You don’t deserve to be happy. Not after what you’ve done.
I pull the hood of my coat up and hurry away down the street, head down, almost running. She’s right. I don’t deserve to be happy. Of course there was no Greg. A nice, normal man would never be interested in me. And even if he was, I wouldn’t know the right way to respond, how to be with him.
But how did she do it? It feels as though Maria has crawled inside my head, her fingers reaching out and scraping around inside my thoughts, taking the worst things I think about myself and serving them back to me. Then I remember Polly’s lighthearted Facebook update: matchmaking with Louise Williams on matchmymate.com. Of course. Anyone can download a picture of a good-looking man. Anyone can write an email. Maria was just lucky that all the other responses were so unsuitable.
I keep walking, staying on busy roads only, constantly looking around for possible danger. I am convinced for several minutes that someone on the opposite pavement is keeping pace with me, until they turn down a side street without a second glance. I double back on myself, switching from side to side of the street. Once I step into the road without looking and a taxi screams to a halt inches from me, the driver gesturing furiously at me. Stupid cow. I avoid the quieter side streets with their dark corners and shadowy, urine-soaked doorways, but even the well-lit, people-thronged areas seem menacing because I don’t know where the danger lies. I don’t know who I am frightened of, who I am running from.
At 8pm I get a text from Polly: How’s it going? Do you need a pretend emergency phone call?
I text her back: Didn’t show, on way home. I can’t explain about meeting Esther without going into the rest of it, and I’m not ready to do that. Oh shit, she texts back. Call me when you get home? I can’t, because I’m not going home. Going to pull duvet over head and hide. Will call in morning.
There’s a pause, so she’s either typing some mammoth reply, or wondering whether she should offer to come over and provide a shoulder to cry on. She obviously decides against, as her next text just says OK. Call me if you need to. Love you x.
I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting Esther, and a large part of me wants to text her and say I can’t make it, scurry back to the safety of my flat. But something about her voice when she said there was something she hadn’t told me won’t let me cancel, so I walk on, down street after street, heart pumping, until I find myself in the appointed pub.
Esther’s not here, so I order a large glass of wine and find a seat in the corner, where I can feel the wall solid behind my back and have a clear view of the whole pub. There’s a buzz of conversation, under which you can hear the sound of ‘Fall at Your Feet’ by Crowded House through the speakers. I used to love this song when I was at university, dreaming of a meaningful connection with some nameless, faceless, soul mate. As I look warily around the room, I think of all the other men in the world I could have ended up with, and how different my life could have been. But perhaps I never really had a choice.
I’ve just taken my first sip when I see her at the door, looking around for me. She’s dressed in a bright red full-length coat, with her hair in a shining plump bun, cheeks flushed from the cold. She looks ten years younger than her age and has no idea that some middle-aged men are eyeing her admiringly. She spies me and waves, miming a drink. I shake my head, so she goes to the bar and two minutes later she’s sitting opposite me, her G&T fizzing on the table between us.
‘How was your day?’ she asks, more as a conversational opener than because she wants to know, I imagine.
‘Oh, you know…’ I say, not meeting her eye. Where would I even begin? ‘Yours?’
‘Yes, good, thanks.’ She’s not interested in telling me about her day. She has her guard up around me; I felt it that day in her office. She doesn’t want to let me in, and I can’t blame her. I feel an urge to clear the air, to make the unspoken, spoken.
‘Look, Esther, what we spoke about last time, when I came to see you. About how I treated Maria. I know you probably think I’m just saying it because I don’t want you to think badly of me, but I am a different person now. I know what I did to her was awful, unforgivable. I know I made her life miserable, and I wish so much that I could go back and change that, but I can’t. All I can do is acknowledge how wrong I was, and, well… try to be a better person now.’
Esther fiddles with the straw in her gin and tonic, the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass.
‘OK,’ she says finally, ‘I can understand that, although I have to admit I can’t always think rationally about our school days.’
Panic rushes through me again at the mention of school and I look around. A man waiting at the bar catches my eye and half-smiles. My chest tightens and I drag my gaze back to Esther.
‘When I think about that time, I’m plunged back into it somehow,’ she says. ‘Everything I’ve achieved since pales into the background, and I’m back there, sitting on my own in the dinner hall, pretending to read a book. They stay with you, experiences like that. Change you. I know I’m successful now, and…’ she gestures to her appearance, unwilling to say the words, but I understand. ‘But inside, there’s a part of me still hovering there, on the outside looking in.’
I know what she means because despite our very different school experiences, I feel this too.
‘Sometimes I’m talking to a woman I’ve met as an adult,’ she goes on. ‘Maybe a school mum, or someone at work, and they say something in passing about their school days, and it makes me realise that they were one of the popular ones. You know, they’ll mention a party they went to, or their football captain boyfriend, and I just think, My God, you’re one of them. And part of me —’ she falters, reddening ‘— part of me feels ashamed. So I don’t tell them who I was at school, I just laugh along and allow them to think that I’m the same, that my adolescence was filled with drunken escapades, giggly sleepovers, pregnancy scares. But it wasn’t, was it? My experience of being a teenager would be like a foreign country to them.’
‘I know this will seem hard to believe, but I understand a little bit of how you feel. My time at school was…’ I trail off, unable to put it into words, especially to her.
She smiles, running a fingertip up and down her glass, making tracks in the condensation. ‘Not the happiest days of your life? I’ve actually been thinking about that, since you came to see me.’
‘What do you mean?’ Time slows down a fraction. What does Esther know? What did she see?