Old Friends

Written in class in response to a prompt from the Writing Lesson Plan: All Change

It was probably a mistake to arrange the meeting at a major shopping complex, but it had been geographically convenient. ‘We’ll meet at the clock’ they had said. So , apparently had the rest of Kent and Essex. As time inched on, without anyone vaguely recognisable turning up, Kate took the bull by the horns.

‘Excuse me, are you Alison?’ she asked her immediate neighbour, a lady of approximately the right age. No reply. She moved on. ‘Excuse me…’ But the lady thus accosted moved away, rather promptly. The next ‘Excuse me, are you waiting for…’ elicited an abrupt ‘No.’

One more try, she thought, looking for someone with some resemblance to the girl she had been best friends with, all those years ago.

‘Would you be Alison?’ she began, but was stopped by a tap on her shoulder. She turned to a large lady wrapped in several layers of none too clean shawls.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I overheard. I’m an Alison. You can’t be Catherine can you?’

‘I can,’ she said ‘Kate now, though.’

Kate could see the wheels turning in the large lady’s brain, trying to associate the form before her with the Catherine she had known.

‘Catherine the Great?’ asked Alison

‘Twice as wide as she is high!’ responded Kate.

‘Good grief, it is you!’ cried Alison, ‘Where did the rest of you go?’

It was a fair comment, she was tiny now, in a trendy little leather skirt and bomber jacket. Alison would remember her lumbering podgily down the hockey field in shit-brown skirt-shorts. Not a pretty sight. She’d realised that as soon as she left school, shed all her weight – four stones of it, and started looking after herself.

‘Well!’ said Alison. ‘I can’t say you haven’t changed.’

‘Nor you!’

Kate suddenly felt worried. Would that sound rude? Alison, once the Sports’ Captain and all-round popular icon, was now, well, frumpy. You could hardly call her groomed – even a Pets’ Parlour would have a bit of trouble sorting out that mane of frizzy grey hair, half plaited into an untidy tail that tumbled over one shoulder. Alison, she remembered, had always been very edgy about comments on her appearance.

‘Well that’s true enough! I certainly have changed,’ guffawed this new Alison. ‘C’mon, girl, I’m dying for a coffee and cake.’

Cake? Whole-food loving, diet fanatic Alison, eating cake? But here she was, sitting behind hot chocolate with marshmallows, wielding a fork laden with a triple layer caramel fudge cake, with extra cream! Did her own double espresso, black, of course, look as though she was trying to make a point?

‘What are you doing now, then?’ barked Alison.

‘Well, I work for an accountant.’

‘Ha! PA? Knew it, you were OK at Maths.’

‘Actually, I’m not. I’m his personal designer.’

‘Designer? You? You were hopeless at Art!’

‘Not the same thing. I advise on décor – his home, office.’

‘Crikey, must be some accountant to have that…’

‘Actually, I’m head of a team...’

‘Oh I see, not just an accountant, more of a plutocrat.’

‘You could say so…’

‘I was joking! Is he really that high up?’

‘As high as you can go!’

‘Well!’

Silence reigned. Alison ingested more cake. Kate felt that she should try to instigate some conversation, but, to be honest, there was nothing much that she wanted to say. She couldn’t believe that this was Alison – the Alison who had shared all her angsts and anxieties and joys when they were 14. Ask about something from when they were young, she thought, her conscience needling her.

‘You went to training college after school, didn’t you?’ she said.

‘For a year,’ laughed Alison. ‘Not for me, though. Couldn’t face the idea of spending the rest of my life in a school.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Found a chap, got myself pregnant – quite deliberately I might add, went off to a croft in the Orkneys, and farmed for the next 20 years.’

‘Oh.’ Kate couldn’t think of anything else to say. She hated animals, and the dirt, and the cold, and untidiness.

‘It was interesting,’ said Alison. ‘Didn’t last though.’

No, thought Kate, I don’t suppose it did. Looking at Alison, she couldn’t imagine any man staying with this heap, this great fat bundle of rags, who was now fishing marshmallows out of the very bottom of her chocolate glass – with her fingers!

‘Left him.’

What? SHE left HIM?

‘…and?’

‘Oh, I managed. Did you marry?’

It was a sore point. She’d been engaged for twenty-five years, but eventually he had left for a younger model.

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

This was going nowhere, they had absolutely no connection at all.

At the same moment, they both looked at their watches, then shrugged and laughed.

‘Oh well, not all childhood friendships last,’ said Kate.

‘No,’ said Alison. ‘But you should know, I did write about it, our friendship, I mean. Here, if you fancy a read…’

And she bundled herself together and left.

Kate looked at the book on the table. ‘From Lamb to Sheep’ it was called. ’A Memoir of Childhood’ by A. A. Atkins. A. A. Atkins? THE A. A. Atkins? The writer of the most hilarious, the most scurrilous and wicked TV comedy show ‘A Shetland Saga’?

Kate didn’t know if she wanted to read it or not.