Spotlight on "Once Significant Others"
A group of five friends who, some thirty years after they lived and worked in the same town, come back together to honour an old friend who has recently died. The weekend is intended as a celebration but merely serves to reignite old emotions and uncover long-held secrets.
“Sally Rooney meets Henry James” – Jim Friedman
“this honest exploration of human nature helped me understand myself better” – Ann Pelletier-Topping
“a story that questions the whole idea of friendship and the notion that we can ever really know anyone” – Janet Philo
“a deeply engaging book…every moment of dialogue and recollection is thoroughly believable” – David Punter
Sharon
She hadn’t meant to die.
Not yet anyway. It hadn’t been part of her grand plan, the ambition for a gradual glide into retirement followed by a few years of freedom and greying ease until something unavoidable caught up with her, ideally at a moment pretty much of her own choosing. Which clearly this had not been. In the end it was the unseemly rush she minded most of all. There was nothing gracious about that. It felt as if she were paying the forfeit for a crime she did not commit. Or for something she hadn’t regarded as a crime.
All of which left her little room for manoeuvre, and the most important thing became to get the others to come together again, not to see her - it would be too late for that in all sorts of ways - but to see each other. Regarding her initiative more as gift than practical joke, she would be offering them a chance to slay old ghosts, especially as there would be no third parties to interfere: none of their partners would be invited - where they had them - and definitely not Malcolm. Apart from that gathering as her final request (necessarily made by proxy via Niamh) she had nothing else to bequeath.
There had been no ghosts to speak of before the summer of ’84, spectral foundations laid across a few short months and built on by arrivals associated with both the annual intake of ‘bright young things’ at the Insurance company on the other side of the harbour and the opening of a new and temporarily spotless ‘logistics hub’ on the ring road north of town. For the majority of them - the five others - those early weeks had been brimming with enthusiasm and naïvety in equal measure, the kind of bravado only starting a new job in a new place can conjure. It helped that they possessed an unquestioning belief in the bullet-proof nature of youth; a belief that would be frayed at the edges within three years.
As it turned out, most of them proved themselves to be irregularly shaped pegs sitting unsteadily in perfectly circular professional holes; and if, during those heady first few months they had been swept along by the newness of everything with one or two of them trying to wedge themselves more firmly into their new roles, very quickly it didn’t seem to matter. When you overlaid their personal explorations on top - attempts to find out not only who they were but how the world worked and how they might rub-up against others who were similarly floundering - the cocktail was complete. Only Niamh, still there some thirty years later, gave the impression of finding her niche relatively quickly and subsequently sticking with it - though Sharon knows even that assertion is a little superficial. How much of Niamh’s perseverance was down to luck or resignation she isn’t certain. It - life, that is - proved to be not so easy for her, at least that’s how Sharon chooses to frame it at the end. But she also knew it had been hard for each of them; one way or another, they had collectively contrived to make sure of that.
Even if illusory, in the beginning Alan and Simon - revelling in the pretence of the solid and mature aura they seemed determined to project - smoothed the way. Having graduated in different subjects (though all five of them had majored in idealism!) they had walked through the double-doors of the Insurance company’s Finance Department as if already privy to its secrets; as if, one day, it would all be theirs; as if they were indomitable; as if there was no way they could ever be ground down by process and routine and the tyranny of numbers. Along with Niamh, equally green in Human Resources, theirs was a triumvirate which coalesced effortlessly, remaining untarnished - for a short while at least - by the personal or subversive. This was adventure in a new world at least two of them were determined to conquer.
Defining where she might sit on the spectrum between victory and defeat was never an issue for Judith, the scales being tipped massively in her favour thanks in no small measure to her remarkable beauty. Right up to the end Sharon debated internally whether she and Niamh ever came to terms with being consistently out-shone by Judith. Sharon liked to think she did - and knew Niamh did not. But was that even relevant any longer? Did it matter? And would the reunion clarify anything, at least for Niamh? Sharon was unable to judge if her assessment was the result of cutting herself some slack and being less self-critical in her final days. But what was the point of beating yourself up when life has already given you a pounding? And as if being tall and slim and perfectly formed wasn’t enough, it didn’t help that underneath her unblemished exterior, Judith was brighter than all of them too - which made the future into which she would eventually knit herself all the more incongruous. Atypically low-key and unheralded, Judith’s arrival at the bank a few weeks after the others had landed in their new world went virtually unnoticed, and it was only her need to house-share with someone - initially Niamh as it turned out - which brought her into their embryonic circle.
In as much as she chose to see herself pulling the strings one final time, the puppet-master dragging her marionettes back for a posthumous farewell gig, Sharon liked to tell herself that she had been the spider at the heart of the web even then. Ignoring the contributions of fate and chance which had transported her from being alone in a clique of one to the master cog in a machine of six, surely she had been at the centre of them all. Already in the town when they arrived - a town in which she had been born and where she worked in the local hospital - eventually she was the only one who remained, apart from Niamh that is. Even if it was a truth with which she played fast-and-loose at times, Sharon had come to appreciate that constancy was worth something, though in her less lucid moments - which became increasingly prevalent as her personal curtain rapidly fell - such a quality came to manifest itself via an elevated opinion of her own importance. If, on occasions of lucidity, she liked to think of herself in the role of organ-grinder, when fully engaged with her decline - and in those few liberating moments when she almost embraced it - she remained savvy enough to recognise that she was, in part, kidding herself. Other than Niamh - who seemed to have inherited at least part of her mantle (and when did that happen?!) - there was no-one left who was qualified to judge, so who cared?
A machine of six? Well finally there was Sebastian, of course. Two years older than most of them, he was the semi-professional maverick partially living off the fame of a father who happened to be a sporting icon. Having already failed in his first choice of career as an architect, he had reinvented himself as a young man emotionally invested in warehousing and logistics, and who - with an enthusiasm which soon betrayed itself as patently manufactured - had sold himself to a company at the heart of the new logistics hub as ‘executive material’, a talent determined to excel in process efficiency and productivity, a Rising Star who professed to love boxes and pallets and fork-lift trucks and who wanted to revolutionise the industry. Such religion was nothing but veneer. Above all else Sebastian was a salesman, not of things but of himself. That was how he came to them, how he swept them along - as much as Judith had done with her beauty - and how he became, in some senses, the brightest light about which the rest of them seemed to flutter.
And at the end, how did she feel about moths and flames?
Knowing she would not be able to see how they have all been transformed by life, nor vicariously enjoy their reunion, Sharon chose to lay back and wait, to die wondering - and not for the first time - whether there might yet be such things as ghosts; not ghosts of the past, but ghosts of the present. And if there were such things? It was something to cling to, the notion that she might yet act as a witness after all.