Chapter Four

Nat was having a stressful meeting with her boss. She was aware everyone had to be fully briefed on the nature of the reunion, but there were problems. Some of the group attending had been identified as volatile characters. She found herself rolling her eyes, as it was yet again made explicit the importance of her secrecy, and the dangers involved if her current target was lost or suspected the true nature of Nat’s employment. Since her closest family were still unaware of what she did, Nat was confident in her abilities. Her boss was nearly as confident, after all, someone does not progress through the organisation as quickly as Nat had, without a high level of skill. However, there had been problems in the past – levels of trust between old friends combined with an emotional reunion and alcohol could produce dangerous confidences that would cost a lot of money to correct. The Globe, where the reunion was planned, had already been placed under surveillance, and the level of detail in the background checks meant Nat knew more about the group than they knew about themselves. Her disguise, someone staid, content and dowdy, was prepared. She was convincing in this role, and knew it would reassure everyone else of the relative excitement of their own lives. Nat could not suppress a smirk at this thought.
Nat was the first to arrive at the Globe. If she had not been briefed with surveillance photos, maps and possible exit routes, she wouldn’t have recognised it.

Chapter 3

The most difficult person to get in contact with had been Chloe. Everyone else’s life provided a fully traceable internet track. Chloe was still attempting to shake off the shackles and traces of technology. This was intensely difficult, and created an isolation of sorts that many people would have found difficult. It was lucky that her face to face contact with people was so effecting – she appeared as a character in many blogs and online diaries. Those around her used the internet, and Ego had at first accidentally contacted her daughter, who at first accidentally believed she was being targeted by a pervert with an unconvincing back story. Once this misunderstanding had been cleared up (this took a lot of courage on the part of Ego, after the abusive and disturbingly graphic castration suggestion he received in his inbox at first), Chloe’s dislike for the internet forced a face–to-face meeting. Chloe and Ego met for tea in a café off Russell Square, three months before the planned reunion. The instant recognition felt both unnerving and natural, and the afternoon quickly spiralled into a drink fuelled discussion of the group. Once their own lives were accounted for, they began to speculate on the others’. The conversation naturally fell to Jen. They noted the gossip magazines had not yet become aware of her predilection for crisp sandwiches, and were sceptical of reports that she spent evenings cooking for her husband. They marvelled at the irony of seeing Jen in the publications she had been addicted to as a student. Ego tried to explain the far reaching effects of Mark’s computer company and its inventions but after an hour they gave up, and Chloe accepted she would never understand the implications, other than the wealth and fame of the couple, and the bizarre circumstances of having a previous housemate on the cover of Vogue, still sporting her lizard tattoo.
In the first months of Mark’s riches, Jen was thrown into a world of wealth and perfection. She was alone and unprepared. At first she felt the way to contentment was conformity – to accept her new life and the people in it. This involved believing in the importance of nostril waxing, and that arranging a party every year for charity was selfless, fulfilling and extremely hard work. If she had continued in this attitude, she would have been an unremarkable and unpleasant wife to a rich man. But Jen revolted. After months of obsessive preening and exclusivity, Jen rejected, rather forcefully, the doctrine. This occurred at the beauty spa, and left other rich men’s wives with broken nails, a nasty case of mud-inhalation, and a bald patch where Jen had waxed the off a section of hair – roots, extensions, highlights and all. In the aftermath and publicity, the spa announced a new and stringent no drinking policy.
Jen’s rebellion was seen by some to be feminist, post-feminist, or post post-feminist. Jen didn’t care either way. She went and got another couple of piercings, a tattoo to mark the occasion, and set up her own, now internationally renowned, business, in representing and promoting actors. More specifically, she searched for unusual looking actors- those who looked real, and those who looked interesting. Most specifically, she rejected any who pouted. She liked to call it Anti-Keira. Being represented by Jen soon became an indicator of acting talent and personality. Many independent and web film producers began to solely use her as a talent scout, and her new discoveries, as well as Jen herself, were looked to as indicators of off-beat and alternative fashions. Jen found this perplexing, as did the members of the Varey group, who saw her wearing her old Camden platform boots in Heat and watched it spark a resurgent craze. Meeting Jen again would certainly be an interesting experience. Chloe and Ego were particularly interested to discover whether the stories of diva behaviour were well founded, as well as the relative truth behind rumours of more intriguing incestuous celebrity couplings. Ego wondered if it would be morally wrong to ring into Heat’s Spotted page after the reunion.

