Friend Request Page 26

  I know that I’m slipping behind with work, and that in a few weeks when it comes to light how little I’ve done for her I will be in danger of losing Rosemary altogether, but I can’t rouse myself to action. I am jumpy, looking over my shoulder, the image of Sophie’s body always in the back of my mind. I wonder if I will ever stop imagining myself on some other piece of ground, cold and lifeless. I save my energy for those hours between picking Henry up and his bedtime where I need to put on my best performance.

  He’s asleep now, shattered after the school day. He wanted to go to the park again today, but after last time I can’t face it. I am making a cup of tea when the doorbell rings. I jump and stare unseeing at the teaspoon in my hand. Who would turn up unannounced at this time?

  I’m in my oldest tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt, and I can’t remember when I last had a shower. I run an exploratory tongue over my teeth and it catches on the roughness; I definitely haven’t cleaned them today and possibly not yesterday either. If I stand very still perhaps whoever it is will go away.

  The bell rings again, a double press this time, followed by a loud knock, official-sounding. What if it’s Reynolds? If so then there’s no point hiding; she’ll track me down eventually. I put the teaspoon down, noticing as I do all the rings on the worktop from the spoons and cups of the preceding days. Have I actually eaten anything or have I just been drinking tea? I can’t remember.

  I edge into the hallway. A blurred shape waits on the other side of the frosted glass. I advance along the corridor, holding my breath, and then in a swift motion pull open the door.

  ‘Oh. It’s you.’ I keep my hand on the Yale latch, unsure how long it’s going to be before I close the door, and which side of it Sam is going to be on.

  ‘Charming,’ says Sam, his eyes flicking up and down, taking in my dishevelled appearance. ‘No need to sound quite so excited.’

  ‘Sorry, but… what are you doing here?’

  ‘Again, charming. Traditionally in our country when a guest arrives at your home, you welcome them in, offer them a drink, that sort of thing.’

  I step back, wrong-footed. ‘Sorry. Come in.’ He fills the hallway, as he always did. The flat was too small for him. He had filled every space in it. It’s much more suitable for a spinster like me. Sam peers into the sitting room as we pass on our way to the kitchen.

  ‘Wow, it looks really different.’ He hasn’t been into the flat since that time when I almost gave in to my loneliness and let him back in to my life. That was a good eighteen months ago, but I remember the way it felt: the longing, how much I wanted to let go. Since then, I’ve tried to make sure I only see him at handovers, which always happen at the door. On the odd occasion we have needed to meet to discuss something to do with Henry, it’s been on neutral ground.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, what did you expect?’ My voice is harsher than I’d intended. ‘That I’d keep it a shrine to you? Add a big photo of you over the fireplace?’

  He looks stung. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean… it looks nice. Just different.’

  In the kitchen Sam looks around, clearly trying to keep his expression neutral in the face of the dirty cups, unswept floor and general air of neglect.

  ‘It’s not normally like this,’ I mutter. ‘Not had a very good few days.’

  ‘It’s fine, Louise, don’t worry about it,’ he says, looking worried nonetheless.

  ‘Give me a minute, will you?’ I say.

  I dive into the bathroom and brush my teeth, splash cold water on my face and have a cursory wash, trying not to think about why I am doing so. In the bedroom I take off the stained sweatshirt and pull on something that at least falls into the daywear category, reappearing in the kitchen feeling slightly more human.

  ‘Tea?’ I ask, gathering up used bowls and stained cutlery and hastily wiping down the kitchen worktop.

  ‘I’d rather have something stronger,’ he says, pushing a crumb-strewn plate to one side as he sits down at the kitchen table. I snatch up the plate and shove it along with the rest of the dirty crockery haphazardly into the dishwasher.

  ‘There’s wine in the fridge. Can you get it while I…’ I gesture to the dishwasher.

  He stands up easily and gets the wine, reaching up to the top cupboard to get two glasses. He knows where everything is. I haven’t changed a thing in here since he left. He pours us both a glass and pushes mine towards me.

  ‘Sit down, Louise. Don’t clean up on my behalf.’

  I give up, promising myself that when he’s gone I will throw off the lethargy that has settled on me since I saw Pete in Dulwich.

  ‘So now you’re in and you’ve got your drink, what are you doing here? Henry’s asleep.’ I sit down and take a gulp of wine. I’m not in the mood for games and it’s liberating to realise that I don’t care what he thinks of me, not in this moment.

  ‘I came to see you, not Henry. I wanted someone to talk to, I suppose. About Sophie and everything. It’s all so awful.’

  He looks genuinely upset and I feel myself softening.

  ‘I know. It’s so hideous. Have you spoken to the police?’

  ‘Yes, they were trying to make something of the fact that Soph spent a lot of time talking to me and Matt. I mean, she was one of my best friends at school, of course I was speaking to her.’

