Second Chance Read online

  She half hoped Paul would know. Paul does not know; she must now be the one to tell him.

  ‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid,’ Holly says, her voice dropping. ‘It’s Tom.’ She waits to hear whether Paul might know.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes. You know he and Sarah live in Boston. He was on a business trip to New York, and he was on the train that was bombed…’ Her voice is remarkably calm. She was expecting to burst into tears again, but if grief is indeed a process, then perhaps this is the first part of the process, that you are able to be the bearer of the worst news you have ever had to give anyone in your life, and you are able to give it with pathos and sadness and without breaking down in floods of tears.

  There is a gasp and a long silence.

  ‘You mean he’s dead?’ Paul’s shock comes down the phone in waves.

  ‘Yes. Tom’s dead.’

  Another long silence. Then a whisper. ‘I don’t believe it.’ There are a few muffled moments as Paul turns away from the phone. When he comes back, his voice is already starting to break. ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ he says, and puts down the phone.

  An hour later he rings again.

  ‘I don’t know when the funeral is,’ Holly says.

  ‘It’s family only,’ Paul tells her. ‘Saffron spoke to Tom’s dad. He said they knew how many people wanted to come, so they decided to do two memorial services. There’s one in America, I think, and then the one here at the family church that’s open to everyone, because they’re keeping the funeral private. So the service is on the thirtieth. I thought maybe we could all go together. I’ve spoken to Olivia and Saffron’s flying over. I know this is crazy, that none of us have seen each other in years, but I just want us all to be together again. I thought maybe we could all have dinner the night before…’

  ‘Yes,’ Holly says quietly. ‘That’s a wonderful idea. I’d love you to come here.’

  ‘Then we will,’ Paul says. ‘October the twenty-ninth?’

  ‘October the twenty-ninth,’ Holly repeats. ‘I’ll see you then.’

  Paul puts the phone down in the cradle, not noticing how much it is clattering, how his hand is shaking uncontrollably.

  He makes his way from the desk to the sofa, numb, not aware that the kettle is still whistling on the stove, that he hasn’t saved the piece he was working on when he took a break to call Holly, that it is quite possible, given how his computer has been playing up recently, he will lose the damned thing, but he doesn’t do anything other than sit on the sofa and stare into space.

  His thoughts are a jumble. The phone rings and he can’t move, can’t pick it up. It was all he could do to call the others, but he had to, had to do something before he could call Holly back. But he hears Anna’s voice on the phone as she starts to leave a message and he rushes over, the safety and familiarity of hearing the woman he loves bringing him back just for a moment.

  ‘Hey!’ Anna says as he picks up. ‘Where were you? I thought you were going to be stuck to your desk for the whole afternoon. I got your message. Is everything okay?’

  ‘I…’ He doesn’t know how to say it, how to fit his mouth around the words.

  There is a silence and Anna takes a sharp intake of breath, knowing suddenly that there is something terribly wrong.

  ‘What it is, Paul? What is the matter? What has happened?’

  ‘It’s Tom,’ he says, his voice flatter and darker than Anna has ever heard it. ‘He was on that train in America. He’s dead.’

  Another sharp intake from Anna, and then her business side takes over. ‘Stay where you are,’ she commands. ‘I am coming home now.’

  Anna walks in to find Paul exactly where he was after they spoke on the phone. He is sitting on the sofa, still in his boxers and the T-shirt he slept in last night, a shower now the last thing on his mind, and he is staring at the wall.

  He looks up slowly as Anna rushes over, and she is speechless at the shock and pain in his eyes. They look at each other as Anna sinks down next to him and puts her arms around him, and for a while he just leans his head on her shoulder as she strokes his back, too raw to cry, too raw to do anything other than stay right here where it is safe and warm and good.

  The girls’ school where Holly, Saffron and Olivia met sits high up on a hill in one of London’s leafier suburbs.