Chapter 2

Ego had sent out the invitations with a sense of foreboding; the group had proved to be positively incapable of successfully meeting up. Also, he had hoped to hold off from sending out the messages for a little longer. However, it had become clear that the time was here, and there was little he could do about it. He wished he could have shared in an abstract joy in seeing everyone together again, or spent idle minutes contemplating how they would all look, how they had changed, and how they would react together. It was with growing disbelief that he had watched the replies flood in, from the US, from Africa, from London, from an unreadable postcard, from assistants, from secretaries, and from hand-writing he could immediately recognise – all agreeing to meet back in Mile End. He still could not quite believe they would all successfully arrive – he had his eye on Alex’s delayed flight, Pat’s book signing on Charing Cross Road, and the vague response from Matt, his old knowledge of Lucy’s inability to be on time. At least, this time, he thought ruefully, he could count on himself. If he had not arranged the meeting, he was a likely candidate to cancel.
Lucy had been up the night before. She padded around a lamp-lit house in thick cashmere socks and a crumpled nightshirt, Death Cab for Cutie, not listened to for years, on low, clutching a mug, as if it would relieve the tense anticipation of seeing faces aged and lives changed. This anticipatory stress was felt by Sarah, as her plane landed in the early hours of the morning. She was greeted by a low-level, but pervasive grey that cannot be fully understood unless you have arrived alone in an airport an hour outside of London, after leaving a country of debilitating heat and bright sunlight. Sarah often travelled backwards and forwards – she tried hard to ensure her children had the same sense of extended family as she had had herself – but she had not managed to accustom herself to the stark contrasts between her homeland and the one she had adopted. This journey had been particularly poignant; as well as the Mile End reunion, it represented one of the last of these flights – she had recently decided that it was time to settle back in Britain. The travelling that had seemed so exciting when she was younger, now felt wasteful and mundane. She wanted her children to know their cousins and their grandparents, and feel a sense of their preceding generations. The importance of family and the assumed wisdom and respect for the elder generations was an aspect of life in the village that she particularly relished, and would miss in her move back to Britain. It was something she tried to encourage the British volunteers to adopt – although technology had increasingly entered the village she still asked the volunteers to rely on conversation and friendships with the locals. She had told the group of volunteer teachers and staff from the school about the reunion. They were sitting together, drinks in hand, on a Friday evening, recovering after a long hard week. As they watched their students kick a football around in the twilight, they discussed the reunion with increasing hilarity – at first thinking clearly about the intervening years, speculations becoming wilder until they discussed the possibility of obesity, hermits, people with eighteen cats, and likely danger of being stalked by an old friend, and finally, as the sun finally set, lewd comments about the possibility of passionate reunions.
Pat was pissed off. He had to keep reminding himself why he was there. People had turned up to see him; they bought his books and this allowed him to become sickeningly used to expensive lunches, quality alcohol, and having a butler. And besides, for every few dozen tourists and slathering mindless fans, there was a person worth knowing, a new contact. When he had first started these events, he had felt ridiculous and incongruous in the bookshop environment – so far removed from what he had expected his career to be, and an ideological distance from the banks where he had earned his first millions. Now, as bookshops had moved from selling the actual publications, which were much more accessible online, they had had to focus more on the human sense experience – providing meeting places for authors and readers, communities, nights focused on bringer together the reader communities from the internet, and a few copies for those customers who were committed to the archaic notion of holding a publication in one’s hands. Pat represented one of the biggest names; his ability to draw people out of their homes and into the shop surpassed that of many other writers. It was speculated that this was related to the controversial way his writing became known, and his column meant his opinions were ever present in many people’s lives. Even Pat, and his respected opinions, could not have anticipated the ever-widening effect of that first unwise email.

