Friend Request Read online

  I’m completely happy for Henry to go to Polly’s, but I do feel a pang when I see grandparents picking up Henry’s classmates from the school gate. I can tell from the easy familiarity with which their grandchildren greet them that they are a proper part of their lives. For Henry, seeing my parents is an Occasion: he chooses his clothes with deliberate care, talks about it for days before, works himself into a state of anxiety, and is always ultimately disappointed when they fail to live up to his ideal. They’ve never shown an interest in looking after him, even when he was tiny and I was on my knees with exhaustion. They were sympathetic, but it simply didn’t seem to occur to them that what I needed was for someone to take him away for a couple of hours. Maybe if we’d been closer before he was born I would have been able to ask for the help I so desperately needed, but the distance between us was too great to bridge by then. Twenty-three years of polite conversation had taken their toll and the time for honesty was long gone.

  Sam’s parents have never really been on the scene either. His dad died years ago, when Sam was at university, and although his mum flits in and out of his adult life, you wouldn’t describe them as close. I used to try and get to the bottom of how and when she got back in touch, but he wouldn’t talk about it. We were so close in some ways, but there were parts of him he never let me see. Henry’s only met ‘Other Grandma’ a handful of times, so she’s taken on something of a mythical status in his head.

  I’ve chickened out of befriending anyone from school apart from Sophie on Facebook, so I’m reduced to poring over the little public information that is available on their pages – profile pictures mostly, although on some of them I can see photos and statuses that Sophie has liked or commented on. Matt Lewis seems to have picked up some small children, although they’re not his; Sam met up with him occasionally when he and I were still together, although I never joined him, and he certainly didn’t have kids then. He must have met someone who had children already. Claire Barnes has older children and is separated from her partner, judging from some of her and Sophie’s exchanges.

  I’m on my laptop at the kitchen table while Henry painstakingly eats a peanut butter sandwich, licking his forefinger and pressing it on the plate after every bite to catch any stray crumbs.

  ‘My sister’s not allowed peanut butter,’ he announces. ‘In case she swells up.’

  It still hurts for me to hear him use the words ‘my sister’ about a child that isn’t mine. He rarely mentions Daisy, or his stepmother. Of course he doesn’t know that Sam left me for Catherine, but he obviously has an unconscious understanding that he is not supposed to talk to me about her or Daisy.

  ‘Swells up,’ he repeats. ‘Like a balloon.’

  ‘Right,’ I say absentmindedly, absorbed in Facebook, wandering further and further off track, browsing through the holiday photos of someone Claire Barnes works with. My phone buzzes on the kitchen worktop as a Facebook notification pops up on the top right of my screen. I click on it, and everything in the room recedes until it’s just me and the screen. It’s another message from Maria.

  Going back to the scene of the crime? I’ll be looking out for you, Louise.

  Each message from her is like a blow to the head from an unknown assailant, leaving me reeling and confused. Henry is oblivious, totally focussed on his sandwich, protected by the egocentricity of small children.

  This is never going to end until I confront it. I don’t know what this person wants, but hiding here in my flat deleting messages is not going to solve anything. I stride into my bedroom and rifle through the wardrobe, discarding outfits: too work-y; too unflattering; too mumsy. I pack an overnight bag for Henry, and go online and book a room at the Travelodge on the outskirts of Sharne Bay. There’s no way I’ll get through this evening without drinking and the last train back to London from Norwich is way too early, something like ten o’clock.

  There’s still a part of me that wonders if I’m going to back out. But a few hours later, I’m in the car, dressed in the boring but flattering black dress I always wear when in doubt, make-up carefully done, high heels in the passenger footwell next to me. With Henry strapped in the back, I can’t pretend any longer that I am not going to my school reunion. I can’t ignore the messages either, and a tremor runs through me at the thought of what, or who, might be waiting for me at Sharne Bay High School. Layered on top of that fear is a tight knot of tension at the thought of seeing Sam, of being in the same room as him at an occasion that’s not a necessary transaction, not a result of handing over our child. An occasion soaked in wine and nostalgia, emotions running high. I focus hard on the road, as if good driving will quieten the emotions that churn inside me.

  At Polly’s, Henry hardly gives me a second glance, struggling out of my embrace to go and find Phoebe, who he knows will happily read him the clutch of Thomas books he has brought in his backpack.

  ‘Phoebe’s got to go out soon,’ Polly warns him. She turns to me. ‘She’s going to a sleepover. That little cow’s going to be there.’

  ‘What little – oh. Her.’

  ‘Yes. Her. Listen, thank you so much for speaking to Phoebe about all that. It really seems to have helped. She went to the cinema with a couple of the others yesterday, they had a really good time. I think it really helped her to speak to someone who’d experienced the same thing.’

  I smile weakly, wishing to God I’d never cast myself in this role of bullied schoolgirl.

