As I approach the school, still thinking uneasily of my conversation with Esther, the landmarks start to mount up: the bus stop with its carpet of cigarette butts; the high fence that still runs the length of the playground; the noticeboard by the front gate with its tatty bits of paper advertising God knows what. The buildings are largely unchanged, the old part of the school still handsome with its Victorian red-brick facade, the ‘new’ buildings grey and blocky, the product of sixties architecture that once thought itself so terribly modern.
I was planning to drive straight past, take a quick look at the place, but amongst the faded notes on the noticeboard that look like they’ve been there since my time at school, a garish poster demands my attention. I slow to try and read it, and can just make out the rainbow-coloured bubble writing: School Reunion – Class of 1989.
I brake sharply and swing over to the side of the road, parking haphazardly half-on and half-off the pavement. I dart across the road, ignoring the hoots and furious gestures of a driver who has to swerve to avoid me, and read the poster from top to bottom: it promises a disco, pay bar and cold buffet; eighties tunes and old friends. I look behind me, feeling weirdly guilty, as if someone might catch me out. I hear Esther’s voice in my head: Still tagging along, Louise?
I cross back to my car and sit at the steering wheel for a few minutes, staring over at the school, trying to get to grips with the emotions tumbling inside me. I’m a completely different person now to the girl who came here every day for five years, and yet I wonder whether that can be true. There must be some core part of me that is the same. The girl who did the things I did is me. That was what made being with Sam so safe. He knew the real me, and I knew he’d never tell anyone about what I had done. He would tell me so sometimes, when we lay together, absorbed in each other, the rest of the world shut out. Promise me that despite the terrible thing I had done, he would never leave me. But of course he did, in the end.
I start the engine and pull off. When I get to the end of the road I have a choice of turning left to head out of town, or right, towards the main residential part of Sharne Bay. I turn right, realising as I do that the contours of the road have been saved somewhere in my brain, a muscle memory that still works over twenty-five years on. Without thinking, I take another right towards my old house. The street is still lined with identikit 1970s houses, the front gardens neat and well cared for. There’s at least two cars on every drive now – some people have even managed to squeeze three on.
Rather than turning the car around in this narrow street, I decide to carry on and rejoin the main road at a different point, but when I get to the junction where I need to turn right, I find the road has been made one-way, so I have to carry on. I turn left and right at random, trusting that I’ll end up back on the main road at some point – Sharne Bay’s a small town, I’m hardly likely to get lost. But as familiar landmarks begin to catch my eye – the post box built into a brick wall, that high box hedge on the corner – I gradually begin to realise that I am far from lost. I am on the road where Maria lived, a street of small Victorian terraces cramped together behind narrow pavements. These houses don’t have driveways so the street is busy with parked cars, but there’s a space opposite number 33, and I pull over, remembering the last time I was there, lying on Maria’s bed, laughing until my stomach ached. I try to recall the last time I laughed like that, but I can’t. Maybe it doesn’t happen in adult life. It’s stuffy in the car where I’ve had the heating on, so I decide to have a walk, get some air and then head back to London – leaving this nostalgia-fest, or whatever it is, behind me.
As I get out of the car, a bald man of about my age comes along the pavement with a baby in a buggy. As he passes me, our eyes meet and there’s a second of non-recognition before I gasp and he does a double take.
Oh my God. A shard of ice slithers down my back. He looks older, of course, older than his years in fact, but I’d know him anywhere. It’s Maria’s brother, Tim Weston.
‘Louise?’ he says, standing stock-still in the middle of the pavement. ‘Louise Williams?’
‘Tim. Oh my goodness, I didn’t know you still…’ I tuck my hair behind my ears, then thrust my hands into my pockets to keep them still. ‘What are you doing here? Does your mum…?’ I indicate number 33.
‘What? Oh no – I live there now. Bought it from Mum. What are you doing here, Louise?’
