‘Louise. Hi.’
‘Oh, Louise! Yes, I’ve heard all about you!’ I wondered what Maria had told her.
‘Stay for a cup of tea! In fact, stay for dinner!’ I was beginning to feel slightly suffocated and was about to make my excuses when Maria interrupted.
‘Mum! Stop being so embarrassing. Come on, Louise, let’s go to my room.’
‘Shall I bring you up some tea and biscuits?’ Bridget called after us as Maria hustled me up the stairs.
‘No, Mum. We don’t want anything.’
Maria closed the door behind us and sank down on the bed. The paint on the walls was chipped and the carpet didn’t seem to quite fit the room, but Maria had obviously done her best, putting an Indian throw on the bed, covering the worst bits of wall with Salvador Dalí prints and filling the white Formica shelving unit with books.
‘Sorry about that.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, lowering myself onto the bed beside her. ‘Is – is she always like that with your friends?’
‘She didn’t used to be. Before… well, before everything that happened at my old school she was fine. I mean, she still is fine really. It’s just… oh, never mind.’ Maria’s fingers went to her necklace, a gold heart on a chain that I’d noticed she always wore.
‘What is it? You can say, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’
‘I don’t want to go into it all. I had a bad time of it. Like I told you at lunch that first day, it was so bad that we moved schools, and home. It was awful for me, of course. But Mum took it even harder. She told me once that there’s a saying, you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. If that’s true then she must have been pretty fucking unhappy.’
There was silence for a while. It was clear that Maria wasn’t going to say any more about it, so I changed the subject.
‘I like your necklace. Where’s it from?’
‘I don’t know. My dad gave it to me.’ Her hand stole to it again, twisting the chain around her fingers. ‘It was the first thing he’d ever bought me himself. Mum always bought the presents. I should have known he wasn’t going to be around much longer. Are your mum and dad still together?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t begin to imagine my parents splitting up. I didn’t think of them as two separate people, more as an entity, mum-and-dad.
‘Well, mine aren’t. They separated before we left London. I think it was the stress of… everything that happened.’ What could have been so bad that it caused her parents to split up? I couldn’t tell if she really didn’t want to talk about it, or if she wanted me to force her to open up.
‘So… what happened?’ I asked.
She looked for a moment as if she was going to tell me, but then her face closed up.
‘Let’s talk about something else.’
I decided to take a different tack, telling her about the different teachers and their quirks and giving her the school gossip about who was going out with who. This was much more successful, and we were in her room for over an hour, punctuated by Bridget bringing up the unwanted tea and chocolate digestives. She lingered too long at the door, watching Maria and me laughing together, urging me again to stay for dinner, which I refused to do as I knew my parents would be expecting me back.
Maria and I said goodbye on the doorstep. I had that warm achy feeling that you get when you’ve been laughing too hard for too long. I had the uncomfortable realisation that I hadn’t worried about what to say all afternoon. I hadn’t turned every potential utterance over in my mind, examining it for possible embarrassment before letting it come out of my mouth as I have to with Sophie. Instead of feeling like a performance, my afternoon with Maria had been completely relaxed. I had simply let go.
As I walked down the front path, I almost bumped into a dark, thickset boy with the same hazel eyes as Maria and her mother. He didn’t introduce himself, but looked at me suspiciously. I smiled, feeling flustered without knowing why, and let myself out of the gate. I didn’t turn round, but I could feel his gaze, white-hot on my back all the way down the street until I reached the corner.
Later that evening I was in my room pretending to do my homework when the phone rang. I picked up the one on the landing outside my room.
‘Hello?’
‘Lou? It’s Sophie.’
Her voice sounded gentle and hesitant, a world away from the strident confidence she had displayed earlier in town. For a moment I thought she was going to apologise. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the landing floor, knees up to my chin, twisting the phone cord around my fingers.
‘I’m worried about you. You hardly hang out with me and the girls any more.’
The girls? Sophie’s the only one out of all of them that ever shows an interest in me. The rest of them barely know I exist, unless they want to copy my homework. There was a part of me that automatically wanted to apologise, to put everything back how it was before. But I still had Maria’s voice in my head, still had the illusion of confidence that spending the afternoon with her had given me.
‘What do you mean? You haven’t even been speaking to me at school.’
‘That’s so unfair,’ she said in injured tones. ‘You’re the one that’s been ignoring me. I didn’t have anyone to go into town with after school today. Claire was a right cow to me this afternoon. I was looking for you everywhere.’
‘But you were with Matt and Sam! You looked pretty happy to me!’
‘Oh, those two. I only went with them because I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. You certainly seemed like you were having a nice time.’
‘Yes… I was.’ My resolve was fading. Could she really be upset? Had I read everything wrong? ‘But obviously… if I’d known you wanted to come with us, you could have done.’
‘I don’t know about us,’ she said carefully. ‘I wanted to go with you.’
‘What’s wrong with Maria? She’s really nice.’
‘I’m sure she’s all right, although sorry but she was quite rude to me this afternoon. Also, what do you actually know about her? Where has she suddenly appeared from? The things I’ve heard about her… well, I shouldn’t gossip. If you want to be friends with her, then of course that’s up to you. But don’t dump your old friends, Louise, otherwise you’re running the risk of losing them. If you’re not careful you’ll end up like Esther Harcourt.’ Sophie gave a little laugh – but a worried one, indicating that although she was joking there was a grain of truth in what she said. ‘Obviously it’s up to you who you hang out with but if I were you I’d think very carefully about where your loyalties lie.’