Friend Request Page 6

  ‘Louise. Hi.’

  ‘Oh, Louise! Yes, I’ve heard all about you!’ I wondered what Maria had told her.

  ‘Stay for a cup of tea! In fact, stay for dinner!’ I was beginning to feel slightly suffocated and was about to make my excuses when Maria interrupted.

  ‘Mum! Stop being so embarrassing. Come on, Louise, let’s go to my room.’

  ‘Shall I bring you up some tea and biscuits?’ Bridget called after us as Maria hustled me up the stairs.

  ‘No, Mum. We don’t want anything.’

  Maria closed the door behind us and sank down on the bed. The paint on the walls was chipped and the carpet didn’t seem to quite fit the room, but Maria had obviously done her best, putting an Indian throw on the bed, covering the worst bits of wall with Salvador Dalí prints and filling the white Formica shelving unit with books.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, lowering myself onto the bed beside her. ‘Is – is she always like that with your friends?’

  ‘She didn’t used to be. Before… well, before everything that happened at my old school she was fine. I mean, she still is fine really. It’s just… oh, never mind.’ Maria’s fingers went to her necklace, a gold heart on a chain that I’d noticed she always wore.

  ‘What is it? You can say, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘I don’t want to go into it all. I had a bad time of it. Like I told you at lunch that first day, it was so bad that we moved schools, and home. It was awful for me, of course. But Mum took it even harder. She told me once that there’s a saying, you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. If that’s true then she must have been pretty fucking unhappy.’

  There was silence for a while. It was clear that Maria wasn’t going to say any more about it, so I changed the subject.

  ‘I like your necklace. Where’s it from?’

  ‘I don’t know. My dad gave it to me.’ Her hand stole to it again, twisting the chain around her fingers. ‘It was the first thing he’d ever bought me himself. Mum always bought the presents. I should have known he wasn’t going to be around much longer. Are your mum and dad still together?’

  ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t begin to imagine my parents splitting up. I didn’t think of them as two separate people, more as an entity, mum-and-dad.

  ‘Well, mine aren’t. They separated before we left London. I think it was the stress of… everything that happened.’ What could have been so bad that it caused her parents to split up? I couldn’t tell if she really didn’t want to talk about it, or if she wanted me to force her to open up.

  ‘So… what happened?’ I asked.

  She looked for a moment as if she was going to tell me, but then her face closed up.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  I decided to take a different tack, telling her about the different teachers and their quirks and giving her the school gossip about who was going out with who. This was much more successful, and we were in her room for over an hour, punctuated by Bridget bringing up the unwanted tea and chocolate digestives. She lingered too long at the door, watching Maria and me laughing together, urging me again to stay for dinner, which I refused to do as I knew my parents would be expecting me back.

  Maria and I said goodbye on the doorstep. I had that warm achy feeling that you get when you’ve been laughing too hard for too long. I had the uncomfortable realisation that I hadn’t worried about what to say all afternoon. I hadn’t turned every potential utterance over in my mind, examining it for possible embarrassment before letting it come out of my mouth as I have to with Sophie. Instead of feeling like a performance, my afternoon with Maria had been completely relaxed. I had simply let go.

  As I walked down the front path, I almost bumped into a dark, thickset boy with the same hazel eyes as Maria and her mother. He didn’t introduce himself, but looked at me suspiciously. I smiled, feeling flustered without knowing why, and let myself out of the gate. I didn’t turn round, but I could feel his gaze, white-hot on my back all the way down the street until I reached the corner.

  Later that evening I was in my room pretending to do my homework when the phone rang. I picked up the one on the landing outside my room.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Lou? It’s Sophie.’

  Her voice sounded gentle and hesitant, a world away from the strident confidence she had displayed earlier in town. For a moment I thought she was going to apologise. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the landing floor, knees up to my chin, twisting the phone cord around my fingers.

  ‘I’m worried about you. You hardly hang out with me and the girls any more.’

  The girls? Sophie’s the only one out of all of them that ever shows an interest in me. The rest of them barely know I exist, unless they want to copy my homework. There was a part of me that automatically wanted to apologise, to put everything back how it was before. But I still had Maria’s voice in my head, still had the illusion of confidence that spending the afternoon with her had given me.

  ‘What do you mean? You haven’t even been speaking to me at school.’

  ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said in injured tones. ‘You’re the one that’s been ignoring me. I didn’t have anyone to go into town with after school today. Claire was a right cow to me this afternoon. I was looking for you everywhere.’

  ‘But you were with Matt and Sam! You looked pretty happy to me!’

  ‘Oh, those two. I only went with them because I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. You certainly seemed like you were having a nice time.’

  ‘Yes… I was.’ My resolve was fading. Could she really be upset? Had I read everything wrong? ‘But obviously… if I’d known you wanted to come with us, you could have done.’

