When We Were Friends

by Tina Seskis

  ‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Giles. ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘The truth. I told her where she was born. I didn’t know what else to say … What can she do now?’

  ‘I’m not sure, dear. But she can certainly go to Somerset House and look up all the births on the day she was born, until she finds her own certificate.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Cyn. I suppose once she knows the name though, she can go about trying to trace her.’

  Cynthia looked down into the dregs of her coffee and it was strange, they seemed to have settled into a human shape: two eyes, a sad downward mouth, the exact opposite of one of those yellow smiley faces that were everywhere these days. She couldn’t look up at her husband again, she knew that if she saw the kindness in his eyes she’d be unable to stop the tears coming. Cynthia was a reserved woman – she hardly ever cried, and if she did it was usually in private. She wasn’t ready to let out her emotions about this, not even to her husband. Maybe Juliette wouldn’t even go through with it in the end, and they could all forget about everything again for a while. As Cynthia sat there gazing at her diamond-ringed fingers, she knew she was being over-optimistic, like she always used to be, every single relentless month, yes, every single one, until every single bloody hateful month it had come (and she was sure it had been all her fault, not poor Giles’), until eventually it had stopped for ever, and she’d thanked God that she’d been blessed with Juliette instead.

  46

  Hyde Park

  Elijah Carlson was excited. His daddy had just said they could go on the boats after all – he had definitely clocked that if he nagged his parents for long enough one or other of them usually caved in in the end. And his mummy had already promised him an ice cream, so there was that to look forward to too – he wasn’t going to let them forget about that, no way José.

  Elijah’s excitement didn’t last long however, once his brief sense of triumph had dimmed. As they stood waiting for their boat, he thought the water looked brown and dirty on closer inspection, and actually rather scary; and then when the little boat turned up it was all old and decrepit and there was water in the bottom of it, like it was leaking; and when his dad got in it rocked wildly, and as he was a large man they wouldn’t all fit in anyway – and so Elijah decided that maybe he didn’t like the look of rowing, after all.

  ‘Right, in you get, sweetheart,’ said his mother.

  ‘No,’ said Elijah. Now he’d spotted that his father’s big fat bottom was already wet he definitely didn’t fancy it at all.

  ‘Come on, Elijah, darling,’ she said. ‘D’you want to hold Mummy’s hand?’

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘What d’you mean, no?’ said his father. ‘I’ve just bloomin’ well paid for this. Get in.’

  ‘I don’t want to any more,’ said Elijah, snivelling.

  ‘Oh come on, angel, it’ll be fun,’ cajoled his mother, as she stood next to him on the bank in her high heels. She tried to push him gently towards the boat.

  ‘Noooo!’ screamed Elijah, and as she went to take his podgy arm he made such a commotion everyone looked over. Perhaps they should leave it after all, she thought, this was becoming embarrassing.

  ‘Elijah,’ said his dad, in a low voice, as patiently as he could manage (although it still sounded unmistakably tight, not far off temper-losing pitch). ‘If you get in the boat we’ll take you to get a milkshake after.’

  ‘As well as an ice cream?’ said Elijah, smelling an opportunity.

  ‘No, not as well, either or,’ said his father.

  ‘Then no!’ said Elijah, folding his arms defiantly. Other people were still looking over, with a definite whiff of parental superiority now. Elijah’s mother really couldn’t cope with yet another scene, they were meant to be having a nice Sunday afternoon as a family, and she was sure her son would enjoy it once they’d got going.

  ‘Oh, OK, Elijah, just this once,’ she said quietly. Her husband threw her a look and shifted crossly in the boat, and as Elijah stepped in jauntily, his fear miraculously dissipated despite the new rocking his father had just created, she caught the tell-tale shape of his tongue poking through his right cheek, and she saw the victory in his eyes.

