Here's Looking at You (36 page)

Daniel ambled up to the bar.

‘You are so generous,’ Anna said to Michelle.

‘Pffft, I was underpaying the stupid beardy-weirdy anyway. Loads of people want him. And do you know what he said to some woman who was being a cow about her moules marinières, last week? She announces: “Don’t contradict me, I am a cancer survivor!” And he replies: “Then I’d have thought you can put the disappointment of these molluscs in their proper perspective, madam.” I swear he should do stand up. A whole group nearby clapped. She’s flamed me on Toptable of course, but it was worth it.’

‘Oh God, that’s funny. Am I allowed to find that funny?’ Anna said, hand over mouth.

‘What’s funnier is that she called them moules “marine air” throughout the attack on my attention to detail with saucing.’

Michelle put her e-fag down and took a swig of vodka tonic.

‘It’s not Dan I resent paying, it’s her.
An MA in conservation
,’ Michelle said to Anna. ‘Penny’s an expert in conserving her own energy, am I right?’

James was hurtling towards Highbury & Islington on the overground when he had the epiphany. It arrived while he was staring at a discarded
Metro
on the floor and listening to the rattle-shake from the iPod of the person next to him. What psychopath would listen to ‘Gangnam Style’ before nine in the morning? All of a sudden, doing something about the heavy pall that had settled in his stomach didn’t seem an impossibility. It was the only thing to do.

He bounded out of the train doors and up the stairs, pushing against the tide of commuters, through the ticket barriers and out to the freedom of the fresh air.

He hit ‘Work’ on his phone
. Please be Lexie please be Lexie please be Lexie please be Lexie
… Harris.

‘Hi mate, I’m not going to be in today.’ James thought as he was pulling a sickie, he should try to be ingratiating. ‘I’ve puked up and I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a bad sequel. Maybe two, like
The Matrix
. Could even go to
Pirates of the Caribbean
numbers.’

There was a sceptical pause on the other end of the line.

‘Where are you? It sounds noisy.’

‘Highbury. I had to find a waste bin here, fast.’

‘There aren’t any waste bins at stations.’

‘No, well done Inspector Wexford, that was in the street. Do you want me to go and take a phone pic of the evidence for you?’

‘Nah. You’ve ruined my chorizo hash brown as it is. Is it anything contagious?’

‘I think it’s more likely last night’s leftover rice from the Chinese than SARS, but thanks for your concern.’

James turned his phone off and worked out his route. He’d walk. He’d quite like to clear his head. If London’s morning traffic fumes could help you clear anything.

Anna was walking across the lawn in front of the grand colonnades of the main building, her breath making ghosts in the freezing air.

Across the quad, she noticed a blurred figure striding purposefully towards her. She suddenly placed the black hair and dark blue coat, as the rest of the features came into focus.

Her heart jumped up to block her throat and she pushed it back down where it belonged and gritted her teeth. She was annoyed with him, not nervous. So why did she feel nervous?

James reached her. He looked apprehensive. It was a strange time of day to turn up. Uh oh. Was this going to be the ‘it was a long time ago, we’re all adults, let bygone be bygones …’? Anna came to a halt with some reluctance.

‘Hi. Can I talk to you?’

‘What about?’

‘School. About what happened.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about that.’

‘Will you listen while I talk, then?’

Anna shrugged.

‘I want to say how sorry I am. It was awful and cruel and I can’t imagine how badly it hurt you. All I can say is that I was an utter fucking fool when I was sixteen years old and I can only hope I’ve improved since then, if far too slowly.

‘And I’m sorry I was an idiot when you confronted me with it, and used a horrible word. It was a lot to take in. I was in shock and blurted those things because you were angry with me and I was ashamed of how I’d behaved. I can’t believe what I said. All I should’ve done is given you a grovelling apology, and it’s shameful that I didn’t manage even that.’

Pause.

‘I’ve asked myself countless times since that night at yours, how I could have done what I did at school. The truth was, I blocked out the fact that you were another human being with feelings. I decided you brought it on yourself by being different. I played along with the group to be popular. I wish my character had been stronger, but it wasn’t.’

