Past Secrets (47 page)

The phone book had the answer.

Tony and Sandra McNamara lived a few miles away on a new housing estate.

Maggie wondered what Sandra McNamara was like now. Could she still reduce people to quivering wrecks with one nasty look? Did she still smoke and flick her ash at other people? She’d burned Maggie a couple of times with a cigarette, always pretending that it was accidental. Once on her leg, once on her knuckle, there was still a faint mark from that. At least those scars were surface ones. The marks on her thigh were Sandra’s marks, hers as if she’d made them herself, with her own penknife. Maggie would carry those scars till the

day she died. But it was time to heal the scars on the inside.

‘I’m going out, Mum,’ Maggie called to her mother. ‘If Ivan phones, say I’ll be back soon.’ ‘Fine,’ came her mother’s voice from the kitchen.

Maggie hopped on the bus that would take her past the McNamaras’ road. Sandra and Tony McNamara lived at number 13 and when Maggie walked up to the gate with her head held high, she noticed there were two cars parked in the driveway. One, a standard people carrier with a baby seat in the back.

Children. Imagine Sandra having children of her own! Imagine if they were there when Maggie confronted her. There was no way she wanted to hurt the kids - it wasn’t their fault their mother was a cow. Maggie faltered at this proof that Sandra Brody was more than an evil presence from her past. She was a person after all.

She stood on the pavement outside, trying to summon up the courage to go to the wooden door, when it opened and a man appeared. Instantly, Maggie turned and fled up the street, her heart thumping.

She didn’t want confrontation with anyone else.

A husband who might have no idea what his wife had once been like. Her heart pounding, she walked home, feeling ashamed.

That night, Maggie lay in her childhood bed in the house on Summer Street and stared up at the ceiling. The events of the past couple of months ran through her head. Betrayal and misery had taunted her, yet she’d got through it. Incredibly, she hadn’t been flattened by it all. If anything, she felt stronger and happier now because she’d taken back control of her life.

It seemed very obvious to her now: she’d been stuck in victim mode for so long that she’d forgotten how to take control. Being a victim was easier as you could blame everything on other people. Taking control was frightening as it meant things might go wrong and you mightn’t be able to handle them. But then things went wrong anyway. So why not face the fear, and take control?

The following morning, Maggie sat in her parents’

car on the road outside Sandra McNamara’s house and waited until Sandra returned from the school run. She’d left twenty minutes ago with three children, and now she had just one small boy with her. Maggie walked over to where Sandra was taking the child out of his car seat.

‘Hi, Sandra, remember me?’ said Maggie pleasantly.

Sandra

turned. She was still blonde but her hair was shorter now, and the heavy eyeliner was absent. She wore no make-up, and looked pale and plain in an unflattering sweatshirt and jeans. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

It was uncanny how she sounded the same. She looked different, but she sounded just the same.

‘You honestly don’t remember me, do you?’

Maggie said.

‘Remember you, should I?’

‘We were in school together, St Ursula’s, until you left after fourth year.’

There was no crash of cymbals as realisation hit Sandra’s face, no triumphant chorus as she stared at Maggie in dismay. Her expression was blank.

‘Sorry.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

And she meant it. She really had no idea who Maggie was. When the crash of cymbals hit, the noise was inside Maggie’s head instead. The girl who had tormented her and made her life hell had no recollection of it. Which meant that people often did horrible things randomly and didn’t remember them.

‘Do you live round here?’ asked Sandra politely. ‘I live on Summer Street,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ve been away for a few years and I’m back now. I’m trying to catch up on old friends, and people like you. I was one of the quiet ones at school and you were the leader of the bullies.’

Maggie could see the dawning of comprehension in Sandra’s eyes.

‘We were all a bit crazy then, you know, teenagers,’ Sandra said.

‘No,’ insisted Maggie. ‘It wasn’t just a bit crazy, it was nasty and horrible.’

‘I mean we all went through phases where we weren’t very nice, teenagers can be little bitches,’

protested Sandra.

