Here’s Looking At You

It was a magical place to work. In her more sentimental moments, Anna felt it was a spiritual reward for schooldays – the dream after the nightmare. The building had that lovely old-fashioned carpety smell and yellow light from large round pendant lamps, as if you were living inside a warm memory.

Anna pushed her office door open with her back, pleased that no one had spied her. She’d feel self-conscious at any cries of ooh let’s see it on then.

Anna might’ve lost her schoolgirl weight and become a perfectly standard dress size, but it didn’t mean she thought and acted like the person she now was. She retained an intense dislike of clothes shops. The advent of online shopping had been a revelation. She would much, much rather use her office as a dressing room.

So when she realised the reunion needed a dress – no, not merely a dress but something truly flash, that would raise two fingers to them all in the form of fabric – she’d gone straight to an expensive designer website and spent the cost of a nice weekend away.

She dislodged the lid, rustling through the layers of tissue paper. There the exorbitant dress lay. Not a lot of material for … well, she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

Anna laid it carefully over a chair and checked the office door was locked, then wriggled out of her shapeless Zara smock, swapping it for the evening gown. She twisted it into place with forefingers and thumbs very carefully, as if it was gossamer, and pulled up a reassuringly chunky zip, with only a little breathing in.

Hmmm. She turned this way and that in front of the mirror. Not quite the transformation she’d hoped for. A black dress is a black dress. She flapped her arms up and down and watched the diaphanous chiffon sleeves waft in the breeze. She heard ‘The Birdie Song’ in her head.

On the website’s mannequin, with its blank white Isaac Asimov robot face, the black Prada shift had looked ‘Rita Hayworth during Happy Hour at the Waldorf Astoria’ chic. Now it was on her, Anna wondered if it was in fact rather blowsy. Like a cruise ship singer who would launch into ‘Unbreak My Heart’ while everyone enjoyed their main of breadcrumbed veal with sautéed potatoes.

Inevitably, as she stared at herself, she remembered that other day, that other dress. And that other girl.

Eventually she picked up her phone.

‘Michelle. I’m not going to the reunion. It’s rank madness and the dress makes me look like Professor Snape.’

‘Yes you are. After you’ve been, you’ll experience an incredible sense of lightness. Like a colon cleanse. Barry! Prep that squid and stop playing Fingermouse with it! Sorry, that last bit wasn’t for you.’

‘I can’t, Michelle. What if they all laugh at me?’

‘They won’t. But even if they did – doesn’t part of you want a chance to live that moment again, but this time, you tell them all to go to hell?’

Anna didn’t want to admit what she was thinking. What if she crumbled, cried and had to face that she was still Aureliana? Aureliana, holding more exam certificates and carrying less weight.

‘Do I look alright in this dress you can’t see?’

‘Is it the Prada one you sent me the link to? BARRY! Get that off that sausage! Do you think you’re working for Aardman fucking Animations? There’s no way you won’t look good. Your problem is going to be you’ll look so good no one will be looking at anyone else.’

‘Knock knock! Permission to enter the bat cave!’ Patrick sing-songed through the door.

‘Michelle, I’ve got to go.’

‘You’re right. You have got to go.’

Anna half laughed, half groaned.

‘Come in!’ Anna called. Cave was a reasonable adjective for Anna’s sinfully messy space on the second floor.

As a lecturer, expert in the Byzantine period, she was allowed some stereotypical nutty professor licence. When it came to housekeeping, she took it. Books were piled on folders piled on more books. The disarray was an insult to a lovely room though, and Anna felt some guilt about it.

Patrick lived down the hall, teaching the wool trade in the Tudor period. They’d started at UCL at a similar time and shared a passion for their work, as well as an ability to laugh at it and talk about something else entirely. This wasn’t to be underestimated in academia. Many of their colleagues were incredibly earnest. Something about experiencing life on an exalted plane of ‘clever’ could lead to malfunctions on the everyday level. As Patrick put it, they were people with brains the size of planets who couldn’t boil an egg.

Patrick often began his day by bringing Anna a cup of tea, drinking his while sitting on the bright blue office supplies chair, once he’d moved a pile of box folders, Anna’s coat and sundry items of course. Anna usually sat at her desk, scanning her emails and gossiping.

Patrick passed Anna her cup.

‘Goodness me, new frock?’ he said, watching Anna set her tea down.

‘Ah, yeah.’ She turned back and stood with her hands on her hips and legs slightly apart, as if she was a plumber about to give her price for addressing a particularly capricious combi-boiler.

‘Is it for the Theodora show? I thought that hadn’t kicked off yet?’ Patrick added.

‘No, I wish. School reunion tonight. Not sure if I should go. I had a molto horrifico time at school.’

