The Friend Read online

  ‘Yes he does, Mum. All the time.’ Now his voice is cajoling, asking me to acknowledge this fundamental truth about his father. He really isn’t a little boy any more. Or maybe he is, and he’s always known what his dad is like – it’s only now that these boys are so important to him that he has to say something.

  My cheeks are set alight by shame, by the absolute bloody shame of having my eight-year-old point out the faultline that runs through our life – the emperor’s new clothes nakedness of our perfect family persona. To the outside world, we are Maxie: loving mother, attentive wife, perfect friend; Ed: loving, attentive, hard-working father; and Frankie: small boy who likes sea animals and the planets, who doesn’t notice that we have no substance beneath what we show to the outside world.

  What was I thinking just now about taking a bad situation and making it better for your children? If only I could.

  ‘All right,’ I say, ‘I won’t tell him and you don’t have to either. Not until afterwards, anyway.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘That’s the deal, take it or leave it,’ I tell him.

  ‘Ooooo-Kay, deal,’ he concedes.

  I stick out my pinkie finger, ready to hook his and for us to pinkie-shake on it. When he sees what I’m doing, he draws back in disgust and one of his bubble polar bear ears almost topples off his head. ‘No one does that any more, Mum. I’m not a baby.’

  ‘Right-o,’ I reply. My face is still a smouldering, guilt-and shame-fuelled wreck. How have I managed to convince myself that Frankie doesn’t know what our marriage is like?

  My phone beeps and the sound is magnified by it echoing along the tiles. There’s a number I don’t recognise and my heart leaps in my chest.

  Hi Maxie Here’s my number. Boys had a great time with Frankie. Let me know if you fancy meeting up again. Cece x :)

  ‘Is that her?’ Frankie asks.

  I nod. And despite myself, despite everything, I can’t help but grin.

  Nice to hear from you, Cece. Do the boys and you fancy coming over for tea next week? Maybe Thursday? Maxie x

  Almost straight away my phone beeps again.

  The boys would love that. See you next week. C x

  11 p.m. In my kitchen, there is a photo that I took of Frankie with Madison (from his class) and Scarlett. I’d driven Frankie and I to the nearest out-of-town shopping centre. I’d wanted to get some extra bits and pieces and thought going away from Brighton would mean we wouldn’t bump into anyone we knew. Obviously not the case because we were there less than twenty minutes when we stepped off the glass lift and there was Yvonne with her daughters. They looked like mini models of her, with their colour-coordinated versions of the same jeans and off-the-shoulder top Yvonne also wore, and their perfectly waved blonde hair falling to their shoulders.

  I stare at the photo. Frankie asked me to take it on my phone, then went on at me until I printed it out and let him stick it on the fridge with the dinosaur magnet. For some reason, he often talks about that day. Always different parts of the day, but it is a day he likes to recall over and over again.

  October, 2014

  We stood on the sidelines and watched the children climb through the play area in the shopping centre. It was a huge plastic monstrosity, with different-coloured netting, cut-outs, tunnels, covered slides that rose upwards almost at a vertical, and connected to netting-covered walkways. Saturday, of course, meant this place was rammed with people. The heat, the noise, the smell of sweat and feet, undercut by gentle notes of wee-soaked nappies, all conspired to drive me insane. I had never liked these places, had been to far too many of them in my life, mainly because Frankie loved them. His idea of heaven when he was younger had been for us to go to a play centre early in the morning, run around the place as it was empty, climbing on everything available, bouncing on the bouncy structure, then stay for a lunch of dark brown sausages, yellow chips and coagulated bright orange beans, then spend another couple of hours running around.

  Those were the days when I was most paranoid, when I couldn’t stand to be away from him even if it was a few metres, so I’d crawl through the holes, the plastic tubes and netting to make sure he wasn’t out of my sight.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Yvonne said as we watched our children, ‘Frankie doesn’t look like you at all.’ She made her voice conversational, as though she hadn’t been working up to saying this since the very first day she saw Frankie run out of the school gates and into my arms.