  ‘Now,’ Polly goes on, looking at me sternly. ‘Are you absolutely sure about this? Think of this as an intervention – an opportunity to change your mind. I’m not judging you or anything awful like that. I’m just worried about you. You’ve done so well to move on from Sam, you’ve been so strong. I don’t want you to get sucked back into… anything. You know what I mean. You could stay here. I have wine. You could watch Strictly with me and Maya.’

  I am only tempted for a few seconds.

  ‘No, I’m going. Honestly, Polly, I’ll be fine. I’m not going because of Sam; I’ll probably barely speak to him. I see him all the time, I don’t need to go to a reunion to talk to him.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t really speak, do you? You do all your communicating about Henry by text. Your only personal contact is passing Henry between you like a baton in a relay race. Which I think is a good thing, by the way. This is different: it’s a social occasion, you’ll be drunk, it’s very emotive, being back at the place where you first met.’

  ‘We didn’t get together when we were at school. We were twenty-six when we started going out.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but you know what I mean. I was there when he left you, remember? I know what he’s like, what you went through. I don’t want you to end up back there.’

  ‘I know. Thanks Polly. But I’ll be fine, honestly.’

  She reluctantly lets me go, extracting a meaningless promise from me that I’ll leave if anything happens or I start to feel upset. The roads are unexpectedly clear and the drive goes by in a dream. It seems as if hardly any time has passed until I am pulling up on the road outside the school. I had thought about parking at the Travelodge and getting a cab to the reunion, but I’ve decided to leave the car here. This way, if I decide to leave after one drink I can get straight in the car and drive back to Polly’s, and if I stay, I’ll get a taxi back here to my car in the morning.

  I am unsure about parking in the car park so I find a space on the road. I pull down the visor to check my face one last time in the mirror. I can hardly meet my own eyes. I could still turn back. It’s not too late. I could go back to Polly’s and watch Strictly, or just hole up in my room at the Travelodge. I sit for a few minutes, phone in hand, Polly’s number up on the screen, thumb hovering. Two women I don’t recognise walk past the car, chatting, laughing, clearly keyed up. They turn into the school gate and one of them howls, ‘Oh my God!’, her friend giggling and shushing her. Who are they? And if I don’t even recognise them, what the hell am I doing here?

  But then
I see Sam, alone, walking easily and confidently into the grounds. My mouth feels dry and my tongue is taking up too much space in my mouth. For a minute I think I’m going to be sick, but it passes and the nausea is replaced by anger. Why should he get to waltz in there without a care, while I sit shivering and vacillating in a car that’s getting colder with every passing moment? This is just as much my past as it is his. I turn off my phone, get out of the car and march firmly towards the entrance.

  I am surprised to recognise the teacher manning the door as Mr Jenkins. He doesn’t even look that old, and I suppose, although he seemed ancient at the time, he was probably only late twenties, making him early fifties now.

  ‘Ah, hello there!’ he says. ‘And you are…?’

  ‘Louise Williams,’ I say, my mouth dry with anticipation.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he says, clearly not remembering me in the slightest as he hands over my name badge. ‘Looking forward to seeing all the old faces?’ He smiles. ‘Some of them have hardly changed a bit!’

  I spend an unnecessarily long time fastening the badge to my dress, but when I can’t spin it out any longer, I walk through the lobby into the hall, my fingers curled into my palms. It’s the smell that hits me first. Like all schools, it smells of rubbers and disinfectant with a hint of old sweat, but the familiarity of this particular odour is like a smack in the face. It throws up memories I didn’t know I had: queuing for chocolate in the tuck shop at break time, hot orange squash that scalded your fingers through the flimsy beige plastic cup from the vending machine, a game we used to play in the first year when we still called it playtime, called for some reason, now lost in the mists of time, ‘That Game’. Of course there’s also another memory, another night in this hall, this one not lost but branded onto my brain, leaving an ugly scar. I try to stem the images that flash through my mind, and the accompanying wash of shame: Maria, Esther, Sophie. Me.

  With an anxiety bordering on panic, I realise I can’t see anyone else on their own. Little groups form and merge, people flitting from one cluster to another with shrieks of recognition and overblown hugs and kisses. I am the only one who has come without the security blanket of a friend. Sam is over at the bar with his back to me, but I can’t bear for him to be the first person I speak to. My eyes sweep the room, as they do everywhere I go now. There’s a woman on the other side of the hall with her back to me, her mid-brown hair swept up into a complicated chignon, and as she begins to turn her head to speak to the man at her side, my heart slows and the room swims before my eyes; but then she looks behind her, laughing at something the man has said, and I can see it’s not Maria at all. I recognise her, but like a lot of the people in the room, I struggle to put a name to her. Janine? No. Sarah? The two women who passed me in the car are whispering to each other and pointing in my direction, and for a horrible moment I think they are talking about me. But then I realise it’s someone else they are interested in, someone chestnut-haired and beautiful. She is with a tall, dazzlingly handsome man, who has his arm wrapped tightly around her. I’m staring at the man, thinking how rare it is to come across someone in real life who is properly handsome in that movie star way, when I realise that the woman at his side is Esther. I’m absurdly, pathetically pleased to see her, and rush over.

