‘Leanne Jones!’ I say at last. I recognise her by the dimples; I’ve had massive dimple envy since primary school.
‘Yes! How have you been? It’s been so long! God, it’s good to see you.’ She throws her arms around me and squeezes really tight. My arms are pinned by my sides, so I do a weird nose-nuzzle thing to reciprocate affection. Leanne Jones. She still smells like vanilla and coconut. I close my eyes and breathe her in.
‘I can’t believe it’s you. I haven’t seen you since we left school! What’s that, like over ten years ago? More? That’s crazy! You haven’t changed one bit!’
I relax a little. Leanne has changed, A LOT, from the tomboy I remember. She used to have cropped auburn hair and lived in tracksuits and football kit. We were inseparable in primary school but then got placed in different sets at secondary. I was filtered off with the advanced-studies kids, whereas Leanne got to stay mainstream.
I really wanted to stay mainstream.
Big classes, loads of different people and teachers, and fun. That didn’t happen in advanced studies. We took extra classes before and after school; for fun we played chess, and at break times we tested each other.
But she sounds the same, and I’d recognise her smile anywhere. I give her a massive squeeze back. I can’t believe how happy I am to see her. This is the single best thing that could’ve happened. We had so many great times together, playing out until dark, sitting on the kerb and sharing trays of mixed fried rice from the Chinese. We even started our own little business, running errands for elderly, immobile, busy or lazy people in our area. All Leanne’s idea, the budding entrepreneur. We picked up dry-cleaning, prescriptions; we fed cats, posted letters, shopped for milk, bread, beer, cigarettes; you name it, we’d do it. We charged two quid a trip, and once we’d made enough, we took ourselves off on the train to Thorpe Park. It was amazing.
I take a deep breath and hold her shoulders with both hands. ‘How has it been so long? It’s been too long!’
‘I know! I’ve thought of you so many times! Every time I go to Thorpe Park, actually!’
I smile at the thought. I haven’t been there since.
‘So how have you been? What have you been up to?’ she asks.
‘I’m okay,’ I tell her. ‘Just graduated. I got my PhD yesterday, in fact, so just picking up some bits and bobs. How about you? You look amazing – so strong.’ There are dips and ridges in her arms like a bodybuilder. I take her all in: carved neckline, tight little waist, long lean legs. Leanne Jones is HOT. ‘You’re like a goddess. In Spandex.’
She rolls her eyes and shakes off the compliment. ‘Oh Poppy, you really haven’t changed a bit. You always know the right thing to say.’ She hugs me again. ‘It really is so great to see you.’
Once I got siphoned off with the other advanced-studies kids, Leanne and I saw less and less of each other. By second year, I’d made a new best friend called Crystal Pang, the only other girl in the class. We had the same IQ, but Crystal was a brilliant pianist as well, and she spoke fluent Cantonese. I can’t play an instrument at all, nor can I speak any other languages.
As a result, Leanne hung around more and more with her twin brother Tom, who was easily the most popular, funniest, fittest, most drop-dead-gorgeous boy in the school. The Jones twins ran our school. Well, the best bits of it.
‘So tell me about you, Leanne!’ I say. ‘What are you up to these days? Whatever it is, it suits you.’
‘Well, Tom and I own a gym together, so that’s fun. And I live in Dulwich, married to Leon Wright – you remember him?’
Oh my God. Leanne and I used to call Leon Wright ‘Prawn’, because he had a fantastic body but a horrible head. She married him? I remember seeing them walking to school together, but I never for one second thought they’d end up married.
I nod, smiling. ‘Oh wow, of course I remember!’
‘We have four kids now – two boys, two girls.’
Four kids? I try not to show my sheer … confusion. Leanne is a mother! When did all this happen? Where did she find the time? Four kids is a big deal. Four smaller people attached to you 24/7. For years and years. How would you even … I can’t begin to imagine.
Leanne is a mother, a wife and a business owner. But she looks so normal. No, not normal; better than normal. I check myself. What was I expecting someone who has accomplished so much to look like? Jaded? Strung out, frumpy and fed up? Leanne is the same age as I am, but compared to me, her life has moved on in leaps and bounds. It’s like she’s had multiple lifetimes compared to mine. And what have I got to show for my time? Framed qualifications gathering dust in a shamefully messy bedroom.
