We never got to be Cliff Richard. It was always Carol, standing on the shoe lockers in the cloakroom, while Oonagh and Heather did their trademark Hank and Bruce sideways shuffle. There must have been two other Shadows, but they weren’t so important. We didn’t get to be them either, or even backing singers. We just got to sit and watch. Later, we would head home on the same bus, practising our skills at jumping off the rear platform before it stopped. Then Janet would head down one road, while I walked down another.
Janet was always the taller, more striking one, with glorious Irish red curls, which she hated. I was the smaller, dumpy sidekick, although she never treated me that way. And she got to do ballet lessons. I envied her when she got picked for Top of the Form on TV, and when she was made a prefect before me. But then I joined her in the Prefects’ Room, looking out over Belfast city and watching TV with envy while French students rioted in Paris. Our Belfast riots would come later. Meanwhile, we were Existentialists, attempting to be Françoise Hardy, dressing in black while we sat in the lurid new-fangled ultraviolet lights of the city’s newest coffee bar.
At weekends, we stood awkwardly around the fringes of the Student Union, trying to pretend we were older than we were, as only the most desperate of boys asked us to dance, usually to the interminable strains of Hey Jude. At the end of the night, we would meet in the ladies, with all the other sixth formers, before traipsing, rejected, to our parents’ waiting cars.
By the time we left school, I knew I would not be seeing much more of her. Like most of our year, we were leaving Ireland and its imminent troubles. I would be in St Andrews, while she would be in Bristol after an exotic year in the Midwest of the States. When she came back from her year away, she made us pizza and cheesecake – hard to believe that in 1970 in Belfast, these were foreign novelties.
No Facebook, no WhatsApp, not even Friends Reunited, in those days. No internet. A world where you kept in touch by notes scribbled on Christmas cards, if you could even track down each other’s addresses. A few years later, we met as bridesmaids at a wedding in the Borders, not in Ireland. We were still living at the far ends of Britain when she was not overseas. Eventually, we found our own partners, had children, continued along our separate ways, until –
One glorious summer’s day, on the Isle of Lismore, away in the west. We had a little holiday cottage there, a place where the children could sail their dinghy and ride their bikes. A place to relax, wear your old clothes, and be yourself. We were cycling along the only island road, the children charging ahead while I wheezed up the hill; round the corner, we were catching a group ahead, day visitors, making the most of the sunshine. They stopped to let us pass. More than twenty years had gone by, but I knew her immediately – that glorious red hair, immaculate shorts and clean shirt, with a jaunty scarf tied round her neck. I looked at my island children in their wellies and dirty sweatshirts. I looked down at my shorts, grey jersey, elasticated waist, hand-me-downs from the son who had outgrown them. Sadly, Janet recognised me too.
'Hello!' we both said, as if we had met the week before.
She was over with friends from the mainland, she said, as we cycled on together. Her accent had lost any hint of Ireland, while mine had become pure Scots. Outside the island shop, her friends waited awkwardly. Soon they were catching the ferry back. There was no time to visit our cottage. They cycled on, while I stood in the shop, unable to think what we needed for tea, feeling a chance had slipped away.
'Look at the state of me!' I lamented to the children.
'But Mum, you’re just you,' they said. And it was true. Our differences had made us friends, Janet and I.
And for many years, I kept cycling round corners, thinking that one day, I might meet her again.