  ST CATHERINE’S PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS says the sign outside. Although if you drive past at 3.20 p.m. on a weekday, you won’t see the sign for the swarms of girls, large and small, identically dressed in burgundy pleated skirts and white shirts, the little ones bundled up in hats and scarves, the older, cooler ones thinking they can’t be seen, sprawling on the bench under the gazebo around the corner, cigarettes in hand as they give disapproving mothers the evil eye, resplendent in their teenage truculence.

  Nestled in the valley of the leafy suburbs, a few streets away, is St Joseph’s private school for boys, yang to St Catherine’s yin, home of St Catherine’s male counterparts, recipients of thousands of schoolgirl crushes over the years.

  St Catherine’s girls and St Joseph’s boys were destined to be together. Some of the more rebellious girls got in with a crowd from Kingsgate, the comprehensive in Kilburn, but what was the point in travelling so far when all the choral societies, all the fairs, all the parties and social events occurred between St Catherine’s and St Joseph’s?

  There was even a rumour that Mrs Lederer, the steely-eyed, firm-but-fair headmistress of St Catherine’s, had been having an affair for several years with Mr Foster-Stevens, the steely-eyed, firm-but-fair headmaster of St Joseph’s, but nobody had ever been able to prove it, although Adam Buckmaster in lower fifth swore blind he saw them snogging after the schools’ joint performance of The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Holly had been a late starter when it came to boys. The other girls in her class had seemed to discover them at around twelve, but Holly, apart from a crush on Donny Osmond when she was a little girl, had not really understood what all the fuss was about. Olivia, her best friend since they had started senior school, was exactly the same; and both of them were slightly worried about Saffron, who had always been just like them but in the last six months had started going to Kensington Market for black-leather, impossibly pointed shoes, and had sewn her school skirt so tight it was less of a hobble skirt and more of a straitjacket.

  Saffron, while still their best friend out of school, had started getting in with a crowd that already wore make-up, already had boyfriends, and met up after school every day with a gang from St Joseph’s, usually going to someone’s house for games of spin the bottle or just to listen to LPs – Madness, Police, David Bowie – in someone’s bedroom while a disinterested mother sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a cigarette, chatting on the phone to a friend, unaware and probably not caring what a group of eight teenage boys and girls were doing behind a locked bedroom door.

  And then came Saffron’s birthday. Her fifteenth. Her parents had let her rent out a youth club, and she was determined to have the best party anyone had ever seen. Someone’s older brother was doing the music, friends of said older brother were going to be bouncers because there had already been three parties that year at the youth club and teenagers from all over the area had come, whether invited or not, and a couple had got slightly out of control. (Nothing beat the story of Matt Elliott, who had a party while his parents were away, and gatecrashers burnt down the staircase. Matt Elliott wouldn’t be coming to Saffron’s party – he’d been grounded for a year, and this was England, where they didn’t even really know what grounded meant.)

  Holly and Olivia were in almost-matching outfits of grey ra-ra skirts, pink off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and striped leg warmers with – oh thank you, Mum! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mum! –jazz shoes. Real, proper jazz shoes from Pineapple Dance Studios that everyone wanted but nobody had.

  Holly went to Olivia’s house, was staying the night, in fact, and they each curled the other’s hair – n
ot for the boys, you understand, but in a bid to look exactly like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.

  ‘You look fantastic,’ Olivia breathed to Holly after she’d finished singeing her hair with her mother’s curling iron, not to mention burning her own hand three times as she attempted to curl Holly’s hair without touching the bloody thing.

  ‘So do you!’ Holly had grinned, and they’d put on the soundtrack to the film and practised their dance routine to Irene Cara’s ‘Fame’ in front of Olivia’s mirrored bedroom wall.

  The hall of the youth club was so dark it was almost impossible to see anything. As promised, Saffron had rigged up the disco ball, which spun slowly – small squares of light rotating around the room, illuminating the groups of people who had gathered in corners. In one were the bitchy girls. In another, the mixed group of boys and girls who met after school, each of them having a boyfriend/girlfriend, some of them already ‘getting off’ with one another, not needing to wait for the slow songs. Duran Duran was quite romantic enough.

