‘I am, actually. I want the distraction.’ I kept my tone light. ‘It’ll be easier than moping around the house all day.’
Carla nodded. As always, she understood.
September 21st. My daughter Lauren’s twelfth birthday.
The last birthday she had lived to celebrate was her fifth. I’d hired the soft-play at the leisure centre and Lauren and twenty of her friends had spent the afternoon jumping up and down on the giant, plastic-covered foam shapes and bouncy castle until their party dresses were dirty and ripped. During those two hours I’d sat back and watched the fickle world of the five-year-old in action. Allegiances had been won and lost, leaders of different soft-play fiefdoms had been created and usurped, jealousies nurtured and petty grievances cried over. I’d put Lauren’s hair into a French plait and tied the bottom of it with a blue velvet ribbon, but after just half an hour in the soft-play, the plait had come loose and her fine brown curls had wisped in the clammy air.
I took another glug of champagne, my throat bulging uncomfortably in its bid to deal with such a large amount of liquid all at once.
‘Steady on,’ said Carla, taking the bottle from me. ‘We’ve got all night.’
Carla. She was my closest friend in the North-East and, until I’d met her, I had to admit that I’d found forming bonds here to be a tricky business.
Back in Kent, my friends had all been people that I’d grown up and gone to school with. They’d been there when I’d become a single mum at an age when I should have known better and they’d been there when Lauren had first gone missing, staying by my side throughout all the days, weeks and months that followed. With them, there had never been any need to explain or recount or tell, they just knew. But then I met Jason. Everyone had encouraged me to move north to be with him, away from everything that had happened. So I did what they said. I moved. I started again. However, it didn’t take me long to realise that adding friends to this new life was going to be more difficult than I’d bargained for.
What happened to my daughter now defines who I am. I’m not sorry about that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. She was everything. But, because of this, whenever I meet someone who could be a potential friend, it’s impossible to answer even the simplest questions about myself – what I do, who I’m married to, whether I have any kids – without also having to tell them my whole story at the same time.
At first, I would just blurt it all out. Be matter-of-fact about it right from the off. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this was too much to expect someone to take in all at once. It was as though my situation required such an initial rush of intimacy – a bit like having an emotional one-night stand – that it was then impossible for the friendship to grow from there in the way that it normally would. And so, after a few unsuccessful attempts at making friends, I tried a different tack, deliberately not mentioning anything about Lauren until I’d got to know the person better. It felt like I was carrying a ticking bomb, but it seemed to work. Until I finally came clean, that is. Then, they would always try to be sympathetic and nice, but it was obvious they felt like they’d been misled and, after a polite few weeks, they would stop returning my calls and emails.
With Carla though, it had been different.
I’d landed my job with Bullingdon’s a month after I’d moved in with Jason and, although I’d done a lot of work in sales before, this was the first gig that had required me to spend most of my day at the wheel. A few weeks in and my shoulders had locked up so badly that I was unable to turn my head from side to side without whimpering in pain. I booked to see an osteopath and that osteopath turned out to be Carla. Divorced and in her early fifties, she was spindle-thin, six feet tall and had spiral black hair shot through with hot pink streaks (she changed the colour of her streaks on an almost monthly basis). With an uncanny ability to read people’s bodies (her fingers could feel out the