The Night Ferry Read Free

in the sitting room. As I pick them up, I notice marks on the glass-topped coffee table. Looking closer, I can make out two neat buttock prints and what I imagine to be elbow smudges. I could kil my brother!

    3
    Someone has spil ed a Bloody Mary mix on my shoes. I wouldn’t mind so much, but they’re not mine. I borrowed them, just like I borrowed this top, which is too big for me. At least my underwear is my own. “Never borrow money or underwear,” my mother always says, in an addendum to her clean-underwear speech which involves graphic descriptions of road accidents and ambulance officers cutting off my tights. No wonder I have nightmares.
    Cate isn’t here yet. I’ve been trying to watch the door and avoid talking to anyone.
    There should be a law against school reunions. They should come with warning stickers on the invitations. There is never a right time for them. You’re either too young or too old or too fat.
    This isn’t even a proper school reunion. Somebody burned down the science classrooms at Oaklands. A vandal with a can of petrol rather than a rogue Bunsen burner. Now they’re opening a brand-new block, with a junior minister of something-or-other doing the honors.
    The new building is functional and sturdy, with none of the charm of the Victorian original. The cathedral ceilings and arched windows have been replaced by fibrous cement panels, strip lighting and aluminum frames.
    The school hal has been decorated with streamers and bal oons hang from the rafters. A school banner is draped across the front of the stage.
    There is a queue for the mirror in the girls’ toilets. Lindsay Saunders leans past me over the sink and rubs lipstick from her teeth. Satisfied, she turns and appraises me.
    “Wil you stop acting like a Punjabi princess and loosen up. Have fun.”
    “Is that what this is?”
    I’m wearing Lindsay’s top, the bronze one with shoestring straps, which I don’t have the bust to carry off. A strap fal s off my shoulder. I tug it up again.
    “I know you’re acting like you don’t care. You’re just nervous about Cate. Where is she?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Lindsay reapplies her lipstick and adjusts her dress. She’s been looking forward to the reunion for weeks because of Rocco Man-spiezer. She fancied him for six years at school but didn’t have the courage to tel him.
    “What makes you so sure you’l get him this time?”
    “Wel I didn’t spend two hundred quid on this dress and squeeze into these bloody shoes to be ignored by him again.” Unlike Lindsay, I have no desire to hang around with people I have spent twelve years avoiding. I don’t want to hear how much money they make or how big their house is or see photographs of their children who have names that sound like brands of shampoo.
    That’s the thing about school reunions—people only come to measure their life against others and to see the failures. They want to know which of the beauty queens has put on seventy pounds and seen her husband run off with his secretary, and which teacher got caught taking photographs in the changing rooms.
    “Come on, aren’t you curious?” Lindsay asks.
    “Of course, I’m curious. I hate the fact I’m curious. I just wish I was invisible.”
    “Don’t be such a spoilsport.” She rubs her finger across my eyebrows. “Did you see Annabel e Trunzo? My God that dress! And what about her hair?”
    “Rocco doesn’t even have any hair.”
    “Ah, but he’s stil looking fit.”
    “Is he married?”
    “Hush your mouth.”
    “Wel , I think you should at least find out before you shag him.”
    She gives me a wicked grin. “I’l ask afterward.”
    Lindsay acts like a real man-eater, but I know she’s not real y so predatory. I tel myself that al the time, but I stil wouldn’t let her date my brothers.
    Back in the hal , the lights have been turned down and the music turned up. Spandau Bal et has been replaced by eighties anthems. The women are wearing a mixture of