Remember Me?

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They weren't even friends, but now they had more in common.
9.2k words
4.64
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Part 1 of the 2 part series

Updated 11/01/2022
Created 09/18/2010
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Taverner
Taverner
440 Followers

When I was sixteen years old, one my dad's old drinking buddies said to me, one day, "Son, you probably don't realise it now, but these are the best years of your life. Once you finish school, it's all downhill from there. Mark my words on that." My heart kind of sank when he told me that, and I thought, You mean, this is as good as it gets?

To put it, mildly, my school years weren't the happiest years of my life. I was skinny, kind of shy, and I didn't have a lot of self-confidence. As for girls, well, just forget all about that, too. They weren't interested in me at all, and I used to get all kinds of crap about being so skinny. My friends were mostly from the non-athletic group, although, being built like a greyhound, I was always good at running, both on the track and cross-country, so at least I got on okay with the school sports master, Mr Shersingh, and he didn't give me a hard time like he did with the others. Unlike all my friends, I would turn up for the school athletics carnivals, and I'd usually do okay in the running events, but that didn't make me any more popular with my peers.

I remember one guy in my year at school, Eddie Clayton, who hung out with all the "tough guys." He was a big guy, who played representative football for the school team, and for some reason, he took a dislike towards me right from the start of high school, even though I hardly ever had anything to do with him. One day, in English class, while we waited for the teacher to arrive, he took exception to something I said, even though I wasn't even talking to him, and he said, "You're a pissweak little poofter, Roberts!" I tried to ignore him, but he went on with. "I see you hanging out with your faggot mates all the time. You're queer, you little cunt, aren't you?" After that, he would often call me a "poofter" or a "queer" in front of his tough-guy friends, and although I hated it, he was twice my size, so there wasn't a lot I could do about it.

Another person in my year at school was Linda Moffatt. She was good looking, in fact, she was a knockout, with long, wavy hair that was a kind of light strawberry blonde colour, and she had fair skin, blue-grey eyes, and a pretty face, with cover-girl features. She had a slim but curvy figure that filled out her school uniform remarkably well, and don't even get me started on her legs, or her butt in a pair of jeans. She hung out with a bunch of girls who all seemed to love themselves almost as much as they loved giving me a hard time for being so skinny. At the school athletics carnivals, they'd sing out "Muscle Man," and "The Incredible Hulk" when they saw me, and I tried to laugh at the stupidity of it, but I used to wish I wasn't so thin, and of course it didn't do much for my self esteem, either.

One day, in my second last year of high school, we were in biology class, in the science lab, and we had our textbook open at a chapter on the human musculoskeletal system. The page was illustrated with a black and white photograph of a big, muscular body-builder type, in the classical pose, showing off his rippling physique. Linda came over and slid onto the stool next to me, and she pointed at the picture in my textbook, and said, "Is that a picture of you?" Back then, I was kind of lost for words, so I didn't even answer, and she just slid off the stool, and went back to her own desk, to giggle with her friends at her witty escapade.

A couple of times during the following year, she would speak to me at school, as though she was trying to start a conversation, but I was a little awkward in responding, because of the crap I'd taken from her in the past, so we never really got to know each other in those days. Even so, if I wasn't friends with her, I have to admit I fantasised over her from time to time, but, hey, I was only human, and I was a teenage boy, wasn't I?

When I finished school at eighteen, there was a recession on, and jobs were a little hard to get. Not only that, but I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I felt like I had to do something constructive, so after a lot of soul-searching, I surprised everyone, including myself, by joining the army. People say the army makes a man of you, but I like to think I at least gave them some worthwhile raw material to work with. My recruit training in the army made me fitter and stronger than I had ever been, and when I got fitter, I felt better, and began to like myself more. I put on a little weight, but not all that much, so I was now lean-built instead of just skinny, but at least I was well-toned.

