What became of us

make it just the way it was before you noticed the frown lines...’
    More laughter. Thank God, I’m not the only one, Annie thought.
    ‘... and isn’t it true that once you’ve seen those lines, they seem to get worse in certain lights, and you wonder how long they’ve been there without you even noticing? Then people stop saying “you don’t look thirty-six” when you scrape two years off your age. Weird, isn’t it, that when you were fifteen you’d have given anything to look twenty-one, and now you wonder why you didn’t start shedding years before it became so obvious. Then you start getting invited to fortieth birthday parties, and because yours is still a way off, you feel a little bit smug and you think, “is so-and-so really forty already?” but then you’re choosing the gift and you’re wondering why you’re spending so much money and then you realize it’s because it’s your turn next. If you’re still single, friends of your parents have got beyond asking, partly because several of them have recently died, and the ones who are alive now assume that you’re old enough to be called an old maid, or you’re a lesbian…’
    Annie caught a whiff of smugness from several tables.
    ‘... and if you’re married, your husband is very likely to have had one affair already, I’m talking statistics, and there are friends of your teenage daughter getting pregnant, so you don’t even have the dignity of being the age that mothers are any more . .
    That wiped the self-satisfaction off their faces.
    ‘Doesn’t it feel weird that our generation is in power now? We are the grown-ups. It is our time. What does that mean? It means that the Prime Minister is someone whose years at Oxford must almost have coincided with ours, and if things had been just a little different any one of us could have married him, that is if you can forget that he used to be a guitar-playing Christian in those days...’
    Annie looked round the room, seeing several people who might well have fancied Tony Blair with long hair strumming ‘Lord of the Dance’. She decided to change tack.
    ‘You worry about whether it would have been better to do something selfless like being a nurse, or sell out completely and go into the City (how could you have missed all that cash in the Eighties?). You worry about things you don’t understand and it’s got a bit late to ask, like how do personal pension plans actually work, and where exactly is the Internet? You worry publicly about whether it is more responsible to send your children to state or private schools, and you worry secretly whether all those weirdo cults might be right about the world ending in the year 2000. You worry about whether you’ll actually get to see the Millennium Dome if you’ve been able to decide whether it’s right to go or not... the money would have been better spent on hospitals and what is holding up all that tenting anyway?’
    Another laugh from Ian.
    ‘... you go to a Meat Loaf concert at Wembley expecting to see loads of long-haired blokes on motorbikes and a lot of leather, and you wonder why there’s a great long queue of middle-aged accountants waiting to go in, and then you realize that nobody is looking at you, because you fit in… and Meat Loaf has to sit down for half his concert because he’s out of breath... and you can remember singing “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” along with the jukebox when you were playing bar footy with a bloke you fancied from St Peter’s and it seems like a bloody lifetime ago...’
    For a moment, Annie was lost in her own nostalgia. She decided to wind up.
    ‘... And you know something? When someone dies, people sometimes say that they’re at peace, because they don’t have to worry any more. But you know what? I’d rather be alive. There is one alternative to getting old, and it’s not plastic surgery...’
    Complete silence.
    ‘... The Who got it wrong with the anthem of our generation. We don’t hope we die before we get old. It was indulgent to think it then, and it’s getting a bit late now…’
    Annie had the strange sensation that she was holding an audience as she had never done before.
    ‘...And people think that death is so horrible that something good must come of it, but I don’t believe that. There is nothing good about Penny being dead. It leaves Roy without a partner, and the little girls without a mother and all of us without our best friend... but maybe, just