‘I’ve been seeing a client in the area,’ I improvise hastily. ‘I lost my way, and I pulled over to look at the map on my phone.’
‘Oh, right.’ He’s looking at me dubiously. ‘Where does the client live?’
My mind goes blank, and I can only think of my own old street.
‘Turner Street, would you believe?’ I smile, trying to deflect the suspicion that this piece of information is likely to garner.
‘So has your mum moved away, or…?’
‘She moved to a bungalow a few years ago, so we bought it from her, me and my wife. Couldn’t have afforded to buy otherwise.’
‘Oh, wonderful!’ I’m going wildly over the top, my heart fluttering in my chest. ‘And this is your daughter?’
His face thaws slightly. ‘Yes. Have to take her out in the buggy, it’s the only way she’ll sleep. Gives my wife a break too. She needs it sometimes, especially now she’s back working again. She’s got her own business, doing really well, but it’s hard, she’s…’ He trails off as if he’s thought better of letting me into his life to that degree.
I look down at the baby, fast asleep in her pink snowsuit, all rosy cheeks and long eyelashes.
‘She’s beautiful.’ It took Sam and me so much time and effort and pain to have Henry, that I thought when he arrived we would relish every minute, every cry, every sleepless night. I thought that when people talked about sleepless nights, it was just a figure of speech. I didn’t realise that it actually meant nights without any sleep at all. It soon became clear that Sam couldn’t or didn’t want to cope with the ferocious demands of babyhood, and that I was willing to take on all the caring duties because I was terrified that if I didn’t, he would leave. I did other things too, to keep him happy, to keep him with me. I didn’t know then that you can’t stop someone leaving you.
Tim looks down at his daughter, smiling. ‘Thanks.’ There’s an awkward pause and I cast around for something to say. What do you say to someone you haven’t seen for more than twenty-five years who you know hates your guts, and with good reason?
‘So, what do you do?’ I fall back on that most conventional of dinner party questions.
‘I’m in IT. I commute to London three days a week, then work from home the rest of the time – hence this.’ He gestures to the buggy. ‘How about you? You’re an interior designer, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ The unease which has been stirring inside me since I first heard his voice steps up a notch. Has he been keeping track of me? ‘How did you know?’
‘I’m not sure… maybe someone told me…’ His forehead creases as he tries to recall who that might have been. ‘Oh no, I know, I saw something in the local paper – you won an award, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did.’ I was proud at the time, but now I feel curiously violated at the thought of people from my past having seen that article, knowing things about me whilst remaining anonymous themselves. I start to mutter something about having to get home, but he interrupts me.
‘Have you heard about the reunion?’
‘Yes, I saw something about it on Facebook,’ I say.
‘Are you going?’
‘I’m not sure. Are… are you?’ I know he is, I’ve seen his name on the Facebook guest list. Why am I so embarrassed about going to the reunion? Sophie doesn’t have any shame about it, neither do all the others that have signed up for it.
‘I thought I might,’ he says, looking down. ‘I know I’m not strictly class of eighty-nine, but obviously I hung out with a lot of you – and, you know, Maria was. I thought I might go, sort of on her behalf.’
The mention of her name takes my breath a little. Although she has occupied a private space in my mind for so long, until the past week I hadn’t heard or spoken her name since I was a teenager. I had thought that Tim and I were going to get through this whole, utterly strange conversation without talking about her. Suddenly I realise I can’t let the moment pass without at least trying to tell him how sorry I am.
‘I think that’s a really nice idea,’ I say. ‘Look, Tim, about Maria.’ I screw up all my courage. ‘I know I treated her badly, and I’m so sorry. I wish… well, I wish I could go back and change it.’ I know he didn’t think very much of me back then, and he was probably right. I don’t think very much of myself either when I look back.
Tim looks away into the distance.
‘I don’t blame you, Louise,’ he says stiffly.
‘Really? I think Esther Harcourt does,’ I say without thinking.
