What became of us

pretty difficult to understand: for her, I mean,’ Annie said.
    ‘I think Penny was one of the few people who might have done,’ Manon said carefully.
    There was a long pause.
    ‘Oh well, you knew her better than I ever did,’ Annie admitted.
    Manon said nothing.
    ‘Secrets are awful, aren’t they?’ Annie moved on again, ‘they kind of have a momentum of their own. I can never be bothered with them. Nowadays, when people start a sentence with “Can I tell you something in confidence” I just say no.’
    She was about to tell Manon about Ursula driving away in her lover’s car, but for some reason held back.
    ‘So are you and Roy going to be an item now?’ she decided to ask.
    ‘No,’ Manon said categorically. ‘I think this weekend has taught me a lot about letting the past go.’
    Annie turned this information over in her head. Then she said,
    ‘I went on a two-week therapy course on a Greek island once. I couldn’t stand all the angst exchange with humourless bearded men whose real problem was they couldn’t get a shag. I’m so bloody competitive I kept having to make my life sound much worse than theirs. After a couple of days, I kind of decanted to the local taverna and found an alternative source of therapy called Stavros, but that’s another story. Anyway, on the last day, at sunset, the leader of the course made us all pick up a stone and pretend that it held everything that we wanted to get rid of in our lives, then hurl it into the sea. And even though I’d thought the rest of it was complete mumbo-jumbo, I invested that stone with so much insecurity and jealousy and inadequacy, and I found myself throwing it out to sea really hard as if I really hated it, and when it went plop into the wine-dark Aegean, I felt much better...’
    Manon waited, turning over in her mind the image of Annie, silhouetted at sunset, throwing away her problems like an Olympian shot putter.
    ‘And did it change your life?’ she finally asked.
    ‘Not really,’ Annie said.

    They were approaching the ring road which divided the countryside from the leafy suburbs of North Oxford.
    ‘I would like to change,’ Manon said, quietly.
    ‘Why? I’d give anything to be you,’ Annie admitted.
    ‘No. No, you wouldn’t. What you mean is that you’d like to look like me, but it isn’t as easy as you think looking like I do. I know that sounds crap,’ she said quickly, anticipating a shrewish remark.
    ‘So, what’s so difficult about it,’ Annie said, between clenched teeth. She missed the turn-off to Summertown and had to go round the roundabout again.
    ‘People, men mostly, think that they know you. They think that you are their fantasy. They sort of think that they have created you because you look so much like their ideal. It’s true,’ she noticed Annie’s raised eyebrow, ‘even if they’re total strangers sitting opposite you in the tube and they don’t even know what language you speak, they think they know you. Sometimes you have to behave in peculiar ways to prove them wrong because you feel your body has become everyone else’s property.’
    Annie tried to work out what she was talking about.
    ‘Peculiar ways?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean, like getting tattooed?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Manon said.
    ‘Drugs?’
    Annie had always half hoped that Manon’s slim figure might be due to heroin addiction.
    ‘I avoided that because of my mother.’
    ‘Prostitution?’ Annie joked. Manon said nothing.
    ‘Jesus!’ said Annie.
    They passed the yellow brick building that had been the Careers Advisory Centre.
    ‘When you think of yourself, I mean your actual self, where do you think you are?’ Manon suddenly asked her.
    ‘In my stomach, mainly, and in my breasts and vagina, and, I don’t know, all over the bloody place,’ said Annie. ‘What about you?’
    ‘I think of myself as something very small trying to hide inside my head.’
    ‘Really?’
    There was another moment’s silence, then Annie said, ‘A bit like at the club! You hide in the coat cupboard, while I eat and drink and laugh too much upstairs.’
    ‘Exactly!’ Manon exclaimed, delighted.
    They smiled at each other.
    ‘Jesus, you’re fucked up,’ Annie said, ‘and I don’t suppose that seeing a shrink would do you much good, because you’re shrunk enough. You want to get out of that head of yours and live.’
    Manon laughed.
    ‘I think I’ve been trying to pretend that I don’t exist,’ she said. Then