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.