Chapter One

Lucy sank into the seat. Her head lolled briefly against the back, and her eyes followed the road in front, and then her own slow progress into London. She couldn’t contain as sense of emotion – strong yet indefinable emotion. It seemed conversely a lifetime and a few days since she had left Mile End. It had been twelve years. Twelve years since they had all vowed to stay in touch forever, since they had made plans for the years ahead, safe in the assumption of their all consuming togetherness. This seemed a laughable concept now, considering how few of them had managed to stay in touch, even fewer had done more than Christmas messages and the odd email. The break up had all started when Alex had failed to return from America that summer, and the stress of living together in the second year had driven rifts between them. When Lucy had returned from her year abroad, the group had scattered further, and only passing reference was made to all their comings and goings. She realised she was as much to blame as anyone. She had had different priorities since then, and despite good intentions, had failed to make the drinks, reunions and all arranged attempts to reunite the group. Thinking about it now, she considered that in some ways she had thought this a good thing – why try and re-create what had already passed?
The lack of communication did not mean, however, that she was completely unaware of their activities, jobs and varying degrees of success. She had stopped to stare at the familiar faces staring back from morning television, the Sunday supplements and magazines. The others? Google, of course.
Across London, dressed in tailored expensive black, and carrying a coffee so large, it could have held a small child, Jen juggled her phone, her bag, and her invitation for the Mile End reunion. In a fit of exasperation she thrust her bag in to the arms of her assistant, who had to maintain a surprised jog to keep up with Jen’s long strides. A charity mugger. He had recognized her face from the press, and, visioning enormous sums of money, sprang in front of her, unable to contain himself from calling her name. He had only reached ‘Je..’ when a swift kick to the genitals with Jen’s favourite stiletto boots rendered him speechless. It was the inane grin that did it, she would have recognised it anywhere. Jen took great pleasure in placing one stiletto on his clipboard, and the other on his hand, before continuing swiftly onwards, glancing again at the invitation. It mentioned tea, it mentioned alcohol, and even with her busy schedule, Jen couldn’t wait to see how everyone had aged.
Alex was drumming her fingers on the armrest, distractedly. The stranger in the seat beside her glanced significantly, attempting to wither Alex into stopping, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking back over the years. Her husband was incredulous that she was travelling across the Atlantic, to a country she rarely visited, to see people with whom she had spent 8 or 9 months with, over a decade ago. She had reminded him of exchanged phone calls, emails, and fly-by-night meetings in New York, where the obligatory few drinks seemed both too long and not long enough time to spend together. At this point however, she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing on this plane. She reassured herself with a sip of her drink and the thought of London shops and museums. Even if Ego’s strange message was a hoax, she felt confident in her abilities to find something to amuse herself, even if it solely involved finding a proper chippy. As the plane dipped in to land, she wondered if the Golden Fryer was still there. In fact, she remembered with a smile, that had been one of the comments that had followed the first shock when she announced that she was staying in the US – how would she manage without proper British chips? She had, it seems.
When she had left that summer, she had been apprehensive to say the least, and the last thing on her mind was staying any longer. Fate had intervened. Or perhaps it wasn’t fate, but Alex’s love of American shops, American living, and, of course, American men, that had been most influential. But had she not met Bradford, whose passion for the geography of the American coastland was infectious, and had she not been able to transfer her course so easily, then she would have been back in Mile End by October. As it was, Alex revelled in the American University experience, and had worked hard to build a successful life for herself. With so much of her family having so many connections in, what she now considered to be her part of the US, she had hardly made it back to the UK once a year. But the message from Ego, asking for the reunion, had hit her in a particularly vulnerable and nostalgic moment in the small wee hours, after a few beverages. She was sat at the computer, in a house full of sleeping bodies – her husband, her children and their friends, entities that were briefly forgotten in her search for memories of her youth. And so, in this state, she booked the flights and hotels that would see her returning to Mile End, for the first time.