Page 23 of The Reunion

To put a stop to this mad, selfish, innocent impulse.

But he throws his head back, laughing at something, and the spell is broken.

Nobody notices as we leave; I’m sure of it, because I brace myself for the playful jeers that I know some of our old friends and classmates haven’t quite grown out of – jokes they’d make about us leaving together and the chorus of ‘Oo-oo-ooh!’s.

But there’s nothing, and the doors swing shut behind Shaun, and the silence of the school corridor envelops us. A fluorescent lightbulb buzzes noisily overhead, and, for a moment, we stand facing each other, and I wonder if he feels as uncomfortable in his skin as I do right now.

Because while we aren’t doing anything wrong, I realise what feels so off about all this, and it’s me – as if my body is suddenly no longer mine, should be smaller and skinnier and younger. As if there’s too much in my mind, a life that doesn’t belong to me and feels just out of reach now. It could belong to a character from a book I spent all day reading avidly, or a dream, instead.

It’s like stepping back through the wardrobe and out of Narnia.

Looking up at Shaun, I don’t feel like the paralegal with her put-together life and wedding-venue booking and council-tax bills.

I’m seventeen years old, and know these corridors and classrooms like I know my own house, and my heart is too big for my chest.

‘Where should we go?’ I ask, and it is like I’m a teenager again, because the whole world feels so big – so open.

Shaun moves as if he’s about to take my hand, then thinks better of it, but the smile he gives me is warm and bright.

‘I think I know just the place.’

We fall into step easily and Shaun turns into the darkened hallway that leads to the maths and geography departments. The lights flicker on as we pass, bulbs humming to life overhead. I smile at the long radiator beneath a window that looks out into the little courtyard in the centre of the school; me and the girls would sit up on the windowsill, legs dangling over it, in the winter. It was our spot, and became Shaun and his friends’ spot after we started going out, too. In the window above it, I see the outline of some wooden picnic benches, which are new.

I point them out to Shaun and say, ‘They must not have PE lessons out there anymore.’

‘Huh. Guess not.’ It’s just dark enough outside that, with the lights on, our reflections are clearly visible in the window, and I see the nostalgic quality that Shaun’s face takes on. It’s a little bit sad. ‘Bryony mentioned they’ve got new tennis courts and stuff, too, and the old gym has been renovated. They’ve got stationary bikes and stuff now, too. And rowing machines.’

‘Bloody hell.’

He smirks. ‘I bet they’re still using the same grotty old copies of An Inspector Calls in English, though.’

‘Probably. How did Bryony know about that? The gym and stuff, I mean.’

Shaun shrugs. ‘Probably did a full tour of the building when she called up the head teacher to ask about hosting the reunion here.’

The mental picture makes me laugh, if only because it’s all too easy to imagine. Given the impressive extent she’s gone to with the decorations, I can absolutely see Bryony waltzing through the entire school before agreeing to use the hall – as if she were doing the school a favour, not the other way around. I wonder if it was as strange for her to come back as it is for some of us, when her reality must be so far removed.

We walk slowly, neither of us in a rush, and both too busy taking in the school to strike up conversation. There’s a faint musty smell that clings to the air – old books and damp and dust and too much disinfectant; the sort of smell we’d grow used to, but notice anew every time we came back from a half-term break or summer holiday. The classroom doors are still the same shade of cobalt with the little glass pane set at an adult’s eye level and covered in a black criss-cross pattern, but the nameplates on the doors are new. I don’t recognise most of them, and the names that should have been there from my school years scratch at the back of my memory, too far away to recall with any real clarity.

The maths rooms wind around the corner and I think about having to queue up in the corridor and wait for the teachers to let us in, or that one time I came back from a dentist appointment late in Year Ten. Mrs Macarthur made me stand out in the hall until she was ‘ready’ and told me off for disrupting the class and being late and disrespectful, which had made me cry because I didn’t mean to be late, and I had a note, and I wasn’t the type of girl to get in trouble with her teachers.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if she was just having a bad day.

I say, ‘Do you remember how weird it used to be to see a teacher outside of school? When you’d spot them out in the supermarket or something like that, and suddenly remember that they had whole lives outside of this place?’

Shaun’s chuckle reverberates off the walls, reminding me of the awful acoustics that made it feel so noisy between classes, which in turn always made you talk louder to your friends to be heard over the noise. ‘Yeah. Like they weren’t quite human, somehow. It’s the same way that parents never used to seem exactly like people, until …’

He trails off with a faraway look on his face and I make a soft noise of agreement. I don’t know when I started to think of my parents as ‘people’ in that sense, either.

‘It just feels strange,’ I say. ‘Like … everything used to be so insular, back then, and it’s jarring to realise it wasn’t ever really like that.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, and some of the unease and strangeness at this whole thing falls away. ‘But I still feel like I’m going to get in trouble.’

My stomach plummets to the ground and I picture Curtis charging after us to have a go at Shaun, even though I know he’d never do something like that.

‘What do you mean?’

If Shaun notices the rasp of my voice and the nerves in it, he’s polite enough to ignore it. He shrugs and explains, ‘Wandering around the school like this. Unsupervised, after hours. Makes me feel like I’m skiving off class or like I’ve snuck in on some dare and one of the teachers is going to leap out at me to tell me off and put me in detention – and remind me to tuck my shirt in properly while they’re at it.’

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