‘Emma Callaghan-Kohli. That’s a classy name, sis.’
‘You told me that once. You said it made me sound worldly and global.’
‘I was right. Did you do good doctoring today?’
‘It was pretty eventful. A teen got stabbed and brought in to us. Right through the lung. He’s lucky to still be here.’
I pause for a moment to think of Emma at the heart of something so critical. I only knew her as a medical student who I felt didn’t make the most of her university experience. Medics seem to be part of this clique who study together, and drink in fancy dress and in moderation but do little else. She used to come back here regularly during her degree as some sort of base camp. To sleep and eat, to allow Beth to stroke her hair on the sofa while she complained to us about Simon, her new boyfriend, who looked like George Clooney but flirted so heavily with everyone that she didn’t know whether to trust him. The answer was no but she married him anyway. Apparently, Mum broke his nose some years later and that is something I wish I could recollect.
‘He was lucky to have you as his doctor,’ I tell her and kiss the top of her head. She studies my face, I guess to see if my recent brain fart is a result of blown pupils or facial paralysis but it’s not. She then looks down to my leg. That was something else that was split open when I went flying across Waterloo Bridge, and she checks the scar regularly. It’s her way of helping, coping, to pour all her doctorly knowledge on me. I catch her reading articles, looking up brain and memory specialists on her laptop, printing out things of interest for me. I read them on the toilet.
‘So let’s run through what you would normally do on a Thursday. You’d go to work. Then what? Go on, try and remember…’
Dad brings over mugs of tea and sits down at the table, watching this little exercise.
‘I’d finish at three. I’d have done lunch and breakfast service so I’d be knackered but I’d have made myself a lot of espresso to fuel me so by the time I finished I’d be buzzing. I’d take party clothes with me to work and then go get dressed at Farah’s and we’d start drinking early. Thursdays were dead in most places so we usually rang people and ended up in Hammersmith or Richmond, except they were full of people in rugby shirts and posh accents, or Kingston…’
For some reason, my words trail off as I say Kingston, and Emma smiles at me.
‘But you still don’t remember coming to my first wedding, dancing on a table, falling off and Meg having to pick splinters and rose thorns out of your arse?’
‘I do not… Was it a complete rager?’
‘It was a good band. They were a swing band from Hampshire. Their singer was like a young Dean Martin,’ she says, looking into the distance. I know when I have to change the subject.
‘Before the summer came, I also used to go to sixth form on a Thursday. Whole day of lessons that day. Compulsory PE in the morning, double English Lit, then I’d spend two periods in the library, drama workshops till home.’
Emma laughs. ‘I think I could tell you my timetables too. They seem to be etched into me.’
The five of us all went to the same school, a bus ride away from here, called King Charles’ Grammar, affectionately known as King Charlie’s. It’s one of London’s best, which I always thought hilarious as it’s named after one of our worst kings, but if you want to know about a place that laid foundations for all us girls then this is the one. Those walls hold our secrets, they saw us succeed, fail and blossom or, in my case, walk them corridors with enough notoriety to be remembered for the next five years at least.
‘School is probably what’s freshest in my mind. I found all my study notes in my room yesterday. They’re old and yellowing but I could still recite bits ofHenry Vto you. I remember all my lines from my soliloquy for my drama practicals.’
Dad chuckles. ‘I remember that. Your mum and I went to watch. You never heard this from me but she may have shed a tear that evening. You were very good.’
‘Grade A, thank you very much.Superbly moving, pace of delivery was sublime,’ I remind them of my moderator’s comments.
I pause for a moment. The memory of that night sears through my brain, the anticipation, the energy and time I spent preparing for those ten minutes. Adrenalin bubbled through my veins to be on the stage, some deep sense of belonging, wanting to perform forever. But look where it got me. There is something slightly painful to know that love never came to anything.
‘How do you drink tea so fast?’ mutters Dad, watching Emma as she downs the cup next to her.
‘Asbestos tongue.’ She shifts a look over at me, almost worried to see me so pensive, out of the default settings she’s used to. ‘So, I was going to catch some shut-eye but maybe you and me should go on a little drive first.’
‘At this time of day?’ I ask her.
‘Before the roads clog up. Maybe we should go back to school.’
‘Really?’
‘It might bring some things back.’
‘It might make me want to defecate on the doorstep.’
‘Please don’t do that.’
The one thing I’ve noticed about Emma that has not changed is that she’s still very into her porridge. She needs fuel and fibre to keep her going. Even now, she’s come back from her shift and she’s there with her porridge but it’s jazzy porridge now with rice milk and seeds and fruits on top. I don’t do porridge. Porridge is for bears and it sits in my stomach like cement. My breakfast of choice was a Twix that was dipped into a cappuccino from the school vending machine. Sometimes I had a weekly banana for health.
We were different students, much to Emma’s chagrin. She was the brightest of stars. They would have made plaques for her if they could.Emma Callaghan (who is now a doctor and got the highest Biology A-Level marks in the country) once sat on this bench and walked these halls as head girl. My name would be in small print, somewhere.Lucy Callaghan (who is superbly moving and got four As in her A-Levels, which was a bloody surprise to everyone including her parents as she spent most of her teens fighting the system in a skirt that wasn’t regulation length) once attended this school. She once entered the school elections and named her party the Old El Paso Party in which she gave a rousing speech that every Tuesday would be Taco Tuesday and she’d force all the staff to wear sombreros because in her own words ‘some of them are dull as balls and need the help’. She won that election but was promptly taken out of contention by the head teacher, who gave an assembly berating the whole school community for not taking the issue of politics seriously enough. Natalia de Vante ended up winning for the Liberal Democrats, whose manifesto included the mundane like recycling bins and bus monitors. Lucy may have lost her shit at the whole debacle. She made placards. She protested, goddamn it, that it was an infringement of election by-laws and shat all over true democracy. Her mother was called.
