Past Secrets (41 page)

A memory came to her, a harsh, bullying voice telling her she was ugly, a long streak of misery, like a boy. Those taunts had had their effect: for years, Maggie had believed them. And yet now, she looked all right, didn’t she?

‘I suppose a white blouse maybe?’ she said, unsure. ‘You’ll look like a waitress,’ said her mother. ‘No, it has to be colour. What’s wrong with the midnight-blue camisole?’

‘No,’ said Maggie, thinking that she’d look totally unlike herself then with shoulders and throat on show as well as her legs. ‘I wish I had someone to borrow something off.’

‘Pity Elisabeth’s in Seattle,’ said her mother. ‘She always has amazing clothes, all designer stuff too, you know. And if you had kept in touch with some of the girls from school, you’d be able to ring them up and borrow clothes off them too.’

‘Yeah,’ said Maggie shortly. She put the camisole back on.

‘You look beautiful,’ sighed her mother. ‘I’ll get out my marcasite earrings and necklace for you and Ivan won’t be able to take his eyes off you.’

‘He’s only asking me because his date did a runner,’ Maggie pointed out, not entirely correctly.

It was what she’d said to her parents to explain how she’d happened to be invited to a wedding by a man none of them knew.

‘Well, it’ll get you out of the house and over that horrible old Grey,’ said her mother, firmly. ‘The louser. If your father ever gets his hands on Grey Stanley, well, let me tell you: we’ll need bail money, that’s all I’m saying.’

Saturday morning in the library flew by. They were incredibly busy and Maggie didn’t have a moment to mull over her pleasure that she had a date for the rest of the afternoon. Still, it was nice to be able to answer, ‘Yes, I’m going out to a wedding,’

when people asked her what she was doing with her half-day off.

Better than saying, ‘No, I’m going to sit at home and mope about my ex-boyfriend who bonked someone else.’ Definitely, a social life made you feel more positive. She’d got up early and washed her hair and even put some of that curl separator stuff in, so that it was now lots of rippling, glossy waves, instead of the usual faintly frizzy curls.

‘You look lovely,’ said Tina as they rushed about

behind the desk. ‘Is your man from Galway coming back?’

‘No, actually,’ murmured Maggie. ‘It’s a different guy altogether.’

Tina looked impressed. ‘I’m pleased for you. I mean he seemed lovely, your man, and everything, but …’ she stopped.

‘But what?’ asked Maggie, fascinated.

‘He was a bit too pleased with himself, wasn’t he? Those gorgeous fellas always are. No one will ever love him quite as much as he loves himself.’

Maggie grinned. ‘I think you hit the nail on the head there, Tina,’ she said. ‘It’s one thing competing with other women, but you can’t compete with the guy himself, can you?’

‘You said it,’ replied Tina, in a voice that said she knew what she was talking about.

Funny, thought Maggie, turning back to the desk, who would have thought that sedate Tina had a big history of men behind her? But you never knew. Everybody had secrets and dramas in their lives, they just didn’t wear them on their faces.

Maggie had just come back from her coffee break and was making her way back to the library desk, when she realised with a shock that she recognised a woman who had just walked in. Billie Deegan, one of the bullying gang of girls who’d made Maggie’s life hell.

Billie had never been as bad as the gang leader Sandra Brody. But just seeing her made fifteen years drop away. Maggie felt the way she always had, her intestines literally churning with fear, her heart thumping, her hands clammy.

Billie was holding a small boy’s hand and seemed totally and utterly oblivious of Maggie. Her hairstyle, her expression, were exactly the same as they’d been all those years ago when she’d swiped Maggie’s school bag and tossed it to Sandra, laughing like a hyena as Sandra tipped the contents over the playground.

Unable to stop herself, Maggie ducked in behind a shelf, heart pounding, and listened.

‘Now, love,’ Billie said to the boy, ‘we’ve got to be out of the library in five minutes. Come on, pick a book, will you? We can’t be here all day, we’re going to meet Daddy. He’ll go mad if we’re late, you know what he’s like.’ The boy stood looking lost. ‘Oh, come on now! Hurry up!’

Leaning against a shelf, knowing it was ridiculous to feel the fear still, Maggie lived again those four years of hell. Even now, she couldn’t quite explain how it made her feel, how frightened, how despairing. There was a brief time when Sandra’s game was stealing and vandalising her possessions, when she’d wondered if killing herself was an option.