  ‘What’s funny about that?’ I asked her.

  She was right, but it wasn’t funny. Frankie had brown hair, hazel eyes and pale skin.

  ‘I don’t mean funny ha-ha, I mean a bit strange.’

  ‘In what way?’ I took my eyes off Frankie for a moment and focused on Yvonne, the woman who spent her entire life, it seemed, either trying to corral people into joining the Parents’ Council or scouring the internet for information on the people she wanted to be her friends. It never occurred to her that being friends with someone should include allowing them the luxury of telling you what they wanted you to know. She wanted to know everything, all of it. Even the bits you would not share with a friend. I knew she would have searched and searched and searched for stuff on me and Frankie and Ed and would have found very little because our surname was Smith (and both had been before marriage) and there would have been so many of them around.

  Added to that, we weren’t part of the social media stuff, we didn’t put everything online, which must have driven her insane. I wondered, often, how far she would go to find out stuff about me. If she would go and try to get a look at Frankie’s birth certificate. If she did that, it would all be over. Everything Ed and I had done would come undone.

  ‘I don’t know. He’s just … He’s pale and you’re not. And it’s not like you’ve got different skin colours and he still looks like you – he looks nothing like you.’

  ‘What are saying, Yvonne? Speak your speak. I can’t stand people who hide behind “it’s funny” or “it’s a bit strange” – say what you want to say.’

  ‘All right …’ She shimmied her shoulders a little, as though trying to shake off the shackles of propriety. When she didn’t manage it, when she couldn’t quite step into being outright rude, she instead said, ‘I just think it’s odd that he’s pale and you’re not.’

  ‘My dad’s white, Yvonne,’ I said. I hated having to explain myself, but there was something about her line of questioning that meant I had to control this. She’d probably already made comments to other people and if she carried on, it could get out of hand. ‘My mum’s black. And I’m sure you’ve seen how pale Ed is. There is no accounting for genetics. And anyway, why am I having this conversation with you, Vonny? Do I ask if you actually had sex to have your children or if you cloned them because they are exact replicas of you? I do not.’

  ‘Oh, don’t take offence – I was only wondering if he might be adopted or something? Or if you were maybe Ed’s second wife?’

  ‘Are you Trevor’s second wife?’ I asked her.

  ‘I am, actually,’ she replied.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  Her face dropped its usual mask for a moment, and she looked smaller, plainer, more ordinary. ‘Do you ever worry about being boring?’ she asked. I turned back to watch the children. Scarlett was hanging upside down from the highest point of the climbing structure; Madison and Frankie were climbing into the gaping yellow hole of the twisty slide that would bring them all down to the ground. ‘I mean, there is nothing remarkable about me. I can’t really get a job because of having to be here to make sure the kids are OK. And I have no backstory. I’d never tell anyone else this, but that’s why I look up people’s backstories on the internet. I want to find out if other people are as uninteresting as me. Beyond the children, beyond the Parents’ Council, I have nothing. I’m simply not interesting.’

  ‘You are interesting, Yvonne,’ I said to her. ‘You don’t need to be married a trillion times or t
o have some high-flying job – you’re interesting because you’re a human being. That’s what human beings are about. We’re interesting. I mean, it’s remarkable to me that there are so many of us, with all the same basic template for looks – you know, eyes, nose, mouth, ears – and we’re all different. It’s the same with our stories. We’re all different and we have these interesting tales to tell, even if we aren’t off fighting dragons or coming up with amazing scientific discoveries. You are interesting.’

  ‘And you are so “peace, love, hope” about everything,’ she sneered.

  I turned to her and stared. ‘Was there any need for that?’ I eventually said.

  She shrugged with one shoulder, as petulant as a teenager caught out after curfew. ‘I opened up to you and you just dismissed it with some New Age bullshit,’ she said.

