"Student Union" - SJ Bottomley (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

I was forced to go down one of the aisles and attempt to come out at the same place as I had done a couple of minutes earlier. Off I went, then. After a short while, I was going by the fruit and veg section on my right and heading in the direction of the freezers and the bit with the chillers, where Kathryn and I had worked, all those years ago. I’d had more than enough surprises for one day, thankyou very much. I mean, seeing Rachel to begin with was quite a shock in itself, I hadn’t expected that. But to then see Kathryn shortly afterwards, that had sent me spinning, well and truly. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you wish to read the situation, I was about to receive another one.
I hadn’t seen Laura Farnworth in years. I’m thinking really hard now and I can’t recall with any kind of certainty exactly when the last time was that I saw her. I’m guessing that it could have been at college, because I think that she did go for a while before she decided to drop out, but I am by no means a hundred percent sure about that. It could have been since then or it might even be longer ago. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago now, I know that. The last that I heard of her, or rather saw something that related to her was a strange instance that I had in the estate agents one day. I was in the middle of the exceptionally long and drawn out and tedious process of buying a house. It’s not nearly as exciting as it might seem from the outside. I know that now. Anyway, I was in there one Saturday, for some sort of meeting or other and while I was waiting to be seen, my eyes fell upon a pile of papers on one of the desks in the office. I think it might have been in one of the trays that you frequently see on desks in that kind of office environment. “In” trays and “Out” trays and all that sort of thing. On the face of it, if you were walking passed it and just happened to spot it out of the corner of your eye as you continued on in the direction that you were going, it would probably seem like a fairly inconspicuous pile of papers. Nothing worth getting excited about, I wouldn’t have thought. So, I was sat there and I saw it and because I was fairly close to it and looking for something to do while I waited, I started reading it. Hey, if it was confidential, then it should have been properly stored away, not left on a desk where me or anybody else could get a hold of it. Reading it, to begin with, I could make out that it was some kind of letter, but I had no idea what it was about and if I was honest, I wasn’t that interested, either. Until, that was, I saw whose name was on it. In the middle of one of the sentences of this letter was the name “Laura Jane Farnworth”. This immediately caught my attention. Well, it would do. There’s only one person that I know with that name in the local area and it just so happens to be the girl that I was infatuated with for all of five years at high school. I’ll hazard a guess and say that she decided to drop the “Sophie” part of her name at some point. Having not seen for a long, long time and with so much other stuff going on in my life, I hadn’t thought about her, really thought about her for ages. I read on and the basic gist of the letter, I think, was that it was informing someone of the fact that Laura was after buying a house or some kind of property and that she was putting a deposit down on it. £10,000 it might have been. What also caught my eye, at the same time, was the date of the letter. It had on it “August 2006”. This got my brain ticking over slightly. The question was, why would an estate agents have a letter on a desk that was eight or nine months old? And especially if it was only about a deposit that was supposed to be being paid at around that time...The only assumption that I could make was that something might have gone wrong with the deposit at some point but again, why would that still be relevant so long afterwards? I mean, if it was going to go wrong, surely it would have gone wrong in August, or shortly after that. Yes/No? I don’t know. Still, there it was. The name of the girl that I had once loved, staring right at me as I sat and waited to see someone in an estate agents. Not really what I was expecting to see at that particular time. After that day, I quickly forgot about her again. I had much more important things to think about than what she may or may not have been up to in the property market. Or any other part of her life, for that matter. That sounds utterly horrible, I know. As though I don’t care about her anymore. I do. Of course, I do. I just haven’t had much time to think about her recently, that’s all. And she was probably the last thing that I was thinking about as I was dashing through Tesco, wanting to get back to see Kathryn, as quickly as possible. In the next instant, though, she was all that I was thinking about.
