In a Dark, Dark Wood (2 page)

Answer
, I begged Nina in my head, as I was running in the park, or cooking my supper, or just staring into space. I thought about calling her. But I didn’t know what I wanted her to say.

And then, a few days later, I was sitting having breakfast and scrolling idly through twitter on my phone, when the ‘new email’ icon flashed.

It was from Nina.

I took a gulp of coffee and a deep breath, and clicked to open it.

From: Nina da Souza

To: Nora Shaw

Subject: Re: Hen???

Dude! Long time no chat. Just got yr email – I was on lates at the hospital. Christ, in all honesty it’s the last thing I want to do. I got the wedding invitation a while back but I was hoping I’d escaped the hen. R you going? Shall we make a pact? I’ll go if you go?

Nx

I drank my coffee while I looked at the screen, my finger hovering over ‘Reply’ but not quite clicking. I’d hoped Nina would answer at least some of the questions that had been buzzing and building in my head over the last few days. When was the wedding? Why invite me to the hen, but not the wedding? Who was she marrying?

Hey, do you know
… I started, and then deleted it. No. I couldn’t ask outright. It would be tantamount to admitting I hadn’t the first clue what was going on. I’ve always been too proud to admit to ignorance. I hate being at a disadvantage.

I tried to push the question to the bottom of my mind while I dressed and had a shower. But when I opened up my computer there were two more unread emails in my inbox.

The first was a regretful ‘no thanks’ from one of Clare’s friends, citing a family birthday.

The second was another email from Flo. This time she’d attached a read receipt.

To:
[email protected]

From: Florence Clay

Subject: Re: CLARE’S HEN!!!

Dear Lee,

Sorry to chase, but just wondering if you got my email the other day! I know it has been a while since you saw Clare, but she was
so
hoping you might be able to come. She often talks about you, and I know feels bad that you lost touch after school. I don’t know what happened, but she’d really
love
for you to be there – won’t you say yes?! It would really make her weekend complete.

Flo xxx

The email should have made me feel flattered – that Clare was so keen for me to be there, that Flo had gone to such trouble to track me down. But it didn’t. Instead I felt a surge of resentment at being nagged, and a sense of invaded privacy at the read receipt. It felt like being checked up on, spied upon.

I shut down the email and opened up the document I was working on, but even as I got down to it, pushing all thoughts of the hen determinedly from my mind, Flo’s words hung in the air like an echo, niggling at me.
I don’t know what happened.
It sounded like a plaintive child. No, I thought bitterly. You don’t. So don’t go prying into my past.

I had sworn never to go back.

Nina was different – Nina lived in London now, and she and I ran into each other occasionally around Hackney. She was as much part of my London life as my Reading one now.

But Clare – Clare was resolutely part of the past – and I wanted her to stay there.

And yet small part of me – a small nagging part, that pricked at my conscience – didn’t.

Clare had been my friend. My best friend, for a long time. And yet I’d run, without looking back, without even leaving a number. What kind of friend did that make me?

I got up restlessly and, for want of anything better to do, made another cup of coffee. I stood over the percolator while it hissed and gurgled, worrying at the side of my nail with my teeth and thinking about the ten years since I’d last seen her. When at last the machine had finished I poured myself a cup, and carried it back to my desk, but I didn’t start work again. Instead I opened up google and tapped in ‘Clare Cavendish facebook’.

There were a lot of Clare Cavendishes, it turned out, and the coffee had gone cold before I found one that I thought might be her. The profile picture was a snap of a couple in Doctor Who fancy dress. It was hard to tell beneath the straggling red wig, but there was something about the way the girl was throwing her head back and laughing that made me stop, as I scrolled down the endless list. The man was dressed as Matt Smith, with floppy hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. I clicked on the picture to enlarge it and stared at the two of them for a long time, trying to make out her features beneath the trailing red hair, and the more I looked the more I thought it
was
Clare. The man I definitely didn’t recognise, I was sure of that.