  ‘All right: Yvonne, you are dull and unremarkable. Is that what you want to hear?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Well then stop it. I wasn’t dismissing you. You may or may not have valid concerns about being boring. Or whatever. But I don’t see it. I genuinely don’t see it and I’m not going to coddle you about it when I can’t actually see it. I think people are interesting. Actually, I find them fascinating. But I also find you fascinating for so many, many different reasons. The main ones being you’re my friend and I know you would drop everything to be there for me if something happened.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Am I really your friend?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, Yvonne. You think I knit with just anyone? Or do yoga or mix cocktails or cook at your house for that matter? You’re my friend and I haven’t had many of them over the years.’

  ‘So you like me as much as you like Anaya and Hazel?’

  I wasn’t sure where Yvonne’s neediness was coming from. We’d been meeting up for nearly two years. Had she really been doubting our friendship all that time? ‘Yes, Yvonne, I like you as much as my other two good friends.’

  She grinned at me.

  ‘Right, that’s about as much as I can stand in here. We need to head back anyway. Ed’s coming back tonight and I need to do some serious tidying up.’

  ‘Where’s he been?’

  ‘New York? Washington? Possibly Tokyo? Somewhere with a time difference, I know that.’

  ‘You don’t know where your husband is?’

  ‘No. I can honestly say, I don’t know where he is. He travels so much, I only really find out where he’s been when I check the flight number on the noticeboard to see where he flew in from.’ Yvonne looked horrified. ‘Trust me, it’s easier that way. If Trevor was away as much as Ed is, you’d lose track too. It’s not like he ever actually tells me anything about these places or brings us back souvenirs. He spends most of his time in horrible hotel rooms and horrible meeting rooms and lecture halls; he doesn’t get to see whichever city he’s in. Most of the time, he could actually be in a room in Worthing for all the culture he manages to soak up.’ It wasn’t always like that, of course. When we were first married, I would hang on Ed’s every word. I would check up where he was, the weather forecast, the time difference, the places he could visit while he was there. Over time, like a lot of things with Ed and me, it got easier to stop engaging. To have my interest not acknowledged or noticed with a vague smile and a few sentences dulled my emotions. I trained my heart not to care, to accept the reality of our situation and make the best I could of it. We had sex, we talked, we lived together quite contentedly. I mostly accepted that.

  ‘I could never let Trevor out of my sight if I didn’t know exactly where he was … Doesn’t he even call you?’

  ‘Yes, every day.’

  ‘And he doesn’t tell you where he is?’

  ‘We don’t really talk about his work on the phone. We talk about Frankie, how my day’s been, what’s going on at home, the news. Remember, this is what our relationship’s always been like.’

  ‘No video calls?’

  ‘Not often.’

  I could see the cogs whirling in her head. She’d watched too many movies, had read too many mystery books, had done far too much internet researching. She thought he wasn’t where he said he was, that he possibly had another family. Or was a two-timing so-and-so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ed was always where he said he was. Always. I knew other women said that sort of thing all the time and had been caught off guard when their husband’s secret life was revealed. But Ed wouldn’t dream of going ‘off plan’. Doing anything out of the ordinary could ruin everything for him and he would never risk it. He had as much to lose as I did. Except, as time went on, I found that I was the one who had more to lose. And that thing to lose was about to go back up to the top of the soft play area and throw himself down the large yellow slide tube again.

  ‘I could not live like that,’ Yvonne stated.

  ‘I know. Most people couldn’t. It works for us though.’

  Yvonne was eyeing me up – I could feel the intensity of her blue gaze, burning into the side of my face like twin blowtorches. Let her look, I thought to myself. She can’t even begin to understand what my marriage – what my life – is all about.

  11:05 p.m. My phone bleeps and makes me jump. I was lost then, back with Yvonne and how, I suppose, that was the start of it. That’s where it really began.

  How did it go today? Was it awful? Sending hugs. Axx

  11:10 p.m.

