my dad still had to go in to oversee some maintenance work that was needed, but he said that I could go with him. He warned me that it would be dull, but I was keen to help. To be honest I was keen to do anything to get me out the house and away from my mum, who I knew would start harking on again about the days when I was happily married,” Charlie said raising her eyebrows slightly before eating some more of her salad.
“You found something at the school didn’t you?” Claire asked eagerly.
Charlie nodded and said; “I was in one of the classrooms with a bunch of desks that the teachers had identified as needing to be discarded. My job was to have a look at them and make sure that they really were at the end of their life. If they still had a couple more terms in them, I was under strict orders from my dad to put a sticker on them for them to be returned. It was pretty dull work, although it was quite amusing to read some of the graffiti on the desks. Messages either pencilled or penned onto the desk, or engraved into the wood with either a sharp pen or…”
“A compass,” Claire said interrupting Charlie and smiling reminiscently.
“Some of the messages seemed to act as a kind of timeline for certain pupils,” Charlie said; “and they detailed their relationships and melodramas.”
“What so there weren’t any I was ’ere messages, or I heart so and so?” Claire asked smiling.
“Well yeah, obviously, there were loads of those. Let’s face it kids from any generation aren’t very original, but I didn’t bother with those. My eyes fell on the more heartfelt messages, or the poems or quips that had been jotted down by previous pupils,” Charlie said.
Claire rolled her eyes at her.
“Anyway, as I was reading them, I came across one that said please speak to me. I don’t want to lose both my best friends. I was intrigued by it, and I wondered what that kid must have done to lose two best friends. Although for some reason,” Charlie said as Claire sat forward on her stool; “I was sure the message had been written by a boy.”
“I honestly don’t know why I thought that,” Charlie said; “but the more I looked at it, the more familiar that something about the handwriting became. Yet the more I tried to focus on the familiarity of it, the further away that feeling of familiarity seemed to go.”
Claire stared at her.
“I’d gotten so used to my doctor’s telling me not to force my memories,” Charlie said; “that I stopped obsessing over the familiarity and carried on reading the chain of messages that followed. The one below it read…”
“You haven’t lost me, but I can’t speak to you,” Claire said once again interrupting Charlie.
Charlie nodded appreciatively, and then she smiled at Claire and said; “nice memory!”
“Thanks,” Claire said inclining her head as Charlie gave her a silent round of applause. “Although I’m not sure that I can remember the other messages verbatim, but weirdly I can picture the desk you’re talking about. It was in the far left hand corner of Mrs Penwood’s class. Matt used to sit in it, and Rich sat in front of him in their English class. In our English class it was originally your desk and I sat in the one in front, but then you got moved for passing notes so I sat in it.”
Charlie nodded and smiled fondly at the memory.
“I used to read the messages that Matt wrote, and then pass them to you in a note by asking to borrow something from Rach. She always sat one desk behind you from the front because she couldn’t see the board from the back. Then you’d write what I should reply,” Claire said as the stream of memories came back to her.
Charlie laughed out loud and said; “yep. I remember that you told Rach when we were at middle school that she either got better glasses or we couldn’t be friends with her anymore, as you weren’t prepared to be associated with anyone that might be classified by any boy as a geek.”
Claire burst out laughing and said; “I was such a bitch! How did I have any friends aside from you?”
“Beats me,” Charlie said still laughing.
“Okay,” Claire said; “so you were reading the messages.”
“Yes. So I read your reply, and the ones that followed it, and I