‘Esther Harcourt? Do you still see her? She’s a lawyer now, isn’t she?’
‘Yes. Do you remember Esther then?’
Part of me is surprised that someone like Tim, who was part of the cool crowd and didn’t even go to school with us, should recall Esther.
‘Yeah, she spoke at the memorial service, didn’t she? And Maria saw a lot of her in the time before… you know. Mum talks about her a bit too. She’s kept an eye on her career over the years. Esther was a good friend to Maria.’
The unspoken hangs in the air like a bad smell: unlike some people.
‘How is your mum?’ I think of Bridget the last time I saw her, the night Maria disappeared: the rising panic, her fear-drenched eyes locking onto mine for those few heart-stopping seconds.
‘Not great, to be honest. She’s not been at all well recently, and she’s lonely. She never met anyone else after Dad left. Having a grandchild helps a bit, but she’s never got over what happened to Maria.’
Of course she hasn’t. How could you?
‘Look, Louise, none of us know what happened that night.’
I try to keep my face neutral.
‘Mum believes Maria killed herself, but I don’t know… she’s tougher than… she was tougher than she seemed, Maria. I know she was drinking that night. If she wandered off, if she was upset, she could easily have missed her footing up there.’
The baby stirs in her buggy, and Tim jiggles her gently back and forth. She sighs and relaxes back into blissful sleep.
‘I know I was hard on you back then, but I felt so protective of Maria, especially after what had happened to her in London. And I was so angry; at our dad for leaving, and at Maria sometimes, for getting involved with that boy, although of course it wasn’t her fault. Really, of course, I was angry at myself. I thought I should have protected her, I should have seen what was happening with that boy earlier. I thought it was my fault, that if I’d behaved better, not made such a fuss about leaving London, then Dad wouldn’t have left.’
He assumes I know the story about the boy in London, thinks that Maria told me. Of course she didn’t, but I don’t feel I can ask him now.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I say.
‘Well,’ he says with obvious effort, ‘it wasn’t yours either. I know you didn’t behave well, but you weren’t to know what was going to happen. No one did. I should have kept more of an eye on her at the leavers’ party. We were close, Maria and I.’
How close, I wonder? Everyone used to comment on how protective he was of her, she even said so herself. Close enough to want to reopen old wounds, to punish the girls he sees as responsible for his sister’s unhappiness?
‘I knew she was… having trouble, you know…’ he goes on.
Having trouble. It’s kind of him to frame it like that, but I know the truth. We had made her life a misery.
‘No one else can take the responsibility for what happened to her. Either she bears that herself, or it was an accident, a misstep, a one-in-a-million chance.’ He’s watching me closely, and I shift from foot to foot, wishing the encounter over.
It’s a comforting fallacy, and I wish with everything in me that his version of events was the true one. Or if that can’t be (and of course it can’t), I wish that I could tell someone the truth without being judged, or worse. I wish that I could loosen this secret knot within me, a knot that is tied so tightly I don’t think anyone will ever be able to get their fingers into its intricacies to tug it apart, however hard they try.
Tim doesn’t know it, but we are talking at cross-purposes here. He thinks we’re talking about the fact that I abandoned Maria for Sophie and the promise of popularity, and how I was partly responsible for ostracising her at school. He thinks we are talking about a bit of schoolgirl bullying, not sticks and stones but words that were meant to hurt, and did. And it’s true; I did do all that. I ignored her, I deserted her, I let her down. What Tim doesn’t know is that I also did something else. Something much, much worse.
We say our goodbyes, and I drive slowly back through the streets of my childhood. As I put my foot down on the A11, something about my conversation with Tim tugs at the corners of my mind. It takes me a while to figure out what it is, but then I get it. She’s tougher than she seems, he started to say, but then corrected himself. A slip of the tongue maybe, or perhaps seeing me threw everything up in the air, flung him back in his mind to 1989. But whatever the reason, there’s no getting away from it: Tim referred to Maria in the present tense.