I’m still sitting shell-shocked at the kitchen table, Maria’s Facebook page open in front of me. Questions crowd my mind. Who is doing this, and why now? I try to wrap my mind around the horrifying possibility that somehow, somewhere, Maria is still alive. When a new Facebook notification pops up, I click on it with trepidation.
Sharne Bay High Reunion Committee invited you to the event Sharne Bay High School Reunion Class of 1989.
Reunion? I click feverishly on the link, and there it is: Sharne Bay High School Class of 1989 Reunion, taking place two weeks on Saturday in the old school hall. On top of the request from Maria, it’s a sucker punch right in the solar plexus. Can it be coincidence, getting this the same day? I click on the Facebook page of the group organising it, and although there’s no way of telling who has set it up, it seems bona fide. There’s a post pinned to the top of the newsfeed from our old English teacher Mr Jenkins, who apparently still works at the school. There were all sorts of rumours that used to go round about him – keeping girls back after lessons, looking in through the changing-room windows, stuff like that – but I don’t suppose there was any truth to them. We all thought the PE teacher was a lesbian because she had a glass eye, so we weren’t the most reliable of witnesses. The rest of the newsfeed is full of excited chat from people going to the reunion, dating back a couple of months. Why has it taken until now for me to be invited? My neck is flushed and there are treacherous, foolish tears prickling at the back of my eyes. How easily, how stupidly, I am transported back through the years; how quickly that familiar rush of shame washes over me: shame at being left out, being left behind. Still not really one of the gang. An afterthought.
I click on the list of attendees, furiously scanning for his name. Yes, there it is. There he is, eyes crinkling away at me from his profile photo, his right arm around someone out of shot. Sam Parker is attending this event. Why hasn’t he said anything to me? Obviously we hardly spend hours chatting, but he could have mentioned it when I was dropping Henry off. Maybe he’s hoping I don’t find out about it.
Other names I recognise jump out at me: Matt Lewis, Claire Barnes, Joanne Kirby. For a heart-stopping second I see Weston and think wildly that it’s Maria, but no, it’s Tim Weston. My God, her brother. He wasn’t at school with us – he was a year older and went to the local sixth-form college – but he used to hang out with Sam and some of the other boys in our year so I suppose it’s not so surprising that he’s going. There are loads of other names – some I know, others that I don’t remember. So many names, but not mine.
I keep scanning the list of attendees until I find Sophie. I knew she’d be there. I click on her profile. I’ve looked at it before, but always resisted the temptation to befriend her. This time I go straight to her ‘friends’ section, but Maria’s not there. Of course that doesn’t mean that Sophie hasn’t received the same request I have, only that she hasn’t accepted it. She’s got five hundred and sixty-four friends. I’ve got sixty-two and some of those are work-related. I’ve thought about deleting my account before, to prevent myself from getting sucked into that terrible time-wasting vortex where you find yourself poring through the wedding photos of someone you’ve never met instead of meeting a work deadline; but actually it’s important to me, particularly in the last couple of years. Since Sam left, I have had to shrink my world, in order for the important things not to fall apart: Henry; my business. I don’t have the time or energy for anything else, but Facebook means I haven’t completely lost touch with my friends and old colleagues. I still know what’s going on in their lives – what their children look like, where they’ve been on holiday – and then on the odd occasions that we do meet, the thread that binds us is stronger than it would otherwise have been. So I keep posting, liking, commenting; it stops me from falling out of my world completely.
The wind is rising outside and a strand of the wisteria that trails around the outside of my French windows taps on the glass, making me jump. Even though I know it was the wisteria, I get up and peer out, but it’s nearly dark and I can’t see much beyond my reflection. A sudden sprinkle of rain rattles against the windowpane, as if someone has thrown a handful of gravel and I jump back, heart thumping.
