Old Friend by Maureen Bowden
I first saw her when I was sixteen years old. I was in my bedroom, slapping on mascara, preparing for my date with the local bad boy biker, Ronnie Jansen, known as Jango. First the woman wasn’t there, and then she was. It was seriously weird. She was no longer young, but not yet old, wearing a nightshirt with “Take Me I’m Yours” printed on the front, and she was standing alongside my mound of dirty washing, staring at me. I stared back. “What the hell…?”
“Don’t you know me, Theresa?” she said.
I’d never seen her before but she bore a resemblance to the face I saw in the mirror, although hers had a touch of sagginess around the eyes and a wrinkle or two. “You look like me,” I said.
“Well spotted. I’m the older version.”
“Oh, come on. That’s impossible. How are you here?”
“I’m dreaming but you’re awake. I don’t know how this works but I need to warn you. Keep away from Jango or your life will be over before you’ve lived it.”
I was having none of it. Jango was exciting and good looking. My parents said he was dangerous. That was part of the attraction. “Well, it’s my life and I’ll do what I want.”
“It’s my life too, Theresa. I’m telling you the truth. You know I am.”
I did know. I felt a shiver down my spine. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’ll be safe if you don’t meet him tonight.”
“What do I do, stay in and watch ‘Opportunity Knocks’ on TV with Mum and Dad?”
She laughed. “Not flamin’ likely. Don’t waste all that slap. It’s Wednesday, best night at The Cavern, The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and The Big Three. Get down there, stomp the night away. Be part of history.” She glanced at the mound on the floor. “But put your dirty washing in the laundry basket before you go. Your mother isn’t your slave.” She vanished.
I did what she said. Jango took another girl riding that night. He was speeding along Queen’s Drive, skidded and wrapped his motorbike around a telegraph pole. He and the girl were killed. She could have been me.
Five years later my best friend, Suzy Sheldon, invited me to a flat-warming bash at her high-rise apartment in Entwistle Heights. Alcohol was plenteous, the music was loud, and so were the guests. Good party. “Help yourself to the punch, Tess,” Suzy said, “my special recipe.”
She handed me a glass that looked reasonably clean. I was about to dunk it into the primordial soup sloshing around in the punch bowl when a familiar shiver down my spine prompted me to look up. My future self was standing by the kitchen door. She looked a little older and she wore a different nightshirt. It had a cartoon ladybird on the front with ‘The Millennium Bug’ printed above it. Nobody was taking any notice of her. They didn’t appear to see her. She frowned at me and shook her head. “I suppose I’m in for a lecture,” I said. “I am old enough to drink, remember?”
“I know, but if you drink that stuff you’ll be throwing your guts up over the balcony in an hour’s time.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t come here planning to stay sober. Nobody else is.”
“No need for that. There are a few unopened bottles of Newcastle Brown in the kitchen. Grab yourself a couple before some cretin adds them to the punch.”
I glanced at the other guests. Some of them were already looking like death without the grin and a couple of them were heading for the balcony. I fled to the kitchen and bagged two bottles of Newkie Brown. When I returned to the living room my old friend had vanished.
Next morning I had no more than a slight headache, brought on mainly by the smell of vomit. Everyone else had spent most of the night heaving and retching and were now longing for the Undiscovered Country.
Ten years passed before I saw the future Theresa again. Suzy Sheldon and I were chartered accountants, employed by the partnership Hopkins, Hopkins and Platt: a sister, brother and cousin who kept most of the profits while doing as little work as possible.
In the bleak mid-winter the partners threw a Christmas party on the office premises. My husband, Alan agreed to take on sole management of our children for the evening so I could stay to enjoy the frivolities. They bore more than a little resemblance to the Entwistle Heights flat-warming bash. The participants were older but just as adept at making idiots of themselves, removing articles of clothing and wearing inappropriate headgear. Suzy was getting frisky with Quentin Platt, the Hopkins’ cousin. I left her to it and helped myself to a dish of nuts to line my stomach and a generous glass of Harvey Wallbanger that was available in numerous ready mixed bottles.
Suzy sought me out. “There you are, Tess. Listen, how adventurous are you feeling?”
“Depends,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
“You, me and Quentin, in the sickroom. A ménage a trois.”
I choked on my Harvey Wallbanger, “What?”
“It means a threesome.”
“I know what it means. Are you crazy? I’m happily married and aren’t you supposed to be happily co-habiting with What’s-His-Name?”
“Well, we’re not telling anyone, so what’s the harm? It’s only a bit of fun. Finish your drink and come and join us.” She took a handful of nuts and scuttled back to the sickroom.
I couldn’t do it, could I? Why not? It would be a new experience and what Alan didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
I felt a shiver down my spine. I knew what that meant. My old friend was sitting on top of the photocopier that had been pushed into a corner. She was much older now, more like my grandmother than me. Her hair was white and she was wearing a pink and purple onesie. She looked like a fruit trifle.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said, “but women don’t have to conform to outdated social conventions anymore.”
“I won’t argue with that,” she said, “but all actions have consequences. You and Alan made promises to each other. How would you feel if he broke his promise?”
That pulled me up short, but I wasn’t giving in. “I’d be devastated but if I didn’t know I wouldn’t feel anything.”
She shook her head. “But you would know because you’re no fool. Neither is he, and if your children were old enough to understand what you’re planning would they say ‘Mummy’s sexually liberated, whoopee-doo’? I don’t think so.”
I thought of my children, five-year-old Clare and three-year-old Mattie, and I thought of Alan. They were the people I loved most. I didn’t even like Quentin Platt. It was no contest. “Thank you,” I said. She smiled, and then vanished.
I called a taxi to take me home. I arrived as Alan was about to put the children to bed. “You’re early,” he said. “Didn’t the party live up to expectations?”
“It did,” I said. “That’s why I left.” I placed a bottle of ready mixed Harvey Wallbanger on the kitchen table. “We can have our own party when the kids are asleep.”
He grinned. “I’ll bring the nuts.”
The children clung to me. “Tell us a story, Mummy.”
Mattie said. “Tell us Winnie the Pooh.”
Clare said, “Yes, the one where they throw Pooh Sticks off the bridge and Ee-yore floats down the river with his legs in the air.”
That could have been me: floating down a metaphorical river with my legs in the air.
The party did have consequences. Suzy ‘Only a bit of fun’ Sheldon caught Chlamydia. She passed it on to What’s-His-Name, who wasn’t laughing. He dumped her. She shrugged it off, of course, and after the clinic sorted them out she and Quentin embarked on an ‘open relationship’. Their choice.
Alan and I raised our family, became grandparents and settled into comfortable middle age. One night I dreamed about my younger self. I was standing in her bedroom next to a mound of dirty washing and she was putting on her slap, in preparation to meeting Jango. I told her she mustn’t do it. She gave me some attitude but agreed to go to the Cavern instead.
Next time I dreamed of her I warned her off the putrid punch. The final time, I turned up at her Christmas party and sent her home to her husband and children, and Ee-yore with his legs in the air.
I’m nearing the end of my life now. She won’t see me again, but one day, when she reaches middle-age, she’ll dream about her younger self, and persuade her not to jump on the back of Jango’s bike and ride into oblivion.
—
Maureen Bowden is a Liverpudlian living with her musician husband in North Wales. she has had 151 stories and poems accepted by paying markets, she was nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Prize, and in 2019 Hiraeth Books published an anthology of her stories, ‘Whispers of Magic.’ She loves her family and friends, rock ‘n’ roll, Shakespeare and cats.
