Chapter 13 #2
Vee turned another page. This time she was confronted by a few of the kids she thought of as the rival gang.
They’d been a sorry lot. In Rhonda’s words, a right bunch of tossers and losers.
She supposed that in any peer group there would be those who fell into Rhonda’s very own set of categories.
The teachers’ pets and swots. The geeks and nerds.
The cool kids. The tossers and losers. The bullies. The victims.
The last category stuck in her mind as Vee thought back to the painful early days at high school when she had been one of the victims. Tallulah’s mixed Spanish and Italian background and her father’s rather brooding good looks had provided Vee with the dark hair and soulful eyes that she hadn’t appreciated in her teens but it had also been something that was seized upon by the bullies.
She had been relieved when for some unknown reason Rhonda had adopted her into the cool kids’ gang, which effectively stopped all the bullying but had its own price to pay. A high price, as it turned out.
Now, unable to stop looking, Vee scrutinised some of the group that had irritated Rhonda so much.
There were three of them in this particular snapshot; two girls and a boy.
Both girls had long, straight hair, looped behind their ears.
One had particularly large ears, which the style emphasised.
The other had pink-rimmed glasses. The boy was dark-haired and skinny.
His expression was one of abject misery.
He had a bad case of acne, in fact all of them were plagued with spots, as Vee now remembered.
She looked at the label beneath the clearest of the photographs.
Ginny Burton (GeeBee), Sharon Smith (Shazzie) and Brad Potter (Petrol Head or BP).
Vee carried on flipping through the pages.
There were no photos of Rick himself that she could find.
The album wasn’t just full of Vee’s year group and others in years above and below.
The last few plastic-covered pages had newspaper cuttings tucked inside them instead.
They all involved the local police’s search for a graffiti artist who was making themselves increasingly unpopular with the townspeople of nearby Meadowthorpe.
There were close-ups of some of the artwork, and Vee couldn’t hold back a gasp of admiration.
They were stunning. Swirling images that reminded her of a rough sea, of dramatic waterfalls, of rivers in full spate.
The final page brought sudden tears to her eyes.
It was a short notice cut from The Meadowthorpe Recorder, describing the death of Sharon Eva Smith, aged twenty-seven, former resident of Willowbrook and by then residing in Manchester.
She didn’t appear to have been married, and no family members were mentioned.
There had been a post-mortem, but no suspicious circumstances had been found.
Shazzie Smith, she of the owl-like glasses and terrible stutter, was no more.
Vee closed the book carefully and placed it back on the shelf.
She retreated to her previous seat and tucked her legs up beneath her, reaching for the fleecy blanket that was folded over one arm of the sofa.
Wrapped in its warmth, she contemplated all that she’d just seen.
To think of Shazzie, dead at such a young age with apparently nobody to mourn her and no explanation given, was heartbreaking.
Vee was aware that even if she hadn’t been directly unkind to the girl herself, she hadn’t made any effort to prevent Rhonda from teasing her unmercifully whenever their paths crossed.
Had Rhonda been equally mean to all the people she classed as losers?
Yes, she had. There was no avoiding that, and if Rick had been at school at the same time as Vee, he must remember what Rhonda had been like too, even if he’d been in a different year group.
She wondered why he hadn’t made himself known to her when they first met.
Surely that was unnatural. It would have been normal to say something like, ‘Hey, we go back a long way. I was at your school, but we didn’t… ’
Didn’t what? Didn’t hang around in the same crowd?
Maybe Rick remembered her family leaving, and the events leading up to it.
The uncomfortable feeling was growing and there was nobody else to ask about what really happened around the time that the Prescotts left Willowbrook.
Vee honestly couldn’t recall anything but the most basic of facts.
Maybe she’d blocked it all out. In that case, there must be something really bad lurking in her subconscious.
This growing sense of unease and unexplained guilt was making her edgier by the minute.
To ask Rick to talk about the past might wreck their working relationship and Vee so badly needed both a safe space to live in for now and someone to make her own house ready for the future.
Reaching for her phone, Vee clicked on Facebook and stared at her list of friends.
Rhonda must have some kind of social media presence, she was far too egotistical to be anonymous in this world of Instagram, TikTok and so on.
She tried a Facebook search first, with no joy.
Then she moved to Instagram and suddenly, there was her quarry.
Rhonda Clements-Barrymore. So she’d married at some point.
Rhonda’s profile picture showed a glamorous woman who was holding back the years very successfully, unless she’d used a whole lot of filters.
Ash-blonde hair in a classy bob, vermillion lips and eyes that stared straight out of the photo with a challenge in them, or so it seemed to Vee.
Her hand shook. She hesitated for seconds before she pressed follow.
Then she pressed the message button and typed:
Hi, it’s Venetia Prescott here, remember me? Would be great to have a catch-up sometime, now I’m back in Willowbrook and I can see from your profile that you’re still living somewhere nearby.
The words were on their way through the ether before Vee had given herself the chance to change her mind. It was done.
Faintly horrified at what she might have set in motion, Vee headed for the kitchen and opened the fridge.
There was a bottle of gin in there and one of tonic.
Mentally apologising to Rick for pinching his booze, Vee found some ice cubes in the freezer, sliced a lemon from the fruit bowl on the worktop – might as well do this thing properly – and poured herself a very large G&T.
If Rhonda got in touch with her, there was at least a chance of getting straight in her mind what had closed her memories off so effectively.
Knowing must be better than guessing. That way madness lies, she told herself, taking a large swig of her drink.
Her eyes watered at the strength of it, so she took another slurp and added more tonic.
Then, turning her back on the cosy living room, she took herself to bed.