  47

  Barnes

  Even though she’d given up years ago, Natasha lit up a cigarette (from the pack of ten she’d bought whilst out for her morning run) as she pored over her board presentation, unable to concentrate. It was Sunday afternoon, three days since the picnic, and she knew things weren’t looking good now. Where the hell was she? Maybe she’d gone back to a friend’s house that night, had been too upset to go home, and perhaps now had gone away for the weekend – which was why there had been no answer when Natasha had gone round earlier. But even if that was the case surely she’d have charged her mobile by now, posted something on Twitter at least? Another possibility, Natasha thought hopefully, was that she’d passed out on a bench somewhere and been picked up by the police – she must have been paralytic to have run off into the night like that, she wasn’t usually that rash – but if that had happened wouldn’t they have let her go by now? Normally even Natasha wouldn’t hope that someone she knew had been arrested, but it was a hell of a lot better than the outcome she kept trying not to think about, the one where the reason her erstwhile friend still wasn’t answering her mobile was because she wasn’t able to, was because she was lying cold and dead at the bottom of The Serpentine. It was like a nightmare, like something you saw on the news that happened to other people.

  Natasha knew in her heart now that it wasn’t a bird that they’d heard, it was a bloody big woman-sized splash. But if that was the case why had there been silence afterwards? What could have happened? Surely if it had been her she would have splashed around, screeching for help?

  Natasha’s heart thumped as she redialled the number, but still it cut to voicemail, and Natasha cursed the cheery, ghost-like voice, and then the horrors, circling in her head like buzzards around a dying carcass, all got too much for her, along with the cigarette smoke, and she ran to the bathroom and retched endlessly into the toilet bowl.

  48

  Hyde Park

  Seven-year-old Elijah was a clever little boy. Not only did he have his mummy and daddy firmly wrapped around his little finger, he’d soon got the hang of rowing a boat too, quickly realising that he could send his parents into even more of a spin than usual with just the little boat’s right oar. It was all such tremendous fun – skimming the surface of the water with the paddle so a mini wave could form, and then if he changed the angle just a teeny bit, the water could travel the length of the oar and soak his mummy (eliciting a plaintively ineffectual, ‘Oh, Elijah!’); banging the top of the water so that the noise was hollow and eerie, water spraying everywhere like an aquatic firework while his dad yelled, ‘Stop that, you little bu—’ before just about restraining himself; or, perhaps best of all, simply digging the oar vertically into the water, so that the boat started to rotate and his dad would start ranting that they weren’t bloomin’ well going anywhere.

  ‘Elijah, just stop that,’ said his dad, for the hundredth time. ‘Otherwise I’ll take that oar off you and I’ll row the ruddy thing on my own. Look, we’re heading right for the bank now – be careful or we’ll flippin’ well hit it.’

  ‘Sorry, Daddy,’ said Elijah, as he lifted up the oar and drove it towards the bottom, exactly as his father had just told him not to. His dad roared at him and Elijah grinned happily, desired outcome achieved, and then he shoved it in again, just for fun. As the oar stabbed down into the tea-coloured water for perhaps the fifth unapproved time, Elijah felt it hit something, and in his young brain he assumed quite sensibly that it was the bank or even the bottom. But when he looked over the side he saw through the murk long trailing hair tangled like weeds, and one hollow eye gaping at him hopelessly, and a flash of colour, and although when they finally got back to shore he was eventually bought an ice cr
eam, his parents never did get him his milkshake, and as he grew older his behaviour worsened if anything, and he never, ever stopped seeing that image.

  49

  Wandsworth

  On the morning after the picnic, Juliette’s home phone kept ringing but she ignored it. Instead she sat motionless at the oak kitchen table nursing her mug of tea, staring into its contents, trying to look beyond the surface at what lay beneath. She’d barely slept the night before, and she’d obviously drunk way more Prosecco than she’d realised: her head was throbbing and she felt empty, as though her stomach had been hoovered perhaps. She tried to fathom just what she and the others had done the previous evening. Had they been totally insane, abandoning their friend like that when she’d been so drunk, especially near water, and especially once they’d heard a splash? What if it had been her after all, what if she really had fallen in, had drowned, was dead? It was too horrendous to contemplate. OK, they may just have had an almighty row, but no-one wanted anything bad to happen to her, they hadn’t wanted her to die, for God’s sake.