  ‘Was she really? One of your best friends?’ When I think of my friends at school, I never consider any boys as part of that group. There were boys, of course, but in my sixteen-year-old head, boys couldn’t be friends. There was always a difference, an edge, whether you fancied them or not.

  ‘Not best friends maybe, but part of the gang. You know.’ I suppose I do. My feelings about that time, about Sophie, Sam, Maria, they’re so complicated. And now it’s all got mixed up with the Facebook request, and what’s happened to Sophie. I’m in a hall of mirrors, full of distorted reflections and false endings. I’ve lost track of which way I came in and I have no idea how to get out.

  ‘Did you… mention the Facebook thing? Maria?’

  He looks uneasy. ‘No. I knew you didn’t want the police to know and… well…’

  ‘You got us the E,’ I finish the sentence for him.

  He twiddles the stem of his wine glass.

  ‘It’s made me think, you know?’ he says.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the past. That kind of thing. You know what I mean?’

  I raise my eyebrows, determined not to make this easy for him.

  ‘You and I, we’ve got all this history together. It makes things easy between us, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ Things don’t feel very easy right now. The air is thick with the unsaid.

  ‘Oh, Lou. I know you’re still angry with me, and you have every right to be. I hurt you and I handled things badly. I am so sorry for that, I really am. But I hoped that maybe we could be friends. I thought… that you might need a friend at the moment, one who understands. Who knows what really happened. I know I do.’

  He’s right, of course, that is what I desperately need. What I don’t need is to get entangled with him again, to allow him to weave himself back into the fabric of my life. But he’s the only one now who understands. He’s standing below me with his arms outstretched and it’s so tempting to let myself fall.

  ‘Have you heard any more from… whoever’s behind this page?’ he asks. I realise that he doesn’t know there have been more messages. I daren’t tell him about the one mentioning Henry. He’ll be furious with me for not telling him at the time. Instead I answer him with a question of my own.

  ‘Sam, do you think it’s possible… that Maria’s still alive?’ I am suddenly close to tears. ‘What if the request really is from her? She must have worked out that she’d been given something. Or someone else has.’

  He takes my hand and despite myself, my fingers curl around his.

  ‘No, Louise. I don’t think it’s possible, honestly. Not after all this time. Whoever’s doing this is just some sic
ko trying to scare you.’

  ‘But Esther… she’s been getting presents from Maria on her birthday every year since she disappeared.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She gets presents in the post, they say they’re from Maria.’

  Sam frowns, and I can almost see the wheels in his mind turning, trying to process this information.

  ‘Sorry, who’s getting these presents?’

  ‘Esther Harcourt. From our year at school? I was talking to her quite a bit at the reunion?’

  ‘I don’t remember her.’ He shrugs, and that one little gesture encapsulates the tragedy of the teenage years: the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Of course he doesn’t remember Esther. She simply never crossed his radar, being neither attractive nor popular. I wouldn’t have crossed it either if it hadn’t been for my association with Sophie. I am overtaken by a desperate wish that I had never become friends with Sophie, that I had been brave and stuck with Esther. It’s my own cowardice, my own craven desire for acceptance, for popularity that has led me here.

  ‘It must be the same person who’s put up the Facebook page,’ he goes on. ‘Like I said, some sicko. Do the police know?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t told them, but maybe Esther has. I know she went to the police when she first started getting them, but they weren’t interested.’

  He sits back in his chair, releasing my hand.

  ‘Will you tell me what happens, next time you speak to the police?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And you’ll tell me if you get any messages on Facebook?’

  I promise but I know it’s a promise I won’t keep. I am as alone as I’ve always been with all this. Polly still hasn’t been in contact since I told her about Maria, and I can’t let Sam in enough for him to help me. I don’t want it to be the way he slips back in. I pour myself another glass of wine and he pushes his own towards me hopefully. I fill it. What difference does it make?

  ‘So, how’s everything else anyway?’ he asks. ‘Work?’

  ‘Work’s good. I’ve got another job on for Sue Plumpton – remember Sue?’

  ‘How could I forget La Plumpton? Has she still got that awful little dog?’

  ‘Lola? Oh yes, she’s still going strong. If strong’s the right word for what’s basically a dog/rat hybrid. In fact I had to make sure I integrated her basket into the design for Sue’s living room.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yep.’ As soon as I start to relax into the conversation, it hits me that in spite of everything, I miss this. Before Henry was born, we would sit down together every evening at this table with a glass of wine and share titbits from our respective days. This tailed off in the early months of Henry’s life, replaced by me walking up and down the flat in a haze of exhaustion, trying fruitlessly to soothe Henry as he screamed on my shoulder. Sam would retreat to the bedroom with his laptop and an attitude. We never got it back, that easy togetherness, even when Henry started sleeping through the night. Moving from a unit of two to one of three where one member was utterly dependent on the other two, shifted the balance of our relationship entirely.