After my recruit training at Kapooka, I was assigned to the Royal Australian Corps of Transport, where I learned to drive trucks, heavy equipment, cranes, and small watercraft. I only did six years in the army, but in that time I went places, and did things I would never have expected to have done otherwise, and I regularly faced both physical and mental challenges that made me a stronger, more confident person, who was closer to my own potential. I feel like I owed a lot to the army, and I loved my time as a soldier, but after six years, I was ready for a change.

At twenty-four, and straight out of the army, I joined a logistics company that actively recruited ex-army personnel, and I spent the first year in Sydney, before they offered me a transfer to a city halfway across the state, and I accepted. I made a good life for myself out there, and a few years later I married a local girl named Wendy, and a new chapter of my life began. At thirty-four, I was an assistant manager, and a year later, I was made area manager for the region. I was earning very good money by that time, and I thought I had a great life. I was married to a beautiful woman, I had two great kids, a nice home in a good part of town, and everything seemed to be going well. Maybe life was just too good, or at least, fate seemed to think so, because it seems like fate must have decided I needed to be taken down a peg or two, and just after I turned thirty-seven, Wendy left me for another woman.

That's right, you did read that correctly. Wendy, the love of my life, left me for the nursing unit manager in the orthopaedics department at the local hospital, and I never even saw it coming. Right up until our last week together, our sex life was great, or at least I thought it was, and everything seemed to be going well, and then I was dumped for a woman. I felt gutted, I felt lost, I felt like I was destroyed.

I tried to minimise the disruption to my kids' lives by moving into a small two-bedroom apartment in the middle of town, so they could stay in our house with their mother. I got a place with an extra bedroom, so they could sleep over, and we arranged for access visits, and everything else that goes on after a marriage breaks up, and I got on with life the best way I could.

Somehow, losing Wendy to another woman seemed to be worse than if it was another man. I don't know why, because the result is the same, but it just felt worse. I kept wondering if it was me, if I had turned her the other way somehow, if I was lacking in something, that made her turn lesbian. It shook me to the core, I can assure you, and I know a lot of guys would be out looking for a new woman straight away, but I didn't feel ready to go back into the arena. Not yet, anyway.

About a year before Wendy left me, I went to a manager's conference in Melbourne, where I ran into a guy called Warren Baxter, who was an old friend from my school days. We had been pretty good friends in high school, and I found out we'd been working for the same company for years, but neither us knew about the other one. After that, we used to keep in contact by email and the occasional phone call, but seeing I had left my home town almost as soon as I left school, Warren was the only person I still knew from those far-off days, although he would occasionally give me some news on people we had known as teenagers.

Now that I was suddenly and unexpectedly single, I had a lot more time on my hands, and about eight months after my marriage broke up, I got an email from Warren, telling me there was a twenty-year school reunion coming up, and asking me if I was interested in going.

Twenty years! I thought, Has it really been that long? Then, I thought about it and wondered if it was really worth going in the first place. My parents had long since retired and moved to Queensland, so I hadn't even visited the city where I grew up for years, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to revisit that forgotten, and forgettable, part of my life again. First off, I told Warren I'd be giving it a miss, but then I reconsidered. My social life was almost zero, but that was mostly because I hadn't felt like going out much after Wendy left me, so I gave it some thought, and decided a few days away might do me some good.

I could have flown down for a two-day stay, but I decided to take a week out of my annual leave, and drive down to the coast, book into a motel for a few days, and in addition to going to the reunion, I thought I might check out a few places from my youth that I hadn't seen for two decades. After all, I had plenty of time on my hands now, so I rang Warren to let him know I was going.

In a week or so, I got an invitation for the reunion in the mail, telling me it was a semi-formal occasion, to be held in the function centre of a luxury hotel that wasn't even built when I left town, and the address showed it was just down the street from my old high school. After I got the invitation, I found I was looking forward to the night, and it occurred to me that apart from my marriage, I was doing quite okay at that time in my life, and I started wondering what my former classmates had been up to.

At nearly thirty-eight, I still had all my hair, I hadn't gone grey, and I was in pretty good shape overall. I was about thirty pounds heavier than I was at eighteen, but that was a good thing, because I was such a skinny kid, and although I was still pretty lean built for my height, I had kept my fitness up. I kind of wondered what everybody else looked like these days.