  The bouncers turned out to be ineffective. It seemed the entire lower fifth year from St Joseph’s showed up, many without invitations. And got in. They stood at the side of the room eyeing up the girls, putting on macho displays, a group of male peacocks strutting around showing their feathers as the girls giggled and played along.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’ Holly had been sitting with Olivia, and she looked up into sweet, eager brown eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ Holly said awkwardly, turning to Olivia with a grin and a shrug as if to ask, What could I say? Self-consciously she followed the boy onto the dance floor, relieved the room was as dark as it was, knowing that every eye was upon them, that she would be the centre of attention tomorrow, and finally having a slight understanding of what it is to be a girl, what it is to attract boys, and how addictive that feeling of power is.

  ‘I’m Tom,’ he said, bopping in front of her.

  ‘I’m Holly,’ she said, switching feet, hoping she looked cool.

  ‘I know.’ He grinned. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ Pause for a few seconds. ‘Where?’

  ‘Just around.’

  They danced to Adam Ant, Michael Jackson and Human League. And then ‘Every Breath You Take’ by Police came on. Tom raised an eyebrow and opened his arms, and Holly wrapped hers around him.

  Together they stood, barely moving, rocking gently from side to side, and Holly had never felt so safe before, wrapped tightly in someone’s arms, her head resting on someone else’s shoulder.

  Through Culture Club, then Lionel Richie, then Christopher Cross, Holly and Tom didn’t move. Holly felt as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment, and in a flash of light she knew what everyone was talking about. She understood about boys. She understood about love. And by the end of the night she knew that Tom Fitzgerald was her soulmate.

  When Tom asked for her phone number, she thought she would burst with happiness. He phoned the next day, and they talked for an hour and a half. An hour and a half! She gleefully reported every sentence of their conversation to Olivia, who felt slightly left out and didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about. And so Holly turned to Saffron, and soon Holly and Saffron were sitting on the phone every night talking about either Tom or his best friend, Paul, whom Saffron conveniently fancied.

  It didn’t strike Holly as odd that Tom and she never kissed. She knew it was only a matter of time. What they did was talk. And laugh. They, and soon a large group of them, would go out every weekend. Saturday afternoons they would jump on a train and go out to the country. Someone’s parent would drop them off at the theatre. They’d meet up at the park and just sit on the swings for hours, a curious mix of adult and child, trying to act older than their years, yet still young enough to shriek with laughter as they squeezed down a slide designed for those far smaller and younger.

  Soon, Holly’s crush on Tom dissipated. Daniel joined the group – taller, louder, funnier than Tom – and within weeks Holly and Daniel were propped up against every available wall, snogging for hours. Holly, lying between Daniel’s legs on a sofa at someone’s party on a Saturday night, felt so grown-up, so sophisticated.

  Tom became her best friend. When Daniel dumped Holly for Lisa, one of the bitchier girls in her class, Tom was the one who comforted Holly, confessing that he had fancied Holly when they first met but that now he was glad they were just friends, especially since he’d recently started going out with Isabelle.

  And of course Holly, who had got over Tom completely, found herself developing a major crush on him again. Except by the time he and Isabelle split up, she found herself going out with Dom Parks, and she and Tom drifted apart for a while – he and Dom Parks mixing in totally different crowds. By the time Holly and Tom rediscovered their friendship, A levels were looming and they both knew one another far too well for there to be anything between them other than friendship.

  Olivia was a slow starter. She was more interested in animals than boys, but eventually, in the fifth form, as they were preparing for their O levels, she developed a crush on her maths tutor. Ben was a first-year student at UCL, only three years older than Olivia, but a maths genius whose mother was a friend of Olivia’s mother, hence the tutoring arrangement that Olivia was initially furious about.