  I keep the conversation bubbling, asking him first about his work and then about some mutual friends that I’ve lost touch with since the divorce. Obviously there’s an enormous elephant in the room that I am absolutely resolved not to mention, but unfortunately Sam strays onto the topic when I ask about his mum. By the time he and I got together she was back in Sam’s life, up to a point, but we never saw a lot of her, even after Henry was born.

  ‘She’s totally obsessed with Daisy, much more so than she was with Henry. I don’t know, maybe it’s because she’s a girl. Spoils her rotten.’

  I think with a pang of my little boy: his intense love for his cuddly toys, as if they were real; his dedicated application to any task he takes on; how seriously he takes the world. Can she really love this other grandchild more, just because she’s a girl? Perhaps it’s not that though. Perhaps it was me that was the problem. I had always sensed that Sam’s mum was not a fan of mine, and I wonder, though I dare not ask, how Catherine is faring in that department. Now he’s mentioned Daisy though, I can’t skate past the subject completely. ‘And how’s that all going second time around? Fatherhood?’

  ‘Oh great, great. She’s wonderful, growing up fast, into everything.’ He’s saying all the right words but there’s an edge to his voice that I recognise. I wait, refusing to fill the gap. ‘Quite tiring though,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t leave much time for… well, for anything else.’

  I must have made a face of some kind, because he goes on.

  ‘I know, I know, poor man, feeling left out, baby’s taken his place. Quite the cliché, aren’t I?’

  He laughs, expecting me to do the same, but the story is so familiar to me that I can’t even pretend.

  ‘I’m sure it must be hard,’ I manage, and then can’t resist adding, ‘Probably not as hard as being left on your own with a two-year-old.’

  ‘Ouch. I guess I deserved that.’ He runs a hand over his head, all the way from his forehead to the nape of his neck. ‘I’m sorry, Louise, I really am. And I know – well, it must have been hard for you last year, to hear that I’d had another child.’

  Hard doesn’t even begin to cover it. We went through so much to get Henry. All those bloody injections, the endless appointments. And my God, the waiting: total inability to concentrate on anything else; trying to hold off testing, because if it was negative I wouldn’t know whether it was just too early or if it was a true negative. It was all so exhausting. And the pain of dealing with other people’s pregnancies; at one point in my mid-thirties it had seemed like barely a day went by without a scan picture appearing on Facebook, or a group email coyly entitled ‘News!’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ I say, trying to mean it. I don’t want to be this person, this caricature, the bitter ex-wife. ‘It’s given Henry a sister, and we always wanted that.’

  ‘Hmm. Be careful what you wish for.’

  ‘Oh Sam, don’t say that.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mean Daisy, of course I love her to bits, that goes without saying. But… it’s not easy, that’s all. Maintaining a relationship, or a life at all, when you’ve got a young child. I don’t know, it didn’t seem this hard with you.’

  Of course it wasn’t hard for him because I went out of my way to make things easy, to smooth his path. I went along with everything he wanted, I never said no, even if what he was asking was unreasonable. I made sure that his life carried on as normal, as far as was humanly possible. He was the only person in my life who really knew me, who knew what I had done and loved me anyway. I can suddenly see so clearly how much pressure that was for me, to be with someone to whom I always felt indebted. I had been grateful that he had chosen me, stayed with me.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll get easier as she gets older,’ I say, knowing nothing of the sort.

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure it will.’ He sounds equally unconvinced. ‘Anyway, let’s not talk about that. Do you remember Rob McCormack?’ He launches into a story about a colleague, a man I met many times when Sam and I were together.

  An hour later we’re still at the table, halfway down our second bottle. It’s as though I’m watching myself from a distance, unbalanced by a combination of wine and nostalgia, tinged with a longing that I don’t want to think about. Part of me yearns to let go, to lose myself, to melt back into him as I’ve nearly done before, but at the same time I know I must hold back if I am to keep myself safe, to retain any trace of the equilibrium I’ve achieved over the last two years.

  The conversation turns eventually and inevitably to Henry, reminding me of the other huge loss I suffered when Sam left me: I lost the only other person in the world who understands how wonderful, how perfect Henry is. The only other person who really gets him. We are laughing about the time he got a tiny plastic ball stuck up his nose when Sam glances at his watch and gives a start.

 
‘God, look at the time. I really should go.’

  I jump up immediately, putting the glasses and bottle on the side.

  ‘Yes, of course, you’d better get back. I’ll get your coat.’ I hurry out into the hall to retrieve his jacket from the pegs by the door, and he follows.

  ‘Can I pop in and see Henry?’

  I recognise the yearning in his voice from all those lonely every-other-weekends, and push open Henry’s door for him. The Thomas the Tank Engine nightlight casts an unearthly blue glow, and I stand in the doorway, watching as Sam kneels by the bed. As usual Henry has got too hot and taken off his pyjamas, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. Sam strokes the soft, silky skin on his back, and Henry shifts but doesn’t wake, pulling Manky closer to his face.