Friend Request Page 7

  When I arrive, I am buzzed in and asked to wait in an elegant room complete with polished wooden floors and immaculately upholstered antique furniture. It’s like an American movie’s idea of an English law firm. I perch on the edge of an embroidered chaise longue, shifting this way and that, crossing and un-crossing my legs.

  I was hoping for a few moments to get my bearings, feel my way, but as soon as I am shown in by the elegantly groomed secretary, it’s obvious that the game is up. Esther raises her head with a welcoming smile in place but within a second it has faded and behind the tortoiseshell frames her eyes register shock. She waits until the secretary has gone before speaking, and when she does her tone is blunt and unfriendly.

  ‘You’re not Serena Cooke.’

  ‘No, obviously… I… I wasn’t sure if you’d see me.’

  ‘I assume you’re not here to make a will then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  I’m still hovering by the door, having not been invited to sit. I tuck my hair excessively and needlessly behind my ears, a habit I’ve had since childhood. Something in the gesture must trigger a memory in Esther of our days running wild and mud-spattered in the woods near her house, because her face softens a tiny bit and she gestures to the padded leather chair in front of her desk. I sink gratefully into it.

  ‘I didn’t know where else to come.’

  Esther raises an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘Something’s happened.’

  A second eyebrow joins the first. I steel myself.

  ‘I got a Facebook friend request. It was from Maria Weston.’

  The sympathy that in spite of herself is Esther’s natural response to my obvious discomfort is replaced instantly by bewilderment, and something else I can’t identify. Is it fear?

  ‘From Maria? But that’s not possible.’ She’s not used to having her composure rattled, I can tell.

  ‘No, I know it’s not. But, well, it happened. I wondered… if you knew anything about it, or if you could throw any light?’

  ‘Why on earth should I know anything about it?’ she says, flushing. ‘I’m not in the habit of setting up Facebook pages for long-dead school friends. I’m not even on Facebook myself.’

  ‘No, of course not, I didn’t think you set it up. I’m just… well, I’m frightened. I think someone might have been in my flat, and I’m sure someone was following me the other day.’

  ‘What?’ Her forehead creases in concern. ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘What can they do? I’ve got no proof. The other thing is… I got another message yesterday. From the same person. Can I show you?’

  She shrugs as if to say I’m leaving her no choice, so I hand my phone over. She presses her lips together as she reads it, as if to keep the words she wants to say from flying out. She taps the screen and her expression softens. She breathes out, a long, slow breath and I know she’s looking at Maria’s photo.

  ‘What do you think it means, about asking you?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Maria and I both suffered at the hands of bullies. Whoever wrote this knows that.’

  I start to protest, but she interrupts. ‘I know, I know, you never bullied me. You just dumped me the minute we arrived at secondary school and never spoke to me again. But I don’t think there’s any other word for what you and Sophie did to Maria, is there?’

  I am hot with shame. I can’t bear to look her in the eye.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I say, looking at the floor. ‘I suppose I needed to talk to someone about it, and Sophie was no good, so I thought maybe you might be able to – help me, I guess.’

  ‘You talked to Sophie Hannigan about this? Are you still in touch with her?’ Esther manages to give the impression that if I answer in the affirmative I will sink even lower in her estimation.

  ‘God no, not at all, not since school. I tracked her down as well.’

  ‘On Facebook?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course. I bet she’s on there all the time, isn’t she? “Look how gorgeous I am, look at my amazing life.” I can’t stand it. That’s why I’m not on there; it’s all so bloody fake, as if it’s actually designed to make you feel crap about your own life.’

  I wonder how I am going to get past the barriers that Esther has been erecting since I walked into the room.

  ‘Look, I know I treated Maria badly.’

  Esther snorts.

  ‘OK, worse than badly. When I think about it now I am so ashamed, it’s like I was a different person. I can’t believe that the me that I am now could ever have behaved as I did. Barely a day goes by that I don’t think of Maria. But I can’t change what I’ve done.’ My God, I wish I could. The worst of it is that Esther doesn’t even know what I have done, not really. ‘I can only control who I am now. What I don’t understand is why this is happening now. Is it something to do with the reunion maybe? Stirring things up in people’s minds?’

  ‘There’s a reunion?’

  Esther’s mask slips and she has spoken before she’s had a chance to arrange her face into the expression she wants me to see. For a second I see on her face the emotions I experienced when I heard about the reunion myself: disappointment, shame, self-loathing. Unlike me she has a live audience, so has to recover quickly.

  ‘I wouldn’t go to that if you paid me. You’re not going, are you?’

  ‘I thought I might,’ I mumble. Why does it make me feel so ashamed? Why am I still so engaged with my teenage self, with my place in that long-ago universe?

