‘Maybe she died, ever thought of that?’
‘I’d have heard. Someone would have let one of us know.’
‘Not necessarily. Sounds intriguing,’ said Nicholas. ‘Aren’t you curious?’
‘To be truthful, I haven’t given her much thought for a long time, but now I’m talking about her, yes, I suppose I am curious.’ Had she tried to contact me? I wondered. Perhaps a message from her got lost in the black hole of social media?
‘She’s possibly not in the UK then,’ said Nicholas, ‘because you would’ve been hard to miss for the last few decades, unless she’s not got a TV. But people don’t just disappear in this day and age, unless she ran off with Lord Lucan.’
‘Sounds about right for Mitch. She’d have done something exceptional. Even the commune, austere as it sounded, was out of the ordinary.’
‘Why don’t you use your newly won spare time to track her down as well as visit Ally and Jo? There are no friends as precious as old ones, and I can’t keep an eye on you every day.’ He sighed, slumped his shoulders and looked weary. ‘I need to share the load.’
I thumped him. ‘Stop it.’
He sat back up and smiled. ‘Seriously, are you coping OK?’
‘Trying not to panic. I have to find something soon or I won’t be able to make the mortage payments, but it’s not just that, what’s happened has given me time to reflect on the fact that I’m going into a new period of life. What do I want now? Who am I now?’
‘Look up your old friends,’ said Nicholas, ‘and ditch the existential crisis, it’s so last century.’
I laughed. ‘OK, it’s ditched. Top of the list – call Ally and Jo and start to track down Mitch.’ These old friends had been my morning, noon and night in my younger days. I knew I’d let things slip, but I was going to try and change that, starting now.
Chapter Five
As I walked home, I thought back to when I first met Ally, Jo and Mitch.
We went to the same convent grammar school and quickly found each other as like-minded spirits amongst the other new girls. Mitch stood out from the beginning; she wore her skirts too short and was always in trouble with the nuns for wearing lip-gloss or mascara. Ally stood out too. She seemed older than the rest of us, the grown-up in our gang, so composed, feet firmly on the ground and always self-assured. She never worried about fitting in and the latest fads or fashions. She was the middle child to two sisters, both boisterous: the elder one sarcastic, the younger beautiful. Ally, being more reserved, escaped from the pair of them into the world of books from an early age. Jo was a sweetheart from day one, one of life’s givers, too much so, in fact – she was always a sucker for a sob story, a puppy in need of rescue or an abandoned kitten. She cried if she came across a bird with a broken wing, couldn’t bear to think anyone was lonely or sad. She was funny too. All were good friends to have.
Those were innocent days. We used to hold sleepovers at each other’s houses, though mainly at Jo’s. We were always welcome there because she was an only child, and her parents were more than happy that she had friends. We spent hours talking about music and boy bands. My favourites were the Small Faces, Jo had a crush on Marc Bolan from Tyrannosaurus Rex, Mitch had a poster of Jim Morrison from The Doors on her wall, and in our first year at school, Ally liked Davy Jones from The Monkees, whom she claimed to love with a love that was true. We told her to keep quiet about that but she didn’t care. Mitch always seemed to be a few steps ahead – first to get her period, first to get a bra, then later a love bite, which got her into trouble when Mother Christina discovered it when checking name tags sewn in on the back of our school uniform.
Saturdays we’d go into town, hang out in Miss Selfridge and Chelsea Girl, trying on clothes that none of us could afford because our parents weren’t rich; then we’d head off to the wig department to try new hairstyles and hats and drive the shop assistants mad. Next was the perfume department to sample all the scents and, lastly, the lingerie department, where the lace and silk looked so much more appealing than the navy blue knickers we had to wear for school.
Once past puberty, we began to think about boys; there were endless earnest discussions about love and what we were going to do with our lives – careers or children? We got little sex education from the nuns. They told us two things about relationships. Firstly, if a boy wanted you to sit on his knee at a party, it was permissible as long as you placed a book at least the thickness of a telephone directory between his legs and your bottom. Secondly, again at a party, if anyone switched the lights off, we were to go to the nearest corner and shout, ‘I’m a Catholic.’ We thought that was hilarious because convent girls had a reputation as goers back then and shouting, ‘I’m a Catholic’ would only have alerted all the lads to where the game girls were. In my case, the racy reputation was unfounded. I was as green