‘I wasn’t,’ Maggie said. ‘I wasn’t a little bitch, but you were so horrible to me I hated going to school. I used to feel sick thinking about it. No, that’s not right - it’s not that I hated going to school, it’s that I was frightened of going to school.

You made my life a misery for years. Do you have any idea what that feels like?’

Sandra shut the car door, leaving the little boy in his seat.

‘Listen, lady, I don’t remember you, right, so go.)

‘Maggie Maguire, that’s who I am.’ ‘Oh.’

Maggie could see Sandra staring at her in horrified recognition. Maggie knew she looked so different nowadays. Everyone said she was beautiful.

Today, she allowed herself to feel it and stood tall in front of this woman.

‘I knew you’d remember,’ she said. ‘No-Tit Maguire, you called me. It’s funny you not recognising me when I’ll remember you for ever. You made me feel so scared of going to school, which is something so normal you’re supposed to do every day of your life without bother. But you ruined it for me. Your nastiness affected every part of my life, did you know that?’

She didn’t want an answer. In a way, she wasn’t even talking to Sandra any more, she was finally voicing how she felt all those years ago. Sandra just happened to be there: an ordinary, fraught woman who was the one looking trapped now.

Maggie realised that meeting your demons head on meant you could see they weren’t the huge, dark monsters of your nightmares, but just stupid, pathetic people who’d had power at the time and had used it against you.

‘I’m sorry, OK?’ Sandra said. ‘I know I was a bit of a pain when I was in school, I had lots of problems and I took it out on other people, but please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for whatever I did.

Now, just go. I don’t want anyone overhearing this.’ She looked around at her neighbours’

windows, clearly anxious that someone might witness this strange meeting.

Maggie smiled inside, thinking that Sandra must have calmed down if she wanted to fit in with the crowd.

‘Worried what the neighbours will think? You never worried in the past. Have you reinvented yourself as a nice person now? Do you go to coffee mornings and pretend to be an ordinary mum?’

Sandra flushed.

‘Guess I hit the nail on the head,’ Maggie said, looking Sandra coolly in the eye. ‘I’ve one question: how can you say sorry to me, if you don’t remember what you did to me?’

Sandra remembered, Maggie was sure of it. ‘What would you do now if somebody bullied your children?’ she went on. ‘How would you react if they came home from school and said they were terrified because someone was picking on them?’

‘I wouldn’t stand for it,’ growled Sandra with a hint of her old menace.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t stand for it?’ interrupted Maggie. ‘You’d march into the head teacher’s office to complain, would you? That’d be pretty hypocritical, given how many people you bullied in school. Would that make you realise how much you hurt me and all the other kids you bullied, if you had to watch it happen to your child? That should be the punishment for bullies, seeing their own families getting bullied.’

‘Look, I can’t talk now,’ said Sandra, looking harassed. ‘Can I make it up to you? Can we meet for a cup of coffee and talk and …’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Maggie. ‘I’ve said what I wanted to say. I guess I’m lucky enough to have the courage to stand up to you. I’m sorry I never had the courage when I was at school, except that one time.’

‘I’m sorry, just go, go!’ Sandra said. She wrenched open the car door and fumbled with her little boy’s car seat straps.

‘Bye, Sandra,’ said Maggie coldly. There was no need for her to stay. She’d said what she wanted to, had given Sandra McNamara something to think about. Maybe she’d toss and turn in bed at night from now on, remembering the people she’d hurt.

Then again, maybe she didn’t have the ability to see how much damage she’d done. Incredibly, her only worry was what if the neighbours overheard.

Maggie walked back to her car. She’d never been the sort of person who liked confrontation but nineteen years of bottling something up did strange things to a person. She’d faced Sandra. She’d had the courage to coolly say all the things she’d wanted to say for years. And it felt good.

Maggie drove out of the estate and headed for home. At the bottom of Summer Street, she parked and took out her mobile phone.

She dialled Ivan’s number, thinking that only a few weeks ago, the person she would have wanted to ring was Grey. Except that if she was still with Grey, if her whole life hadn’t come tumbling down, she’d never have reached this moment in the first place.