  Juliette felt devastated. She knew she could never see her university friends again after this, whatever the outcome – getting together had become increasingly fraught over the years anyway, for all sorts of reasons, but last night they had mined a new seam of hatred and envy, of poisonous secrets uncovered, of tragedy beckoning and maybe having occurred. She’d discovered things that were surely too hideous to be true, things that made her sick.

  Radio Four blared obliviously in the background, going on about a double-dip recession, and it made her think idly of a fairground ride, a roller coaster that left your stomach in the downward bit, before it swept upwards again, away from it, leaving you screaming with terror.

  Noah slunk back into the kitchen, although she’d sent all the children upstairs to get ready, unable to cope with the noise levels this morning. He stood there silently, staring at her, dangling his revolting-looking bear by one arm beside him. His pyjamas didn’t match and there was a dark patch on the front of his trousers, Ireland-shaped. Juliette looked up from her tea. She tried to stay calm.

  ‘Noah, sweetheart,’ she sighed. ‘Have you wet yourself again? I thought I told you to go upstairs and put on your school uniform.’

  ‘I haven’t, Mummy,’ said Noah, trying denial as a tactic this morning.

  The panic was rising in Juliette’s throat.

  ‘Yes, you have! Please don’t lie to me, Noah.’

  ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he said, taking a conciliatory approach now, but rather than help it seemed merely to enrage her. Juliette let rip, with less provocation than usual.

  ‘Well, sorry’s not good enough, is it? Not wetting your trousers is good enough. Getting ready for school is good enough. Anyone would think you were still three years old.’

  Noah looked as if he might cry at this onslaught, but he didn’t answer, just stood there silently, teddy trailing, eyes wide, the patch in his trousers getting bigger.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Juliette. ‘Just get into the toilet, will you,’ and she stood up and dragged him by the arm towards the downstairs cloakroom, and he started screaming now, and she couldn’t stand the noise, so she shoved him in and pulled the door shut, leaning heavily against it, so he couldn’t get out. She closed her eyes and tried counting to ten, but by the time she got to six she heard a sound, and when she opened them Flo was standing there.

  ‘What?’ she said crossly.

  ‘Mummy, are you being mean to Noah again?’ asked Flo.

  ‘No, I am not,’ said Juliette. ‘He just can’t stop wetting his trousers. It’s disgusting.

  ‘And what do you mean, again?’ she added, realising what her daughter had said. She felt inflamed with shame. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  Flo stood looking at Juliette, and somewhere in her nine-year-old brain she was aware that her mother’s temper and Noah’s incontinence were quite firmly related, but she knew better than to say anything more, she was lucky Juliette’s reaction hadn’t been worse. Noah sat silently on the toilet seat behind the door, his Spiderman trouser bottoms around his ankles (he found he needed to do a poo as well now for some reason), and as he kicked his legs the word kept repeating in his head, over and over, although he tried his hardest to stop it. The phone started up again and even the sound of that changed into the word, and it went on and on, through the hallway, echoey with its high ceiling and fancy light fittings and solid parquet floor, as his mother still didn’t pick up – bring bring, bring bring, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting.

  It was nearly nine now and the phone went unanswered yet again (much to Natasha’s continued fury, she knew that if anyone could help sort out this mess it was Juliette, she was the one with connections), but in Juliette’s defence she was oblivious to the ringing this time rather than deliberately ignoring it, having sloped back to bed where right now she had a plump Canadian goose-down pillow over her head. Although she’d tried to make amends with Noah earlier, once she’d finally coaxed him out of the toilet, he’d rebutted her attempt and bolted straight past her up to his bedroom and hidden under the duvet. She’d followed him upstairs and sat on the bed, tried to hug him, tell him she was sorry, that it was her fault not his, but he’d turned his stiff little body away from her which had made her cry again. She was a useless mother, the worst in the world, despite loving them so much. Perhaps she shouldn’t even have had children, it wasn’t fair on them – how could she have hoped to be any good at it, she obviously hadn’t had a single maternal gene passed on to her by her bitch of a mother. This line of thought had been almost as distressing as imagining her friend at the bottom of The Serpentine, or thinking about the terrible things her husband was alleged to have done – it was hideous, everything was turning into a never-ending horror show. And so when the nanny had finally turned up, Juliette hadn’t been able to bear for Didi to witness her hapless parenting, see her red-rimmed eyes, and she’d rapidly made her excuses and disappeared off to the spare room, where she’d slept last night, unwilling to share the marital bed with Stephen after what she’d heard about him.

