Free The Way It Never Was by Lucy Austin Page A

kiss’ when it took place in England.
    Funny how there are people that have become like mythic folklore and the subject of numerous anecdotes for those that still know each other, disappearing off the face of the earth as though they only existed to give you an interesting story to tell: And yet the likes of Claire, who I genuinely thought I would see again, are still in my life.
    Claire positively hated secondary school for the whole time we were there. When she wasn’t grimacing at having to do lessons, she was wearing her hair in an enormous pineapple do and sneaking round the back of the sheds with the boys to smoke cigarettes. What’s more puzzling still, is that given the amount of sweets she ate everyday, Claire has wound up being a skinny beautician, with a hostile manner that affords me not so much as a free leg wax, let alone a blackhead steamed off. I’m pleased to report however, that her two front teeth are crowns and unbeknownst to her, glow neon on the dance floor at our local pub – a stark reminder of why it’s never good to go to bed with a bag of cola cubes.
    Sweating profusely and feeling the strain of the bags cheese wiring my hands, I stop in front of the window of Claire’s salon to catch my breath, catching my reflection in the glass looming back at me – I look so tired, my mascara has run, my lipstick has bled around the edges, and my auburn hair is now tied back with an elastic band for the tension headache effect. It’s not a good look.
    Claire has worked at Divine Beauty since she left school, by far the trendiest beauty salon in town, with a state-of-art interior and a wall at the back containing a professional photo shoot of all the beauticians that work there. Now co-owner, Claire has the job title of ‘Vice President of Beauty Operations’, which as my brother puts it, ‘sounds like she’s about to start working with Madeline Albright’. Wax off the super fancy title though and her day-to-day essentially involves plucking eyebrows and filing nails for ladies who are waiting for school pick-up time.
    ‘I am a perfectionist Kate,’ she tells me on a regular basis. ‘I just can’t abide people who don’t work to the same standards.’ I’ve yet to find out just what these standards are.
    Many a time I’ve caught Claire staring at me appraisingly. ‘You’d be stunning Kate, if you tried a bit harder. You do know that right?’ Just as I’m taking in the sight of a six-foot window display of my flatmate posing with feathers in hair like Pocahontas, I hear someone behind me.
    A loud female voice jolts me out of my own thoughts. ‘She’s looking good hey!’
    My immediate reaction is to pretend I’ve not heard them, because on any given day you can bump into at least four people a) you used to be friends with and still like, b) you used to be friends with and fell out with and c) you are friends with but as you are looking like a dog’s dinner you do not want to see. I seem to always meet the latter. Sometimes I get away with it when I’m wearing sunglasses but not on an overcast Tuesday morning. In a small town like this, everyone round here knows everyone else’s business – sort of like the Kevin Bacon connection, only in deepest darkest Kent.
    I turn around and there jogs Scary Linda who was also in my year at school. For the whole of the first year, I didn’t know her name until she and Claire started hanging out in the common room, becoming this impenetrable force to be reckoned with. I call Linda ‘scary’ as she’s everything I’m not – highly determined and bloody minded – a woman who doesn’t just grab life, she bites its ears off and makes a stir fry out of the bits afterwards. Not surprisingly, by sheer determination and force of will she now owns her own successful travel agency and a flat in the same building as me. And finally, after three years of online dating and hundreds of bleak anecdotes, she also appears to have found true love – no