Is that it, Eddie? Is my marriage why you didn’t call me? If it is, please try to remember how it felt when we were together. I meant it all. Every kiss, every word, every everything.
I read the message three times and then deleted the whole thing.
Dear Eddie, I wrote instead.
I suspect you’ve found that I am married. I would dearly love the opportunity to explain the whole thing to you, face to face – although I want you to know right now that I am not married any longer: the website is out of date. I was – and still am – single. And I want to see you, and apologize, and explain.
Sarah
Tommy, Jo and Rudi were long gone. I had been crouching in the back of Tommy’s car for nearly half an hour.
I was going to have to get out.
Chapter Eight
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 programme . . . 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 make-up. 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 programme, not Tommy.
I was halfway down Rudi’s champagne when I saw Mandy and Claire at the back of the crowd. Ten metres 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 grey 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 favourite 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 children in hospital, 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 mid-nineties 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 email.
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 towards 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-coloured 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 towards Rudi but towards my part of the field. In fact – I turned round, but the only person nearby was 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, towards a new entrance gate onto the main road.