  ‘Still tagging along, Louise? God, have you not moved on at all?’

  ‘Look, forget it,’ I say, eager to be away from her. ‘You obviously can’t help me. Or you don’t want to.’

  Her face softens. ‘It’s not a question of not wanting to; I simply don’t know anything about this. I haven’t seen anyone from school since the day I walked out the door. Not deliberately anyway. Look, give me your number – if anything occurs to me, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say quietly, scribbling it down on a Post-it note.

  She looks down at her hands, which are balled into fists, and I get the impression that she is digging her nails into her palms.

  ‘It must have given you a terrible jolt, getting that request. Seeing her photo.’

  ‘Yes. Must have been taken not long before – you know.’

  There doesn’t seem to be any more to say, so I leave with the firm intention of heading straight back home. However, without thinking, I find myself turning right at a crossroads and negotiating a hairpin bend, and before I know it the outskirts of Sharne Bay begin to roll out around me. Things haven’t changed much, although there’s a row of houses that I don’t remember, and the corner shop where we used to go for sweets has become a Tesco Metro. We’re closer to the sea on this side of town, and I roll my window down to let in a waft of salty air.

  As I drive through a mixture of the painfully recognisable and the disorientatingly new, my mind replays the encounter with Esther. Something is nagging at me and as I automatically bear right to loop round and join the road where my old school is, I realise what it is: that brief second where fear crossed her face. Why should Esther be afraid? If someone is playing a sick joke on me as some kind of retribution, then Esther surely has nothing to worry about. She was the one person who was never anything but kind to Maria. And she can’t have anything to fear from Maria herself. Maria drowned more than twenty-five years ago.

  Didn’t she?

  Chapter 9

  1989

  The next time I spoke to Maria wasn’t at school. In fact she must have been avoiding me there because I had hardly seen her at all for over a week except in the lessons we shared, where she carefully sat where she wouldn’t have to meet my eye.

  I’d never been invited to one of Matt Lewis’s parties before, but Sophie said Matt definitely said I could go. He barely knew who I was, but I think he would have agreed to anything S
ophie asked. His mum and dad were away for the weekend. I saw his mum at parents’ evening once. She’d started chatting to my mum while we were waiting to see Mr Jenkins and the contrast was hilarious: Matt’s mum with her expensive highlights and flawless make-up, sporting a vivid electric-blue trouser suit, radiating sophistication and charm; Mum in her A-line skirt and beige car coat, funny little handbag on her lap, desperately trying to keep up her end of the conversation.

  I got ready for the party at Sophie’s, Blind Date blaring from the telly in her room (Mum never lets me watch it at home) while she crimped my hair. I took practically my entire wardrobe over to hers and tried everything on in front of the full-length mirror in Sophie’s walk-in wardrobe. Sophie was rifling through the rack, handing me things to try on.

  ‘What about this?’ she said, thrusting a black, fitted, velvet mini-dress at me.

  ‘I’ll never get into that,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, of course you will,’ she said, holding it out for me to step into and pulling it up over my hips. She took me by the shoulders and turned me round.

  ‘Ah. I don’t think it’s going to do up,’ she said. ‘I’d try, but I don’t want to rip it…’

  I struggled out of the dress, my face hot.

  ‘Ooh, this maybe?’ she suggested, holding a red tube skirt. ‘It’s nice and stretchy. Maybe with that long navy T-shirt, although that might be a bit tight as well.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’d rather wear something of mine.’

  ‘Awww, really? OK.’ She slithered into the tube skirt, smoothing it over her hips, turning sideways to look critically at her perfectly flat stomach in the mirror.

  ‘What do you think? Bit tight?’

  I ended up going with all black because it’s meant to make you look thinner, and also I didn’t want to stand out too much or get it wrong. Sophie had a bottle hidden in the wardrobe that we swigged from as we got ready. It consisted of a variety of different drinks all mixed together that she had nicked from her mum’s drinks cabinet – gin, rum, vodka, some weird yellow stuff her mum got on holiday plus some coke to make it taste better.

  Matt’s house was on that estate where all the hulking great brand-new detached houses had been made to look like oversized cottages from a bygone age. As we got closer we could hear the thudding bass of the music, and there were loads of other people obviously going there too. Lights were blazing from all the front windows as we walked down the path. Groups of boys and girls spilled out of the house into the front garden, which was already filled with cigarette ends and empty glasses and bottles. The front door was ajar and we slipped through into a large hallway with a black-and-white tiled floor. A wide staircase led upstairs to our right, and to the left of it was a corridor that obviously led to the kitchen. Boys I’d never seen before greeted Sophie as we made our way through the throng into the kitchen, which was large and very hot. Matt was sitting at the huge oak table rolling a joint, with Sam to his right.

