What became of us

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Authors: Imogen Parker
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halfway across the country and managed to be there on time, whereas Annie just lived down the road.
    Annie tried to think of a valid excuse not to go, but the writing had exhausted her creativity. She thought about ringing Brown’s and saying she had broken her leg, but annoyingly Ursula watched her programme religiously and would be able to work out when it was screened that that wasn’t true, unless she pretended she had broken her leg for the programme too, but Annie McClintock had broken her leg two series back and it might seem a bit repetitive. Anyway, a broken leg would not be a serious enough excuse to miss the whole day. She had been bullied by Leonora into agreeing to read something at the dinner. If she was going to get out of it altogether, rather than just reading from a wheelchair, she would have to invent a much more critical illness, which would be in pretty poor taste. It was bad enough to have missed Penny’s funeral because she was on holiday in the Caribbean, but if she missed this, Ursula would never forgive her, nor would Leonora and more importantly, nor would Roy.
    The prospect of seeing Roy again made Annie shiver with excitement.
    A couple of nights after the invitation to the reunion arrived, she had woken herself up with an orgasm in the midst of an incredibly erotic dream in which Roy had been fucking her on a tennis court. What was so weird was that she had never been aware of fancying him, yet what they had been doing together in the dream was unbelievably sexy. In fact it was so intimate and wonderful, she somehow felt that Roy’s subconscious must, in a curious telepathic way, have been involved too. It was the first really randy dream she could remember having since her early teens, when, still a virgin, she used to get up to all sorts of things with Ilie Nastase in her sleep. She imagined that the connection between sex and tennis stemmed from the fact that when she was a teenager, the sports pavilion in the recreation ground near her mum’s council house had sometimes been the venue for discos, and she had experienced her first snogs against the wire netting surrounding the courts.

    The wall of wardrobes in Annie’s bedroom was one of the interior designer’s better ideas. He had designed them as a row of beach huts at some unfashionable English seaside resort. The first hut was a washed-out chalky pink colour and contained her underwear. The second had weatherbeaten white paint and was full of dresses and suits. She took a long time making up her mind before choosing her new Gucci dress and a Donna Karan little black dress as a stand-by. The third hut was painted with vertical red and white stripes and held her casual separates. She took out a pair of cargo Pants, a pair of jeans, and a couple of white T-shirts for the next day. The fourth, for shoes, was white again. She selected a pair of red sandals to go with the dress, some Nike trainers and her ponyskin mules. The final hut, in bright yellow gloss with ice-cream company logos stuck onto it and half a stable door, was filled with shelves for her collection of bags.
    Annie had handbags in every shape and colour. There were hard plastic 1950s bags, and soft leather drawstrings, there were briefcases and vanity cases, suitbags and, on the floor, a complete set of Louis Vuitton cases including a small shipping trunk. There was almost the entire range of the Gucci Jackie bag which everyone had been photographed with that season. She had one in yellow and black, one in white and black, and one which was black and the same fabric as the dress she was going to wear. Her only regret was that she had stopped herself buying the black on black on the basis that she had at least ten plain black handbags already.
    On the upper shelves of the cupboard there were several dozen of the free make-up bags that department stores give away with two purchases, all complete with miniature sets of face cream, doll’s size lipstick and mascara and tiny

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