‘How about you? Married? Kids?’ she asks.
I shake my head to both. ‘Child-free and boyfriend-free at the moment, just temporarily, until I get set up,’ I tell her. I feel like I’ve just woken up from a coma. I’m not saying I want kids; I don’t even think I want a husband. But I do think I need to jump-start my life.
She nods appreciatively. ‘God, I’m jealous, what I would do to be child- and husband-free for even one day! If you’ve got some time, we’ll have to hang out, catch up. You remember Tom, right, my twin?’
‘Yes, of course. How is he?’
She blows out her cheeks. ‘Tom is Tom, no change. Still exactly the same as ever. He’s great, he loves the gym; he does the business side of things. He’s always looking for something new, wanting to move on to the next big thing. He gets bored quickly, can’t stand still. Don’t think he’ll ever settle down, to be honest. Knows everything except what he actually wants, you know?’
I nod along. Tom is Tom. A lifetime later and I still flush at the thought of him. I used to sit by the study-room window and watch him play football with his friends. Tom was BEAUTIFUL, that’s what Tom was. There was something about him that just made people flock to him. Maybe it was the way he smiled at them, or clapped them on the back when they missed a shot, or ran to defend the smallest player on the pitch. Everyone loved Tom. And I wasn’t immune. Tom Jones was the reason I joined the swimming club. I just wanted to get closer to him. Hear him. Watch him. Think about him …
Leanne takes out a card and hands it to me. It’s deep purple, with lots of swirls, and lists an array of phone numbers, websites and social media addresses.
‘Take this, it has all my numbers on it. I run the women’s fitness classes.’
I look down at the card in my hand: Gymbox.
‘We’re just behind the station, under the arches. Come down any time and I’ll sort you out with free membership, taster sessions – whatever you’re interested in. I’m always there, and so is Tom.’
‘Wow, Leanne, I can’t believe you’ve got your own business as well as a husband and kids.’
She shrugs. ‘Most of the time I love it, but sometimes it takes over. That’s life, though, so I’m not complaining. You’ll come down and join?’
‘Absolutely,’ I lie as I realise that this queue is not moving despite the big red sign promising express service. I haven’t been in a gym … ever. I love to mess around with a ball and I like to swim, but I would have no idea what to do with weights or machines except make a complete tit of myself by pulling the push one or sitting on something you should stand on. I have my own approach to weight management called ‘just buy bigger knickers and then make sure all photos are headshots’. Tried and tested. A hundred per cent research-approved.
She squints at me and then begins to nod, as if she’s just had a light-bulb moment. She tilts her head to the side and starts swiping through her phone.
‘So I guess this also means that you’re back in the game, ready for some kick-ass netball! We have the best team this year – absolute dynamite! I mean it. If we take this seriously enough, we could make the Superleague FINALS!’
I widen my eyes. I enjoy netball but I haven’t played properly in years; there was just no time between lectures and exams.
‘That’s so nice of you to think of me, but I’m not
going to be around here much longer – I’m probably going to be back in Banbridge really soon, so it’d be wrong of me to commit. I just have a few things to sort out and that’ll be me out of here again, back at the university, lecturing or researching.’
Leanne stands with her legs shoulder width apart and roots herself to the ground. Her eye contact is intense.
‘Poppy, listen to me. Remember the finals against Wandsworth? You scored in the last minute and broke Crystal’s fingers?’
Shocked, I glance behind me to make sure nobody overheard. ‘That was a complete accident, Leanne! I never meant to do that, especially to Crystal!’
Leanne raises her eyebrows and sucks her teeth. ‘Crystal deserved it; she was a complete bully! She looked down on everyone, thought she was so superior, terrorised the younger kids. And then you came on court; just flew up from nowhere like a phoenix rising. It was amazing! Breathtaking! No joke, that was one of the best games of my life. Promise me you’ll play for us!’