  ‘You said you weren’t coming!’ I want to hug her, but I know it will seem too much.

  She looks embarrassed. ‘Turns out I’m human after all,’ she says, glancing at her husband. ‘You know what finally decided me? You looking so surprised when I said I was married. This is Brett, by the way. Brett, Louise.’

  Still clasping Esther with one hand, he shakes my hand with the other. ‘Good to meet you, Louise. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Yes, white wine, please.’

  ‘Same for you, darling?’ he asks Esther, who smiles her assent.

  He releases his grip on her and goes off to the bar, and I turn to Esther.

  ‘What do you mean, you’re human after all?’

  ‘I didn’t think I cared what anyone here thought of me. Actually, I didn’t want to care what anyone thought of me.’ She’s so scrupulous with herself, so honest about her own motives. ‘But you know what? I’ve worked bloody hard to get where I am. I’ve got a great career, a gorgeous husband, two lovely children. I’m OK. I’m more than OK, in fact; I’m properly happy. And I’m afraid there’s a little part of me – or maybe not so little – that wants to show them, people that might still be laughing about me, or even worse pitying me in a corner of their minds.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here. Do you even recognise anyone?’

  We look around. There are vaguely familiar faces, but none of them belong to anyone who I knew well, or was even in our class. There were four classes of thirty kids in our year so there were a lot of them I barely knew.

  ‘Ah. There’s someone we know,’ says Esther. There’s a commotion over by the entrance, someone being embraced and exclaimed over. A man stands back from the group surrounding the new arrival, holding a large white fur coat and looking embarrassed and out of place. I know his face, but it takes me a couple of minutes to realise he’s not an old school friend – it’s Pete, Sophie’s date from the night I went to her flat.

  As I look over I catch Pete’s eye and smile at him. After a couple of seconds he smiles in grateful recognition and gives a half-wave. Sophie is now engaged in animated conversation with three identikit, Boden-clad blonde women. When it becomes apparent that she’s in no hurry to extricate herself, he comes over to Esther and me, and Brett, who is back from the bar with our drinks.

  ‘Hi – Louise, isn’t it?’ says Pete.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Well remembered.’

  ‘Oh, I always remember names; it’s one of my things. I remember everything anyone ever says to me too. It’s a nightmare for my old friends, nothing gets forgotten.’

  I turn to introduce Esther and Brett to Pete, but a woman I don’t recognise has come up and started talking to them, so I leave them to it. I notice that Brett never releases his hold on Esther, his arm tightly glued to her back at all times.

  ‘I didn’t realise you and Sophie were serious. How long have you been together?’ I ask Pete. I can’t put my finger on why, but I’d got the impression that night in her flat that this was a new relationship, if it was even a relationship at all. Until he turned up, Sophie hadn’t so much as mentioned his name.

  ‘We’re not really.’ Pete looks embarrassed. ‘This is our third date.’

  ‘Your third date? And you’re accompanying her to her school reunion? Jesus, that’s a heavy old third date.’

  ‘I know.’ Pete shakes his head despairingly. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I do actually. I’ve got this… I suppose you’d call it a policy.’

  ‘Policy?’ This man is getting stranger by the minute. He seems a very unlikely match for Sophie from what I’ve seen of him so far.

  ‘Yes. I got divorced a couple of years ago, which was fairly horrendous.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Me too.’ I wish the admission didn’t make me feel such a failure still. Divorced by forty. I wouldn’t normally admit it to a near-stranger, but the fact that he went first bolstered me. I’m not going to tell him that my ex-husband is here though.

  ‘Really?’ His face softens. ‘You know then. So about a year ago I decided to get back out there. Put myself on a few online dating sites.’

  ‘You met Sophie online?’

  He looks defensive. ‘Yes. Maybe it’s been a while since you were on the whole dating circuit – everybody meets everybody online now. There’s no stigma.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ Don’t I just. ‘It’s more that… it’s Sophie. I can’t imagine her doing it.’ Sophie, who used to have all the boys hanging from her every word.

  ‘Like I said, everybody does it. Anyway, when I first started, I was so quick to dismiss women – weird voice, nails too long, that sort of thing. My sister said I was deliberately picking holes in them to avoid getti
ng involved. So I made up this rule for myself. If I go on a date with anyone, I have to go out with them at least three times – if they want to, obviously – and I have to say yes to whatever they suggest. As long as it’s not illegal, or dangerous.’

  ‘So you’ve ended up at someone else’s school reunion? Someone you hardly know?’

  ‘Yep. That’s why I was so happy to see you. You count as an old friend in this scenario.’

  I laugh and sip my drink, casting about for something to say, falling back inevitably on the obvious. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m an architect – at Foster and Lyme.’

  ‘Oh, I know them. They’ve put work my way in the past, when John Fuller was there?’

  ‘He was before my time, but I’ve heard of him. So you’re a…?’

  ‘Interior designer. Freelance now, although I used to work for Blue Door.’

  Sophie pops up at Pete’s elbow, looking annoyed.