they laughed because I had to wear wellies to school that were so small my heels stuck halfway up the leg part and I had to walk around on my toes. You should try that some time … all day.’ Beneath the table he shifted his legs, as if his feet, tonight in tooled leather, remembered those wellies. ‘I found that if I laughed at myself then at least they were laughing with me more than at me, but I hate to even remember those old humiliations.’ He fell silent, propping his chin on his hand and gazing across the room, perhaps seeing not villagers chatting but long ago insensitive teenagers sneering and pointing.
Allowing him time to gather his thoughts, Georgine fidgeted with her wine glass on the table. If she positioned it correctly the Christmas lights on the bar were reflected, as if the last mouthful of wine was joyfully twinkling.
But it was an illusion.
So much of life was.
Quietly, she waited.
Finally, he heaved a great sigh. For the first time this evening, he seemed reluctant to meet her eyes. ‘Remember the Christmas card?’
Georgine nodded. The shiny blue front had been hand sewn painstakingly with gold beads, the careful lettering inside. To Georgine, Merry Christmas, Rich. How could she forget?
‘I’m really sorry about how I behaved.’ He groaned, closing his eyes for an instant. ‘You’d always made me feel … well, as if I was just like everybody else.’ He held up a hand as if she’d tried to interrupt. ‘We both know I wasn’t. “Neglected” I heard Miss Penfold call me, the one who looked after the sale of second-hand school uniform, which she gave me free if I was looking particularly desperate. “Neglected” was a sanitised term for not enough food or adequate clothing.’
‘Are you sure you want to tell me all this?’ Georgine’s hands had begun to sweat at the way Joe was exposing himself with this bald recounting of his early life.
The expression in his eyes altered, became wary. ‘Aren’t you sure you want to hear it?’
It sounded like a test: Are you strong enough to listen to my story?
‘Listening’s hard,’ she admitted, ‘knowing that all this was going on right under my nose. But it’s a lot easier than living it. Would you like another drink before you go on?’ She reached for her bag. But when she turned back, purse in hand, she saw he was already up and threading his way through the drinkers that filled the area in front of the bar.
He was served quickly this time. He dropped back into his seat and slid her glass of wine across the table to her before taking a gulp from his fruit juice, waving away her attempt to pay for the round. It seemed that all his attention was focused on telling his story now he’d begun. He rested his elbows on the table and leant closer. ‘I made that Christmas card at lunch times in the art room. I wanted to show you what your friendship meant to me.’
‘Why did you sign it “Rich”, not “Joe”?’ she asked, frowning as she tried to put herself in his place.
He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Would you have known who Joe was?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Because you hadn’t told me. I don’t understand why even the teachers called you Rich.’
The hint of a smile flashed in his eyes. ‘I brought that on myself with silly boy bravado. When I first joined Bettsbrough Comp my form teacher called me John, as I was on the register as John Joseph Garrit. I said I was called Joe and he got me a form to fill out to tell the school what I wanted to be known as. Bettsbrough Comp was trying to be forward-thinking over that kind of thing. But I was sitting with my Shitland mates when I completed the form and one of them snatched it off me and in the box “What would you like everyone to call you?” he wrote in my nickname, “Rich”. Everyone thought it was hilarious. We all laughed. So I handed it in like that.’ Slowly, he sat back, folding his arms as if putting up a barrier. ‘The deputy head called me in.’
‘Mr Jenson,’ she supplied.
He nodded. ‘He gave me this little talk about it being up to me what I was known as in school, but my medical letters and exam entries would always be in my full name. And if I ever went on a school trip abroad my proper name would be on the passport.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I was too busy thinking that as I didn’t have lunch money the passport question was unlikely to arise to take the opportunity to say “I don’t want to be Rich, I want to be Joe,” let alone sussing out that this was a perfect time to let someone in authority know that it said Blackthorn on my birth certificate.
‘Letting my proper identity slip away – it was all part of the powerlessness I felt back then. I was different to the other kids – but the Shitland rat pack shared more experiences with me than the rest of you. A gang … you have a love/hate relationship with it. Sometimes it’s your best friend and sometimes it’s a tyrant. The gang pushed me into doing shit I didn’t want to do, just as Garrit did. I identified with the other members, though, and let them influence me.’
‘And you were standing with the gang when I came up to thank you for the card …’ Georgine broke in, the scene suddenly shockingly clear.
He nodded. ‘I’d slipped it into your bag at the end of art, the last lesson in the afternoon. You were meant to open it on your way home on the school bus. You weren’t meant to turn around and gallop back to find me to thank me, showing everybody the card.’
She screwed up her eyes in pain at viewing the scene from a new perspective. ‘It was so pretty. You probably thought it made you look soft. So you said it wasn’t from you, snatched it off me and ripped it up.’
‘I had to,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I didn’t care for myself but a lot of us in Shitland would wake up on Christmas morning to nothing. It made us angry at the rich kids who had nice parents to supply a sack of presents. Those guys in the gang would’ve enjoyed ridiculing you; and considered it a victory if they could have made you cry. Some of them had even begun to look specifically for rich kids to bully out of their money and designer kit. And there was you, wearing your gold watch, with Nike trainers in your school bag, pointing out that we were friends! I’d already told them we weren’t really friends but just happened to be in the same lessons because I was terrified they’d start pressuring me to steal your stuff. Acting like a moron and denying any knowledge of the card was the best way to protect you.’
‘Wow,’ she breathed. It had never once occurred to her that their friendship could have made things uncomfortable for him.
Then he lightened his morose expression with a comical eye-roll. ‘I can’t imagine why people visit psychologists to confess all the stuff that festers inside them. It’s plain awkward.’
She found herself half laughing, though her heart ached to see that even now he mocked himself as a defence mechanism. ‘Stop if you want. We were fourteen—’
But he shook his head. ‘Let me get it over with. I wanted to apologise. I thought I’d be able to talk to you at the Christmas party that night. I waited outside for you all evening. But you didn’t turn up.’
She felt her cheeks burn. ‘You’d shredded my feelings. I told my mum I felt ill so I didn’t have to go. And then …’ She breathed in deeply, surprised that she still remembered the hurt so clearly after two decades. ‘You just vanished.’
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