I shrug nervously. It was one of the worst games of my life. Crystal’s parents withdrew her from school, and my parents were called to say that I’d been involved in a serious incident. This was enough to allow Dad to get his own way and send me to an all-girls boarding school for A Levels. Mum fought him tooth and nail, but he said it was all the evidence he needed that inner-city comprehensive schooling was no place for his daughter, and no place for a child of my ability. I told him I didn’t want to go, that I’d miss my friends. He said I could just make new ones. Turns out that’s easier said than done.
Leanne starts tapping furiously on her phone. But I don’t know where to look. The prickle of tears feels very, very close to the surface and I don’t want her to know what a pathetic mess I am right now.
‘Time to make plans. I’ll call Tom and tell him we’re going out to celebrate your graduation and your homecoming. We’ll have a few drinks, catch up on everything. Just the three of us. It will be so great.’ She raises the phone to her ear.
I’m starting to remember Leanne’s single-mindedness. She’s bossy. Once she’s got an idea in her head, she bulldozes everything else out of the way.
‘Hi, Tom, it’s me. You will not believe who I am with right now!’ She’s smiling like she’s going through a wind tunnel. ‘Poppy! Poppy Bloom! Yeah? No. Not her. Yes, swimming. No, not that one either, that girl had a birthmark. No, Poppy was the one that broke that bitchy girl’s fingers and then her parents went crazy and said her piano career was ruined and they pulled her out of school and sent her away to live with her grandparents in Hong Kong. How can you not remember that?’
This is mortifying. Tom Jones was my every waking thought throughout my formative years, and he has no idea who I am? Does that mean that I imagined all his sweet side-smiles in the canteen? That I didn’t catch him looking at me when I mounted the diving block? That my entire recollection of events from my schooldays is nothing more than a subjective, heavily filtered and thoroughly flawed version that means nothing to anyone else but me?
Tom Jones does not know who I am.
Not that I want him to remember the Crystal thing. That was horrific and hand-on-heart a complete accident. I got overexcited; I lost control. I never, ever meant to hurt her. My first heartbreaking lesson in how to lose friends and injure people.
I pretend to slit my throat with my finger. Oh my God. This is utterly humiliating. Tom Jones thinks that I want to catch up with him like long-lost friends and he can’t even remember me – if he ever knew who I was in the first place that is. Please, Leanne, can you just cut this conversation NOW!
‘Poppy BLOOM! She was really smart and used to come round our house when we were at primary school. Mum was really fond of her because she had such lovely manners … I know it’s a long time ago, but that’s not really the point, is it? The point is that she’s here now and then she’ll be off doing something brainy and important again soon, so let’s catch up, all right? Show her around and grab a bite to eat.’
She stops to listen. ‘Okay, today is Thursday, I’m free but can’t do tomorrow, the kids have appointments all day, and all next week is out as the accountant is in for three days. The next window I’ve got is six weeks’ time. So it’s got to be tonight.’ Her voice is getting more hushed but more forceful. ‘You’re right, Tom, I don’t care. Here’s Poppy, speak to her yourself.’
She thrusts the phone into my hand and crosses her arms so I can’t throw it back at her.
‘Uh, hi?’
Tom sighs on the other end of the line. ‘Hi, Poppy, I’m really sorry about this. As you can tell, Leanne is basically mental. I know this is probably the last thing you feel like doing, and I don’t suppose you have the faintest memory of me from school either, but you know my sister, she won’t let up. Kim Jong Leanne has decided that we are going out, so that’s obviously what’s going to happen.’
His voice is breathless and he’s speaking a million miles an hour.
‘Are you okay? You sound like someone’s chasing you?’ I say.
‘I’m out for a run. I’ve had a shit day. I’m not great company at the moment, to be honest.’
‘Oh well, snap! I’ve just been to the job centre.’
‘No way! I thought the bank was bad, but the job centre, that sounds …’
‘Utterly deflating?’ I offer.
He laughs. ‘Yes. Utterly deflating. That’s a good way of putting it. Exactly.’ Tom Jones is laughing at something I said. ‘So maybe a drink isn’t such a bad idea after an utterly deflating day, right?’