  ‘Soph!’ called Matt. ‘You made it!’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, leaning down to hug them both. ‘Hello boys.’

  I don’t know if it was my imagination but I’m sure her hand lingered longer on Sam’s shoulder than it did on Matt’s.

  Matt peered uncertainly at me. ‘All right? Good to see you, um…’

  ‘Hi,’ I muttered, flushing. He didn’t even know my name, but it didn’t matter, I knew I was protected by Sophie, a shining titanium wall made entirely of popularity and beauty.

  ‘Have a drink,’ said Matt, waving towards the marble worktop, which was sticky with spilled drinks, littered with cigarette butts and covered in half-empty bottles of spirits, huge bottles of cider, lipstick-stained plastic cups and several bottles of something very bright blue. I’d never been to a party like this before and I veered between wild excitement at simply being there and the acceptance that this implied, and a nagging fear that I would somehow say the wrong thing or make a mistake and that everyone would see me for what I was.

  ‘Ooh, great,’ said Sophie, pulling me over to see. ‘Where did you get all this?’

  ‘People brought stuff, and my brother got a load of it for me,’ said Matt. ‘Have whatever you like, Soph. And —’ he gestured in my direction ‘— you too.’

  ‘It’s Louise, you idiot.’ Sophie laughed. ‘God, Lou, he doesn’t even know your name! Honestly, you see her every day at school!’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Matt to me.

  ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ Sophie said, smiling. ‘What shall we have, Louise, vodka and coke?’

  My head was already swimming from the effects of the drinks-cabinet concoction, but Sophie slugged vodka into two plastic glasses and topped them up with coke.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and see who else is here.’

  We left Matt in the kitchen staring longingly after Sophie, and made our way back through the hallway and turned right into the living room. This was the source of the music – someone had set up decks and a boy from school was DJing. There were a few girls I recognised dancing in the centre of the room, bodies moving effortlessly to the beat, completely absorbed in the rhythm, which thrummed like a heartbeat, insistent and demanding. I watched in fascination as Claire Barnes and a boy from the year above kissed on an armchair in the corner. Claire was sitting astride him and he had one hand on her bum and one caressing her breast through her top. They seemed totally in a world of their own, but I could see a couple of boys watching intently from the sofa on the other side of the room as Claire writhed and the movement of the boy’s hands grew ever more urgent.

  ‘We’ll leave her to it, shall we?’ shouted Sophie, but as she turned to leave the room, Matt came sidling up to us. The volume dropped temporarily.

  ‘Want a pill, Soph?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, have you got something?’

  ‘Not at the moment but Max will be here later. He should be able to sort us out.’

  He turned to me.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked politely. ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘Oh, um, no. I’m all right, thanks.’

  I cringed inwardly. All right, thanks? That’s what you say when someone asks if you want a cup of tea. As the music rose again, a wild, irresistible beat, Matt took Sophie by the hand and pulled her into the middle of the room to dance. Sophie beckoned me to join them but I can’t dance to that kind of music (or any kind) so I shook my head and took another gulp of my drink. I stood there for a while watching them, wondering how people learn to dance that way, and how they are able to do it so freely and unselfconsciously. Matt didn’t take his eyes off Sophie as she moved to the beat, taking in every perfect inch of her as her top rode up to show an inviting strip of taut, tanned skin. I drained my drink, and decided to go and get another one, more for something to do than anything else.

  Back in the kitchen, Sam was still sitting at the table. I poured myself another vodka and coke from the bottles on the side, unsure what the ratio was supposed to be.

  ‘Blimey, like your vodka, do you?’

  It was Sam’s voice. I’d obviously erred too far on the side of vodka.

  ‘That’s how I like it,’ I said pompously, taking a sip and trying not to wince.

  ‘Take a pew, Lou,’ he said, laughing softly at his own joke.

  I sat down opposite him, my heart beating very fast. I could feel the swell of my stomach under the flattering black clothes I had chosen so carefully, and my clumsy hands, large and in the wrong place wherever I put them. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a small V-neck and I had a strange urge to reach out a finger and stroke the soft triangle of lightly tanned skin that was on show. Already this counted as the longest conversation I had ever had with him.

  ‘Soooo, Louuuu.’

  He laughed again; he must have been stoned. ‘Saw you in town the other day with that new girl.’

  ‘Maria? Yes, she’s… she’s OK,’ I trailed off lamely, thinking of my recent phone conversation with Sophie.

&n
bsp; ‘I heard some… interesting stories about her. Matt Lewis’s cousin knows someone who goes to her old school in London.’

  ‘I heard there were some rumours. Do you know what they’re about?’

  The effects of the vodka and my interest in Maria were making me relax to the point where this was verging on feeling like a normal conversation.