street, heart pumping, until I find myself in the appointed pub.

  Esther’s not here, so I order a large glass of wine and find a seat in the corner, where I can feel the wall solid behind my back and have a clear view of the whole pub. There’s a buzz of conversation, under which you can hear the sound of ‘Fall at Your Feet’ by Crowded House through the speakers. I used to love this song when I was at university, dreaming of a meaningful connection with some nameless, faceless, soul mate. As I look warily around the room, I think of all the other men in the world I could have ended up with, and how different my life could have been. But perhaps I never really had a choice.

  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.

  ‘And did you?’ she asks. ‘Become that person, I mean?’

  I stare into my wine. ‘No, not really. But then, things were never the same. After that night, I mean.’

  ‘No, they weren’t.’ It’s Esther’s turn to look down. She can’t meet my eyes, I realise. What does she know?

  I’m skirting too close to the truth here. I can feel it looming, like an iceberg in the ocean at night. I don’t know exactly where it is, but I’m so frightened of hitting it unexpectedly, of feeling it crashing into me, tearing and splintering, sinking me entirely. Part of me wants to tell her everything, to let her in to this crushing fear that is consuming me. I want to shake her and make her hear me: someone is watching me.

  My eyes slide back to the bar, but the man who smiled at me has gone. There’s a woman there now with her back to us, her long brown hair in a loose ponytail. She begins to turn her head and my stomach rises up to my throat, but then I see her face and she’s in her twenties, smooth-skinned and smiling at her friend who’s just walked into the pub. I turn back to Esther.

  ‘I saw Tim Weston.’ I didn’t even realise I was going to say it until the words were coming out of my mouth.

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘After I came to see you in Norwich, I drove on to the coast. To Sharne Bay. I didn’t even mean to, I just found myself driving that way. Did you know he lives in their old house? His mum sold it to him a few years ago, moved into a bungalow.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. Is that where you saw him then?’

  ‘Yes. I went to look at my old house and then… I lost my way, and I found myself there.’ As I say it, it feels unlikely, and I wonder how much of an accident it really was that I ended up outside Maria’s teenage home.

  ‘What was he like?’ Esther asks in fascination. ‘I always thought there was something a bit weird about him. He was so protective of her.’

  ‘He was… OK, actually, under the circumstances. He was very kind to me about… you know. Said he didn’t blame me.’ I think back to our encounter. ‘He seemed to know a lot about me though, which was weird… you too, actually.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much really, I suppose. He knew what we both did for a living, that’s all. I sort of got the feeling he’d been keeping tabs on both of us.’

  ‘I suppose maybe he feels like we’re a link to Maria. It must be hard to let go. I can’t imagine the pressure he must have been under, to be the only child left.’

  ‘I know.’ We are silent for a few seconds, each lost in our own thoughts. ‘There was something else too,’ I add hesitantly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but… just something else Tim said. When we were talking about what happened to Maria. He said, “She’s tougher than she seems”. Not, “She was tougher than she seemed”. He spoke about her in the present tense.’

  I expect Esther to laugh it off or suggest a slip of the tongue, but she does neither. She just stares at me, her face pale, the frames of her glasses harsh against the whiteness of her skin. We are suspended in uneasy silence for a few seconds, then she speaks.

  ‘That was actually what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I can’t look away although I am half-dreading whatever it is she’s going to tell me.

  ‘Every year since Maria disappeared, on my birthday, I get a present, delivered through the post.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s a small thing, usually – candles, bath oil, a scarf. There’s never a return address, or a card. Just a label: Dear Esther, Happy Birthday. Love from Maria.’

  I put my wine glass down harder than I meant to, my hand jolting, the contents threatening to spill onto the table. The chatter and buzz of the pub blurs around me, only Esther’s face pinpoint-sharp.

  ‘Every year since…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are they posted from?’

  ‘Different places – London, Brighton once, sometimes Norwich.’

  ‘Norwich?’

  ‘Yup, sometimes.’

  ‘But who do you think… you don’t think it’s from her, do you?’ My voice has dropped to a whispe
r. There’s a pain in the palms of my hands and I realise that my nails are digging into the soft flesh.

  ‘Believe me, I’ve considered all the options. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out to be honest. At least I had, until you showed up in my office. That was partly why I was so short with you. I was… freaked out, I suppose, at the idea that she’s still alive, that the presents really are from her.’

  ‘Did you ever tell anyone, go to the police?’

  ‘I did take them to the police, after the first couple of years. They didn’t take it seriously, though – I mean, there’s no threat, is there? What could they do?’