At least then she wouldn’t be picked on. At least then she wouldn’t wake up on a Monday morning with sheer dread in every atom of her being.

Sometimes now she read articles in the newspaper about bullying. The reporters who had written them had never been victims themselves,

she could tell. They wrote about it as if it were a minor blip, something that occurred a couple of hours every day and then you’d move on to another part of your life. Those writers never realised that the bullying became your life, took hold of it, destroyed you.

‘Maggie,’ said Tina loudly, indicating the queue. ‘We need you over here, sorry. I’m on the phone.’

Maggie took a deep breath and almost ran to the safety of the desk. Automatically, she stamped books, smiling at the children and their parents, saying things like ‘The Narnia books are fabulous.

I loved them when I was little, still reread them.’

And the children would grin and their parents would grin even more, glad to see their kids reading.

Tina was on the phone again, trying to tell some woman that the Jacqueline Wilson still hadn’t come in. The queue was getting shorter, bringing Billie closer to Maggie.

Get off the phone, please, Tina, Maggie thought in anguish. Please get off the phone and deal with this woman. There were two more to go before Billie and her son now.

Peering up surreptitiously, Maggie watched her.

Yes, Billie looked exactly the same, still hard and still with that dead-straight platinum-blonde haircut, probably not dyed at home any more, and the heavy eyeliner ringing her eyes into two cold slits of muddy blue. She and Sandra had been the eyeliner queens of St Ursula’s, even when makeup was forbidden. They hadn’t paid attention to the rules, naturally: rules were for other people.

Her clothes were remarkably normal: a longsleeved top and pale trousers, none of them ripped or bearing a rude logo. That had been another of Billie and Sandra’s idiosyncrasies. Outside school, they’d favoured tiny Tshirts, ripped leather jackets, tight pale-blue jeans and high-heeled boots. The punk slut look, Maggie’s friend, Kitty, called it.

She and Maggie loved that name: being able to call the bullies something rude. It gave them a tiny, welcome sense of power. It was a shame when Kitty’s family had moved away.

‘Now, Jimmy, give the woman your book and we’ll get out of here,’ said Billie.

Maggie had no option. Keeping her eyes down, she scanned the book number, stamped it and handed it to the child, not saying one word.

‘Thank you,’ the woman said. ‘Jimmy, say thank you.’

Maggie was gobsmacked. Thank you hadn’t been in Billie’s vocabulary when Maggie knew her. ‘Thank you,’ said Jimmy obediently.

He was eight or nine, Maggie reckoned, so Billie must have got pregnant soon enough after they’d left school. For a flicker of a moment, she wondered if Billie’s life had been hard at that time, then dismissed it: Billie Deegan didn’t need her pity.

‘Come on, Jimmy, we’d better go,’ and without exchanging one single glance with Maggie, Billie marched him out of the library.

There was a small stool behind the counter and Maggie sank on to it. Only days before, she’d spoken to Christie Devlin about laying her demons to rest and now, here was one of the bullies in her life. That bitch. Maggie hated her with a venom time hadn’t diminished and, yet, Billie had strolled in happily, smiling, lively, as if she had no idea what she’d done, what she and her mocking pals had done to Maggie’s life. How could she not know?

‘Tina,’ Maggie said urgently, ‘I just feel sick, can I run to the loo for one minute?’

Tina, who had just replaced the phone, nodded.

Maggie fled to the staff toilets where she locked herself in a cubicle, sat down on a seat and held her face in her hands. She could feel her cheeks burning and still, that familiar ache in her intestines.

Sandra and her cronies had always been a cure for constipation. Rage, anger, impotence and fury flooded through Maggie. Laying your demons to rest was one thing but why now, why today?

Maggie had cleaned up the mascara that she had cried down her cheeks and reapplied more by the time Ivan arrived at the house to pick her up.

‘Hello, Maggie,’ he said, admiring her outfit. ‘You look great.’

He looked pretty good too, all spruced up in a suit and tie.

‘Thanks,’ said Maggie shortly. She had read a book once about accepting compliments and apparently you had to say, ‘Thank you, that’s lovely,’ instead of ‘Oh, this old thing, I’ve had it for a hundred years,’ or ‘My boyfriend gave me this skirt and I never normally wear it.’