Back at the kitchen table, I click on Sophie’s profile photo. It’s one of those faux-casual ones where she looks impossibly gorgeous but manages to give the impression it’s any old snap she’s thrown up there. Look closely and you’ll see the ‘natural’ make-up, the semi-professional lighting, the filters applied in the edit. Lean in closer and you might see the lines, but I have to admit she’s worn well. Her hair is still a tumbling waterfall of molten caramel, her figure enviably but predictably unchanged since her teenage years.
I wonder if she’s ever looked for me on here, and I click back to my own profile picture, trying to see it through her eyes. I’ve used one that Polly took, me sitting behind a table in the pub, glass of wine in hand. Under my newly critical gaze it looks like the photo of a person self-consciously trying to look ‘fun’. I am leaning forward on the table in a short-sleeved top and you can see the unattractive bulge of my upper arms, in grim contrast to the gym-toned, honey-coloured limbs on display in Sophie’s photo. My mousy brown hair looks lank and my make-up is smudged.
My cover photo is one of Henry taken last month on his first day at school. He’s standing in the kitchen, his uniform box-fresh but marginally too big, looking heart-wrenchingly proud. Only I had known his private worries, confided to me last thing at night from deep beneath his duvet: ‘What if no one wants to play with me, Mummy?’; ‘What if I miss you too much?’; ‘What will I do if I need a cuddle?’ I had reassured him as best I could, but I didn’t know the answers to those questions either. He had seemed too small to be going off on his own into the world, out there where I couldn’t protect him. I wonder briefly if Sophie knows that Sam and I have a child, or even that we were married. I push down the thought of Henry, trying not to think about what he might be doing at Sam’s tonight, trying not to worry about him; it’s like trying not to breathe.
I think about what it will mean if I become Facebook friends with Sophie, and scroll through my timeline, trying to see it through her eyes. Lots of photos of Henry; posts about childcare stresses and working-mother guilt, especially when Henry was starting school and only went mornings for the first two weeks. I wonder if Sophie has children. If she doesn’t, she’s going to find my timeline extremely tedious. If she scrolls back far enough at least she’ll see the photos from our summer holiday, Henry and I tanned and relaxed, all tension eased away by warmth and distance from home.
What she won’t be able to see is that I was married to Sam, that’s if she doesn’t know already. I removed all the evidence of him from my timeline two years ago when I realised that he’d deleted his own Facebook account, the one with the story of us on it. He had simply started again. All the holidays, the days out, our wedding photos carefully scanned in several years after the event: gone, replaced by his shiny new narrative. He wiped me clean away like a dirty smear on the window.
I check to see if Sophie is Facebook friends with Sam, and she is. He must have his privacy settings very high, because all I can see are his profile photos, which are either of him alone or landscapes, and the date two years ago when he ‘joined Facebook’. I struggle to tear my eyes away from his photo. I know that I’m better off without him. Yet there is still a part of me that yearns to be with him, the two of us luminescent in a dull world that wants everyone to be the same.
I start clicking through the photos on my laptop, trying to find a better one for my profile picture, wondering whether to take a new one, although selfies are always horrendously unflattering, so maybe not. What about one of those ‘amusing’ ones where you put a picture of the back of your head, or a blurred photo? Mind you, maybe she’s looked for me before and seen the current one, so if I change it today and then send her a friend request, she’ll know that I’ve done it on purpose to impress her.
That brings me up short: impress her? My God, is that what I’m trying to do, even after all these years? I look back through the prism of time and it’s perfectly clear that Sophie was using me to shore up her own ego; that she needed someone less attractive, less cool than her to stand beside her and make her shine even brighter. I couldn’t see it then, but she was jostling for position as much as I was, just a few rungs up the ladder. But receiving this message from Maria has plunged me back to the playground and the lunch hall, where fitting in is everything and friendship feels like life and death. My professional achievements, my friends, my son, the life I’ve constructed – it all feels like it’s been built on shifting sands. My feet keep sliding out from under me, and I can sense how little it will take to make me fall.
