Here’s Looking At You. Mhairi McFarlane
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corridor to the appointed door. She had the pulse-in-the-neck trepidation of someone navigating the Ghost House at a funfair, her whole body tensed for surprise. Underneath the Milanese chiffon, she was clammy.
Another, deeper breath. She remembered what Michelle had said, that this was a demonstration of strength. She opened the door and stepped into the room. It was near-empty. A few people she didn’t recognise glanced over, returned to their conversations. In her many, many rehearsals in her head, a gallery of familiar faces turned towards her, accompanied by a needle scratch noise on a record. But no, nothing.
The worst of them weren’t even here yet, if they were going to turn up at all. Was she relieved, or disappointed? Weirdly, she was both.
A sagging banner above the bar announced a school reunion: 16 YEARS SINCE WE WERE 16!!!!!! Oh dear, multiple exclamation marks. Like having someone with ADD shaking maracas in your face.
Anna got herself a glass of bathwater-warm Stowells of Chelsea white wine and retreated to a wallflower location on the left hand side of the room. She judged that everyone was only one alcohol unit away from circulating more freely, and she would be approached. She’d throw this drink down and get gone. There, she’d put her head in the lion’s jaws. Done. Extra points for doing it alone. She wasn’t quite sure why that felt so necessary, but it did. Like when the action hero growled: ‘This is something I have to do for myself.’
It was an anti-climax, but wasn’t it always going to be? What did she expect, that everyone would be queuing up to make their apologies?
The wall opposite held a collage of pictures on large coloured sheets of sugar paper, with childish bubble letters spelling out Class of ’97 above it. Anna knew she wasn’t on it. No one would’ve asked her to squeeze – squeeze being the operative word – into the disposable camera snaps.
Below the display was a congealing finger buffet that sensibly, no one was touching. When everyone was pissed enough, a few dead things in pastry might get snarfed, but the crudités were strictly for decoration.
The room filled steadily. Every so often there’d be some ghostly reminders – no one that prominent, but the odd aged version of a face Anna faintly recognised from groups in the lunch hall, or the playground, or the sports field. There was one semi-significant: Becky Morris, a chubby girl who’d made Anna’s life a misery in the third year, to make it clear they were nothing alike. She still looked like a malevolent piece of work, Anna noted, just a more tired one.
It was a strange thing, but their flat ordinariness felt diminishing to Anna, rather than wickedly triumphal.
She’d let such people bring her so low? The banality of evil, the pedalling wizard behind the curtain in Oz. By comparison, Anna felt as if she was an inversion of a Halloween mask, moving among these people as one of them, a normal visage concealing the comic horror beneath the surface.
Hang on … was that … could it be? NO. Yes. It was.
Huddled in the far corner were Lindsay Bright and Cara Taylor. It was so strange looking at them. They were instantly recognisable, and yet all the vibrancy of her memories had leached away, like photographs that had lost their colour.
Present Lindsay’s long blonde hair was now mid-length and slightly mousey, with roots that needed doing. Her middle had thickened, though her tight dress displayed fake-tanned legs that went on forever. The teenage hauteur had set as lines, giving her once-pretty face a set-in scowl. Anna could close her eyes and see Past Lindsay in a hockey skirt, chewing Hubba Bubba with a casual, glamorous menace.
Cara’s dark hair was short, and she had the unmistakable sallow, pinched complexion of a behind-the-bike-sheds smoker who hadn’t stopped. She used to hit Anna on the back of her legs with a ruler and call her a lezzer.
So this was the revelation that was supposed to make her feel better. They weren’t terrifying, glittering ice princesses anymore. They were slightly beaten, early middle-aged women who you wouldn’t notice pushing a trolley past you in Asda. Anna didn’t know how she felt. She was entitled to gloat, she guessed. But she didn’t want to. It didn’t change anything.
They both looked over at Anna. Her heart hammered. What would she say to them? Why hadn’t she prepared something? And what do you say to your former tormentors? Did you ever think about me? Did you ever feel bad? How could you do it?
But there was no light bulb of recognition in return. Lindsay and Cara’s eyes slid over her and they carried on chatting. Anna realised they were probably looking at the only other dressed-up woman in the room.
And then, as time ticked by, Anna had a realisation. No one knew who she was. That’s why they weren’t speaking to her. She was so changed she was anonymous. They weren’t going to risk admitting they’d forgotten her to her face.
The door to the function room opened again. Two men walked in, both wearing an air that suggested they thought the cavalry had arrived, and the cavalry wasn’t much pleased with what it saw.
As their faces turned towards her, she had one of those funny moments where your breath catches in your throat, your heart high-fives your ribcage and all sound seems distant.
James really had to ask himself who he’d become if he’d put himself through this to score a tiny point against Eva.
Stuck in a windowless function room upstairs in a dingy boozer, pear-shaped pairs of semi-shrivelled balloons were dotted about the place, like garish testes. As always with forced gaiety, it came off as the very antimatter of fun. There was textured wallpaper painted the colour of liver below a dado rail, and the stale musk of old, pre-smoking ban tobacco. These were the kind of pubs he never went in.
Against one wall stood a trestle table with paper tablecloth and plates of mini Babybels, bowls of crisps and wizened cocktail sausages. In a nod to nutritional balance, there were withered batons of cucumber, celery and carrots arrayed in a sunburst formation around tubs of supermarket guacamole, bubblegum-pink taramasalata and garlic and onion dip. Only a sociopath would eat garlic and onion dip at a social event, James thought.
The room was sparsely populated and had divided broadly into two groups, each single sex, as if they had rewound to pubescent years of the genders not mixing. There were the men, many of whom he recognised, their features softening, melting and slipping. Hair migrating south, from scalps to chins.
James felt a shiver of schadenfreude at still looking more or less the way he did when he was a fifth-former, albeit a good few pounds heavier.
Everyone had given him quick, hard, appraising stares, and he knew why. If he’d gone to seed, it’d be the talk of the evening.
And hah – he’d said hello at the bar, and Lindsay Bright had actually blanked him! She may be an ex-sort-of-girlfriend, but surely she didn’t still have the hump about things that happened seventeen years ago? I mean, they could have a kid doing A-levels by now. Perish the thought.
Returning with two pints of Fosters, Laurence nodded back towards where Lindsay stood.
‘Blimey, she’s not aged like fine wine,’ Laurence muttered. ‘Made of lips and arse now, like a cheap burger. Shame.’
‘So can we go?’ James said, under his breath. Bloody Laurence and his bloody schemes to meet women. These were even women he’d met already. ‘I don’t think there’s anything here for you.’
‘Yeeeaah … No. Wait. Holy moly. Who the hell is that?’
James followed Laurence’s line of sight, towards a woman standing on her own. James realised he’d overlooked her numerous times but it wasn’t because she wasn’t worth looking at. She was dark: black hair, olive skin, black clothes, so much so that she had disappeared into the background like a shadow.
Mysterious Woman was done up to the nines in something that