  Not too bad. The two new boys in Year 3 walked past and played with Frankie. Was fun, actually. She’s called Cece, the mother. Frankie loves her twins. Sleep tight. M xxx

  11:11 p.m.

  Xxxxxxxx A x

  11:12 p.m. My phone bleeps again and the little (1) appears at the top of Anaya’s text, meaning there is a message in the list waiting for me.

  I scroll back to the message list, to see if it’s Hazel, who hasn’t replied to the text I sent first thing this morning. Instead:

  Maxie, I need to talk to you about what happened that night with Yvonne. Why didn’t you answer my calls that night? I know she was with you. What’s going on? I thought we were friends? Please, just talk to me. Trevor

  I drop my phone, it’s a miracle it doesn’t smash on the tiled floor. I stare at it, shaking. Shaking, shaking, shaking. Just like that night when I got in after being with Yvonne and the others. Shaking, shaking, shaking.

  Anaya

  11:05 p.m. I’ve not been able to get Maxie out of my head all day. I don’t know how I’d cope if I was forced to go back there. Sanj and the kids think I’ve gone mad because I’ve been so jumpy, but I can’t help it. It must be awful for her.

  How did it go today? Was it awful? Sending hugs. Axx

  Sending hugs. That’s all I can do. Send hugs. Keep quiet about what happened.

  March, 2015

  Until I’d started meeting up with this lot at the beach hut, I’d never really been down to the beach beyond sunset. I’d obviously walked home that way sometimes, but I’d never come down here in the evening, for the specific reason of being here. I didn’t know what I was missing. The darkening sky had inky, blue-black clouds stained upon it like the potato prints the kids made in Reception; the moon carefully but gloriously sprinkled its light on the ripples the sea made; while the slick pebbles seemed to gently glow like a Hansel and Gretel path down to the water’s edge.

  When we came down here to knit and sometimes to mix cocktails if Maxie could be bothered to bring it all down here, we generally sat in the same places: Yvonne at the ‘head’ of the table with her back to the beach hut, facing the sea; Maxie didn’t seem to mind craning her neck to see the sea so she sat with her back to it; Hazel sat to Yvonne’s right and I sat to Yvonne’s left. We each of us had our rocks in front of us to keep the tablecloth flat on the metal fold-up table. I’d found those large palm-sized rocks, made sure they were all a similar size and shade, then used a scrubbing brush and soap to clean them up. Once clean, I’d used gold paint to inscribe them
with our initials. It was ten years now since I’d changed my name for the first time and I’d even changed it when I got married, but I still hesitated over writing my surname initial. It was fake. I always felt that. It wasn’t my true name, but what was done was done and I’d pushed aside my thoughts to make the stone mine. After the gold had dried, I’d varnished them to keep the lettering, to preserve our names as part of the friendship. I’d done it because, for once, I had friends.

  I’d had friends at school. I’d had Candy, who was what people would nowadays call a frenemy in that she was a friend who had so many issues with me that she often behaved like an enemy to me. But these three were lovely and they were my friends. I could talk to them, I could trust them to look after my children at a moment’s notice, and I could be who I was without them expecting anything in return.

  ‘Do you ever have that heart-stopping, terrifying moment that you’re turning into your mother?’

  Yvonne asked this. It was spring, but it was also chilly. We had on thick jumpers and blankets over our shoulders. Maxie and I wore fingerless gloves; Yvonne and Hazel wore full gloves because they were experienced enough knitters to do that. We’d all brought flasks of hot drinks, and Yvonne kept topping up her and the others’ plastic drinking cups with shots of whisky.

  Yvonne often asked questions like that. It was the way she got to know people, I’d come to decide. We all knew that she was an obsessive when it came to spending hours on the internet searching for information about people, hunting out their secrets, especially with those she called her friends. (We all knew she still did it because sometimes she’d forget herself and let things slip. But since my two name changes, I was reasonably certain she would find out nothing significant about me.) But her questions worked both ways: the answers to these odd, sometimes intrusive, questions also allowed me an insight into her.