Patrick squinted. ‘Oh. Right. So why are you going?’

‘My friend said it would be a defiant gesture. She’s mad, isn’t she? I don’t think I can do it. It’s a stupid plan. Oh, and do us a favour while you’re over there, and top Boris up?’ Anna said, nodding towards the large, beleaguered-looking cheese plant, and a scummy-looking milk bottle of water on the windowsill. ‘I’m thinking Prada and spillages don’t mix.’

He obligingly tipped an inch of greyish fluid into Boris’s soil.

Patrick had very neatly-cut auburn hair and the quivery, undernourished look of someone who had been shucked from a shell, rather than woman-born.

His uniform was fine knit V-necks and a mustard-coloured cord jacket with leather elbow patches. He claimed it had become such an academic cliché it had gone right through cliché and come out the other side as original.

He looked up at a portrait on Anna’s office wall.

‘Ask yourself this. What would your heroine Empress Theodora do?’

‘Have them all killed?’

‘Then second best; knock ’em dead,’ Patrick said.

6

Anna stood on the stairwell in front of a Blu-tacked sign in a distinctly ungentrified pub in East London with two stark options spelled out in Comic Sans.

Damn, she wished she knew Beth. It was a young name. Probably off to travel the world. She could hear a very bad karaoke rendition of Take That’s ‘Patience’ drifting from Beth’s party HQ.

Anna felt the vodka and oranges she’d had for Dutch courage sizzle acidly in her gut and trudged up the creaking, threadbare stairs and along the musty-smelling 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 any more. 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.

7

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 he thought looked a bit ‘Eastenders trattoria owner throws a divorce party’. He could imagine Eva telling him it was doing things the male mind was too crude to appreciate.

She radiated a kind of European art house film or espresso-maker advert beauty. Heavily lashed, vaguely melancholy brown eyes, thick eyebrows like calligraphic sweeps of a fountain pen, big knot of inky hair in an unwinding bundle at the crown of her head. All in all, it wasn’t especially his thing, but he could certainly see the appeal. Particularly in these drab surroundings.

‘Oh, we have got to say hi. I am appalled that she must’ve done an exchange programme and we didn’t introduce her to our country’s customs,’ Laurence said.

‘You realise you’re getting to the age where this is grotesque?’

‘You’re not the slightest bit curious about who she is?’

James glanced over again. Her body language was that of someone desperate to be left alone, the arm holding her glass clamped tight to her body. It was a puzzle who she was, and why she’d come here. If James was on his own, he might approach her, given she was the only point of intrigue in the room. He didn’t want to spectate a Laurence seduction attempt, however.

‘I know who she is, she’s the wife of the guy who’s going to punch you in about fifteen minutes,’ he said, brusquely.

‘Plus one?’ Laurence asked.

‘Of course she’s a plus one.’

James knew without question this woman was an exotic outsider. She hadn’t gone to his school. No way his libidinous adolescent radar wouldn’t have picked up the slightest incoming blip. Obviously some trophy wife, dragged along reluctantly. And the women here clearly didn’t know her, bolstering the theory.

‘Whatever her marital status, she’s gorgeous.’

‘Not that hot and not my type,’ James snapped, hoping to shut Laurence down. As James spoke, she glanced over. Mysterious Woman swigged the last of her drink and shouldered her handbag.

‘Shit no, Penélope Cruz is leaving? I’m going in,’ Laurence said.

8

In her twenties, Anna had a few fantasies about running into James Fraser again, and constructed elaborate imaginary verbal takedowns. Bitter excoriations in front of his wife and kids and co-workers about what a completely vicious conceited bastard he was, which usually ended with everyone applauding.

Now here he was. Over there. The man himself.

Anna could stride over and say anything she wanted to him. And all she could think was: yuck. I never want to share the same carpet square with you ever again.

He’d kept his looks, she’d give him that. Still the obsidian black hair, now worn artfully mussed, instead of those silly floppy curtains all boys had in the 1990s. And the shaving advert jaw line was hard as ever, no doubt much like his heart. It was a type of ‘stock model in a water filter infomercial’ handsome that didn’t move her in the slightest now.

He was in a very thirty-something trendy combination of plaid shirt, buttoned up to the collar, grey cardigan and desert boots. What was with this thing of dressing like a grandpa, lately? Anna did a young fogey job but she didn’t go around in orthopaedic sandals.

The youthful smirk had been replaced with an ingrained look of distaste. Exactly as she anticipated – he was surveying the company with the expression of a Royal being shown the pig scraps bins at the back of a chippy. Why deign to turn up, if he thought he was so far above the company? Wanted to reassure himself he was still top of the heap, perhaps.

