Tommy was standing on a sad little platform in the middle of our old school field, talking into a PA system. He was pretending to find it funny that the equipment was punctuating his speech with burping noises.
I scanned the assembled crowd. Why were Mandy and Claire here today? Did they not have better things to do? Did they not have jobs? My lungs felt like they’d been bundled into a tiny chamber behind my nose. I couldn’t stand the prospect of seeing them. Not now. Not in this state.
“Hey.” Jo appeared from nowhere. “How are you doing?”
“Great.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said quietly. “Even if Tommy feels he has to hang around, we’ll be done within the hour. And I’ll keep an eye on you.”
We watched in silence as Tommy talked about Matthew Martyn. A real inspiration to his pupils . . . Has worked tirelessly on this program . . . Makes all the difference to work with people like Matt . . .
“Look, I . . . um, are they here?”
Jo slid her hand into the crook of my elbow. “I don’t know, Sarah,” she said. “I don’t know what they look like.”
I nodded, trying to breathe deeply.
“What have you been up to, anyway?” she asked. “Hiding on the car floor?”
“Mostly. I messaged Eddie. About being married. Then I put on too much makeup. And now I’m here.”
There was a short gust of applause, and we turned to watch as Tommy handed the microphone over to Matthew Martyn. Matthew was one of those men who’d spent so much time working out that he had to carry his enormous arms at an angle, like a penguin. He and Tommy slapped each other on the back as they swapped places.
“Right,” Jo said. “I think I’d better go and wait for him. After Matthew’s speech it’s mingling time.” I watched helplessly as she walked away.
After a few minutes Rudi sauntered up, holding a glass of champagne. “This is so boring, Sarah,” he said.
“I know.”
“And Tommy’s being weird.”
“It’s because he’s nervous,” I told him, removing the champagne from his hand. “Do you ever behave?”
“No.” Rudi smiled, then pointed at an all-weather running track that hadn’t existed in my time. Hurdles were arranged across the lanes closest to us. “Can I go and jump over those things?”
“If you promise you’ll stick to the lower ones.”
“Epic!” He ran off.
Wretched memories oozed from my skin like sweat as I scanned around me again. I hated this place. And no matter how juvenile it was, I hated Matthew Martyn. I didn’t care that he’d been a teenager: he’d made another boy cry, again and again and again, and he’d derived pleasure from it. He was talking now as if he’d designed the bloody program, not Tommy.
I was halfway down Rudi’s champagne when I saw Mandy and Claire at the back of the crowd. Ten yards away, maybe less. I darted my gaze away before I was seen, taking with me a few fragmented details: a blue-and-yellow dress, a fringe, back fat straining over a bra strap. I lowered the glass, my arms moving like those of a robot in a crude animation. My face flared red.
Then: “Sarah Harrington?” a voice whispered near my left shoulder. “Is that you?”
I turned to find myself face-to-face with my English teacher, Mrs. Rushby. Her hair was a little gray now, but still scrolled into that elegant twist that we’d all tried to copy at some point during our school years.
“Oh, hello!” I whispered. My voice was laced with hysteria.
Mrs. Rushby, without warning, gave me a tight hug. “I wanted to do that years ago,” she said, “but you’d gone off to America. How are you doing, Sarah? How have you been?”
“Great!” I lied. “And you?”
“Very good, thank you.” Then: “I am so pleased to hear you’re well. I really hoped it would work out for you in California.”
I was touched. Not just that she’d hoped for better times for me, but that she had remembered me at all. Then again, I thought, I hadn’t been a very ordinary pupil by the time I’d left.
For a short while, protected from the crowd by Mrs. Rushby, I started to feel a faint whisper of confidence. I made a couple of jokes and felt pathetically happy when she laughed. Did anyone ever lose the desire to impress their favorite teacher? I wondered. More than nineteen years had passed since I’d been in her A-level English class, and yet here I was, trying to make clever gags about revenge tragedies.
Mrs. Rushby, thankfully, changed the subject when she realized I couldn’t remember John Webster’s name. She told me she’d seen a news piece about my charity when she’d taken her family on holiday to California. “Something to do with entertaining hospitalized children, isn’t it? Clowns?”
I relaxed as I slipped into even safer territory: work. Clowndoctors, I explained, as I had done a thousand times before. Not clowns. Trained to support the kids, normalize their medical experience, make the hospital environment feel less intimidating.
As I spoke I glanced over at Mandy and Claire, still there at the back of the crowd. The blue-and-yellow dress and the fringe had belonged to Claire; the back fat to Mandy. Her once-spiky little frame had expanded by at least five stone since school, something I’d probably have prayed for back then. Now I felt nothing. She looked over at me, then quickly away.
