The Reunion

‘Yep.’

‘Is it friendly?’

‘You have no idea how friendly.’

He doesn’t hear the irony in my voice. ‘That RenÉe strikes me as being a pretty dominating type.’

‘RenÉe? She’s a really lovely girl, always so understanding, sociable, warm. Yes, we’ve struck gold with her.’

Olaf frowns then spots my expression and smiles. ‘A bitch.’

‘A bitch,’ I confirm.

‘I thought so. She’s always nice when she sees me, but I’ve heard her telling people off.’

I don’t say anything and Olaf doesn’t seem to want to talk about RenÉe. What links us is the past, so it doesn’t surprise me when Olaf mentions it. He lights up a cigarette, blows the smoke upwards and looks at the sky. ‘Little Miss Shy,’ he ponders. ‘You can’t have enjoyed that.’

‘I was used to it with an older brother.’

Olaf laughs. ‘How is Robin?’

‘Good. Busy. He’s working hard. I haven’t spoken to him for a while but the last time he called he was pretty enthusiastic about someone called Mandy.’

‘Good for him,’ Olaf says. ‘I’ll give him a ring sometime. Do you have his number?’

‘Not on me. I’ll email it to you tomorrow.’

Olaf nods and gazes at the smoke from his cigarette as he touches on the one subject I’ve been trying to avoid.

‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘You were a friend of Isabel Hartman’s weren’t you? Have you ever heard anything more about her?’

I pick up the packet of cigarettes that is lying between us on the table and light one. Silence stretches out.

11 (#ulink_537602ef-a972-5b5b-b80a-8acce7ec0366)

I’ve forgotten a lot about my time at high school. When I read back through my diaries or listen to Robin’s stories, I come across completely unknown events, as if another person was living then in my place. And yet a recollection can suddenly knife its way through my mind, a spark that lights up the grey matter of my memory for an instant. I don’t understand how memory works. I don’t understand why it lets you down in one instance, then confronts you with something you’d rather forget.

The flashback I get when Olaf mentions Isabel’s name isn’t pleasant. I see myself standing in the school canteen, looking for somewhere to sit and eat my sandwiches. My classmates have settled not far away. Isabel is sitting on the edge of the table and leading the conversation. I’m twelve and until recently I was part of this group. I take a chair and walk towards them. They don’t look up but I see the exchange of glances, as if they were surrounded by a magnetic field which launched an alarm signal as soon as I broached it.

I go to put my chair down with the others, but there’s a scrape of dragged chair legs and the circle closes. I sit down at an empty table right by them and watch the minutes tick by on the clock until lunch is over. One time my eyes meet Isabel’s. She doesn’t look away; it is as if she is looking right through me.

‘Wasn’t she your friend?’ Olaf sips his beer.

‘Isabel? At primary school she was.’ I inhale deeply on my cigarette.

‘They still don’t know what happened to her, do they?’ Olaf says. It’s a statement, not a question, but I still answer.

‘No. Her disappearance was just recently on Missing.’

‘What do you think happened to her?’ Olaf asks. ‘Didn’t she have some kind of illness?’

‘Epilepsy.’ Images from the past come flooding out. I try to stop them, to break away, but Olaf carries on.

‘Yes, epilepsy, that was it. Could she have had an attack?’

‘I don’t think so. An attack doesn’t last long. You feel it coming on and when it’s over, you need a while to come round. If it is a light attack, at least. I know all about it, I was so often with her when she had one.’

‘So you don’t think the epilepsy had anything to do with her disappearance?’

I signal to the waiter for another glass of beer and shake my head. I really don’t think so and never have done.

‘I can barely remember anything from those days around Isabel’s disappearance,’ I tell him. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think I would remember the first time I heard she didn’t come home. Her parents came around to talk to me the following day, hoping that I might be able to tell them something. It got a lot of attention, at school and in the media, but I only know about it through hearsay.’

Olaf looks sceptical. ‘You must remember something.’

‘No.’

‘The entire school was talking about it!’

‘Yes, but I really don’t remember much more. I always feel so wretched when I think back to that time. Now, I get the feeling that I’ve forgotten things. Important things. I think I knew more then than I’m conscious of now, but it’s all gone, lost.’

Olaf sprinkles icing sugar over his pancakes.

‘Is that why you wanted to go to Den Helder?’

‘I was hoping that it would all become clearer if I was there, but it didn’t work. It is too long ago.’

Olaf stuffs five mini-pancakes into his mouth at the same time. ‘Perhaps you were in shock and got through those early days in a kind of daze. I can understand that. Isabel used to be your best friend. It must have had an effect on you.’

I stab my fork into a clammy, cold pancake.

‘Last year, just after I’d gone on sick leave, I asked my mother how I’d reacted to Isabel’s disappearance,’ I say. ‘She couldn’t tell me much. When Isabel went missing, my father had just had another heart attack and was in hospital, so she had other things on her mind.’

Olaf’s light blue eyes look at me.

‘My mother thought that Isabel had run away from home at first,’ I continue. ‘She’d often had older boyfriends, even some in Amsterdam. God knows where she found them. Who knows, perhaps she did run away.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

I think about it and shake my head. ‘Why would she? Her parents gave her an enormous amount of freedom. Sometimes even a bit too much, my parents thought. They never said anything but I think they were relieved when Isabel and I didn’t get on so well anymore. Isabel could go out as late as she liked, with whoever she wanted. Her parents didn’t go on at her about her homework. They’d let her go out with a vague group of friends to Amsterdam. That kind of thing. It didn’t surprise my mother that something happened to Isabel, of all people. She’s always believed that something happened to her in Amsterdam.’

‘That’s not likely,’ Olaf says. ‘She disappeared during the day, after school.’

I look up, surprised that he’s so familiar with the facts.

‘Yes, that’s right. I was riding home behind her. She was with Miriam Visser and when Miriam turned off, Isabel went on alone. I was going the same way, but I rode really slowly because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself and then I took a side street to avoid her. I rode back through the dunes, but it wasn’t as nice as I’d thought it would be. I was completely out of breath when I got home. It’s funny, the kind of thing you remember. But I’ve no idea what I did for the rest of day. I might have gone to the library or something. Or done my homework.’

‘But the next day? Or after that, when it was clear that Isabel really was missing? It was the biggest topic of conversation at school!’