‘Done?’ she asked.

‘… In essence?’ James looked quite fearful of her.
Good. ‘
I wanted you to know how sorry I am.’ He cleared his throat. ‘From the bottom of my heart.’

‘Is that a long way?’ she said, unsmiling.

James managed a wan smile.

‘Cheers. Thanks,’ Anna said, and walked on.

James turned as she passed him.

‘Is that it?’ he said.

‘What do you want me to say? Do you want forgiveness and absolution, so you can file this one away? Then I forgive you. Over.’

‘I don’t want forgiveness. I understand if you can’t forgive me, or not yet.’

‘Then what do you want?’ Anna asked.

‘To talk. To be friends again.’

Anna shook her head.

‘I don’t want to be friends.’

‘We were getting on before I saw that picture. More than getting on. We had a laugh, we really clicked. What’s changed?’

Anna even cringed at the words
that picture.
If he’d seen her in her surgical stirrups it’d have barely felt more exposing.

‘I never meant to have anything to do with you. It was a working relationship, after the total shock horror of seeing you in that meeting. Then I went to your company do as a favour. I knew I shouldn’t have even done that. The whole fight over the picture was a massive wake-up call. I don’t want anything to do with you.’

‘Because of school? You think I can’t change?’

‘I don’t care if you’ve changed or not. Because I’ve changed. Because I don’t let superficial dickheads get to me anymore.’

James grimaced.

‘That’s harsh, Anna.’

She was finally riled. She felt the kind of raging hurt that swelled behind the chest wall and travelled up the throat and out of the mouth in the form of ugly words.

‘
That’s
harsh?! Try five years of daily hell topped with a public demonstration that a whole school-full of people hate you, James. That they’re laughing at you for your stupidity in ever thinking you could take part,’ she spat. ‘You haven’t ever met harsh. You haven’t been
near
it.’

‘With the Mock Rock, there wasn’t as much reason to it as that. It was dumb crowd mentality.’

‘Oh, here we go – you think it’ll help for
you
to tell
me
it wasn’t that bad really? You think some “there there, dear” is going to do the job?’

‘No, this is a policy of complete honesty.’ James pulled his bag over his head and dropped it at his feet. ‘Last time I saw you, you said something about me knowing you liked me at school. I didn’t. What happened was …’ He bit his lip. ‘A month or so before, Laurence was doing one of his hugely mature “would you rather” conversations. When you were mentioned, I said you would look OK if …’ James paused.

‘… If?’ Anna folded her arms.

‘If you lost weight. And Laurence teased me relentlessly that I liked you. He put me up to the Mock Rock stunt. I did it to get him off my back. I had that teenage peer group head on where you go along with it, so it’s somebody else instead of you. I was a craven arsehole who didn’t want to be bullied either, I guess. If that’s the word.’

‘It’s not the word.’

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t know. That’s like telling someone who’s lost an arm in a thresher that you had a paper cut that really smarted once. No one would’ve bullied you like they did me if you’d said no. People like you can never understand a person like me.’

‘People like me?’

‘People who float through this world, who are handed things easily, who are treated as special because their face fits.’

‘Oh come on. I’m not for one second saying you haven’t been through the mill, but saying you’re alone in knowing suffering is a bit much.’

‘Did you ever get punched and hit, and your bag stolen and thrown in the bin for the crime of being fat and ugly, James? Did you sit through detentions for lost homework rather than reporting that someone had ripped it up, because reporting it meant more bullying? Did you ever have to tell your parents you got those bruises from P.E., whilst seeing the tortured look on your little sister’s face because she knows exactly where they came from? Did you wake up every morning before the alarm went off, feeling sick at what you’d have to face? Did you count a good day as one where you were only viciously abused once every lesson?’

James put his hand out to touch her arm but she stepped back, out of his reach.

‘What else? So much to choose from. Let’s see … Did you get dressed up in your fat girl dress and dropped off at the leavers’ do by your dad, wait until he was out of sight, then go and sit on your own in a park for hours, because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell your parents you weren’t welcome?’

James stared at her, then the ground.

