‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ It was the
University Chancellor welcoming them back to the campus, telling them that
dinner would be served now and to look at the seating plan.
Maddie accepted a refill from
another waitress and walked towards the dining hall. She wasn’t exactly
scanning the room, but really, she realised, she was. Looking for a certain…
Maddie was suddenly accosted from
behind by a shrieking noise. ‘Maddie! Maddie Brown! I knew it would be you! I
would have spotted those legs a mile away. I remember them pedalling your bike
around the place – always late for lectures!’
It was Liz – from Yorkshire. They’d
done second-year Psychology together, sworn to keep in touch on graduation day,
then promptly gone off and led very different lives. There was no Facebook back
then to keep tabs on people or virtually stalk anyone. But they’d connected a
few years ago and were now ‘friends’ on Facebook – hence the invitation to the reunion.
‘How are you, Liz?’ Maddie kissed
her on the cheek and wondered quite how many foreign holidays she’d taken as
her skin resembled a leather boot. ‘Good to see you.’
They chatted for a while about life
now: Liz, four kids, owned a riding school – did Maddie ride? No? Well, there
was always a first time – two cats and a dog. Maddie filled Liz in on her only
son, Ed, who’d just finished sixth-form college, now in Bali on a gap year, her
life working at a school, her husband who was a wine salesman.
It all sounded so normal, didn’t it?
So plausible that she was that happily married woman. That she trod an entirely
different path to the one in her mind. Eventually, she looked behind Liz’s
shoulder to find an escape. As endearing as it was to listen to chat about the
menagerie chez Liz, Maddie wanted to meet more old pals. First though, she
nipped to the loo and checked her make-up. No, there was no lipstick on her
teeth, she just saw a frazzled-looking brunette with a lopsided fringe (cheap
hairdresser), hair piled up behind her with a few escaping russet tendrils,
wearing an emerald wrap-over jersey-knit dress – good for her bust, not great
for the belly. She sighed.
She pulled out some lip gloss and
reapplied it. That would do. Grin,
girl. She held her own gaze in the mirror for a while and then
swiftly turned around and went to the door.
As she was coming out of the
ladies’, a figure in the corner made her look twice. If she was honest, she had been thinking about him. It was hard
not to in that Great Hall, where even the familiar air of the place brought
memories skidding back to her frontal lobe.
She twisted a bit of her hair
between her fingers and remembered when she’d first seen him. He’d been down by
the beach, at Widemouth Bay. Surfing was his thing and she’d been there because
it was Freshers’ Week. She’d been with the Try-to-Surf Club, ten of them
giggling in the minibus before pouring out of the bus, heady with the sight of
the sea, comparing what their wetsuits would look like. (Without Facebook or
Insta, it was just sideways looks and memories. If you were lucky, a Post-it
left on your door or a number scribbled on a beer mat.)
Maddie had glanced over, seen the
muscly outline whilst she was getting her wetsuit on, and had stopped mid-yank,
halfway up her thigh. The musty neoprene remained clamped on her leg. She’d
stared at this man as a sensation unfurled in her lower belly; he was no boy.
Now she carefully tucked the loose
hair behind her ear with shaky fingers and scanned to the right again in the
dim corridor. There were two women talking in hushed tones. One of them had a
fascinator in her hair, an electric-blue fluffy creation, and the other was in
a tight black pencil skirt. They glanced at Maddie as she wandered past and she
caught a whiff of expensive perfume.
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