Out of the corner of my eye, coming from my right and going virtually straight across my path, seemingly in something of a hurry herself, was the one and only, Laura Jane Sophie Farnworth. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me...” I thought to myself as I instantly recognised who it was. If the thought of going to Kathryn’s till had seemed to me at the time to be too much, then this definitely was. And as Kathryn had been earlier, even with the new/old hair colour, Laura was equally as unmistakable. Her hair was different now, too. Not in colour, like Kathryn’s had been, but more in style. When we used to know each other, when we had both been sixteen, her dark hair had been long and frizzy. Now it was short and straight. Because I’m not much of a hairdresser and I don’t know the correct terminology, I’ll just have to show my ignorance and improvise. It was sort of brushed or combed over to one side at the front, with a little bit of a fringe as well. There is, no doubt, an official hairdressing term for that kind of a cut, but I’m afraid that it just escapes me at the present moment. You get the idea, though, I think. But, it was her, no question about that. And I was stood there, again, for the second time in a matter of minutes, looking and feeling absolutely staggered. What was going to happen next? Who was I going to see now? When I popped to the gents on the way out, would I pass Georgina coming out of the ladies or something? This was just getting silly. I couldn’t cope with much more. With Laura was a man. Put two and two together and you would reach the same sort of conclusion that I did. That is to say that this bloke was her boyfriend...or even her husband, maybe. After what I’d witnessed since coming in, it was evident that we were in la la land now and that anything that I might see and hear from now on in shouldn’t really be shocking me anymore. So, if she was married, that wouldn’t come as a surprise to me now. The only thing that I noticed about him, or the only thing that I remember, at any rate, was that he had long hair. The reason why this stuck in my head, I think, was that he hardly seemed to me like the kind of bloke that Laura would ever go for. To me, Laura liked the bad boys. I say this with some conviction, because Laura was quite a bad girl, herself. But, I’ll save all that for another day, I think. It seemed slightly odd then, that the person that she was apparently with didn’t have a shaved head or tattoos everywhere or a mean look on his face. Maybe this only indicates that I didn’t know Laura quite as well as I thought I did. I guess that I froze for a while. Literally froze. Not going anywhere. Because as soon as it seemed Laura had passed me from right to left, she was then passing me again, going back the way she had come. Still trying to do everything at a thousand miles an hour. This time, somehow, don’t ask me how, we managed to look eye to eye at each other. Hard you might think when one of us is stood totally still and the other is rushing passed like its the beginning of the end of the world. But, nevertheless, we did look one another in the eye. Considering that we were together, educationally speaking, for a good eight or nine years, sat next to each other in class for almost all of one of those, you would think it common sensical, I believe, if I assumed that she would recognise me, just as I had recognised her. Well, common sensical or not, she didn’t. Or, at least, she didn’t seem to. She may have been playing it extremely cool but if she was, she was doing it well. Kathryn glazing me over is one thing. That’s her personality, the way that she is and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Being in her own little world most of the time. It’s a brilliant thing and I admire it. Laura, on the other hand, there’s no way she would ever be able to do anything like that. Laura was always far too cold and clinical and with it to be able to get away with anything like that. Which leads me to think that she genuinely didn’t realise that it was me that she was looking at. Fair enough, I guess you have to say. If she didn’t know it was me, then she didn’t know it was me. That’s something I have no control over, sadly. Because she was going so quickly, after the momentary eye contact, she was gone again in a second. Boyfriend/husband left tagging along behind her. And I was left, still stood there, wondering what dimension I’d suddenly stepped into without knowing about it.
The thing with Laura was pretty incidental. I was utterly staggered to see her, absolutely, but in a relatively small town, seeing someone that you used to go to school with in the only supermarket in the area is hardly that big of a deal. To demonstrate this, I would like to refer back to the time that I also saw Karen Turner in the very same place. Again, with that, I was taken aback by it in the moment. In time, though, I came to see it for what it was. It was a chance meeting, nothing more. Seeing Laura in there, was exactly the same. It could have been anybody that I knew, any of the people that I used to go to school with. As it was, it turned out to be Laura and it was only this fact that got me slightly bent out of shape for a while. I’m sure that seeing another person that I knew or used to know in there