Besides, Grey hadn’t known about her past. In five years, she’d never been able to tell him the secret Ivan had instinctively known was there in a few weeks.

Ivan was busy, she could tell from his voice when he answered his phone. But when he realised it was her, his voice softened.

‘Hello, Maggie,’ he said.

He didn’t call her babe or honey or any of the things Grey called her. Ivan used her name. ‘What’s up?’

‘Just wanted to say hello,’ she said. Then, ‘You’ll never guess who I just met.’

There was a beat.

‘Not Grey?’ said Ivan, strangely uptight. ‘No, no,’ said Maggie. ‘Sandra, the girl at school, the girl I told you about.’

‘And did you say anything to her?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes,’ Maggie said and she felt proud of herself, proud for standing up for herself. ‘I did.’

When she hung up, Maggie thought back to her school days. Except, today, it all felt different.

Resolved. She’d faced Sandra Brody with courage and learned two lessons. First, she hadn’t been the perfect victim - she’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And secondly, the past could only ruin your life if you let it.

Sandra wasn’t important any more. Maggie had faced her and won. The real challenge was letting the past go.

Could you ever truly know somebody you loved?

Could you ever know what went on in their minds when they lay in the dark beside you under the covers?

Those questions filled Christie’s thoughts in the hours following her last, emotionally charged meeting with Carey.

As a child growing up, she’d watched her parents’

marriage and known that she’d wanted exactly the opposite of what they had. There had been no real closeness between her mother and father, no knowledge of each other’s inner thoughts and dreams.

Her father bullied his way through life and treated his children like bonded servants, there to do his bidding.

Christie’s mother lived inside her head, not coming out for any of them. It was her survival technique and while Christie could understand it, her mother’s mental retreat had made life lonely for her children.

So Christie had watched them, utterly separate and yet bolted together in marriage. She knew that she wanted something different.

That’s what had made her marriage to James so special - closeness, respect, honesty. She shaved her legs and bleached her upper lip in front of James, let him know when menstrual cramps used to plague her and let him rub her knotted belly.

She’d put her arms round his shoulders when he had the vomiting bugs he was prone to catch, steadying him as he threw up, wiping his face with a cool face cloth.

He’d seen her give birth to their two sons, and it hadn’t diminished his desire for her, as some of the books said it might. He’d seen her cry a thousand times and knew which scenes in films and books made her upset and knew that she loved white roses above all other flowers.

Yet despite her craving for utter honesty, there were parts of her mind that she kept to herself: the parts that related to Carey Wolensky.

She’d tried so hard over the years to forget, hoping that eventually the memory would fade like writing on old parchment. If nobody could see it, it was no longer there. Except it was.

Now she could see it in full oil on canvas, hard evidence of a secret she’d tried so hard to forget.

She’d hidden Carey’s gifts in Shane’s old bedroom and found herself flicking through the sketchbook as a kind of punishment. There were cartoons of many of his most famous pictures here,

rough sketches of paintings much prized amongst collectors. And the exquisite drawings that would become his Dark Lady series, each painting worth hundreds of thousands.

But it was the painting that revealed her secret.

She knew now what she had to do.

The day after her thirty-fifth birthday, Carey Wolensky phoned her at home, having found the number in Ana’s address book.

Christie, who’d known instinctively that he’d contact her, knew what she ought to say. She’d practised it in fact. ‘It was lovely to meet you, but no thank you, I don’t want to see you again.’

However, knowing what you should say, and saying it, were two very different things. When she heard that low, husky voice, a voice that she’d dreamed of, she found herself saying yes.

She’d just meet him, she decided, to get this crazy bug out of her system. It would all be different in the cool daylight, when she wasn’t annoyed with James or when she wasn’t overwhelmed by the sight of Carey’s stunning paintings.

She would be able to see that the rush of fierce sexual excitement had all been in her mind, a fantasy, a little break from the real world.

It was the perfect justification for meeting him.

Despite the churning guilt in her stomach, she convinced herself that agreeing to meet Carey in his studio was a wise move. There, nobody would see them.