  As Juliette shifted in the bed, her bones felt heavy, like they were trying to burrow into the mattress, which was soft and pocket-sprung and ludicrously comfortable, but the comfort somehow made her feel like an imposter, like she shouldn’t be there, like she should be lying still and drowned herself.

  Drowned. Surely not, no.

  Juliette lay still, too anxious to move, the pain in her head nuclear now, trying to quell the dread. Finally, in desperation, she removed the pillow and sat up a little, tried to study her surroundings, take in every detail – apparently it was a form of meditation, Renée had told her once, back when they were friends – and besides she hardly ever came into this room, had forgotten how nice it was. She concentrated hard, noticing how the curtains at the bay were thick and silky and hung all the way to the floor, pooling luxuriously; how the chaise longue in front of the window was upholstered in dove-grey velvet that seemed to absorb the shadows thrown from the monstrous crystal chandelier hung high above the bed; that the gorgeously thick sheepskin rugs slung casually across the linen-white floorboards were perfectly positioned to keep visitors’ toes warm as they stepped out of bed. She admired the fireplace, which was large, white marble, with arty black and white photos of the apparently happy family arranged across the mantelpiece, below the muddy-hued artwork of a naked man and woman abstractedly embracing (is it from Habitat, she remembered Siobhan asking once, guileless as ever, unaware it was worth a fortune). Juliette sighed to herself – she did have good taste, at least in home furnishings if not in husbands, she’d give herself that.

  It seemed calmer downstairs now, the kids having stopped screaming at last, Didi a miracle-worker as always. Maybe she’d get up in a minute. But the feeling of doom, of fear and recrimination, just wouldn’t go away, so when the home phone started up, yet again, Juliette dived further under the covers and lay there, luxurious
between the Egyptian cotton sheets, cold and shaking.

  50

  Sardinia

  Sissy had fallen into a deeper sleep this time, and when she awoke her face felt hot and tight, as if she’d maybe had a facelift. Delighted squeals that carried in on the hot breeze from the carport below were almost certainly what had roused her, and as she shifted in the double deckchair she heard the key in the lock and two little children come stomping through, flip-flops thudding, sand going everywhere, she was sure of it – how many times had she told them?

  ‘Hello, Mummy!’ cried Nell, her eldest, as she ran onto the terrace. ‘We went snorkelling and I saw a huge fish and it came swimming right by us. It was brown,’ she added proudly.

  ‘I had a ice cream,’ announced Conor, and she could tell, there was chocolate all round his face.

  ‘Did you have a lovely time, my darlings?’ said Sissy, her head aching as she scooped them towards her. Nell snuggled in whilst Conor wriggled away, giggling.

  ‘I think they did,’ said her husband, coming out onto the balcony after them. He must have gone into the kitchen first, to fetch a tall glass of water that was now shimmering in his hand, like a mirage in the sunlight.

  Sissy turned and smiled up at Nigel. He looked blondish and fit, larger than life through her sunglasses, and it seemed almost impossible that they were here in Sardinia, on holiday as a family, celebrating ten unbelievable years of life after cancer. She was so grateful to Juliette and Stephen for lending them their holiday apartment, she’d never known Stephen to be so generous before, at least not without expecting something in return – maybe she’d misjudged him after all. He’d been delighted for them, according to Juliette, calling it an absolute bloody miracle, and it was he who’d suggested they borrow the apartment, saying it was only sitting there unused at the moment. They’d been reluctant to accept, but Stephen had insisted, saying he needed someone to give it a trial run now it had finally been done up.