  Furious until Ben walked in. Quiet. Studious. Gentle. Olivia finally realized what everyone else had been talking about, and for the next two years she carried the weight of her crush in her heart, fantasizing about Ben turning to her over the calculator and admitting he’d fallen in love with her, dreaming of the day when Ben would see her as someone other than his little O level maths student.

  The day finally came in the upper sixth. She had passed her maths O level with a B and had run out of excuses to see Ben. Her mother mentioned one day that she had to go over to see Ben’s mother and that he was down from uni, and Olivia jumped in the car, desperate to show him how grown-up she was, how much she had changed, and how perfect she would be for him.

  And he noticed. Noticed that this was a young woman standing awkwardly in the hallway of his house and not the child he had last seen two years previously. He noticed and he liked, and when they went into the den to chat about school and university he was surprised at how easy she was to talk to, how sweet she seemed.

  He took her to a movie that weekend and then out to the Queen’s Arms for a drink a couple of nights later. Olivia invited him to a party that weekend, slightly apprehensive about Ben meeting her friends, worried he would find them too young, but after he told her how much he liked them, he kissed her, and Olivia floated up to her A levels on a cloud of joy.

  They all studied together for their A levels. At the local library, Holly, Olivia, Saffron, Tom, Paul, and sometimes a couple of others, Ian and Pete, would grab a table upstairs, throw their books open and whisper to one another as they worked, all moving downstairs mid-morning, like a wave, to go to the local Italian coffee shop for cappuccinos and Silk Cut King Size.

  Over twenty years ago and Holly remembers it as if it were yesterday. She remembers when they first met, when Holly loved Tom and knew that there would never be another Tom, how Tom and Paul had the same jacket in different colours. They had, in fact, bought them together one Sunday morning down at Camden Market, the five of them weaving their way through the crowds on Chalk Farm Road, cool, confident, indestructible.

  Tom’s jacket was navy. Paul’s was green. Holly’s heart used to lift when she saw Tom’s jacket. Just a glimpse of navy in those early days would send her heart soaring, stick a smile on her face that seemed to last for weeks.

  Holly remembers how Tom used to smile at her across the desk as they worked in the library. Sometimes she’d be buried in revision and she’d look up and catch Tom’s eye and he’d grin; and even then, even when she was over her crush, knew that Tom probably wasn’t the one for her, no longer spent nights crying in her bed as she listened over and over again to the soundtrack for Endless Love
, even then she knew that whatever she and Tom had, it was special.

  And thought that, maybe, at some point in the future they would find one another again.

  Holly spreads the photos out on the floor and starts to move them around, sifting through for the photos from school, photos of Tom, needing to see him again, if only in a photograph.

  She pulls one from the pile. It’s Tom and some girl. Holly doesn’t even remember who she was, only that she never liked the girl very much. Holly had been at Tom’s flat when she had seen the photo; it was during one of her phases when she had been in love with Tom, but gently, one of the resigned phases when she didn’t expect anything to happen, had been there so many times before only to have it pass. She had seen the photo and had demanded to have it because Tom looked so handsome, smiling next to the girl she hadn’t liked. He looked almost model-like, and Holly had been so proud of knowing him.

  Tom had cracked up laughing when Holly had said she was taking it. ‘I’m going to cut her out and stick me in instead,’ she had said with an evil glint, and Tom had shaken his head as if he didn’t know what to do with Holly, which he didn’t. She was, in turn, funny, delightful, warm, wise, insufferable, jealous, insecure and impossible. He loved her but didn’t know how he could live with her. He loved her but wasn’t in love with her.

  Not today, at least.

  She just was.

  Holly Mac.

  A fact of his life.

  Someone who would always be a part of him.

  As he would always be a part of her.

  Holly gathers all the photos of Tom and stares at them, one by one, thinking back, emerging from her reverie to answer a ringing phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Holly?’ It’s a familiar voice. A voice from a long time ago. It swims back through her consciousness, bringing the past back with it.