And God, he was still with that lanky Laurence, court jester to James’s king. Laconic Laurence, who once fired off machine-gun-like rounds of quick fire ridicule at her. She felt their eyes move to her. But unlike everyone else’s, their gaze didn’t move on. In fact, when she risked looking back their way, she got the distinct impression she was being discussed.

A self-conscious warmth started creeping up her neck, like a snood of shame. Had they recognised her …?

The thought sparked great comets of stomach acid, making her hands tremble. She suddenly felt as if she was nude in the middle of a crowded space, an anxiety dream made reality.

And at that exact moment, she could perfectly lip-read James Fraser’s words.

‘Not that hot. And not my type.’

Amazing. She’d come all this way, and he still found her wanting. Only this time, he could go to hell.

She chugged her drink and headed to the door. She was intercepted by Laurence, cutting right across her path.

‘Tell me you’re not leaving,’ he said.

‘Er …’ once again, Anna felt her lack of a script. ‘Yes.’

‘Put us out of our agony and at least tell us who you are. My associate and I have been completely foxed.’

Laurence put a caddish emphasis on the last word, making it clear this was a chat-up.

Anna glanced over at James, who didn’t look like he wanted to speak to her at all.

‘Anna,’ she said, dumbly, as she frantically calculated how to play this. She knew what happened next if she answered him honestly. He’d whoop with disbelief, say patronising, oleaginous things about how she was looking fantastic.

Then he’d call others over: Hey everyone, this is Aureliana! Remember her? As if she was so stupid she wouldn’t decode the Bloody hell, how did this happen? And she’d feel like something in a zoo. They always did treat her like a separate species. She should never have come.

‘Anna? Anna …?’ Laurence shook his head and waited for the surname.

Mercifully, magically, letters in Comic Sans came back into her head.

‘… I’m supposed to be at Beth’s leaving do, next door. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place, I don’t know many of the other guests. I was trying to finish my drink and slip out before anyone noticed.’

A wolfish grin spread across Laurence’s face and she could see he was delighted at having a conversational opening.

‘The whole SCHOOL REUNION banner thing didn’t tip you off?’

‘I … uhm. Usually wear glasses, the words were fuzzy.’

‘Well, you’ve just settled a bet with my friend,’ Laurence said, calling out: ‘You were right! She’s not from Rise Park. We were agreeing there’s simply no way we wouldn’t have remembered you.’

And before Anna could stop him, he’d beckoned James Fraser to join them.

9

‘James, this is Anna. Anna, James.’

‘Hi,’ James put his hand out to shake hers. It was chilly and slightly damp. She gave him a look that was simultaneously intense and unreadable.

‘Anna here is actually meant to be in Beth’s leaving do in the next room. But lucky old us, she stumbled in here by mistake.’

Anna looked awkward and James tried to convey with his eyes that he wasn’t encouraging or condoning Loz’s hitting on her.

‘Who is Beth and to where is she departing?’ Laurence asked.

‘Uhm. She’s my cousin,’ Anna said.

‘And …?’ Laurence made a ‘tell us more’ circling gesture with his hand.

‘And …’ Anna’s line of sight cast around the room, as if looking for escape. ‘She works at Specsavers. She’s travelling round Australia. Flying to Perth.’

Poor Anna was clearly dying to be released to Beth from Specsavers’ karaoke song murdering party. James was wishing very hard he’d reminded Laurence that striding over and introducing yourself to sultry strangers rarely went well. Not that it would have stopped him.

‘Wait, wait. Are you saying you came in here without your specs, but you literally shoulda gone to Specsavers?’ Laurence hooted.

Anna waited for him to finish laughing. James rolled his eyes in what he hoped came off as tacit apology.

‘Anyway. Australia!’ Laurence said. ‘Always quite fancied the Outback. James here says Oz is the choice of boring uncultured beer monsters, but I disagree.’

Oh my God, we’re playing good cop, bad cop now? You utter … James was going to have some words for Laurence when they left, not all pre-watershed.

‘Not exactly,’ James said.

Anna looked at him with burgeoning hostility.

‘James here works for a digital agency, lots of big impressive clients. And I’m in sales. Pharmaceutical sales. So if you’re fresh out of Anusol, I’m your man.’

‘Loz, how about we let Anna get to the right party?’ James said, hoping to redeem himself and halt the haemorrhoids chat. She scowled at him, as if he was trying to get rid of her.

‘I’ve got a better idea. Given this reunion has all the atmosphere of a Quaker quilting party, how about you smuggle us in to Beth’s do, and we buy you drinks by way of thank you?’

‘Loz!’ James said, sharply, writhing with embarrassment.

‘I think Beth might mind,’ Anna said.

‘Nah. Sounds like there’s karaoke in there? I do a belting “Summer of ’69”. Come on. Don’t you think it’d be a laugh?’