In the end I leave the photo as it is and merely send a friend request, after some deliberation not including a message. After all, what on earth would I say? Hi Sophie, how’ve you been these past twenty-seven years? That’s a bit weird. Hi Sophie, I’ve had a Facebook friend request from our long-dead schoolmate, have you? Even weirder, especially if she hasn’t.
I sit at the kitchen table, abstractedly chewing the inside of my mouth, eyes on the ‘notifications’ icon. After two minutes, a ‘1’ pops up and I rush to click on it. Sophie Hannigan has accepted your friend request. Naturally she’s the sort of person that’s always on Facebook. She’s not sent me a message, which makes me feel a bit sick and panicky, but I trawl through her profile anyway. While it might not give me much of an insight into what her life is really like, it certainly tells me a lot about how she wants the world to see her. She changes her profile picture once or twice every week, an endless succession of flattering images accompanied by the inevitable compliments from friends of both sexes. One of her male friends, Jim Pett (who appears to be married to someone else) comments on every one: I would, one of them says; I just have, another. Oh Jim, you always have to lower the tone, she replies, mock-disgusted, loving it.
I know that Facebook offers an idealised version of life, edited and primped to show the world what we want it to see. And yet I can’t stifle the pangs of envy at her undimmed beauty, the photos, exotic locations, the comments, the uproarious social whirl, the wide circle of successful friends. There’s no mention of a partner though, nor any sign of children and I catch myself judging her a little bit for this. It seems that even after what I’ve been through I still see it as a marker of success for women: finding a partner, creating life.
When it comes to sending her a message, I am paralysed by indecision. How can I explain what has happened? But who else is there that I can talk to about this? Once I might have spoken to Sam, but that’s out of the question now. I decide to keep it simple and try to be breezy:
Hi Sophie, it’s been a long time! I type, cringing at the desperation that she will surely sense oozing from every word. Looks like we are both in London! Would love to see you some time! Too many exclamation marks but I don’t know how else to communicate breeziness. Clearly I shouldn’t have worried about that because a message pings back immediately.
Hey! Great to hear from you!! Love to see you!! Are you coming to the reunion?
Hope so! I type, my fingers slipping on the keys. Waiting to hear about a possible diary clash but would be great to see everyone!
I’m conscious of the mismatch between the brightness of my tone and the confusion and distress I feel as I type. A voice inside my head (probably Polly’s) is telling me to stop, to ignore the reunion altogether, but I can’t do it.
I know! Gonna be great!! she replies.
My God, these exclamation marks are killing me. I can’t do this on email; I need to see her. I gather myself and begin to type.
Be great to catch up properly before the big day – fancy meeting for a drink?
I press send before I have a chance to change my mind. Up until now the messages have been flying back and forth like nobody’s business, but there’s a slightly longer hiatus after I send this one. I hold my breath.
Sure, why not? Why don’t you come over to mine for a drink – how about this Friday?
I exhale, shaking. I feel a bit strange about going to her house – I would have preferred somewhere neutral – but I can’t keep this up much longer so I agree. She gives me her address, a flat in Kensington, and we say goodbye with a flurry of kisses and smiley faces from her and a couple of self-conscious kisses from me.. Another notification pops up straight away. I’ve been tagged in a post by Sophie Hannigan: Looking forward to catching up with my old mate Louise Williams on Friday night! I click the like button with trembling hands. I am thankful that this first encounter with Sophie took place online, giving me time to compose myself privately afterwards. I’m an adult now, I think. I don’t need her approval, but I’m not even convincing myself.
Outside, night is falling. I close the laptop and sit unmoving at my kitchen table for a long time. First the Facebook request, then the reunion, now this meeting with Sophie… I feel as though I’m on a ride, or a journey, that nobody asked me if I wanted to go on. Although I am profoundly shocked by the turn events have taken, at some level I’ve always been expecting this to happen, or something like it. I don’t know who is driving or where we are going, but wheels have been set in motion and I don’t know how to stop them.