Mrs. Rushby excused herself to hand something to another teacher and I downed the rest of Rudi’s champagne, just as the railway level-crossing alarm—a sound I hadn’t heard in years—started up in the distance. And for a second I was back in the midnineties again, a teenager wading through uncertainty and emotional hubris, exhausted by the effort of just living. A ladder in her tights, a thin attempt at a knowing smile smeared across her face. Trying so hard to get it right with Mandy Lee and Claire Peddler.
Mrs. Rushby was still busy and I was now exposed, so I checked my Facebook messages. I made myself look tense and focused, as if I were responding to a critical work e-mail.
Still nothing from Eddie.
I put my phone away and watched Rudi, who was sizing up a far too big hurdle. “Rudi,” I called. “No.” I mimed slashing my throat.
“I can do it,” he shouted at me.
“No, you can’t,” I called back.
“Yes, I can!”
“If you move one more inch toward that hurdle, Rudi O’Keefe, I’ll tell your mum you’ve been using her password.”
He stared at me in disbelief. Aunty Sarah would never be so mean!
I stood my ground. Aunty Sarah would absolutely be so mean.
He returned angrily to the smaller hurdles and I noticed someone watching him from the grassy island in the middle of the track. Someone slim, boyish, wearing shapeless jeans and a khaki-colored mac. The hood was pulled up, even though the rain had cleared. A sixth-former? Photographer? After a few seconds I realized his gaze was directed not toward Rudi but toward my part of the field. In fact—I turned round, but the only people nearby were Mrs. Rushby and the other teacher—it seemed oddly as if he were looking at me.
I squinted. Male? Female? I couldn’t tell. For a second I even wondered if it was Eddie, but he was broader than this person. Much taller.
I turned round again, to make certain there was nobody else he could be watching. There was not. Abruptly, the figure started walking away, toward a new entrance gate onto the main road.
“Sorry, Sarah.” Mrs. Rushby returned. “So, tell me, how’s your husband? I remember him from the television piece. He seemed like a very talented man.”
I checked over my shoulder one last time, just as the person in the khaki mac did the same. It was me he was looking at. It was definitely me. But after a split second he turned back and walked off the school grounds.
An electric bus whined past on the main road. Slender planks of sun splintered out from between clouds, and something moved uneasily in my abdomen. Who was that?
I watched Mrs. Rushby’s face drop as I told her Reuben and I had recently separated. This, I thought, would take some getting used to. “We’re still running the company together, though. It’s all very amicable and grown-up!”
“I’m sorry.” She frowned, folding her arms self-consciously. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Not at all.” I wished I could explain to her how easy it was—how embarrassingly easy—for me to talk about Reuben. Why had a person in a hood been watching me? That’s what I wanted to know.
“Well, Sarah, I’m quite sure you’ll find happiness with someone else.”
“I hope so!” I said. And then, to my horror: “Actually, there is a someone else, but . . . It’s difficult.”
Mrs. Rushby was clearly taken aback. “Right,” she said, after a pause. “Oh, dear.”
What was wrong with me? This had been my first shot at a normal conversation in two weeks! “I’m sorry,” I sighed. “I sound like one of your GCSE students.”
She smiled. “One is never too old to yearn,” she said kindly. “I can’t remember who said that, but I endorse it wholeheartedly.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so I apologized again.
“Sarah, if we didn’t have thousands of years’ writings on the pain of love—not to mention the questioning of faith, the loss of self it precipitates—I’d be out of a job.”
Yes, I thought miserably. That was it. The loss of self. How could I ever admit that I preferred the idea of Eddie being dead than I did that he’d simply changed his mind? I was a monster.
I missed Sarah Mackey. She’d been so regular. She’d—
“ARGHHHH!”
I whipped round. Rudi must have tackled the too-high hurdle. He was curled on the ground, clutching his leg.
“Oh, fuck,” Jo hissed, right into the silence that followed. She ran over to him, and all the parents and the teachers and the local journalists, all of Matthew Martyn’s junior sports troupe—not to mention Matthew himself—turned as one, sending javelins of disapproval across the field. Who was this woman who’d turned up with Tommy? Why wasn’t her child in school? And why was she using the F-word?
“Charming,” I heard a woman say. It was Mandy Lee. I’d know that voice anywhere.
I hurried over to the screaming heap of Rudi and helped Jo inspect his leg. “Mummy,” he wailed, a word I hadn’t heard him use in years. Jo caved herself around him, kissing him, telling him he was safe. A tall man with a pointed face marched up to Jo and announced that he was the designated first aider.
“Let me take a look at him, please,” he said, and Rudi’s wails increased to siren pitch. He never did accidents by halves.