The reunion was to be held on a Saturday night, so I rang up and booked a room in the same hotel where it was going to be held, and after a week at work, I packed my car on Friday afternoon, and headed back to my home town, wondering along the way who I might meet again, and what everyone had been up to over the years. As I drove along, I thought back to those long-ago days, when I was a shy, skinny kid, and I thought of the things I got up to with my friends, and how simple life was, but amongst the nostalgia, one or two bad memories came back as well. Sometimes, Memory Lane can take you through some bad neighbourhoods.

As I got into town, taking the turn-off from the highway, past suburbs that were just open fields in my youth, past the old war memorial, towards the city centre, I actually got butterflies in my stomach. I didn't expect that, I thought to myself.

I got to the hotel in the late evening, so I went straight to bed, without even looking around town, as I had planned, but as I checked in, I saw a sign already in place outside the door leading upstairs to the function room, saying "Lake Chifley High School Class of 1988 Twenty Year Reunion." When I saw that sign, and when I read the name of my old school, with the school crest underneath it, and the latin motto, "Vultus versus lux lucis," the nostalgia seemed to return for a few moments, and I wondered if I was going soft in the head, feeling that way about a school I didn't even like going to in the first place.

The next day, I got up, had breakfast, and then I went for a drive, for a look around town. I took a detour past the house where I grew up, now remodelled since my parents sold it, and I checked out a few places where I played, or hung out as a kid. Naturally, the memories, both good and bad, came flooding back, as I drove around town, occasionally stopping just to breathe the old, familiar air again.

The reunion was due to start at 6pm, with dinner and dancing, and seeing it was semi formal, I wore my best suit, and I walked up from my room just after six. I met up with Warren and his pregnant wife, Casey, who had a coke while Warren and I had a couple of beers, and the evening began. Seeing and meeting all these people from my youth, after so long, was a strange experience, as I looked around, sometimes recognising people immediately, and sometimes having to ask their names, because I had forgotten, or just didn't recognise them. Some of the guys had lost their hair, some had gone grey, many of them had put on weight, and some of the girls who had been lookers back in the day were now plump and matronly middle-aged women. One girl, who wouldn't even talk to me as a teenager, walked over and hugged me, saying "Kevin, I haven't seen you for years! Where've you been? What've you been up to?" and then gushing and talking like we were old buddies or something. Almost everyone had a husband or a wife with them, and I felt a little conscious of the fact that I was there on my own, but with so many people from my past coming up to shake hands, hug me, or exchange stories with me, I didn't have much time to think about that.

For three quarters of an hour, we all stood around talking and drinking, and there was an excited buzz of conversation, with plenty of laughter mixed in, going around the room, and the waiters started to bring in the tables with food for the serve-yourself buffet dinner. People were forming into groups, and everyone was working out where to sit for dinner, and as I looked around for Warren and his wife, thinking I may as well join them, I heard a female voice to my left, saying a plain, and simple, "Hello."

I looked over to my left, and I saw Linda Moffatt, or at least that's the name I knew her by. I expected she'd be married by now, and she was standing a few feet away, looking at me, with a slightly ironic smile. My first impression was that the years had been good to her, because she didn't look much different from the way I remembered her at school. She still had that same light, strawberry blonde hair, now a little shorter, and if her face was no longer "covergirl," she didn't look thirty-eight, either. She was wearing a sleeveless, knee-length, red satin evening dress, with ruffles at the shoulders, that was showing a little of her very tidy cleavage, before hugging her figure on the way down, and flaring a little at the bottom. That figure it was hugging was still curvy, but now a little more rounded and womanly than when she was at school, and I have to say she looked elegant and impressive. With her fair complexion, and her strawberry blonde hair, that red dress really suited her, and I knew straight away who she was, but I must have hesitated, taking in what I saw, because she said, "Remember me?"

I nodded, and said, "Yeah, of course I do." I smiled, offered a handshake, and as she accepted, I said, "You're Linda Moffatt."

