After a few minutes Rudi sauntered up, holding a glass of champagne. ‘This issoboring, 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. Ihatedthis 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 toldme 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.