After Jo had taken Rudi off in a taxi to the minor injuries unit at Stroud Hospital, I slunk off to the toilet with the vague notion of collecting myself.
I ran my hand over the brick cubicle wall, knowing that, under layers of paint, my name was scratched alongside Mandy’s and Claire’s and some fierce words about how nobody would ever come between us. Ironic, really, given that a few days after we had committed our indestructibility to the toilet wall, they had decided to eject me from their block of desks for the day and I’d ended up having to eat my lunch in the very same cubicle. It had been raining outside; I’d had nowhere else to go. I recalled the burst of misery as my crisp packet had rustled and someone—some girl who’d never identified herself—had peered under the door to see what I was up to.
I flushed the loo, thinking about the unidentifiable person watching me from under the hood of his coat earlier. Who even knew I was in Stroud today, beyond Eddie? Could he—or she—really have been looking at me? And if so, why?
I checked Messenger before leaving the cubicle, but there was nothing from Eddie. He still hadn’t been online since the day we met. Maybe Jo was right, I thought. Maybe I should write a public post on his wall. The only thing stopping me, after all, would be fear of what people might think. What Eddie might think. And if I was as certain as I said I was that something bad had happened, that should be the least of my worries.
The idea pitched around me like a bird trapped in a room.
But then: No! came the answer. It’s not as simple as that. The reason I haven’t written on his page is that . . .
Is that what?
I was going to have to write something. If Eddie really had been wasting away in a ditch, if he really had drowned in the Strait of Gibraltar, I was being pretty damned casual.
I opened up his Facebook page, took a long breath, and typed.
Has anyone seen Eddie recently? Have been trying to get in touch with him. A bit worried. Let me know if you’ve heard from him. Ta. And before I had a chance to stop myself, I pressed “Post.”
Suddenly the loo was filled with sounds I remembered. High-pitched chatter, makeup bags being unzipped, mascara wands being pumped. Several women talking through curved mouths as they smeared on lipstick. They shrieked with laughter about how they were still doing their makeup in the toilet mirrors after all these years, and I smiled despite myself.
Then: “Have you seen Sarah Harrington?” someone asked. “That was a surprise.”
And then Mandy’s voice: “I know! Pretty brave to just turn up like that.”
Murmurs of agreement. “Can I borrow your mascara? Mine’s gone clumpy.” Taps being turned on and off; the useless sigh of the hand dryer that had never worked.
“If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed to see her,” Claire said. The other women went silent. “I just wanted to have a nice afternoon, support Matt—know what I mean?”
Know what I mean? I’d said it for a while, to fit in.
“Yes,” Mandy said. “And of course she’s got as much right to be here as anyone else, but it’s . . . well, difficult. For us, at least.”
Claire agreed that it was.
“She pretended not to have seen me earlier,” Mandy said. “So I’m afraid I did the same. And so should you, Claire, if it’s going to stress you out.” This was the kind of leadership that had made her popular at school. Let’s ignore Claire tomorrow. Let’s make some fake IDs. Although not for you, Sarah—you don’t look old enough. “I’ve got too much on my plate at the moment—I haven’t the mental space for Sarah Harrington.”
Further murmurs of agreement.
Then: “Tommy Stenham’s looking well,” Claire said lightly. “Don’t you think?”
Oh, she’d been deadly at that! Drop some poor person into the conversation—tone innocuous, intentions murderous—and wait, quivering, for Mandy to take the lead.
“Looking very well indeed,” Mandy agreed, “although I was a little confused by his girlfriend.” Her voice just skirted laughter.
I tried to breathe quietly.
“Oh, that’s not his girlfriend,” Claire said. “His girlfriend’s a lawyer. Matt’s seen a photo of her. Apparently she’s much better looking than the woman with the kid.”
Mandy said, “I suppose the real surprise is that he has a girlfriend at all.”
Witchy cackling. More taps. More towels. And then they started recounting, voices thick with guilty pleasure, all the things the boys used to say about Tommy. Through gales of laughter they agreed it had been very cruel. On a roll, now, they moved on to the length and appropriateness of Jo’s dress, the generous proportions of her body, the embarrassing spectacle Rudi had made, and I began to boil. Hearing them talk about me had been bad enough, but it was nothing I hadn’t spent years imagining them saying. Tommy, though? Jo? No.
So I wrenched open my cubicle door and I faced them: this row of thirty-seven-year-old women, with their carefully done hair and their perfume and their outfits that they wouldn’t admit to having bought especially for the occasion. They all turned round, mascaras in hand, lip gloss sparkling sickly. They all stared at me, and I stared at them.
And I said nothing. Sarah Mackey, keynote speaker, lobbyist, campaigner. She stood there in silence in front of her old friends, and then she fled.
