‘Oh, right, well.’ I steel myself to lie to Phoebe, who I held in my arms as a baby. ‘She told me you’ve been having some trouble with a girl at school.’
‘Oh my God! Why did she tell you that?’ Phoebe’s clearly taken the ‘teen’ part of pre-teen to heart.
‘She’s worried about you,’ I say. ‘And we were talking, and I mentioned that I’d had something… similar happen to me, and she asked me to talk to you.’ It was similar, but not in the way I am allowing her to believe.
‘Right,’ says Phoebe, unconvinced. ‘I can’t believe she was talking about me behind my back.’
‘She just wants to help you. And so do I.’ I do want to help, desperately. Is there part of me that thinks I can somehow atone for what I did to Maria in some great cosmic trade-off?
‘So what happened to you then?’ asks Phoebe, curiosity getting the better of her.
‘Oh, I won’t go into all that,’ I say, trying to sound light-hearted. ‘But what you have to remember is that most bullying comes from insecurity. Even though this girl… what’s her name?’
‘Amelia.’
‘This Amelia, she probably seems untouchable, full of confidence, she’s actually probably massively insecure, that’s why she feels the need to play you and the others off against each other.’ If only I’d been able to see this myself when I was at school. If I could have seen that Sophie’s unkindness sprang from insecurity, I might have been better able to keep myself from being sucked into it. If I had had more confidence myself, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so easily persuaded to cruelty, so frighteningly keen to distance myself from anything and anyone even slightly tainted with the possibility of unpopularity.
‘She’s not insecure.’ Phoebe is definite about this. ‘Seriously, Louise, she’s not.’
‘Well, OK. The thing is the other girls probably feel like you do – scared of getting on the wrong side of her, scared of being left out. But if you can somehow band together with some of the others, you’ll have more power, as a group. If she can’t isolate you, she won’t have such a hold over you. Is there anyone else, any of your other friends, who you can try and make more of an effort with, do things on your own with? Anyone who you think is maybe less in awe of Amelia than the others?’ I wonder about Claire and Joanne, lip-glossed and bouncily confident in my memory. Were they struggling too? Was anything as it seemed to me then?
‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘there is Esme. And maybe Charlotte.’
‘Great! There you go. Why don’t you invite them over, or arrange to meet up with them without her. Once Amelia sees that you’re not all going to roll over and do exactly as she says – well, maybe then you can all be friends.’ I wonder whether Maria ever confided in anyone about what was happening to her, how different things might have been if she had had a concerned adult in her life to offer advice and comfort.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she says. ‘I don’t think she’s a normal human being. She’s just a cow.’ She giggles and I hear a glimpse of the old Phoebe, the one I used to push high on the swings as she whooped and squealed with delight. ‘But I might try what you said about Esme and Charlotte.’ She pauses, and then says almost shyly, ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I say. ‘The other thing to remember is that school, and your friends there, are just a small part of your life. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, it feels like everything. But you’re going to go on and do amazing things, and this Amelia, well, she may not.’ I think of Esther with her high-flying career and her impeccably groomed hair; and of the look that flashed across her face when I told her about the reunion that no one had thought to invite her to. Will we hold them for ever, these hurts we bear from our teenage years?
I say goodbye to Phoebe and lay my phone carefully down on the table. What I have said to her is good advice, I remind myself. So why do I feel so guilty? I know why. It’s because I’ve let her think I was the victim, not the perpetrator. Allowed her to imagine that I am like Esther, still bearing the scars of the humiliations I suffered at the hands of others, when in fact the opposite is true.
We leave late, what with the phone call to Phoebe and Henry being unwilling to leave our train game, and the traffic is awful so it’s after 11.30am by the time we get to Sam’s. I get out of the car to open Henry’s door and unstrap him, loading his Thomas the Tank Engine rucksack onto his little back.
I lift him up so he can ring the bell, and as always it’s Sam who comes to the door. His hair is messy and he’s wearing jeans and an old T-shirt he’s had for years, made of a faded soft cotton I’ve laid my head on a thousand times. You’d think I’d be used to it after two years, but it still takes me aback to see his face, so familiar, so much a part of me, in this unfamiliar context. I’m still poleaxed by what has happened to us, by the fact that I’m handing over our child to him, exchanging pleasantries at a front door that is Sam’s but not mine.
‘Can I go straight in?’ Henry says to me.
‘Yes, OK.’ I kneel down to cuddle him, but he’s already gone, slipping from my outstretched arms like an eel. I still hate leaving him here, my stomach knotted with anxiety the whole time he is away, the clock inching its way to handover time agonisingly slowly.
I honestly think Henry is OK with parents who are not together, but I don’t think I will ever get used to watching him walk away from me to a world I know nothing about. I always knew that when he was a teenager he would have an unknown life away from me that I couldn’t control, but it feels so terribly wrong that he should have that now, aged four. There are people intimately involved in his life about whom I know practically nothing. A stepmother who doesn’t come to the door. A little sister I’ve never seen. When he’s not with me, how can I know if he is safe?
‘You’re a bit late,’ says Sam.
‘I know, sorry, we were playing trains, and then the traffic was bad…’
‘It’s OK, Louise, I don’t mind.’ He looks at me closely. ‘But… is something wrong? Anything I should know?’ He leans against the doorjamb, hands in his pockets.
‘What do you mean?’ Has he had the Facebook request too?
He is silent for a moment, as if weighing something up.
‘Nothing. It’s just you’ve seemed a bit… distracted lately. And you’ve been late with Henry a couple of times. I just wondered… Is everything OK?’
‘Yes, everything’s fine.’ I fight the urge to run into the house and gather Henry up, take him away somewhere it can just be the two of us, for ever. Somewhere where I never have to watch him walk away from me into the unknown again.
‘Are you sure, Louise? You seem…’ he trails off.