‘And best of all, did the most popular person in school make you, for one shining moment, think he might be unlike all the other bastards? Then put you in the stocks, get you pelted with food and call you an elephant? You know James, you were a tiny bit of happiness at school, for me. Just getting to look at you, thinking about you, writing stupid stuff in my diaries. You were only nice to me in my imagination, but that was enough. You didn’t need to do anything. All I needed you to do was
nothing
to me. But you didn’t let me even have that.’

James was stricken, and yet Anna couldn’t hold back. It was like the floodgates had opened.

‘… Every night I poured it all into my diary, great screeds of misery. I promised myself that one day I would get away. That the time would come when I’d never have to see any of you fuckers again. And by being friends with you, I’m betraying that girl. That’s why I don’t want to be friends. You didn’t want to be friends back then. But you do now, now that the very sight of me isn’t an embarrassment. Well, I don’t want to know you. What did you call that, “harsh”? Why don’t you try to pick up the shattered pieces of your life and limp on?’

It was quite a tirade and when James spoke, his voice sounded weakened by the onslaught.

‘I want the chance to make it up to you, Anna.’

‘You
can’t.
That’s what you’re not grasping.’

Anna knew she’d finally done enough to make James walk away. It was a battle of wills, him pushing against a door to get into a room that she was determined not to let him into. Somewhere, deep down, it was possible she wanted him to try hard enough. But she was certain he wouldn’t. There was no way he was winning this. In strength of feeling, she had the power of twenty men.

‘I have to get back to work,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

Anna made it a few paces across the grass, bristling with a poisonous sense of triumph, before James tapped her on the shoulder again.

‘You think I’m the last person you want around. What if I‘m precisely the person you need?’

Anna eye-rolled him. ‘Which movie poster did you whip that from
?
’

‘I’m serious. You need to exorcise Rise Park. You need the person responsible, or one of them, to truly understand what they did. So you can let go of it.’

‘I was living my life fine before you came along, thanks.’

‘Despite you being a much better person than me, I don’t accept we’re as dissimilar as you say. We wouldn’t make each other laugh so much if we were. You don’t think we have anything in common?’

‘No.’

‘You said you liked me at school? You mean you had a crush on me?’

Anna lifted her chin in a terse nod.

‘Why? We never had one conversation, until the Mock Rock.’

‘I knew things about you. You know how it is with the cool kids and the no-marks. We watch from the sidelines while you’re in the spotlight.’

‘But we never interacted. You simply liked the way I looked.’

‘So?’ Anna shifted her weight and made a face that let him know his time was nearly up.

‘You were judging purely on appearances.’

‘Hah. Nice try. But that’s a phony equivalence. It’s hardly like I made your life worse. You didn’t even know I was there.’

‘My point stands. We both judged on appearances. I thought you weren’t worth anything and you thought I was worth something. We were both wrong.’

James took her pause as encouragement.

‘I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like to be in your shoes, and to then have people treat you so differently once you’re … well, obviously you’re beautiful. It’d make most people deadly cynical. Yet you’re not, and that’s impressive.’

‘You’re beeyoodifull. Oh, please.
Not that hot and not your type
, was the real assessment, I recall.’

James went red. ‘Come on, I apologised for that. I was trying to discourage Laurence. Of course I think you’re beautiful, everyone does. Take a compliment.’

Anna shrugged with a nonchalance she didn’t really feel. ‘So would you want to be my friend if I still looked like Aureliana?’

James looked to the heavens in mock despair and back down.

‘Yep. Nothing in our friendship was about looks. Wouldn’t you agree? It was unusually pure, in that respect.’

‘Mmmm. Are you finished? I do have work to do.’

‘No. I’m not leaving things like this,’ James said. ‘I think your pride won’t let me back in. So tell me what it needs me to do. I will do anything you ask of me to atone for this. But I won’t simply go away. You’ve got to let it out. Punch me or something.’

She knew they were inching closer to her saying the thing she didn’t want to. Her voice became tremulous.

‘James. You have no idea how bad it was. This is not fixable with jokes, or token acts of play-fighting. You don’t know what you’re interfering in, here.’