I clicked on the ‘about’ tab. Under ‘Mutual friends’ it said ‘Nina da Souza’. Definitely Clare. And under the ‘relationship’ header, it said ‘in a relationship with William Pilgrim.’ The name made me do a slight double take. It seemed familiar in some indefinable way. Someone from school? But the only William in our year had been Will Miles.
Pilgrim
. I couldn’t remember anyone called Pilgrim. I clicked on the profile picture, but it was an anonymous shot of a half-full pint glass.

I went back to Clare’s profile picture, and as I looked at it, trying to work out what to do, Flo’s email echoed inside my head:
she’d so
love for you to be there. She often talks about you
.

I felt something squeeze at my heart. A kind of guilt, maybe.

I had left without looking back; shell-shocked, reeling, and for a long time I’d concentrated on putting one foot in front of another, keeping going, keeping the past firmly behind me.

Self-preservation: that was all I could manage. I hadn’t allowed myself to think of everything I’d left behind.

But now Clare’s eyes met mine, peering out flirtatiously from beneath the red wig, and I thought I saw something pleading in her eyes, something reproachful.

I found myself remembering. Remembering the way she could make you feel like a million dollars, just by picking you out of a crowded room. Remembering her low, gurgling laugh, the notes she’d pass in class, her wicked sense of humour.

I remembered sleeping over on her bedroom floor aged maybe six, my first time away from home, lying there listening to the soft purr of her night-time breath. I’d had a nightmare, and wet the bed and Clare – Clare had hugged me and given me her own bear to cuddle while she crept into the airing cupboard to get new sheets, and hid the others in the laundry basket.

I heard her mother’s voice on the landing, low and groggy, asking what was going on, and Clare’s swift reply: ‘I knocked over my milk mummy, it made Lee’s bed all wet.’

For a second I was back there, twenty years ago, a small frightened girl. I could
smell
the scent of her bedroom – the fustiness of our night breath, the sweetness of the bath pearls in a glass jar on her window sill, the fresh laundry smell of the clean sheets.

‘Don’t tell anyone’ I whispered as we tucked the new sheets in, and I hid my wet pyjama bottoms in my case. She shook her head.

‘Of course not.’

And she never did.

I was still sitting there when my computer gave a faint ping, and another email popped up. It was from Nina.
What’s the plan then? Flo is chasing. Yes to the pact? Nx
I got up and paced to the door, feeling my fingers prickle with the stupidity of what I was about to do. Then I paced back and before I could change my mind, I typed out, Ok. Deal. xx.

Nina’s reply came back an hour later.
Wow! Don’t take this the wrong way but gotta say, I’m surprised. In a good way I mean. Deal it is. Don’t even think about letting me down. Remember, I’m a doctor. I know at least 3 ways to kill you without leaving a trace. Nx

I took a deep breath, pulled up the original email from Flo, and began to type.

Dear Florence (Flo?)

I would love to come. Please thank Clare for thinking of me. I look forward to meeting up with you all in Northumberland and catching up with Clare.

Warm wishes, Nora (but Clare will know me as Lee). PS best to use this email address for any updates. The other one is not checked as regularly.

After that the emails came thick and fast. There was a flurry of regretful reply-all ‘nos’ – all citing the short notice.
Away that weekend … So sorry, I’ve got to work … Family memorial service …
(Nina:
It’ll be a funeral for the next person who abuses the ‘reply all’ button.) I’m afraid I’ll be snorkelling in Cornwall!
(Nina:
Snorkelling? In November? She couldn’t think up a better excuse? Man, if I’d known the bar was that low I’d have said I was stuck down a mine in Chile or something.
)

More work. More pre-engagements. And in between, a few acceptances.

At last the list was set. Clare Flo Melanie Tom (Nina’s reply back to me:??? Nina Me.

Just six people. It didn’t seem many for someone as popular as Clare. At least, as popular as she’d been at school. But it
was
short notice.