They got into Ivan’s car, which was suitably Ivan, being a classic something or other. Maggie knew nothing about cars but it had to be old, what with the ancient dashboard and seats that looked like they came from a 1960s art installation.

He was playing classical music, Dvofak, if Maggie could remember anything from her music classes, a million years ago.

‘That isn’t the music I pictured you listening to,’

she said.

‘No?’ he said good humouredly. ‘What did you think? I’d be a Guns N’ Roses sort of guy, one of those dudes who plays air guitar and dances with his legs spread apart, shaking his head.’

As this was an accurate assessment of what she’d thought of Ivan the first time she’d met him, she didn’t reply to that but said: ‘Lots of people aren’t into classical music any more.’

‘My mother taught piano,’ he said. ‘I grew up with music. It lifts me.’

‘My dad’s the same,’ she replied. ‘He went through a classical music phase. There were phases for everything.

Phases for learning about stars and phases for learning about classical music. He’s into opera too.

I quite like it as well, but not played full blast, which is how Dad says you have to play it. His current phase is model-making. Planes and boats.’

‘That sounds nice,’ said Ivan. ‘I like the idea of being a model-maker myself.’

He was easy company, Maggie thought. She didn’t have to make an effort to be scintillating or funny. She just had to be. Sit there in the car and let the conversation roll on, or not, as the case may be. Ivan was quite happy to let the strains of Dvorak glide over them. Undemanding, that was it. Grey had been demanding, she realised suddenly.

She’d never had anything to compare him to but Ivan was so relaxed, the contrast showed Grey up.

‘You’re not quite yourself today,’ Ivan said abruptly, putting the kibosh on the judgement. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked defensively. ‘You’ve been crying.’

She flipped down the passenger visor and looked into the mirror. She’d cleaned away all the mascara, but her eyes were a teeny bit red.

‘Most guys wouldn’t have noticed,’ she said. ‘I’m not most guys,’ he replied. ‘Do you want to talk?’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t.’

But she couldn’t stop thinking about her shock that morning. The worst thing about it was that she had been made to realise that she hadn’t got over being bullied, not one little bit. And that made her conscious that the past would always imprison her unless she did something about it.

But what?

It was a very modern wedding, although nobody seemed to have told the majority of the guests.

The women, decked out in floral frocks, hats like galleons perched on their heads, with fluffy feather boas, dainty jewelled handbags and shoes in summery colours, all stared aghast at the bridal party who might have come straight out of Italian Vogue in their shades of cream and slate grey.

The bride wore a cream shift, so simple it looked as though Maggie herself could have run it up on her mother’s old Singer machine, although it was so stylish the label undoubtedly proclaimed it as a piece of designer art from a Milanese atelier.

The groom wore a Nehru-collared suit in slate with his groomsmen similarly attired and the bridesmaids wore slate-grey shift dresses, with tiny posies of cream roses.

‘Very hip and trendy,’ Maggie said, trying to find the right thing to say.

‘Where are the frills?’ a woman in the pew beside her was wailing. ‘What’s the point in getting married if you can’t have frills and flowers and … look at that for a bouquet, one hopeless flower.

Desperate, that’s what it is.’

The bride indeed carried only one flower, although Maggie wouldn’t have called it hopeless, but she had never been a fan of those birds of paradise blooms. It looked like a plant that had somehow eaten a passing bird.

‘Well, it’s what they wanted, obviously,’ she said to the woman beside her.

‘You’re very diplomatic,’ said Ivan. ‘I hate it.’ ‘I didn’t think you had any interest in high fashion at all,’ she teased him. ‘I thought your only cosmetic interest would be in whatever miracle product you use to get the grease out of your hands after a day in the garage.’

‘You mean after a day of honest, hard labour?’

he said, holding up hands that were spotlessly clean.

Without thinking, Maggie took one of them to examine it. ‘How do you manage that? If I do any painting or anything in the apartment, I’m filthy for days. You can’t get stuff like that off your hands. What do you use?’

‘Trade secret,’ he murmured, ‘but I might be prepared to reveal it to the right person.’

She dropped his hand quickly.

At the reception, they were at a table made up of various cousins, which included Ivan’s brother, Leon, who looked a lot like Ivan, although Leon had more of a wolfish look to his face, as if he might pounce at any moment.