Linda smiled a pretty, but slightly wary, smile at me, and she said, "And you're Kevin Roberts." After shaking my hand, she looked at me and said, "You haven't changed much."

"I like to think I've improved on the inside," I said, offering her a smile of my own, and I added, "You haven't changed much, either."

"Well, I'm older," Linda answered, and she added, "and I like to think I'm wiser." I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but she made eye contact when she said it, as though she was scanning me for my reaction. I looked at her left hand, and I didn't see a wedding ring, and I think she knew I was looking, because she fidgeted with her hand for a moment, as though seeing me looking down there made her uncomfortable.

"I haven't seen you around for years," Linda said.

"I haven't been around for years," I answered, smiling so I didn't sound abrupt saying that, "I joined the army straight out of school, and moved away. I haven't lived here since I was eighteen."

"The army?" Linda said, looking a little surprised, "You never struck me as the army type."

"That's what my drill sergeant told me on the last day of basic training," I answered, "He was surprised, too."

"So, are you still in?" Linda asked, smiling, and seeming like she was interested.

"No," I said, shaking my head, and I went on to tell her what I was doing for a job these days. I asked what she was up to, and she told me she was assistant manager at a local credit union, and we had a conversation about life and work, and what we had done for the last twenty years. In the back of my mind, it felt strange to be talking to her like that, considering we hardly knew each other at school, and then considering the sort of contact that we did have there, but the truth was she was a very attractive woman, and I was enjoying talking to her.

Our conversation kind of faltered after a few minutes, and someone announced over the PA system that dinner was now served, and Linda looked around and said, "So, are you married now? Have you got someone here with you?" She kind of shrugged as she said that, and I stammered, "No. I'm umm, married, but we're separated." I swallowed, almost hating to acknowledge the fact to another person, and I added, "Umm, going through a divorce."

I couldn't help sighing after I spoke, but Linda said, rather flatly, "That's a coincidence."

"Why is that?" I asked, thinking, Surely she's not going to tell me she's going through a divorce, too.

Linda took a deep breath, and then she sighed, and said, "I'm separated. I was married, but..., " and she stopped, as though she was going to tell me more, but had changed her mind.

"I think I know how you feel," I said, truthfully.

"Yeah, I suppose you would," Linda said, nodding thoughtfully, and then she brightened a little, and said, "So, I guess you're here on your own then."

I nodded, and she said, "Well, seeing you're here on your own and I'm here on my own, why don't we sit together for dinner?" She looked me in the eyes, waiting for me to answer.

"I think I'd like that," I said, smiling at her. Almost beyond my control, my eyes fell to her cleavage for a very brief moment, until I caught myself, and when I looked back up, I saw that she knew I looked, but she just gave me a tiny smile, almost like she was pleased with herself.

Linda and I served ourselves dinner, and found a vacant table, and she sat on my right as we ate. We shared a bottle of white wine, and we talked about our memories of our school days, about the eccentricities of certain teachers back then, about things that went on at school over the years, as well as life since we finished school. It was kind of odd to be discussing all these shared memories with Linda, because we were virtually strangers, but I found myself liking her for her ironic sense of humour, her wit, and for a kind of vulnerable-yet-stylish thing that she had going for her. Not only that, but I was in the company of a rather beautiful woman, so I was really enjoying myself, and the thought occurred to me that I would have missed all this if had gone with my original decision not to come to the reunion in the first place.

Now and again, people we had known at school would come me over to speak to us, and at one stage, a girl came over to speak to Linda, with her husband in tow. She said to him, "This is Linda Clayton, one of my old school friends," and they shook hands over the table. After a few minutes of animated conversation, they left to speak to some other people, and I said to Linda, "So, is Clayton your married name?"

"Yes," she answered, and the tone of her voice suggested she was not happy about that right now. She looked at me, and added, "I married Eddie Clayton." She sighed and said, "I didn't mention his name before because I didn't feel like talking about him."

Taverner
Taverner
440 Followers