‘You’ll never guess who that was,’ said Ange, sipping at her drink. ‘It was Karen Walsh.’
‘Ah.’ Yes, I remembered Karen Walsh. ‘Oh, joy,’ I said.
Ange laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘everyone’s grown up a bit since school. Even Karen.’
‘Just a bit?’ I tried to affect a sophisticated expression, but I think I may just have managed mean. ‘So you two are still friends then?’
She said yes; they had drifted apart after school, then met at an earlier reunion.
Ange then spent five or ten minutes filling me in on her life since school—the bad exam results and time served at McDonald’s, the subsequent promotions and wasted years; the Pole she loved and lived with, long before Poles were de rigueur; the baby she lost when the Pole got drunk and jealous and punched her in the kidneys; the six-month trip around the world with her younger sister; her new life as a teacher in Hackney, retrained, revitalised and, despite the frustration and laughably long hours, daily rewarded.
‘We should go and find the others,’ she said. My stomach turned. I was enjoying talking to her, listening to her, looking into her eyes and remembering. I really didn’t want to find the others at all. ‘Let me just get another drink,’ she said, knocking back the rest of her rum. ‘Do you want another Guinness?’
‘ELBOWS!!!’
And so it began.
Suddenly a fist of faces reared up at me from the past. There was Neil ‘Bucky’ Buckley, who had a reputation for violence at school he appeared not to have outgrown. He was in tip-top physical condition, with some unpleasant tattoos, including a small blue teardrop high on his left eyelid. When he came towards me laughing, I flinched, but he was friendly. ‘Look at the size of you,’ he laughed, and shook my hand vigorously. He seemed pleased to see me. He asked me what I do now. I told him I write stuff for junk mail. Looking slightly impressed, he said, ‘That figures.’ He said, ‘You was well into all that shit.’ I resisted the urge to correct his grammar.
The best story I heard about Bucky all night was that he might be about to lose his job as a security guard for smoking a joint at work. The detail that made the story golden was that he was filmed smoking the joint on the same security cameras he was being paid to monitor. Bucky had a copy of Nuts in his coat pocket and a rash of tiny white scars on the knuckles of his left hand. He was a travesty and, like me, he was the polar opposite of Deborah Hutton.
Deborah Hutton was almost as unpopular as I was at school, but for entirely different reasons. She managed to irritate almost everybody with whom she came into contact simply by being perfect. Well spoken, beautifully turned out, very bright and sweetly pretty, she always gave the impression that she was in entirely the wrong school. Other girls hated her because they sensed in her a superiority which they suspected was well founded; boys hated her because she wouldn’t let them taste her unnaturally bright lips or put their grubby, nicotine-stained fingers up her skirt. I always liked her myself, but from a distance of light years. We were amusingly dissimilar, and I was very surprised to see her at the Hufflers Arms. She seemed surprised to see herself there. It was her first reunion too, and the only reason she was there at all was because her father was dying and she was desperate to escape the cloying stench of rotting flesh and ylang ylang, even for just a couple of hours.
Age had not withered Deborah Hutton. She was still bright and beautiful and beaming. Also, transformed by impending grief, she was caustic and careless and dangerous. When she smiled at me, I ached. I wished I were eight stone lighter and had Jake Gyllenhaal’s face. Sadly, I do not. Happily, neither does Darren McLaren.
Fifteen years have not been kind to Mac. Indeed, time has transformed a boy with quite a pleasant face and a sprightly form into a man with a pot belly and a comb-over. On the upside, he no longer seems to be under the impression that spitting phlegm at people’s backs is the height of sophisticated repartee. On the downside, nothing seems to have taken the place of this odious habit. Mac is a sophistication vacuum, and a charm void to boot. He’s also a Business Manager at a branch of the NatWest bank in Dartford. Hearing this made me smile. It made me really happy to think that, although I may, in my time, have stooped devilishly low—so low, in fact, that neither stealing and defacing a bible nor ripping the genitalia from a dead man’s memories were beneath me—I have never, never worked in a bank.
If we’d had US-style year-books at our school, Georgina Bentley would have been voted ‘Girl most likely to end up in the sex industry’. Georgina apparently thought nothing of orally pleasuring any boy brave enough to ask her. Such was the reputation she never denied. Now she’s a secretary for an insurance company in Maidstone.
Georgina—George—is a big, bouncy girl with a square face, eyes that are slightly too far apart, and a passion for Arthurian legend. She met her current boyfriend playing World of Warcraft. George isn’t exactly the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, but she is fun and funny and extremely likeable.
Then there was Karen Walsh, sporting a sensible brown bob and a not unpleasant smile on her eager, open face. Walshy was an absolute shit to me at school. Now she’s a social worker in Lewisham. She hadn’t said a lot to me since arriving at the pub, but she definitely seemed to have changed. It was early though. The jury was still out.
The strangest thing was standing there actively harbouring a grudge for at least two of those people. After all these years. As if nothing had changed. As if we were still teenagers.
Things, however, had definitely changed. I’d changed. Apart from ballooning in size, the main difference was that I was no longer crippled by shyness and shame. I used to let the likes of Bucky and Mac make me feel inferior. Now I looked at them and I felt pretty damned good about myself. They both looked so spent, and defeated, and neither of them had anything of any consequence to say. I felt good.
Realising they no longer had the power to make me feel bad, I felt less pressure. I relaxed. And the grudge fell away, like a cloak of dead skin, and a new me emerged, unashamed, unafraid, and confident. Suddenly I was glad to be there. Back where I belonged, among people. However, there was still plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.
But for now I was mingling magnificently and speaking to everyone. Alfie Mussett had turned up too, as had Liam McDowell and Julie Moore. I caught up with them all, and reminisced like Gulliver, excited and freshly returned from his travels. Sadly, none of us—except Deborah Hutton and Angela Charlton—had done anything particularly exciting with our lives. At least Deb and Ange had each travelled a bit, more than the odd fortnight in a hotel here and there. Bucky, I discovered, had never once set foot outside the UK. And neither did he seem particularly perturbed by this fact.
‘But there’s so much going on,’ I pointed out. ‘There are, like, two hundred countries in the world, and nearly seven billion people. Don’t you want to maybe, experience a bit of it?’
He scowled at me, and half laughed, but not in a mean way. ‘You don’t get it, do you? The thing is, I really couldn’t give a fuck about all that. I’m happy where I am, with what I’ve got. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about the rest of the world, if I’m honest.’ His face had softened. He was genuinely trying to explain himself. I felt quite touched and privileged in a distinctly patronising way.
I held my hands up in resignation. ‘That’s fine. I’m happy you’re happy. I just can’t help thinking, you know…’
‘Yeah, you always thought too much,’ he interrupted. ‘That was your problem, mate.’
‘What does that even mean? And what the fuck else was I supposed to do?’ I realised I’d kind of snapped this. And I swore. And I don’t often swear. Not out loud. ‘There was nothing else for me to do. I was hardly the most popular kid in school.’ I’d snapped that too. I smiled at him, deliberately. I could feel myself getting emotional. That really wasn’t supposed to happen. The grudge had gone. I tried to remember that. It was all in the past. Calm. Calm. ‘What do you want to drink, Bucky? Let me buy you a drink.’