  ‘I don’t know about us,’ she said carefully. ‘I wanted to go with you.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Maria? She’s really nice.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s all right, although sorry but she was quite rude to me this afternoon. Also, what do you actually know about her? Where has she suddenly appeared from? The things I’ve heard about her… well, I shouldn’t gossip. If you want to be friends with her, then of course that’s up to you. But don’t dump your old friends, Louise, otherwise you’re running the risk of losing them. If you’re not careful you’ll end up like Esther Harcourt.’ Sophie gave a little laugh – but a worried one, indicating that although she was joking there was a grain of truth in what she said. ‘Obviously it’s up to you who you hang out with but if I were you I’d think very carefully about where your loyalties lie.’

  After we hung up, I sat on the landing for several minutes, my hand still on the phone. I thought about defying Sophie, and what that might mean for me socially; about the parties and sleepovers that I felt I was on the verge of being invited to, and of how much I wanted that. I wondered whether I was ready to throw all that away for someone I liked very much but hardly knew, who could potentially end up being my only friend.

  The next day at school I didn’t have any lessons with Maria in the morning. At break I went straight from Biology to the library and sat there for twenty minutes pretending to read a book about Anglo-Saxon England. I was going to skip lunch, but Sophie stopped me on my way back to the library and hauled me off to the canteen with her. My jacket potato was dry and starting to crack inside, and, as I added a small pot of congealed baked beans (no butter), I could see Maria out of the corner of my eye, a few places behind me in the queue. I paid and Sophie shepherded me firmly with her over to the far left corner table, settling down next to me with a protective hand on my arm. I could feel rather than see Maria coming up behind me. She put her hand on the chair next to me, but Sophie was ready for her.

  ‘Sorry, that seat’s taken,’ she said, smiling brightly.

  ‘It doesn’t look taken,’ said Maria. ‘It looks totally empty to me. Unless one of your really skinny friends is sitting there and has managed to slim down so much that nobody ca
n see her.’ She looked at me, hoping for a smile or at least an acknowledgement but I stared studiously at my tray, running my fingers over the brown moulded plastic bumps as though they were braille, and I blind.

  ‘I’m saving it,’ said Sophie. ‘For a friend.’ The emphasis on friend couldn’t have been more pointed.

  Maria risked one more glance at me, but my eyes were glued to the tray.

  ‘Right. OK. I get the picture,’ she said, and took her tray over to the furthest possible table.

  As I left the canteen I looked over at her. I think of her now as she was then: sitting on her own, her lunch barely touched in front of her, hunched over, pale-faced and staring unseeingly at her maths textbook. I saw Esther Harcourt watching her too from another table where she also sat alone, unread book in hand.

  Chapter 7

  She stands on the bridge, staring down at the water, brown and uninviting on this sunless winter day. Her knuckles stand out, harsh white against the dark wood of the railings. A solitary drink can bobs under the bridge and out of view, the only bright spot in the murky ribbon that snakes its way through the city. She could dash across the road in a kamikaze version of the childhood game of Poohsticks, to see if it makes it to the other side; to see if she does.

  It’s an impulse she’s familiar with, having lived with it all these years. She first felt it that night, all those years ago, and it has returned at intervals ever since. What would life have been like if she’d made a different choice then, not just for her, but for everyone around her? It’s been hardest for her family. Things have never been the same for them. They’ve done their best to support her, to be there, but they didn’t really understand. How could they?

  She looks down at the water again as it flows beneath her, away from her, her thoughts returning as they always do to that other time and place; that other choice, its implications still reverberating through her life.

  What she wishes more than anything is that she could make things right; rebalance the scales. The world was knocked out of kilter that night. If only she could find a way to set it back on its proper axis. Maybe then she would be able to get on with the rest of her life. To live it fully, engage with the world, instead of existing in this shadowy half-life, where no one knows who she really is.

  She releases her grip on the railings and slowly walks away, leaving the swirling water behind her. Not this time, she thinks. Not this time.

  Chapter 8

  2016

  It happens again on Monday morning, three days after my visit to Sophie’s flat and exactly one week since the original friend request. Outside it’s one of those sunny autumn days where you feel summer might not be over after all. Light streams through the French windows, warming the surface of the kitchen table where I am struggling to concentrate on work. I’m already late in delivering two proposals for potential new clients, and I’m falling behind on a project for Rosemary as well. I check Facebook constantly, dreading the moment. I’ve been praying that it was a one-off, an ill-judged joke by someone going to the reunion. With every day that passes, the tiny seed of hope that I’ll never hear from her again has been sprouting.

  When I get the notification that there is a Facebook message from Maria Weston, I can hardly get my hands to work fast enough, my fingers scrabbling desperately over the keys in my haste to get to the message.

  Run as fast as you like, Louise. You’ll never escape from me. Every wound leaves a scar. Just ask Esther Harcourt.

  I sit for a moment or two, heart racing, reading the message over and over as if that will yield some further clue as to who is doing this, and why. Run as fast as you like. There was someone following me that night. I knew it.