Part of me wants to say, whoa, hold up, I can’t possibly agree to doing something tonight. It hasn’t been arranged. It is frightfully short notice. I haven’t psyched myself up properly, I don’t know where we are going or what’s on the menu or what I should wear … but then it hits me. I have nowhere else to be. I have nothing on tonight or any night until Burley gets back to me, except watching Mum and Frank shout wrong answers at quiz show presenters. And resisting the urge to social-media-stalk Gregory and Harriet.
‘Yeah, okay. A drink would be great,’ I say.
‘Right, tell Leanne that I’ll meet you both outside the Ritzy at eight, and we’ll go from there.’
I hand the phone back to Leanne. She is smiling now. If anything, it looks like a smile of relief.
‘Cashier number two, please,’ calls the automated voice.
‘You go first, Leanne,’ I say. ‘I know you must be crazy busy.’
‘Ah, thanks so much.’ She dashes ahead to the cashier in front of us and turns to face me while packing her bags. ‘Poppy, you know you haven’t changed at all.’
‘Really?’
She nods keenly. ‘Not even one little bit!’ She waves and makes for the door. ‘We’ll see you later, can’t wait.’
I start my journey home feeling a little lighter than I did when I set out this morning.
Today has been weird.
Harriet and Gregory are still sticky with each other’s perspiration. A forensic orgy of mutual fluids. I am still the discarded, expired stock of the Banbridge elite. Nobody has called to say that there has been a dreadful mistake. Alternative offers from competing universities have not materialised. I am not a fellow. I am number 633. I have no job, and only shockingly depressing prospects to mull over.
I walk past the railway arches by Leanne’s gym, past the park, the church, the charity shops, and soon I’ve got the footpath to myself again. I’ve got space to think.
I am going out for a drink with an old friend. A friend whose smile makes me happy. A friend who I’ve missed more than I realised. Not to mention her gorgeous blonde-haired, dimple-cheeked brother, who laughed at something I said even though he couldn’t remember me from the shy, mousy army of admirers he must have encountered all through his school life.
I take the bends in the road and find that at the top of our street someone has put a large wooden wardrobe out on the kerb to be collected or recycled. I catch sight of myself in its scrat
ched and darkened mirror. I’m not shocked or surprised at my reflection – it’s exactly as I expect. I’ve never really looked any different. I’m fine. Average. Plain. A stock image of a long-haired student. On a deluxe colour chart I’d blend well into the light beige to medium tan. No wonder Tom doesn’t remember me. I’m just myself; nearly thirty, tea-coloured with shades of biscuit.
Hold up … nearly thirty?
As in three-decades-old thirty? As in age 30–39, a brand-new age bracket in survey-based data gathering?
I demand a recount.
Thirty is the age where you are expected to know what you are doing. If I heard on the news that a thirty-year-old woman had been arrested for murder/drug smuggling/kidnapping, I’d think she was old enough to know better. No benign judge is going to rub her back and make excuses for her to the jury.’
Thirty? Me? Really?
Yep. In three months’ time I will be thirty years old. I set my shopping bags down and look at myself from every angle in the mirror. In the grand tradition of denial when one approaches a milestone age, I feel I should say that I’ve never felt so alive or comfortable in my own skin, but the truth is that I’m exhausted.
Poppy, you know you haven’t changed at all. Not even one little bit. I know Leanne meant this as a compliment. And I appreciate that most people would be delighted to be told that they haven’t changed. But this is niggling at me. More than a niggle, actually; it’s bothering me big time.
Its closer to fifteen years since I last saw Leanne and I haven’t changed? Not one bit? I look the same, I act the same, I wear the same clothes, I go to the same places, I haven’t moved into a new role as mother or girlfriend or wife or businesswoman. I’m still pretty much exactly who I was before. And that’s not normal. It’s static.
If you’re not growing, you are decaying. That’s nature in its full-blown brutality. I take a step closer to the mirror, pull out my topknot, shake down my hair and look again. Yep, she’s right. I haven’t changed one bit, and that’s the bit I need to change.
Don't Stop Me Now: The perfect laugh out loud romantic comedy Page 5