“Don’t feel like it,” I say and pick up the laminated menu. “Anyway, if Paul rings, I’ll have to lie. Okay? Oh, don’t look like that. You’ve done worse.”
She laughs and pulls the menu out of my hand. “Actually, I was supposed to go last week and ducked out, so I won’t grass you up.”
“What was yours for?” I ask.
Harry pulls a face. “Lump in my breast. Well, not even a lump really.”
“You idiot,” I say. “Go. Make another appointment.”
“Yes, yes. Okay. I’ll do it tomorrow. What do you want to drink?”
I watch her disappear into the café and thank God for her.
? ? ?
It was Harry who finally made me take stock of my shambles of a life. It was the summer of 1994 and she breezed into the pub where I was working. Pulling pints, defrosting shepherd’s pies, and treading water.
“Emma!” she called when she spotted me bringing a tray of food to the next table. It was so weird seeing her again. It had been years and all the context had gone so she was familiar but a stranger—like someone famous you spot in the street and can’t quite place for a moment.
And Harry didn’t look like the best friend I’d last seen.
This Harry was glamorous in her tailored trousers and jacket, manicured nails, straightened hair, and eyes hidden by outsize sunglasses.
And I suppose I didn’t look like her best friend anymore. I’d grown taller, my hair was bleached blond and cropped short, and I was stick thin. In photographs of myself from that period, I looked like a heroin addict.
“Hello, Emma,” she said.
I had sort of expected her to turn up one day. Secretly hoped, I suppose. I missed her when I let myself think about my previous life. Little things would set me off: a song on the radio we used to sing together, a phrase she used to use, and I’d be stopped in my tracks. I’d be a teenager again. Just for a moment. Then I’d get back on with scraping greasy plates or pulling pints.
It was hard seeing her and remembering how close we’d been once. I held myself back from her, as if she was some sort of threat.
“Hello, Harry,” I said. “Can’t stop, sorry. Got a kitchen full of orders.”
She pushed her sunglasses onto her head and looked at me hard.
“No problem. I’ll wait,” she said.
Later, when I sat with her in the park, in this park, cans of cider and bags of chips in our hands, like the old days, I started thinking she was my wake-up call.
She knew I’d gone to live with my grandparents, but I’d left without saying good-bye to her and she was still furious about being deserted when we finally met again. It was only when I told her I’d been thrown out by Will and Jude that she calmed down. That day in the park, I told her I’d left school as soon as I could because I didn’t want to be tied down.
“I chose freedom instead of a degree and a mortgage,” I boasted. “I wanted to do what I liked and go where I wanted.”
Harry had given me another one of her looks and said: “Then why aren’t you out there, conquering the world, Emma?”
The cider and nostalgia had lowered my defenses and I started to cry. Fat tears splashed on my chips.
In that moment, I longed, physically longed, to be me again. The girl I used to be.
Harry put her arms round me and held me without speaking.
“Because I am nothing,” I managed to say.
“Not to me,” she said. And waited.
And I started to tell her how I really felt.
“Jude used to tell me I could be anyone,” I said. “When I was little. But the reality is, I’m no one.”
The years of pub work and waitressing in the winter, changing beds and cleaning loos in the summer, dirty sheets, dirty strangers, drifting from job to job, had worn me down.
“I can’t get started, Harry, that’s the problem. I feel like I’m in a thick fog most of the time. I can’t make out what’s ahead. I’m too scared to move forwards. It might be worse than this. I keep telling myself: Stay where you are. This is the safest place to be.”
“What happened to you?” she said.
“There was a baby,” I said.
“Oh, Em,” she said.
“I couldn’t tell you—or anyone. I did a terrible thing.”
She was silent again.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sure it was the right thing to do at the time.”
I remember being startled at the remark. How could it be the right thing to do? But then I realized she thought I was talking about having an abortion, and for a moment I almost corrected her mistake. But the relief that I didn’t have to explain further stopped me.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she said when I quieted. I rested my head on her shoulder and dreamed a future.
“I’m thinking about going to university, Harry,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll need A Levels, but with your huge brain . . .”
“I’m not sure what’s left of it,” I said and she squeezed my hand.
“Loads,” she said. “So . . . ?”
“I once thought I’d apply to do evening classes.”
“Sounds like a plan, Emma.”
“Yes, I’ll be a schoolgirl again,” and I laughed and there was something light in my head I hadn’t felt for a long time.
? ? ?
But there is nothing light in my head now. The coffee is going cold as I struggle to tell Harry everything and nothing.
I know she’ll bring up Alice Irving—the Howard Street connection is irresistible.
“What about this baby Alice story?” she says. “We used to sit in your garden, didn’t we? That last summer before you went to your grandma’s. You had deck chairs, didn’t you? Do you remember? We used to argue over who got the yellow one.”
“I think the baby in Howard Street is mine,” I say. “I’m having dreams about it.” And she looks at me hard while she’s thinking what to say.
“It isn’t, Emma,” she says slowly, as if to a child. “It is Alice Irving. The police tests show that. You mustn’t talk like this. I can see that this story has really upset you, but don’t you think it’s because of your abortion? It’s dragged up all those feelings you had at the time. It’s completely normal. It was a terrible thing to cope with. Have you told Paul?”
I shake my head.
“Well, maybe you should. He loves you, Emma. He’ll understand.”
I nod.
“But you have got to stop saying this is your baby. People are not going to believe you if you say these things. Okay?”
I nod again. She’s right. I’ll keep quiet until people find out for themselves.
FIFTY-THREE
Angela
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012
Asda was heaving with people throwing bags of Monster Munch into trolleys and screaming at their offspring.
“Kylie, put that down,” the woman in a Southampton football shirt shouted behind her in the queue for the till and Angela ducked her head against the noise.
“Sorry, love,” the woman said. “But the little bleeders need telling, don’t they?”
Angela mimed that she had forgotten something, pretending to search through her trolley, and walked away from the queue. She carried on out of the supermarket and sat in the car with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears. Her sensitivity to noise had become unbearable since Alice had been found. She found everything unbearable, really. She’d thought it would be easier, knowing where her baby was after all those years, but it wasn’t. It was a piece in a long-abandoned jigsaw but there was still no picture, still no answers.
She sat on until it began to rain, then started the car and set off for home. When she drew up in the drive feeling cold to her bones, she didn’t remember whole sections of the journey. Nick came out to get the bags of shopping from the boot. And she remembered her discarded trolley in the supermarket.
“I’m sorry,” she said when he opened the car door. “I didn’t get anything. I couldn’t bear it in there. Everyone was shouting . . .”
He put his arm round her and shepherded her to safety.
“I’ll go later,” he said. “Give me your list.”
Angela watched the television without seeing anything. Nick had been watching sports, but the images of Howard Street, the mud, and the flapping tape played over and over in her head.
“It’s not getting any better,” she said when he sat down beside her.