  Ask Esther Harcourt. I saw Esther once in town, after it happened. She averted her eyes as if my guilt might somehow rub off on her, as if she could catch my shame like it was a contagious airborne disease. She didn’t even know the whole truth – if she had, she would have done more than look away.

  She was the only person that Maria talked to in those last months before the leavers’ party. There are spaces, huge gaps, in what I know about Maria. Esther might be able to fill them in. I’ve spent the weekend poring over every detail of my meeting with Sophie, and the thought of speaking to someone who genuinely cared about Maria is strangely comforting.

  I type her name into the search box, but she’s not on Facebook. I quash the terrible teenage part of my brain that immediately concludes that she doesn’t have any friends. Many people are not on Facebook for a variety of excellent reasons. Once I have exhausted that avenue, I try simply googling her, which throws up a number of results. LinkedIn is the top one, and it’s her. She is a solicitor, and still living in Norfolk. Her profile picture reveals that she has aged well; in fact, she looks about a million times better than she ever did at school. The bottle tops have been replaced by a sleek pair of angular designer frames and what on the teenage Esther was an unruly mass of bushy mousy hair is now a thick, glossy, chestnut mane.

  She is a partner in the wills and probate department at her firm, one of the big ones in Norwich. It seems she is a proper high-flier, speaks at conferences, writes papers, the kind that probably gets invited back to school to give inspirational talks. I thought when I won that interior design award recently, and was featured in the Sharne Bay Journal, that they might invite me back to speak, but I never heard anything.

  Now I know where Esther works I could call or email her, but I cannot shake the memory of our eyes meeting all those years ago, and how she turned her face away. A mad idea occurs to me and I pick up the phone. Two minutes later Serena Cooke has an appointment with Ms Harcourt to make a will. They’d taken my details and tried to fob me off with someone else but I insisted. Normally I would have had to wait, but she has had a last-minute cancellation for tomorrow morning. She’ll probably recognise me straight away but at least she won’t have had any time to prepare, and can’t refuse to see me.

  The next morning we’re up early. Henry always goes to the school’s breakfast club on a Tuesday anyway so I can work, but today I’m taking him a bit earlier than usual. He sits at the kitchen table in his pyjamas, spooning cereal into his mouth, bleary-eyed and red-cheeked, still carrying the warmth of his bed with him. I lean down to kiss him as I pass, mentally listing the things I need to remember like a mantra: book bag, lunch box, water bottle, reading book, school-trip letter, fabric samples, email Rosemary.

  ‘Mummy?’ Henry says, between spoonfuls.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, distracted and still swooping around gathering everything we both need for the day.

  ‘At school yesterday, Jasper and Dylan wouldn’t play with me.’

  I sit down next to him, mental lists abandoned.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say with a sinking heart.

  ‘I wanted to play trains in choosing time, but they wouldn’t play. I kept telling them, but they wanted to play outside.’

  ‘You can’t make your friends do what you want them to do, Henry. It sounds more like they wanted to play a different game, not that they wouldn’t play with you as such.’

  ‘No, Mummy. They didn’t want to play with me. I asked and asked. Dylan said all I want to do is play with the trains. He said I’m boring.’ He puts down his spoon and jumps onto my lap, wrapping his arms and legs around me, his hot face buried in my neck. My heart aches with love for him, and I try not to examine my feelings about Jasper and Dylan too closely. They are only four, after all.

  ‘Can’t I stay with you today?’ The words are muffled but there’s no mistaking the hope in them.

  Guilt clamps around me like a vice. I’m not going to get much work done today. The fabric swatches and paint colours I was meant to be putting together for a client were going to have to wait anyway. I’m already late with them, what’s one more day? I could easily cancel the appointment with Esther, call Henry in sick, spend the day snuggled on the sofa watching Disney films. I’m not going to, because my need to find out what�
��s going on with the Facebook request is overriding everything else.

  I unpeel Henry and manage to persuade him to get dressed by promising that I will play trains with him for a long time when we get home this afternoon.

  ‘A really long time?’ he asks beadily.

  ‘Ages and ages,’ I promise.

  I drop him at breakfast club and drive east under a leaden sky. Once I leave the motorway behind, the A11 unwinds reluctantly before me. The landscape is dully familiar, despite the many years since I’ve been this way: vast skies, rippled with threatening cloud; flattened expanses of field after rolling field; the war memorial standing stark and alone as the traffic roars past, just before the mysterious-sounding Elveden Forest, conjuring images of Tolkien-esque creatures engaged in thrilling adventures but delivering only bike hire, rock climbing and other wholesome family activities. The wind is buffeting my car and a few miles past Elveden I pull over in a layby and sit for a moment, gripping the wheel, trying to calm my breathing. I check my phone, as I do every time I have a spare moment, but there is only an email from Rosemary asking for something I am meant to have done but haven’t.