Was that why she’d invited me? To make up numbers, on what she knew would be a barrel-scraping do? But no, that wasn’t Clare, or not the Clare I once knew. The Clare I knew would have invited
exactly
who she wanted and spun it as soooo exclusive that only a handful of people were allowed to come.

I pushed the memories aside, burying them under a blanket of routine. But they kept surfacing – halfway through a run, in the middle of the night, whenever I was least expecting it.

Why, Clare? Why now?

2

NOVEMBER CAME ROUND
frighteningly quickly. I did my best to push the whole thing to the back of my mind and concentrate on work, but it became harder and harder as the weekend approached. I ran longer routes, trying to make myself as tired as possible when I went to bed, but as soon as my head hit the pillow, the whispers started.
Ten years. After everything that happened
. Was this a huge mistake?

If it hadn’t been for Nina, I would have backed out but somehow, come the 14th, there I was: bag in hand, stepping off the train at Newcastle into a cold, sour morning, with Nina beside me, smoking a roll-up and grumbling for England as I bought coffee from the kiosk on the station platform. This was her third hen of the year (drag on cigarette), she’d spent the best part of five hundred quid on the last one (drag), and this one would be more like a grand once you took into account the wedding itself (exhale). Honestly, she’d rather write them a cheque for a ton and save herself the annual leave. And please, as she ground the butt out under her narrow heel, remind her again why she couldn’t bring Jess?

‘Because it’s a hen night,’ I said. I scooped up the coffee and followed Nina towards the car-park sign. ‘Because the whole point is to leave partners at home. Otherwise why not bring the fucking groom and have done with it?’

I never swear much, except with Nina. She brings it out of me somehow, like this sweary inner me is in there, waiting to be let out.

‘Do you still not drive?’ Nina asked as we swung our cases into the back of the hired Ford. I shrugged.

‘It’s one of the many basic skills of life I’ve never mastered. Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise to me.’ She folded her long legs into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and stuck the keys in the ignition. ‘I hate being driven. Driving is like karaoke – your own is epic, other people’s is just embarrassing or alarming.’

‘Well … it’s just, you know … living in London, a car seems like a luxury rather than a necessity. Don’t you think?’

‘I use Zipcar to visit Mum and Dad.’

‘Well.’ I looked out of the window as Nina let in the clutch. We did a brief bunny hop across the station car park before she sorted it out. ‘Australia’s a bit of a trek in a Volvo.’

‘Oh, God, I forgot your mum emigrated. With … what’s his name? Your stepdad?’

‘Philip,’ I said. Why do I always feel like a sulky teenager when I say his name? It’s a perfectly normal name.

Nina shot me a sharp look, and then jerked her head at the sat-nav.

‘Stick that on, would you, and put in the postcode Flo gave us. It’s our only hope of getting out of Newcastle town centre alive.’

Westerhope, Throckle, Stanegate, Haltwhistle, Wark … the signs flashed past like a sort of poetry, the road unfurling like an iron-grey ribbon flung across the sheep-cropped moors and low hills. The sky overhead was clouded and huge, but the small stone buildings that we passed at intervals sat huddled into the dips in the landscape, as if they were afraid of being seen. I didn’t have to navigate, and reading in a car makes me feel sick and strange, so I closed my eyes, shutting out Nina and the sound of the radio, alone in my own head with the questions that were nagging there.

Why me, Clare? Why now?

Was it just that she was getting married and wanted to rekindle an old friendship? But if so, why hadn’t she invited me to the wedding? She’d invited Nina, clearly, so it couldn’t be a family-only ceremony or anything like that.

She shook her head in my imagination, admonishing me to be patient, to wait. Clare always did like secrets. Her favourite passtime was finding out something about you and then hinting at it. Not spreading it around – just veiled references in conversation, references that only you and she understood. References that
let you know.

We stopped in Hexham for lunch, and a cigarette break for Nina, and then pushed on towards Kielder Forest, out into country lanes, where the sky overhead became huge. But as the roads grew narrower the trees seemed to come closer, edging across the close-cropped peaty turf until they stood sentinel at the roadside, held back only by a thin drystone wall.